The whole hospital seems to be buzzing and beeping—the lights, the intercoms, the computer monitors, the phones at the circular nurses’ station. The place is a complex machine, and at the heart of it is his Angel, his beautiful child in pain.
Amadeo peers at his daughter through the narrow window in the door, sees the spasms that tighten her pale face. She lapses into a light, drugged sleep before being yanked awake once more.
Amadeo pokes his head in. “I remembered a joke. Did you hear about the hurricane that passed through Espa?ola?”
A nurse is doing something between Angel’s spread legs, so Amadeo rushes. “Ripped right through town and did two million dollars’ worth of repairs.”
A smile passes over Angel’s face, as brief and pained as a contraction. “You shouldn’t be talking crap about Espa?ola. It’s my hometown. And you went to high school there.” Then she looks beyond him to the hallway, carts and gurneys and visiting families passing. “I’m practically naked! Shut the door!”
Amadeo withdraws his head. Now other jokes present themselves to him, jokes he remembers from his own high school years that he’ll never tell Angel. Why’d they cancel the driver’s ed program? They needed the cars for sex ed. Why wasn’t Jesus born in Espa?ola? Because God couldn’t find a virgin.
Amadeo is filled with an electric jangling fear that doesn’t expend itself. He presses his thumbs into his palms and prays to Jesus, but he isn’t comforted. What does Jesus know about waiting for one’s daughter to give birth? Nothing. So he prays to God, who’s a father, too, but he can’t picture God except as a woolly jovial guy. He’d pass out cigars, clap Amadeo on the back, call out hearty congratulations, and Amadeo doesn’t trust that. Finally, he prays to Mary, who does know what he’s talking about, having had a kid herself and having had to watch that kid go through big troubles. Let her be okay, he begs. Please let her be okay. But he can’t give the prayers the kind of lift they need, the lift he was able to give his prayers in the morada. Amadeo can almost see them catch in the drafts from the air conditioner and drift to the floor, skate around the linoleum like dust bunnies.
Amadeo remembers praying as a child, listing the people he wanted God to bless. He lay in the dark, stiff with anxiety that he might forget a name, scouring his mind for even the most forgettable of his classmates lest God, to punish Amadeo for his omissions, take that person out. Amadeo still remembers the Technicolor cartoon violence of those visions: anvils plummeting from heaven, chasms splitting the floors of buildings, fires leaping unbidden from the sidewalk. It must have been boring for his mother, having to sit there at the edge of his bed, holding back her final kiss until he’d finished droning. But these prayers were important, because hadn’t his father—whom Amadeo hated, whom he feared for his rages and silences, whom he intentionally left out of his prayers starting the year he turned five—died just such a Looney Tunes death? Descending La Bajada on I-25, crashing through the guardrail, the car （as Amadeo imagined—still imagines—it） flying in slow motion through sky until the tires once again touched earth and the car erupted in flames.
Even now when he thinks of his father, Amadeo remembers with a pang his little vinyl case of Matchbox cars, which he’d left in his father’s trunk and which never made it out of the wreckage. He’d loved those cars, each of which somehow had its own personality—the serious, studious police cruiser and the sassy delivery van and the peevish chipped blue convertible with the doors that opened—those beloved cars that had met their own miniature fiery ends. He wept a lot for those cars, though even at age five, he knew better than to let on. Surely he’d been weeping for his father, too. But amid those memories, Amadeo remembers the exhilaration of his own power, the sense that God was listening carefully.
Fuck, Amadeo thinks now, looking at his palms, disgusted with his exaggerated sense of his own importance in the eyes of God.
He wonders now how things between him and Marissa would have turned out if he had been in the delivery room with her. If they’d held hands, united and ready to welcome their daughter, while their mothers waited outside, would they have moved in together? Would they be together to this day?