I stood at the door of her room and discovered Didi’s mother lying, asleep, in the bed. For a split second, Didi looked exactly like Mrs. Steinberg after Mr. Steinberg had died, pale, slack, a person haunting a body rather than inhabiting it. Probably exactly how Didi would look when she was old. If she lived to become old.
She was a mess. Her cheek and pillowcase were streaked black from the charcoal slurry they’d pumped into her stomach. Her right eye flamed red where a blood vessel had burst when she was throwing up. Her nose was greasy, ringed in the K-Y Jelly used to thread a tube into her stomach.
Behind me in the hall, a family passed by talking loudly enough that they woke Didi. Her lids fluttered up, then she worked to bring me into focus. “Rae.” She exhaled my name on an exhalation so long she might have been holding it for all the months since she’d seen me last.
I lifted one hand in a How, paleface greeting but didn’t step one foot closer.
“Rae.” Her voice was a whispery wreck, so soft that I had no choice but to move forward. She shrugged and gestured at herself, the tubes coming out of her nose, her veins. The preemptive strike. It was what she always did, whenever she’d let me down, whenever she didn’t do something she’d said she would. She’d always start by neutralizing any complaint I might have by detailing all her current dramas and misfortunes. This time she mimed the strike simply by presenting her pitiful condition. “You saved my life.”
Only after I willed you dead. “Don’t talk, okay? Save your voice.”
“I have to talk. Rae, I did a horrible thing. I wasn’t as good a friend as I should have been, but I wasn’t as bad as you think.” She shook her head, then chastised herself. “Cut the bullshit. Cut the bullshit. Here’s the truth: I didn’t take Tomás from you because you never really had him. Neither of us ever had him. No one will ever have him because Tomás does not have himself.” Didi echoed the exact words Guitos had spoken to me.
“Rae, he’s waiting for you. Up north. He wants you, he needs you to come and see his village. That’s the only way you’ll understand.” Her eyelids drooped, then popped back open. She lifted a hand with an IV taped to the back of it. “Look, I’m zoning out here. I don’t know what they’re putting in my soup, but I gotta make this short. Go. Just go to him. Anyone in town can tell you where his cabin is.” Her eyes rolled up and she laughed. “I told you. Told you I’d get him for you and I did.” She was drifting off again. “I got him for you. Go get him. The name of the village is...”
Her eyes closed and I considered leaving, simply walking out while I still had a choice because I knew, once she told me the name, the choice would be gone. I hoped she was asleep. Her eyes and mouth twitched as if she were struggling to open them. She didn’t open her eyes, but the name sighed as if of its own accord: “La Viuda.”