The Five Wounds Read online

  “I’m serious. Spit it out.” At Brianna’s temples and above her upper lip, sweat rises.

  “No.” The word comes out parched. Angel licks her lips. “No.”

  Brianna half stands, her skirt rumpled and riding up, then stops in that position. “I am warning you, Angel. We have rules here, and if you want to stay in this community you need to abide by them.”

  “You kicked Lizette out for nothing.”

  “Lizette left. She made the decision to leave.”

  “Because you forced her out! She needed help, more help than any of us, and instead you forced her out! Right now she probably doesn’t even have food in the house except maybe cereal. She only has her brother and he moved out, and now where’s she going to go? To some stranger she barely knows? With a GED she could’ve done so many good things, like a job. And what about Mercedes? None of this is Mercedes’s fault.”

  Brianna is miserable; she doesn’t want to be doing this, but can’t stop herself. “Angel, I am warning you: Get control of yourself. You are pushing boundaries, and that will not be tolerated.”

  “Boundaries?” cries Angel. “Oh, please, tell me more about boundaries. Tell how sleeping with my dad isn’t pushing boundaries!”

  Brianna’s breath is sharp.

  “Wait, what?” asks Trinity. “Are you for serious?”

  Angel is crying, her sobs loud and messy. The girls watch—some with eyes on Angel, some with eyes on Brianna, their mouths actually agape.

  “Angelica Padilla, spit out your gum now, or there will be serious consequences.” It never crossed her mind that Angel would confront her, and like this, in public. She assumed that Angel would turn inward with her suspicions, that she’d second-guess herself—and that if Angel did somehow give voice to her suspicions—in private, after school, maybe—that she’d ultimately believe Brianna, might even apologize for thinking her teacher could be so preposterously unprofessional. Brianna had trusted in her power over the girl. Foolish, foolish. And she feels obscurely betrayed by Angel, too, as if she broke a pact—of what? Affection? After all Brianna has done to support her!

  The movement of Angel’s mouth is robotic. Her face is contorted, anguished, as she chomps. She looks like she is about to be ill.

  “Okay, Angel. You’ve made your decision. Out.”

  Angel’s mouth stills. Her tear-glossed eyes widen in disbelief.

  Brianna holds her gaze for a moment, then, feeling very calm and self-contained, sits and turns her attention to the stack of papers on her desk. Ache blooms in her heart. Evenly, without looking up, she says, “You heard me. Don’t come back.”

  Just a couple hours after his daughter leaves for school, she’s back, Connor babbling in her arms. Without a word, she tosses the keys on the table, and spends the rest of the morning shut in his mother’s room with the baby.

  Amadeo gets up several times, beer in hand, pretending that he’s on the way to the bathroom, but instead stands listening at his mother’s bedroom door. Occasionally he hears murmurs, but mostly silence. Maybe they’re napping in there. Or maybe Angel has already told his mother that he slept with her teacher, and they’re so united against him they’re beyond language.

  When Angel helps her grandmother to the bathroom, or changes Connor, Amadeo tries to catch her eye, but she doesn’t look down the hall in his direction. Each time the door clicks shut behind her. Amadeo brings lunch—two bowls of canned chicken noodle—but no one answers his knock. He leaves the tray outside the door, and when he comes back, one has been brought inside, the other left untouched.

  At dusk, she emerges again, whispering to Connor. She crosses the hall, shutting the bathroom door. Water runs, and she’s in there so long he understands that she’s bathing the baby. Connor squeals, but his daughter’s replies are muted.

  Amadeo sits rigidly on the couch, his eye trained on the hall, his tense fingers pressing into the warm can. The beers do nothing to still his agitation.

  The living room has darkened. He’s lying in wait for his daughter, though he doesn’t exactly know what he wants from her. Rather, he does know what he wants from her: attention, forgiveness, love. He wants her to join him in the living room. All things he has no right to.

  When she opens the door, Connor rubs his eyes and the top of his head, mussing his damp curls. The smell of baby shampoo reaches Amadeo and fills him with a yearning nostalgia for a simpler, cozier time, a time that has never, for him, existed.

  “Hey!” he calls, and she freezes without turning. “Aren’t you going to eat? Have you eaten all day?”

