“What I’m trying to understand,” she continued, “is why you let me take you to the doctor’s office, and then didn’t actually go inside.”
Papá met her eyes sheepishly, but only for an instant.
“Why I filled all your prescriptions, sorted them out for each hour of each day, double checked them, and, apparently, you didn’t bother to take them.”
Papá shrugged weakly. “They made me feel funny. Upset my stomach. And I felt tired when I took them.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Amalia said, somehow sounding even angrier than she had at the beginning of this conversation. “You had me do all these things for you, manage all your care, and then you lied to me about actually accepting that help? And then – then – you didn’t even bother to list me as your emergency contact for when this all inevitably happened again? For when you would definitely have a heart attack because you weren’t even bothering to try not to?”
Ah, here it was. Now her voice was getting louder. And she was pausing between sentences to suck her snot back into her nose.
“I did take it easy, Mali. I made some tea. Whenever I was feeling run down, Mamá would make me some tea, and that would fix me right up."
The silence after he mentioned Mamá was deafening.
"If Mamá was here," I interjected, my voice soft, but steady, low, but devoid of sympathy, "she would have taken you to the doctor." Silence fell again. Inside, I was shaking with rage, but outside, I was determined to stay even-keeled. “She would have taken you to the doctor, and sorted out your medication, just like Mali did. So why am I your emergency contact?”
“Because you are my only daughter. And that’s why you came home, mija. To help with these things. When you said you were coming home, and then I filled out the papers at the doctor, I thought –”
“You thought I was coming home to replace Mamá.”
My lips, my entire face, went numb as the truth washed over me. Shock, for myself and how little I understood what my life had become. Anger, for Mali, who had dedicated her life to Papá, who apparently didn’t even want to accept any of her help.
“You said you were coming home to help.”
“With the gym, Papá! With The Knockout. That’s what I can do. That’s what we agreed on.”
“Sí, and you’re here, and you’re taking care of the gym, and I’m in the gym every day.”
“You can’t just expect these things of me, Papá! I am not a replacement for Mamá! I can’t do what she would have done. And you shouldn’t be in the gym at all, especially if you’re not taking your medicine!”
Amalia brushed her hand down my arm, but I jerked it away.
“No!” I shouted, at everyone and no one. “None of this is okay. I can’t – I have to – I need to be my own person. Don’t you understand that?’
Papá just looked at me, confused. “I… Nati, when did my nurse say she was coming back? I need another pillow or something.” He grimaced as he shifted in the bed. I could see that he was in pain, but in this moment, with the anger and resentment flashing through my body, setting my spine on fire, I couldn’t bring myself to care.
“I’ve got it, Papá. Here, we’ll go get your nurse.” Amalia’s voice, soothing as ever, accompanied her hand firm on my shoulder. Ethan sat in the corner, watching with his brow furrowed, probably frozen. I was grateful for it. I wouldn’t know what to do if he got involved in all this, at this moment. She steered me out the door by my elbow, and once we got out to the hallway, I spun to look at her. I could feel the anger behind my eyes, making them burn, spreading upward in the beginning of a fierce headache.
“Natalia, I am saying this with absolute love for both you and your father. I am just as angry as you are, but we can’t stress him out any more right now. You need to walk this off.”
The red hot rage flared. “Great. One more person telling me what to do. You’re right, that’s exactly what I need right now.”
She deflected my sarcasm with a blink. “It’s not because I want you to go. But before you start screaming at a sixty-seven-year-old man who just had a second heart attack, maybe you should take a walk.”
“The first one was just an almost,” I grumbled. Amalia gave me a look.
“Like I said,” Amalia continued, “I think we could all benefit from taking a step back right now. Everyone is tired. Everyone is stressed. You are still wearing most of last night’s hairspray. Let’s regroup. Go home. Rest. Get a shower.”
Ethan made his way out of Papá’s room. “He just dozed off, so… yeah,” he said. “Just heard Amalia say ‘shower’ and I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard in a while. Let’s get you home.”
He said it so naturally, like the decision was already made, like he’d be the one taking me home from now on, like his steering my comings and goings were a matter of course. He said it so sweetly, with a protective hand brushing the small of my back with that slight pressure pushing me toward the exit, that I almost felt bad freezing in place. He didn’t know what was going on in my head. Didn’t really know where I should go, what I should be doing with myself. How could he, when I barely did myself?
Numb, I started walking down the hall toward the elevators, taking stiff steps just a little too quick for Ethan to keep contact with me. I stared at the numbers above the buttons, trying to ignore how they were fuzzy around the edges. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just do. Just get home. Then you can regroup.
Ethan fidgeted beside me in the elevator. In a back corner of my mind, I knew this couldn’t be easy for him. He’d been so supportive, from driving me here to buying me sweatpants and a phone charger, to being the one to basically forcing me to go home for some much needed rest now.
