by Unknown
It’s not like Jesus was the only person to ever suffer, Amadeo thinks sourly as he jogs through the Plaza, head down. Hadn’t people died before? Haven’t they died since? And in worse ways, too. How about all the Jews in the Holocaust? How about that guy down in Arizona who used a two-hundred-year-old saguaro cactus for target practice and it fell on him, pinning his torso to the dirt, and he bled and bled, taking ever-shallower breaths, and they say he wasn’t even dead when the vultures and coyotes starting taking away pieces of him. That guy definitely had Jesus beat for suffering. In fact, now that he thinks of it, what Jesus went through barely even counts as suffering when he knew all along he had good things coming down the pike. Daddy would bail him out, sweep him up to heaven and seat him at his right hand. Real suffering isn’t just about physical pain, but about not knowing when the pain will end, not knowing what the point of it all is.
He failed, Amadeo realizes. Failed deeply, irredeemably. This isn’t the surprise, though. The surprise is that for all those weeks of Lent, Amadeo managed to convince himself that failure wasn’t inevitable. All along, however, some absolute core in him had known failure was coming the second he saw Angel waiting for him on the steps.
Kaune’s Market is mercifully open, and Amadeo buys himself a forty of overpriced craft beer. It’s nine now. More people are around, and the last thing he needs is a cop hassling him, so he opens it in the alley by the dumpster. The trash smell is thick in the warm September air. He barely tastes the beer, but it’s refreshing, and he drinks it down quickly. His burp is big and soft, and in its wake his anxious stomach settles some.
The alcohol does its magic, and Amadeo feels calmer. He walks back toward the park. He’ll apologize to the blond guy. “No hard feelings, man. I’m going through some shit. Sorry for—” How to phrase it? He’s sorry for calling the guy an asshole, sorry for snapping at him, sorriest for treating the man like someone who deserves Amadeo’s venom. How do you say that to a homeless person? But when he gets to the river, the picnic table is empty. Now he has the homeless guy to feel bad about.
Amadeo makes his way to Evangelo’s in time for it to open, where he sits drinking and watching ESPN, because at this point it’s all shit and who cares if he’s off the wagon. He drinks until the sick pounding of his heart slows, and then he keeps drinking.
He can guess what’s going on back in the parking garage. At lunch Yolanda probably insisted on going out to the car with Monica, eager to see Amadeo’s job well done. Together they would have discovered the disaster Amadeo made of her car. Yolanda would have apologized over and over, humiliated, and she would have offered to pay for the damage, and maybe Monica took her up on it, but maybe, in a gesture of largesse, she didn’t, which would have humiliated his mother still further.
On the street, tourists stream past the window, arms full of shopping bags from the trading post, the bookstore, the folk art shop. He rests his head against the cool window.
Yolanda leans into her chair, suffused with an unfamiliar euphoria. In this very building, her son, five months clean, is doing his first repair job, getting his life in order, and all around her the business of the State of New Mexico ticks along.
Since Friday, she has felt changed, as if some scratchy scrim has lifted, leaving her soft and bare to the sky. For the first time, she feels equal to the task of dying.
She’s supposed to be printing certificates of commendation for the members of a high school basketball team in Grant County, but the names on the list before her won’t stay put. The tumor is an insistent pressure on the top left of her head, and when she ignores it, it nudges her gently, like a blind old cat.
Yolanda sets the list of basketball players aside. Her hands rest quietly in her lap. Above her, the light buzzes and an indistinct conversation down the hall drifts toward her.
She closes her eyes, placing herself again in the bar on Friday. The heavily lacquered tables sticky with spilled beer and barbecue sauce, the red plastic baskets, the yeasty, greasy smell of beer and fries, the man’s arms encircling her.
Why does the body continue to yearn? Even now. Friday night she’d thought the magic of that kiss was her own allure, but maybe the magic came from him. Maybe he really was a goblin with some uncanny power, maybe he kissed girls in bars all over New Mexico and planted the memory of himself in them like a magic bean.
Girl. She has to laugh. How can Yolanda, terminally ill at age fifty-five, still think of herself as a girl? Surely this is a sign of a failed personality.
