The Five Wounds Read online

  “I’m just saying you’re lucky, because there are churches right here in this town waiting and hoping you’ll join.” Jen looks like she might cry.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s churches in Honduras,” Christy says.

  “You know, you could buy a whole roll of tickets for nothing at Dollarland,” says Trinity helpfully. “Then you’d definitely win.”

  Jen has buried her face in her hands, and only now does Angel notice that she’s not wearing her promise ring.

  “Hey,” Angel whispers. “Are you okay? Are things cool with Jared?”

  Jen looks squarely at Angel, stricken. Her eyes gleam with unspilled tears.

  Lizette closes her workbook quietly and stands. She announces, “I’d like to call a Community Meeting.”

  Brianna sits up in surprise. “Uh, okay,” she says, then looks as if she regrets it.

  The girls scramble their desks into a circle, as if it’s totally normal protocol for a student to call Community Meeting. Angel hesitates, then drags her own desk into the circle.

  Lizette paces at the front of the classroom while the girls settle. Near the door, Brianna stands uncertainly, arms crossed, weight on one foot. It’s a provisional stance, as if she might at any moment turn and bolt. Lizette stops pacing, and now she faces their teacher. “I have an issue I need to raise about favoritism.”

  Brianna opens her mouth, shuts it.

  “And one of your favorites is Angel, which, whatever. And one of them is Jen, who breaks rules all the time, trying to convert our butts during work period. I was in the middle of a math practice test just now when she started running her mouth. Which is not respecting others or supporting each other.” She taps the relevant rules, numbers one and five, on the butcher paper.

  Jen clutches her roll of raffle tickets, her nostrils flared and white. Tears roll down her face.

  “Lizette,” says Angel quietly. “Stop.” I don’t think Jen’s okay, she wants to say, but doesn’t want to embarrass Jen.

  “Shut up,” Lizette tells her, and turns back to Brianna. “Some of us want to do our work and get our GEDs. So my point is, don’t have favorites, and make everyone follow the rules the same way. Please.” She clears her throat. “That’s all.” She sits at her desk and stares ahead of her at a spot on the carpet.

  The girls swivel toward Brianna. Their teacher inhales shakily, but the breath seems to steady her. “That was way out of line, Lizette.” Her voice is rigid. She strides to the front of the classroom and faces them, legs apart, hands on hips, shoulders flung back: her power stance. “I do not have favorites, I absolutely do not. If you have issues you want to bring up about how I run this class, we can schedule a meeting. I am always available.”

  “Right. You’re always so supportive of me.”

  “Please stop fighting, guys,” Jen says.

  “You held the classroom hostage with that little ‘Community Meeting’ stunt. You wanted to humiliate me publicly.”

  “That’s not true! You claim this is a democracy. But you’re a dictator!”

  “Um, okay. Let’s have a little perspective, shall we? Also, I never claimed this was a democracy. I claimed that the students should have some input, a limited stake in the running of the classroom. But I am the teacher. It is my job, a job for which I’m paid very badly, to ensure that this whole ship doesn’t sink.” Brianna has abandoned the power stance. She’s keyed up, hands flying here and there and chopping at the air. As her voice climbs, Angel hunches as if under a barrage. A deep embarrassment is welling in her: for Brianna, who should know better than to let Lizette get to her, and also for Lizette, who should know better than to behave this way. Both of them are being idiots. “I am the one with a degree and a shitty little salary and training in parent outreach.”

  “This is our school!” says Lizette.

  “If it weren’t for this school, you’d be dropouts.”

  The girls turn shocked faces on their teacher. “I wouldn’t,” says Ysenia. I wouldn’t either, thinks Angel, but she isn’t at all sure that’s true. After all, she left EVHS.

  Lizette’s eyes are a glint of green between thick lashes. “You don’t even got a kid. What do you know about what we go through?”

  “Yeah, miss,” says Christy, as if genuinely curious. “Do you even got a stepkid? A baby brother?”

  “Children are raised successfully every day.” Brianna enunciates each word.

  “Just not by us,” says Angel quietly.

  Brianna widens her eyes at Angel. Her hands fall to her sides, then she looks around the classroom helplessly. “Excuse me, please.” She makes for the door.

