A History of the Present Illness (7 page)

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“When the bleeding stops, I'll put on a pressure dressing.”

A window had been left open and the fog had come in. Cold air blew through the room. Marta shivered.

“I mean about Sophie.”

Oh, she thought.
That
. Marta ran the fingers of her good hand through Nick's hair, blond waves increasingly giving way to gray. Every night, something different set Sophie off. One night it was Olivia, the next it was a look Nick might or might not have given her. The amount of milk in her glass, a t-shirt not yet washed since its last use, her science homework, the trill of her mother's pager—any minor infraction could cause major chaos: screaming, flying objects, punching, scratching, and kicking. One evening a passing pedestrian had called the police.

Marta had lost whole nights—weeks, months—of sleep, running through their parental decisions and actions, trying to uncover the source of Sophie's overwhelming anger. She couldn't figure it out. Not knowing why her child was such a mess was almost as agonizing as the hostility itself.

“Boarding school?” she suggested, only half joking. They'd already tried therapy, first individual and now family, a change of school, and upward and downward adjustments in structure and independence.

Nick frowned. “She's not a chair or a coat. We can't just send her away because she doesn't suit us anymore.”

“I know,” Marta said, but thought, Where's that law written? People must do it all the time. They couldn't be the first parents unable to cope with a child.

“I pushed her too hard,” Nick said. “Way too hard.”

“You were upset about me.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, yes, of course, but that was only part of it. I wanted to push her even harder. I wanted to . . .”

She could guess what he was reluctant to admit. She'd had the same feelings herself, moments when she didn't worry whether Sophie was cutting herself or doing drugs or contemplating suicide, and instead imagined in cold, gratifying detail slapping certain expressions off her daughter's ugly, hate-filled face. Once upon a time, they'd had a wonderful, happy family. She had loved her life. But in the last year, she'd begun coming home filled with trepidation. She dreaded dinners and bedtimes and mornings before school and even weekends, sixty hours without reprieve from a child who had painted the walls of her room black, rarely pulled up the shades, worshipped Kurt Cobain, hated school, and preferred plants and animals to human beings.

Marta took Nick's hand. “Tell me.”

He closed his eyes. “I wanted to throw her onto the floor. Beat the crap out of her. Get back at her for all she's put us through.” He took a sharp breath. “My own daughter, and I wanted to hurt her so badly I could taste it.”

She kissed his palm, then closed her eyes too. The reddish darkness behind her lids seethed with minute speckles of light she couldn't hope to organize into a useful clarity. Against that backdrop, Marta imagined Sophie as a smiling infant, a temperamental toddler, a pretty and charmingly precocious child, and finally, she pictured her daughter waddling into the kitchen, slumping down at the table, and shoveling bite after unwieldy bite of lavender and pink and lime-green cereal into her huge, sneering face, and she felt something inside her tighten, shut down, and turn off.

*

Everyone knows what to do for a heart attack. Everyone, it turned out, except Marta's two useless half brothers, graduates of the nation's leading universities, both of whom still lived at home and neither of whom called 911 when their father's chest pain began later that night. Instead, they squeezed a pallid, sweat-drenched Ricardo and the invisible six-ton elephant on his chest into Carlos's new chrome-and-silver Mini and drove him not to the closest hospital but, at Ricardo's insistence, across town to the University Medical Center.

“What were you thinking?” Marta yelled at Carlos in the waiting area outside the cardiac intensive care unit. And he and Jorge exchanged the look they'd shared as boys when she'd explained to them the importance of learning Spanish or flossing their teeth.

Early the next morning, Marta went home to change her clothes and give her family an update on Ricardo's condition. Nick hadn't gone with her to the hospital, as they were no longer willing to leave Jason and Olivia at home alone with Sophie. After she explained to the kids that their grandfather had had a heart attack and then a surgery he barely survived and might not recover from, Sophie announced that she'd
rather die
than be a doctor.

Marta said, “I can't have that conversation right now.”

Sophie smirked. “That's me all over. The inconvenient child.”

Jason was on the verge of tears. “Please, can't we just talk about Abuelo?”

“Inconvenient?” Nick turned to Sophie. “What about selfish?”