But I knew, deep down, I could not let him take me home right now. I needed to pull myself together, and I couldn’t do that with him around. Mostly because, the more confusing things got, the more I realized that he was the most complicated piece of this puzzle. How to get out of this mess and keep Ethan at the same time seemed like an impossible riddle. Having him standing beside me while I tried to puzzle it out would only make everything that much harder. Suddenly, there we were, standing in the hospital lobby, the late morning staff trickling in and the day’s appointments just starting to clog the various waiting areas. Ethan stuck a thumb over his shoulder. “Oh, the garages are that way. I think we’re on –”
Ethan was interrupted by my phone, buzzing in his butt pocket. “Shit,” he said, reaching back to pull it out. “Do you think everything’s ok up there? He seemed – Oh. It’s not Amalia. It’s… Carol?”
I practically lunged for the phone, snatching it from his fingers, not missing the confused look that twisted his features.
“Hey, Carol,” I said, injecting every ounce of strength into my voice I possibly could.
“I have good news for you, honey!” Carol chirped on the other end of the line.
The hand holding the phone shook. I blew out a long breath and watched as Ethan’s eyes grew progressively wider in the silent space before I answered.
“Tell me the good news,” I urged impatiently. God help me, I wanted to know. Wanted her to give me a reason to run away. My heart galloped in my chest.
“The girl they hired for the first stunt was awful. The girl that did the next episode was worse. I know you said you didn’t want to do it, and I promised wasn’t going to call you, sweetie, but they practically begged for you, so I told them I’d try you again.”
I narrowed my eyes, even though Carol couldn’t see my glare through the phone. “You re-sent my reel, didn’t you?”
“That’s neither here nor there. They want you for this show. It’s a motorcycle job – it’d be amazing for you. You’d be amazing for it. There’s a crew worker’s strike looming in New York, you know, and they’re not sure how much longer they’ll have their effects guys, and technically, you can get there faster than anyone in LA, and you know, Natalia stunting for Natalia, and you look just like her too,
it’s just too perfect to – ”
“Yes,” I said, strong and decisive, like the gavel banging at the end of a court judgment. In the end, she’d barely had to babble at all. “Yes, I’ll be there. When do they need me?”
Carol let out a high pitched scream. I winced pulled the phone away from my ear, dimly realizing that Ethan had started pacing, three steps one way, three steps another. “Call time is seven o’clock tomorrow morning!” she screeched. “I’ll text you the details now! Natalia, baby, we are back! Love you to bits! Ciao!”
My hand was still shaking. It was only physical evidence of what I knew to be absolutely true – committing to this job terrified me, which was exactly why I had to do it.
“You’re taking a stunt job, aren’t you,” Ethan said. “Are you –” He stopped abruptly, rested his hands on his hips and blew out a breath. When he spoke again, it was like someone had turned the volume down to just above a hiss. “Are you kidding me right now?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “What kind of stunt is it?”
“Motorcycle,” I said simply. “It’ll be fine.”
Ethan scoffed. “Fine. Yeah. You’re gonna – are you even trained for that?”
“Listen, Ethan. I am freaking out right now, okay? About all this hospital shit, and about… everything. I need – I need something to make me feel – alive.” I looked down at my feet, realizing how lame that sounded, but not being able to bring myself to care.
“Your dad needs you, Natalia. Your family needs you, and I need you. Safe, and sound, and here.”
“No, they don’t. You don’t. Amalia has all this under control. She is the grownup here. Dammit, Ethan, she just dismissed me from the hospital room! Just because my father left me in charge doesn’t mean I should be making any decisions about his health.”
“The gym needs you, too.”
I shook my head, mashing my lips together, hoping that would help keep my responses more even. “Sebastian and Rodrigo can handle it for the next two days. They’ll probably like having something else to do besides hover around Papá’s bed.”
Ethan was very clearly dumbfounded, and I wished I could have found something to say that would have wiped the shock off his face. But I didn’t. We both knew what Ethan was leaving left unsaid. We both knew that him saying it would change everything.
“I’m going to head home,” I muttered. “I’ll call you, okay?”
* * *
“Natalia, don’t go. I need you here, not doing crazy stunts. I need you to be safe. Please, just – I don’t think I can do this if you’re really going to leave and put your life in danger at a moment’s notice.”
And there it was.
“Don’t do this,” I said, my eyes filling with tears.
He swallowed hard, a contrast to his strong, stubborn jaw. He wasn’t going to budge. “Why not? Haven’t things been going well, Natalia? Haven’t we been having fun? I thought we were happy here, together. Jumping out of airplanes once in awhile. I thought we were good.”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t be making big decisions about my life.”
Ethan’s jaw clenched, working back and forth almost imperceptibly. “Not even if we love each other?”
“Maybe… maybe it’s not enough.” The only way he heard that awful sentence come out of my mouth was if he was hanging on every word.
“Jesus, Natalia!” His voice broke, and I didn’t dare look at his face.
A tear slipped from my eye. He was hurting. I was the one causing the pain. I could see and hear all the evidence. And I was still walking away from him.
One more time, the voice inside me said. Kiss him one more time before you leave for New York. Even if it ruins the whole damn relationship.
