14. Sabrina
The grilled cheese was halfway done when I let myself notice I was happy.
The agreement was no commitments, no promises, no talking about what came next, and no bringing him into Bonnie's life as anything other than the man who had given her an octopus and held a heavy door for her at piano. He was just a man I was sleeping with.
I dropped the second sandwich into the pan.
His father had been dead for less than a month.
That was the part of the happiness I wasn't allowed to look at directly.
He wasn't okay. He was using me to help him forget his pain, and we both agreed to that.
It worked for both of us at first. But over time, even though I was the one he was using, I started to care about it — and I never expected that to happen.
I pressed the second sandwich flat with the spatula.
I wanted to fix him, but I wasn't allowed to. We had a deal, and the deal was that I wasn't in his life that way.
A weight landed on the counter beside me.
"Pickles."
He stared at me.
"I just fed you. Go away."
He stared at me longer.
I picked him up and put him on the floor.
He sat down where I had put him and looked up at me. He glanced sideways, deliberately, at the kitchen table. Then stood up and walked, with great dignity, toward it and climbed into Bonnie's lap.
Bonnie was applying glue to a cotton ball, as if she were performing a small surgery.
The cotton ball was joining a collection of cotton balls already glued to a square of cardboard.
The cardboard was supposed to be Saturn.
Saturn had been chosen by Bonnie because it had the best rings in the solar system, and the best rings deserved a cotton-ball ambassador.
Beau was at his mother's house.
He had been there for a few days. His mom had been having bad nights, and he had wanted to be in the house when she couldn't sleep.
He had been sleeping in his old bedroom.
He had texted me a picture of it last night, and the bedroom had looked like a thirteen-year-old's bedroom, with band posters on the wall.
I had spent three nights at his apartment in the last couple of weeks.
Mrs. Park had stayed over with Bonnie. I'd be home before Bonnie woke up every time. I would take a shower in my own bathroom before Bonnie came out of her bedroom.
That was the deal.
I wasn't bringing him into her life in any way that required explaining.
"M-Mommy."
I turned. "Yeah, baby."
"My chest is doing the tight thing."
I went still.
Not now. Not tonight. Not now.
I turned the burner off.
The grilled cheese could wait until another night.
I crossed to her and crouched at her chair. I put my hand on her cheek — not because I needed to, but because she liked it, because it was the part of the routine since she was five.
"Okay, baby. We are going to do the thing."
She nodded. Pickles, in her lap, had sensed that something was happening and jumped to the floor.
"How long?"
"Ten minutes."
"Belt or rope?"
"Belt. Tighter than usual."
The medication was on the second shelf of the cabinet beside the stove. I had moved it to the second shelf two years ago, when the third shelf was too high to reach at speed. I grabbed at speed. I poured the dose into the small plastic cup we used. I brought it to her.
"Slow sip."
"I know, Mom."
She drank it.
I sat across from her at the table. I took her wrist in my hand — the back of her wrist against my fingers, the pads of my fingers reading her pulse. Her pulse was fast. I held her wrist, looked at her face, and started counting.
She watched me back.
She knew the routine as well as I did. The routine was that I held her wrist for three minutes, that the medication usually started working in two, that on a normal night, by the time I got to two and a half, her chest had loosened, and her shoulders had dropped, and we would go back to whatever we had been doing before her chest would tighten again.
At two and a half minutes, her color started going.
I had seen her color go before. I had seen her color go pale, gray, and blue around her mouth. But the color of her whole face changing wasn't in any of those categories.
"Bonnie," I gasped.
She didn't answer.
"Bonnie. Hey. Hey, baby."
Her eyes were on mine, but her eyes weren't registering.
She slid sideways.
I came around the table without remembering how. My arm was under her shoulders before she was going to hit the chair. I lifted her. I lowered her to the floor gently, the back of her head in my palm, her body going down the length of my forearm.
Pickles got out of the way without a sound.
Her chest was rising and falling. The rising and falling were small. I put two fingers against the side of her neck. The pulse was there — fast. Her eyes were open.
I had my phone out and dialed nine-one-one with my thumb.
The dispatcher picked up. I gave her my information — the address, the apartment number, my daughter's name, my daughter's age, my daughter's heart condition — in the calm, steady voice I didn't, in this particular moment, recognize as mine.
"Ma'am, is your daughter conscious?"
"Yes."
"Is she breathing?"
"Yes."
"How long has the episode been going?"
"Three minutes. The medication hasn't worked yet."
"Stay on the line. Help is on the way."
Bonnie's eyes came back.
I was holding her hand. I hadn't been aware that I had taken her hand until I felt her fingers move. Her fingers gripped mine, her eyes came up, and the lights behind her eyes turned back on.
"Mommy."
"Hey. Hey, baby. I'm here."
"What happened?"
"You went a little dizzy. We are okay. We are on the floor."
"Why are we on the floor?"
"Because you fainted, baby."
"Mommy. Mommy, my chest hurts."
"I know, baby. I know. I called the ambulance."
"I don't want the ambulance."
"It’s okay, baby. Mommy’s here. I called them. We are going to the hospital just to be sure you’re okay. Dr. Reyes is going to be there."
She started to cry. The crying was small and quiet because her chest couldn't do a big one. Her tears went sideways down her face onto the kitchen floor.
There was a knock at the door.
"Sabrina?" It was Mrs. Park.
Her key was already in the lock.
She came in. Took two steps into the apartment. She saw Bonnie and me on the floor. The phone in my hand.
She didn't panic.
Mrs. Park worked as a nurse for thirty-eight years. She retired at sixty because her knees gave out. In all the time I'd known her, she never panicked — not once — and she didn't panic now. She knelt down next to Bonnie and placed a hand on her forehead.
