Pops doesn’t call back. I guess he’s still kicking it in California, getting laid, having a helluva time. It better be a hell of a time. He’s not around when the doctor comes out and gives me a fishy look, looking to see if there’s an “adult” to talk to.
“I’m her only relative,” I say, getting pissed off with this white dude who doesn’t give much of a shit in the first place. Grams doesn’t have insurance and these fucking sharks don’t care about anyone if they aren’t getting paid. “It says here that she has a son. A forty-two-year-old son.” He says it like I was going to try and slip one past him. Why I’d want to take responsibility for all of this is a mystery. “He’s not around. I’m her grandson. I take care of her.” He gives me the once-over taking in my shark teeth and old scars. After a second though, he lays down a kinder, gentler routine. “Well, Mr. Lomos. Your grandmother is in a lot of pain. We gave her something for that. She told us that it was her back, but after some preliminary tests, including X rays, we don’t think that it’s a back problem. How long has she been complaining about pain?”
My stomach is going off like a fire alarm, warning me with a flood of acid that something has gone really wrong here. “A long time,” I say. “More than two years. When she didn’t go to work the other day, I knew that she was really hurting. I tried to get her to come in, but she wouldn’t.”
The doctor nods his head sympathetically. “Wouldn’t really have mattered. What’s your name, son?”
“Robert,” I say.
“Robert. It wouldn’t have mattered. If it’s what it looks like on the X rays, she would have needed to come in months ago. There’s nothing conclusive for me to tell you right now. Best thing is for you to—”
“Look, Doctor, I’m not going anywhere right now. I want to know what you think it is. Is it her appendix? Did it burst? Has she got a hernia? What is it?” Deep down inside I know what it is, but I want to give this sucker a chance to prove my stomach wrong, that it’s just a chickenshit worry-wart. “Tell me, Doctor.”
The guy hems and haws for a couple of more minutes, but finally he gives it to me. “It looks like she has a growth in her liver. It looks like cancer. But,” he rushes in, “there’s a chance that the tumor is benign.”
“What’s that mean?” I ask, trying to keep myself steady. “That mean that she isn’t going to die?”
This guy isn’t in the hope business. “Look, we can’t tell anything until we get in there. We’re going to have to operate and we won’t know how serious it is until we do a biopsy of the tissue.”
“Is my grams going to die?” I sound frantic, like a kid.
“Son, go home and get some sleep. We’re going to operate tomorrow afternoon and we won’t know for a few days.”
I’m about to tell him that I’m not his fucking son, that I’m nobody’s fucking son, when it registers like a thunderstorm that my grams is going to die. She’s going to die. My grams, the only person I got that gives a good goddamn about me, is going to die. I stop listening as my stomach fills with bile and without bothering to say excuse me, I head for a bathroom. Just as I hit the stall, it comes pouring out and I puke all over the shiny, white porcelain, little red threads and clearish acid that I can’t flush away quickly enough. I hit that fucking toilet handle four or five times, trying to clean up my mess, erase it. I sit there and moan, feeling like I just got a face full of mace, my eyes tearing up from the strain of throwing up.
* * *
She’s always talked about her death. I guess all old people do. You can’t get old without starting to think about dying. I’m only gonna be seventeen and I think about it all the time. But Grams, she’s been talking about it since I can remember. Always warning me about what relatives do when people die. She used to tell me, “When I die, you make sure to come over and get everything you want before I’m even in the ground. The first thing people do when somebody dies is come over and steal everything from them. Especially relatives. They’re the worst. So you come here and you get it all or there won’t be nothing when you finally get the courage to come over.” It used to bug me at first, but then I got used to it. Whenever we drove past San Fernando Cemetery, she’d point it out. “You see all those flowers? That’s respect. That’s how the living show the dead that they remember them. You going to leave your gramma’s grave empty and all alone?” I always told her that I’d visit, but I never thought I’d actually have to do it.
She’s so strong, but all that death talk is where she’s always kept her vulnerability. That was just supposed to be a mental trick, though, a way of putting all the bullshit she’s had to deal with in a coffin in the ground somewhere, which she can visit when things get tough. She wasn’t supposed to go ahead and die! She’s always seemed unkillable, undie-able to me, secure in her own immortality almost. How do you kill a tank? Not that she’s big. She’s actually compact, though she gives off this aura of being armored. But those little fucking cancer cells found a way in where other things, other things like me and my pops and my moms and having to work like a goddamned mule, never did.
“I don’t want no silly, fancy funeral. We’re not rich people. I want a cheap wooden one. When the time comes, they’re going to bury me with your grandfather over there in the military campo. There won’t be no need to be spending money. That’d be a sin. All I want is a simple burial. A few songs, and to make sure that you ain’t going to forget to come visit me.” What a sucker I am for not seeing that God would pull the last rug I had to stand on right out from under me and leave me flat on my ass.
* * *
When I get home, I can’t manage to go to sleep. I’m supposed to go to work, and I figure that Grams would get mad if I don’t go, so I take a Demerol to knock out. I clock in for a couple of hours the next morning, till I figure that Grams will be up. I make it over to the hospital by ten A.M. Grams is awake, sort of. They’ve given her all kinds of pain medication and she’s barely coherent. “I’m going to give you your dollar,” she keeps saying. She thinks that I’m still a little kid and that she needs to give me my allowance.
