by Unknown
“Tío,” announces Valerie from her cross-legged posture on the floor. “Lily’s doing a report on New Mexico statehood. I’m sure she’d love to include oral history from her great-great-uncle.” Valerie always tries to make their uncle map the family’s genealogy and asks earnest prying questions about life in the olden days. Her interest in the plumbing of his childhood is depthless. “What were those early years of statehood like?”
“He’s not a hundred and thirty years old, Valerie. He wasn’t keeping no journal of his thoughts in 1912.”
Lily drags her eyes from the cooking show on the mute television. “It wasn’t a report,” she informs her mother. “It was a worksheet. Just some stupid random worksheet. It wasn’t even for a unit.”
Amadeo catches his uncle’s eye, and is startled to see the hint of a smile tugging the old man’s mouth.
Flustered, Valerie turns her attention to her younger daughter, who is going through the baby toys, methodically rattling, squeaking, and crinkling each one. “How’re you doing, bean?” Sarah declines to answer her mother, allowing Amadeo the novel experience of feeling sorry for his sister.
“Oh my heck, I just realized—” Angel crows to the baby, “That’s your great-great-great-uncle.”
“Holy,” says Tíve.
Valerie shakes her head. “That’s crazy.”
“Great-great-great-great-great-great-great,” chants Sarah. She gives a plastic rattle a celebratory fling into the air. It hits the ceiling with a crack, drops to the carpet.
“Quit it,” says Lily. “Mom, tell her.”
Yolanda has finished the dishes and joins them now. She lowers herself onto the couch beside her uncle and the baby. “Whew.”
Since when did his mother start moving like an old person? Amadeo scans them all with alarm: his suddenly frail mother, her hair full-gray at the roots; his daughter, whose bright features have become puffy and pale; his rickety uncle; his sister slumped on the floor, her ridiculous woven scarf hanging from her stooped shoulders. Even his nieces, homely and intelligent and socially deficient enough to eventually find success in tech or academia, seem doomed. Connor, the newest and theoretically least doomed among them, can’t even hold his own head up. Since when did everyone around him become so fragile?
Yolanda waggles one of Connor’s fat feet, and his red-blotched arms and legs recoil briefly before relaxing again. “Does he remind you of Elwin?” she asks her uncle with tenderness.
Tíve looks up sharply. “No.”
“What about me?” asks Amadeo, aware that he sounds desperate. “Does he look like me when I was a baby?”
Tío Tíve frowns as if Amadeo’s question is an insect buzzing around his head. “I can’t remember that long ago.”
Amadeo is jealous of a baby. The humiliating realization zings through him. He has the sense of being the least necessary person in the room, the person they’d all be justified in cannibalizing in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.
Amadeo would not have noticed anything at all amiss about his uncle if Angel didn’t exclaim, “Wait, are you crying?”
“Nah,” says Tíve, eyes swimmy.
“What’s wrong, Tío?” Yolanda touches his arm.
“He’s just a real cute little guy,” Tíve says, dipping his head.
Everyone lowers their eyes to the baby. Tíve’s arms tremble. Connor starts fussing noiselessly, grimacing in his sleep. Tíve jiggles him. Connor struggles to pry his eyes open, and when he does, he squints up at the light fixture and, to everyone’s relief, lets out a howl.
Angel reclaims the baby and kisses the old man’s cheek, which hangs brown and loose and clean-shaven. Amadeo imagines that it would be cool against her lips.
Back in her seat, she pulls up her satin shirt and unhooks her nursing bra. Only a few days in, Angel is no longer self-conscious about baring her breasts. She just pops one out, blue-veined and swollen, brown nipple jutting, and draws the baby toward her. Connor shakes his head furiously, trying with his open mouth to get at the nipple, milking her flesh with a tiny red hand as wrinkled and dexterous as a monkey’s.
The routine is impossible not to watch, and it’s embarrassing to be caught watching, but they’d all rather focus on the baby than on whatever sour vulnerability has blown into the room.
“I’m so glad you’re breast-feeding,” Valerie says.
“I already know about the research, Aunt Val,” Angel says testily. Amadeo marks another point in his column, but derives no pleasure from it.
