We Never Asked for Wings (5 page)

T
he room smelled like too many bodies. In the dim moonlight she counted them, wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, pillows scattered across the hard floor. Twenty-seven. Men, women, and children pressed so close together it was hard to tell who was snoring. That was how it was here. Ten beds per room, one nurse per floor; there were no visiting hours, only family, day and night, changing sheets and bedpans and carrying the old or injured to and from the bathroom.

Letty ached for Maria Elena, a pain more acute than any of her injuries, but from the moment the seventeen-member support squad found out that she was alone and no one was coming to care for her, Letty lacked for nothing. In fast, serious voices, pesos had been exchanged, plans made. It was a bring-your-own-food, bring-your-own-toilet-paper kind of a place, and within minutes she had been surrounded by trays of sliced mango, pineapple, pan dulce, and (because she was American) a small, wrinkled hot dog.

After she ate, an old woman washed Letty's hands with sanitizer and warm towels. She had tried to pay them back, but not a single person in the room would take her money. Just by virtue of being in the public hospital, Letty knew every single one of them was poor, and their refusal made her eyes fill, which just brought more sweets, more flowers, more hand-crocheted handkerchiefs, until she thought she might be buried alive in their generosity.

Twenty-four hours later she still felt the physical shock of what had happened to her, a dizzy tingling as she replayed over and over again the bloody ride to the hospital in the flatbed of a farmer's truck, convinced she was going to die right there underneath the starry sky. She could have died—she'd swerved to avoid the oncoming car and driven straight off the mountain road—but she'd fallen into a shallow ravine instead of careening off one of the many steep cliffs, and the dense shrubbery had cushioned her fall. At the hospital she'd needed ten stitches for a cut to her forehead, just above the hairline, and they'd given her a series of tests to rule out traumatic brain injury. Afterward she'd asked to use the phone.

It was the middle of the night, but Sara had answered, finally, accepting Letty's collect call and then driving straight to the Landing with Letty still on the phone.
I'm glad you're okay,
Alex said, relief and something more complicated in his voice, and then Luna, sleepy and uncensored:
Where's my nana?

Letty asked her to put Alex back on the line.

I'm not telling Luna,
he said when she told him his grandparents weren't coming back. So she asked for Sara—but already she could hear Luna in the background.
Tell me what? Tell me what?
Alex whispered something to her, and she sniffed once and then started to cry.

It was a tiny sound, that sniff, just a whimper, but it haunted her: the physical incarnation of everything she feared, proof that it wasn't her they wanted, that it didn't matter if she went home. All day she had heard her daughter in the chatter of the children stretched out on the neighboring beds, in the tears after poorly executed shots, in the excitement over a pending patient release.

Now, night had fallen, and her anxiety had gotten worse: every whimper of a sleeping stranger sounded like Luna crying out for her grandparents. Letty covered her ears, but she could still hear the gasping and snuffling all around her. She would never fall asleep. There wasn't enough air in the room to satisfy all the hungry, gaping mouths. Standing up, she felt her way along the wall—gingerly stepping between elbows and knees, noses and ankles—to the window at the far end of the room. It was open, but there was no breeze. Fresh air hovered stubbornly on the other side of the screen. Leaning into it, she pulled a breath through the dusty metallic mesh.

“Are you okay?”

Letty was startled to hear perfect English, without even a trace of an accent. She looked down the row of bodies. Only one pair of eyes was open: a girl wrapped in a red crocheted blanket, sitting against the cinder-block wall. She looked sixteen, seventeen at most. It wasn't the first time Letty had noticed her—she was the only one who'd been there as long as Letty had. It was why she had the coveted spot, underneath the only window.

“I'm okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure,” she said, but she felt more light-headed than sure. “I just need some air.”

“I'll take you outside, if you want.”

Letty followed her through the maze of bodies. When they were outside, the girl unwrapped herself and draped her red blanket across Letty's shoulders.

“Thank you.”

They walked to a bench and sat down, looking across the mostly empty parking lot and into the forest. Out of habit Letty looked for her own car, even though it was still in the ravine where she'd crashed it, and it would stay there, being scavenged for parts and scrap metal, until there was nothing left. She took a big gulp of air and thought about her children, asleep in Sara's loft. Safe. She didn't like having to ask so much of her friend, but what choice did she have? And anyway, Sara owed her. In high school it had been Sara who was a constant runaway. Letty had spent years tracking her down in San Francisco, sheltering her from her parents' violent fights and from a long chain of bad boyfriends. Sara always said Letty was the only reason she'd even survived high school, and when she'd gone off to college she'd remained fiercely loyal to her high school friend.

“How much longer will you be here?” the girl asked after a time.

“Six more days,” Letty said. It was the soonest Sara could get a ticket. “What about you?”

“I don't know.” The girl nodded toward the building. “My grandma's in the hospital, and our family's small.”

“Where are your parents?”

“I lived in Los Angeles with my mom until she died.”