“It’s going to be alright,” is the only thing I can think to say. It’s a weak thing to come out with. I feel like I should be praying for her, something more serious, but I can’t think of how to do it, even. I don’t think God’s listening anyway, not by a longshot. I run it around in my head to call my uncle, but I don’t want him coming around here right now. I don’t want any relatives here. I know once they come, everything will turn out in the worst possible way. I want them to stay the fuck away. I don’t want them wringing their hands here, trying to comfort me by giving me phony hugs and pats on the back. Grams belongs to me, not to them, and Grams doesn’t care much for them anyway. They never really come around unless they need something. I stay with her till a couple of nurses come to take her away. “I’m going to be right here,” I say to her, but Grams is freaking out a little. She’s drugged up, and she doesn’t really know what’s going on.
“We need a next of kin,” another nurse is saying to me; meanwhile I’m trying to keep Grams from scampering off the goddamn gurney. I don’t want either of those nurses to touch her. “It’s going to be alright, Grams,” I say even though my stomach is telling me that it isn’t going to be alright, ever. “Don’t worry, Mr. Lomos. Let them take her away. We’re going to get her all better.” She’s talking to me like I’m four years old. “Look, lady,” I say, “let’s cut this. What are they going to do to her?”
The nurse keeps up the sympathetic act. “The doctor is going to cut out the tumor and then we’re going to run tests on it. But right now, I need you to sign some forms and to answer a few questions.” I do what she wants and finally go to the waiting room with a lot of other people who look just as miserable and hopeless as I feel. I’m so fucking nervous that I keep getting up feeling like I gotta throw up. Maybe like I owe it to Grams to throw up, feel sick, to feel a shitload of pain. I didn’t bring my ulcer medicine. Funny, I’m usually stocked like a walking hospital, but today, no pills.
Next to me there’s this older couple, maybe in their fifties, and the man is hugging his wife and she keeps blowing her nose. The guy, a poor-looking Mexican who probably does day labor because his hands are thick and calloused, keeps telling her, “God won’t let him die. You’ll see.” It’s more than I can take right now, so I head off. I go outside and have a cigarette.
I never realized how fucked up it is to be stuck in a hospital like this. I’ve been in plenty of them, what from the snake bite and my ulcer and all the other crazy shit that’s happened to me. But I’ve always been the patient, never the person having to wait and worry. Mental torture, mental pain, that’s the real hurt. I can see that now. Physical pain you can locate, and people usually treat you nice because they feel sorry for you and they’re getting paid to look after you. But mental pain? Who can locate that? What cure is there for that? What about when no one gives a shit? Where do you go where someone’ll understand and be able to actually help you? The best someone can do is say, “Well, Mr. Lomos, we’ve got it narrowed down to your heart.” Well, thanks a whole helluva lot for that one, Doctor. I knew it was my heart all along, but why does it hurt everywhere and why can’t I get a moment’s goddamned rest?
Everyone I know is suffering something awful, some deep pulsating pain that has completely fucked up their ability to navigate through life. My moms is a wreck; me, I’m a lost son of a bitch; poor Antony, he’ll probably wind up the same way as me. Now Grams? This is too much now. I want to tell God that I give up.
Then I want to find the fucker who runs the show down here, burst into his office, grab him by his fucking power tie and tell him, Look, you win. I give up with this whole thing, this whole endeavor. Okay? I’m serious here, pal. I give up. I’m gonna be good, I’m gonna follow the rules, be kind, whatever laundry list of things I need to do. I’m just gonna be here, chilling, not bothering anyone, not asking anyone for shit. So if I don’t make any noise, can you just go on to someone else? I realize I’m being melodramatic, but I don’t give a fuck because it seems like that’s the only answer sometimes. Only I know I can’t do that, the not-give-a-fuck thing. I’ve tried. So I throw my half-smoked cigarette against the hospital wall like it’s some grand act of defiance, and I go back to the waiting room with all the other tortured.
When I get in there, the older couple has gone. I’m afraid to ask where they went because it’s probably some really bad news. I’m glad I missed out on that scene. After a while—just over an hour because I’ve watched back-to-back episodes of that lame-assed Leave It to Beaver—the doctor comes in. I’m so drained all of a sudden that I can’t stand up. I can tell just by his face that it’s all bad news.
“Robert Lomos?” he says. I’m the only guy in the room. “Your grandmother came through the operation fairly well. We took out the tumor and we’ve sent it for a biopsy, but I have to be honest with you. It looks malignant.”
Malignant. That word. I’ve never thought about it much, if ever. But now, it’s the ugliest word I’ve ever heard. It means death and being alone and saying good-bye to my grams. I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. The phrase keeps floating through my head, bumping into malignant, and I know, my stomach knows, that somehow I can’t is not going to be enough. I’m going to have to.
The doctor goes on, but I’m hardly listening. Something about waiting but it looking bad. “Can I see her?” I ask. He hesitates a second. “You can, but you might want to wait till tomorrow. She’s just coming out of the anesthesia, and she’s going to be discombobulated and nauseous.”
“I don’t care. I want to see her.” He nods and tells a nurse that it’s alright. She walks me to a room, my grams’s hospital room. There’s a nurse in there with her. Grams is moaning and gurgling like she has to vomit. “It’s okay, Grams,” I say, but it doesn’t do any good. She can’t really hear what I’m saying. So I just sit there and stroke her hair, trying to do what I can to calm her down.
I sit there for a long time. She keeps falling asleep and then waking up startled, like she’s heard some loud noise. But as the night goes on, she seems to get better at recognizing that I’m there. After midnight sometime, she says “Robert,” and goes to grab my hand not realizing that they’ve tied her down so that she won’t pull out the IV. I hold her hand. It’s strange what you do and what you don’t do and when you realize what you haven’t done in a long time. Holding my grams’s hand is something I haven’t done since I was a little kid. It’s been so long that I’d forgotten what her hand even feels like. It seems so thin and delicate, like the skin of an onion, so that I’m afraid that I’ll tear her hand if I press too hard. I feel sad because I never even missed it, that is, holding her hand. Being alive, it seems to me, is about walking around forgetting everything, forgetting even that you’re alive. Forgetting that holding the hand of someone you really love, is something you should be conscious about when you do it. Obviously you can’t go around holding everybody’s hand all the time, but when you do, you should really think about it. Recognize it, you know?