Connor snuffles away, kicking like a drowning victim.
“Welp,” says Yolanda into the silence. The cheer in her voice is at odds with her grim expression. She stands. “There’s more cake.”
Without any provocation, she seems to lose her balance, sways first one way and then another, as if playing a drunk in a comedy act. Her eyes and mouth open in terror so pure and magnified that it can’t be real. And then, as if the ground has summoned her, she tips forward onto her face.
“I’m okay,” she cries. And then she’s laughing, tears running down her cheeks, as her nose begins to trickle blood. “I’m okay!”
Yolanda doesn’t forget about her brain tumor—she couldn’t—but somehow she allows herself to slip back into her life. She goes to work as she always has, makes dinner. All the while, she is waiting for someone to notice that she’s dying. It seems ludicrous to Yolanda that no one checks on her to make sure she follows up on Dr. Mitchell’s diagnosis. Did she expect official calls? A summons to the hospital as if to the principal’s office? Yes, actually.
Even Cal, attentive Cal, hasn’t called. In their one conversation after her return, she told him in the vaguest, most clichéd terms, “I need time. To figure out what I want.” After a pause, during which she could hear the long inhalation whistling in his nostril, and then the long, resigned exhalation, Cal said, “Take your time. I love you, but I’ll give you time.” And true to his word, he hadn’t tried to contact her since.
She should get her affairs in order, but the practicalities of her own funeral arrangements and finances are boring and unreal.
Yolanda watches herself for worsening symptoms, and indeed they come. Words—nouns especially—become maddeningly elusive, ducking away as she reaches for them, leaving her with other, unsuitable nouns to slot into their places. Periodically the world swirls, as if God has decided to give it a stir around her. She drops things. Multiple times throughout the day, fatigue crashes into her, and she rests her head on her desk, flickering out of awareness. Soon, she’ll fall again. Soon, she will no longer be able to work, will no longer be able to leave the house alone, and the prospect of this new, diminished existence terrifies her. She especially worries about letting down Monica. It’s fortunate that the chief clerk’s schedule is so packed, because somehow, miraculously, Yolanda doesn’t get caught.
So she continues to work, simple tasks looming large. She needs to reorder letterhead for three legislators, and then she’s supposed to put in a request to Building Services to have a flag flown over the Capitol, which will then be sent to a new senior center in Alamogordo. She needs to prepare a certificate and letter of authenticity for that flag. It’s not complicated work—just a matter of filling in dates and names and affixing seals—but it’s overwhelming. Also, what’s the point? Who cares if a flag has been flown over the Capitol? Do any of the little old people who gather for their mediocre two-dollar lunches of posole and green Jell-O even notice the flag?
She thought, during her long, juddering drive back from Las Vegas, that she might refuse treatment, pretend nothing is wrong until the day she is struck dead. But though her mother had a friend who approached cancer like that, to save her family the pain, and though this seems both admirable and courageous, and smacks appealingly of martyrdom, Yolanda understands that she is afraid and she will get professional support, because her need to talk to someone about what is happening to her is stronger than her need to avoid it. Still, somehow, she finds it impossible
to pick up the phone.
On her way back from the bathroom, one afternoon in June, Yolanda discovers that she doesn’t know where her office is. The Capitol is a perfect circle, and the hallways go all the way around, punctuated by offices and occasional corridors to the chambers. The curved walls are endlessly beige; above, the fluorescent lights hum. Over thirty years she’s worked in this building, and now it’s like the stage of a nightmare. Be calm, she tells herself. If you can make your way back to the bathroom, then you can make your way. But the bathroom doesn’t reveal itself, either. Doors, doors, on either side of her, but none opens onto that short hallway and her own snug, familiar office.
During the legislative session, these offices are all open, bustling, people rushing briskly by with folders tucked under their arms. The House chambers are cheerful, the curved benches decorated with fresh flowers and little flags and jars of candy. Now, though, the place is deserted, the offices dark through the panes in the doors.
