Chapter 26 Claire
Claire
She got Aracely on the phone steps before the subway entrance.
“Claire—”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know! Luis and I were sitting with Matías and his brain and heart activity had been elevated again, in a good way. We thought maybe it was a sign that he would come out of the coma. But a few minutes ago, his heart rate shot up, past what it would even for someone who was sprinting, and all the alarms went off. The nurses kicked us out of the room and the doctors are coming.”
“Oh god.”
“Claire, you have to get back to the hospital.”
“I just left Matías’s studio. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
—
The subway ride felt interminable. It seemed like the conductor stopped at every station longer than he had to, and just when the train was about to depart, a tardy passenger would inevitably come stampeding down the stairs, and do-gooder passengers would hold the doors open for thirty more precious seconds.
Come on, come on, come on, Claire thought. She paced the length of the car, constantly checking the subway map on the wall as if she could possibly will them to the next stations faster. But every time she did that, the train would inevitably slow down in the middle of the tunnel. Or it would take its sweet time cruising into a stop, and then just sit there, and sit there, and sit there. Probably waiting for some unseen traffic ahead to clear, but still.
She crammed in her earbuds and tried to listen to a Spanish language lesson. But Claire’s mind would not focus. Verb conjugations and new vocabulary fluttered from the phone to her ears and then straight out into the train stations, not bothering to stick around in her head for even a second. Sentences she had understood at the end of the previous lesson yesterday at Matías’s bedside now sounded like gibberish to her.
No, even less, because she hardly even registered the sounds; the worried chatter of her thoughts drowned all the Spanish out.
When they finally reached her stop, Claire flung herself out of the train and ran all the way to the hospital, shoving through people on the sidewalks, yelling “?Perdón!” over and over while not really meaning it, because she didn’t care how they felt. All she cared about was getting to Matías, and it had taken way too long.
She burst into the hospital and almost crashed into an orderly in the lobby. She barely managed to avoid him as she hurried onward, into the elevator, up to the third floor, and down the hall past the other wards.
As soon as she ran through the doors of Matías’s unit, Soledad and Aracely descended on her, both crying, both gathering Claire into their arms.
“Oh god. Is it bad?” she choked out. Claire both wanted and didn’t want to know what the doctors had concluded while she was stuck on the subway.
“We still don’t know anything,” Aracely said.
Tears spilled over onto Claire’s cheeks, and she sagged against Soledad and Aracely. It wasn’t relief, because they did know something had happened to Matías’s heart. But at least it wasn’t the awful news that Matías was dead.
Yet.
A pair of cardiologists emerged from Matías’s room. The entire mass of the de León family surged toward them.
“?Qué está pasando?” Armando asked.
The woman doctor spoke in rapid Spanish. Claire stood helpless, only able to scan the faces and body language of those around her to try to figure out what the doctor was saying. This was not the time to ask Aracely to explain.
Soledad crossed herself. Armando squeezed his eyes shut. Aracely held herself rigid, fighting to keep her composure. Luis walked away.
The rest of the de Leóns reflected the same range of reaction. But what was missing were relaxed sighs or people going to sit back down. Everyone remained on their feet as they began to ask the doctors questions.
Claire looked all around, hoping someone could explain what was going on.
But everybody around her was talking all at once in Spanish.
She turned and located Luis, who had separated himself from the crowd and was sitting with his head in his hands.
Claire sat down beside him.
“What’s happening?” she asked quietly.
Luis didn’t lift his head. But he let out a long exhale and said, “Matías might have had a heart attack.”
“What?” Claire’s own heart clutched.
He slowly looked up, as if it took great effort to peel his face from the hands. “They need to do more tests. I’m sorry, I don’t know what they’re called in English.”
Claire let out a sob. “Why didn’t I work harder at Spanish months ago, when I had the chance?”
Luis shrugged, just a sad, minute movement. “It probably would not make a difference. I started learning English when I was four years old, and I still don’t know how to translate these medical things for you.”
Claire gasped. Translate. She snatched her phone from her purse and began searching the app store for the translation program Vega had used this morning.