I don’t want to go off on one of those “love your life” things like some fucking New Ager might, nodding with a silly, distant, empathetic grin. I’m talking about fucking losing things around you left and right and not even knowing how important they are, like you’re some kind of kid with too many toys and you don’t give a shit when one breaks or gets lost because you think you have so many of them. I’m talking about being a spoiled brat. It makes me want to hate myself, and it makes me so goddamned confused because my plans haven’t amounted to shit and I’ve been all over the place thinking that I’d get what I needed. Only I’ve been going in circles around what I already had, trying to find what I’d lost. “Is it my fault?” my stomach nudges me. “Haven’t I tried to tell you?” Grams moans again and I come back to her. For a second I’m mad at her for making me come back, for making me feel so bad, for making me focus all my energy and thoughts on her, and for making me feel guilty that my mind strayed off of her and on to myself.
Then I get this idea. If Grams dies, the disaster will be complete and her dying will be my way of showing the world how fucked up it is for doing so many things to me. It’ll be my way of shouting at everyone that I hate them and this goddamned life. In a sick way, it has me almost wishing for her death the same way a kid hopes he’ll die after he gets belted so that his mom will get hers. Only I don’t know who’d get theirs if Grams dies. Only me, really.
Grams drops back to sleep and I go on sitting there in the dark trying to sleep but not being able to because I’m so angry with everything.
* * *
I don’t tell any of the guys at work what’s going on. I don’t want to talk about it with them and I don’t want them giving me any of their sympathy. I stay quiet most of the day. But they don’t notice. They’ve got their own problems, and it’s so hot that nobody’s much in the mood to flap their gums anyway. I get off, go home, and try my pops’s house again. This time I’m a lot more hardcore with his girlfriend. “You tell him that his mom is in the hospital and that she might be dying and that if he gives a damn, he better get down here.” I hang up before the bitch can even get a word off. I try to eat, but my stomach won’t let me. While I’m taking a nap, the phone rings. I wake up and the house is dark and I’m confused for a minute because I don’t feel like it should be nighttime already. But the phone keeps on ringing and I stumble to pick it up expecting that it’s going to be my pops. “Hullo,” I say like I’m drowning.
“Robert?” a girl’s voice says. It’s Amelia.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I say, trying to wake myself up, but it’s hard because I’m so groggy. I feel like I just got kicked in the head.
“It’s Amelia, from the other night?” She thinks I don’t remember.
“Hi,” I say. “Yeah. Of course.”
“Should I try you some other time? You sound like you were sleeping.”
“Yeah, I mean no. I needed to get up. I have to go to the hospital.” And there it is. I’ve already started confessing my problems to other people. I was going to keep my mouth shut, but hearing Amelia’s voice makes me feel like telling her even though I don’t really know her.
“The hospital? Are you sick?”
“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s not for me. My grams is there. She’s the one who’s sick.”
“Oh no. Really sick?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?” she asks. She says it so sweetly that it makes me feel worse. Sympathy will do that to you. It gives you an in to your own pain. I don’t want that.
“Sure,” I say. “I’m okay. I just gotta go over there and you know, keep her company.”
“Do you want company?” I didn’t expect that one. She makes me feel how alone I am and she makes me realize how much I really do want company.
“No,” I say. “I’m fine. I just gotta go do this thing.” She’s trying to be nice, but goddammit, I don’t want that. I can’t start accepting that kind of sympathy. I gotta get to a mirror, make The Face, defend myself from all the scab-poking that motherfuckers are going to unleash. All for their own satisfaction, bastards, so that they can then disappear into their own lives as soon as they can do it without looking like—She interrupts my thought.
“Okay,” she says. She actually sounds disappointed. For a second, despite myself, it makes me feel a little better.
“Thanks,” I say. “Listen, I’ll give you a call. Maybe we can hook up somewhere later?”
“Sure,” she says. “Only, I can’t be out late. My stepfather…” and she trails off.
“No problem,” I say. “But I have to go right now. I’ll call you early.” We hang up. Just before I head out the door, the phone rings. This time it is my pops.
“Robert,” he says. He actually sounds scared. “Robert,” he says again when I don’t answer right away. I’m not trying to be mysterious or a bastard, I just can’t talk because if I do, I’m afraid I’m gonna go off like a little scared kid, and I’m not going to let myself do that. It’d be too easy right now and I’m not giving him the satisfaction of playing Daddy for me.
“Yeah,” I say quick and strong. “Yeah, it’s me. Grams is in the hospital. I think you better get here as soon as you can. The doctors keep telling me it’s bad.”
“What’s wrong? You’re not giving me any real information. What’s happened?” He sounds nervous. I’ve never heard him like this before. He’s the one that sounds like a kid, but in a way, he is the kid, because Grams is his mom.
“She’s got cancer. They say it’s probably malignant.” That word again. My pops doesn’t say anything for a minute until finally I hear him say, “Oh God,” just two words leaving his mouth like a last breath.
“Are you still in California?” I ask him. He doesn’t answer my question. Instead, he gathers himself together. He’s not going to be punked out by his punk kid. “I’ll be there tomorrow. Delia will bring me to the hospital.” Delia’s his girlfriend. “Which hospital is it?”