“I'm going to be a doctor,” Olivia said. “I'm going to go work in Africa like Megan's mom.”

Sophie glared at her sister. “You can't be a doctor. You can't even kill a bug.”

Olivia opened her mouth to protest, then glanced at her sister and closed it again without speaking. Jason turned on his Game Boy and began pounding the keys.

Nick said, “Each of you can be whatever you like. But right now we should be thinking about your grandfather.”

Marta nodded.

“Oh, sure,” Sophie said. “We can be anything. As long as it's the kind of job that makes people say, ‘Wow, you're such a good person.'”

Nick flinched. Marta looked at her daughter and tried to feel something other than exhaustion and a wish that they'd sent Sophie to spend the night at a friend's.

“We just want you to be happy,” Nick said. “All three of you.”

Sophie cackled. “News flash! Plan not working!”

Marta pictured her father tethered to a bed by tubes and wires and coma. “What would make you happy, Sophie? Tell us. Please.”

Sophie threw her head back and slapped the table, as if her mother had just told a great joke. The performance stopped as abruptly as it began, and she glared at Marta. “Like you care.”

“Do not,” Nick said, “speak to your mother that way. Ever. And you can do whatever you damn please. Just don't hurt other people.”

Sophie turned to her siblings. “But,” she said, “it's A-OK to degrade and deprive yourself and your family for the sake of strangers.”

Jason's fingers froze above his toy.

“Jesus, Sophie!” Nick said. “What the hell does that mean?”

Marta felt dizzy. She had refused Jorge's early-morning offers of vending machine cookies and soft drinks. “We have never degraded you, Sophie,” she said. “Never.”

“I forget,” Olivia said. “What's
degrade
?”

Sophie's eyes narrowed. “Try and figure it out, hot stuff. Start with the Latin root.”

“Please,” Jason whispered.

Sophie pushed back her chair and stood up. “You two don't even like me,” she said, her eyes shooting from Marta to Nick and back again. “If that's not degradation, what is?”

“Like?” Nick protested. “I love you!” The usually unspoken words emerged too loud and with the unmistakable violence of an expletive.

But his words were no match for Marta's silence. The refrigerator buzzed. Outside, a car passed the house, its radio turned up so high that she felt the beat in her bones and gut before she heard the blurred scream of vocals.

Sophie walked over to where her mother was sitting and leaned forward until her pimpled face was just inches from Marta. “And
I'm
supposed to be the problem around here,” she said. Then she turned and ran upstairs.

In the cardiac intensive care unit, Marta and Mercedes spent the day sitting side by side in orange plastic chairs beside Ricardo's bed. Machines hummed and beeped. Every six seconds, the respirator made a whoosh and Ricardo's chest rose and slowly fell. Above his head hung bags of medications—the right ones at the right doses, Marta knew, since every time she left the cubicle, if only to use the bathroom down the hall, she checked them on her return. Below him, attached to the bedrail, other bags collected liquids from his bladder and
chest tubes. Pumped with fluids during the resuscitation and operation, her father had put on twenty pounds overnight.

“The children are okay?” Mercedes asked for the third time in two hours. Her face, usually round and decorated with powder and rouge, appeared ashen and deflated, as if she'd lost the pounds Ricardo had gained.

“Nick picked them up from school,” Marta said again. “They'll be here soon.” She looked out the window and watched an aide check the blood pressure of a patient in the next building. “And the boys will be back. They decided we needed real food for dinner.”

The aide across the way turned on the light behind her patient's bed so he could read despite the fading daylight. Marta looked at her watch. Nick and the kids should have been at the hospital over an hour ago.

“I have no hunger,” Mercedes said. Her eyes filled, and she clamped them closed. They had agreed not to cry in front of Ricardo, not that he would know the difference, as Marta alone knew because she had overheard the residents rounding that afternoon, saying things no one had told the family after the surgery, such as how the team had had trouble restarting Ricardo's heart and the number of minutes his brain had gone without blood and oxygen. It had never occurred to the young doctors that a family member might understand their jargon. At their stage, Marta probably hadn't realized either that doctors were people too.