  “No. Thanks. We’re going to bed.”

  “We need to talk.” His voice comes out sounding high. “You can’t just ignore me. I’m your dad.” He realizes that pulling rank is not the best tactic, given his recent sins against her, and given how much responsibility she has had to shoulder. Her face is in shadow.

  “What do you want to talk about?” She hitches the baby higher on her hip.

  Amadeo falters. “Nothing, I guess. You go ahead and put him to bed.”

  Now she turns to him. Her jaw is set. When Connor catches sight of his grandfather, his face splits into a rubbery grin and he grabs at the air to wave. Amadeo doesn’t wave back. “We could talk about the fact that you’re drinking all the damn time. Or, you know, we could talk about how I’m doing in school. You may be interested to know that I got kicked out. For chewing a piece of gum. Your little girlfriend expelled me.”

  “What? But you’re one of the best in the class. Brianna told me so.”

  Angel flaps one arm up at the pointlessness of his argument, lets it fall.

  “She can’t do that to you. I’m going to talk to her. I’ll go there now.”

  “You think that’s gonna work? Mr. President of the PTA? And how are you going to get there? Limo?”

  “I’ll take care of this, Angel.”

  “Whatever.”

  Long after, Amadeo contemplates the phone in his hand, then dials. As he listens to the phone ring and ring, his heart sloshes in his chest. He’s enraged at this woman for bullying his daughter, but he’s nervous, too, and he hates that he’s so nervous. And he’s also unsure, both of his own rights and of Angel’s. He’s already composing his voicemail in his head (It’s Amadeo, we need to talk) when she picks up.

  “Before you say anything, I want to be clear that I am speaking to you in an official capacity, as Angel’s teacher.”

  “You’re ruining her life over a piece of gum?”

  Brianna laughs, one contemptuous honk. “That’s a bit of an overstatement, don’t you think?”

  “You’re kicking her out of school over a piece of gum. It’s not about gum, and you know it.”

  Amadeo pictures her exactly, her splotchy flushed throat, the anxious blinking. But when she speaks her voice is smooth and collected, brittle. It is the voice of Valerie, of Monica Gutierrez-Larsen, the voice of all these pushy professional women who think they can get the best of him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Padilla. The zero-tolerance rule is what keeps the program functioning.”

  “Mr. Padilla? You fucking joking me?”

  Brianna presses on. “It’s what keeps the classroom a safe space. I would be remiss in my responsibilities if I allowed students to break rules without consequences. Consequences are what teach us—”

  “I think my daughter knows about consequences. You can’t just kick a kid out for chewing gum.”

  “I can. Angelica broke the classroom rules. Gum is a choking hazard. Gum destroys classroom equipment.”

  “Angel spits her gum in the trash. And what kind of fucking equipment you got in there?”

  “Smart Starts! is a privilege, not a right, and it is supported by a private foundation. We have a waiting list of girls who will be grateful for Angel’s spot and who are more than willing to abide by the rules.”

  She must have rehearsed this. This Brianna sounds not at all like the awkward girl who w
as so ashamed of her virginity. He’s shivering as if he were cold. Maybe he is cold.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” Amadeo says. “Taking out your feelings about whatever happened with us on a kid. On two kids. You’re fucking mental.”

  “This has nothing to do with my feelings, Mr. Padilla. This is about policy.”

  “Would you quit with that bullshit? We’ve seen each other naked. I’m sorry it didn’t work out with us. What, you wanted to be Angel’s stepmother?” Again that imagined future presents itself: the green lawn, the big house with pillars and sunny rooms, Amadeo and Brianna and Angel and Connor, and, in Brianna’s arms, a new baby. He’s imagined it so clearly it has the quality of a memory. He realizes with a pang that he’d never included his mother in this picture.

  “Why would you tell her? Do you always talk to your daughter about your sex life?”

  “I didn’t tell her. She ran into us, remember? She asked me.”

  “So? Then you lie.”

  “I’m not going to lie to my kid. I’m trying to be an honest person that takes responsibility.”

  “Dandy for you. You have nothing to lose. I jeopardized my whole job for this.”

  “My daughter! I have my daughter to lose!”

