The Five Wounds Read online

  “Taste it,” Angel urged Mike, but he patted his stomach.

  “Alas, no. I have genetically high cholesterol.”

  Finally all the dessert plates had been scraped clean and the cappuccino cups stood empty but for some drying foam on the rim and the thick dark circle in the bottom (Angel had never known her mother to drink coffee after dinner). It hadn’t felt as though they were biding their time until Marissa’s tipsiness faded. They’d had so much fun that, in the end, they were nearly the last to leave.

  Mike slid his credit card into the folder without even looking at the bill—Angel had hoped to catch a glimpse of the total—the dinner must have cost a fortune. After he’d signed the slip, he walked them to their car and opened the passenger door for Angel, handing her in.

  Then he went around to the driver’s side, where, aware of Angel watching, he and her mother shared a laughing, awkward kiss that melted into something longer and less awkward.

  Sitting there, Angel was embarrassed by how dingy their car was—twenty years old, stained upholstery, used napkins in the cup holder, the dirty floor mats worn bald. She wished Mike didn’t have to see it, but he wasn’t looking. His hand was deep in Marissa’s hair, Marissa’s head tipped back.

  Finally they pulled apart and Marissa got in, giving a single self-conscious giggle and then falling silent.

  “Do you like him?” Marissa asked worriedly once they were on the highway, her nostrils tensing, the wires already beginning to tighten below the surface of her face.

  “Definitely,” said Angel, and Marissa had looked over at her and flashed a sudden radiant smile, and Angel was so lifted by that smile that she didn’t ask her mother if she was okay to drive.

  “I’m really glad. It’s important to me that you like him.” Marissa paused. “We were thinking he might move in with us. At the end of the month.”

  And Angel had been so happy about her mother’s happiness that she hadn’t even minded that the plan had already been made and that she hadn’t been consulted.

  The first few months Mike lived with them, things were great. Angel felt that they—she and Marissa—were rising, occupying a more stable position in the world, even if their actual circumstances hadn’t really changed. They still lived in the same house, but it felt tidier, and with the second income, the rent didn’t feel like such a burden. Marissa had never fallen seriously behind in rent, but the worry that she might preoccupied her and sifted like sand into Angel’s sense of home, a constant itchy grit.

  There was more money for dinners out and movies and little spontaneous gifts from her mother—a lip gloss here, a new outfit there. On Angel’s fifteenth birthday, Marissa and Mike presented her with a laptop computer. “You have to have one now that you’re in high school,” Mike said.

  He didn’t ignore Angel, as some of her mother’s boyfriends had, as if by ignoring her she’d simply disappear and they’d have Marissa to themselves. And he never seemed creepy, either, like these guys who seemed to regard a single woman with a daughter as a twofer. That’s how one of them actually put it, joking about his “girls,” when Angel was eleven. Marissa had turned on him savagely. “That’s fucked up. Never, ever say that.”

  No, Mike was a good guy. He seemed like a dad, cracking corny jokes, chiming in on whatever subject her homework was about. He was well educated, he subscribed to boring thin-paged magazines with lots of news and commentary and not many pictures. And he seemed to care for Marissa. He was always slipping his arm around her waist, commenting on her sexiness, grabbing her boob, and Angel would avert her eyes or hang out more with friends. He supported Angel when she lobbied to be allowed to go to parties. “She needs her freedom.” Marissa agreed, flushed and happy and, after fifteen years of single-parenthood, relieved to give up some of the burden of parental responsibility to someone else—someone older, with kids of his own, a man.

  So Angel began going out more, staying out later. “We trust you,” Mike said over and over, and Angel, thrilled and uneasy with the sudden freedom, would look for confirmation to her mother, who would lift her head, nod, then lay her head back on Mike’s chest. Not long after, they announced with clasped hands that they were engaged.

  Mike’s personality began to change the summer before Angel’s sophomore year, when he was tasked with designing picnic ramadas in a park in Roswell. This was a big deal, he emphasized to Marissa. “I do this right, and it’s a whole new ball game. They’ll give me more projects, a promotion. We can move out of this craphole.” He looked around Marissa and Angel’s little living room, with the bent venetian blinds and the shelf of Disney animals, the friendly polka-dotted rug and the suede-like microfiber couch that Angel and Marissa had chosen together with great enthusiasm several years earlier, but that hadn’t, admittedly, held up well.