“The Baptist,” I say. He hangs up without even asking how I’m doing, but I don’t let it bother me. Much.
* * *
“Can I please speak with Amelia?” Her pops has answered the phone. I didn’t intend to call but I couldn’t get my mind off that girl and her limp and how she was able to make me feel better. In the middle of all of this shit, I keep remembering her fingers and how they felt in my hand. Her pops is going to be a prick though. “No you can’t,” he says. It’s a strange thing to say right off the bat. I mean, he doesn’t know me. I’ve never really been out with his daughter. He doesn’t really have a reason to dislike me yet. Although I could understand if in the future he decides I’m just a little, nowhere chuco. But now? That I don’t get. It takes me a second to come up with a response because he’s not saying anything and he’s not hanging up. He’s just waiting, listening, probably thrilled by my discomfort. Then I remember, the bastard used to be a fucking cop. Finally I say, “Is she there?”
“Yes,” he says, leaving it at that. Again, there’s silence, ex-cop silence. Heavy, almost menacing.
“Can I speak with her for just a second?”
“No, you can’t.” And then the bastard hangs up on me. Now I’m puzzled and pissed. I’m waiting around for my pops to come barging in to play Daddy dearest and now this other prick has just made me feel like a snot-nosed punk, a snaggle-toothed waste case. As I’m steaming about the balls on that guy, the phone rings. It’s Amelia and she’s crying. “That asshole,” she says. “Come get me, please. I’ll meet you around the corner.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I say, and as soon as I put the phone down, I’m out the door. I drive to her house. It’s a nice house in a “good” neighborhood. That means the guy keeps the yard looking neat and shit, and that it isn’t on the westside.
Amelia is waiting where she said she’d be. It’s dark and she comes bounding out of the shadow waving her arms so that I’ll see her. She doesn’t run too well and she’s out of breath having come only about thirty feet or so.
“I’m sorry about my stepdad,” she says a little breathless. “He’s an asshole.”
“I can relate.”
“How’s your grandmother?” she asks right away. “Is she okay?”
“Not really. I think she’s going to die.” It’s the first time I’ve admitted that out loud. I’ve been thinking that for the last two days, but I haven’t said it. Mostly because I’ve had no one to say it to.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“You got nothing to be sorry about,” I say. “You didn’t give her cancer.”
“Cancer?”
“Yeah, malignant.” She doesn’t say anything. She reaches for my hand instead. “You want to go to my house?” I ask her. “No one’s there.” I regret saying that as soon as I’ve said it because it sounds like I want to take advantage of Grams being in the hospital so as to fuck her. She doesn’t take it that way, though. “Sure,” she says instead. When we get there, I take her inside. She sits down in the living room and I get her something to drink. “All I have is orange juice,” I say. But she doesn’t mind.
I sit down across from her. She’s on the couch and I’m on Grams’s chair. The place is real quiet. I’m used to having the TV on for noise. I get up and turn on the big metal fan. It makes me feel like Grams is home. “Is that your grandmother?” Amelia asks. She’s pointing at a picture of Grams when she was young. It’s a big black-and-white portrait, her straight, then-black hair pulled back and tied loosely behind her head. “Yeah,” I say. “She got that done when she was just about nineteen. She was performing in a carpa in those days.”
“What’s that?”
“It was a kind of traveling circus for poor Mexicans. She used to do some sort of acrobatics. No shit.”
“Really. That sounds so different.”
“Well, she did other things, too. I mean, she worked as a cotton-picker, and ever since I’ve known her, she’s cleaned houses. She’s tough.”
“You love her a lot, don’t you?” She sounds very sad for me. For some reason, it both thrills me and bothers me.
“Let’s not even talk about it.”
“Okay.”
“Why does your dad hate me?”
“He’s my stepdad. He’s not my dad. He drinks.”
“Was he drunk when I called?”
“No. Not yet. On his way.”
“Is he a mean drunk?”
“He’s a mean everything.” She goes on to tell me how he’s always waking up her and her little brother at night when he comes in fucked up, screaming and cursing. She tells me that last week he pushed her little brother against the wall, screaming right in his face because he said the kid left his shoes in the living room. Motherfucker.
“Is your real pops around?” I ask. Somebody should look after her.
“He lives in Chicago,” she says. “I haven’t talked to him since I was in the third grade.” She’s saying all of this like it doesn’t really matter, like it doesn’t really affect her anymore. Like she’s gotten used to it.
“You want something to eat?” I say to change the subject. “I can make you something. A grilled cheese? If you’re really hungry, I can make you French onion soup. Ever eaten that before?” She shakes her head. “I learned how to make it in French class. I took French when I was a freshman. I flunked it. Didn’t learn a damned word except how to count to ten. But our teacher, Monsieur Borden, he was a nice guy and he tried to make the class interesting. It wasn’t his fault that I didn’t want to learn. But one of the things he did was have Culture Day. He’d bring in these terrible French movies. You ever watched a French movie?” Amelia shakes her head again. “Always, always, gotta be some kid discovering his penis for the first time in those flicks. Also, he’d give out recipes and everyone had to make something to bring to class and we’d eat all kinds of French things. He gave me the onion soup recipe. It’s really easy to make, but it’s good. Really good. You want me to make you some?”
She smiles at me. “Well, after a buildup like that, how can I refuse?”
“It’s good. Trust me.” We go into the kitchen and I open up a can of Campbell’s onion soup. While I’m heating it up, I tear some french bread into two bowls and then shred some mozzarella cheese on top. Lots of it. When the soup is steaming, I pour it on top of the bread. “Taste that and tell me if it isn’t good.”
