We Are Called to Rise (13 page)

There’s a group of volunteers at this hospital, and they had a Valentine’s Party for the patients. We didn’t have a talent show, but I ate a lot of heart-shaped cookies. I thought of you too, because I figured you would have a party or something at your school.

I’m going to be in this hospital for a while, but when I get out, they are going to send me back home, at least for a while. Maybe we can go to a park or something. I don’t know if I am going to be too good at soccer anymore, but we could kick a ball around. I’d like to meet your baba too.

Have fun at school,

Luis

18

Luis

THE FIRST TIME I
heard his voice, I was strung up in the walking machine. It’s kind of like a conveyer belt with a harness hanging above it. The therapist hooks me into the harness—which holds me like a swing—and then my legs dangle until they lower me enough that my feet touch the moving belt. I can’t move my feet, but the doctors say that I don’t have any nerve damage, I will be able to move them, and walk. I just have to get my brain to remember that my feet are there.

Like I said, I am one fucked-up soldier.

The walking machine is a lot of work, not just for me but for the two people that are moving my feet too. There’s one person holding my left ankle and another holding my right. I can’t feel them holding me, but I can look down and see that they are. And they just move my foot and my ankle and my knee as if I were walking, and I sort of stumble-walk in my harness hanging above them. They have to keep a rhythm, so Terence, who has my left foot, says, “Left, left, left,” in a really steady way, which reminds me of the movies I used to watch when I was a kid about being in the Army. It doesn’t remind me of being in the Army, though. That’s kind of funny.

I try to amuse myself when I am in this contraption, because as stupid as it looks, it’s a hell of a lot of work. I’m sweating and panting and, man, I just want them to quit, I’m just waiting for them to say it’s been long enough. Every day, I have to do it for a few more minutes. The first day, we counted the number of steps I took, but now Terence times me for a certain number of minutes, and then I get a two-minute break, and then we go back to it. Over and over. I want a smoke.

But I still noticed his voice. I was on the machine, sweating and pushing and trying to feel my feet, and I noticed this voice asking for directions. I heard it clearly. For some reason, it stuck in my head a moment. But then, I was concentrating on walking, and I forgot to think about that voice.

The doctors say my brain doesn’t know that my feet are there, but that’s not quite right. I know my feet are there. I can almost feel them, I know they’re moving, they’re being moved, and I can almost imagine moving them myself, but they just don’t feel like my feet. They feel like an idea of feet.

Weird, huh?

If it weren’t me, this whole brain thing would be pretty interesting.

WHEN I GO BACK TO
my room, the nurse mentions that someone has asked about me. She says he didn’t leave his name, but he looked like a soldier.

That makes me nervous. I suppose someone is doing an investigation. And I’m cool with that. I’m okay with being punished for what I did. I mean, I think I am. I still feel scared. And I can’t even stand to think about how my abuela will feel if it gets in the paper or something. If her friends know about it. I always sort of thought I made up for what my mother had done, for the way my abuela didn’t have any nice stories to tell about her daughter.

Yeah, that’s over.

I asked the nurse if he left a message, but she said, no, he didn’t leave anything.

I’ve got an hour free before I have occupational therapy, so I look out the window and I think about whether I’ll be able to see the sky if I get sent to jail. I figure I should look out the window a lot, try to memorize everything, what I see, what I hear. Which is mostly birds, and cars way down below, and a lot of wind. I keep my windows open no matter how cold it gets, because I like to hear something outside of this hospital, and it helps me relax: the wind, a bird chirp, a squawk, a horn, the low chug of a truck engine waiting at a light. It’s been raining a lot, day after day, so everything looks slick and shiny out the window. I wish I could hear the rain. I don’t know how tall this hospital is, but the fourth floor is not the top, and I can’t hear the rain.

It doesn’t rain much in Nevada, but when it does, it comes down like someone dumped a bucket. When I was a kid, I could never quite imagine a raindrop. Rain in Las Vegas is a sheet, it’s a deluge, and then it stops. It wasn’t until I went to basic training that I felt drops of water from the sky, you know, before the rain really starts or as it stops. I suppose it must be possible to feel that in Nevada, but I never felt it; it’s not how I thought of rain.

HE COMES IN WHILE I
am thinking these thoughts.

Quiet. But I hear him breathing. I’m pretty sensitive that way. And I’m starting to be more on alert here.