  He started spending days at a time at the job site four hours south in Roswell or in meetings in Santa Fe. When he got home, he was grouchy and constantly on his cell phone. The board hadn’t liked his design—too ambitious, unrealistic for the budget—and now he was being asked to work with another architect senior to him. “Collaborate,” he spat. “They’re giving me a fucking babysitter.” He and Marissa began fighting—about money, about the state of the house, about the hours Angel was keeping. It was true that she was spending two and occasionally three nights a week out. A few times last summer, Marissa, bleary and nearsighted, had come out of her bedroom at the sound of Angel quietly letting herself into the house at dawn. “What time is it? Have you been drinking?”

  “No. God,” Angel would say, pushing past her mother into her own bedroom. And, doubtless because it was the easiest course, Marissa decided to believe her.

  One evening during one of Mike’s trips away, Angel had come home from Priscilla’s house to find her mother, in too-short sweatpants and her hair in a rough ponytail, standing over a pile of laundry in the hall. Marissa was inspecting what Angel realized in horror was a pair of her own—Angel’s—underpants.

  “Are you having sex?” Marissa demanded. She looked angry and old, her skin discolored and dry, her mouth warped into an ugly little curl.

  “That’s disgusting, Mom.” Angel snatched her dirty underpants from her mother’s hand and slammed her bedroom door.

  Her head throbbed. What kind of sick Sherlock did her mother think she was? Of course she’d been having sex. And how hypocritical! It wasn’t Angel who dangled her disgusting, lacy panties from every towel rack in the house. It wasn’t Angel who left her stupid diaphragm on the edge of the bathtub, where it winked lewdly at Angel like a fleshier and less amiable version of one of those Scrubbing Bubbles from the commercial. It wasn’t Angel who hung on the neck of her smug, jerky architect boyfriend, and who cracked sly innuendos as though Angel were too stupid to pick up on them.

  She waited all that night for her mother to come in after her, to lay down the law, and, in the nights that followed, she kept waiting. She was ready to be defensive and angry, but she was also relieved to have been found out. Maybe her mother would start behaving like an actual mother—ground her, keep her safe in the house—and Angel would have no choice but to get off this increasingly troubling train she’d found herself on.

  But Marissa didn’t come into Angel’s room. And in the weeks following, did Marissa, even knowing what she knew, ever once talk to Angel about birth control? About abstinence? Did it, in those days, ever occur to her to just not let Angel go out every night? No, it did not, because Marissa was preoccupied with Mike, who, it turned out, hadn’t given up the lease on his Santa Fe apartment—the revelation had resulted in a massive fight and a smashed kitchen chair—and was now staying half the week there. Marissa was spending her energies dressing up for him, trying to cajole him back into his former good mood, then breaking glasses and yelling at him and at Angel, too, when her attempts failed.

  So Angel went out more and more to parties in people’s parentless houses or in empty buildings and construction sites or at the end of long roads i
n the empty desert. She lost herself in hysterical drunken laughter with friends, in the pleading pressure of someone’s body against her own, and also in the long, sad days after that were muffled by irritability and hangover, when memories of things she’d said and done would detonate in the smog with radioactive clarity and, always, shame. Her own stupid plays at self-assuredness were laughable and wrong, and, tense with humiliation, Angel would relive moments from the previous night’s party and the many parties leading up to it: laughing meanly at Priscilla for saying taken for granite or calling some other girl a bitch behind her back or giving some guy a blow job through the pee-hole of his boxers.

  Three missed periods later, after Angel could no longer ignore it—and after confirming it with both a drugstore-brand and a name-brand pregnancy test, wrapping the packaging in a black garbage bag and pushing it deep into the trash can outside, not even recycling the paperboard—Angel confessed to her mother. It was late on a school night, just the two of them home, and they were washing their faces at the sinks in the bathroom. After Angel uttered the words, she nearly cried with the relief of handing her burden to her mother.

