by Unknown
As if her body is turning into something else already, Yolanda doesn’t smell like herself. The ghost of that old powdery scent is there, but it’s morphed into something waxy and sweet that goes to the back of the throat.
Beside her, the baby monitor winks its red light. They’ve moved the transmitter from next to Connor’s crib to Yolanda’s bedside table; now it picks up her thin cries as she sleeps. She sleeps almost as much as Connor did right after his birth. “Mama,” they sometimes hear. Or, “Wait, please.” Mostly it’s garble, delivered with conviction: “Forty eighty I says trespasses.” Once, horribly, she called, “Stop! You’re hurting me!” Her voice through the monitor is somehow both reedy and gravelly, unlike her waking voice, which is unlike her old, healthy voice. Sometimes she just moans.
Now, beginning to retch, Yolanda tries to pull herself up. Angel stands swiftly, helps her lean over the mixing bowl—the same mixing bowl with the dent that Yolanda used when she taught Angel to make tortillas. She holds the back of her grandmother’s head in her hand as if she were an infant, careful with her soft spot under the knit cap. Yolanda vomits, a watery, foul-smelling green fluid. It seems impossible that a body so frail can be wracked so violently. Yolanda drops back against the pillow. Her eyes are more dimensional, the closed lids translucent and shiny.
“Here, let’s get you cleaned up.” Angel uses one of Connor’s terry washcloths to wipe her grandmother’s trembling chin.
Her grandmother’s eyes flutter, but remain shut. “I’m a mess.”
Each time her grandmother tries to speak, Angel tenses, praying for lucidity. Today she’s been sharp. Angel takes her grandmother’s hand. It is warm and smooth, the skin loose over the delicate bones. “Your hands are always so soft. Why are they always so soft?”
Her grandmother’s eyes open slightly and she laughs, a low weak chuffing. “I’m not doing dishes no more.”
For a time, they lie there, watching the shifting pattern of the sunlight on the ceiling.
Her grandmother pats her hand. “Glad you’re here, hijita. Right with me.”
“I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad we’re here together.”
“You’re good girl.”
All at once, tears slide from Angel’s eyes. “No I’m not.”
“Yes.” Her grandmother’s lips barely move. “Hijita, promise. Get a kind boyfriend.”
Sadness presses like a knuckle against her throat. “Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”
Her grandmother takes a deep breath that Angel can feel all along the length of her body.
The room is quiet, a night-light glowing in the corner. Yolanda wakes in a panic. She’s forgotten something. She cannot sit up, but she searches the shadowy room, gasping, oppressed, terrified. She has no memory of the faces that had crowded close to assure her of their love, no settled feeling of reconciliation or resolution. Just pure disorientation, immense and intolerable, untethered from reason or cause. There is a shape there in the dark beside her. Anthony? she asks, but the word means nothing to her, and she’s not sure she spoke it.
“Mom? I’m right here.” Amadeo touches her hand, and, just like that, the terror is gone. Yolanda sinks back against the pillow. She is aware of being awash in love, love flowing from the world toward her, and she is afloat on it. She is in the bottom of a boat rocking on a serene ocean, gazing up into the depths of stars, anchored safely to the dock by her son’s hand. Somewhere she can hear the water lap against pilings.
And then Yolanda is dancing in the arms of a very ugly man. The room is light and Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris are singing about highways. It’s an incredible song, she realizes now, and wonders why she never noticed before. Her body is filled with the music, and the man’s arms around her are steady and pliant, guiding her across the floor. Tang of barbecue and beer, the easy give of the boards under her feet, the clean scent of his shaving cream and soap. She feels sated, afloat on the music, steady on her feet. The man says something to her, and though she doesn’t hear, she laughs and nods. Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels.
He pulls her close as he guides her smoothly through a turn. The spin is easy and graceful, and he takes her around the dance floor again. She is weightless, and when she leans into him, it’s as if his heat alone holds her aloft.
The song is on its last refrain, and Yolanda isn’t ready for it to end, but there is still time. Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down. The man bends toward her, and Yolanda is poised for the kiss she knows will come. She is waiting for it. Goose bumps rise on her arms as she anticipates the delicious mild scratch of his stubble, the press of his lips against her neck, the electric rush that will pass through her like absolution.
