by Unknown
Marissa’s own mother, Angel’s Gramma Lola, contributed enormously to Angel’s upbringing, both financially and in child care, until the dementia set in, and if this somehow slipped Marissa’s mind, then she’s an idiot.
Now Angel squares her shoulders. She will not be like her mother. She will not blame everything on Connor. She’ll give him what he needs, even if those are things she never got herself. And she’ll start by getting him a good godmother. She looks down at him, asleep against her chest, then at Brianna’s back. There’s something private and delicate and almost sad in her teacher’s posture, the way her fingers rest on the sill. Angel expects Brianna to see her reflection, to turn with a smile, but apparently she is looking beyond reflections. Angel takes a deep breath. “There you are!” she calls. “I was looking all over for you!”
“Yes?” Brianna pushes herself off the windowsill, and Angel wonders if she startled her. “What can I do for you, Angel?”
Angel falters. “It’s okay. I can ask you later. I just had a question.” She is more nervous than she expected, because Brianna is more distant than Angel’s ever seen her. She tries another approach and turns Connor. “I realized I never told you his full name. Brianna, this is Connor Justin Padilla. The First.” She laughs lamely. “You can hold him if you want.”
Brianna gives Connor’s socked foot a little shake, but her eyes skate over him toward the door. “That’s a nice name. A nice, real name. It’s good to meet a baby who isn’t named after a rapper or a car.”
Angel laughs uneasily. A knot of something in her chest is as hard and pointed as a nectarine pit. “You mean like Mercedes? Lizette’s loved that name since second grade. Plus, it was a name before it was a car.”
“I shouldn’t have said that.” Brianna smiles brightly, just a flash, and then is remote again. “I was kidding. Mercedes is a lovely baby.”
The pit is still wedged up under her rib cage. “She really is.”
“And so’s this little guy.” Brianna shakes Connor’s foot again. “We should wrap up in the classroom, Angel. We have to be back here before we know it.”
“There was just something I wanted to ask.” Angel reaches out to touch Brianna’s cardigan sleeve, but doesn’t make contact. This isn’t going at all the way she’d hoped, but she plows forward because she’s waited too long as it is. “I wanted to ask, would you be Connor’s godmother?”
Brianna’s distant, private expression shifts. A gleam of alarm—fear, almost—and then her face is sunny, enameled, professional. Angel didn’t understand until now that the face she knows so well is a professional face. The corners of her own smile tremble.
“Oh, Angel. That’s so nice.”
“Thanks,” says Angel.
“I’m afraid I can’t accept the offer.” Brianna now turns professionally sympathetic, mouth downturned.
“Okay,” says Angel, stung. “Sure.” Every part of her feels cottony and numb. It had never occurred to Angel that her teacher might decline. Angel had assumed Brianna would be flattered. She’d assumed that she’d be grateful for the honor. Angel pictured Brianna pulling her in for a hug, both of them happy and safe in the understanding that they’d be bound together long into Connor’s adulthood.
“I hope you understand.” Brianna tips her head and adjusts her loose dress. The flowers are large and pink and ugly. They belong on a grandmother’s curtains, a grandmother with less taste than either of Angel’s grandmothers. “It’s nothing personal, Angel. I just have to be careful of boundaries. When Ysenia asked, I told her the same thing.” Brianna smiles again, a quick, indifferent stretching of her mouth.
When Angel was a child, four or five, she discovered that she was possessed of a minor, yet astonishing, magical power. If—say, when she’d just woken from a nap—she watched the closed blinds or the dots on the couch, and yielded to a certain tug on her eyes and allowed her vision to slide out of focus, then the stripes of the blinds or the white dots on the couch would lift, levitate apart from the object, until eventually Angel blinked, and everything snapped back into place. This power was a marvelous secret that the universe offered up just for her.
She depended on her secret power. When her mother was giggling with this or that boyfriend in the living room, or, just as frequently, weeping and yelling, Angel would go to her room, lie with her cheek against her comforter, and focus her attention on not focusing at all. Her vision would blur but for the tiny pink fleur-de-lis pattern on her sheets, and the sounds outside her bedroom door would fade. Two or four or five fleurs-de-lis would rise off the percale, hovering there until Angel released them. Angel could control and dismantle the world in her tiny, secret way.