The thing is, I don’t move easily, not even to turn my head, and when I do move, there’s nothing subtle about it.

“Luis Rodriguez?”

I knock a pillow off the side of my bed trying to shift position and look toward him. My arms and legs jerk like that sometimes when I’m just trying to move my head. That’s the brain thing.

“Yes.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me. Really stares.

I’m thinking: wow, this is some funky investigation. Is he waiting for me to crack, start yelling that I shot a kid or something? Because he’s really not making me that nervous. He better ask me straight up if he wants me to tell him something.

“You look like him.”

Like who? This dude is weird.

“I thought you would. I mean, I remember that. But, shit, you really look like him.”

There’s something about his voice. I realize it’s the voice I heard in the gym, on the machine. Of course, he’s Mexican. That’s part of it. He sounds like a lot of guys I know.

I decide not to speak. Not to ask him who I look like. I really don’t care. I wish he would just do what he’s going to do, get his information, read me my rights, whatever, and get out. I can’t imagine the Army wants someone as fucked up as me in Leavenworth. They’ll want me after I can walk again. When I can really miss my freedom.

That’s a joke. Sort of.

“Do you remember me?”

What the hell? Do I remember him? I’ve never seen him in my life. He’s too old to have been downrange with me. Unless he was an officer or something. And he doesn’t look like an officer. He looks like a grunt.

“I’m your Uncle Mike. Miguel. Your dad’s brother.”

Fuck me. I didn’t even know my dad had a brother.

“You don’t remember me.”

That’s for sure.

“You didn’t even know I existed, did you?”

He looks upset.

I still don’t talk. Because my life is really getting crazy. Who is this guy? My dad died before I was born. I never met anyone in his family. The only things I know about my dad are things I heard my mother and my abuela fighting about, when Abuela would spit out the word
gang,
or when my mother would be so fucked up on the couch, she’d call me Marco.

“Your dad was my little brother. I loved him.”

That’s what he says. That is all he fucking says.

And then he just walks away.

“Hey! Hey!”

I yell, so he sort of turns and says, “Later, man. I shouldn’t have come. But you sure look like him.”

It takes a lot of effort, because I’ve just been on that damn walking machine, but I push myself up in bed, I kind of shove my chest out, and I flail my arms. I guess I’m trying to get him to think I’m going to follow him. He stops. Watches me thrash around there.

Then he digs in his pocket, and he pulls out a rosary. I know what it is, of course. He looks at that string of beads—they’re kind of chocolate brown in color, like they might be seeds or something, not glass, not plastic or anything—and he looks at those beads for quite a while.

I don’t say a word. I try not even to breathe, because I can tell the man is struggling.

He lifts the beads to his face, and he kisses the cross, just barely. “Adios,
Papi
,” he says.

Then he lays the beads on my lap.

“These belonged to your abuelo. My dad. He made a lot of trips around these beads, once every day for me and once every day for your dad. Once every day for you too.”

We look at each other, eye to eye, but for some reason, I don’t speak. I’m kind of in shock or something. And then he walks out of the room.

And that’s it. I’m stuck in the bed, right? It’s not like I can chase the guy down. It’s not like I can do anything. I don’t even know where he lives. Mike Rodriguez? That should be simple. Not too many of those out there.

How the hell did he find me? How the hell does he know who I am? Why did he think I’d recognize him? Why did his voice stick in my mind when I heard it in the gym?

Do I know him? Did I meet him? When I was a kid?

Did I meet my grandfather?

I don’t remember ever knowing anything about my dad’s family. I wouldn’t have forgotten that my dad had a brother. I used to wonder about my dad all the time. I would remember that.

So who’s Miguel Rodriguez? And how did he know who I was? How long has he known who I was?

WHEN I WAS STILL AT
St. Anne’s, in eighth grade, Sister Antonella told us all a story about a cloistered nun. This nun had taken a vow of silence. She spent her whole life praying. But she wrote a diary—I don’t know if nuns are really supposed to do that—and she left it behind when she died, and somehow Sister Antonella got to see it. Maybe they were related, Sister Antonella and the cloistered nun. I can’t remember. But in the diary, the nun wrote that she had stopped believing in God, that she couldn’t do anything about it, that she wanted to have faith, but that she didn’t. And still she kept praying. She kept her vow of silence. Sister Antonella said this nun accepted God’s will in not granting her the gift of faith.

