The Five Wounds Read online

  Lizette has hardly spoken to Angel since their Finland project. For three weeks—how has it only been three weeks, when so much has happened?—she’s sat at the desk nearest the whiteboard, bent over her workbook, but she just seems to be drawing circles in the margins. She hasn’t once antagonized Jen—not even when Jen distributed flyers for the day care center at her church—and when Brianna calls on her, her replies are muted.

  Angel misses her. She hates that even in the midst of this crisis, she is distracted by longing. She has tried positioning herself in Lizette’s way when class is released, but Lizette moves smoothly past her. Lizette no longer saves her a seat at lunch, and she speaks to Angel with the same cool, offhanded ease with which she speaks to anyone else. Angel doesn’t understand how it was all shut off so entirely. She is humiliated that she ever allowed herself to be so vulnerable. And there’s no one she can talk to about it.

  Angel can’t shake the feeling that she, Angel, is responsible for the horror that has swamped her family. Not because God hates lesbians and thinks they don’t deserve grandmothers—Angel can’t believe that, not when God is love and mercy and goodness—but because there must have been something wrong about her joy, about the way the hours fell away in Lizette’s presence. That fact is, Angel’s attention was completely absorbed by Lizette—by the exhilaration of those afternoons in her bed, yes, but also by the marvelous, singular person of Lizette.

  And when her mother asked after her grandmother, Angel hadn’t heeded the warning, hadn’t even been able to recognize it as a warning, simply because it came from her mother.

  So Angel deserves this swollen, hot-faced rejection. She deserves this hurt. Perhaps she even deserves to lose her grandmother.

  Lizette rests her head in the crook of one arm and bounces the tip of her pen off her notebook. Her shining hair falls heavily across her cheek. Angel imagines lifting that hair, drawing it behind Lizette’s ear to expose the clean curve of jaw, but then turns back to her workbook, biting down on her own pen until her teeth ache. The intensity of Angel’s attention must surely reach Lizette, must feel as weighted as a hand pressed against her skin. But Lizette continues to tap her pen.

  Angel stands. She palms her phone, slips it in the pocket of her hoodie. She doesn’t even peek through the nursery window. In the bathroom, she leans against the wall and checks her phone.

  There’s no word from home, from her grandmother, from her father. No word from her mother, either, big surprise. As usual, Angel is thinking more about them than any of them are thinking about her. She hasn’t told her mother about Yolanda, because she can’t stand the thought of Marissa swooping in, too late, all concern and readiness to help and smug pleasure at having seen what Angel did not, when until now she’s been so entirely unconcerned about anyone other than herself. She doesn’t deserve to know what’s going on with them. Unless she calls. If she calls, then Angel will tell her. Why won’t her mother call?

  Everything OK? she texts her father. To her grandmother she simply writes: Thinking about you. Love you. If it’s a good day, her grandmother can still read her texts, might even send a bizarre reply, co-authored by autocorrect. Lemonade constrict.

  Ryan, however, has written. Hey Angle, what’s happening? As she taps away at her screen, another beeps through. You busy lately? It would be great to see you guys. I could come see Connor anytime after school!! He makes liberal use of exclamation points and grinning emojis. He even stopped by last week, sat chatting with Yolanda in the living room. Yolanda loved him, smiling spacily at him from under her crocheted blanket, offering soda that Angel had to get up to pour. Ryan just took Yolanda’s interest in him for granted. “You’re a good boy,” Yolanda said with effort, and Ryan replied, “Thanks!”

  Angel pauses with her fingers above the screen. The bathroom door swings open and, fearing it’s Brianna, Angel quickly snaps up and turns on the tap.

  “Hey,” says Lizette, as the door wheezes shut behind her. Lizette holds Angel’s gaze in the mirror, unsmiling, and Angel’s heart pounds. She swallows and turns off the tap.

  Another text chimes through. Angel glances at her phone. LMK!!!!!

  “Who’s that?” Lizette steps behind her.

  “No one.” Angel silences the phone and slips it in her pocket, glad Lizette sees that she has other people in her life. She grips the wet edge of the counter to steady herself.