She gives it a taste. “That’s good,” she says. She tries to mean it, but I can tell she doesn’t really like it all that much. She’s cool, though, and she eats the whole thing. The two of us sit there at Grams’s table and eat and talk. I feel almost happy for a while. I don’t make any moves at all. I don’t really feel like messing around anyway. It’s enough to just have her company.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“Sure.”
“What happened to your teeth? I mean, they don’t look bad. But it looks like whatever happened must’ve hurt. Did you get in an accident?” I don’t feel like going into my thuggish past.
“I told you I’m a vampire,” I say jokingly. “I can only come out at night. Remember? You’re my next victim.” She smiles. She seems to get a kick out of me. She reaches over and puts her hand on my head and strokes my hair really quick. “You couldn’t hurt anybody. You’re about the farthest thing from a vampire I can think of.” Ordinarily, I might get defensive about that kind of observation, but Amelia doesn’t make me feel like I gotta prove shit.
“You want to meet her?” I say all of the sudden.
“Your grandmother?”
“Yeah. I want you to meet her.” I do, too. It seems important. “I mean, I’d have to tell her about it first. She might not want to be seen in the hospital. My grams is proud. But if she wants to, do you?”
“Yes,” she says. “That’d be nice.” She reaches for my hand again. My fucking heart hurts when our hands touch. Crazy. But I don’t mind this pain. It feels good and it drives the other one, the one that burns my stomach and keeps me up at night, out of sight for a while. At least until I drop her off around the corner from her house and I have to drive home to the house that now seems a lot darker and lonelier.
* * *
My pops comes over without warning the next morning just before I head off for work. I hear him pull into the driveway. He’s got his girlfriend in the car waiting. “I went to see your grandmother last night. I’m just checking up on the house and how you’re doing.”
“I’m doing alright. How long are you going to stay?”
“I’m due back for some recording work next week, but I’m going to be gone as little as possible.” It strikes me that my pops is hurting, too. I don’t really want to admit it, but it’s true. I can hear it in his voice. “You going to go see her later?”
“Yeah,” I say. “As soon as I get out of work.”
“She’s not going to get well,” he says all of the sudden. “You know that?”
I don’t say anything.
“Robert?” he says like it’s a question. “Do you know that?”
“Yeah,” I say finally. I say it sharplike, as in, I don’t want to talk about it with you, get it?
“She’s going to come home. She wants to be here, not in a hospital. Are you going to be able to handle that?” Him asking me that question. “I can handle it,” I say. “When?”
“Soon. Probably tomorrow or the day after.”
“How long?”
“Not too long.” He’s about to cry and I’m embarrassed because I’ve never seen this from my pops before. He’s always been so cool, so self-contained and smooth in front of me. The original nothing-gets-me-flustered-Mexican-macho man. But the words sink in. Not too long. And then there’s that awful word again, malignant. It describes everything about this fucked-up universe. It’s the perfect, most awful fucking word.
“I gotta go to work,” I say.
“Well, I’ll see you tonight at the hospital.” I leave my pops in the house and head for my car. I don’t bother to wave at his girlfriend, who’s busy giving me a scowl because I hung up on her ass the last time I called looking for him. That almost cheers me up.
* * *
Nacho’s waiting around for me when I get home from work. “Hey, man,” he says. “When did you get back from Califas?”
I’ve been avoiding him for some reason. No, I know the reason. Nacho connects me back to Sunnydale and school, and also to the drugs and fighting, and I’ve been trying to be good, or at least better. But is anyone even watching? I guess I’ve decided that there isn’t.
To tell the truth, I’m happy to see him. “Yeah, man. Got back a few weeks ago. When’d you get that bike?” He’s on an old Nighthawk motorcycle. It’s a little beat up, but it still looks sharp.
“Got it a couple of months ago. Had to do something with my money. Wanna ride?” he asks me. “Don’t worry, man, no one’s gonna think you’re gay.” He has a sly look on his face, which I take to be a dare. He only has one helmet and he puts that on himself. “I gotta wear it so I can see. I don’t want bugs getting in my eyes,” he says explaining. I sit behind him, and not wanting to look too much like a punk, I hold on to the little chrome rail designed to keep the rider’s ass from sliding off the seat. He guns the motorcycle onto the street, deafening sound falling around me, vibrations running up my spine. The motorcycle doesn’t have a muffler and it sounds like all hell crashing down. At first I think he’s trying to show off, speeding around the neighborhood, taking hairpin turns, popping the gears to make the bike jerk. It’s enough to make me start breathing all deep and everything. But then he turns his head a little and yells, “I’m gonna take you on this back road so we can open her up a little.”
“I don’t have a lot of time,” I yell back, “I gotta go to the hospital,” but I give up because either he can’t hear me or he’s pretending he can’t hear me. Either way, I’m going on this trip with him. We ride out to this jerkwater road, half unpaved and bumpy, and then he opens the throttle. The bike keeps picking up speed and getting louder and louder until all I’m conscious of is the vibration and the deafening sound. The bastard has picked up so much speed that my eyelids are turning inside out. My chest feels like it’s collapsing with a paralyzing fear that I’m gonna end up with a split head and an ass full of asphalt. Although I can’t read the speedometer, he must be cranking at over one hundred miles an hour on this roadkill-littered back road. I got a mouthful of grit, I can’t focus my eyes, and all I can think is that if this fucker hits one bump or crevice, it’s all over. Every bit of it. The thing is that this fear, this adrenaline-pumping craze, makes me realize that I do not want to die. All of my sorrow and self-pity can’t hold a candle to the power of my survival instinct. I don’t want to go. Not fucking ever.
