ANDREA’S ENTRANCE INTO ADOLESCENCE was sudden and dramatic. One night in November she came into the kitchen, where the family was gathered, wearing contact lenses, lipstick, a long white dress, silver sandals, and drop earrings made by Tabra; she had been chosen to sing in the chorus at the school Christmas festivities. We didn’t recognize that sensual, golden beauty from Ipanema with her distant, mysterious air. We were used to seeing her in scroungy blue jeans and clumsy outback boots, with a book in her hand. We’d never seen that girl who was shyly smiling at us from the doorway. When Nico, whose Zen serenity we had so often laughed at, realized who it was, he was thunderstruck. Instead of celebrating the young woman who’d just made an appearance, we had to console her father over the loss of his awkward little girl. Lori, who had taken Andrea to buy the dress and the makeup, was the only one in on the secret of the transformation. While the rest of us were recovering from our stupefaction, she took a series of photographs, some with Andrea’s thick dark honey-colored hair loose on her shoulders, some with it piled on her head, in a model’s poses that were all affectation and spoof.
Andrea’s eyes were shining, and she was flushed, as if she’d been in the sun, though the rest of us were wearing our November pallor. She’d had a bad cough for several days. Nico wanted to have a picture with her sitting on his knees, the same pose as one when she was five and she was a plucked duck wearing an alchemist’s thick eyeglasses and the pink nightgown she wore over her normal clothes. When he touched her, she was burning hot. Lori took her temperature and the small family party turned dark, because Andrea was aflame with fever. Within a few hours she was delirious. They tried to bring down her fever with cold baths, but finally they rushed her to the emergency room, where they learned she had pneumonia. Who knows how many days she had been incubating it and hadn’t said a word, faithful to her stoic, introverted nature. “My chest hurts, but I thought it was because I’m developing,” was her explanation.
Celia and Sally came immediately, then the others. Andrea was in the local hospital surrounded by family, all of us watching like hawks to be sure that she wasn’t given anything on the porphyria blacklist. Seeing her in that iron bed, her eyes closed, her eyelids transparent, growing paler every moment, breathing with difficulty, and connected to tubes and wires, brought back my worst memories of your illness in Madrid. Like Andrea, you checked into the hospital with a bad cold, and when you left six months later, you were no longer yourself but a lifeless doll whose only hope was for a gentle death. Nico calmly reasoned with me: this wasn’t the same. You had terrible stomach pains for several days, and couldn’t eat without vomiting, porphyria crisis symptoms that Andrea did not have. We decided that to avoid any possible oversight or medical error, Andrea would never be alone. We hadn’t been able to do that in Madrid, where the hospital bureaucracy had taken you over with no explanation. Your husband and I stood guard for months in a corridor, never knowing what was happening on the other side of the heavy doors of the ICU.
Andrea’s room in the hospital was filled. Nico and Lori, Celia and Sally, and I installed ourselves at her side. Then Juliette came, Sabrina’s mothers, the other relatives, and a few friends. Fifteen cell phones kept us connected, and every day I called my parents and Pía in Chile so they would be with us, though far away. Nico handed out the list of forbidden medications and instructions for each eventuality. Your gift, Paula, was that now we were prepared; we wouldn’t let anything take us by surprise. Our doctor, Cheri Forrester, asked the personnel on the floor to be forbearing because this patient came with a tribe. While the nurse was pricking Andrea, looking for a vein to place an IV, eleven people around the bed were watching. “Please, just don’t chant,” said the nurse. We all laughed. “You look like the kind of people capable of chanting,” she added, preoccupied.
The day-and-night vigil began, never fewer than two or three of us in the room. Very few went to work; those who weren’t taking a turn at the hospital were looking after the other children and the dogs—Poncho, Mack, and especially Olivia, who was a nervous wreck from finding herself shunted aside—keeping the houses running, and bringing food to the hospital to feed our army. For two weeks, Lori assumed the role of captain, which no one tried to usurp because she actually is the manager of this family and I don’t know what we would do without her. No one has more influence or more dedication than Lori. Raised in New York, she is the only one with the intrepid character that will not be intimidated by physicians and nurses, that can fill out ten-page forms and demand explanations. In the last few years, we have moved past the obstacles of the first years; Lori is my true daughter, my confidante, my right arm in the Foundation, and I have watched how little by little she is being converted into the matriarch. Soon it will be her turn to take her place at the head of the table as the mistress of the castle.
Andrea at first grew weaker because they couldn’t administer several of the antibiotics ordinarily used in such cases, and that prolonged the pneumonia longer than normal, but Dr. Forrester, ever vigilant, assured us there was no indication of porphyria in the blood and urine tests. Andrea would perk up for brief periods, when her brother and sister, the Greek boys, or some classmate visited, but the rest of the time she slept and coughed, holding the hand of one of her parents or her grandmother. Finally, the second Friday of her stay, her temperature was normal and she woke up with clear eyes and an appetite. We could draw a breath of relief.
For more than ten years the family had been dancing its way through the skirmishes that tend to follow divorces, a tug-of-war that leaves everyone exhausted. The relationship between the two sets of parents had its ups and downs; it was not easy to come to agreements on details of raising the children they were sharing, but as they were moving out into the world to make their own lives, there are fewer reasons for confrontation, and the day will come when there is no further need to see each other. That day is fairly close. Despite the difficulties they’ve had, they can congratulate one other because they have three happy and likable children who get good grades and are well behaved, and who up to this moment have not presented a single serious problem. During the two weeks of Andrea’s pneumonia, I lived the dream of a united family; it seemed to me that all the tensions had disappeared beside our little girl’s bed. But in real-life stories there are no perfect endings. Each person just has to do the best he or she can, that’s all.
Andrea left the hospital weighing ten pounds less, listless and the color of a cucumber, but more or less recovered. She spent another two weeks convalescing at home, and got well in time to sing in the chorus. From the audience we watched her come in singing like an angel in the long row of girls who occupied the stage. The white dress hung on her like a rag and her sandals fell off her feet, but we were all in agreement that she had never been prettier. The entire tribe was there to celebrate her, and once more I found that in an emergency you toss overboard the things that are not essential, that is, nearly everything. In the end, after a thorough lightening of loads and taking account, it turns out that the one thing that’s left is love.