Chapter Thirty-One
San Juan, Puerto Rico
2023
“Dag, Grandma!” Vic says when Rafaela finishes talking.
“Get it, Grandma!” Carlos says.
Daisy smiles and sips from her iced coffee, but says nothing. Ruth, too, is speechless, her mouth slightly opened. Rafaela stands up.
“Sit down, dear,” she says to her daughter. Ruth plops into the chair.
“Are you okay?” Rafaela asks.
“I don’t know, Mama. I just. I’m shocked.”
Rafaela nods, pulls her sunflower seeds back out of her purse.
“That’s understandable,” she says, once again offering the bag to Ruth who once again is stunned by her mother’s capacity to snack at a time like this.
“No thanks,” Ruth says, and then for a moment, the only noise in the room is the sound of Rafaela crunching the seeds.
She looks at her daughter, who can’t muster a verbal response to the information she’s struggling to take in. “You know it’s okay, Ruth,” Rafaela says, pausing her snack long enough to impart this. “We loved each other very much. We still do.”
But Ruth is blinking and her face remains pinched, her breathing shallow. Rafaela puts the seeds down and leans into her daughter’s face. She places one hand on Ruth’s shoulder and the other under her chin, just like she did when Ruth was tiny, when she needed her little girl to see that the only important thing was right here, between them. The same signal she performed with Lola when they were small—the hook and reel. She brings her eyes level with Ruth’s eyes.
“Listen, I made one big mistake in my life,” she says, her voice soft but ardent. “And it most certainly wasn’t you.”
After the initial shock, the rest of the story emerges in a way that reminds Ruth of labor and delivery. It’s intense and it comes in waves, and after each new revelation, everyone retreats to recover before the next swell appears. Ruth has so many questions she has to write them down, but she doesn’t ask them all at once. Some of them she will never ask, because she will decide that, despite her curiosity, some things are truly none of her business. Some things are, though.
“Does Dad know? Does Candido?”
Mama’s response to this most basic question astonishes Ruth.
“They likely knew as much as I knew. Which is to say they had their suspicions.”
They have moved to the hospital cafeteria, where they are sitting in a corner booth, an attempt at privacy.
“Until today?” Ruth is incredulous. “You mean you never knew, until what, until these DNA results? But you must have known!”
“Well, of course I knew what was possible,” Mama says. “But the opposite was just as possible. You and Benny look so much alike! And you both look like me.”
This is true.
“Anyway, it didn’t matter,” Mama says.
Ruth’s mouth falls open as if to protest, but before she can get there, the veracity of her mother’s words strikes like a bell in her consciousness.
“What mattered was the family,” Mama says. “I was Peter Brennan’s wife, therefore, you were Peter Brennan’s daughter. That was it.”
“And I’m still his daughter,” Ruth says, realizing as she tries these words out that they are true. There’s no denying that she’s always been closer to Mama. But what passes through Ruth in this moment is a hurricane of memories, her father on his knees at her bedside, in the soft glow of her daisy nightlight, saying her prayers. Her father holding a giant camcorder at her college graduation. Her father walking beside her down the long aisle of Saint Columna’s where Thomas waited for her to say I do .
Her father is her father. Nothing has changed. Nothing about Ruth has changed at all. She’s exactly the same person today as she was yesterday, and the same is true for her children. They are still who they’ve always been—the numbers mean nothing. They are quiet for a moment while Ruth catches up with the machinery of her mind.
“Candido seems like a nice man,” she says. Generously, she thinks, given the circumstances. “Is he… is he married?”
“He was. Though not at the time we made you,” Mama says. “He got married after we moved to St. Louis, and you know, I never admitted it even to myself, but I think that was a big part of my depression, moving away. Knowing that he was lost to me.”
Ruth thought she knew every single thing about her mother. What a revelation! Even the utterance of the word depression feels like an epiphany. But of course. Of course that’s what it was, how obvious now. “So he was married? Not anymore?”
Mama shakes her head. “She passed a few years ago. Cancer.”
“Oh,” Ruth says, and then other questions about Candido and his life appear in her mind, but Ruth isn’t ready to ask them. “So, what do we do now?” she asks instead.
“Should we tell Candido, maybe?” Mama asks. “And your dad?”
