Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(44)

What was the use in arguing? I got in her old Chevy pickup and let her take me to the clinic. She helped me up the stairs and checked me in, and it was all I could do not to take her with me into the examination room so she could hold my hand through it all.

Instead, I went in alone. A woman with dark curls and an unlined face introduced herself as Dr. Hernandez.

“I had a, uh, mass removed, and it hurts a lot,” I told her, lifting up my shirt. “I’m going to go back to my doctor at home”—a tiny fib, I reasoned—“but I was hoping you could give me something to ease the pain until I get there.”

She inspected the incision, then pressed down on it with her fingers while I gritted my teeth and willed myself not to boot her in the head. “It hurts because it’s infected,” she said. “You should have had these stitches out at least a week ago.”

“I thought they would dissolve.”

“Wrong type of stitches. I’m going to use a local anesthetic to numb you up. It’s going to hurt while I do it, but you’ll feel better after.” She plunged an enormous syringe into my stomach, pushing it this way and that as she loaded my skin with a cold-feeling fluid.

“It—still—hurts,” I gasped as she eased the needle out.

She tossed it into a medical waste bin and smiled at me. “But now it doesn’t anymore, right?”

I grimaced, though the pain was giving way to a tingling sensation. Maybe local anesthesia would be how I would get through the next few months. But I’d have to find a physician—someone other than Dr. Sanders—who would agree to take a palliative, rather than prescriptive, approach. Which could be complicated.

Dr. Hernandez used tweezers to pull bloody-looking stitches from my skin, cleaned the wound out, and told me to apply ointment and new bandages for a week. Then she handed me a prescription for an antibiotic. “This should knock out the infection. You’ll feel better in a day or two, but don’t stop until you’ve taken every last pill. Your incision could get worse if you’re not careful. I’ve seen cases of septic shock when patients haven’t been compliant with their medicine.”

I thanked her for this uplifting morsel of information and returned to the waiting room. “All set,” I told Milagros.

She nodded, then looped her arm under mine. We left the clinic that way, with me leaning on an elderly woman for strength, and her holding me up as though I was a wisp of a girl. As she helped me into the Chevy, I began to cry. The soothing, the kindness, the subtle mothering: these acts comforted even as they reminded me of what I did not have. Because at that moment, what I longed for most was not my life before my husband came out, or even before I set foot in Dr. Sanders’s office. It wasn’t even Paul and my father, the two people in this world who loved me most. It was my mother.

Milagros seemed to understand that I was not crying out of pain. “It’s okay, mija. Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay. You’re here. You’re alive.”

“That’s the problem,” I said from behind my hands. “I’m not supposed to be.” I thought of the plane crash, and the truck on the hiking path. Cancer aside, weren’t these evidence I was fated for a short and unspectacular life?

“And who told you that?” Milagros said, not unkindly. “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be until it’s over and you aren’t anymore. Prince or pauper, that’s how it works for us all.”

If this was true, then why was I meant to be driving down a dirt road in the middle of a tiny island in the Caribbean? Why was I meant to die in a rapid and devastating manner, just like my mother?

I looked out the window for wild horses, but there were no hidden signs or answers. Only trees and bushes and vines, blurring into a seemingly endless line of green.





TWENTY-THREE


My mother was buried in a suburb just outside of Detroit, three hours from our home, in a cemetery where her own parents and many of her relatives lay.

It might as well have been Uzbekistan.

It wasn’t as though physical proximity to the cemetery would have allowed me to interact with her, but I was still furious. It was just one more way in which she had been kept from me.

Perhaps because of this, in the months following my mother’s death—our death, really, as our family as we knew it had died there next to her—our father drove me and Paul to the cemetery as often as we requested. Then, after several exhausting months of weekend travel, he said no. “I’m tired, and we’re beginning to outstay our welcome with my cousins,” he told us, referring to the relatives we stayed with during visits. “We’ll go again soon. Just not right now, okay?”

It wasn’t okay with me, but instead of saying this, I decided to relay my anger by taking a pair of craft scissors to my curls. Paul, sensing a catastrophe in progress, let himself into the bathroom while I was halfway through the hack job. He didn’t say anything, just held out his hand for the scissors, which I gave him.

“You can’t tell Dad that this is about him not taking us to Mom,” he said as he did his best to make it look like I had not stuck my head in a fan.

“Fine.”

“Libby, please,” he said, still snipping away, “you can’t. He’s already upset. Pretend you had gum in your hair. Tell him you were tired of kids pulling on your curls. Just, this is not about the cemetery, okay?”