That kiss made her feel profoundly sexy, sexier than she has in decades. Maybe sexier than she’s ever felt, because even if Anthony pushed her against the refrigerator, the car, the malformed trunk of the globe willow tree in the backyard, even if Yolanda found herself gutted with desire, there was always something missing. She hadn’t yet understood that she would never be enough for him.
All the men over the years. Yolanda is so tired of the vigilance, the effort: having to be always alert for romantic possibility, seeing herself through other people’s eyes, finding after the whole rigmarole of grooming and dating and seduction that she doesn’t want the person she’s won over. Yolanda won’t get what she longed for all those years—love and romance, the grand culmination, the quiet aging companionship—but what she has isn’t so bad. Her house, her bedroom, her gleaming dressing table with the pink brocade bench, the smell of Pledge and the dusty burning vacuum smell, her son and granddaughter and the baby in the living room with the television. Maybe all she ever really wanted was to be led around a dance floor and a single kiss on the side of her neck. Except that now she wants another.
At five fifteen Amadeo makes it back to the Capitol and walks down the ramp into the garage. He’s calmer now, the drink muffling the world.
He’ll sleep on the way home to avoid his mother’s disappointment. She is not the type to press him or reproach him; her shoulders will slump, and her face will be drawn, and that will be bad enough. Tonight he can apologize, promise to do better.
His mother is waiting for him, as they planned, but not at her car. As his eyes adjust to the dim, flickering fluorescence, he realizes that his mother is standing by Monica Gutierrez-Larsen’s car, and that Monica Gutierrez-Larsen is there, too, sitting on the bumper. His toolbox is on the hood, all packed up.
The two of them aren’t talking. Monica scrolls through her phone. Yolanda clutches herself, small and shamed.
For a moment he considers fleeing back up the ramp.
“Oh, mi hijito,” his mother says as he approaches, and her voice is so sad he wants to pull her into his chest to comfort her, but she’s across the parking garage and the car is between them. Monica Gutierrez-Larsen rises, and the two women watch him.
The chief clerk is now wearing sneakers with her suit. They’re lightweight and neon, expensive, and he gets a flash of her in performance gear running on trails. Her face is unsmiling, but she seems to be watching him with curiosity.
“Where have you been?” His mother’s voice is strangled. She’s shaking.
“We’ve been trying to call you,” says Monica Gutierrez-Larsen. With one finger—the nail buffed and painted a neat pale pink—she pushes his cell phone across the hood toward him an inch. “Guess you left in a hurry?”
He’s about to defend himself, to tell her that her piece-of-shit car was too far gone for him to work with, or, maybe, maybe, to beg forgiveness. His head is fuzzy, the thoughts coming slow and thick.
“You need to pay for this, hijito.” In this light, his mother looks unlike herself: the bones of her face protrude, casting deep shadows around her eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks. She is leaning against the hood, fingers splayed, arms tense. She lists to the side and her eyes flutter open and shut.
“We can work something out,” Monica says crisply. “A payment plan. It would be best, I think, if we manage this between ourselves, and keep your mother out of it.”
“Something’s happening,” his mother says.
Amadeo’s entire face is hot with the shame of being reprimanded by this tiny woman his own age. He raises entreating hands to his mother. “Why aren’t you helping me?”
“How can I help you?” Her voice is low and oddly staccato, her eyes flicking rapidly. She cuts off. Her lips are pale.
“Yolanda?” Monica Gutierrez-Larsen steps toward his mother but doesn’t touch her, and then Yolanda slides to the concrete.
His mother is making a joke, though she does not make jokes, not like this. By the time he circles the car, Monica Gutierrez-Larsen is squatting beside her, and his mother’s arms and legs are jerking.
YOLANDA IS IN emergency surgery at St. Vincent’s. Amadeo walks tight, anxious circles around the waiting area. He’s completely sober: his vision clear and dry under the vivid lights, his mouth parched. The set expressions on the faces of the doctors do not inspire confidence, and neither does anything they say, which isn’t much, only that Yolanda is undergoing brain surgery and they will update Amadeo as soon as they have news.