  Her mother looked up at Angel in the mirror, her face streaming, hairline wet. “Wait. You think you’re pregnant?” She looked very young and frightened, which wasn’t the reaction Angel had hoped for.

  Angel’s mouth went dry. With shaking hands she spread toothpaste on her brush, and tried to steady her voice. “I guess I don’t just think it.”

  “Oh, shit. Oh shit.” Marissa’s face dripped into the neckline of her pink pajama shirt. “Mike’s not going to be happy about this.”

  Angel put down her toothbrush and stepped back. “Mike’s not the one who’s going to have to go into labor.”

  Marissa snatched the towel and rubbed her face vigorously. Then she folded it with great precision and hung it on the rack. “Let’s not pretend this isn’t going to affect Mike. And me, too. Who’s the father?”

  Angel was still too stunned to speak, but Marissa must have interpreted her hesitation as not knowing, because she let out a long keening whimper.

  “Oh god, how stupid could you be? Messing up all of our lives!”

  “What about me?”

  “Your life, too! Especially your life! Oh god.”

  She seemed about to go on, but Angel left the bathroom without brushing her teeth, and shut herself in her bedroom. She curled on her bed, waiting for her mother to come in and make things right, waited and waited.

  “SHE’S GOT TO GET an abortion,” Mike said when, a full three weeks later, Marissa finally told him. Angel overheard the conversation from her bedroom.

  She might have gotten one, too, would have gotten one, except that her mother never suggested it and Angel was somehow afraid to bring it up, because her mother must have thought it was a sin. Why else wouldn’t she mention it? And it was a sin, wasn’t it? Except that she can’t believe that God would be so unfair, letting guy after guy get off scot-free, while saddling girls with either lifelong responsibilities or mortal sins.

  At the same time, Angel had a sense that she should suffer for her mistakes, see them through. Now she wonders at the inertia that somehow allowed her to ignore what was happening inside her week after week and the self-loathing that insisted she be punished.

  Mike was already looking up clinics. “Call them,” he ordered Marissa, waving the phone in her face. “Now.” Angel was flooded with relief, because even if he was a jerk, Mike was an adult, taking charge, and Angel was about to get a second chance at a normal life.

  “It’s too late,” Marissa said in a small voice. The disappointment was like a sack of sand in the gut. Angel hadn’t actually known it was too late until now.

  She could hear Mike’s long exhalation. “What the hell do you mean, it’s too late.” It was a statement. “How long have you been keeping this from me?”

  “Maybe if you’d been around. You were staying in Santa Fe! Anyway, it’s Angel’s business and she’s my daughter. And besides, you know we’re Catholic. We don’t believe in abortion. I didn’t give up my baby, did I?”

  He gave a short mean laugh. Angel could picture him exactly: tipping his round head, smiling wryly. “Do you really not believe in it, Marissa, or do you just think you don’t, because then you’d have to admit you made the wrong choice?”

  “Gee thanks, Mike,” Marissa said bitterly, lamely.

  “I guess I should be congratulating you,” Mike said when Angel finally ventured out of her bedroom. “I guess the stork’s bringing you something extra special for your sweet sixteen.” He looked at the swell of her stomach, his lip twisted in revulsion, and Angel wrapped her arms around herself.

  Amadeo knew it was coming, but still, when Angel goes into labor, it’s somehow a surprise. There’s a window in the delivery room, but it seems to have been tinted with some UV protectant so that everything—the parking lot, the mountains, the sky heaped with clouds—is violet-blue, the whole world on the verge of evening even now, in the heat of the day. Angel is yellow and drawn, and her hair frames her face, frizzy against the pillow.

  They’re waiting for her to dilate, the nurse tells him, which makes Amadeo think of a giant dark eye between his daughter’s legs, an infant bursting through the fragile, unblinking tissue. She’s resting, her belly a mound as high as her propped head, but it’s only a matter of time before it all starts. A nurse has supplied him and his mother with blue papery smocks and shoe covers like shower caps.

  “Ungh,” grunts Angel as a contraction comes, then she relaxes. “Where’s my mom? Is she here yet?”