  “I bet.” Lizette pulls her in and hooks her chin over Angel’s shoulder. Angel wants to close her eyes and surrender against that softness at her back, but there’s something rigid in her that she doesn’t understand. Lizette’s chin digs into her shoulder, her arms are tight around her chest; Angel presses her nails against the counter. She forces herself to look at their reflection, to meet those green eyes. Lizette’s lips—soft lips, dry lips, pink without gloss or color—are challenging. Her loose hair falls down Angel’s throat and sweater, but Angel is immovable. If breath were possible, she knows she would inhale the citrus of Lizette’s shampoo, the warm, salt smell of her skin.

  It occurs to Angel that love doesn’t feel good to her. It’s truly lovesickness: malarial, systemic. It’s left her shaky and unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to concentrate.

  “Who was that?” Lizette’s voice is low, almost dangerous, and Angel wonders for a moment if she’ll wrest the phone from her pocket and find her out. But somehow, in speaking, Lizette has broken the taut enchantment; whatever was keeping Angel immobile has vanished.

  “No one.” This time a smile tugs at her mouth. She turns in the embrace to face Lizette, but when Angel moves to kiss her, Lizette pulls away, swats Angel’s ass.

  “Good.” Lizette walks to the door, her Pumas scuffing along with indifference.

  Her hand is on the knob when Angel calls out. “My grandma is dying.” This is the first time she’s said the words, and Angel is surprised by how easy they are to say, how simply the situation can be summed up.

  Lizette pauses. Under her gaze Angel backs against the bathroom wall. She slides down the tiles and hugs her knees to her. Her belly is still full against her thighs. She can’t look at Lizette, can’t bear to be rejected again.

  Lizette sits heavily beside her. “That sucks,” she says, cold.

  “Like, really soon she’s dying.” Angel can’t keep the desperate pitch from her voice. “Really soon.” She hates her tone, as if she’s pleading, trying to convince. She’s using this information as a kind of currency, spending it on sympathy, to get what she wants, which is for Lizette to hold her and care for her and to want to take her out in public. She wants Lizette to be her girlfriend.

  “Sucks,” Lizette says again. She stares straight ahead, emotionless as wax.

  “Yeah.” Angel thinks of all the people Lizette has lost: her mother, her father, that network of family that fell away after what her uncle did to her. In the face of all that loss, a dying grandmother is nothing. A dying grandmother is normal, expected, even right. It’s impossible to explain to Lizette what Yolanda’s dying means, how the natural order of her world is about to be upset, how Yolanda is like the keystone of an arch, and without her, everything will collapse to rubble.

  “Wait,” she says. “How’s stuff with you? I mean, like with your brother and his girlfriend? Are they . . .”

  “My brother’s living with this new chick.” Lizette’s voice is steady. “She’s okay. I don’t know her that good.”

  “Oh my god, Lizette. What are you going to do?”

  “Figure it out. Get a job. I’m staying with Selena until the lease runs out in December. He’s paying my part until then.”

  “But where will you go? Do you have family you can stay with?” She doesn’t, Angel doesn’t think, except those cousins. “Who will you stay with?”

  “Will you quit?” Lizette turns on her, almost savage. “I said I don’t know, Angel.”

  “Sorry.”

  They sit for a long time, listening to the pipes and distant voices passing in the hal
l. Again she thinks of asking Lizette to move in with them, but it’s not her house, not her place to ask, and where would Lizette sleep? In Angel’s single bed? She almost laughs to think of her father’s and grandmother’s reactions to that. Soon, of course, there will be room, a whole empty room. Angel can’t bear to think of it.

  “Hey, sorry ’bout your grandma.” Lizette wraps one arm around Angel and pulls her head to her shoulder. It’s not comfortable, and the gesture isn’t anything more than what a regular friend might do, but Angel allows her eyes to fall shut. A tap dribbles, and the funk of disinfectant is all around them.

  “So,” says Lizette, waggling Angel’s ear not very gently. Angel catches her breath. She wants, wants, wants. Her breastbone could nearly crack with longing, her nerve endings straining, her very marrow pressing to the edges of her bones toward Lizette. She lifts her lips to meet Lizette’s. Lizette places a single finger against Angel’s chest and pushes her back. “If you want, we can go to story time.”