Amadeo extends his pacing to the wide halls and calls Valerie, who drives up immediately from Albuquerque with the girls. As she drives, she keeps him on speaker, assailing him with questions he doesn’t know the answers to.
“All I know is they’re operating on her.”
“I can’t hear you!” she says. “Hold the phone higher, Lily!”
“Is Lily in the front seat? Is she big enough for that?”
“Not technically,” Lily says, her calm voice loud in the speaker. “But she needs me to navigate her.”
“Oh, shut up,” his sister snaps.
“Hey!” protests Lily. “That’s child abuse! Verbal-style!” Farther in the background Sarah chimes in, fragments of chirping static.
“I’m not talking to you,” Valerie says, her voice muddled and desperate.
“Is Gramma going to die?” Lily asks, and Amadeo halts his pacing, his breath still in his chest, waiting for his sister’s response. But there’s only the distant whir of the car engine. Then he realizes that Lily is asking him, waiting for his answer, and that not just Lily is waiting.
“I don’t know.” He clears his throat. “You shouldn’t be on the phone,” he tells his sister with effort. “It’s not safe. Call when you get here.”
Amadeo tries to sit in the waiting room with its calming desert colors, but he keeps springing up. You don’t know anything, he reminds himself. She might be fine.
Tears rush his eyes. He looks around the corridor to see who might be noticing. Part of him hopes someone does notice, that someone will unravel this nightmare. He imagines something out of an old folktale: a saint or a bruja in the guise of a hunched woman, resting a hand on his shoulder, holding Amadeo steady with a clear gray-brown gaze, rearranging fate and circumstance with a quiet, cryptic utterance. Amadeo would blink and she would be gone, and his mother would be walking toward him down the hall, her step firm as she returns to him, a little smile at the corners of her mouth.
But in the corridor, people move with swift, oiled competence. No one looks his way.
As he waits, the thought crosses his mind that he’s off the hook for damaging Monica Gutierrez-Larsen’s car, and he’s immediately ashamed.
He nearly calls Angel, but he doesn’t want to scare her, not yet. He thinks about calling Brianna, then puts his phone away.
Half an hour later a pretty woman in scrubs approaches to tell him that his mother is in post-op, still under anesthesia, and that the doctor will be out to speak with him soon.
When his sister arrives, rushing through the automatic doors, Amadeo slackens in relief. She’s frantic, whipping her head around to look for him. Sarah and Lily hurry behind, pinched and worried and clutching enough books for a week of waiting.
At the sight of his sister, Amadeo’s eyes fill again. He wants to embrace her, but he isn’t sure whether this crisis is enough to bring on a détente.
Valerie also seems uncertain, and stops short before him. “Have you heard anything?”
“Hi, Uncle Amadeo,” Lily says gravely, glancing at her mother. Valerie is in loose yoga pants and a Lobos T-shirt with a thickly embroidered emblem, her long hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, but her face, though tired-looking and creased with worry, is still made-up. He’s not used to seeing her dressed so carelessly. He imagines she must have just changed out of her work clothes when she got his call.
“Mom’s in post-op. Post-operation,” he clarifies. “Her doctor is going to talk to us soon.”
Lily looks around mournfully, blinking behind her glasses. “It’s cold in here.” She’s right. It’s freezing. Amadeo hadn’t noticed. His nieces’ bare arms are goose-bumped.
“Here,” he says, unbuttoning his plaid shirt. “I guess you’ll have to trade off.” He’s self-conscious in his undershirt; he feels like a stereotype, like he should be bumping along in a flame-emblazoned lowrider.
Lily hesitates, and doesn’t look at him as she takes it and wraps it around herself. “Thanks, Uncle Amadeo.”
Just then the pretty woman in scrubs approaches. “Mr. and Mrs. Padilla? Dr. Seth and Dr. Konecky, your mother’s neurosurgeon and oncologist, are ready to see you. I’ll take you to the private lounge.”
Anguish flashes in Valerie’s face, and, to Amadeo’s surprise, she leaves it to him to clarify their relationship. “She’s my sister.”
Valerie points the girls to a bank of seats against the wall. “Wait for us here.” The girls eye the chairs, but don’t sit.
