by J. D. Glass
I couldn’t say no to the expression in her eyes, the combination of love and pain in them. She hurt for me, and the knowledge of that…it threatened to break me. I didn’t want anyone to hurt for me, because of me. I didn’t know what good speaking with my mother would do, but if it made her feel better…
“You can try, I guess.”
Nina nodded as she removed her hand. “I’ll do better than that.” She excused herself to make that call, and about twenty minutes later, Samantha left.
She returned in less than an hour carrying the mail and accompanied by my mother. For the first time since I could remember, for a situation that was not a family gathering of some sort or one of her organizational functions, my mother had really dressed: she wore a suit and had pulled her hair severely back. I remembered that look, my strong mother who had faced down desperate, conscienceless thugs and corrupt governors.
Sam handed Jean the mail as my mother held me to her firmly. “Let me help you, mi hija querida, okay?” she said before she turned to Jean and gave her a big hug too.
“You have to remember, Tori, Jean,” she said, her tone gentle as she observed us both, “you’re both going through this, okay?” Her tone shifted, became brisk and matter-of-fact. “Have you found a therapist yet?”
Jean and I looked at each other as I held her hand tightly.
“I, uh…no, Mom, haven’t thought about that, honestly.”
“I didn’t think about it either,” Jean answered.
“Well, that’s your next task,” my mom said, “but for now, it’s a beautiful day out there—why don’t you two go see a movie or go to the zoo, and—”
Nina came into the living room, Fran beside her. My mother beamed at her niece and at her friend as they approached.
“Nina…Samantha’s taking wonderful care of you two, I see,” she commented as they hugged each other and my mom took a second to do what everyone did, which was pet the belly.
“Tía, you remember—”
“Francesca? Of course, but it’s always wonderful to see you again,” she said as she shook her hand.
Jean swore under her breath next to me. “Fuck.” She held two envelopes in her hand and stared anywhere but at me as I took them from her.
I examined them. Both were cards, one from the Cayden family, thanking me for attending the wake, the other from Trace. I stared at the handwritten name and address in the corner. Whatever composure I’d had left was gone.
My mother turned back to us. “Give that to me,” she said, her voice gentle as she took them both from my numb fingers. “Victoria?”
My head snapped up at her voice speaking my name. “Huh?”
“Give me your cell phone.”
I automatically reached into my back pocket for it. “I haven’t had it on since…” I couldn’t finish that thought as I handed it to her. My chest began to squeeze, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to breathe normally again.
“I know. I left you a message yesterday.”
My mother’s eyes snapped like lake fire as she took my phone from me. “I need this,” she said, waving it at me. “It’s going to help. I’ll find something—te lo juro.” I swear, she promised.
“I…I still have her stuff from…from the hospital,” Jean said to her. “Bagged it and tagged it. It’s in the car.”
“I’ll get it,” Samantha offered and slipped out.
My mother nodded at Jean with approval. “Good. That will help. Girls, please. Go out, do something nice, let the lawyers”—she grinned at Fran, who gave her the same grin right back—“take care of it.”
She stepped away and tucked Nina’s hand in her arm, and Nina smiled reassuringly at me over her shoulder as we were dismissed.
“You don’t need to ask me questions or anything?” I asked, finally able to speak around the painful buzz that filled me.
My mother walked back to me. “Victoria, querida,” she said quietly, and she brushed the hair behind my ear, “it’s better for both of us if I read it, okay? Let me be a lawyer now, and later, when this is all done, I can be your mother, you can be my daughter.” She glanced up at Jean and smiled. “You can both be my daughters and we can talk about this, any way you’d like to.”
I understood, I really understood her need to be objective at the moment; I wished for that ability myself. “Okay, Mami.”
A thought struck me. “Mami, should I talk to Elena?”
I could see her hesitate, think before she spoke. “She’s your sister, and she loves you,” my mother said finally. “It’s your decision, hija. I’d advise you…give her a chance to be there for you, to…to…you know what I mean.”
