by Tim Murphy
It all felt very inevitable to Milly. She was torn between thinking that Jared should forgive her and the truer feeling that she’d had this coming all these years. Even Mateo’s flight—she’d had it coming. You can’t adopt a child to fill an inner void, she’d tell herself. You have to do it out of some detached, selfless impulse to put good out into the world. You can’t expect a motherless kid to fulfill your own need to be someone’s mother because you’re afraid of having your own kid. And yet, Milly would think, it had sort of worked for a while, hadn’t it?
She sleepwalked through her days, telling only Gallegos and Kyla out in L.A. all that had happened, and at the end of the day, she’d come home to the large, empty apartment at the Christodora. She would sit in the window and stare down at the bare treetops in the park and think, Well, it’s come to this. And I’m not surprised at all.
EIGHTEEN
No Meaning
(1993)
The middle-aged, heavyset woman coming up out of the train station at Fourteenth Street from Queens on a chilly November night had to orient herself, as she wasn’t normally in downtown Manhattan, and then she had to ask a passerby to point her in the direction of St. Vincent’s, the entrance of which she stood in front of for several seconds, frozen in distress, before she thought to reach into her pocketbook for her rosary. She pulled it out, kissed it, and prayed to the Virgin Mother for strength, resolve, and compassion, and then she entered. At the front desk, reassured by the large crucifix hanging on the opposing wall, she asked for directions to the room of Ysabel Mendes.
Walking down the hallway, she glanced into rooms where extremely frail young men lay, their faces sunken, often with people at their sides holding their bony hands. She heard a fragment of a song that was always on the radio at the bank where she worked, that “Dreamlover” song, float out of one room. As she approached the room she was looking for, she found a woman sitting in a chair just outside, a pile of paperwork in her lap.
The woman looked up and rose. “Mrs. Mendes?”
Gladys Mendes nodded, peered into the face of this woman she’d never seen before and determined that her face looked kind and trustworthy. “Are you Ava?” she asked.
“I am,” Ava said. “I’m the one who called you. I’m so glad you’re here. I think it’s going to mean so much to Issy that you came.”
Gladys’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t tell her father I was coming. But I couldn’t not come. It would haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“It’s good you came. Will you sit with me for just a minute before you go in?”
Gladys sat down, looked beseechingly into Ava’s face.
“It doesn’t look good,” Ava said, putting her hand on the woman’s arm. “This was the second time this year that Issy had pneumonia and this time the drugs haven’t been able to beat it. She went into acute respiratory failure four days ago and this afternoon she went into multisystem organ failure and septic shock. She’s on a lot of pain medication right now and she’s on a ventilator to lessen the pain of breathing. She’s going in and out of consciousness but I think she’s called for you a few times.”
Gladys averted her eyes, overwhelmed with the terminology and that final piece of news. “She’s gonna pass?” she finally asked.
“The doctors think she’ll pass tonight. It’s just about making her as comfortable as she can be now. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Mendes.”
But Gladys was sitting up straighter in her chair. “Is a priest here?”
Ava took a breath. “Issy didn’t want a priest.”
“But she has to.” Gladys’s voice rose, alarmed. “She can’t die without a priest.”
“She’s in there with Shirley, her best friend from the house. She wanted me and Shirley here at the end. Some of the other girls from the house and a few friends have already come by to say good-bye. Mrs. Mendes, we have to respect her wishes.”
But now Gladys was upset, restive. “I have to talk to her. She can’t do this.”
She began to rise, but Ava gently pressed her back down. “You can’t go in there and upset her, please, Mrs. Mendes. She is at the very end and the best thing you can do is go in there and hold her hand and smile at her and tell her that you and her whole family love her and send her off with peace in her heart. Please promise me you can do that.”
But Gladys was now crying freely, shaking her head and twisting her rosary in her hand. “She didn’t get married, she didn’t have children, and now she’s going to die without last rites. Her life had no meaning.”
