I don’t even know the original diagnosis for Reina. She is fourteen now. She comes in with her mother, two sisters, and a brother. They push her in a huge stroller-wheelchair her father made. The sisters are twelve and fifteen, the boy is eight, all beautiful children, lively and funny. When I get in the room they have her propped on the exam table. She is naked. Except for the feeding button her body is flawless, satin smooth. Her breasts have grown. You can’t see the hooflike growth she has instead of teeth, her exquisite lips are parted and bright red. Emerald green eyes with long black lashes. Her sisters have given her a shaggy punk cut, a ruby stud in her nose, painted a butterfly tattoo on her thigh. Elena is polishing her toenails while Tony arranges her arms behind her head. He is the strongest, the one who helps me hold her upper torso while her sisters hold her legs. But right now she lies there like Manet’s Olympia, breathtakingly pure and lovely. Dr. Rook stops short like I did, just to look at her. “God, she is beautiful,” she says.
“When did she start to menstruate?” she asks.
I hadn’t noticed the Tampax string among the jet-black silken hairs. The mother says it is her first time. Without irony she says,
“She is a woman now.”
She is in danger now, I think.
“Okay, hold her down,” Dr. Rook says. The mother grabs her waist, the girls her legs, Tony and I hold her arms. She fights violently against us but Dr. Rook at last gets the old button out and puts in a new one.
She was the last patient of the day. I’m cleaning the room, putting fresh paper on the table when Dr. Rook comes back in. She says, “I’m so grateful for my Nicholas.”
I smile and say, “And I for my Nicholas.” She’s talking about her six-month-old baby, I’m talking about my six-year-old grandson.
“Good night,” we say and then she goes over to the hospital.
I go home and make a sandwich, turn on an A’s game. Dave Stewart pitching against Nolan Ryan. It has gone into ten innings when the phone rings. Dr. Fritz. He’s at the ER, wants me to come. “What is it?”
“Amelia, remember her? There are people who can speak Spanish, but I want you to talk to her.”
Amelia was in the doctor’s room at the ER. She had been sedated, stared even more blankly than usual. And the baby? He leads me to a bed behind a curtain.
Jesus is dead. His neck was broken. There are bruises on his arms. The police are on the way, but Dr. Fritz wants me to talk to her calmly first, see if I can find out what happened.
“Amelia? Remember me?”
“Sí. Cómo no? How are you? Can I see him, mijito Jesus?”
“In a minute. First I need for you to tell me what happened.”
It took a while to figure out that she had been riding around on buses in the daytime, spending the nights in a homeless shelter. When she got there tonight two of the younger women took all her money from where she had it pinned inside her clothes. They hit her and kicked her, then left. The man who runs the place didn’t understand Spanish and didn’t know what she was saying. He kept telling her to be quiet, put his fingers up to his mouth to tell her to be quiet, to keep the baby quiet. Then later the women came back. They were drunk and it was dark and other people were trying to sleep, but Jesus kept crying. Amelia had no money at all now and didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t think. The two women came. One slapped her and the other one took Jesus, but Amelia grabbed him back. The man came and the women went to lie down. Jesus kept crying.
“I couldn’t think about what to do. I shook him to make him be quiet so I could think about what to do.”
I held her tiny hands in mine. “Was he crying when you shook him?”
“Yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then he stopped crying.”
“Amelia. Do you know that Jesus is dead?”
“Yes, I know. Lo sé.” And then in English she said, “Fuck a duck. I’m sorry.”
502
502 was the clue for 1-Across in this morning’s Times. Easy. That’s the police code for Driving While Intoxicated, so I wrote in DWI. Wrong. I guess all those Connecticut commuters knew you were supposed to put in Roman numerals. I had a few moments of panic, as I always do when memories of my drinking days come up. But since I moved to Boulder I have learned to do deep breathing and meditation, which never fail to calm me.
I’m glad I got sober before I moved to Boulder. This is the first place I ever lived that didn’t have a liquor store on every corner. They don’t even sell alcohol in Safeway here and of course never on Sundays. They just have a few liquor stores mostly on the outskirts of town, so if you’re some poor wino with the shakes and it’s snowing, Lord have mercy. The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from DTs just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.
The best town is Albuquerque, where the liquor stores have drive-through windows, so you don’t even have to get out of your pajamas. They don’t sell on Sundays either though. So if I didn’t plan ahead there was always the problem of who in the world could I drop in on who wouldn’t offer a wine cooler.
Even though I had been sober for years before I moved here I had trouble at first. Whenever I looked in the rearview mirror I’d go “Oh no,” but it was just the ski racks everybody has on their cars. I have never actually even seen a police car in pursuit or seen anyone being arrested. I have seen policemen in shorts at the mall, eating Ben & Jerry’s frozen yogurt, and a SWAT team in a pickup truck. Six men in camouflage with big tranquilizer rifles, chasing a baby bear down the middle of Mapleton.
This must be the healthiest town in the country. There is no drinking at frat parties or football games. No one smokes or eats red meat or glazed doughnuts. You can walk alone at night, leave your doors unlocked. There are no gangs here and no racism. There aren’t many races, actually.
That dumb 502. All these memories came flooding into my head, in spite of the breathing. The first day of my job at U—, the Safeway problem, the incident at San Anselmo, the scene with A—.
Everything is fine now. I love my job and the people I work with. I have good friends. I live in a beautiful apartment just beneath Mount Sanitas. Today a western tanager sat on a branch in my backyard. My cat Cosmo was asleep in the sun so he didn’t chase it. I am deeply grateful for my life today.
So God forgive me if I confess that once in a while I get a diabolical urge to, well, mess it all up. I can’t believe I’d even have this thought, after all those years of misery. Officer Wong either taking me to jail or to detox.
The Polite One, we all called Wong. We called all the other ones pigs, which would never have applied to Officer Wong, who was very nice, really. Methodical and formal. There were never any of the usual physical interchanges between you and him like with the others. He never slammed you against the car or twisted the cuffs into your wrist. You stood there for hours as he painstakingly wrote up his ticket and read you your rights. When he cuffed you he said, “Permit me,” and “Watch your head” when you got into the car.