It sounds weird, but I never forgot that story. I never forgot about that nun who kept praying, who lived behind fucking walls, even though she didn’t believe in God. How could she accept God’s will if she didn’t even think there was a God? How did she keep from talking to anyone? How did she keep praying?

But that’s what she did.

I prayed a lot when I was in Iraq. I probably prayed every day, every single time I felt fucking scared. It was automatic. I didn’t let anyone know I was praying, certainly not Sam, but I couldn’t really stop it. I was just always talking to God, always just hoping that maybe someone was listening.

But you know, I never thought it made any difference to God whether I prayed or not. I mean, I didn’t think God was going to save me because I prayed, or not save me because I didn’t pray. I just never bought that idea. I mean, if he’s God, he already knows everything anyone is thinking. How could it possibly matter if one person said some words and another person didn’t?

That’s one thing I think. But the other thing I think is that my abuelo said the rosary for me every day, and maybe that’s why I’m alive.

WHEN DR. GHOSH COMES IN
the next day, I tell him about Mike’s visit. He’s interested, I mean, it’s a pretty interesting thing, but he doesn’t know anything about him. The hospital has security, but there are a lot of people coming in and out all the time. And the rehab floor, where I am, has outpatients. So it’s really easy to get in here.

“Have you called your grandmother? Did you ask her about him?”

“No.”

I thought about calling her. I thought about it all night. And suddenly, I don’t feel like talking to Dr. Ghosh about this. About how I thought about calling Abuela, and how I imagined the conversation, and how I imagined me getting angry at her for not telling me whatever it is she knows. How ridiculous would that be? For me to be angry at Abuela, given what I’ve done, given how badly I’ve messed everything up.

“Do you want to talk to your grandmother about this? Do you want to see this uncle again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Dr. Ghosh waits.

“I mean, the thing is, I don’t know what I am supposed to do with any of this. With all of it. What am I supposed to do, Dr. Ghosh? About Sam? About that fucking kid? About Bashkim? What do you want from me? What am I fucking supposed to do?”

By the time I get to this last question, I am practically screaming. I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t feeling worked up at all, and then, all of a sudden, I’m going loco on Dr. Ghosh. The thing is, it’s just impossible, living with this, thinking about Sam, having this Mike come in my room, looking at that rosary, writing letters to that kid Bashkim. I can’t do it. I don’t know what to do with all of this.

I stop talking, and I lie there, sort of shaking. I am trying not to cry.

“I think you are just supposed to feel it, Luis. I think your job right now is to feel it all.”

This is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard Dr. Ghosh say. It makes me mad, which helps the shaking, and it lets me get back to the issue of my so-called uncle. Dr. Ghosh and I look at each other for a while.

“I just don’t want to talk to this Mike right now. I don’t want to think about something else right now. I’ve kind of got everything I can stand. Right now, I mean.”

“I think that’s fair, Luis. I think it’s fair to say that this is not the time when you can think about your dad or his brother. If he is your dad’s brother, he’ll be out there. You can find him, you can find him when you’re ready.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Definitely. You learned something yesterday. And it might even be important. But it’s not what is most important right now. Not unless you want it to be.”

It’s weird how I was all worked up a second ago, and now I feel calm again. That happens to me a lot here. But I do feel calm, calm enough to tell Dr. Ghosh what really surprised me about Mike Rodriguez’s visit.

“The thing is, he said he loved my dad. He misses him.”

Dr. Ghosh says nothing.

“I never thought about someone loving my dad before. I never thought of him as someone somebody loved.”

Then he looks at me. Sometimes I can tell I surprise him. Maybe he thought spics weren’t that interesting before he met me. Maybe he just can’t figure me out.

I SPEND THE NEXT FEW
days doing my rehab, which keeps me pretty busy, actually, and thinking about my Uncle Mike’s visit. I think about Dr. Ghosh’s stupid idea too, that my job is to feel it all. I mean, that’s all I’m doing isn’t it?

But on Thursday night, I try it. I just try feeling some of it. I think of Sam, and for just a second, I think how much he wanted to live. I think about Sam having a little brother, how he didn’t want his little brother to enlist, and I think about the way Sam looked when he got an email from his girlfriend saying she “had to move on.” I think about the way Sam used to step in front of me, put me a little behind (unless I was quick enough to stop him); I think all of these things, and the tears start rolling. I mean, I really start crying.