Gingerly, I took two steps in to Ethan. I curled my hand around his shoulder, raised up on my tiptoes, and brushed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. He stiffened, and the small rejection rolled through me like a wave. He was making this almost impossible. Almost.
Still on tiptoes, I whispered, “I love you,” before lowering myself and taking a step back.
Ethan just scoffed in reply. Yes, it stung. But what did I expect? Still, the decision about the job was so clear. Like I was standing in the eye of the storm, and it was the only thing that wasn’t spinning like crazy, uncontrollable, pinning me in place. I didn’t know if I could salvage this situation later, but I knew, as surely as I knew that I loved my family and I loved Ethan, that I had to take the job.
What else could I do?
“I’ll call you when I’m on my way back from the city, okay?” I said, willing some strength and clarity into my voice.
“You know what? Don’t,” Ethan managed through gritted teeth. “I’m sure if you manage to get yourself killed, one of your brothers will call me. After all, I’m just the guy helping you with the gym. Just the guy who keeps you entertained while you’re here doing what you need to do, until you inevitably run off again. Just the guy who would kill to have a family like yours, and you can’t even be bothered to appreciate it when you very nearly lose it.”
A choking heat spread up through my throat, like Ethan’s words had the power to suffocate me.
My hurt bound together with my mother’s indignation from deep within me, protesting that anyone would say such terrible things to me. “Don’t say another word. Don’t you dare.”
But Ethan had found his fire, it seemed. Exactly at the time that he could use it to hurt me most. His lips pulled up in the beginnings of a snarl, and my heart stuttered as my body recoiled. “You don’t need to call me to tell you you’re still alive,” he growled, “since you don’t actually give a shit what I think about all of it.”
“Ethan, that’s not fair. I –”
“You what? You care about me?” The way his lip curled up in a sneer when he said that made my heart twist in on itself. “Because that’s not fucking true, Natalia. Obviously not. This is the one thing – the one thing – I can’t bear for you to do. And you’re doing it anyway. Do you understand how excruciating this is for me? I lost one person in a car crash. Now you’re going to purposely do insanely dangerous things on a moving vehicle? For what? For the thrill, while you’re killing me?”
A terrible silence hung in the air for a long beat. Then he said, “I can’t go through that again, Natalia. I can’t.” His voice broke on the last word, and then a single tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it away angrily, then crossed his arms over his broad chest, a monolith cemented firm in the middle of the hospital lobby.
There were a million things I could have said. “Get your head out of your ass.” “I love you.” “Don’t do this to us.” “I’m sorry.” But none of them would have helped. So I took a step backward, then another. “I’ll call you,” I finally said, forcing every word in hopes that he understood how determined I was. Then, with one more heart-wrenching look into his stunned, red-rimmed eyes, I walked out of the hospital into a cab.
This was going to be absolute hell, but I knew I had to walk through it.
Chapter 27
Ethan
My co-host for the Bro Show, Mark Mahler, just happened to text me when I had almost arrived back home. I didn’t know how I actually managed to operate my car and make all the necessary turns to get back to my place. My brain was filled with fuzz, and it took effort to breathe in and out.
I’d been thinking that, in this fishbowl of life, Natalia and I were little guppies swimming side by side for a while. Turned out that I was a guppy. She was the water. Take her away, and my whole world would change really fast.
The text tone repeated insistently, so I as soon as I was at a red light, I pulled out my phone.
Mark: Beers tonight?
My eyebrows went up. In the recesses of my mind, I knew that the time I spent hanging out with Mark had gotten more and more sparse. Not that I’d really cared, on the couple occasions I’d noticed; I had Natalia, and there was no love lost between Mark and me. Guys weren’t like that.
Still
, I had to admit that hanging out with Mark sounded like exactly what I needed right now. Mark wouldn’t try to reason with me. Mark would listen to everything and only comment if I asked him to. We weren’t the best of friends, but we were close enough to know that.
Me: Beers now?
I squinted as I looked up at the sky on my way into my building, realizing I had no idea what time it actually was. Minutes could slow down to feel like hours or hours could compact into what seemed like seconds in a hospital. Natalia had slept, and I’d dozed, waiting for her dad to make any kind of change. I’d eaten here and there. At some point, the sun had come up.
Like he read my mind, Mark responded.
Mark: It’s three thirty in the afternoon.
Me: Yeah, and by the time you get here it’ll be almost four which is almost five.
Mark: Is something wrong?
Me: Yeah. Or maybe it’s for the best. But I could use some company.
The three little dots that told me he was responding appeared and reappeared a couple times over the next
Mark: Ok, just changed plans with Toby. I’ll see you soon.
Hell if tears didn’t well up in my eyes at that. Since I’d graduated and all my college friends had dispersed to jobs across the country, Mark had been my only good friend in Philly. We didn’t hang out quite enough and I hassled him a little too much, but shit like this made me feel like at least someone in this town had my back.
He arrived at my door in under half an hour, with a dorky secret knock that wasn’t secret because literally everyone knocked that way when they were trying to be funny. I would have made fun of it under normal circumstances. Under normal circumstances, I would have changed my clothes from the salsa club the night before. I knew I stunk.
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