My legs are shaking when I get off the motorcycle. Nacho gives me an “everything’s cool” look and shuts the thing down. “That thing moves, huh?” he says, barely containing his pride in scaring the dogshit out of me. “Yeah,” I say. “It moves.”
“Where’s your grams? You got time to smoke one?” He’s pulling out all the stops, God bless him.
“She’s in the hospital,” I tell him.
“Serious?”
“Yeah. Malignant.”
“Fuck that shit, man. That sucks. Are you alright?”
“Yeah. I gotta go see her.”
“Maybe you should smoke one then. If I had to deal with that, I’d be high all the time.”
“You are high all the time.”
“Yeah, but I’d be high all the time.” The thing is that I’ve got my own weed. And I have been wanting to smoke it to distract me, but I’ve been thinking that I gotta stay straight. Take it straight, without any painkillers. Fuck my stomach, my grams is dying—that sort of thing. I’ve even felt guilty about Amelia because in a way, she lessens the pain, even for a while. Maybe if God’s watching, if I can show that I’m willing to take my punishment straight, no excuses, no asking for mercy, then He won’t take my punishment out on Grams. I tell Nacho this.
“Man, Robert. You’re crazy. God ain’t killing your grandmother. Cancer is.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a big difference. One way, it’s God, the other way, it’s just dumb, blind chance. The second way, you got nothing to do with it. Smoking a j ain’t going to mean shit either way.”
“Well, I’d almost rather it be God that’s killing her. That way maybe He’ll change His mind.”
“God doesn’t change His mind.”
“How do you know that?
“Man, didn’t they teach you anything up there at Sunnydale? If I’ve learned anything from Sister Mac, it’s that. Anyway, God’s just another word for ‘chance’ as far as I’m concerned. You better face that one.”
He makes sense and we sit on the back porch and smoke one. There’s always a moment, maybe the best moment when you smoke marijuana, that you first notice you’re high. You’re passing the joint, chitchatting, when whooosh, you feel the top of your head lift clear off and whoever you’re smoking with suddenly seems to be chattering in another language. You have to re-orient your senses just to start listening again. It’s the most pleasant feeling, like everything around you that just a second ago seemed normal, so normal that you’ve stopped noticing it, now seems different, foreign, worthy of new contemplation. That’s when strange ideas begin to float through your mind and things, everyday normal things, take on a new significance. They seem to contain a hidden, secret meaning within them. Not just the meaning that people assign to them, but meaning that can’t really be spoken. But you try anyway, and that’s why stoners always sound so banal and stupid to people who aren’t high.
“You know what I’ve started to do every morning?” I say. Nacho doesn’t say anything. He’s lost.
“Nacho,” I say louder.
“Huh?” Nacho says.
“What I’m doing every morning?”
“What?” He’s confused. He doesn’t want to listen to my idea right now. He’s got his own.
“Do you know what I do every morning now?”
“No, what?” He’s back on the porch.
“I make my bed.”
“Why?”
“It’s the only thing I can do lately that makes me feel like I got something under control.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. I get up and stare at the bed, all unmade, the sheets all crumpled, always, always at least one of the pillows thrown on the floor. I get this urge to make it all right. It makes me feel good to smooth out the sheets, spread out the comforter, make it even on each side. Then I plump up the pillows. I give them a little smack on their pillow-asses just to let ’em know it’s all good.”
“Gives you a sense of order.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s it. Order.”
“Gives you a sense of accomplishment.”
“Yeah. No matter what else happens to me during the day, I can remember that at least I made my bed. It’s waiting for me nice and neat.”
“You’re wrecked, man. You sound like one of those goddamn housewives, the ones that are all neurotic about stains and shit,” he says. He thinks it’s funny. I guess it is. “You need to smoke some more of this shit and stop thinking about everything so much.”
* * *
“Your grandmother is sick,” my pops says to me. “She’s coming home, but she’s not going to be the same. She’s going to need your help.”
“Where are you going to be?”
“I’m going to be around, but not always. I have to be back and forth between California. Your grandmother’s cousin, Tonia, is coming to stay with her from Fredricksberg. You be a help to her.” He’s saying it serious. If it weren’t so pathetic, it’d be funny. Him telling me to be a help? He doesn’t have the first idea about help. He doesn’t have the first idea about what Grams needs and he doesn’t have the first idea about who I am. I hope he does go back to California and the sooner the fucking better. About the only thing he’s good at is helping chicks in and out of the sack, and helping my moms go off the deep end. Fuck’im. I don’t need anyone to tell me to help my grams.
She comes home that afternoon. She’s been gone more than a week. She seems smaller in that house, like the hospital swallowed a big part of her. They didn’t just take out a part of her liver, they took out her strength. Pops and me put Grams on a wheelchair and we roll her inside to her bedroom. It’s tough moving her to the bed because she’s got no power and she feels delicate, like any sharp or unexpected movement will break her. “You be careful there, boy,” she says, but I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or Pops. “You trying to kill me before the cancer?” She’s repelando. A kind of funny complaining that old Mexican women do. It can get on your nerves, but to hear Grams doing it now, with all this, it makes me feel good, like even though she’s dying, she’s still Grams. I want her to be Grams until the end.
I saw a cousin die when I was a little kid. At the end, she wasn’t herself anymore. She seemed more like a rag doll that people were using to mourn around. She just lay there and moaned and looked scared or confused, until finally she didn’t do anything but become this thing that tubes ran in and out of. It was horrible.