  “Hey!” yells Lizette. Brianna stops, then turns. “You can’t walk out of Community Meeting.”

  Angel is surprised at Lizette’s tone: the woundedness, the shock that Brianna would disrespect such an essential, esteemed institution.

  “Yeah,” says Jen. “Let’s just work it out together.”

  Brianna shakes her head and leaves. Behind her, the door falls quietly shut.

  “Are you serious?” Jen demands of the shut door.

  “Fucking bitch,” says Lizette. Her arms clutch her middle, as if she’s been punched.

  “Stop, Lizette,” says Angel.

  “You got the hots for her? You like a white girl? You like tiny little titties?”

  Ysenia scrunches up her nose. “Too far. That is seriously disgusting, Lizette.”

  Angel flushes. “You’re not being fair.”

  “What the fuck is fair? She’s not fair. Just because she thinks you’re so great, Angel. What makes you so much better than any of us?”

  “I’m not better,” Angel says, stung. The argument is moving too swiftly, she can’t grasp it. She stands before Lizette, but now Lizette is glaring stubbornly at her lap. Angel longs to touch her, but doesn’t know if she’s allowed to touch her at this stage of their relationship or whatever it is, and plus they’re in public, and she’s lost track of the distinction between what’s a normal gesture and what could give them away. “We need this program.”

  Angel is about to put an arm around her, to draw her close, but then Ysenia is kneeling before Lizette on the carpet, both arms encircling her. “It’s okay, Liz.” Lizette drops her head onto Ysenia’s shoulder and shuts her eyes. Her expression releases in a way it never has with Angel.

  “She’s not a bad person, and when we leave we’ll have options.” Angel is panicky. “Like, we could go to college. We could move away.”

  From the knot of Ysenia’s arms, Lizette raises her green eyes to Angel as if she’s the only one in the room. Between the heavy swaths of hair, her face is open, needing, and the sight of it guts Angel. Lizette is asking her for help.

  If only they could be alone. If only everything keeping them apart—school and Brianna and illness and their babies—could be swept aside, and they could be pressed against each other. Then they could talk properly.

  She moves toward Lizette, arms out. “Just go along with it, Lizette.”

  What was open in Lizette’s face now snaps shut. She narrows those eyes and Angel freezes. Her mouth—that beautiful mouth—lifts in a sneer. “Go along with it. Right.” She seems to come to a decision. “Fuck this.” Lizette doesn’t even sound mad anymore, just resigned. She extracts herself from Ysenia’s clasp and stands, sweeps her belongings from her desk—papers, lip gloss, journal, hand sanitizer, pacifier, pens—dumps them into her purse, swings the purse onto her shoulder, and then she’s out the door and down the hall toward the nursery.

  “Wait,” says Jen, and several of the girls call, too, but only Angel follows her.

  “Lizette!”

  She wheels around. “Fuck you, Angel.”

  Angel jerks back. Her face pulses with heat.

  Lizette will run into Brianna in the hall, Angel thinks. Brianna will apologize, and they’ll make up, and both of them will return to the classroom. The class will push the desks back to how they should be at ten thirty on
a Wednesday morning, and they’ll all go on with their workbooks. Later, Lizette and Angel will stand together somewhere quiet, and Lizette will pull her in, and this hurt will be worth it.

  But no, a few minutes later, as the girls sit in silence, some with their eyes fixed on the classroom door, some fixed on the window, which overlooks the Family Foundations entrance, Lizette steps outside, Mercedes in her arms. The girls cluster at the window, but in a moment she’s disappeared around the corner of the building.

  Trinity is the first to speak. “You guys, what just happened?”

  Amadeo hasn’t been to the morada in months, not since Good Friday. He’s almost surprised when he finds the key still on his dresser, behind a tissue box and among a clutter of loose vitamins and scratched CDs and the certificate of completion from his DWI class. He didn’t expect he’d need to come back here, not after getting the nails.