Panic starts beating its wings in her chest. Finally she stumbles upon an elevator. Above the panel of buttons is a map showing fire exits and egresses, and she peers at it, hoping it will illuminate her current position, but the map is confusing and unlabeled and she can’t make the green arrow line up with anything she sees around her.
“Making sure our emergency exits are in order, Yo? Or you just lost?” asks Sylvie Archuleta. She presses the elevator button, then bends to pull her hose up her leg.
Sylvie Archuleta is an old friend, another of the year-round employees. She’s older than Yolanda, thrice married and flamboyant, and her politics change with each new husband. She works in the House Speaker’s office, despite the fact that she’s currently a Republican. She still has her West Texas drawl, though her family moved to Roswell when she was a teenager. She’s Anglo with big blond hair; her second husband, the one who died on her, was the Archuleta. “He was my favorite,” she says. “The love of my life. I like him even better than Willy.” Willy Greene is her current boyfriend, who also works in the legislature, though just during the session.
For a moment Yolanda considers confiding in her. Yes, I am lost, she’d say. I don’t know how to handle this.
“Just taking a breather.” Yolanda laughs, and the sound is false in her ears. This is it, she thinks. Game over.
But Sylvie Archuleta does not appear to notice that Yolanda is adrift. She fluffs the back of her hair and with her chin gestures down the hallway on the left. “I just saw Jim Gordon lingering around your office. He wants to ask you about Monica’s schedule next week.”
“I’ll try to catch him.” Yolanda sets off down the hall. A few seconds of disorientation, and then, as if someone rotated the focus on a camera, everything is clear. She pushes through the door to the suite of offices.
She sinks into her desk chair, gripping the armrest, filled with an overwhelming urge to sob. That afternoon she calls the first number on Dr. Mitchell’s list of resources.
MORE TESTS ARE ORDERED, and Yolanda is required to fast for ten hours. They call the night before to remind her. Maybe it only takes a bite of oatmeal or a piece of toast or a single grape to throw the test results, to cheat fate and orchestrate another diagnosis for herself. Maybe, with the right breakfast, she could walk out of here with a normal life expectancy. But with her luck, she’d probably only further diminish her paltry allowance of days, so she fasts as instructed.
She spends a lot of time in various waiting rooms at the Cancer Center, which is not, as Yolanda expected, part of the St. Vincent’s campus, but rather in a separate location behind the Albertsons. She avoids eye contact with the other pallid patients who are squandering their last precious hours in this sucking, air-conditioned sterility. They are bundled in sweaters and scarves, and it’s only when she makes this observation that Yolanda realizes that she, too, is wearing winter layers, that she, too, has been feeling an insidious chill along her spine. Some of the other patients wear knit caps on their heads, some pull oxygen tanks, some vomit weakly into pink kidney-shaped tubs. Everyone but Yolanda is accompanied by frightened spouses or heavily accented caregivers or adult children with set jaws, determined to advocate. A gray-haired Native American woman with a windbreaker spread over her lap smiles at Yolanda, and Yolanda looks away.
Near the reception is a table spread with hats. A framed placard announces that every patient is entitled to a free hat, handmade by volunteers and available in two equally ugly styles: stocking caps knit in rainbow variegated acrylic, or the cotton calico (cats and florals and Lobos are popular prints), reminiscent of the floppy bonnets Yolanda’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers used to wear when working in the gardens so that their skin wouldn’t darken. It seems that dying people are expected to relinquish any sense of style along with their plans for the future.
Yolanda’s new oncologist is Dr. Konecky, a tall woman in her thirties with very fine hair held back with a too-large purple velvet scrunchie, a girlish, outmoded choice of accessory that irritates Yolanda. Dr. Konecky confirms the diagnosis of the shellacked Dr. Mitchell.
Many of the neurological tests are the same that Amadeo endured in the drunk tank and later railed against: walking a line, touching finger to nose. “They think I’m a fucking idiot?” he demanded.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Dr. Konecky asks, and Yolanda says with relief, “Four.”
“Good,” says Dr. Konecky.
