Bulletproof Vest (31 page)

“Maybe he hit his head when he fell,” she says, pulling out of the parking lot. “There are a lot of rocks near that river where they found him.”

I had already asked the doctor if they had checked his head, but he said that if the doctor who was on duty when my father arrived hadn't ordered a CT scan, then it wasn't necessary. When I asked if they could give him a sedative to help him sleep, the doctor explained my father's situation as a catch-22. Since he hadn't slept at all, there was a chance he could go into cardiac arrest, but he also had a very faint heartbeat, and a sedative might stop his heart altogether. Even though it didn't make sense, I had sat next to his bed, trying to accept this dilemma, thinking that maybe this was the way his life was going to end. Not with a bullet but with his heart. And what if he did die? Would it be so bad? My cousins still lived in and around town, and I'm sure they'd be relieved to know that the man who killed their father was gone. Tito and my mother would probably breathe a bit easier, as well. Recently, he had taken to driving circles around their house, blaring music from his truck, playing a ballad that he used to serenade my mother with before they married.

“He asked about you,” I say to my mother when we pull up in front of my aunt's house. “He asked if you were going to go see him.”

“You should have never told him I was here,” she says.

“He figured it out,” I say.

“I don't know what to do,” she says, gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. I can see the conflict on her face. If he dies, she might regret not having seen him, but what if she opens that door and then he survives?

“I think if it's going to make you feel better, then you should go see him. Don't do it for him, do it for yourself,” I say, using the same reasoning Martin had used on me.

“It's not like I can remove that blood from your veins.” She glances over at me, and it's as if she can see his blood and her blood forever interlaced and swimming in my veins.

The following day, she drives me back to the hospital, and Sonia and Jorge say that my father had kept the entire wing up all night. One minute he was yelling something about how the dead man was standing at the foot of his bed and the next minute he was trying to get up and leave. He demanded to know who had taken his boots and put him in that blue dress. The jars scraped along on the floor, as they struggled to hold him down. They had asked for a sedative, and received the same catch-22 response.

“Apá, how do you feel?” I ask, and he says he's fine, though he looks beyond exhausted, seems to have aged twenty years since he arrived. The oxygen tube has slipped out of his nose and is resting on his chest, and his blue gown is stained and draped loosely around his exposed shoulders. He seems so helpless. I adjust his nightgown, place the tube back in his nose, and turn the oxygen knob up a few notches.

“Inhale,” I say, thinking maybe a boost of oxygen to the brain will help clear the tunnel through which his mind keeps slipping. He takes a deep breath. None of this makes sense. What are we supposed to do? Sit by his bedside and wait until his heart stops beating?

“Again,” I say, and he inhales with less gusto. I can't help but feel partially responsible for his condition, like perhaps he had risked his life, put himself in the hospital, just to keep me around a little longer. He must have known the horse would rear if it heard gunshots. Perhaps this was his backward way of showing his love for me.

“Again,” I say, and he inhales, and swats at the green smudge on his sheet, still thinking it's a spider. What if he dies? Will I be able to live with knowing that I watched him slip away and did nothing to help him? I go to the foot of his bed, pick up his chart, and start jotting down all his stats: blood pressure, meds, heart rate. Martin has a friend in Chicago who is a doctor, and I think I'll send him an e-mail. Get a second opinion.

“Hola, mija,” he says. I look up and he's looking at someone behind me, and just seeing the way his face is lit up, I know that it must be my mother. He smiles wide and stares at her in awe, as if the ceiling has opened up and a ray of sunlight is shining down just for him. This is probably not the way he imagined a reunion with my mother. With him lying in bed, stripped of his cowboy boots, and wearing a blue dress.

“Your kids asked me to come pray for you,” she says, holding her purse against her chest like a shield. “Do you want me to pray for you?”

“That might be a good idea,” he says, still staring at her in disbelief.