“Here,” she said, holding her phone toward Luis. “Tell me what the doctor said. Please?”
He squinted at her phone. “What is it?”
“An app that does immediate speech translation. Vega showed me this morning.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that existed. But I guess Vega would know, so she could sell her work internationally. Her English is shit.”
Claire sat back for a second. She knew Aracely detested Vega, but this was the first time Luis had spoken about her so strongly.
Luis pressed the record button and repeated what the doctor had reported. A moment later, the app said in English:
“Various measures of Matías’s heart appeared abnormal. It could have been a heart attack or it could be something else. They need to run more tests to figure out what happened. A nurse is going to do an EKG soon, and a lab tech will come to draw blood to check troponin levels. They are also going to send him in for an X-ray, and maybe a CT scan if the other tests don’t show anything definitive.”
“How long will all that take?” Claire asked.
“At least two hours, maybe more,” Luis said. He studied the translation on the phone and nodded, absorbing the new terminology. “The EKG will be the fastest, but everything else takes time. Even if they get the blood soon, the lab must run the test.”
Claire slumped in her seat. She had done this, by kissing Matías. Or kissing Matías’s soul.
What was she going to do? Professor Hong had said Claire had to get Matías’s soul to fall in love with her. Yet when they touched, it seemed to hurt the part of Matías she was trying to save.
But what if Professor Hong was wrong? After all, Claire’s body hadn’t gone straight through Matías’s, as the professor had said it would.
She was an academic, her knowledge accumulated mostly from the anecdotal reports of others who had interacted with astral projections, because it was impossible to set up scientific studies on the subject. So everything Professor Hong said was conjecture. A well-educated guess, but still a guess.
How the hell was Claire supposed to know what to do then?
She wanted to punch something. But just as Claire began to ball her hand into a fist, she froze.
Could she bring Matías’s soul here and reunite it with his body with simply the press of her palm?
Claire whirled and stared at the door to his room, which now hung open, the doctors having left to take care of whatever needed to be taken care of, and the de León family back in their seats in the waiting area, hugging each other. Soledad, Armando, and Aracely were nowhere to be seen, though; they must be inside with Matías.
But Professor Hong had explicitly warned Claire that she could not tell Matías’s soul about the accident until he was ready. Even though Claire was no longer sure that the professor was right, that part still made sense—it would be a huge shock to Matías’s soul to suddenly expose him face-to-face to his own battered body, covered in stitches and bruises and splints and casts for the thirty-seven broken bones.
And Claire could not risk that discord breaking the tenuous threads that connected Matías’s soul to reality. Without the soul, Matías would die.
So Claire uncurled her fist. She just had to keep hold of hope and let the doctors run their tests and do what they could.
She took a shaky, deep breath and walked toward Matías’s room. She kept her left hand splayed open and held away from her body, no longer making contact with anything. Just in case.
—
Soledad kneeled at Matías’s bedside, praying. Armando stood behind her, his hand on her shoulder. And Aracely sat in a chair, glaring at Matías. The nurses would probably let the three-visitor rule slide for a little while.
Claire assumed her place in the chair on the opposite side of the bed, the one the family always kept open for her. Guilt stabbed at her as she sat down, aware that the seat had been vacant too long. Matías needed her here. She knew that. But he also needed her out there, with his wandering soul.
For now, though, Claire settled in, intending to be at the hospital until visiting hours ended.
She cocked her head at Aracely. “Hey. Are you okay? Why are you…scowling at him?”
“I am angry at him for scaring us,” Aracely said, her voice hot, but also shaking.
“Oh.”
“He’s my big brother. He is supposed to be strong. He is always supposed to be there, and I am supposed to be able to take him for granted. But look…” She glared harder at him.
Claire understood. When her parents had died, she’d been mad at them, too, in completely irrational ways. Mad that they’d been so eager to go on that stupid RV trip to Carhenge. Mad that they’d died without clearing it with her calendar first. Mad that they wouldn’t be there to send her off to law school, to see her get married, to meet their grandkids.
Mad that they had left her all alone, again, in the world.