She smiled at me and chucked my chin. “But don’t worry about that right now. Go out, girls. This might take some time.”
Jean and I opted on Ralph’s Ices, where they served over twenty different flavors of combinations of milk, ice, sugar, and flavors, and a gratifyingly stupid movie, followed by the promised trip to the hardware store for paint. We didn’t speak much. I was still numb, and Jean was giving me room.
“Hey, Jean?” I asked on the way home. “Can we go somewhere?”
“Any place you want. Where to?”
“I want…” I hesitated. I felt a little silly asking, but it was a compulsion, a directive I had to follow. “I want to see my grandmother.”
We stopped so I could pick up some flowers on the way.
“It’s all right, I’ll wait here if you want,” Jean said as I stepped out of the car. I smiled at her in thanks and made my way among the headstones.
I cleaned out the old flowers, carefully put the new ones down, and pushed away the grass from the marker.
“Hi, Nana,” I said quietly as I sat on the grass. “I’m sorry it’s been so long, but I think of you all the time.”
I traced the engraving on the polished granite, following the whorls and the curves with my fingers over her name, Sophia Del Castillo Monte Negron, past the date of her birth and the date of her death. The anniversary of the first would arrive in a few days; the anniversary of the second had already passed.
It was so strange, I mused, how two days, two different days separated by years, could follow one another in reverse of their events in each twelve-month cycle.
“Nina’s pregnant, she’s due in about twelve, thirteen weeks, but you probably knew that,” I said, then laughed a little self-consciously. I was talking to a stone, but I continued anyway. “I got married, Nana, to Jean, right after Easter. She’s a paramedic, and you’d love her, you really would, everyone does. I…” and my breath caught.
My fingers dug into the grass, letting the blades wrap around them as I combed along. “Nana…I feel so lost. I miss you so much and I’m scared, so scared, Nana, that I’ve fucked everything up. Everyone’s back at the house, trying to figure something out, ready to go do I don’t know what, and I don’t even know why. Why do they care? If I hadn’t gone there in the first place, nothing…”
I swallowed and wiped my eyes. “And Nana, I feel so strange…it’s like I had a whole life before two days ago, and that day? That day is a wall, separating me from everything, like there’s a field of grass behind it, and ahead? It’s all gray stone. I hurt, Nana. I didn’t tell anybody, everyone’s stressed enough, but it hurts, and…and…” I wiped my eyes again.
“I can’t even feel you anymore. You’re completely gone, and I can’t feel anything but the hurt, and the gray…”
I couldn’t continue. I buried my face into my hands and wept, part of my mind surprised I could even do that.
“I just wish I knew where you were,” I said quietly through the tears, “that you could tell me somehow that it’s all gonna be okay.”
I sniffed as I stood. I could hear someone approaching through the field of stones and knew, without looking, that it was Jean.
“Hi,” I said softly and held out my hand for her. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” I told her as her palm met mine. “Nana, this is Jean.�
�
*
We spent the next few days moving things around and painting in the apartment, although I still slept in the house with my Jean blanket.
“You still interested in diving?” Jean asked on the way back from one of our many trips to and from the hardware store.
“Yeah, definitely.”
“All right, then.” Jean nodded as she drove. “Let’s go down to my favorite dive shop.”
We crossed the Narrows and went to Sheepshead Bay near Manhattan Beach, where we walked along the piers and the promenade hand in hand. When we got to the shop, we picked up some basic books on equipment and technique, decided on a wet suit—“It’s all cold water around here,” Jean informed me—and I registered for a class that would start in two weeks. Jean would attend as well, so she could make sure “all my stuff is current,” she said.
It was after one of those busy painting days, following a shared pizza with Nina and Samantha, that Nina convinced me to go for coffee and dessert at the local coffeehouse with her and my mother while Samantha took Jean and Fran with her, destination unknown. Mission? “Just some stuff to take care of,” Samantha said.
