Stop, thinks Yolanda. Above all she must not let herself get depressed. But who wouldn’t be a little blue? Three days ago, she was a woman with a boyfriend and a normal life expectancy, a woman vacationing in Las Vegas.
For the last month Yolanda has been holding the headaches at bay with increasing doses of Aleve. Headache, singular, really, since it never actually goes away, and has, in fact, worsened.
“You’re stressed,” Cal said two weeks ago, always chivalrous, over a too-expensive dinner at the Steaksmith in Santa Fe. She’d set down her fork to press her head into her palms when the pain nearly scooped her eyes from their sockets. “Come away with me.” And he described the fountains and lights, the shows and the escape. Cal is thin, a carpenter with shot knees. His jowls hang loose and pink and clean-shaven, giving him the kindly sad-sack look of a basset hound, and Yolanda agreed.
Who wouldn’t agree to a vacation in Vegas, to being cared for so completely by a good man? She met Cal when he came to install the new prefab shelves in the chief clerk’s office （a job unworthy of his talents, she discovered later when she saw the shelves in his own house）， and for over a year now, he’s treated her to dinners and movies and taken her back to his tidy condo, where he lets her pick the show they watch and then, after, is incredibly attentive in bed.
He is so easy to be with, and Yolanda is impressed with the version of herself she is when she’s around him: laughing and quick and unencumbered by the past. Unlike any man she’s dated, he’s never expected her to cook for him, has never asked anything of her, except once, when he was remodeling his master bathroom and wanted her to weigh in on whether he should get a Jacuzzi tub. “I don’t have an opinion,” she said, because it wasn’t fair to let him make permanent decisions based on her preferences.
Cal is, in fact, so perfect that Yolanda cannot understand why she can’t love him. Yet the more time they spend together and the more he seems to love her, the more aware she becomes that part of her remains remote.
When she went to Urgent Care in Las Vegas, it wasn’t for the headache, but for her acid reflux, which had gotten bad enough that she was eating only saltines. She couldn’t enjoy the seafood buffets or the inexpensive cocktails, or even drink coffee anymore, and the caffeine withdrawal certainly wasn’t helping her head. Twice she woke in the night so nauseated she had to throw up in the tiny cardboard bathroom of Cal’s travel trailer in the Mojave Oasis RV park. Each time she was afraid Cal would wake up and find her, but he was always dead asleep when she crawled back in beside him.
Her acid reflux was not acid reflux, but an ulcer. “Why are you taking so much Aleve?” the RN asked, alarmed. “That’s fully six times the recommended dose.” When she explained about the headache, he sent her down the road for a CT scan, just to be sure.
The technician blathered cheerfully about her son’s trip to France. “I’ve never been, myself,” she said, inserting the needle into the top of Yolanda’s hand for the IV of contrast dye. “Why go, when we’ve got an Eiffel Tower right here in Vegas?” Woozy, Yolanda tried to determine if she was feeling the tug of the needle or of the tape. “You’ll feel a little warm when we get this dye flowing, and then you’ll roll right in. Just follow the instructions over the speaker.” Yolanda barely heard the technician shut the door behind her, because a strange metallic heat grabbed the back of her throat. Before she’d even processed this, the heat shot down her torso, settling in her groin like a violation.
After the scan, doors began whooshing open to welcome her. She was ushered from the dingy emergency facility to a fancier wing of the medical center with grassy courtyards and curving palm trees, where she, Yolanda Padilla, VIP, was treated to an immediate MRI. As she rode the elevator up and down from chilly floor to chilly floor, from Radiology to Lab to Neurology, receptionists treated her kindly, nurses told her not to worry, medical assistants brought her little Dixie cups of cold water to sip. At first Yolanda hadn’t worried. She read magazines in the plush chairs and ate a peanut butter cup from the vending machine and rubbed her sleeveless arms, wishing she’d brought a sweater. How pleased and impressed she was with the health care offered in Nevada. What speed! What service! Las Vegas was surely a special place, with its apparent surfeit of doctors and their wide-open appointment books, with its hale and hearty population kept busy at the slots.