That night, I hear Tonia whispering and Grams moaning quietly and then her breathing heavily. I get up so drowsy I bump into the fucking doorsill of my bedroom. “Can I help?” I ask, standing at the entrance. “Your grandma, she can’t get up,” Tonia says. She’s practically an old woman herself, but she’s nice. She hardly talks at all. My grams is next to the bed. She’s slipped off and she can’t raise herself up. Her white cotton nightdress is pale in the dark and rumpled around her legs. I don’t turn on the light because I don’t want her to be embarrassed. I have to go very slow because she’s so fragile and everywhere I try to get a hold of her makes her cry. It takes more than an hour, the minutes dragging slowly, the moonlight making everything glow so that it almost seems like a bad dream. One of those where you’re trying to do something, like run or lift an object, but your muscles won’t work right so that any action seems hopeless and it frustrates you all the more. The whole time I’m trying to get her back on the bed, the horrible idea that I won’t be able to keeps running through my head. I’ve never imagined that my grams would be this helpless. I guess she never imagined it either.
The next morning, I get up to take a shower. Just before I walk into the bathroom, I pass by Grams’s door. Looking in her room, I can see her sitting down on her wooden rocker that I moved in there. Her long silver hair is hanging below her shoulders, not in its usual bun. I didn’t know her hair was so long. “Robert,” she calls to me. “Thank you.” She says it quietly, not really like her at all. She is losing at something she never expected to lose at. “I don’t mean to be so much trouble.”
“You’re no trouble,” I say.
“I’m just trouble now. Look at my hair. I can’t even comb it anymore.” She starts to cry in front of me for the first time ever.
“You’re no trouble,” I keep on repeating because I don’t know what else to say. Then, “I’m glad you’re here.” I walk in and put my arm around her. I hug her to comfort her. I want to be a comfort to her. As I sit there holding her frailty, I want to try to reach her strength because I know it’s in there, that strength I’ve always depended on. But I’ve got to be strong now. Because I must be the comfort.
Comfort/Malignant. Those words clash. And for a split second, it makes sense to me. I gotta choose, everybody’s got to choose what force they’re going to give in to. What they themselves are going to be. It’s an honest-to-God revelation.
Grams is a woman, and I’ve never seen her that way. She’s a woman who still cares about her hair and who feels herself edging toward death. Facing it. Actually facing death. I feel her fear and her despair, and though I can’t do anything about it, I sit there holding her, somehow trying to let her know that I’ll be there as she has to do this awful, goddamned thing. When I come home from work that night, Grams is already asleep. Tonia is sitting talking with another relative, a cousin I hardly ever see. She looks at me and says, “Your grandmother kept telling everyone who came to see her today that you told her how she was no trouble and how much you wanted her here. You made her very happy.”
* * *
The next morning, Saturday, I ask Grams if she’d like to meet Amelia. She says it’s okay. I have to pick up Amelia at the mall because her miserable stepdad won’t let her come over here. Grams is feeling really bad, so the visit is short. Amelia brings her some flowers, just a few pink carnations. Grams likes them and she tells her to be careful about me. “You have to watch him.” But then she looks at me and says, “No, he’s a good boy. A good boy.” Amelia leaves. Her friend comes to pick her up. Grams wants to talk to me. “You like her a lot?”
I say, “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“If you really like her, you be good to her, hear? I know a good spirit when I see one. She’s got that walk. I know what that walk means. She’s suffered. Hay suffrido mucho esa muchacha. Don’t you add to it.” I nod and neither of us says anything for a while. “Take one of these oranges,” Grams says pointing to a basket of fruit my great-uncle dropped off for her. I take one and start to peel it. I peel oranges really well. One long strip, all the way around. I pride myself on it. Grams watches me. “Give me a piece.” I hold it out for her and she takes it, her hands shaky. “I’m going be gone soon,” she says. “You know that?” I put the orange down. “You know that, Robert?” She wants me to answer. I’m hoping I can keep her from giving me her deathbed speech through a combination of ignoring the question and feeding her more orange slices. I’m not ready for it.
“Answer me, Robert. You know that?” I nod my head.
“You’ve had a hard life,” she says. “Too hard. You young in years, old in pain. That’s why I love you the more. You know pain. We’ve both of us known lots of pain. You don’t like pain?” It’s a strange question, but I can tell she wants me to answer it.
“No,” I say. “I’m sick of it.”
She looks at me long and hard. “You better not get sick of it. It’s going to be around you all your life. You better learn to appreciate the pain more than the joy. We’re all born to pain. There ain’t no way to ’scape it. Only way to ’scape it is to die. Nobody wants to die. I ain’t never met anybody worth a damn that didn’t suffer lots of pain in their lives. You know that?”
I don’t say anything.
“My momma, she died when I was eight years old. I watch her die from pneumonia. I remember her telling me something, though; she say, ‘Rosita, nunca déjate de las cosas duras. Es la noche mas oscura que nos dice las cosas mas importantes.’ You know what that means?” My Spanish isn’t that great and I shake my head. “It means ‘Never keep yourself from those things that appear hard. It’s the darkest night that shows us the most important things.’ Las cosas profunda. What’s that mean? I don’t know the English for that.”
“The most profound things,” I say.
