A History of the Present Illness (6 page)

Mercedes looked down in horror at her dress. It was red and covered with hundreds of tiny metallic disks she'd sewn on one at a time herself.

Nick took Jason by the shoulders from behind and tilted him backward until they were eye to eye. “I bet I could rig it so you had to eat dinner in your room.”

Jason grinned, shook free of his father, and kissed his grandmother. “I meant that as a compliment. No kidding. You look totally glam.”

Mercedes smiled uncertainly.

“
Glamoroso
,” Nick explained. “A good thing.”

“Abuelo?” Olivia asked. “What are they going to do to you at the hospital?”

Ricardo tucked an errant wisp of Olivia's hair behind her ear. “They are going to take pictures of my heart and maybe clean out its pipes,” he said. “You remember last year when you stayed with us and we had to call a man to come fix the kitchen sink? What they will do to me is something like that, like Roto-Rooter.”

“Roto-Rooter of the heart?” Olivia laughed.

From upstairs came a stomping. The ceiling shook, then a door slammed.

Nick said, “Why don't we sit down. I'm starved.” He pulled Mercedes's chair back from the table and pushed it forward again once she was seated.

“Me, too!” Olivia said, waiting beside her seat.

Jason and Marta went into the kitchen to get the food. Neither Ricardo nor Mercedes asked where Sophie was or why she wasn't joining the family for dinner.

A necessary barbarism. A mutilating assault for an undeniably good cause. In the years prior to Sophie's adolescence, that was how Nick described his oldest daughter's entry into the world to family and friends. For Marta, the birth by cesarean section had been like the Civil War surgeries she'd read about in medical school, chaotic and bloody and brutal.

The epidural wouldn't take. Frustrated, the anesthesiologist treated her as if she were a patient instead of a colleague. “Can you feel this?” he asked over and over, repositioning the catheter and poking her legs and pelvis with a pin. When
she answered yes and yes, he tried again, but eventually he gave up, shaking his head in disgust, as if
she
were the problem. So when all the monitors alarmed, signaling fetal distress, and the obstetrician cut a long, horizontal window across her abdomen, Marta felt pain like an explosion that reduced her to a single inflamed sensory bundle. She smelled shit and blood and singed flesh, and she listened with a cringe to volleys of high, piercing sound she only later recognized as her own screams. She watched herself being filleted, and if the pain and the nurses hadn't held her in place, she would have lifted herself up off that table and tried to kill them all.

Perhaps for that reason, bonding with her firstborn hadn't resembled the experiences described in her new-mother books. What, Marta privately wondered, was so terrific about a bald, blemished, inarticulate being who transformed one's life using precisely the same techniques used to indoctrinate people into cults? For weeks that felt like decades, she resented the sudden and drastic change in the way she spent her time, the dietary restrictions and sleep deprivation, her relentless busyness and loss of privacy, the monotonous repetitive tasks, the forfeiture of her former activities and professional identity, and, most of all, other people's assumption of her unconditional surrender to her infant's needs, the universal belief of family members, friends, books, and health professionals that these changes constituted not only life's greatest miracle but her own greatest joy.

And then one evening when Sophie was two and a half months old, she began to cry and wouldn't stop. Nick fed her and changed her diaper and walked her around and sang to her, all to no avail. Finally, he carried their wailing daughter
into the bedroom where Marta was trying to nap and placed her on Marta's chest. Sophie quieted mid-scream. Her eyes widened, and a few minutes later, they both fell asleep.

That night, Marta began to appreciate her new role. She returned to work on schedule two weeks later but negotiated a decrease in her clinical responsibilities so she'd have more flexible hours and fewer ancillary demands. Four years and two miscarriages later, they had Jason, and three years after that—to their surprise—came Olivia. As Sophie reached her tweens, Marta watched as her eldest became increasingly strong-willed and serious, less family-focused than Jason, and more needy than her much-younger sister. Conveniently forgetting that Sophie hadn't always been that way, Marta attributed those traits to genetics, birth order, and the unique individuality she and Nick tried to cultivate in each of their children. In other words, long after the signs of serious trouble appeared, she underestimated their significance. She made excuses. Like Nick, she repeated the story of Sophie's beginnings to her friends, as if to say they'd been through hard times before with this kid and look how well things came out. As if the story offered more insight about her daughter than herself.

