“Can you just sit in this moment for a minute, Milly?” Gallegos asked.
She turned to him with a corrosive smile. “I’ve been sitting in this moment my whole life. It doesn’t get any better.”
“Yes, but you know that’s depression talking, right, Milly? You know that moments vary and change. You know you’ve been happy before and you’ll be happy again.”
She unleashed a laugh that sounded unhinged to her. “I’m tired of trying so hard to be fucking happy!”
Sitting up that night at the Christodora, at the dining-room table with the crossword puzzle mostly blank in front of her, Milly waited for Jared to come home. Certainly he’d come home at least to sleep. But, by two A.M., he’d not. In the morning, she had a text from him: “Staying elsewhere for a while. Will be by apt during work hours to pick up some things.” In other words, thought Milly, I’ll be by when you’re not there.
It all felt very inevitable to Milly. She was torn between thinking that Jared should forgive her and the truer feeling that she’d had this coming all these years. Even Mateo’s flight — she’d had it coming. You can’t adopt a child to fill an inner void, she’d tell herself. You have to do it out of some detached, selfless impulse to put good out into the world. You can’t expect a motherless kid to fulfill your own need to be someone’s mother because you’re afraid of having your own kid. And yet, Milly would think, it had sort of worked for a while, hadn’t it?
She sleepwalked through her days, telling only Gallegos and Drew out in L.A. all that had happened, and at the end of the day, she’d come home to the large, empty apartment at the Christodora. She would sit in the window and stare down at the bare treetops in the park and think, Well, it’s come to this. And I’m not surprised at all.
Eighteen. No Meaning (1993)
The middle-aged, heavyset woman coming up out of the train station at Fourteenth Street from Queens on a chilly November night had to orient herself, as she wasn’t normally in downtown Manhattan, and then she had to ask a passerby to point her in the direction of St. Vincent’s, the entrance of which she stood in front of for several seconds, frozen in distress, before she thought to reach into her pocketbook for her rosary. She pulled it out, kissed it, and prayed to the Virgin Mother for strength, resolve, and compassion, and then she entered. At the front desk, reassured by the large crucifix hanging on the opposing wall, she asked for directions to the room of Ysabel Mendes.
Walking down the hallway, she glanced into rooms where extremely frail young men lay, their faces sunken, often with people at their sides holding their bony hands. She heard a fragment of a song that was always on the radio at the bank where she worked, that “Dreamlover” song, float out of one room. As she approached the room she was looking for, she found a woman sitting in a chair just outside, a pile of paperwork in her lap.
The woman looked up and rose. “Mrs. Mendes?”
Gladys Mendes nodded, peered into the face of this woman she’d never seen before and determined that her face looked kind and trustworthy. “Are you Ava?” she asked.
“I am,” Ava said. “I’m the one who called you. I’m so glad you’re here. I think it’s going to mean so much to Issy that you came.”
Gladys’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t tell her father I was coming. But I couldn’t not come. It would haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“It’s good you came. Will you sit with me for just a minute before you go in?”
Gladys sat down, looked beseechingly into Ava’s face.
“It doesn’t look good,” Ava said, putting her hand on the woman’s arm. “This was the second time this year that Issy had pneumonia and this time the drugs haven’t been able to beat it. She went into acute respiratory failure four days ago and this afternoon she went into multisystem organ failure and septic shock. She’s on a lot of pain medication right now and she’s on a ventilator to lessen the pain of breathing. She’s going in and out of consciousness but I think she’s called for you a few times.”
Gladys averted her eyes, overwhelmed with the terminology and that final piece of news. “She’s gonna pass?” she finally asked.
“The doctors think she’ll pass tonight. It’s just about making her as comfortable as she can be now. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Mendes.”
But Gladys was sitting up straighter in her chair. “Is a priest here?”
Ava took a breath. “Issy didn’t want a priest.”
“But she has to.” Gladys’s voice rose, alarmed. “She can’t die without a priest.”
“She’s in there with Shirley, her best friend from the house. She wanted me and Shirley here at the end. Some of the other girls from the house and a few friends have already come by to say good-bye. Mrs. Mendes, we have to respect her wishes.”
But now Gladys was upset, restive. “I have to talk to her. She can’t do this.”
She began to rise, but Ava gently pressed her back down. “You can’t go in there and upset her, please, Mrs. Mendes. She is at the very end and the best thing you can do is go in there and hold her hand and smile at her and tell her that you and her whole family love her and send her off with peace in her heart. Please promise me you can do that.”
But Gladys was now crying freely, shaking her head and twisting her rosary in her hand. “She didn’t get married, she didn’t have children, and now she’s going to die without last rites. Her life had no meaning.”
Listening, Ava remembered the promise Issy had extracted from her when Issy made her Mateo’s legal standby guardian: that Ava would not tell her family about Mateo, that Ava would find a truly extraordinary home for him — educated people, open-minded people. So instead, all Ava said was: “Her life certainly had meaning. She’s done incredible work the past four years fighting this disease. She’s been incredibly brave telling her story. And she’s been a part of our family at the house and she is very loved. So she is certainly not dying without meaning. You cannot go in there and make her feel badly. It’s better you just leave if you’re going to do that.”
That caught Gladys up short, stifling her tears. She had a painful realization, which was that other people — including this Ava woman, apparently — had been taking care of her daughter these past years, had come to consider her their family, and that her own maternal right to intervene in her daughter’s life had withered in the interim. She had forfeited it when she submitted to her husband’s order that Issy was too much a source of anguish and hence no longer welcome in the house. She’d always submitted to her husband’s orders, and in the wake of that bitter edict, she’d contented herself with stealth phone calls to Issy — calls that often ended badly, anyway, in sighing fits of recrimination on both ends. Gladys loved her daughter and prayed daily for her health, yet she hadn’t understood why Issy felt the need to parade around so publicly with her disease in front of the police and TV cameras — especially when Issy knew how much it upset and embarrassed her father!
Yet for Gladys, being reminded by this woman that she was no longer the first authority in Issy’s life was a shameful and humbling feeling. She regretted her outburst of a few moments prior, even as the matter of the priest still nagged at her.
“I don’t want to upset her,” she said. “I just want to tell her I love her.”
“That’s the best thing you can do at this point,” Ava said.
Gladys steeled herself and walked into the room — filled with flowers and, on a wall facing the bed where Issy could see it, a blown-up photo of Issy shouting into a megaphone, surrounded by other women — to find her daughter — her lifelong borderline gordita of a daughter, that childhood lover of whole plates of tostones with garlic sauce — to find her a wraith, a third her former size, her damp black hair pulled back from her face, a ventilator across her nose, her eyes remote and half shut, her thin hand being held by a tall, skinny black woman with a long, aqualine nose who sat by her bed, gently dabbing her forehead with a damp washcloth.