Listening, Ava remembered the promise Issy had extracted from her when Issy made her Mateo’s legal standby guardian: that Ava would not tell her family about Mateo, that Ava would find a truly extraordinary home for him—educated people, open-minded people. So instead, all Ava said was: “Her life certainly had meaning. She’s done incredible work the past four years fighting this disease. She’s been incredibly brave telling her story. And she’s been a part of our family at the house and she is very loved. So she is certainly not dying without meaning. You cannot go in there and make her feel badly. It’s better you just leave if you’re going to do that.”
That caught Gladys up short, stifling her tears. She had a painful realization, which was that other people—including this Ava woman, apparently—had been taking care of her daughter these past years, had come to consider her their family, and that her own maternal right to intervene in her daughter’s life had withered in the interim. She had forfeited it when she submitted to her husband’s order that Issy was too much a source of anguish and hence no longer welcome in the house. She’d always submitted to her husband’s orders, and in the wake of that bitter edict, she’d contented herself with stealth phone calls to Issy—calls that often ended badly, anyway, in sighing fits of recrimination on both ends. Gladys loved her daughter and prayed daily for her health, yet she hadn’t understood why Issy felt the need to parade around so publicly with her disease in front of the police and TV cameras—especially when Issy knew how much it upset and embarrassed her father!
Yet for Gladys, being reminded by this woman that she was no longer the first authority in Issy’s life was a shameful and humbling feeling. She regretted her outburst of a few moments prior, even as the matter of the priest still nagged at her.
“I don’t want to upset her,” she said. “I just want to tell her I love her.”
“That’s the best thing you can do at this point,” Ava said.
Gladys steeled herself and walked into the room—filled with flowers and, on a wall facing the bed where Issy could see it, a blown-up photo of Issy shouting into a megaphone, surrounded by other women—to find her daughter—her lifelong borderline gordita of a daughter, that childhood lover of whole plates of tostones with garlic sauce—to find her a wraith, a third her former size, her damp black hair pulled back from her face, a ventilator across her nose, her eyes remote and half shut, her thin hand being held by a tall, skinny black woman with a long, aqualine nose who sat by her bed, gently dabbing her forehead with a damp washcloth.
“Dios mío,” Gladys said quietly to herself, which made the black woman turn to her.
“You’re Issy’s mom?” she asked.
Gladys nodded, unable to take her eyes off Issy, who didn’t seem to have noticed her yet.
“I’m Shirley,” said the woman. “I’m her roommate at the house. She’s like my sister.” The woman turned back to Issy. “Isn’t that right, Issyboo? You’re my sister, right?”
This elicited a shadow of a smile and a nod from Issy.
“Look who’s here, baby. Your mom.” Shirley turned to Gladys. “Come sit here.”
Gladys approached and sat in Issy’s line of sight, took her hand. “Hola, cariño,” she whispered. “Es Mami. Te amo, cariño. Mi nena hermosa.”
Gladys couldn’t read the look in her daughter’s eyes. It seemed far away, al
oof even. Issy did not smile, weakly but clearly, as she’d just smiled for this Shirley woman. But Issy still pressed her mother’s hand, barely perceptibly, and whispered, “Mami.”
At that moment, three years of remorse flooded over Gladys, forcing tears to her eyes. How wrong they had been to push Issy away! How could they have let shame conquer their own blood? How weak had she been not to stand up to her own husband? How much time had they lost? But Gladys made herself withhold these thoughts and only cried and continued to hold her daughter’s hand and say, again and again, “Mija, te quiero mucho, mucho.”
“You should,” Shirley said. “Issy’s done some amazing things. You know she got the definition of AIDS changed.”
Gladys had no idea what that meant, but it sounded important. So she turned back to Issy and said, “Estoy orgullosa de ti, Issy.”
Finally Issy smiled vaguely, her eyes darting about. She mouthed something.
Shirley leaned in. “What is it, honey? What you trying to say?”
Issy looked aggrieved, her breathing more labored than a moment before. She began mouthing something again.
