“Thirty stitches,” he was saying. “In her arm. Apparently, they have to hold patients in the psychiatric unit for at least seventy-two hours if they, um—” Here, Santiago could hear Frank struggling to find the right words. “Do what she did,” he settled on.
“Ay, dios mío.” Santiago shook his head softly. “I’m so sorry, man.”
“But the paperwork took forever.” Frank’s voice hardened. “So they left her on a gurney in the emergency room hallway all night. The fucking hallway! She was pretty out of it on pain meds, but it was … Well, you can imagine the shit that goes down in an emergency room at night. It was rough, man. They finally transferred her up to psych yesterday.”
“Is she okay there?”
“I just left,” Frank continued. “And visiting hours don’t open again until 2 p.m. But I have to go back to work. We have this huge client meeting I just can’t miss. Basically, I was wondering if you could go sit with her at two? I’d ask one of her friends, but they’re so—”
“Of course, brother,” said Santiago. “I’ll be there. Can I bring anything?”
“No, no. I dropped off her clothes this morning. Just bring yourself.”
“And how are you doing with all this? Are you okay?”
Frank gave a dry, scraped laugh down the phone.
“To be honest, I could use a drink. But I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s Cleo I’m worried about.”
“Remember to take care of yourself too,” said Santiago, repeating something Dominique had told him. “You owe yourself the same care you give to others.”
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” said Frank suddenly. “About Cleo? It was a mistake, and I don’t want anyone thinking … the wrong thing about her.”
“I would never say anything that hurt you or Cleo.”
“I know, man. Thank you. You’re a good friend.”
Santiago had unwittingly stopped walking; as he hung up, he suddenly became aware of the people streaming around him, nudging his girth with their elbows and bags. He was sick of taking up so much space. He stepped into the bike lane to avoid them and checked his phone again. It was midday, a couple of hours before visiting hours started. The thought of going to the restaurant to talk about barstool designs and table arrangements was incomprehensible. He would have liked to eat something, but he had already had his muesli breakfast and allotted morning snack that day, a single apple with a tablespoon of almond butter. Just across the street was the tantalizing orange and pink of a Dunkin’ Donuts. He imagined biting into soft, warm dough, the powdered sugar coating his mouth, quieting his mind. He looked down at his yellow tote bag. He couldn’t throw this week’s progress away, not when Dominique had said she was proud of him.
If he couldn’t eat, he could at least cook. He went home to make something for Cleo. He decided to prepare his favorite comfort food, arroz con leche, or Spanish rice pudding. It was what his grandmother made for him back in Lima when he’d had a hard day at school, “to sweeten your grief,” she would say. He boiled the rice in milk and added a cinnamon stick, watching the thick, creamy mixture swirl against the wooden spoon. His grandmother told him that his ancestors in Babylon had made this same dish thousands of years ago, sweetening the mixture with honey and dates. Today, he would make it the way she had taught him, with vanilla and orange peel. He added the condensed milk and inhaled the cloud of sweet steam that enveloped him.
And there, in that fragrant fog, he thought of Lila, the woman who had once been his wife. Lila was from Bogotá, five feet to his six and a half. Lila spoke Spanish like she was cutting tall grass with her tongue. She could walk on her hands and cook a perfect chicken. She was always cold and never wrong. Lila won first runner-up in her local beauty pageant but had the most prized possession of all, an American passport, endowed by her half-American father. At fifteen, she was sent to high school in New York to learn to speak English like a white American and, upon graduating, dismayed her family by enrolling at Alvin Ailey to learn to dance like a Black American.
Santiago met Lila when he was still in culinary school, clearing tables at the diner on Fifty-Sixth Street. She would come in after class with the other dance students, all lithe as panthers in black leotards and sweats, all smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee and talking reverently about people he’d never heard of. He’d catch the names as he cleared away plates of smeared ketchup and discarded burger buns, try to memorize them so he could look them up later. Martha Graham. Merce Cunningham.