“Are you crying, Gramma?” Angel asked.
“No.” Yolanda laughed through her tears. Who was she identifying with, anyway: the girl? The father? The dying dog?
“You’re crying over an insurance commercial?” Angel jostled her with her elbow.
“Get a grip, Mom,” Amadeo said affectionately. “Geez, what a softy.”
All at once Yolanda remembered: “Your dad wanted to get you a dog, Dodo. You loved your stuffed dog, and he wanted you to have a real one.” Anthony had harped on it for weeks during a manic phase in that last year of their marriage, and Yolanda had argued against it, because the care and feeding would fall to her. Amadeo hadn’t even, in the beginning, wanted a real dog, not until Anthony gave him the hard sell, and she’d resented Anthony for putting her in the role of the starchy, mean mother. “Do you remember?”
Amadeo appeared not to have heard her, and even this struck her as funny. The hilarity swept her up and up. She glimpsed herself in the mirrored back of the doll cabinet and was startled by her stretched lips, her face glistening grotesquely in the lamplight. Fear stuttered across Angel’s smile, so Yolanda gasped, dragged a sob back into herself.
“Whoa boy.” She wiped her eyes. “Don’t know what’s got into me.”
They swiveled their heads back to the television, chuckling. The whole episode ended before the commercial break.
“Mom,” Amadeo said, “we need more cheese. Get the sharp cheddar. That Mexican blend don’t taste like nothing.”
Yolanda wants to prepare her children for her absence, but she can’t bear the thought of them imagining the world without her, as if by imagining it, they will push her one step closer to total erasure. Still, she longs to unburden herself. At the supermarket, a girl with bleached hair barely glances at Yolanda as she scans her groceries. I’m dying! Yolanda imagines telling her. I’m dying, she imagines telling Monica Gutierrez-Larsen or Sylvie Archuleta or Bunny Flores. She pictures the compassion that would roll out and surround her like fog. She would fall backward, let her bones and aching head sink into that compassion.
She thinks of this bedroom enduring without her. All her belongings, so carefully chosen, so carefully tended. Who will appreciate her dressing table, her satin lampshade, the lace curtains she hand-washes each year? Valerie, Yolanda knows, thinks it’s all tacky. If it’s up to her, Valerie will deposit it in the Goodwill parking lot after hours. Maybe, Yolanda thinks hopefully, one of the girls will want her bed.
Why does she spend so much time thinking about sadness? She doesn’t have to, she realizes. She doesn’t have to grieve what she will never see: Lily in college, maybe with contacts and some cute clothes; Sarah—what?—playing professional soccer?; Angel as an adult, married, perhaps, to a man who will give her the stability she needs to catch up on everything she’s missing out on. Connor walking and talking and starting school, becoming a full person. These futures aren’t hers anyway, were never promised to her, were never promised to any of them. Yolanda doesn’t have to keep banging her head against that terrible, immutable fact. She doesn’t even have to see the fact as particularly terrible.
Instead she can enjoy the time she has left. She can gaze up into the pink of her canopy bed. Allow the body to be a colander, recommends the Mindfulness for Pain CD they gave her. She just has to let the pain pass through her on its way to somewhere else.
Yolanda is aware that this clarity will dart out of sight any moment, that she will, more than likely, wake up tomorrow to a brain cluttered with all the usual preoccupations. But this glimmer, regardless of how brief it may be, surely counts for something. Even when it is lost to her, this glimmer will be like a window open in a distant room of a rambling, stuffy house, stirring the air. She can see the dust motes swirling, golden and mesmerizing.
On Monday, Angel and Lizette meet after school to work on their project.
Lizette’s house, where she lives with her older brother and his girlfriend, is on a dead-end in a run-down development. The homes are identical: brown stucco with six ornamental vigas poking out just below the roofline, a small weed yard. At the end of the street, where the asphalt meets a low cinderblock wall, the desert stretches.