He drops the bag with a clatter and lurches down the hall, pushing doors, flicking on lights. Angel’s room, his own, the bathroom, and—terrible, terrible—his mother’s room, the mattress bare on her canopy bed, still pushed against the wall, the blank space where the hospital bed was.
The smell of her sickness is gone; her old smell remains, the mild scent of perfume caught in a scarf, as if the room she inhabited for nearly forty years is not yet ready to give her up.
Amadeo spent so little time in here when his mother was alive. He always felt uneasy in her bedroom: the close, feminine intimacy of this space where his mother dressed and undressed, where, sleeping, she breathed undefended into the dark. Yet he was here, beside her, when her soul unmoored itself from her body. He held her bony hand as she breathed those last breaths: each slow and gasping, with that long suspended pause in between, until finally all that was left was pause.
The room is stark under the bulb. He pulls the door shut behind him.
He returns to the doorway of Angel’s room, steps inside. With the crib and changing table, it’s crowded, but Angel has made it her own, cleared out Valerie’s old books and Garfield figurines. She doesn’t have a lot of belongings, his daughter. Her schoolbooks are in the shelf, looking like they haven’t been touched since Angel left Smart Starts! The room is even tidier since his mother died, pajamas folded at the foot of the bed, Connor’s diapers stacked neatly on the changing table.
His mother’s bottle of Shalimar stands on Angel’s cream-painted dresser. He takes off the blue top, sniffs, and tears spark in his eyes.
Angel has left him. Taken the baby and gone home to Marissa when he needs her the most, just as he always knew she would. And with the fear, that old anger comes up, familiar and almost comfortable. The little bitch, he thinks. Not just her, but Brianna, too, and Valerie, and Marissa. And especially his mother. Bitch, he thinks savagely, the word satisfying and horrible in his head. His vision blurs, the back of his throat thickens.
Rage like a flash flood, a wall of water as solid and sinewy as muscle sweeping down an arroyo, lifting him. He can ride its current until it gives out, leaving him tossed up, exhausted, on its banks. With relief, he sinks into the swirling, dirty force of it, lets it fill his lungs.
He sits on the couch, his bag crinkling against his thigh. One after another, the seals of the metal tops crack. His body loosens. This is how he’ll get through the next hours, the next years, drifting in that whirling, obliterating tide, the loop of curses slowing in his head.
The TV is on, the jingles and murmurs and swelling dramatic music on the edges of his awareness. His eyes are barely open. He should just go to sleep. He’s adrift on the drunkenness, but each time his eyes shut completely, the world rocks and spins around him.
Neither the rage nor the anesthesia is quite obliterating, though. Amadeo is still here, unable to snuff out that last glimmer of himself. He keeps jolting to awareness, thinking he needs to check on his mother, but then remembers that she’s dead, deep in the churchyard’s cold, dry dirt.
Still, something nags at him, something he forgot.
Lizette’s house in the dark has an abandoned aspect to it. Next door, the front windows are blazing, shades up, Christmas lights illuminating the mounds of junk in the yard. A man passes before the window, head angled over a bowl of something. At Lizette’s, the tomato plants are dead stalks. Angel steps almost soundlessly up the walk, and knocks on the door between the security bars, a timid little tap she can barely hear over her heart’s sloshing. She knocks again, bolder.
What if Lizette is gone, already moved in with her cousin’s friend? What if Selena answers the door? Or someone else entirely? Maybe they’ve both moved, and the house is now occupied by lurking, threatening men waiting for a teenage girl to present herself at their threshold.
Angel checks her phone again. Ryan still hasn’t texted, the dick, and neither has Lizette. He’s teaching her a lesson, she gets that, but still, nightmare scenarios present themselves: Ryan leaving Connor at Blake’s Lotaburger, Ryan dropping Connor at the police station or on the cold steps of the church.