The Five Wounds

by Unknown

  She hopes she’s wrong. She hopes Creative Windshield Solutions takes off, and that he makes as much as he says he will. Angel has the uneasy sense that in not truly believing in her father’s venture, she’s dooming it. So she’s all the more determined to help him out. That way, if it doesn’t work, then the failure will belong to them both, and he won’t have to feel, once again, that he’s foundered.

  After she burps Connor, she still isn’t ready to leave him. He stands on her lap with his wobbly legs, high-stepping his round socked feet on her thighs. He belches again happily, oblivious to the trickle of milk at his mouth, and his damp little hands grasp her cheeks, tangle in her hair.

  “Hey,” Lizette says, thumping around the screen, Mercedes held casually in her arm. “Ditching Vocabulary Building?” She cocks her hip and boosts Mercedes higher.

  “No,” says Angel quickly. “I just needed to feed him.”

  Lizette drags another rocking chair behind the screen and flops into it, legs splayed. Mercedes rests her head sweetly against Lizette’s chest and gazes at Angel through clear eyes.

  “You missed bucolic, temperate, and patronize. Speaking of patronize, personally I’m sick of Brianna. Bitch needs to get laid.”

  Despite herself, Angel is shocked. She tries for a sardonic tone. “Right, because we both know that solves everything.”

  Lizette gives a half-smile. “I’m sick of this whole damn program.”

  “I know—me, too,” Angel says, though she isn’t sick of it at all. “You wouldn’t leave, though, right? You wouldn’t, like, drop out for reals? We need our GEDs if we’re going to make something of ourselves. Plus, Brianna can be pretty great, don’t you think?” She can be; she is. Since the Open House, Brianna has, in fact, been remarkably warm toward Angel, and Angel is grateful to have been forgiven for her inappropriate boundary-crossing.

  Lizette pushes her thick hair back and laughs at Angel, then kicks off against the floor with her sneaker so her chair rocks dramatically. Mercedes raises her head in alarm, then gives her mother a wet grin. Lizette doesn’t smile back. “I forgot she was your best friend. Maybe you want to be the one to do her.”

  “Don’t talk like that in front of the babies.” Angel stands, reluctant to go. “I guess I better go learn some new words.” She angles Connor so he faces Lizette, then makes him wave. “Say bye to Mercedes. Say bye to your little girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend.” Lizette snorts. “How do you know he’s not gay?”

  Angel turns Connor again and peers into his face. He grabs hold of a hank of her hair and gives it a friendly shake. “He’s not gay. That’s gross. Anyways, he doesn’t even have an opinion on peas versus carrots yet.”

  “Fish versus carrots, more like. You’re the one who said they were dating.”

  “I said Mercedes was his girlfriend. That could mean anything. Like, we’re girlfriends.” Angel flushes. “You know, like, girlfriend!” She goes for a hammy delivery of this last word, but can’t commit, and instead it comes out merely squeaky.

  Lizette looks at Angel steadily for a moment from under those thick lashes. “If you say so.” Mercedes has begun to protest the delay and now tries to burrow openmouthed through Lizette’s Raiders sweatshirt. “So um, if you don’t mind, I gotta feed her.” Lizette jerks her chin toward the door.

  Each afternoon when his daughter gets home from Smart Starts!, she asks, “Any windshield calls?” But each day Amadeo has to shake his head. He double-checks his number on the flyer, checks that his phone is fully charged. Really there was no need to pay the forty dollars extra for expedited shipping.

  “It takes time,” Angel assures him. “You think Target was always the world’s best superstore?” Then, with tact, she changes the subject.

  When the first call comes, Angel is at school, which turns out to be a good thing.

  “You fix car windows?” the man says.

  “Most definitely.” Amadeo glances at the clock above the stove. Angel will be home in an hour, so they can head out then. “Where you located?”

  “Do you take insurance?”

  “No,” says Amadeo.

  The guy goes on as if Amadeo hasn’t said a word. “My window’s all busted up. Passenger side. Some asshole smashed it, didn’t even take nothing.”