Yolanda is still waiting when time stutters and blinks out.
This is death, then: a brief spot of light on earth extinguished, a rippling point of energy swept clear. A kiss, a song, the warm circle of a stranger’s arms—these things and others—the whole crush of memory and hope, the constant babble of the mind, everything that composes a person—gone.
The baby is seven months old. He still needs his diapers changed, still demands milk and love and Nurturing Touch. Angel isn’t even sure he notices that Yolanda is gone. He has developed a bizarrely intense attention span, and exhibits a particular interest in junk mail, turning promotional postcards from department stores inexpertly in his hands, studying them with no less wonderment than if they’d been dispatches from Jupiter.
When he bends over his postcard, the sight of the chaotic duckling fuzz and that bare, vulnerable little channel at the base of his skull leaves Angel weak. After many minutes have passed, Connor will lower the postcard, blink, swivel his head in search of his mother, and then, when he finds her, erupt in emphatic babble.
Will Connor remember Yolanda at all? As a shadow or a sensation, as a vague feeling from those long, early days of his infancy? The thought that he won’t is unbearable. Connor pumps his arms, whacking his own face with the postcard, startling himself quiet before emitting a peal of laughter at the joke of it all.
Angel had sort of believed that death—the death of someone essential and life-defining—meant the end of everything, but here she is, mashing banana with a fork, loading the dishwasher. Here she is (having placed Connor in his pen), doing something as mundane and necessary as choosing from among the bottles lined up along the edge of the bathtub and shampooing her hair.
This heartache is so much larger than anything she’s felt. It’s agony—she can’t sit still, it hurts so much—and also enlivening. Angel had no idea that the world could hold ache like this, just as, before Connor was born, she had no idea it could hold such love.
But she can’t cry. Right after Connor was born, Angel cried so often that sometimes she didn’t even notice. Sometimes she’d be moving through the house, breasts leaking, Connor fussy in her arms, and would only become aware of her own sobs when she realized she had to blow her nose. But since her grandmother’s death, apart from some dry convulsions the night of, all those once-plentiful free-flowing tears have dried up. If only she could cry, she might find some relief.
Yolanda’s death has meant tasks—now, instead of spooning thin oatmeal into her grandmother’s mouth, she deals with the men who come to collect the hospital bed and the wheelchair and all the other equipment on loan. There are copies of the death certificate to order, thank-yous to be written to all those faceless friends of Yolanda’s who sent flowers and notes. The bills are piling up—phone, utilities, cable—and she sorts them and sets them aside for her father.
She’s glad to be busy. But still, somehow, the days feel slack and empty, Angel rattling around in them. She who’d once felt so overwhelmed by the needs of her son, who’d longed for his naps just so she could think for one stinking second, now lingers at his crib, listening to his near-silent breath, waiting for him to wake up and keep her company.
Here’s what she doesn’t want to think about: her grandmother’s death has
brought—horribly, undeniably—relief. She’d been warned that this would be the case, by the hospice aide and the doctor, but the warnings don’t make her feel any less shitty.
What also feels shitty is her inability to make herself comfort her father, who seems to be having no trouble at all accessing his tears. He’s spent the last two weeks sobbing and casting plaintive looks at her from across various rooms.
“I feel so bad,” he whimpers, his red eyes imploring.
“Yeah,” she says, and returns to wiping mashed peas from Connor’s chin. His face is chapped. The house is hot and dry, and outside the air is cold and dry, snow bunched like squeaking dirty Styrofoam. Angel’s knuckles crack and bleed.
Yolanda’s death should have drawn them closer, but it hasn’t. Instead of compassion for her father, she feels resentment, because he made her do so many punishing jobs, jobs no kid should have to do, and now he wants her to comfort him? Worse, he stays up late every night, drinking, tears running down his cheeks, as if he’s the only one who lost anything. In the morning, she gathers the bottles—and not just beer now, vodka, too—and puts them in the recycling. He doesn’t keep the beer in the fridge anymore, not after she poured them all down the sink two days after the funeral, so he’s stashing them somewhere else, out back or in his room (is she supposed to search for them?), drinking them warm, which is all the more pathetic. Just looking at him slumped at the table, eyes red and lips trembling, makes her so mad she wants to spit or smash a window or stomp a hole right through the kitchen linoleum.