I tried not to think about what they were doing, though I noticed my mom cast occasional sharp and worried glances my way while she asked Nina if she and Samantha had already picked out a name for the forthcoming niece or nephew (they had some ideas, but Samantha thought it was bad luck to name a baby before it was born), whether they knew if it was a niece or a nephew (they didn’t want to know, and those procedures weren’t always reliable anyway), and what was new with the label and the club. I understood none of that part of the conversation, so I just let myself enjoy the rhythm and enthusiasm of their voices as they spoke and I savored my cappuccino.
When Jean and I got ready for bed later, I asked her what that had been all about, and she told me that she and Samantha took Fran to take care of a few things with Trace. I asked her what that meant.
Jean carefully caught my shoulders. “It’s taken care of,” she said softly. “You won’t have to deal with her.”
Her expression was so somber it alarmed me.
“You guys didn’t make her take a long walk off a short pier with heavy shoes or something like that, did you?” I asked, half joking, half afraid they’d done something unrecoverable, that could put them at risk. Then again, considering the 911 connections we all had, it was unlikely that they would get in trouble, but still…I didn’t want anyone to do anything unethical, not for me, not because of me, not ever. And if anyone was going to do anything, it should be me.
Jean studied me intently. “No. Nothing like that.” She carefully caught my chin in her hand. “Would you want that?”
My entire body flushed as I thought about it and stared back up at Jean. “Yeah,” I said finally, “yeah, I would, but I’d want to be the one to do it.”
I didn’t know how she’d react, but she had to know how I honestly felt.
Jean sighed and wrapped her arms around me. “Me too.”
*
We both woke suddenly to Nina’s voice calling for Samantha in a tone I’d never heard before, and as I jumped out of bed and slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, Sam knocked on the door as she passed. I could hear the rapid tread of her feet across the hallway as she ran to the bathroom.
“I’m right behind you,” Jean said as I popped on a pair of loafers, grabbed my bag, and slung it over my shoulder, then ran out into the hallway, Dusty leading the way.
The dark red blood on the floor prompted action without thought: bleeding in a pregnant patient was considered a true emergency, especially past the first trimester. While Jean ran down to the truck to grab an O2 tank and her medic bag, I had Samantha get a sheet and lay it out on the floor in the hallway while I guided Nina down into a left-lateral recumbent position. I then asked Samantha to call 911, and she held the phone for me so I could speak to dispatch while asking the questions involved in the initial assessment.
We had a female whose history revealed this as a second pregnancy in its twenty-eighth week with a previous miscarriage in the sixteenth, a blood pressure that just skirted excessively low, and who had started to bleed—deep, dark red blood that was thankfully progressing slowly. She said she had reached “the wrong way” and had felt one, terribly painful, “tearing” sensation. The abdomen was very tender, the uterus felt tightly contracted.
I could hear the screen door slam shut when Jean returned.
“I left the door open so the responding team can walk in,” she said as her head topped the stairs. The tank was set to high-flow O2 with a non-rebreather mask, SOP for pregnant women, and Jean dropped a line for Ringer’s lactate to prevent Nina’s blood pressure from dropping too severely and to open a passage for other meds to be administered, if necessary. Samantha held it over her shoulder.
“What the…?” Jean asked under her breath as she tried to monitor fetal tones. “Tori, give a listen.”
I listened but heard a strange, rapid off-beat. I listened for another few seconds, then it hit me: it wasn’t one strange rhythm, but two non-synced ones.
Two. “Are you guys expecting twins?” I asked, looking from Nina’s face to Samantha’s.
Samantha swallowed, then nodded.
That explained quite a bit about things I’d seen in the past few months.
“You got this for a moment?” I asked Jean.
“Yeah.”
“Great. Give me four seconds,” I said as Dusty began to bark, letting us know the response team had arrived. I ran to the room and grabbed our wallets—so we’d have our shields on us.