Over a salad of organic greens, heirloom tomatoes, and home-stewed chipotle black beans, Ricardo—who had turned seventy-six the previous month—lamented his family's lack of longevity. “They all died by their late seventies, more or less,” he said, and then listed them. “Lupe at seventy-eight, José at seventy-five, Maria Elena at eighty-one, Tío Miguel just before his seventy-ninth birthday.”

“Late seventies isn't so bad,” Nick said. “It's beating the average.”

Jason asked what the average was.

“It depends,” Marta said. But before she could finish answering the question, Mercedes—who wouldn't consider even the latest barely visible in-ear hearing aid—interrupted.

“Rico, te olvidas Juan Carlos.”

“Oh, no,” Ricardo said. “I didn't forget Juan Carlos. Just the opposite.” To Nick he said, “Juan Carlos Luis Manuel de Perez, my paternal grandfather. A self-made man like myself. He was not the sort to complain or ask for help. Thought people got where they were by their own strengths or failings and it was not anybody's job to help them out.” He looked at Marta. “Juan Carlos was our only centenarian.”

Nick nodded, but his attention was on Olivia's plate. They were seated side by side. He reached over with his fork, picked out the orange and yellow tomatoes, then waved them at a grimacing, delighted Olivia before dropping them onto his own salad. Olivia could have done this for herself, of course, but Marta's husband and youngest child were a mutual admiration society, each thriving on surprising the other with small, unnecessary kindnesses. If Nick—whose firm specialized in civil rights law and ethically ambiguous, often highprofile local criminal cases—noticed her father's backhanded slight at his leftist predilections, he didn't let on.

“They used to call him
El Luchador
,” Ricardo continued. “The Fighter. And he was. Devil of a man, opinionated on everything from the proper length of ladies' skirts to the history of Mexican-American relations. Even in his nineties, he was always getting into altercations, and not just the kind with words.”

Marta refused to argue with her father about the relative influence of genetics and character as determinants of extreme old age. Between her exhaustion and his unshakable confidence,
she'd be wasting what little energy she had left after a day of work and family and the latest Sophie drama. With chest pressure when he walked up hills and what the cardiologist called “a better than even chance” of needing bypass surgery, she worried that Ricardo wouldn't reach seventy-seven, much less eighty or ninety or a hundred.

With her patients, Marta considered herself skilled in the art of difficult conversations. It was only when people with options—not those with little money and no access to affordable, healthy foods, but her Glen Park boomer neighbors or her wealthy patients from Nob Hill or Pacific Heights—repeatedly and knowingly made unhealthy decisions that she felt helpless in the way dealing with Sophie made her feel helpless. Those conversations left her speechless—or almost. She went through the motions. She did her job. Often it seemed that her patients couldn't tell the difference. She hoped Sophie couldn't either.

Her father would not only recognize insincerity, he would pounce on it. So rather than respond to whatever question may have been couched in his Juan Carlos story, she asked Olivia what a centenarian was.

Olivia puckered her lips and moved her eyes from side to side. “Ummm.”

“Try and figure it out.”

The little girl rested her fork on the side of her plate and let out a world-weary sigh. “Cent-ten-a-rian. Cent, like a penny. Ten, that's a number. A-rian. Arian. Ar-ian.” Her shoulders sagged. “Oh, boy, I'm in trouble now.”

“What's a librarian?” Jason asked his sister.

Marta and Nick smiled at each other across the table.

Olivia squinted at her brother, clearly concerned that this
might be a trick question. Reluctantly, she said, “A library person.”

“So if I tell you
centum
is Latin for a hundred,” Nick said, “what's a centenarian?”

Olivia sank in her chair until her eyes were just above her plate. Suddenly they widened, and she sat up. “A hundred-year-old person!”

The adults clapped, Jason hooted, and Olivia climbed up on her chair for a bow.