Then, when they were nine, Priscilla had shown Angel a large softcover book of 3-D Magic Eye illusions, colorful stereogram images that looked like wrapping paper but concealed silhouettes of sports cars and cats.
Priscilla, bossy as ever, had shoved the book into Angel’s face and launched into detailed instructions. “It’ll take a while, but you’ll get it.”
“Yeah, I see it,” Angel said, cutting her off.
“Well, what is it, then?” Priscilla challenged.
“A mushroom.” Angel traced the outline, her forefinger passing through the translucent, floating image.
Angel was astonished to learn that others shared this gift, then stricken, because she now saw her superpower for what it was, a phenomenon as common as it was unimportant, good only for selling cheap books and posters of tacky mall art.
This is how she feels now, standing with Brianna in the dark conference room. This precious, secret thing—the intimacy she’s felt for Brianna—has been exposed as tawdry, unreciprocated, shameful. She thought Brianna cared for her, when Brianna was just doing her job.
“I hope you understand,” Brianna says again.
“Oh, yeah, course. I get it.” She didn’t know she was crossing boundaries inappropriately, didn’t understand that all of Brianna’s warmth has meant nothing—and it smarts that Ysenia had the same idea and got there first, all those months ago.
Brianna smiles. “Shall we go back to the Open House? I think people are starting to leave.”
“Okay.” Angel stares down at Connor’s fuzzy, scaly head nestled in the crook of her elbow. He is fast asleep, his pursed lips slick with drool. He has no idea that he’s been rejected. The abashment turns to indignation, because little Connor deserves only love and goodness. He will never, ever know about this, Angel vows.
Brianna is already at the door. She switches off the conference room lights. “You working on your book report?”
“Yeah,” Angel says stiffly. “It’s this World War II thing.”
“Terrific.”
Angel presses her lips against Connor’s scalp as she trails Brianna down the hall. It’s amazing to her that someone so little can create so much heat.
“THAT WAS AWESOME,” her dad says when Angel starts the car. “You got a really good thing going.” He’s energized and grinning.
“I guess. It was fine.”
He peers at her as she pulls onto the road. “You tired?”
“I guess.”
“Well, you had a long night, showing Connor off to all those people. He was cuter than all those other babies put together, did you notice?”
Angel thinks for a moment about this image: a baby that’s really eight babies mashed together, a colossal, multi-limbed monster of need, all its mouths wailing. She drives silently. Eventually her dad gets the hint. He leans against the window, a little smile on his face, as the headlights sweep past the dark trees along the road.
“Are you asleep?” she demands.
“No,” her dad says, surprised. “What is up, Angel?”
“Nothing.” It’s not fair. The night started off so well. It should have been perfect. The girls all seemed happy to see her, and Angel felt like a truly essential part of the school. Lizette, usually so undemonstrative, even called out “Hey, biatch!” and hugged her. The li
ghts before her slant and blur. She wills her father not to turn to her.
She squeezes her eyes to clear her vision and inhales deeply, and all at once a flash of white darts across the road. Angel yanks her foot off the gas, swerves, stomps the brake, then lets up.
“Whoa,” cries her dad, grabbing at the dashboard as the truck lurches. “What the fuck?”
Angel yanks the truck to the shoulder, fear slamming through her. The wheels grind the gravel. She squints wildly into the dark on the left and right of the road, but sees only the black outlines of the trees against the depthless starry sky. At first she had the impression that a naked child had flashed in front of the car—she has a distinct image of a round face and big eyes—but she doesn’t know why she thought that, because whatever it was was bigger, longer, four-legged. A dog or a wolf.
“Did you see that? What was that?”
“What was what? What happened?”
“Didn’t you see? I almost hit something. A wolf or something.” The weak headlights illuminate only a swath of crumbly pink soil and the nearest trees, the night crisp against their ragged edges. No glowing eyes, no movement at all.