  He doesn’t switch on the light. The morada remains largely empty until the next Ash Wednesday. Lemony sun filters weakly through the beige-painted window, illuminating the chaotic brushstrokes. The sealed air is hushed and smells faintly of dirt. Amadeo kneels before the statue of the suffering Christ and bows his head. He didn’t bring his Rosary, which is just as well, because he’s never prayed it alone and he doesn’t know all the Mysteries, doesn’t even know whether it’s the day or the season or whatever for the Sorrowful or the Glorious or the Luminous. He clamps shut his eyes and tries to focus on the shifting red-black behind his eyelids. Our Father, who art in heaven, he begins, then loses track: Please, God, let my mother be all right. A stupid prayer, because his mother is most emphatically not going to be all right. Almost instantly, he’s slipped back into thinking about Brianna, his sadness at how things ended, and then he’s running through the conversation again, heart thudding, and then he’s crying out in his mind to Brianna or God or to whomever, justifying himself, and before he knows it, he’s not praying at all, but ranting.

  Once again he trains his eyes on the Christ up there.

  “My mother’s dying,” he tells the statue.

  The man on his cross offers nothing. He is gazing at his own bleeding feet.

  Jesus also had to take leave of his mother. Amadeo tries to remember this, but the story feels distant and dead.

  The story was sadder for Mary, Amadeo realizes, because Jesus never doubted he was the Son of God. Mary, on the other hand—surely she had her doubts. Even if she loved her son and was proud of him, and liked the stuff he was saying about love and humility and all that, surely she sometimes wondered if her kid was nothing more than a deluded narcissist, with gifts, not of prophecy or divinity, but mere charisma. At what point did she begin to believe him, this kid whose diapers she changed and spit-up she wiped? Did she ever wonder if the wine and fishes were cheap conjuring tricks? Until they rolled that stone away, was she ever entirely free of doubt?

  At what point might he, Amadeo, begin to believe that Connor, with his unhinged joyful garble, his single-minded focus on gumming his copy of Good Night, Gorilla, might have something to teach him?

  He always assumed there was time, time to grow up, time to quit drinking, time to become the astonishing individual he’s surely been on his way to becoming. Now, what’s the point? Who is his audience?

  The morada is changed. How had he ever believed this place held magic? It’s just an old gas station, empty but for some benches. He feels like a fool for ever having trusted in it. He should have known better than to seek comfort here.

  This whole enterprise—the hermandad, the ritual—it’s all just created by people, feeble, limited people. He thinks of himself hauling the cross up Calvario. His swagger, his exaggerated acting, his humiliating belief that the performance meant something. All the while his mother was losing herself.

  “Why?” he asks the man on the cross. “Why do you got to make it all so hard?” But he’s entirely alone in this room.

  He flexes his hand, pokes the pink knot of scar. He remembers the fact that the injury hurt, but he can’t summon an actual memory of the pain, which is something his mother has said about childbirth. “That’s why, like an idiot, I went and did it again. But you were worth it, hijito.” If he can’t remember the pain, how could it have meant anything at all? How could Christ’s pain have meant anything over all these centuries?

  The knuckles of his thumbs are pressed into his eye sockets, smearing flashes of red and green, when he hears a key grinding in the door. He leans back on his heels, blinks. The door scrapes along the concrete, and daylight leaps in.

  “Oh,” says Al Martinez. He runs his hands through still-thick hair. “I didn’t think anyone was here. The lot was empty.” Another younger, smaller man is with him.

  “Hey,” Amadeo says eagerly, standing.

  The two men hover near the door. “Don’t let me disturb you,” says Al.

  “No, no! I’m not disturbed.”

  “This is my boy, Isaiah. Isaiah, Amadeo.” Al flashes a guilty glance at his son.

  So this is the addict. “Good to meet you, man.” Amadeo shakes his hand.

  Isaiah Martinez is thinner and less robust than his father, but takes after him, with a short beard and features that are fine and handsome. When he smiles, the skin around his steady eyes creases.

  “I wanted to show him the place,” Al says.

  Amadeo would like to engage the old guy in conversation, but they’ve never spoken about anything not directly related to the morada. Maybe they can go get something to eat. “So how’re you guys doing?”

  But both men have turned away from Amadeo. Isaiah is standing with his arms loose at his sides, staring at the statue of Christ.