She takes two steps toward his bed and tells him to close his eyes and repeat after her. His whole face puckers up as he squeezes his lids tight, seems to be using all his might to keep them shut.

“Dear God,” she says, closing her eyes and bowing her head.

“Dear God,” he repeats.

I stand at the foot of his bed, watching as his eyes snap open and he gazes at her, repeating every word that is rolling off her tongue as if he were afraid to let a single syllable slip from her lips onto the floor. I glance back and forth between them, and can't believe that here, standing in the same room, in such proximity, breathing the same stale air, are my parents—reunited after twenty years.

“I come to ask your forgiveness,” she says.

“I come to ask your forgiveness,” he repeats.

“Please, forgive me for all the pain I've caused onto others,” she says.

“Please, forgive me,” he says. His smile waned, and he looks as though he wants to reach out and take her in his arms.

“For all the pain I've caused onto others,” she repeats.

“Forgive me, Pascuala,” he says, and she opens her eyes and glares at him. “Forgive me for having left you with the burden, with all the kids,” he says, “and for having ended your brother's life. Please, forgive me.” They stare at each other, and for a split second I think it actually might start pouring rain inside the hospital. “Ever since I left you, my life has been unstable, I've done nothing but roll around, and…”

“I have already forgiven you,” she says, thrusting her chin up. “Now, let's ask God to forgive you.” She closes her eyes, continues with the prayer, and though he repeats everything she utters, he does not take his gaze off her.

“Amen,” she says, and opens her eyes.

“Amen,” he says, once again smiling wide.

“Take care of yourself, Jose,” she says, and turns to leave.

“Wait,” Sonia practically shouts, jumping away from the wall where she and Jorge have been standing semiparalyzed—as shocked as I am to be seeing our parents standing face-to-face after all these years. “I want a picture,” she says, already clawing around in her purse. She pulls out her camera, hands it to me, and runs to the head of the bed, waving my mother over. My mother goes and leans in on the other side, and I snap the only photo of our makeshift family reunion. They say a photograph is worth a thousand words, but no camera could have captured the magnitude of that moment.

Again my mother goes to leave, and this time it's my father who calls after her.

“Can I have a hug?” he says.

She stops, places her purse at the foot of his bed, pivots, takes two swift strides toward him, gives him two quick taps on his shoulders with her fingertips, and a kiss on the cheek. She turns and grabs her purse, and though his arms are still rising to meet her embrace, she's already gone.

Later that day, I send Martin an e-mail detailing my father's condition, and ask if he can please forward it to his friend, Eric, the doctor. Eric responds almost immediately.
Does Maria's father drink? Is it possible he is going through alcohol withdrawal? Is he having trouble sleeping? Does he feel he's slipping off the bed? Is there a tunnel? Spiders? If so, have her call me ASAP.

“The painkiller your father is on is not enough to make anyone hallucinate,” he says when I call him. “It's aspirin, basically.” He tells me that my father is having classic alcohol withdrawal symptoms, and that he needs a sedative immediately. “If they don't give him a sedative, he will have a heart attack. I'm surprised he hasn't already. I honestly don't understand how your father is still alive.”

After getting off the phone with Eric, I go straight to the hospital and practically demand they give my father a sedative. The doctor tries to explain his catch-22 theory yet again, and I stop short of telling him to fuck off—how was it possible that they didn't know my father was going through alcohol withdrawal, while a doctor thousands of miles away had diagnosed him based on an e-mail? Perhaps to them, if he were to have a heart attack, he'd be one less “elderly” person on social security or one less drunk on the street. Maybe to them, he was just another patient, but to me, he was my father—the one and only.

The head of the hospital comes down to have a word with us, saying they will give my father a sedative, but if he never wakes up, they won't be to blame—we will. Is this really what it had come to? Whether my father lives or dies, somehow being our responsibility?

“Fine,” I say, knowing that if my father never wakes up, at least I can live with knowing that when he was unable to fend for himself, I had not turned my back on him.