“Sí. You know what I knew when you was born?” I shake my head. “You was chosen. Chosen. Like King David.” She’s looking me straight in the eye, my grams, my old grams who never blinks when something’s got to be said. I see her there, all there, for this minute. She is using all her strength to tell me something important. I understand the importance of it, for once, the importance of a moment that is happening now. I listen. “You ain’t suffered all this misery, all this pain, for nothing. You going to use it, boy. You going to use it. You gotta make sure you use it for good, somewhere for someone. That cancer that’s in my bones, in my organs, that ain’t nothing compared to pain kept inside your heart. Ain’t nobody can keep that kind of pain without it coming out. You either going to use it to kill yourself slow, and to give it to others that come after you, or you going to use it to understand other people’s pain. Lágrimas. That makes you human. That makes you part of God. That’s the spirit I’m talking about. El espíritu santo. You know what that is? The Great Comforter. Don’t you wait for no sign from God, boy. Don’t you wait for Him to come down and cure you or me or your neighbor. We here to do God’s work. You know how?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Your dark night, your pain, is everyone’s dark night, everyone’s pain. You make it less. That’s what you do. If you do that, you make something new. You make love. You’ll be wiser than Solomon if you know that, stronger than David, closer to God than you ever imagined. Don’t you doubt God. Don’t spend your life blaming Him, or worrying yourself that He hasn’t done anything. You do it, and you’ll be answering that call like King David did. You hear?” She wants an answer, requires one, now.
“I will.” I don’t know what else to say.
* * *
Grams stays at the house for only about two more weeks. She gets worse and worse till the visiting nurse tells me and my pops that she’s got to go back to the hospital. Grams can hardly talk now because they’re giving her so many painkillers. But I know that she doesn’t want to go back there. It’s not that I can see the fear in her eyes, or some bullshit like that. I just know she wouldn’t want to be there. But there’s nothing I can do. My pops and the doctor decide to check her in again.
I go to see her as often as I can, but not enough really. Every time I go, she seems to be worse than the last time. After a couple of weeks and another unsuccessful operation, they put her on a morphine drip so that all she does is mumble or talk about things that don’t seem to make any sense. She does a lot of apologizing, saying she’s sorry about this or that, things that she’s got no reason to regret, but that with the drugs and the pain seem somehow regrettable.
One day, I go in to see her. I’ve been working and the fiberglass is irritating me, and I stink. I don’t have much time because I’m on lunch, but I want to check in on her. No one is with her. She’s alone. I know that she hates that the most. The idea of dying alone. But that’s what she’s doing. I guess that’s what everyone does. But that doesn’t change anything. That’s probably why she planned her own funeral, so that no one would have any excuse not to come. She wants to be seen off, and on this beautiful Saturday afternoon, everyone is outside enjoying the day, or trying to make the best of the weekend. I stand next to her bed and say hello. For a minute I don’t think she recognizes me.
“I’m sorry I haven’t given you your dollar,” she says clearly. My allowance again. She used to give it to me on Saturdays, and today’s Saturday. She knows intuitively that it’s allowance day. “I don’t want a dollar,” I say to her. “I just came to see you, Grams.” I should tell her that she can give it to me when she gets out or something like that. Make her feel needed. But instead I keep on telling her that it’s alright, that I don’t need it. “I’m sorry,” she keeps repeating.
I try to reassure her, but it does no good. After about an hour or so, I have to leave. The fucking dirty insulation is waiting for me. I give her a kiss and stroke her now-white hair for a second and then I leave. She’s fallen asleep by that time. She dies before I get a chance to see her again, just a couple of days later. Nobody’s there when it happens, although my pops gets to the hospital only minutes after.
* * *
It’s late, past one in the morning. I got out of work earlier, went home, took a shower, and then went to meet Amelia at the public library, where she’d told her old man she was going to study. Then I’d been sitting here drinking a Dr Pepper, not thinking about Grams or anything else really. Instead, I’d been almost enjoying the feeling of being really, physically tired. When the phone rang, I smiled thinking it was Amelia, but instead it was my pops. He didn’t hem and haw. He gave it to me straight, no emotion, no nothing. “Your grandmother died tonight,” he said. Just like that. He said it just like that, and just like that my grams was dead. “She’s in heaven now, with your grandfather.”
“Okay.” That’s the only thing I could say, and he said something about coming around tomorrow.
That was an hour ago. Now I’m slumped against the door in the front room, covering my head with my hands. I’m not really crying. Not yet. Instead, I just keep sitting there, not really knowing what to do. On the door, I watch my silhouette, dark, vaguely familiar, more real than the moment itself. It makes sense. A visual sense of all that I fear and feel. Just a big black shape, the me that’s even more alone than a few minutes before, and the me that I’m stuck with. It’s this image of death, that still, black shadow. And all I can seem to do is sit here and stare at it, my mourning staring back at me. It’s myself looking back at me, knowing that this sadness will always be right there, just behind, sneaking up when it’s darkest.
It’s then that I look at Grams’s little metal box where she keeps coupons. I think about how she’s never going to use them and how sad it is that she had to clip them and that she took time to do that so that she could save a few cents, and that’s when it really fucking hits me that she’s gone. No, no. That’s not it at all. She’s not gone. She’s dead. That’s when I lose it. I get scared. More scared than I’ve ever been, so scared I can’t even walk to my room to get some clothes. I just grab my keys, get in the car, and drive.
I think about going to Enrique’s or Juan’s, but I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to get Amelia in trouble. So I just drive till about three in the morning. Finally, I stop at a Denny’s, but I can’t go in. It reminds me too much of Grams. She didn’t even like it that much, but remembering that she didn’t like it that much, and remembering how she used to tell me that she made better pancakes than they did, makes me too fucking sad. So I keep driving till I can’t keep my eyes open. Instead, I turn back and drive home, but I don’t go in. I don’t even put the car in the driveway. Instead, I park it on the street, so that it’s next to but on the outside of Grams’s fence. The house is dark and it already looks haunted. I lock the doors, not because I’m worried about ghosts, but because in this neighborhood there’s a good chance some asshole junkie might try and smash the window and my head for seven dollars’ worth of change. I lean back in the seat and recline. The next thing I know, my pops is knocking on the car window and it’s morning. I wake up and the first thing that I remember is that Grams is dead.