  “Thank you for calling, Mr. Padilla. I appreciate your concern, and I know that your concern is very valuable to your daughter. She’ll continue to need your support.”

  “Please,” says Amadeo. “Angel loves school. She loves you. Her grandmother is dying right now. My mother.”

  After a silence, Brianna says slowly, “Listen. At this point it’s out of my hands. But Angel could talk to the agency president.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Amadeo says. He throws the phone across the living room. It lands on the kitchen linoleum and skids into the baseboards. “Fucking bitch,” he says, and then worries that Brianna has heard him. He retrieves the phone and puts his ear to it. But the phone isn’t working. It won’t work again. Then he worries that he’s wakened his mother or daughter or the baby. He steps quietly into the hall, listens, but there’s no sound coming from either bedroom.

  Now he wants to wake Angel, to let her know he tried, to let her know how truly awful Brianna is. As if Eric Maxwell would listen to a sixteen-year-old girl. He wants Angel to know that he sacrificed his cell phone to her cause. But he checks his impulse to prove to her what a good father he is, because a good father wouldn’t tell his daughter about any of this. A good father would protect her.

  Amadeo whirls uselessly on one foot. Then he goes to the fridge and helps himself to another beer.

  The first early snow comes, a dry flurry that doesn’t accumulate and stops by noon, and along with it the spicy smell of piñon smoke rising from neighbors’ chimneys. It’s late November. In Española, Christmas decorations are up, but Angel rarely goes into town now.

  There was talk about moving Yolanda to Valerie’s in Albuquerque, where she’d be closer to hospitals, but Yolanda wept. “My house.”

  So they’ve pushed Yolanda’s canopy bed against the wall, taken out the bureau and dressing table, all to make room for an ugly hospital bed that rises and falls. And a commode with a removable gray plastic pan. Yolanda is now unable to do things that she could manage even a week and a half ago: walk with assistance to the bathroom, for example.

  Yolanda drifts, she mumbles, she counts to herself, brow furrowed. She sips most of her food through a straw: apple juice, thick vitamin shakes, chocolate milk made with half-and-half for the calories.

  It’s beyond Angel’s comprehension how something in the brain can cause her grandmother to lose so much weight in just a few short weeks. Nonetheless, it’s physical work, helping Yolanda onto the wheelchair or commode. When her grandmother stands—lurching, unsteady—her buttocks and thighs under her nightgown are so emaciated that the elastic on her underpants slips.

  When it becomes clear that Yolanda can no longer clean herself, she submits to Angel, her face pinched with humiliation. They buy plastic boxes of baby wipes in bulk. Angel holds each wipe in her hands to warm it, whether she uses it on Connor or on her grandmother.

  “Well,” Yolanda says, resigned. “I guess I’ve wiped your button. Batten.”

  Once, to her eternal shame, Angel grouches, “Why can’t Dad ever help?”

  “No!” cries Yolanda, and Angel is shocked by the look of alarm that crosses her grandmother’s face.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  The caretaking is all-consuming. Angel doesn’t know what they’d have done if she hadn’t been expelled. Yet she mourns her time at Smart Starts!, and goes over and over the events of that morning. She wanted to spit the gum out, she really did. The wad was stale, and as she chewed the sour mass, jaw aching, nausea rising, her mouth filled with saliva. Her teacher was unmoved by Angel’s sorrow, completely without sympathy or kindness or love, and Angel wasn’t so caught up in her sobs that she didn’t register the distaste in Brianna’s expression.

  Driving to school that morning, Angel had thought about how it would be when she and Brianna finally talked about everything—Lizette, her father. She was scared of the conversation, yet also looked forward to it. Angel would explain that her feelings were hurt, and Brianna would apologize. Or if she didn’t apologize, she would at least explain to Angel that actually it was fine, totally normal, that she’d slept with Amadeo, that they were adults and it wasn’t actually the betrayal Angel felt it was. There was never any question in Angel’s mind that she would forgive her teacher. She expected, after all, that people would mistreat her—that people in general mistreat other people—and though she minded, really, really minded, what she wanted was the time after, when they could be closer for it. Even if Brianna and her father had lied outright and told her that nothing had ever happened between them, Angel would have believed them. Even in the face of glaring evidence, Angel would have believed them, because she needs them.