It explained the girl's English, for which Letty was grateful. Maria Elena and Enrique had stopped speaking Spanish at home when Letty started school. She could still understand a lot of what was being said around her, but it took all her concentration to figure it out—and her head hurt too much for that now.

“I'm sorry about your mom,” she said.

“It was ten years ago.”

The girl had been tiny when she'd lost her mother. Luna's age. Letty's heart leapt, thinking how very close she'd come to leaving her own children motherless.

“Where's your family?” the girl asked Letty, changing the subject.

“I just left my parents in Oro de Hidalgo, near Morelia, but I was born and raised in California. My kids are still there.”

“With their father?”

“No,” Letty said, shaking her head slowly. “No father.”

Singular: as if there had been only one. Because in Letty's mind, Luna's father was hardly a person at all, just a fuzzy moment she tried not to remember, and even when she was pressed—as Luna had done on more than one occasion—she couldn't recall much, and nothing at all she could tell her daughter. She remembered the bartenders she'd gone out with after closing one night, and the woozy feeling of too much to drink; she remembered the room spotting out in black and gray and thinking she should put on her pajamas, as if she could go to bed instead of watching the couples pairing off in twos or threes, not even bothering to look for a private room. Then—and this was the clearest memory—she remembered thinking how very glad she was that she was only watching the sloppy groping, at the very same moment she had a surreal, almost out-of-body realization that she wasn't watching at all. She was doing, or being done to, and she would have stopped it if the next thing she remembered hadn't been waking up alone in a filthy, unfamiliar apartment. When she'd found out she was pregnant she'd considered having an abortion, but she'd been such an absent mother with Alex, she couldn't help but think this was her mother's God, giving her a second chance.

“What happened to him?”

The question pulled Letty back to the only father that mattered. Alex's father, Wes. “He left. It was a long time ago—after high school.”

They were quiet for a long time, the girl studying Letty and Letty studying her hands. Blood flaked from deep underneath her fingernails, trapped there from the hour she'd spent holding the cut on her forehead closed before they reached the hospital.

“Did you love him?” the girl asked.

Letty thought about denying it, but she couldn't. She'd loved Wes immediately. It had surprised her—she actively disliked blonds, and there was Wes in the front row of honors science, his shaggy yellow hair long enough to partly cover one eye, his hand stretched high in the air. She was a junior, finally confident in the extremely foreign universe of Mission Hills, and her first conversation with him had been an argument.
Why don't you do something that matters?
he'd asked, when she and Sara presented their project idea to the class. They had designed an experiment testing whether different colors of food dye affected the temperature at which sugar hardened. Wes was working on a water purification system for use in third-world countries.

Later, he told her that his father had tasked him to “use his powers for good,” and Wes's powers were many: he'd been given more than his fair share of money, intelligence, and good looks. Letty might not have had exactly the same powers in exactly the same proportions, but Wes argued with her like she was squandering her talents, and though she fought him hard and loud, she was secretly flattered. Did he really think she had talents that could be squandered? His pencil pounded the desk in a way that could only mean he did, and his belief in her made her work harder, and her hard work impressed him, and soon they weren't fighting, they were dating.

She remembered the first time they'd gone out, to Half Moon Bay at low tide. He identified all the invertebrates by their scientific names and then took her to an Indian restaurant, where she pretended she'd eaten
palak paneer
and
aloo gobi
a million times before and that the dishes didn't slightly scare her, the neon yellow cauliflower and pureed spinach with something floating in it that Wes called cheese. But she felt better for having tried it, brave and cultured, and that was how it was between them. Wes pulled her into his world and acted like she belonged there, and she struggled to keep up.

The girl was quiet beside her, and when Letty looked at her, she realized she was waiting for an answer to a question that Letty hadn't heard. “What?”

“Was he angry?” she repeated. “Is that why he left? That's why my dad left my mom. He said she got pregnant on purpose.”

“No,” Letty said. “He wasn't angry.” Then, after a long pause, she added: “He wasn't angry, because he didn't know.”

The girl sat in silence, considering this, and Letty was surprised at her own honesty. Only Sara knew the truth, but it was easy to tell the truth here, to this girl she would never see again.

“How could he not know?”

It was the question Letty had asked herself every day for the past fifteen years. She rocked back and forth, squeezing her knees to her chest. Finally, she spoke.

“Because I never told him,” she said simply. “He had bigger things to do. He was on his way to college, and I didn't want him to get stuck at home with a baby, hating me for it. I figured I'd tell him eventually.”

The first Christmas after Wes left for New York had been the hardest. She was hugely pregnant and he'd wanted to see her, but Maria Elena had turned him away—believing (because Letty had told her so) that Wes had left her outright, caring more about college than about his own child. During summer vacation she'd refused to see him yet again, because she was still fat (and young and stupid and vain, she thought now), and then the second summer, when she'd promised herself and Sara she would tell him, he hadn't come home. Then Alex had almost died and it was off the table that she'd tell Wes, and have to explain Alex's broken teeth, and what she had done to him.