“There aren’t wolves out here,” he says uncertainly. “It was probably just a coyote. You didn’t hit nothing. We’re fine.”
“Why weren’t you looking? You’re supposed to be looking! That’s the whole point of you being the licensed adult driver.” Angel cranes around. In the back, Connor is still asleep, a plug of mucus clinging to one nostril. She wants to get out, to hold him to her. Angel drops her head to the wheel. Wracking sobs clutch at her. She’s shivering, freezing suddenly.
“Hey now.” Her dad’s voice is calm, but he looks shaken. “Hey now.” She presses her forehead into the steering wheel until it hurts. After a moment, he opens the door, and Angel almost cries out, afraid he’ll let whatever is out there into the truck. But he shuts the door. She listens to his steps outside. He opens the driver’s-side door. “Scoot over. I’m driving us home.”
“You can’t!” But she slides over and buckles herself in obediently. “You’ll go to jail,” she says, muted.
“No I won’t.” His tone is assured and calm, the voice of a father. He cranks the heat and adjusts the blowers so they hit Angel full-on.
She tries to relax her body, part by part, the way Brianna taught them in Guided Relaxation, but her rigid muscles won’t release. “Probably it was nothing. Just a coyote or something. Maybe a big rabbit.”
Her dad looks both ways down the long empty road and pulls back onto the hardtop. At the edge of the road, the shadows swing to avoid the headlights. He drives smoothly, his speed restrained.
“Close your eyes,” her dad tells her, and she does, feeling the warm sway and rumble pressing into her back as the truck carries her toward home.
She wakes to her dad shaking her. Angel lifts her head. The house is waiting for them, yellow light at her grandmother’s bedroom window.
“I’m tired.”
He laughs. “I know you are.” He gathers her purse and backpack, the stack of informative handouts and the free picture book about alligator pilots that each family got as a party favor. “I’ll get the door, you get the baby.”
Under the dim orange of the dome light, Angel blinks her sticky eyes and grapples with the straps. Connor’s eyes open and he squints up at her. His face is pinched and he begins to whimper.
“Oh, calm yourself,” she murmurs. “You’ll give yourself a stress disorder.” Her memory of whatever shot in front of the truck—a vague impression of light and speed and fur and sentience—hasn’t faded, but it no longer seems as terrifying. She can think about it later or not at all. She fusses with the plastic handle, trying to release the carrier from the base. When she tugs, the entire contraption shifts forward.
“Oh, god, Dad!” Angel cries. “Look.” In a flash, he’s at her side. She lifts her head, stricken. “Look what we did.”
Her dad follows her pointed finger to the seat belt that dangles against the back of the seat, the metal buckle glinting. Connor is strapped into his car seat, packed as snug as an egg in its carton, and the seat is snapped securely into the base, but the base itself rests loose on the bench. In a collision, Connor might have been pitched forward onto the truck floor, pinned beneath the immense weight of safety features.
“Oh,” her father breathes.
A wave of despair crests, but her father reaches past her to release the baby and settles him gently at his shoulder. Sinking back into sleep, Connor exhales long.
“He’s fine,” her father says firmly. “Look at him. We made a mistake, we both did, but he’s fine. We’re lucky we’re both such excellent drivers.”
“I could have killed him. I’m a horrible mother.”
“Listen.” He takes her chin and turns her face to him gently, a gesture he’s never, ever made. “It was a mistake. Every parent makes them. That don’t mean it’s okay, but we’re not gonna ever make this one again.”
July is hot, but Yolanda shivers in her sweater. Somehow she manages to schedule and attend all these appointments—chemo every other week, four hours at a time, plus scheduled labs—without arousing any suspicion in Amadeo or Angel. They’re so incurious, her offspring.
And Monica Gutierrez-Larsen, too, seems to believe her when she explains her days off as “a minor medical thing.” Monica searches her face, as if to check for signs of lying or plastic surgery. “Of course, Yo. Take care of yourself. Just make sure the agenda for the meeting with the governor is good to go.”
