Across from them, a woman scrolls through her phone. Her young daughter—seven, eight—swings her feet restlessly, and a rhinestone-studded flip-flop drops to the teal epoxy floor. With both hands she grips a bag of cherry cough drops. Her eyes are wide and fixed on his bloody towel.
“Are you sick?” he asks the girl as nicely as he can, trying to rein in his annoyance.
The girl raises her eyes from the gore in his lap with some reluctance. Her hair is ratty and she wears a pilled yellow pajama top. “I might have foot-and-mouth disease.”
The mother looks up warily from her phone.
“Maybe I could go before you, then?” Amadeo raises his swaddled hands, shrugging regretfully. “I’m bleeding out.”
“We been here three hours,” the woman says, voice flat, and she returns to her phone.
“You are not bleeding out,” says Angel, louder and meaner than necessary.
But what does she know? Angel is a high school dropout, not a doctor. People die all the time from slit wrists, and the palm is basically the wrist.
He moves in his chair and gasps when the bandage on his back shifts. After the second nail, the hermanos helped him right down and gave him water, offering their congratulations. At first his hands didn’t even hurt—his feet did, from clinging to the block on the cross. Al Martinez had bandaged him up gently. “Keep pressure here and here,” he said, his voice low. “You did good, son.” Still, the man is no professional, and Amadeo can already feel the medical tape coming unstuck.
To Amadeo’s surprise, Tío Tíve didn’t show any of the kindness of the other hermanos, didn’t even seem proud. And the old man didn’t call him an ambulance, either, just got one of the hermanos who lives in Espa?ola to drop them at the hospital. “Nail gun,” Tío Tíve warned. “You got in the way of a nail gun.”
“Anyway,” says Angel, turning the page of her magazine, “it would serve you right if you did bleed out.”
He looks at her, disbelieving. “Hey. Come on.” What a thing to say. “Where did that come from?”
All of a sudden, he remembers that today is Angel’s birthday. Sixteen. She didn’t mention anything this morning; he wonders if she forgot herself, or if she wanted the day to be his.
“Listen, Angel. I’m sorry you had to be in the emergency room on your birthday. I apologize. Is that your problem? Is that what’s bugging you, that you’re not getting the attention? Listen, I wouldn’t have asked you to come if it wasn’t an emergency. I’m wounded.”
Angel says nothing. Thank god she’ll have the baby soon, Amadeo thinks, because he’s not sure how much more he can take of these moods.
“Did you see the whole thing?” he asks in an undertone. He wishes he’d had her take pictures, but, he reflects, that wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the occasion. Still, he wishes there was a record of his success.
Angel riffles through the magazine too fast to be reading anything. Amadeo watches the article titles as she flips past them: Oral Fixation: Take-Along Snacks Your Child Will Love!; Milking It: Your Toddler and Lactose; I Feel You: Raising Empathetic Children.
Amadeo taps this last article, and Angel pauses her frenetic page-turning. “Hey, that one looks good. Wish I’d known about raising empathetic children.”
Angel gives him a shriveling, disgusted look. “You got to be joking me.”
He turns away from her and looks instead at the television mounted in the corner. Cable news plays too loud. A cruise ship has lost power and is floating free in the Caribbean; the toilets have flooded and the king shrimp have gone off. Big deal, thinks Amadeo. So they get a longer cruise. So they eat Fritos. It’s not like they’re facing a medical situation. It’s not like there is blood involved.