  “Can I go to your house?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Lizette kisses her, then hoists herself up and bangs out of the bathroom.

  News spreads, and Yolanda receives cards and calls and visits from old friends and second cousins, some of whom she hasn’t seen in years. Yolanda feels for them; no one knows how to talk to the dying. She sits for as long as she can force herself to, but she’s so tired, and she wonders what, really, she means to them. They laugh, rehashing old stories—the time she leaned against the punch table at the fiesta and the whole thing tipped, the time the cashbox at Willard Romero’s grocery was stolen, and the culprit turned out to be someone’s seventy-year-old grandma—and that feels good, but there’s a seed of resistance rooted in her chest, a little piece that has already said goodbye to these extraneous people.

  She assumed that it was only a matter of time before Cal showed up, but as the weeks pass, it becomes less clear how he’d hear the news. They don’t have mutual friends—the few times they went out with others, it was with his friends and their wives, not people likely to hear about Yolanda’s diagnosis. And he’s been so thoroughly respectful of her wishes that he hasn’t called.

  Still, she waits for him, and is, frankly, surprised to find herself waiting.

  When she finally picks up the phone, her hand shakes with nervousness. She sits at her dressing table, back to the mirror because she can’t bear to look at the skinny creature with the comical bandage on her head. As she listens to the ringtone, Yolanda pictures him in his kitchen, spare but for a flourishing potted Christmas cactus on the table, gazing at her name on his phone, considering before silencing it. It’s what she deserves, leaving him like that, giving him the laziest possible explanation—I need time—but she can’t help feeling piqued: Cal never screens her calls.

  “Yolanda.” His voice is gravelly and warm from cigarettes. “It’s you.”

  Hearing him, Yolanda is for a moment no longer sick; for a moment, she’s her old, pre-dying self, and they’re about to arrange a steak dinner followed by pleasant sex in his dusty bedroom with those beautifully oiled shelves that he’s filled with paperback mysteries and power tools and assorted bottles of vitamins. How easy to fall back into that old life—and then the impossibility crashes into her.

  “Yolanda?” She pictures him extracting a toothpick from between his teeth, gazing at it blankly a moment before setting it on the table.

  Yolanda’s voice won’t come. In its absence it takes shape: a toad, solid and afraid, backing down her throat with powerful legs.

  Cal sighs. She imagines him chewing his thin lip.

  “Cal,” she finally says, relieved that her mind is clear, her voice still her own. “I need to start by saying I’m sorry.” But instead she can’t resist self-dramatizing. “I wanted to see you. I have brain cancer. I’m dying.” This is the wrong note, the falsest note she can strike while technically still being honest.

  But Cal doesn’t seem to hold the drama against her, maybe doesn’t even notice the performance. Being Cal, he attributes the best possible motives to her.

  “I wondered if something bad happened. It had to be bad, for you to leave like that. That wasn’t you. I wrecked my brain to come up with what I done.” He falters here, hearing, perhaps, his unfortunate phrasing. “I’ve been worried, Yolanda.”

  “I know.”

  The conversation proceeds: Cal is disbelieving, and Yolanda manages to sound stalwart and brave as she confirms that, yes, her time is limited, very limited.

  “Oh, no. Are they sure? Can I see you? Now?”

  She agrees; they hang up. It’s that easy to get Cal to come back to her. She throws the phone onto the bed, but misses and it falls to the floor. Can’t Yolanda even die with dignity? Now she’s simply pushed pain onto Cal; before, at least, he could hate her for leaving, but now she’s made him subordinate his suffering to hers.

  He’s there within the hour.

  “Oh, hey,” says Amadeo from the couch, surprised, when Cal steps into the kitchen, and beats a retreat to his room. Yolanda knows that Amadeo likes Cal, but he’s always been cagey around her boyfriends. Cal is tall and stooped, canvas jacket zipped up. He turns his acrylic stocking cap in his hands.

  He’s come directly from the job site (she was wrong, after all, to picture him standing in his kitchen; she’d already forgotten that people work on weekdays) and still smells of sawdust; he’s covered in it. Yolanda can’t help but picture it falling to the floor. Oh, shut up, she tells herself. This is a reunion.