  “Oh, see, if it’s totally broken I can’t help you. If you got a crack, then I’m your man.”

  “You can’t replace a window?” The incredulity in the guy’s tone is insulting.

  “No,” says Amadeo deliberately. “I just told you that.”

  “You kidding me? I got your flyer right here. You said, let me see—” A rustle, then the man comes back on the line. “Let me save your life!!!!!!! All cracks fixed, cheap,” emphasis on all. “I’m gonna call Windshield Doctor. I only called you because you said you were cheap.”

  “Yeah, well, a pile of shattered glass isn’t a crack,” Amadeo says, but the line is dead.

  FOR TWO DAYS, Amadeo refuses to go on his rounds. “There’s no point.”

  “You can’t get discouraged.” The concern in Angel’s expression makes him feel worse.

  “It’s fine, Angel. Let it be.”

  “We just got to let the advertising do its work. People will call.”

  The next morning, he wakes to find that Angel has slipped an article under his door: Fail Your Way to Success: Lessons in Resilience. At the top, in Brianna’s photocopied handwriting, are reading comprehension questions. The text is covered in pink highlighter. Amadeo snorts, but he’s moved by Angel’s gesture, and actually the article is pretty inspiring. Apparently seventy percent of start-ups fail. There are some useful tips for instilling resilience in children, too, and he sees where Angel gets some of the things she tells Connor: “You’re really trying to lift your head, baby. It’s hard work, but keep trying and you’ll get it.” Amadeo doesn’t recall ever having praised Angel for hard work—and certainly not for lifting her head, which seems like a low bar—yet Angel has turned out to be remarkably resilient.

  That night Amadeo intercepts his mother as she walks in the door, laden with grocery bags, the plastic handles cutting into her wrists. “Mom, listen. Can you take my flyers to work? Pass them out? I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”

  His mother’s coworkers do this kind of thing, swap favors and support each other’s enterprises. For years Yolanda has been bringing home vitamins and health drinks and cosmetics from one or another of “the girls” at work. While the state’s dilatory business creeps along, interminable meetings arranged and attended, meaningless press conferences held, bills proposed and drafted that will never see the light of day, other business flourishes in the halls and offices of the Capitol building: turquoise jewelry is haggled over, Super Bowl pools bought into, homemade tamales and tortillas pulled from coolers and tucked snugly into desk drawers until five o’clock. All around the circular halls, money is changing hands, private economies prospering. When Amadeo was a kid, whenever his school held magazine or chocolate fund-raisers, while his friends trudged door to door or sat bored in hot supermarket parking lots, Amadeo had only to send his mother to work with the order form and wait for his incentive prizes to roll in.

  Yolanda detangles herself from the bags, but shows no sign of putting the groceries away. She leans against the counter and rubs her eyes so violently that Amadeo winces. “Oh, honey, I’m not so sure.”

  “You never believe in me!” Glancing at his daughter feeding the baby in the living room, he lowers his voice. “I need a support system.”

  Yolanda’s lips part, and she seems about to say something, then to change her mind. She holds her hand out for the flyers. “I’ll take them.”

  Yolanda drives herself to her appointment at the Cancer Center, sits tethered to the IV for hours while toxic fluids are pumped into her. Some people sit in recliners, but because she can’t bear to make conversation, Yolanda prefers to lie on one of the raised beds with the pink curtain shut around her. Beyond, a
man murmurs weakly while his daughter encourages him. A television chatters. Two women—sisters?—with similarly robust voices complain about the parking, the facilities, the care. “I’m getting me an appointment at Mayo in Phoenix.” Very close, the pages of a magazine turn. Here you can almost convince yourself that chemotherapy is as routine and harmless as a trip to the hair salon.

  She settles against the pillow, arms limp. The sleeves of her sweater are rolled. She’s weightless and warm under the cotton blanket. Her last sensation is of the pull of the tape on the back of her hand, and then she’s gulped under into a black sleep.

