“Dios mío,” Gladys said quietly to herself, which made the black woman turn to her.
“You’re Issy’s mom?” she asked.
Gladys nodded, unable to take her eyes off Issy, who didn’t seem to have noticed her yet.
“I’m Shirley,” said the woman. “I’m her roommate at the house. She’s like my sister.” The woman turned back to Issy. “Isn’t that right, Issyboo? You’re my sister, right?”
This elicited a shadow of a smile and a nod from Issy.
“Look who’s here, baby. Your mom.” Shirley turned to Gladys. “Come sit here.”
Gladys approached and sat in Issy’s line of sight, took her hand. “Hola, cariño,” she whispered. “Es Mami. Te amo, cariño. Mi nena hermosa.”
Gladys couldn’t read the look in her daughter’s eyes. It seemed far away, aloof even. Issy did not smile, weakly but clearly, as she’d just smiled for this Shirley woman. But Issy still pressed her mother’s hand, barely perceptibly, and whispered, “Mami.”
At that moment, three years of remorse flooded over Gladys, forcing tears to her eyes. How wrong they had been to push Issy away! How could they have let shame conquer their own blood? How weak had she been not to stand up to her own husband? How much time had they lost? But Gladys made herself withhold these thoughts and only cried and continued to hold her daughter’s hand and say, again and again, “Mija, te quiero mucho, mucho.”
“You should,” Shirley said. “Issy’s done some amazing things. You know she got the definition of AIDS changed.”
Gladys had no idea what that meant, but it sounded important. So she turned back to Issy and said, “Estoy orgullosa de ti, Issy.”
Finally Issy smiled vaguely, her eyes darting about. She mouthed something.
Shirley leaned in. “What is it, honey? What you trying to say?”
Issy looked aggrieved, her breathing more labored than a moment before. She began mouthing something again.
Shirley darted out, returned with Ava, who stood over the bed, taking Issy’s hand.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
Issy mouthed the word clearly this time: “Hector.”
Ava’s eyes widened. “You want Hector? You said you just wanted the girls, sweetheart.”
“I want Hector,” Issy mouthed, a mere whisper.
“Who’s Hector?” Gladys asked.
“That’s her friend,” Ava said. “He brought her into the activist group.” Then, back to Issy: “You want me to call Hector and see if he can come here, Issy?”
Issy nodded once, slowly, her eyes widening.
Ava pulled her battered Filofax from her bag, found Hector’s number, dialed it on the hospital phone. As she listened, she fumbled for a pen in her bag. “It’s his machine,” she said. “He’s in D.C. right now and he left a number there.” She scrawled the number into her Filofax, then dialed it.
“Hector? It’s Ava.” She paused. “I’m at St. Vincent’s with Issy and her mother.” She paused, then soberly: “Yes.” She paused again. “I know. But she just called for you, she said your name.” She paused again, sitting by the bed in the chair Shirley had relinquished, once again taking Issy’s hand in her own and rubbing it gently with her thumb. “No, I don’t think so.” She paused. “Yes, of course.”
Ava put the phone close to Issy’s ear. “He wants to talk to you, Issy. Go ahead, Hector.”
Faintly, the women in the hospital room could hear Hector’s voice: “Issy? It’s Hector. I love you, Issy. I’ll never, ever forget you. Okay, do you understand that? I love you so much. I’m so glad you came into my life, chica.”
Tears rose in Issy’s eyes, then one raced down her cheek. She made a low, guttural, urgent sound. “Hector,” she said. “Hector.” More tears came and her fingers gripped Ava’s as hard as they could.
“What do you wanna tell him, honey?” Ava asked. “You wanna say you love him, right?”
Issy made another guttural sound, her hand breaking free and reaching feebly for the phone.
But Ava gently shushed her and placed her hand back down. “She wants to say she loves you, too, Hector,” she said back into the phone. “That’s what you want to tell Hector, Issy, right?”
Issy raised her head slightly and looked at Ava, Shirley, and her mother beseechingly, unable to say more.
Ava concluded her call with Hector. Then the three women took turns sitting by Issy until 1:46 A.M., the Monday before Thanksgiving, when Issy made the sound that Ava knew too well, that final horrible rattling sound in the throat, and then lay there, her mouth and eyes open and immobile.
“She’s gone,” Ava said. “Our beloved Issy is gone.”
The three women prayed and cried and said their good-byes until 2:05 A.M., when Ava stood up to go find a nurse. Before she did, she gave Shirley cab money to get back to Judith House, where an eleven-month-old baby boy named Mateo, his silky cap of hair just as dark as his mother’s had been, was sound asleep.
Nineteen. Prodigal (2021)
The twisting in Mateo’s stomach starts subtly, when the plane is probably somewhere over Pennsylvania or eastern New Jersey, then intensifies when he first catches a glimpse of the skyline, glittering amid the black, even higher reaching and more crowded than it was in his youth. That familiar parabola: the peaks in midtown, then the dip through Chelsea, the Villages, SoHo, Chinatown, Tribeca, then the jagged ascent at the island’s tip — once again with a pinnacle, the past ten years now, much as there’d been a staggering pinnacle before a day he vaguely remembers from childhood, when he was eight, nine, back in the days of frites on Avenue A and his first East Village friends. But today, the pinnacle is one tower, not two, and its summit is a spiky radio spear, not twin flattops. There will never be a drug that hits him as hard and as fast as New York City, the first sight of which, swallowed whole from above, seizes him with dizzying waves of exhilaration, nostalgia, and panic. And unlike a drug, it’s real, it’s all real. Everything that happened down there is real, real, real.
On his little tablet, he pings Gary, his AA sponsor: “looking down on ny now from plane, freaking out a little.” How long before he pings back? What will he say? “You’re gonna be fine.” “Breathe and pray through it.” “Hit a meeting ASAP.” Or: “You’ve done this before, not your first time.”
True, that. Mateo’s been here before, several times the past few years. Less than he might’ve, given all the professional invitations he’s gotten. And never for more than a few days, a week, where he stayed in Brooklyn, well away from the old neighborhood. But this, now: at least six months! And smack-dab in the old hood, on a big job no less. It’s almost more full circle than he can deal with.
Next, he pings Dani: “Landing soon. You home?” She’d come here a month in advance, for various design jobs, and she’d moved into the loft they’d subletted in Chinatown, set it up all cozy for them.
Now he just sits back and breathes, wondering who’ll thumb him back first. But soon he’s landing at LaGuardia, soon he’s picking up his huge duffel at the baggage claim, soon he’s in a cab speeding through Queens toward midtown, soon — oh God! — he’s cabbing it down Second Avenue on a Thursday night, his mind a patchwork of memory-stabs of storefronts that have remained and of marvels of those that have changed. It seems like everyone bikes now, it feels like Copenhagen or something. The newer buses are so streamlined, streaking up and down their designated lanes, and more and more of the cars are so small, electric. What’s changed and what’s remained? Do the kids on the street look the same? On not one wall but two he sees ads for liquors or clothes that have been done in a cheap, knockoff version of the style of him and Charlice — ah, ah, he means Charlie. He keeps forgetting the subtle change and he feels like, in his head, she — uh, fuck, no, he, Charlie — keeps rolling his eyes at Mateo in disapproval. Well, she always basically was a he to me, anyway, Mateo thinks, it shouldn’t be that hard. But yeah, it’s just like L.A., he can see people have been ripping off his and Char’s style, and that both annoys him and makes him privately proud.