After a dessert of dulce de leche frozen yogurt and out-of-season, imported, and very expensive blueberries bought for the benefit of her father's long-suffering arteries, Marta walked Ricardo and Mercedes down to their car. “What are you doing tomorrow?” she asked.

“Monday,” Ricardo said. He pulled a slim black leather datebook from his back pocket. It had gold-rimmed light blue pages and a red ribbon place marker, and he'd had one just like it every year Marta could remember.

Using his index finger as a guide, he read, “At eight, there is epilepsy update. At nine, irritable bowel syndrome, and for lunch, ocular emergencies.” He closed his datebook and smiled.

“Tell me you're at least going out for a nice dinner.”

Mercedes studied the front of her already buttoned coat.

Ricardo's nostrils flared. “Tomorrow,” he said, carefully articulating each syllable, “I will have dinner at home, as always, at seven o'clock
punto
, as I would on any other Monday. And anyone”—he looked from Marta to Mercedes—“anyone who thinks I am in need of a last supper should not bother to come on Tuesday to the hospital.”

Mercedes leaned her head against the sleeve of his coat. He pulled her toward him until they were side by side and Marta stood alone opposite them.

“That's not what I meant,” she said, though it was precisely what she'd meant. “You may have to stay overnight, and you know how hospital food is.”

“And I know also what a fine cook Mercedes is.”

Ricardo didn't look at his wife as he said this, but it was clear to Marta from Mercedes's reaction that he'd never uttered those or similar words during any of the twenty-six years of their marriage.

She gave her father a quick kiss and hugged Mercedes.
“Me llamas?”

“
Claro
,” Mercedes said, and reached up to lay a hand on Marta's cheek. “I will call as soon as he finishes.”

The Perezes did not pry into one another's affairs. They did not ask direct, obviously concerned, and conspicuously unasked questions such as,
Why didn't Sophie have dinner with us?
And,
I know you're very busy, but won't you talk to the heart doctor to make sure everything goes okay for your father?
In fact, the Perezes were the sort of family that did not even say
I love you
. Not on birthdays or holidays. Not after pleasant family meals. Not even before angiograms or when confronted by a child desperately trying to get their attention.

Seconds after her grandparents left, Sophie came downstairs and poured herself more cereal than Marta consumed in three days. None of the rest of them ate that particular brand, with its refined sugars, artificial coloring, and television cartoon tie-in. Sophie bought it for herself with money she earned watering neighbors' yards and feeding their cats
when they traveled. Because of their busy schedules, the Perez-Bartons had no pets, no indoor plants, and cactus gardens both front and back, facts that appeared at numbers five, twenty, and twenty-one on their elder daughter's thirty-two-item list of complaints, a list Sophie made available to anyone—their friends, colleagues, random strangers—on her Facebook page.

Nick confiscated both bowl and cereal box. “Dinner's over,” he said. “And you missed it.”

“No problemo. I'm having breakfast.”

“No,” Nick said, holding the cereal out of reach. “You're not.”

And then it started. Red blotches covered Sophie's round face. She picked up a heavy glass serving bowl and dropped it onto the floor. It cracked in two but didn't shatter, so she lifted the largest piece over her head, prepared to throw it across the room. Marta reached for the half bowl and Nick grabbed Sophie by the wrists. A sharp sting seared Marta's palm, then she felt a warmth, and all three of them watched as bright red blood rushed down her arm.

Nick let go of Sophie. “Get out of here!” he bellowed, shoving her with such force that she nearly tripped over her own feet. Marta put her hand under the tap and turned on the cold water. She lifted the flap of severed skin. It was a clean, relatively superficial cut. No glass fragments, no exposed tendons.

“Should I do something?” Nick asked. “What should I do?”

“A dish towel,” she answered. “A clean one.”

Nick had the good sense to pass a towel well past its prime, and Marta wrapped her hand with it, then held the hand above her head. Regaining control, Nick led her into the den
and sat down beside her on the couch, positioning himself so his shoulder was under her elbow and it was no longer any effort for her to elevate her arm.