  “Yo,” he says, and pulls her into his arms. She allows herself to relax against him, to remember his old smell beneath the sawdust. The smell is the smell of life before her diagnosis, and breathing him in now brings her back to that old person. He pulls her tighter and arousal quickens in her.

  She knows Cal’s body so well—long and brown and wiry, the ripples of loose flesh on his back. She’s seen pictures of the sandy-haired boy he once was, and can occasionally glimpse that boy’s stubborn, jutted jaw. He is a man who for decades worked outside with his shirt off, a man whose neck actually is red from the years of sun, crisscrossed in pale creases. She liked to run her finger along those creases. But she’s certain that if she were to lead him to her bedroom at the back of the house, he’d resist. With a shock, Yolanda remembers her current bony state.

  “Oh, god,” he murmurs into her shoulder. “Why did you keep it from me?”

  “You were having fun. You were on—” She sticks on the word. She sees real fear in his eyes, but pushes past, airily. “I didn’t want to bring you down.” This is disingenuous, and the knowledge flickers across his face, too. That he doesn’t call her on it is another sign of his generosity. He asks all the right questions: though it clearly pains him, he asks if they’ve told her how long she has.

  “Months, not years.” Yolanda means for her voice to be clipped, but it cracks into self-pity. For a moment she cries into the coarse canvas of his jacket.

  Cal pats her, and then gently steps out of her clutching embrace. His eyes are full of compassion and hurt. He unzips his jacket, removes it, and hangs it carefully on the back of a kitchen chair. He’s looking at his hands, not her, and Yolanda is afraid. “It’s been nearly six months since you’ve spoken to me, Yo. After over a year together. Why call now?”

  Yolanda shrugs. Because I missed you, she might say. Because I’m scared. Because I need to be distracted from what is happening. Because I am alone.

  Cal waits for her answer, and when it doesn’t come, he lets out a long breath, swipes his calloused hand down his cheek with a sound of sandpaper. He sits. Elbows on thighs, head dropped over limp hands. The knees of his Levi’s are worn nearly white. He searches the linoleum between his work boots. She remains standing before him, a child being reprimanded. The shoulders in his sweatshirt are strong.

  When he lifts his head, those brown, kind basset-hound eyes are steady. “If you want to go it alone, you can, Yo. But you should be aware that
it’s hard for me, too.”

  Oh, I’m sorry, she nearly says, flaring. What can I do to make my terminal cancer easier on you? But it’s not what she wants or means, and she knows she couldn’t get the sentences out whole anyway.

  “I’d like to help you, and it hurts that you don’t want me to.” He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, swipes them down his thighs, then hooks thumbs in pockets, before letting them fall once again. “I’d like to say that I’ll always be here for you, but I’m not sure it’s an offer that won’t expire.”

  She knows that he has only said what is true, and that it is, furthermore, a brave thing to say. She thinks about Cal’s marriage, the ex-wife who dropped him once she got her real estate license and whom he has never once, in Yolanda’s hearing, bad-mouthed. He’s not a man who deserves to be left, and yet he has been, again and again. He’s a good man.

  “Expire. Well.” Yolanda forces a laugh. “I guess the question is which expires first, me or the offer.” The words come, assured and correct, as if her brain has gathered its forces for this parting.

  Cal shakes his head. “You don’t have to be so self-protective, Yolanda.” Yolanda senses that if she took his hand now, he would follow her to the bedroom. It would be easy, wonderfully easy, to draw him toward her, to move his hands to her breasts. And god knows Yolanda needs it. She wants him on top of her, crushing the pain out of her.

  He’s not her true love, and she understands that she won’t, after all, find that now. She can appreciate the comfort he gives, the possibility that when it happens she won’t be alone. But she doesn’t reach for him. Perhaps she simply—even at this stage—needs to prove to him that she doesn’t need him. Perhaps, for once, she is thinking of Cal.

  “Thank you for coming, Cal,” she says gently, focusing hard on each word. “It means so much to me. I appreciate the time we’ve had together.” The words sound scripted, simultaneously too saccharine and too cold, but they are true.