  “We left messages, honey,” says Yolanda.

  As if Angel has just noticed Amadeo there, she turns on him. “Could you say something at least? If you’re gonna be standing there? Tell a story? Crack a joke?”

  A joke. Nothing comes to mind. “Why did the chicken . . . Shit, I don’t know, Angel.”

  She pushes her face away in disgust and grimaces into another contraction.

  Yolanda says, “I heard on the news where a little boy—” Her voice breaks, but is strong when she starts again. “A father shot his own son. The little boy was hiding in the closet. Seven years old.”

  “What’s the punch line, well?” asks Angel.

  “That’s just the story I heard. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “God, Mom. Not the time.” Amadeo looks at his mother in surprise. Her judgment’s been a real issue lately. Just the other day she left the burner on under the kettle for four hours. The kettle was so hot the enamel flaked off.

  “Well, it’s a terrible story,” says Yolanda. “Really terrible! Why shouldn’t we think about that poor baby? Terrible things happen in this world and we can’t just pretend they don’t. We can’t turn our backs on people who are scared and in pain.”

  “Ungh,” moans Angel again.

  Three hours they’ve been here. When he got the call this morning that Angel was in labor and was being driven to the hospital by the Family Foundations receptionist, Amadeo had to get Tío Tíve to give him the ride. It’s not the first ride Amadeo has had to beg from his uncle since the night Tíve bailed him out. Each time it’s a profoundly humiliating experience, having to wait outside the community center or probation office, and then climb into the passenger seat like a twelve-year-old. Generally Amadeo endures these humiliations in silence. Today, he asked, “Can’t you go any faster?” and his uncle growled, but sped up.

  Amadeo was the first of the family to arrive, and was, gratifyingly, the sole beneficiary of the relieved smile Angel beamed onto him as he came toward her in the waiting room. She waved from her wheelchair.

  “Why’s she in a wheelchair?” he asked the woman who drove Angel. The woman’s purse strap crossed her chest like a bandolier of bullets. “Why’s she need a wheelchair?”

  He’d expected to be ushered into a sterile delivery room in time to see his scarlet screaming grandson lifted triumphantly over the doctor’s head. But Angel w
as still in her jeans and Pumas, her big gold purse hanging from her knee.

  Angel shrugged. “They just gave me one.” She maneuvered forward and back, flexed her bicep. “I’m going to get me some guns, lose this baby fat.”

  “Well, I’ll duck away now that your dad’s here,” said the receptionist.

  Angel looked up in alarm. “Tell Brianna I’ll keep up with my journal. Tell her I’ll call the minute the baby comes.”

  The receptionist laughed. “Catch your breath first.”

  “And tell her there’s no way I’m missing the Open House! I’ll be there, and so will my dad. Right, Dad? You’re coming? So you can meet Brianna?”

  “Relax. You’re good, Angel,” Amadeo said. “You’ll be good.” Of course she would be good: her father was here. But then the receptionist shook his hand and passed through the automatic doors, leaving Amadeo horribly in charge.

  “Brianna’s like my personal hero.”

  He pictured a competent, gray-haired woman with a shelf bosom. She’d be a hugger. “Hey, what about me?”

  Angel laughed, full-throated. “Oh yeah. You, too.”

  Now, she groans.

  “You’re okay, hijita,” says Yolanda.

  Amadeo peels the hefty Band-Aid off his left hand. Maybe a nurse can check out his injuries, wrap them up professionally. They haven’t healed entirely, but it’s clear that he’s not permanently wounded. Now he can more or less do the things he used to do, though his writing looks like shit. He’s forever knocking the back of his hand into things and making himself yelp.

  “Weird that we’ve both been to the hospital lately,” Amadeo remarks to his daughter. “Who’d have thought?” He pushes the Band-Aid back on, but the stick is ruined.

  “Huh,” says Yolanda.

  She pats Angel’s hand, the hand Amadeo can’t bear to look at because of the IV needle pushed under her skin. A piece of curling tape keeps it from getting wrenched loose, but, Amadeo thinks, the needle must shift around in there. Woozily, he imagines the tip grazing the thin walls of the vein, scraping bone.