Nineteen
Carmen Rivera’s day at work had been fitful and full of grief. She was all out of sick days, so under pain of losing her job she was forced to come in. In spite of having gotten away from 99th Street, at work there was really no way to hide from what had happened either. At home, where there was no phone, she could utterly sequester herself, not coming to the door, not showing her face. But when the phone rang from 9 to 5, she was obliged to answer it. “Mr. Kelson’s office…�? Of course today, Mr. Kelson had had very few calls as a percentage of the total..
They had started around 9:30. Carmen soon realized that the calls she was getting were divided into waves. The first to call her were those half dozen or so women from Corona, that would identify themselves as intimas amigas, or her “best friends�?. Oh, Carmen is it true? …y que fue lo que pasó m’hija? Ay Dios mio! Cuentame…. Hypocrites all, she thought. And this was confirmed by the second wave, which consisted of neighborhood acquaintances with a slightly more laughable claim to closeness. She could tell by the pointedness of their questions and the expectation of juiciness in their voices that they had already been provided with several versions of Friday night’s events by members of the first wave, and even by other people she knew she would never meet, but that still somehow trafficked in the misery of strangers.
With the sound of all those voices still buzzing in her head, Willie’s mother at last tumbled herself out of the taxi, and into the hospital, up to the sixth floor, where in a small room all the bedlam of her life sat incarnate, running a tarnished fork indifferently through a small pile of mashed potatoes.
She bounded out of the elevator and came face to face with Wanda.
Wanda, was a cocoa-colored mountain of human flesh. She had a certain skill, when she chose to employ it, of arresting all human activity within her circle of influence, which extended out from behind the nurse’s station, throughout the whole of Children’s Psychiatry. So that whomever bounded out of the elevator, regardless of their fervor to move in some other direction, was always caught and drawn in by her sheer planetary magnetism.
“Can I help you?” Wanda corralled.
“Yes, please. I’m William’s mother. Rivera, you know him? Where is he?”
“Jus’ a moment. Someone will be with you shortly. Why don’t you take a seat over there.”
Carmen had that singularly Dominican ampleness in the hips, that in conjunction with the way she moved them, suggested a difficult-to-quash proclivity for the sex act. At 39, she still got more than her share of male attention, especially on Fridays (Copa Nights) when all The Girls made their way to a car waiting at the curb, amid the wild and assorted sounds of Latino male approval. But looking close, under bright fluorescents, she had those creases in the corners of her eyes that were the etched evidence of long hours spent in painful self-reflection. There were other nights, when the spike heel pumps had been kicked into a corner and the mascara made dark streaks down her face. She would sit in front of the make-up mirror, trying in vain to glean some wisdom from the deepening furrows in her face.
Willie’s mother took one of the chairs that Wanda had indicated, and summoned patience from within herself with visible difficulty. The oppressive size of the woman standing behind the desk, and the color and odors of the place, shrank Carmen down into her seat. To Carmen’s right and left, a corridor extended away from the elevator bank in both directions. Both walls of the corridor on the left were hung with strange crosses, a row of six or seven on each opposing wall. They were inscrutable artifacts of the place, and she filled her time of waiting with a mounting curiosity about them.
Crosses? Two wooden sticks, remnant lengths of slim lumber really, were matched for a certain size proportion, and tied or somehow attached together, forming the familiar symbol. But then, each had been wadded over with dense knots of color, so that only the ends of the sticks were visible. Lengths of yarn and colored strips of fabric, it seemed, had been wound over the intersection of the sticks, again, and again, in an ” X ” pattern, making for a heavy wound ball in the center. Some of the crosses were small, and could have fit in the hand, while others were by comparison enormous, and appeared as unlikely hanging on the walls of a hospital as variegated basketballs.
The sight of Wanda shifting behind her circular desk, clarified a sense of the place in Carmen’s mind that the hanging crosses and the passing smells of ether and faintest vomit only portended. Under the impenetrable cocoa flesh, Wanda’s purposes were hidden away from casual scrutiny. Her deep brown face was just another bulging flank of the rotund head, as unreadable and empty of expression as the rear curvature of the skull, fuzzed over as it was with her short, graying curls. A panic for Willie in this place where such a woman had power began to prickle Carmen’s skin, even more than it had in the police station three nights before. She saw the danger clearly, no longer as a threat to the boy’s freedom, but as a well-intentioned, eloquently-defended surgery of his mind. She saw a clear parallel between the massive woman behind the desk and the blind hospital bureaucracy that now had Willie in its maws. These dark forces were moving unstoppably toward Willie and would destroy him, not out of malice, but simply because he had fallen into their path. Ill fortune, yes, that was it. The whole mess was like tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, an accident. This was one sort of situation with which Carmen had much experience. The knowledge gathered from all the times in the past when she’d tripped over cracks in the sidewalk, recovered, and tripped again told her that she must now concert every effort toward getting her son out of this place.