Shirley darted out, returned with Ava, who stood over the bed, taking Issy’s hand.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
Issy mouthed the word clearly this time: “Hector.”
Ava’s eyes widened. “You want Hector? You said you just wanted the girls, sweetheart.”
“I want Hector,” Issy mouthed, a mere whisper.
“Who’s Hector?” Gladys asked.
“That’s her friend,” Ava said. “He brought her into the activist group.” Then, back to Issy: “You want me to call Hector and see if he can come here, Issy?”
Issy nodded once, slowly, her eyes widening.
Ava pulled her battered Filofax from her bag, found Hector’s number, dialed it on the hospital phone. As she listened, she fumbled for a pen in her bag. “It’s his machine,” she said. “He’s in D.C. right now and he left a number there.” She scrawled the number into her Filofax, then dialed it.
“Hector? It’s Ava.” She paused. “I’m at St. Vincent’s with Issy and her mother.” She paused, then soberly: “Yes.” She paused again. “I know. But she just called for you, she said your name.” She paused again, sitting by the bed in the chair Shirley had relinquished, once again taking Issy’s hand in her own and rubbing it gently with her thumb. “No, I don’t think so.” She paused. “Yes, of course.”
Ava put the phone close to Issy’s ear. “He wants to talk to you, Issy. Go ahead, Hector.”
Faintly, the women in the hospital room could hear Hector’s voice: “Issy? It’s Hector. I love you, Issy. I’ll never, ever forget you. Okay, do you understand that? I love you so much. I’m so glad you came into my life, chica.”
Tears rose in Issy’s eyes, then one raced down her cheek. She made a low, guttural, urgent sound. “Hector,” she said. “Hector.” More tears came and her fingers gripped Ava’s as hard as they could.
“What do you wanna tell him, honey?” Ava asked. “You wanna say you love him, right?”
Issy made another guttural sound, her hand breaking free and reaching feebly for the phone.
But Ava gently shushed her and placed her hand back down. “She wants to say she loves you, too, Hector,” she said back into the phone. “That’s what you want to tell Hector, Issy, right?”
Issy raised her head slightly and looked at Ava, Shirley, and her mother beseechingly, unable to say more.
Ava concluded her call with Hector. Then the three women took turns sitting by Issy until 1:46 A.M., the Monday before Thanksgiving, when Issy made the sound that Ava knew too well, that final horrible rattling sound in the throat, and then lay there, her mouth and eyes open and immobile.
“She’s gone,” Ava said. “Our beloved Issy is gone.”
The three women prayed and cried and said their good-byes until 2:05 A.M., when Ava stood up to go find a nurse. Before she did, she gave Shirley cab money to get back to Judith House, where an eleven-month-old baby boy named Mateo, his silky cap of hair just as dark as his mother’s had been, was sound asleep.
NINETEEN
Prodigal
(2021)
The twisting in Mateo’s stomach starts subtly, when the plane is probably somewhere over Pennsylvania or eastern New Jersey, then intensifies when he first catches a glimpse of the skyline, glittering amid the black, even higher reaching and more crowded than it was in his youth. That familiar parabola: the peaks in midtown, then the dip through Chelsea, the Villages, SoHo, Chinatown, Tribeca, then the jagged ascent at the island’s tip—once again with a pinnacle, the past ten years now, much as there’d been a staggering pinnacle before a day he vaguely remembers from childhood, when he was eight, nine, back in the days of frites on Avenue A and his first East Village friends. But today, the pinnacle is one tower, not two, and its summit is a spiky radio spear, not twin flattops. There will never be a drug that hits him as hard and as fast as New York City, the first sight of which, swallowed whole from above, seizes him with dizzying waves of exhilaration, nostalgia, and panic. And unlike a drug, it’s real, it’s all real. Everything that happened down there is real, real, real.
On his little tablet, he pings Gary, his AA sponsor: “looking down on ny now from plane, freaking out a little.” How long before he pings back? What will he say? “You’re gonna be fine.” “Breathe and pray through it.” “Hit a meeting ASAP.” Or: “You’ve done this before, not your first time.”