“I get it,” Claire said to Aracely. “Sometimes, pain masquerades as anger, because you can do something about anger. Pain by itself just chips away at you until you’re pockmarked with sorrow and regret. It’s better to yell and kick and punch things instead.”
“I feel like the doctors might be unhappy if I punched Matías,” Aracely said with a grim laugh.
“I can find you a spare pillow if you want,” Claire said.
A lab technician came in wheeling a mobile cart full of vials, needles, tourniquets, and other supplies. She said something in Spanish—Claire assumed telling the family she was going to take Matías’s blood—then began the process of cleaning the bend of his elbow, one of the few places not covered in bandages and casts.
Claire bit her lip. Matías’s skin there was mottled purple from all the times they’d poked him. She’d asked on the first day why they couldn’t just insert an IV and take blood from there, but the answer was that some tests required sterile collection and that meant they had to be able to clean the skin first. Claire still wasn’t sure why IVs weren’t considered sterile, but she’d seen lab techs come and go in the days since, sometimes drawing blood through an IV, and other times from the very same beaten-up site that was being used right now.
She looked away during the process. She wasn’t squeamish about blood itself, but watching them draw the literal life force from Matías’s already weakened body was too much. He seemed so much smaller in the hospital bed; it was shocking how quickly muscles lost their tone, how swiftly a patient could lose weight.
As the lab tech was leaving, a nurse came in with a portable EKG machine. Aracely stood. “I can’t be here anymore. I’m going to get some fresh air.”
When the nurse opened the front of Matías’s gown, Claire let out a cry. It was the first time since being at the hospital that she’d seen that part of him exposed. She knew there had been surgery to stop the bleeding in his internal organs, but now she could see the red welts and the thick black stitches from the incisions. The undignified patchwork shaving of the hair on his torso to clear his skin for the surgeries and heart monitor stickers, like a lawnmower had gone berserk. The slackness of his usually taut abs.
Oh god, Matías.
The rest of the afternoon went like that—nurses and lab techs in and out as more tests were ordered. They took X-rays. Couldn’t see anything obvious. Ordered a CT scan of the heart.
The chief surgeon—Soledad and Armando’s friend—returned with the cardiologist from before. Aracely and Luis were permitted in the room, even though it was crowded, to hear the results of what they’d found.
“Sus niveles de troponina están elevados, lo que indica estrés en el corazón,” the cardiologist said.
Luis, who had learned the cardiac terminology from Claire’s app earlier, translated quietly for her. “Matías’s troponin levels were high, which means there was some kind of stress on his heart.”
Claire felt the blood drain from her face. “?Es malo?”
“Todavía es difícil de decir,” the cardiologist said. “Su electrocardiograma también fue un poco anormal, pero la radiografía no mostró nada preocupante.”
“It’s still hard to say,” Luis translated. “His EKG was also a little abnormal, but the X-ray did not show anything worrying.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s fine, does it? X-rays are hard to see. Isn’t that why they ordered a CT scan?”
He asked the question. The cardiologist neither confirmed nor denied, just said they needed to wait for more information.
Soledad threw her arms into the air. “?Por qué estamos esperando? ?Su corazón podría sufrir da?os irreversibles! Dale algún medicamento o algo. ?Por favor!”
The surgeon—their friend—gathered Soledad into her arms, where Soledad broke into tears. The doctor explained that Matías’s levels were all down to his coma baseline now—heart rate, blood pressure, pulse—so they didn’t want to give him anything like a beta blocker that might suppress his heart too much. Cardiac medications were very powerful, but they also came with potential side effects. They didn’t want to overshoot and cause him more harm than he had already suffered if they didn’t have to.
Claire hadn’t taken her eyes off Matías the whole time since the doctors arrived, even when she was asking questions. He really did look like his body couldn’t take much more; she understood why the doctors wanted to balance precaution and care.
Still, the limbo of waiting was horrible.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Yolanda. It was around lunchtime in New York. Checking in. How are you?
Claire sighed. She desperately needed to hear from a friend. But Yolanda would have to wait.
At the hospital, Claire typed. Call you in a few hours?
Yolanda wrote back immediately. Ok. If I’m on another call, I’ll drop. Something is happening here. We need to talk.