Hard little bitch.
To her credit, Marissa has been by every couple days, bringing lentil soup and Angel’s favorite homemade tortillas from the lady with the cooler in the Superette parking lot and a double batch of green chile mac and cheese.
“Thanks,” Angel says, pulling away from her mother’s tight embrace too soon.
“God,” Marissa says, turning in a slow circle around the living room while Angel scrubs at a baking sheet from the entire frozen pizza she ate for lunch. Angel has been starving since her grandmother died, a sucking black nothingness. She’s been gorging on the food neighbors bring; just last night she ate an entire Frito pie casserole, standing joylessly over the dish with her fork at the counter, then, after, lay in bed, heavy and sick and sleepless.
“I can’t believe Yolanda is gone. Like, really gone.”
“I know,” Amadeo says from the couch, his plate heaped with Marissa’s food.
“Well, believe it.” Angel’s voice is as dry as her eyes.
“I mean, she was, like, my mother-in-law,” Marissa says, turning her tear-glossed gaze on Angel.
“No she wasn’t.”
“Well, closest thing to.” A note of stubbornness has come into her voice.
“She liked you,” Amadeo says, and both Angel and Marissa turn to him in surprise.
“Really?” Marissa sits beside him on the couch.
“Yeah, of course. She thought I was an idiot for breaking up with you.”
Marissa laughs. “You didn’t break up with me. That would’ve been the mature path to take. You were just a dick and then quit calling until I got the message.”
Angel puts down her scouring pad and listens in amazement. She’s never heard her mother and father talking to each other like this, with kind directness, has so rarely ever even seen them in the same room.
“Well, yeah. That was my mom’s point, too.”
There was a time, when Angel was seven or eight, when her dearest wish was for her mother and father to get back together. “Never gonna happen,” her mother said brusquely the one time Angel brought it up. “That’s a mistake you don’t make twice.”
Now Marissa’s voice softens. “Remember when we were in high school and Yolanda used to buy us those frozen hash brown patties and after school we’d make green chile and bacon sandwiches, with them as the bread? Still when I have hash browns I think of being pregnant and hanging out at your house. Remember how Val would be so mad about all our dishes in the sink, but she’d do them anyway before your mom got home?”
“Ah, shit, yeah. Poor Val.”
“What jerks we were. How’s Val doing? Is she pretty shook up? She was always real protective of your mom.”
“Yeah,” Amadeo says, and, eyes filling, he excuses himself.
As she’s leaving, Marissa hesitates at the door. “Anytime you want to come home, Ange, you know you can. We could set up the crib in the laundry room, turn the whole thing into a nursery. When you were a baby you loved the sound of the washing machine. It put you right to sleep.”
“Thanks,” Angel says, exhausted. “We’re fine.”
FOR WEEKS NOW, Angel has been sending Lizette a text a day. Hey, she says. What’s up? Or Call me! Or I got expelled, too. Even, I miss you. But Lizette never replies.
Therefore when Ryan asks if he can come over after school, Angel says sure. He is reliable in his texts, so over the past weeks, she’s told him about getting kicked out, and about her grandmother dying. On the subject of Smart Starts!, he was gratifyingly outraged. “Dang, that’s so wrong!” On the subject of her grandmother, his mournful sympathy comforted her. Once the conversation continued until Angel told him she had to go to bed. Always, he sends the last text, and the first the next day. Angel’s role in these conversations is harsh, mocking, reluctant, but she enjoys them in a grim sort of way, enjoys his devotion, and figures she deserves it, given how her life is going.
Angel watches from the window as he jog-skips to the door, his backpack bumping up and down with him, but once he’s out of her sight line, a long moment passes before he knocks. Angel can’t see him, but imagines him adjusting his nards in his pants in that disgusting way boys do.
Connor is out of sorts, rubbing his face clumsily. He was up in the night, screaming and arching his back in discomfort from the new tooth perforating his top gum.