  When Yolanda wakes to the clinic’s cool light and whir, Anthony is standing at her bedside. Not Anthony as he was when she last saw him, paunchy, face bloated with addiction and unhappiness, but as he was when he was a teenager, when Yolanda was still a kid looking up to him and her cousin Elwin: athletic and slender, his hair a mop.

  After Elwin’s Rosary, as the old people dabbed at their eyes and sipped coffee in Fidelia’s living room, Anthony, in his new suit, found her. Without a word, he drew her to him and did not let go, sobbing into her hair. She’d stroked his back, murmuring, and had felt, beneath her sadness, a swelling sense of herself as a woman, offering comfort. After, her dress had been creased where it was pressed between them.

  Anthony’s hand rests on the blanket near her shoulder, a crescent of white under each clean nail. He watches her with steady brown eyes. His lips are chapped.

  “You’re here,” she says with surprise.

  He tips his head, gravely considering.

  The breath stills in her chest. She’s afraid of what he will say to her.

  He reaches toward her and slowly runs a single nail along the back of her hand, along where the needle pierces her skin. Yolanda wants to flinch, to jerk her arm away, but she only watches, sickened, as his nail scrapes up the crepey skin of her arm. It doesn’t hurt, but everything in her shrinks from his touch. He moves slowly, watching her face all the while, until he’s reached her elbow. Her heart gives a sick thump. Eyes widening, he pushes his finger under her sleeve, then grins, his stretched lips taut and pale.

  Yolanda’s eyes are dry and burning. When she blinks, Anthony is gone.

  A moment later, the technician comes with a paper cup of water to detach Yolanda from the tubes. “You’ve got someone to drive you, hon?” Yolanda nods and pushes through the pink curtain and makes for the hallway, not even bothering to fluff her flattened hair.

  Without allowing herself to think, Yolanda gets behind the wheel, bilious and shaking, the sweat seeping from her cold skin. Her flesh is tight under the tape and the gauze where the needle was withdrawn.

  Anthony was a dream, Yolanda tells herself. No: a hallucination. Dr. Konecky warned her that hallucinations would come. Or he was the son of one of the other patients, or even a patient himself, a creepy young man who slipped behind Yolanda’s pink curtain, and Yolanda, in her haze of sickness and exhaustion and emotion, the tumor threatening to smother her clarity, jumped to the wildest possible conclusion. Her husband is dead, and therefore not wandering the halls of the Cancer Center.

  But while there isn’t a mark from his touch on her skin, she can still feel the prickling shadow of the scratch, the pressure of his nail as it traveled up her arm, the eerie violation of his finger under her sleeve, and she knows that his presence was real.

  Anthony, the father of her children, her one love, her one ruinous love. Yolanda sucks in air noisily as a wave of nausea passes over her.

  ON THE HIGHWAY north toward home, Yolanda speeds, trying to outrun Anthony, but he’s there with her, vivid and insistent.

  After she made him move out, he came back just once. Yolanda arrived home from work to find him screaming at the children, drunk. Amadeo’s lunch box was splayed on the kitchen floor, the plastic cracked. Sticky wrappings scattered, and a juice box leaked onto the linoleum.

  “Daddy, stop.” Valerie put an arm around her father, and Anthony pushed her off him roughly. Amadeo stood frozen by the door. “It’s our fault,” Valerie told Yolanda. “We were fighting. Dodo wouldn’t put his lunch box away.”

  “Take your brother to your room,” said Yolanda, and dutifully, chin trembling, Valerie led him away.

  Anthony slid to the floor against the cabinet, his cries getting quieter and quieter.

  Yolanda stood over him, still holding her purse. “Did you hurt them?”

  “No.” His voice was injured, bleary.

  “You need to leave.”

  “Please, Yo. Let me come home.” The silence dilated between them, punctuated by his sniffles. Finally he said, “I loved Elwin.”

  Yolanda was exhausted, wrung. “We all loved Elwin,” she said coldly. “That was thirteen years ago.”

