He’s about to defend himself, to tell her that her piece-of-shit car was too far gone for him to work with, or, maybe, maybe, to beg forgiveness. His head is fuzzy, the thoughts coming slow and thick.
“You need to pay for this, hijito.” In this light, his mother looks unlike herself: the bones of her face protrude, casting deep shadows around her eyes and in the hollows of her cheeks. She is leaning against the hood, fingers splayed, arms tense. She lists to the side and her eyes flutter open and shut.
“We can work something out,” Monica says crisply. “A payment plan. It would be best, I think, if we manage this between ourselves, and keep your mother out of it.”
“Something’s happening,” his mother says.
“Everyone makes mistakes, of course. But mistakes have consequences.”
Amadeo’s entire face is hot with the shame of being reprimanded by this tiny woman his own age. He raises entreating hands to his mother. “Why aren’t you helping me?”
“How can I help you?” Her voice is low and oddly staccato, her eyes flicking rapidly. She cuts off. Her lips are pale.
“Yolanda?” Monica Gutierrez-Larsen steps toward his mother but doesn’t touch her, and then Yolanda slides to the concrete.
His mother is making a joke, though she does not make jokes, not like this. By the time he circles the car, Monica Gutierrez-Larsen is squatting beside her, and his mother’s arms and legs are jerking.
YOLANDA IS IN emergency surgery at St. Vincent’s. Amadeo walks tight, anxious circles around the waiting area. He’s completely sober: his vision clear and dry under the vivid lights, his mouth parched. The set expressions on the faces of the doctors do not inspire confidence, and neither does anything they say, which isn’t much, only that Yolanda is undergoing brain surgery and they will update Amadeo as soon as they have news.
Amadeo extends his pacing to the wide halls and calls Valerie, who drives up immediately from Albuquerque with the girls. As she drives, she keeps him on speaker, assailing him with questions he doesn’t know the answers to.
“All I know is they’re operating on her.”
“I can’t hear you!” she says. “Hold the phone higher, Lily!”
“Is Lily in the front seat? Is she big enough for that?”
“Not technically,” Lily says, her calm voice loud in the speaker. “But she needs me to navigate her.”
“Oh, shut up,” his sister snaps.
“Hey!” protests Lily. “That’s child abuse! Verbal-style!” Farther in the background Sarah chimes in, fragments of chirping static.
“I’m not talking to you,” Valerie says, her voice muddled and desperate.
“Is Gramma going to die?” Lily asks, and Amadeo halts his pacing, his breath still in his chest, waiting for his sister’s response. But there’s only the distant whir of the car engine. Then he realizes that Lily is asking him, waiting for his answer, and that not just Lily is waiting.
“I don’t know.” He clears his throat. “You shouldn’t be on the phone,” he tells his sister with effort. “It’s not safe. Call when you get here.”
Amadeo tries to sit in the waiting room with its calming desert colors, but he keeps springing up. You don’t know anything, he reminds himself. She might be fine.
Tears rush his eyes. He looks around the corridor to see who might be noticing. Part of him hopes someone does notice, that someone will unravel this nightmare. He imagines something out of an old folktale: a saint or a bruja in the guise of a hunched woman, resting a hand on his shoulder, holding Amadeo steady with a clear gray-brown gaze, rearranging fate and circumstance with a quiet, cryptic utterance. Amadeo would blink and she would be gone, and his mother would be walking toward him down the hall, her step firm as she returns to him, a little smile at the corners of her mouth.