Ruth shakes her head. “Not yet. Maybe later. I need to get used to it first. And Dad should hear it first, for sure, if we decide to tell them.”
She wonders if there’s any point in telling him, in telling either of them. She needs time to think.
“Smart cookie,” Mama says. And then, standing out of the booth, “Speaking of cookies, they have chocolate chip. You want one?”
Ruth watches Mama walk back to the food counter, lean over the cookie display, and peer inside. Ruth tries to remember if she’s ever seen Mama eat a cookie before. She’s never known her mother to be such a carefree snacker, and so she wonders whether this is part of some larger personality change, another symptom of decline. Ruth runs her hands through her hair, pushes that worry out through her lungs because truly, she does not have space for it. Maybe, after seventy-five years of watching her figure, Mama has finally decided just to eat what she wants. Maybe it’s as simple as that, Ruth thinks. And why not? Good for her.
Rafaela is standing in line to pay for her cookie when she recognizes one of Daisy’s doctors in front of her. He’s paying for his soup and Snapple when his pager goes off, which strikes Rafaela as comical. Who carries a beeper anymore, aren’t those things obsolete? Certainly there must be a more dignified way to urgently contact a person whose job it is to save people’s lives? She makes a mental note to share this observation with Daisy.
The man looks down at the pager, which is clipped to his belt, and then before he can even tell the cashier he’ll come back for it later, she is already lifting his tray and setting it aside. She knows the routine. The cashier says, “Next,” just as the doctor breaks into a run toward the elevator, and Rafaela watches him go. She pays for her cookie and rejoins Ruth at the table. She breaks the cookie in two, keeps one half for herself and slides the other across to Ruth on a paper napkin. They are finished eating, and Rafaela is imprinting crumbs onto the tip of her finger when Ruth’s cell phone begins to ring in her bag. Ruth’s bag is a mess, of course, and she can’t find the phone, but Rafaela knows anyway, even before Ruth finds it in the third zippered pocket and pulls it out, before she can swipe the slider that will connect her to Carlos and the news he needs to deliver. Rafaela knows because during the second or third ring, it occurs to her that there was nothing comical about that doctor and his pager at all. That beeping, buzzing little contraption, that was a call for help, Rafaela knows, from someone in this very hospital. A plea to save someone’s life. Daisy’s life.
Over the many decades of her life, Rafaela can count on one hand the number of times her panic superseded her self-awareness and her animal instinct took over: Lola’s death. Her parents’ deaths. Thomas’s death. Four times. This is the fifth. She doesn’t register how she looks or how she sounds. She doesn’t care if she’s wrong, she hopes to God she’s wrong, there’s no potential for embarrassment here. There’s nothing but urgency. Something in her gut tells her it’s Daisy. And then Ruth’s face confirms it.
They run.
By the time Ruth and Mama arrive back in Daisy’s room, her bed has been wheeled out with her in it. Vic has his arms around Carlos, who is weeping heavily. Ruth has never known a feeling like this. There is a stampede of horror in her throat.
“Where is she?”
“They took her to surgery,” Vic says.
“What?” Ruth turns in a circle, as if she’ll find Daisy standing behind her. “How, why? How so fast?”
“They said it was a pulmonary embolism,” Vic says.
Ruth doesn’t really know what that means. She knows it’s very dangerous. How dangerous? Where is the nurse?
“Nurse!” she yells, like a maniac. “Nurse!”
“She said she’d come right back, after they got her into surgery.” Vic is such a grown-up.
Ruth maneuvers herself into position to take over the comforting of Carlos, who seems to have shrunk back to his preadolescent self. She wraps her arms around him, and Vic steps back, bumps himself against the windowsill.
“It’s okay,” she says to Carlos, although she has no idea if this is true. It’s a mantra she will repeat until it happens. “It’s okay, it’s okay, she’ll be okay.”
She kisses Carlos’s forehead and squeezes her eyes shut.
“What happened?” Mama asks, taking both of their handbags from Ruth and parking them on the chair. “She was fine when we left here.”
“She was, she was fine,” Vic says. “And then—” He takes a deep breath. “We were just talking. Carlos said something funny and we all laughed, and Daisy laughed. And then she coughed.” Vic is crying now, too, but in a very somber way. The tears walk down his face. “She coughed and then… she couldn’t get her breath after that.”
