Everything becomes hazy; sound is fuzzy, his vision clouded. The vinyl of the chair is damp beneath his thighs. He looks at the floor, the walls, the arms of the very chair he’s sitting in, and because he just saw a segment about it on the news, he thinks of the MRSA bacteria that must be coating every surface. The Band-Aid on his hand flaps off.
“I gotta go,” Amadeo says, and murmurs something about the bathroom to a medical assistant as he staggers into the clean bare cold of the hall. He leans against the blank wall, breathing heavily, willing himself not to vomit.
If only Angel could be like her friend and just crap the baby out.
After taking a spin around the hospital, though, he feels better. He goes down to the cafeteria, pressing the elevator button with his elbow. He feels useful, trucking around like he has a purpose. “I got you a Jell-O snack,” he informs Angel, pushing back into the room.
His daughter turns a dark look on him. “I’m about to blast a watermelon out of my pussy and you think I want a Jell-O snack?”
Yolanda flinches. “Angel, mi hijita, please.”
“Fine.” Amadeo places the Jell-O on the rolling tray. “You could have it, Mom.”
“You go ahead.” But there’s no way Amadeo is going to carry a spoonful of Jell-O snack through this thick viral air and into his mouth.
A nurse assures them that Angel is dilating, slowly but surely, not that Amadeo wants to know the details. He sees very little change in Angel’s state, except that she is becoming increasingly irritable.
When Angel was being born, Amadeo remembers, he sat in the waiting room watching VH1, clutching a package of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine and concentrating very hard, as if he were going to be quizzed later on the video for TLC’s “Waterfalls.” The whole time, Marissa’s mother had been in there with Marissa, and her sister and Yolanda, too. All those women united over Angel’s birth as they never would be again once, just a few months later, things began to disintegrate between Marissa and Amadeo.
He doesn’t know why he wasn’t there with Marissa. He’d wanted to be—or part of him had wanted to—except that the prospect felt scary and intimate and he sensed that the women would have been surprised if he’d presented himself at the delivery room door.
Now, five hours in, Yolanda stands, presses the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. She unties her smock and folds it neatly, removes her shower cap. “I’m going to go home for a while, hijita.”
“Wait, what?” Angel scoots up, alert. “You’re leaving?”
“What can I do, honey? I’m not helping anything, just sitting here. It could take hours and hours. And you’ve got your dad.” She gathers her purse. “I have a headache. I just need to lie down. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Call if anything changes,” she tells Amadeo.
“You’re not leaving, are you, Dad?” Angel’s hair is tangled, her face pale. The caked mascara looks ready to crumble into her reddened eyes. She looks a little unhinged.
“No,” he says meekly. He hadn’t known leaving was an option.
They both watch in shock as Yolanda follows through with her threat, pulls out her car keys, plants a casual kiss on Angel’s head, and is gone.
“What the hell?” says Angel. “What is with her? What is with all of you?”
“Hey now. I’m right here.”
Angel is right. Yolanda has been strange. For instance, her comment earlier: What was she thinking, bringing up some kid’s murder at a time like this? And then up and leaving at maybe the most dramatic moment of their lives, the moment when Amadeo is going to become a thirty-three-year-old grandfather? Yolanda is not behaving like the mother he knows, the one who cooks for them and buys them socks and hands them money when they need it. She has a responsibility to be the mother they’ve come to expect.