The Book of Unknown Americans(28)

I stood in shock, blood frozen in my veins.

“Don’t touch her,” Luis said, but Arturo didn’t listen. He held his hand under Maribel’s nose to make sure she was breathing, then picked her up, her body limp as a rag doll, her head rolled back over one of his arms, her legs hung over the other, and said her name, over and over and over again, as if it was the only word he knew. She didn’t wake up.

The other men on the site started running over, asking what had happened, offering to help. Without a word, Arturo cut through them all, cradling Maribel, trying to keep her still, walking quickly toward the truck while I hurried behind them, afraid to look, afraid to know what I already knew.

There was no discussion. Luis got in the driver’s side while Arturo climbed in the back with Maribel, holding her across his lap. I sat in the front, staring out the window, my eyes unfocused, my palms sweaty, my breath catching in my throat.

At the hospital, Luis jumped out of the truck and came back not a minute later with a nurse, who took one look at Maribel and called for a gurney.

“We have to take her away now,” the nurse said. She was stocky and firm.

“We’ll go with her,” I said.

The nurse shook her head, and when someone else arrived with the gurney, Arturo laid Maribel down on it. As they started to wheel her away, I tried to follow.

Arturo put his hand on my arm. “Let them do what they need to do,” he said.

We sat in the waiting area, a small room with a cluster of wooden chairs. Arturo had sent Luis back to the job site. I trained my gaze on the floor, squeezing my hands. Once, I dared to look at Arturo. He had a wild, frantic look in his eyes. He saw me looking at him.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She fell.”

“But what happened to the ladder, Alma?”

“I don’t know. I—”

“You were supposed to be holding it.”

“I was!”

“Then how did she fall?”

“It must have slipped.”

“You were supposed to be holding it,” Arturo repeated.

“I turned around. Just for a second.”

“Why did you even let her go up there? It wasn’t safe.”

“I thought she would be fine.”

“But I told you!”

“I know.”

“And now she’s not fine!”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, the combined weight of horror and reproach pressing against my chest.

Arturo leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees, burying his face in his hands. I stared at the curve of his back and tried to remember: I’d had my hands around the ladder, and I had turned. Had I really let it slip? Was it my fault? Arturo had said as much, hadn’t he? My fault, I thought. My fault. Repeating it in my head again and again.

We waited. And waited. Until finally the doctor emerged from the bowels of the hospital and told us: A bruised tailbone. Two broken ribs. Minor injuries except for one. Her brain. Because of the way her head snapped back against the ground, the way it had snapped back up again and down one more time, her brain had been shaken inside her skull. “The brain is very tender,” the doctor said. “When it shakes like that, it can tear against a small piece of bone in the skull that acts as a ridge. It’s called shearing. That’s what happened here. And now her brain is swelling. We can’t let it keep swelling. There’s only so much room inside the human head. If it swells too much, well—” He looked at us both. He was an old man with a bushy mustache. “She might not survive,” he said. At the moment those words came out, someone—some spirit somewhere—snatched the air from my lungs. The doctor went on: “She’s intubated and on a ventilator. We gave her drugs to relieve the pressure, but they haven’t helped in the way we hoped they would. So now what we need to do—what I need your permission to do—is remove a small piece of her skull to make room for the swelling and to keep the pressure from building too much.” He stopped and looked at us again. “If it builds too much, she could die. And the longer we wait to relieve it, the more damage she’ll likely experience.” Neither Arturo nor I said anything. We were holding hands. Gripping each other’s fingers as if strength could be found there. “It’s the only option,” the doctor said.

They opened her head. They removed a piece of our daughter. And when it was over we realized that in that piece had been everything. Until then, I had believed that a person inhabited his or her whole body. I had believed that a person’s essence was spread throughout them. Who could think that a person’s entire being is housed in a finger or in a hip bone or in a small piece of a skull, and that the rest of the body exists for appearances only? But Maribel changed so completely after the surgery, what else could I believe? Of course, I knew better. Medically, scientifically, they had explained everything to us. It wasn’t the surgery that stole her from us. It was the accident. The moment her head snapped and bounced up and fell back again, her brain, like a mass of Jell-O, slid inside her skull. Forward and back, and it tore against bone. And when it tore, it destroyed some of the connections between neurons, which was a word the doctor had to explain to us. And then there was the swelling, which second by second was only making everything worse. No, the surgery wasn’t the thing that took her from us. It was the thing that supposedly saved her.