  “I really loved Elwin,” he said. When he looked up, his eyes were red and swimming and imploring. “Yolanda, I’m gay.”

  The words skewered her. “No you’re not. You’re a selfish, mean drunk.”

  How she wishes, now, she had responded differently. How she wishes she hadn’t been so hurt and afraid and furious. Poor Anthony, a kid crushed under longing he didn’t know what to do with, in the claustrophobia of those times and this village, of the church and his parents’ home, suffering from the loss of the first boy he’d ever loved. No wonder he sought every escape he could; no wonder he turned his desire from gold into straw, transformed it into an open-mawed chemical hunger that devoured them all.

  By the time he finally showed himself to Yolanda, it was too late. She didn’t know how to tell him, then, that she could, eventually, accept that part of him, but not the rages and drunkenness and certainly not the heroin. At the time, she needed to clear him from her life entirely. It took all her strength to make him leave.

  Now, as she drives, she rewrites the scene, says the things she wishes she’d said: I don’t mind that you are gay. We are family and you are our children’s father and they need you. Maybe that acceptance would have been enough to pull him back from the edge.

  Just beyond Pojoaque, her breath still short, Yolanda sees the blue-red flash in her rearview mirror. “Shit,” she says, yanked back to the present. She slows, and the car vibrates over the corrugated edge of asphalt.

  She watches through the side mirror as the cruiser pulls smoothly behind her.

  “License and registration.” Ernie Montoya, his name tag says. He shows her his badge, which, even though she knows it’s part of the procedure, knows it’s the law, strikes her as a courteous gesture.

  Ernie Montoya is in his early forties, a few silver hairs gleaming in his buzz cut. He has a smooth moon-shaped face, a shadow of whiskers above his upper lip. “That was a forty-five zone,” he says, examining her license. “You were going seventy.” He nudges his chin back up the road. “Right through town, ma’am. Little kids could be crossing the road there.”

  She nearly argues that no little kids cross the road there, that it’s clearly a highway, and that if little kids are crossing the road, then their parents are the ones who should be arrested.

  You hear about women getting off for flirting, for crying. Yolanda crafts her defense: I’ve never had a speeding ticket. Not once since I was sixteen! I follow rules! I’m the one always telling people to slow down. She could say, I have cancer.

  He taps the inside of her car door through the window. “Wait here.”

  It takes a long time for him to note her license plate, to type it all into his little laptop, to say whatever he has to say to his partner, whose face is obscured by the light of the setting sun on the cruiser’s windshield. With a shock she realizes that her doctors must surely have reported her to the DMV for her faulty brain; he’s going to see the note on her record and take her away in handcuffs. While Yolanda waits, caught, oblivious cars crest the rise, slow when they see the cruiser. They whoosh by, sending dry wind over her face.

  When Ernie Montoya returns, he rests his hands again on the window, his fingers inches from her should
er. He looks grave. The jig is up, her secret is out, and the burden of its weight will be lifted from her. Yolanda wants to be seen. She wants her name entered into the computer, anchoring her solidly in the world.

  But Ernie Montoya just says regretfully, “I’m going to have to give you a citation.”

  Tears sting her eyes.

  “Don’t feel bad,” says Ernie Montoya. “Everyone gets tickets. I did myself, just last year, up there in Colorado. Really, it’s not that big a deal.”

  “That’s it? Just a ticket?”

  He laughs. “What, you want to go to jail?” He smiles kindly and hands her the citation with her driver’s license. “Your license expires end of next month. Don’t forget to renew it. People forget all the time, and that carries a doozy of a fine.”

  By the end of next month she might be blind. By the end of next month she might be in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines. She might be gone.

  “Hey, don’t be too hard on yourself, Ms. Padilla. I mean it. Drive safe.” Ernie Montoya taps the edge of her window one last time.

  As she watches him pull back onto the highway, she thinks of Anthony, her husband, touching her with that single nail, and she’s filled with grief for their broken, damaged love, and for the life they never had together. She’s filled with grief for her children, who will have to go on without her.