As a rule, tall people make Yolanda nervous, looming above her, but it isn’t just the lanky, stooped height or the scrunchie that seems off about this oncologist. After she takes her seat behind the desk, Dr. Konecky gazes at Yolanda with pale lashless eyes. Yolanda keeps looking at those eyes and then having to look away as Dr. Konecky reviews with her the results of the scans and the blood tests. That blue—clear and nearly dead. Yolanda’s own eyes water, and she grips the strap of her purse.
This new MRI—performed a mere seven weeks after her first—shows not one but two tumors. The almond, now a Brazil nut, has been joined by a marble. The marble presses on the occipital lobe, which explains the results of the vision exam, results that Yolanda, strangely, hasn’t noticed: the entire right field of her vision has vanished. This may be playing a role in her loss of coordination. She has begun to list, and she steps heavily with her right foot, like a green sailor on a rough sea.
“As you can see,” Dr. Konecky says, sliding over both the new image and the Las Vegas image, which Dr. Mitchell had sent, “the first mass has grown significantly, and another has established itself. I wish you’d come right in. We need to get you started on radiation to try to arrest the growth.” Arrest: Yolanda pictures the biggest tumor being handcuffed and read its Miranda rights. The lump takes on the image of her son. “Radiation won’t eradicate the tumors, but if we’re lucky it will slow the growth. Surgery is the best option. Either way, we’re looking at a matter of months, not years.” The doctor clears her throat and seems to labor to make her voice soothing. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” says Yolanda, then wonders where this sangfroid came from. “It’s what I expected. I mean, it’s what I knew.” She realizes that she was hoping for a do-over, that maybe this second death sentence would be accompanied by plaintive strains of music that could, if not make the situation okay, at least make it lovely.
Dr. Konecky looks relieved: evidently not everyone takes the news so well. She puts her fist to her mouth and burps quietly into it. “Excuse me.” She taps her narrow breastbone, and Yolanda imagines her eating her lunch at this desk an hour ago—something vegetarian, surely—flipping through Yolanda’s file, thinking what a drag it is that once again she’ll have to spend her Friday afternoon in the role of the Grim Reaper.
“I don’t want surgery. Not if there’s no chance. Not if I’m going to die anyway.”
Dr. Konecky shakes her head, back and forth, back and forth, and keeps shaking as she speaks. “I do not recommend forgoing surgery. It will buy you time.”
“No
,” says Yolanda with a certainty she didn’t know she felt. Surgery would mean telling her family, would mean the whole business of dying had begun.
Dr. Konecky asks if she’d like to speak with a counselor. “Some people find it useful to process the information with someone trained in these things. I’ll page someone.”
“No,” Yolanda says, straightening her purse on her lap, drawing herself together in preparation for leaving. “I don’t need a counselor.”
“I think it’s best.” Dr. Konecky picks up the phone and calls for a floater. To Yolanda, she says, “Someone will meet you in 209, just down the hall. And it goes without saying, I hope, that driving is out. With the loss of vision and coordination—”
“Right.”
On her way to reception, Yolanda passes Room 209, head down, expecting to be caught, but she escapes without a hitch. As her copay is being processed, Yolanda gestures vaguely at the line of photos on the wall above reception. Dr. Konecky is frozen in a wan, stretched smile. “That Dr. Konecky doesn’t look so healthy herself.”
The receptionist laughs, then composes himself. “You be safe out there,” he says, handing her the receipt.
Friday afternoon, and Angel is curling her hair in preparation for the Smart Starts! Open House. Connor fusses on a receiving blanket on her bedroom floor. She thinks of it as her bedroom—hers and Connor’s—despite the fact that the bookshelf holds an array of Valerie’s yearbooks and plastic Garfield figurines, about thirty years of Yolanda’s Cooking Light magazines, and a couple of indeterminate glazed clay mounds made by Angel herself, if the initials gouged into the base are to be believed. Angel loves this room more than she ever loved her bedroom at home, perhaps because she hasn’t ruined it with her personality. She especially loves the mirrored bureau and matching nightstand, cream with gold accents and curved legs, which Valerie declared she’d always hated. The sixties-tackiness makes her feel bohemian. She likes to imagine them in the brick loft space of her future, which will be spare and tasteful with maybe a single bright silk scarf dropped lazily on the gleaming wood floor.