She wondered what Sophie had done this time. Snippets of the morning's conversation had haunted her in quiet moments throughout the day. Once, remembering Nick's nod toward the stairway after Sophie's exit and her own decision not to follow their daughter upstairs, she'd groaned aloud,
sending Mercedes into a panic about Ricardo. She'd have to make amends, she knew, but hopefully not that evening.

“Dr. Perez?” said a voice.

Marta recognized the nurse who'd worked the same unit with the same chipper attitude nearly twenty years earlier when she was a resident. The woman had aged, her hair shorter and more gray. But the same could be said of Marta.

“Your family's here. In the waiting room. I can't let the kids in. Policy. You know how it is.” She rolled her eyes before fading back into the hallway.

“I should come?” asked Mercedes.

“No, stay with Dad. I'll be back.” More likely she'd send in Nick. Marta needed a break. She imagined that five minutes on the roof screaming at the top of her lungs might help, but how would she explain it to the children?

“Mommy!” Olivia shouted, and threw herself at Marta. “She's gone. She's really, really gone!”

Marta hugged the little girl's body to her own and kissed the top of her head, smelling chalk and shampoo and sweat.

Around her, the busy waiting room seemed glacial, all white walls and haunting silence. Families sat in small clusters separated by one or two empty chairs, and in a far corner, light blinked from a soundless television hung from the ceiling by thick metal cables. Outside the lone window, the sky had turned black.

Gone?

Jason stood beside his father, his eyes huge and his cheeks wet.

Gone.

Marta put an arm out for Jason, who wrapped himself around her and his little sister. She backed up, pulling them
with her until she felt the cool of the wall against her legs and shoulders. Finally, she looked at her husband.

“I've called everyone,” Nick said. “All her friends. The neighbors. The school. And I tried to file a police report, but it's too soon.”

Jason's body heaved against hers. Marta couldn't catch her breath.

“Hospitals?” she asked.

Nick shook his head. He looked pale but composed. “But that's good, right?”

She wished he would come closer, encircle them all. When he didn't, she said, “How can you be so sure? Sophie has keys to neighbors' houses. She could be hiding. Getting back at us—at me. She went to school this morning, Nick. I saw her get in your car.”

Marta kept her voice low, but the pitch rose as she spoke. Around the room, a few people looked up, then away.

“Her drawers are empty,” Nick said. “Her iPod is gone. Kurt Cobain is gone.” He might have been reciting a grocery list.

Suddenly he lurched forward. In the second before she felt his breath on her neck and understood what he had said, his face shattered.

“Marta. She's gone.”

Over the next week, as Ricardo failed to regain consciousness, as Mercedes agreed to withdraw life support, as they prepared Jason and Olivia for their grandfather's funeral and heard nothing from or about Sophie, Marta couldn't eat. She couldn't sleep. She turned off her pager, threw bills and catalogs unopened into a pile on the front-hall floor, and erased phone messages as soon as she was certain they had nothing
to do with Sophie. She didn't know what was happening at work, and she didn't care.

Twice daily, Nick checked the bus depots and youth shelters. He organized groups of their friends to methodically canvas the Haight, Golden Gate and Buena Vista parks, the Tenderloin, SoMa, and every other part of the city where teenagers were known to sleep in doorways and under bushes. Every three days, they went to the police. “With this type of kid . . . ,” said one officer, shrugging his shoulders and not even bothering to finish his sentence, much less write down Sophie's most distinctive characteristics. They stared at him, speechless, coming up with suitable retorts only much later. “Your father would have known what to say,” Nick told Marta as they drove home, and his use of the past tense hit her like a blow.

They hired a private detective who repeatedly claimed he found signs of Sophie—in Seattle, then Phoenix, then L.A.—but it was always some other chubby teen with brown hair, pimples, and black clothes. They learned that the country was full of runaway kids prostituting themselves, doing drugs, and somehow getting by on the streets. Before Sophie left, Marta would have converted her new knowledge into donations to charities and letters to the editor about the precious individuality of the nation's faceless, voiceless youth. Now she knew all that social passion was just a role she'd played for her own selfish gratification, a persona she'd invented that had fooled everyone but Sophie.