“There was blood,” Carlos says. “She coughed up blood.” He lets loose a few quick sobs.
Vic nods. “That’s right. And then, she was sort of clutching her chest. It looked like she was in pain. And then she just, like, fainted. Or something.”
It’s the or something that incites a horrid tingle from Ruth’s scalp to the soles of her feet. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she repeats.
“Her lips were blue,” Carlos whispers.
And then the nurse is there in the doorway, and it takes every morsel of psychic strength Ruth can muster in order to lift her face to what’s coming, to square her shoulders to this woman. To ask the next questions.
The nurse warns them that the surgery can take up to four hours.
“But they’ll have a better idea once they get in there and see what’s going on. Your sons did an excellent job getting help right away.” The nurse puts a hand on Vic’s forearm and squeezes. “She was so lucky they were here.”
Vic shakes his head, but the move is almost a spasm of emotion, and he can’t really breathe. He gulps air and then hold it in. The nurse continues.
“We came with the crash cart right away, and we could see on the echocardiogram that she had a massive pulmonary embolus.” There are many words in this sentence that Ruth doesn’t fully understand, but she wants as much information as possible, so she nods her head, urging the nurse to go on. “She wasn’t a good candidate for thrombolytics because of her previous brain bleed after the accident. So we had to take her to surgery right away. She’s already under. It may be the fastest I’ve ever seen a patient get from embolism to operating table, which bodes very well for her.”
“What’s the surgery called?” Carlos asks, wiping his eyes. And Ruth knows that he’s asking so he can google it after the nurse leaves the room. Ruth both does and does not want him to google it.
“The procedure is an open embolectomy. We have excellent surgeons here, Mrs. Hayes. Your daughter is in very skilled hands.”
Ruth nods, but can’t bring herself to say thank you.
“I will keep you updated as soon as I have more information.”
Ruth nods again, and when the nurse turns to go, Carlos is already googling the surgery. “Up to twenty-nine percent.” His voice is awed, reverent.
“What is that?” Vic asks. “What’s twenty-nine percent?”
“The mortality rate.” Carlos is crying again.
Ruth seals her eyes closed. She nods and then opens them again. “That means the survival rate is seventy-one.”
“For Daisy?” Rafaela says. “I like those odds.”
After Thomas died, Ruth stopped taking the kids to church. It wasn’t a decision she made on purpose, but at first, after her husband’s death, she had her own crisis of faith. And then, once she’d found her way back to the comfort of hope, she was simply overwhelmed. She had three small children. Vic played soccer on Sunday mornings. Carlos had dance recitals. Daisy was forever at a sleepover. Weekly mass became monthly mass, which eventually became Easter and Christmas. Ruth cannot remember the last time she prayed with her children.
In Daisy’s vacant hospital room, she gathers her boys and her mother together. They stand inside the space recently occupied by Daisy’s bed. There are black rubber marks against the linoleum from the wheels. The tile is slightly discolored there, in the rectangle where the bed should be, where Daisy should be. They huddle together inside this faded linoleum rectangle. They do not hold hands. They hold arms and necks and shoulders. They press their heads together.
They pray.
As the surgeon divides her breastbone and opens her pericardium, Daisy dreams of her father. In the dream, she remembers things about him that she’d long ago forgotten. The scar that dissected his right eyebrow. The curl of his lashes. The faint freckles along his cut cheekbones. His T-shirt tucked into his jeans. He doesn’t speak in the dream, and neither does she. But they attend to each other in a way that’s beyond words. She feels a warm comfort radiating from him. First, as they sit side by side atop the blue quilt in his childhood bedroom in Cong. Next, as they stand in the doorway of Daisy’s own childhood bedroom in Palisades. Then, in the Double Down, Daisy on her stool behind the register while her father sits on the red velvet chaise longue someone brought in last month. He is smiling. He is beaming.
And then they’re in a fluorescent room with broad windows and a banyan tree just outside the window. A curtain hangs from the ceiling, and when her father pulls it back, they’re all there—her family. Mom is there, with a face like war. And there are her brothers, clinging so tightly to each other that their fingers dig, their knuckles whiten. There is Grandma, the infrastructure, brick and mortar. She holds them all together in her small arms. Daisy steps in among them but her body is loose. Vapor.