She supposes she can’t blame them, these young people with their faith in the body, their faith that the world will keep providing what it always has. Was Yolanda ever so oblivious to death? No, but then, she’d been the only child of old parents, one of just a few children born to all those uncles and aunts and second cousins, and sometimes it seemed barely a year went by without someone in that once-vast family dying, a long parade of death headed up by Elwin and punctuated most dramatically by Anthony.
On the way out of the Cancer Center parking lot, Yolanda flinches at the sun glinting off the hood of her car. The whole landscape—the streets and stucco medical buildings, the piñon-dotted hills to the east—is achingly bright, like an overexposed photograph of another, less habitable planet. Realizing she is trembling and nauseated from hunger, Yolanda stops at the Tortilla Hut for a milkshake and an enchilada. It’s two in the afternoon, still plenty of time to make it back to work and finish some tasks there, but Yolanda is sapped.
At a table near her booth, a red-faced girl gazes into her computer screen and chews her three middle fingers. The fingers are in deep, to the second joint, and the girl works away at her big drooly mouthful, heedless of the people seated all around her. Yolanda feels a rush of compassion for this girl wearing her private face, forgetful that she is more than a mind perched on a body. Yolanda tries to freeze her own expression, to catch herself in her own private face, but the muscles in her cheeks and forehead tighten with awareness, composing themselves into something to be observed, if only by herself. The girl removes her slick fingers to type something, then plugs them back in her mouth.
Yolanda will soon be like one of the patients in the Cancer Center waiting room, one of the thin chalky-faced people hunched in their wheelchairs, the tubes of oxygen hissing in their nostrils. With a shock Yolanda realizes that many of those people will outlive her.
Not ten minutes ago, Yolanda thought she might pass out if she didn’t eat. But now, faced with her enormous, high-caloric meal, that urgency has fled. She drags her fork through the chile at the edge of her enchilada, then sets it down, sips her milkshake, pushes it away. She stands, hooks her purse over her arm, and leaves.
In the car, Yolanda crosses herself, then raises her head, the sunlight stabbing at her eyes, and pulls out. She backs into a parked car, then brakes hard. Her heart sloshes and she looks around. No alarm sounds, no one shouts. No one is in the lot at all. The bumper of the sedan behind
her is dented.
Driving in her state is, she knows, deeply unethical. One day, one day soon, she will have her first seizure, and if it happens while she’s behind the wheel—and the chances are fairly good that it will, given that she commutes over two hours every weekday—she could kill someone. Yolanda registers her hypocrisy, judging her son for his drunk driving, but continuing to drive herself. Somehow, though, despite the headaches and the spotty gray brain scans and the grim assurances of Dr. Konecky that she is, in fact, dying, she can’t believe that her body could betray her so spectacularly.
Still, she vows, she won’t drive the baby, won’t drive Angel. This resolution has required some quick footwork and creative excuses at home to dodge her son and granddaughter’s demands. They’re a family of barely capable drivers: an old man, a teenage girl, a lady with a glioblastoma pressing on her brain, a drunk. Connor’s practically the most qualified member of the family to shuttle them all around.
In her previous life, Yolanda would have left a note on the dented sedan. It would never occur to her to not do the right thing. Now, though, she straightens out and drives away.
Amadeo calls and leaves a message for Brianna on her line at work.
“Hey. It’s Angel’s dad. From the Open House? I was wondering how you are.”
It’s the middle of the day, and he thinks of her standing in the classroom in front of all those teenagers, doing good. He feels as if, having called her, having pictured her and those girls hard at work, he is a part of that good, hard work. Energized, he does twenty push-ups on the living room carpet, then, further invigorated, he does ten more.
When Brianna doesn’t call back that day, he’s surprised by his disappointment. Since the Open House, he’s thought of their encounter in the conference room with fondness—he liked talking to her about art, this girl who is clearly intelligent, who recognizes his daughter’s gifts—but it’s when Angel mentions her teacher, when he sees her through his daughter’s eyes, that he experiences a rush of warmth. His crush is fueled by his daughter’s admiration, a strange and unsettling dynamic.