  For his part, Amadeo sees only Al’s expression—the love and worry, the gentle loosening of the older man’s features—and he is struck in his solar plexus by something he can’t precisely identify, something that isn’t quite envy and isn’t admiration, but is in the same family. The feeling is aching, and pleasurable, too, and also unbearable in its intensity. He chuckles unconvincingly. “Yeah, whoever made that Jesus didn’t hold back, huh.”

  Isaiah turns and smiles a pained smile at Amadeo, eyes shining. “My girlfriend OD’d last night. Just thirty years old and a hundred pounds and now she’s gone.” When his father puts a hand on his wrist, Isaiah falters. “I wish I’d been there.”

  Amadeo hooks his thumbs in his pockets, then removes them. He straightens.

  “Listen, son,” Al says, swiveling his attention slowly to Amadeo. “Will you pray with us?”

  And as if he’s a child being led to some place of safety where he’s never been, Amadeo nods, and the three of them make their way to their knees. There, with the press of the concrete rooting him to the dirt and the whole spinning planet, Amadeo thinks not of himself, but prays, truly prays, for this lost young woman and this addicted man and for this father who loves him.

  Only when she gets home on Friday afternoon, with the whole desolate weekend ahead of her, does Angel understand that the fight on Wednesday was irrevocable. Lizette made her decision, and she will not be going back on it. Angel drops onto her bed, watching from a fetal position as Connor plays with a sealed tube of diaper ointment on the floor.

  Angel is sick of irrevocability: of fights, of illness, of death.

  How are you? she texts Lizette, then feels stupid. As overtures go, it’s too flip. Angel should address the fight, should address the fact that Lizette hasn’t been in school. She should address the fact that, without Lizette, Smart Starts! is a different, much worse place. They’ve all turned against Brianna, even Jen. Brianna has been formal and unsmiling, setting them to work individually in their workbooks.

  This afternoon’s Community Meeting was a subdued affair, with no mention of Wednesday. “Okay,” Brianna said into the silence as the girls looked at their nails. “How about we go around and do Peaches and Pits.” And when Ysenia, who went first, gave only a Peach (“We had a birthday for my grandpa and that was fun”), Brianna didn�
�t press her, and no one else offered a Pit either.

  When it was Angel’s turn, she truly couldn’t think of a Peach, but she was surprised by the spite in her voice when she spoke. “I don’t have a Peach.” Her arms were crossed, a defiant posture that Angel realized was Lizette’s.

  Brianna startled, seeming to also recognize Lizette. “Okay. Pass, then. Christy?”

  Lizette was right; in walking out on Wednesday, Brianna shook the bedrock of the classroom, and then betrayed them all further by letting Lizette walk out. After school, Angel peered into Lizette’s desk, hoping to find something of hers, something she could hold, maybe, or something essential she’d need to return to her. But Lizette had cleared out everything.

  She hasn’t texted back. Angel should probably address the fact that she’s been going nuts without any word from her, that she checks her phone a thousand times a day, that her heart hurts from being clenched. She should, probably, address the fact that she’s in love with Lizette. So she adds, Are you okay? Which is lame, and offensive, too, because she’s assuming that Lizette isn’t okay, that what happened was terrible, and won’t pointing out how terrible it is make Lizette feel worse? How are you? she tries—a nice, neutral, open-ended question, one that demonstrates caring—but it’s too ordinary. And now the sheer number of texts—six, including three unanswered ones from yesterday—looks so desperate. She should stop—let Lizette answer if she wants, and if she doesn’t, well, then, fine. But why should Angel be ashamed of how she feels? Be true to yourself, the magnet on her grandmother’s fridge implores. I miss you, she writes, but rethinks it. Miss you.

  Then she remembers the glaring fact that the lease is up in less than two months and Lizette is almost homeless. She’s been so wrapped up in her grandmother that she hasn’t even thought about the urgency of Lizette’s situation. Are you okay?

  Stop, Angel rebukes herself. She jams her phone in her sock drawer.

  Just before bed, Angel allows herself to check her phone. Lizette hasn’t texted, but there is a missed call from her, fifty-three minutes ago.

  Angel sits upright on the edge of her bed and rings back, almost numb with nervousness.