Once they give him the sedative, he sleeps for thirty-six hours straight, waking only now and then to ask for a drink of water. When he wakes, the tunnel and the spiders are gone, and so too is the man who had been in the bed next to his. The man had died in the middle of the night. Had gone quietly, without making a fuss—he, too, had fluid in his lungs.

Three days later, my father is released from the hospital, and Yesenia and I drive him back to La Peña. It's been raining so much that the face of the land itself has been transformed. On either side of the road, the fields that had been parched and dusty now stretch all the way to the horizon shimmering with different shades of green.

*   *   *

When classes let out in mid-December, I pack my bags, a stack of books, running shoes, and a month's supply of espresso. On the night before I leave for Mexico, I throw a going-away party, an apple-pie party. I make the pie from scratch, using Abigail's recipe, and while it's in the oven, a bottle of tequila makes its way around the room. This has been my routine for the past two years. The minute classes let out for summer or the holidays, I'm throwing a going-away party and hopping on the first flight back to Mexico.

“So, where in Mexico are you going?” Matt yells, over the music. “Are you going to the beach?”

“I'm going to see my father,” I say.

“Nice,” he says. “You're going to go spend the holidays with your parents?”

“Not exactly,” I say, making my way to the kitchen to check on the pie. Though my parents had had that moment, their brief reconciliation two years earlier, and my father had not stopped talking about my mother, how she had been to see him, and who knows, maybe once he got out of that place, they could work things out. But deep down he must have known that the past would forever run like a deep, dark vein between them.

“Almost ready,” I yell over the music as I pull the pie from the oven and cheers erupt from the living room, where everyone is dancing to a mix of hip-hop and disco.

When I had returned to New York after that trip, I suddenly felt like an outsider in my own neighborhood. Williamsburg had undergone massive construction that summer, and new buildings, complete with doormen and elevators, had sprung up on every other street corner, it seemed. I was walking home from class one day and had come to a full stop at an intersection. Where there had never even been a stop sign, now there was a traffic light. Before there had been no need for stop signs or traffic lights, as there was hardly any traffic, but now the line of cars waiting at the light stretched all the way down the street like a metallic snake. And dispersed among the cars was the one thing that had been as uncommon in Williamsburg as tourists—yellow cabs. It was disorienting.

I set the pie to cool on the counter, next to the cheese and charcuterie boards, and grab two pints of vanilla ice cream from the freezer. For the past two years, the gentrification had continued at such a rapid pace that each time I went to Mexico and came back, another slew of buildings had gone up, another wave of foreigners had moved in, and another handful of friends who could no longer afford the rising rents had moved away, including Josh. He had moved to Bushwick, and within a few years would be returning to California. I felt more and more like an outsider as I watched the neighborhood I had fallen in love with practically vanish from underneath me.

Another bottle of tequila makes its way around the room and I take a swig, knowing that I'm going to feel it on the plane in the morning.

 

20

SHOOTING GUNS LIKE SHOOTING STARS

 

 

SCATTERED STARS BEGIN TO APPEAR
, one by one, like eyes glistening against the cobalt sky. The sliver of moon doesn't illuminate enough of the darkness, out there beyond the courtyard, on the dirt road where the dogs have fused into a ball of claws and teeth tearing through the night. Out there where dust is already clinging to fresh blood. One dog breaks from the pack and runs toward the church that sits under the single light post in La Peña. A cloud of dust rises toward the light as the pack pounces on the one that broke from them, the one that tried to get away. A log collapses in the fire, red sparks soar into the cool air, mingle with the growling, and then vanish.

“Should we do something?” I ask my father.

“About what?” he asks, leaning back in his white plastic chair, his legs extended in front of him and crossed one over the other so that the soles of his cowboy boots are almost in the fire.

“The dogs,” I say. “Won't they kill each other?”

“Nah, they'll work it out,” he says, taking a swig of the rum and Coke in his nicked tin cup.