  Her whole life, Angel has tiptoed around adults, trying to be good, then all at once this anger poured out of her, all of it directed at this woman Angel loves—loved, she realizes now. The crazy thing is that Angel even once dreamed of Brianna being her stepmother. Now, she feels actual hatred toward Brianna, who is not at all the person she pretended to be, the person Angel needed her to be.

  Her grandmother is all Angel has left, her grandmother and her son.

  THANKSGIVING IS SUBDUED, without arguments or the smell of cooking. Valerie brings most of the dishes already prepared in plastic containers, which they reheat, without even putting out platters. Yolanda sits quietly in her wheelchair, eating nothing, gesturing as if punctuating a silent conversation with someone not there. Tíve steals glances at his niece and then looks away, Adam’s apple bobbing. Lily’s eyes keep welling up, but she swipes the tears away, no-nonsense.

  Even Sarah, who can usually be counted on to enliven a gathering, is muted. “This is good chicken, Mom,” she says gravely.

  “Thanks. I figure no one likes turkey anyhow.”

  With difficulty, Yolanda lifts her dinner roll from a pool of gravy on her untouched plate and inspects it. She is slouched in her chair, head tilted. For nearly a minute, as she stares at the roll, gravy drips onto her dress, and they all watch in silence. Finally she drops the roll. It tumbles down her front, bounces off her lap to the floor, the stillness broken.

  Around the table, exhalations. Yolanda works her lips. When Tíve cuts himself a bite of chicken, the knife squeals against his plate.

  Valerie clears her throat. “Angel said you got your license reinstated, brother.”

  “Yeah.”

  Ordinarily Angel might point out that he’s still on probation, but she doesn’t.

  “Good.” Valerie’s voice is loud. “Mom’s not able to tell you this anymore, so I have to. She depends on you, Angel depends on you, that baby depends on you.”

  Angel flashes an alarmed look at her father, but he just pushes his fork into his uneaten potatoes. “You
think I don’t know that?”

  “Mom,” says Lily. “Leave him alone. You’re just sad.”

  “Yeah.” Valerie’s eyes redden. “I’m not wrong, but yeah.”

  They are all relieved when Yolanda nods off. Angel and Valerie help her into bed, turn the blinds to cut off the sunlight. Soon after, Valerie and the girls leave, and all around, the hugs are long and quiet.

  THAT EVENING, Ryan shows up in a puffer coat. “Hey!” he calls, cheerful, and then he catches sight of Yolanda listing in the chair, despite the cushions Angel has shoved around her. “Hey,” he says, hushed. He’s come bearing gifts: a chocolate Advent calendar each for Connor and Angel, with $1.99 stickers still affixed, and a box of Get Well Wellness tea. “For your grandma.” He reddens.

  Angel doesn’t even have the heart to rip into him. “Gramma, remember Ryan, Connor’s dad?”

  Yolanda brightens; this is more interest than she’s shown in weeks.

  “Nice to see you, Mrs. Padilla,” Ryan says, hand extended. “Happy Thanksgiving.” When it’s clear that Yolanda won’t lift her hand to his, he places the tea on the slope of her lap. “Just a little something.”

  She’s not speaking well today, but she smiles, turns the box of tea in her hands, cellophane crinkling.

  “I hope you feel better.”

  With embarrassment, Angel notes that her grandmother’s sweatpants are bunched and puffy at the crotch, and there’s yogurt crusted on her chin that Angel failed to wipe away. It’s intolerable that Ryan should see them like this, should stand before them, pleased with his meager, useless gifts.

  “Thanks for coming,” Angel says. “We’re kind of busy.”

  Yolanda gazes at the door long after Angel has shut it behind him. “Nice boy,” she says.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, during Connor’s nap, Angel lies beside her grandmother on the small hospital bed, careful not to crush her limbs. The bed creaks, but holds them both.

  The television is on, some manic game show, with dramatic music and flashing lights and stricken faces. Some days, Angel tries to engage with the television, cracking jokes, making guesses of her own, an energetic performance for her grandmother. But today, she is quiet, her head on the edge of her grandmother’s pillow.