“Hey, Mama. Hi, baby girl. Hi.”
The paramedics came up the stairs. They were quick and exact. They got Bonnie onto a stretcher, and carefully brought her down.
Mrs. Park stayed beside us the whole time, holding the medication bag — the inhaler, the prescription bottles, the laminated card with Dr. Reyes's contact — and telling Bonnie she was going to be fine. In the lobby, she put the bag in my hand and squeezed my elbow.
“I'll meet you there as soon as I can.” She let go of me.
I followed the stretcher.
Bonnie was on oxygen and a monitor in the back of the ambulance. I was holding Bonnie's hand. I wasn't, for the entirety of the ride, in my body.
Dr. Reyes was on call.
He met us in the ER. He put a hand on Bonnie's forehead briefly. He spoke to her at her face's level. He told her she was going to be fine and that he was going to take her into the back and have a look.
He looked at me.
“Ms. Vela.”
“Yeah?”
“Family lounge is around the corner. We will come get you after.”
I waited in the family lounge.
I paced from the door to the window, from the window to the door, and back to the door.
The window looked out at a courtyard with a fountain that wasn't on.
The fountain had a leaf in the bowl. The leaf wasn't floating because the fountain wasn't on, and it was very flat and very still, and it was the part of the courtyard I couldn't look at.
I stood at the window. My breath was on the glass. The leaf in the fountain bowl hadn't moved.
I didn't have a phone call I could make.
There was no number for Bonnie's father. There had been a number for him for about three months in my life, and the number had been disconnected for the rest of the time, which was nine years.
There was Beau on my phone.
I wasn't going to call him.
I wasn’t going to call him because he was with his mother, and his mother had been having bad nights.
I wasn’t going to be the woman who dragged him away from his mother just so he could hold the hand of a woman who, by any agreement we’d ever made, wasn’t owed that hand.
I wasn’t going to be the woman who broke the deal.
Sabrina, Sabrina, Sabrina, don't. Don't call him. Don't call him. Don't call him.
I gave in and called him anyway, because I couldn’t hold it in me anymore, because the silence felt worse than the mistake I was about to make.
He picked up on the first ring. "Sabrina."
"Beau."
"Where are you?"
"The hospital. It's Bonnie. She — "
"On my way."
He hung up.
I sat down on the floor of the family lounge.
I sat with my back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, the phone still in my hand. The lounge was empty.
I waited.
They came through the door at the same time.
Dr. Reyes came through one door. Beau came through the other. They were not, in fairness, a coordinated arrival, but the timing was perfect.
Dr. Reyes saw me. He crouched at the wall — slow, careful, getting his face level with mine.
"Sabrina."
"Yeah?"
"Bonnie is stable. She is alert, and is asking for you, but I want to keep her on the monitor for a few more minutes."
"Okay."
"I have an update on her markers."
I closed my eyes.
The markers had been something the cardiologist had been writing letters about. The markers were the reason Bonnie was on the ambulance instead of the kitchen floor.
"Tell me."
"They have moved. The wall thickness is at a value I'm going to call clinically significant.
The exercise intolerance has worsened. Tonight's episode crosses a threshold I've been telling you we didn't want to cross.
I'm not comfortable with the spring window any longer, Sabrina.
I'm going to push for surgical acceleration.
I'm going to push hard. I want her in for the procedure within four to six weeks. "
I didn't move.
Beau was standing in the doorway. His coat was still on. His eyes were on me.
Dr. Reyes put his hand on my forearm. "I'm going to make the calls tonight."
"Thank you."
"I'll come back when she is ready for you." He stood and went.
Beau came across the lounge.
He sat down on the floor beside me, back against the wall, his shoulder touching mine. He pulled me into him and didn’t let go.
I broke.
I cried the kind of cry I hadn't let myself cry in years.
I cried until my sleeve was wet. I cried into the front of his coat. He had one hand at the back of my head and the other at my shoulder, and he was holding me up because I had stopped, in my head, doing the holding-myself-up thing.
When the cry slowed — when the air came in regular instead of in pulls — he asked me what the doctor had said in details. His voice was at the top of my head.
I told him, and he listened.
He didn't move.
When I had finished, he took half a breath. "Sabrina."
"Yeah."
"I'm going to write a check tonight."
I went still.
"I'm going to call my comms director, and I'm going to write a check that pays for the procedure in full at whatever hospital and whichever surgeon Dr. Reyes recommends. I'm going to do it tonight and before we leave the lounge."
He turned his head. "Sabrina. Let me."
I came up off his shoulder.
I didn't, at first, know what was going through me. The thing going through me wasn't gratitude. The thing going through me was something that had been waiting to come up for fourteen and a half months and had decided, on the floor of a family lounge, to come up.
"No."
He blinked.
"Sabrina — "
"No, Cross."
"Sabrina, I have the money. It’s just sitting in an account doing nothing. Let me do this for Bonnie. She has been on the foundation's list. Please."
"I don't want your money."
"Sabrina — "
"I don't want to be a project to you. I don't — I don't want my baby — " I couldn't finish the sentence. I tried. The sentence wouldn't come. "The foundation has to. It has to."
He held my eyes. "Sabrina."
I caught his sleeve. "Her birthday is coming up, Beau. I've been trying to prepare for it."
"Sabrina — "
"I have a cake I've been planning. It has three tiers and a fondant cat on top of it because Bonnie wanted a fondant cat on her cake, and I’ve spent some time figuring out how I'm going to make a fondant cat by myself in my apartment and not ruin Bonnie's cake.
I have to make her the cake and celebrate her birthday.
The foundation has to do the surgery…I have to celebrate her birthday with my daughter, Beau. "