“Can’t I go in with you?” Lily asks. “I also want to hear how Gramma is.”
“Me, too, I want to go,” says Sarah. “You’re not the only one who cares about her.”
Valerie shakes her head. “Stay there.”
Even though the corridor is clear, Amadeo and his sister walk so close together that their arms brush.
He hates how they look: his sister in her shapeless lounging clothes, her ponytail sagging, himself in his wife-beater, tattoos exposed. Sloppy. They are going into battle unprepared, unarmored. Valerie has a master’s degree! he wants to shout.
At the door of the lounge, they pause. Beside him, Amadeo can sense Valerie steeling herself. He touches her wrist—to give comfort or to take it, he isn’t sure—and then they go in.
In the lounge, a Himalayan salt lamp glows pinkly on a side table. Valerie’s demeanor is deferential. She keeps her hands clasped before her like a schoolgirl afraid of punishment, which comes anyway.
“We’ve removed most of the biggest tumor,” Dr. Seth says. “And part of another. But a third is inoperable. Based on its location, getting at it would cause severe damage to the brain tissue.” He’s what Amadeo might expect from a brain surgeon, if he’d ever bothered to imagine one. He’s a small and precise man, long-fingered, with a faint British accent. His bald head is shiny. Easy to sterilize before surgery, Amadeo thinks, which makes him think of vultures; he saw once on a nature program that their baldness is an adaptive trait to cut down on the parasites they’re exposed to when they dive headfirst into rotting bodies. This in turn makes him think of his mother as a corpse, a thought so horrible bile rises in his throat. He coughs, gags, but doesn’t, thank god, throw up.
She’s alive, he tells himself. She’s alive, she’s herself, she’s your mother.
“Your mother suffered a grand mal seizure this afternoon. With every seizure, there’s a strong possibility of brain damage,” says Dr. Seth, “and the seizures will come more frequently.”
“Can stress trigger it?” Amadeo asks. “Like, if something stressful happened?”
“Of course. Our bodies and minds are intrinsically linked, and it wouldn’t be surprising if she was under a great deal of pressure.”
Amadeo is awash in hot horror. Her eyes had flickered so strangely in the orange light of the parking garage as she waited for him.
“But it could happen without
obvious triggers, too. With this condition, it was going to happen.”
Both Amadeo and Valerie have trouble absorbing the bewildering news that the hospital already has their mother on file, that apparently she’s been in treatment since June.
“She would have told us,” Amadeo says lamely, and the doctors press their lips in sympathy.
“Her fall that night,” says Valerie, stricken. “Remember?” She turns to Amadeo, her tone less accusing than imploring. “Haven’t you noticed symptoms?”
Of course he’d noticed—he just didn’t let himself think about the moments of vertigo, the increasingly random things she’d say, or the spacey, panicked look that would come over her, as though she was lost in their own living room. It never occurred to him that anything truly bad could befall his mother, who is the surest force in his life. And Amadeo himself hurried her condition along by making her so unhappy.
“How could she have known and not told us?” Valerie asks the doctors in a drowning voice, searching each of their faces, and Amadeo is surprised by the protectiveness he feels for her. “Didn’t she need us?”
Dr. Konecky raises her palms with compassion. “You’ll have to talk to her about it. But it’s possible your mother wanted to maintain control of the news, given how out-of-control the diagnosis is.” She posits this gently, regretfully, as though she risks blowing their feeble little minds with a theory so profound. Amadeo expects Valerie to lash out at the lank-haired doctor, but his sister doesn’t seem to take offense.
It’s after ten when they’re allowed to see their mother. In the waiting room, the girls have fallen asleep. Lily, still wrapped in Amadeo’s shirt, is slumped in her chair with her fat novel open in her lap, her neck kinked in a way that makes Amadeo wince. Sarah sprawls on a love seat wearing an oversized purple sweatshirt that Valerie was forced to spend forty-five dollars on in the gift shop. Santa Fe: Living the Dream! “Whose bright fucking idea was it to sell these in a fucking hospital?” Valerie said as she handed over her credit card. “I fucking hate this city.”