True, that. Mateo’s been here before, several times the past few years. Less than he might’ve, given all the professional invitations he’s gotten. And never for more than a few days, a week, where he stayed in Brooklyn, well away from the old neighborhood. But this, now: at least six months! And smack-dab in the old hood, on a big job no less. It’s almost more full circle than he can deal with.
Next, he pings Dani: “Landing soon. You home?” She’d come here a month in advance, for various design jobs, and she’d moved into the loft they’d subletted in Chinatown, set it up all cozy for them.
Now he just sits back and breathes, wondering who’ll thumb him back first. But soon he’s landing at LaGuardia, soon he’s picking up his huge duffel at the baggage claim, soon he’s in a cab speeding through Queens toward midtown, soon—oh God!—he’s cabbing it down Second Avenue on a Thursday night, his mind a patchwork of memory-stabs of storefronts that have remained and of marvels of those that have changed. It seems like everyone bikes now, it feels like Copenhagen or something. The newer buses are so streamlined, streaking up and down their designated lanes, and more and more of the cars are so small, electric. What’s changed and what’s remained? Do the kids on the street look the same? On not one wall but two he sees ads for liquors or clothes that have been done in a cheap, knockoff version of the style of him and Charlice—ah, ah, he means Charlie. He keeps forgetting the subtle change and he feels like, in his head, she—uh, fuck, no, he, Charlie—keeps rolling his eyes at Mateo in disapproval. Well, she always basically was a he to me, anyway, Mateo thinks, it shouldn’t be that hard. But yeah, it’s just like L.A., he can see people have been ripping off his and Char’s style, and that both annoys him and makes him privately proud.
A message flashes on his tablet from Gary: “Pray to be protected. Then go to a meeting and get your hand up, idiot.” Mateo laughs. Fucking Gary. How many times has this AARP balding dude, who’s basically been living off rerun checks from his 1980s sitcoms the past thirty-one years, talked him off the ledge and set him back on course over the past decade? Many, in a word. Because there were so many times when Mateo’s daymares and nightmares about Carrie felt like they were going to get him, too. You didn’t deliberately kill her, Gary would tell him, you were just two addicts and sometimes there are casualties—that’s the way it goes. Just pay it forward, pay it forward. So he had, hours and hours doing art projects with unluc
ky L.A. kids who reminded him of how he’d been born an unlucky New York kid, helping them get into programs and schools, wondering when, when, he would crawl out from under the shadow of hell and into redemption.
Now the taxi is crossing Houston Street, which after decades of work almost looks like some kind of fucking Paris boulevard with its lush, manicured strip of green running down the middle and more glass towers on either side than he wants to count. A message flashes from Dani: “You on your way?”
“Xing Houston in cab,” he thumbs back. Oh, shit, he thinks, these streets! Wasn’t that stoop . . . or didn’t it look like that stoop? No, wait, that stoop was on Orchard, right? The stoop where he and Oscar had nodded that Christmas night when the snow fell, leaning against each other in their black puffy coats and black caps, barely able to keep their heads up to look at the swirling wonder, and the feeling that the sky was infinite, that the sky spun counterclockwise to the snow.
His stomach twitches—his first anticipatory junkie twitching in a long, long time. Oh, shit, he thinks. Gary’s right. He really does need a meeting. Maybe later tonight.
The cab pulls up in front of a blue glass sliver on East Broadway. All these fucking tinted glass slivers and shards that have shot up everywhere amid the dirty, old, stone street walls—it’s surreal! There’ll be one, two, three, four old tenements, brick and fire escapes and the like, then suddenly a glass shard, whose street-facing apartments are utterly transparent, like looking in a glass box at someone’s life. They’re either like that or they’re opaque, a milky glowing white or a shimmery onyx. These new apartments never have curtains or blinds anymore, Mateo notes. It’s all this fucking window technology, making the windows go opaque white or black or red or jade.