“Down, Dusty, friends!” Jean called, and Dusty stopped barking immediately. I could hear the scatter of her paws as she flew back up the steps, leading the response team behind her. She settled herself by Nina’s head as I tossed Jean her shield, then reevaluated the vitals.
“Hey, Tori, Jean,” Roy greeted us.
Jean presented as they loaded Nina onto the stretcher and Roy put the Ringer’s bag over his shoulder.
“You’re coming, right?” he asked her.
She had to go; there was a live IV running, and as competent as Roy was, his unit was BLS, not ALS. Also, even though Jean and I were both off duty, at that moment, legally, we represented the city, while Roy, while off duty for the city, was on duty for a contracted hospital, which meant, in essence, this was our scene, and even more so Jean’s, since she was the highest medical authority as well as senior to at least me and Roy.
“Who’s coming with us?” he asked as they got to the top of the stairs.
“I am,” Jean said, and she whirled back and grabbed Samantha, “and she is.”
“Which hospital?” I asked as everyone walked carefully down.
“St. Vin’s has a NICU,” Jean said, “and it’s closest. Roy, have dispatch contact the hospital and tell them what we’ve got.”
“I’ll meet you there. Nina, I’ll see you in two minutes,” I assured her as they loaded her in. She waved at me before they closed the doors and Samantha was escorted to the front passenger seat.
I don’t know how I got there before them, but I did, and when the guard who sat by the vestibule tried to chase me off, I popped my shield out of my back pocket and into his face. He backed off immediately; I’d seen him a thousand times before while working the privates, and he’d always been an officious prick.
In the end they tried to bar Samantha from entering, but one of the receiving nurses was Kathy, my instructor. I caught her on the side. “Kathy, don’t make her leave. They’re her kids too, and my cousin shouldn’t go through whatever’s going to happen by herself.”
Kathy nodded in understanding and gripped my shoulder, pulling me closer so no one could overhear.
“Scotty, this is a Catholic hospital. Half the staff will be cool, the others will be”—she tightened her lips—“official. Tell her to tell anyone that asks that she’s her sister, get me? She can’t be refused entrance then—I’l
l get the word to anyone else.”
“Okay. Thanks, Kathy.” I patted her arm and she smiled at me.
“No problem, Scotty. I have a cousin too.”
I stopped by Nina’s bed where an orderly was preparing to wheel her away. She was still on high-flow O2 and was now attached to a few portable monitors.
I curled my fingers around hers, reached over to brush an unruly strand of hair behind her ear, then kissed her cheek. “Nina, tell them Samantha’s your sister,” I whispered to her in Spanish, “so they’ll let her go with you, okay?”
Nina squeezed my hand lightly. “Gracias, hermanita.” Thanks, little sister.
Kathy brought Samantha back to Nina’s bed. “You know the deal?” I asked her quietly.
“Yeah, I do. Thanks, Tori.” She hugged me briefly but fiercely. “And tell Jean the same.” She handed me her cell phone. “Do me a favor?” she asked as they began to move en masse.
“Sure. Anything. Name it.”
“Call Nina’s doctor. Tell him what’s going on, then call Mom, call Uncle Cort, and call Fran? Their numbers are all in there.” Sam’s eyes darted back to the stretcher.
“Go, Sam, I’ve got it covered,” I told her, “and we’ll see you upstairs.”
They disappeared around the corner into the corridor, and I stepped back out through the vestibule to the bay to make those calls.
Jean came out and split a cigarette with me while I left a message with the doctor’s answering service, a message for Samantha’s uncle, another one for Fran, and then…I was rather certain that other than my mother and possibly Elena, no one else in Nina’s family knew yet. I called my mother, because I didn’t know how to step into that breach.
“Victoria, qué pasó?” What happened, my mother asked. “Are you and Jean okay?”
“Mami, we’re fine, it’s Nina,” I began and reached for the comfort of Jean. “She’s in the hospital…”