Her father is god knows where with the truck, probably draining the last of Yolanda’s savings account at the liquor store. Angel pushes that thought from her mind.
“Hey,” Ryan says as she opens the door. He bends over for a hug, but she has Connor in front of her like a shield, and he ends up patting her on the arm. “I’m really sorry about your grandma.”
“Thanks.”
He keeps looking at her steadily, and Angel winces under his attention. “I didn’t know her that well, but she was nice to me.”
“I know.”
“Hiya, little dude,” Ryan coos, and Connor’s face scrunches into a lopsided, drooly grin. Ryan leans his face close to Connor’s, which means his face is also close to Angel’s, and she can see a yellow-tipped zit on his cheek. She shifts Connor away.
Ryan moves, too, though, and keeps talking gibberish an inch from the baby’s face, and Connor’s delight rises into squeals. “Little doodarooni, little doodaroonikiss.”
“Careful. You’ll make him puke. He just had yams.” She gestures to the orange-streaked surface of Connor’s high chair.
Connor’s laugh turns to whimpers. He thrusts his arms down, as if trying to push everything away, and his fist gets tangled in a fold in his pants, triggering another wail. She jiggles him. “Hush now.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Ryan asks in alarm.
“He’s getting another tooth. It’s normal.” She holds the writhing baby close, not wanting to let him go. “I guess I should put him down. I hoped he’d stay up for your visit.”
In his adult voice, Ryan says, “Oh dang. I miss this guy.”
“Say night-night,” Angel instructs Connor, who screams in response.
“Okay,” says Ryan, disappointed. “Night-night, little feller.”
As Angel carries Connor off to her room, Ryan drops his backpack onto the floor with a thump. The thought of those algebra and life sciences textbooks fills Angel with hot, yearning anxiety, because she must be falling so far behind. She probably can’t even fathom how far behind she is.
After Connor has been put down,
Angel expects Ryan to go, but when she emerges, reattaching her bra under her shirt, she finds that he’s cleaned up the yammy high chair, done the stray dishes on the counter, taken out the kitchen trash, and is in the midst of wiping down the counters, too. Angel sits on the couch, tucks her feet under her, watching.
“What are you doing? Why are you being so nice?”
He rinses the sponge, places it beside the sink, and comes to sit beside her. “So how are you? Really?” His Adam’s apple bobs nervously.
Angel shakes her head. Her throat is tight, and, now of all times, she can feel the tears coming. And because she can’t bear to cry in front of Ryan, she pulls him toward her and kisses him.
His mouth is muggy and tastes faintly of a cherry cough drop. After she pulls away, he keeps his eyes shut and chin canted toward her for a beat too long.
When he opens his eyes, they’re gleaming, and he says, “I really, really like you.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.” Angel thinks with anguish about Lizette, the taunting quirk of her mouth when she’s about to kiss Angel. The unfairness is staggering—that he’s the one here, that she loves Lizette in the first place. Again, the tears threaten to come. She swallows and leans in again, but because she doesn’t want to kiss him, she pushes her hand up his T-shirt. Needing no encouragement, he pulls the shirt over his head, dropping it to the ground.
Ryan tucks his elbows close to his skinny torso. “Your dad’s out?”
“Yeah. We’ll hear him if he gets home.”
She traces her finger down his chest, and, in fact, there’s a narrow thrumming trench, and alongside it, an even paler scar. He’s nearly hairless—another thing she doesn’t remember from that first time—and his skin is a little sticky to the touch. He watches her, eyes hazy, lips parted, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He’s so trusting—though why he would trust her, she who has been so mean to him—is beyond her. It makes her hate him, and love him a little, too. If she could only be into him, it would make such clear, easy sense. She imagines pushing through his chest as though he were a too-ripe tomato, which makes her think of the sad tomato plants tended by Lizette’s brother, and then of Lizette. She imagines Lizette watching her here with Ryan, imagines the hot twist of envy Lizette would surely feel, so she leans into Ryan. She runs her hands down the smooth skin of his back, slides a finger into his waistband. See? she imagines telling Lizette.