“I mean, it doesn’t really work at Saint Ag’s because the nuns don’t wear habits since they usually wear plain skirts, and I think I heard that joke in a play somewhere, uh—” I keep talking nonsense to try to cover up the horrible silence.
And then my dad blinks.
I’m so used to hiding a lot of my feelings from my mom—I think she doesn’t show everything she’s feeling to me, either. But when she says, “Rom?” in a high, breathy voice that’s not her usual voice, I know we’re feeling the same wild hope. I wait for Papa to sit up. Maybe he’ll even unplug all his tubes and ask us why we look so worried.
We lean close. But my dad’s eyes can’t seem to settle on anything. They flick around.
The heart rate monitor sprints. And then there’s a horrible choking sound. And a tear trailing wet down his face. Now I’ve seen my dad cry.
“Nurse!” my mom cries out at the air. “Nurse! Tulong!” She finds a remote and presses call buttons. The doctor from yesterday, Dr. Miller, and more nurses rush into the room. They hustle me and my mom out.
We wait, both of us crossing our arms, hugging ourselves, not speaking to each other. My mom prays again.
Dr. Miller comes out, crouches near us, and asks my mom’s name. His explanation swims toward both of us.
A seizure. Immediate operation to relieve pressure on the brain. Induced medical coma. Intracranial pressure monitor. Preventing infection. Could be weeks. Indeterminate amount of time.
Then someone from the billing department asks to meet with my mom. She closes her eyes, nods, and follows her into another office. She doesn’t ask that I come with her, and I don’t offer to go.
We arrive home together for the first time since Papa fell.
His truck is in the driveway. Uncle Dan drove it home from my dad’s last work site sometime yesterday.
Is it his last work site? Will he work again?
My dad’s stainless-steel mug is still upside down near the sink, dry now against a dish towel after his last coffee. The last necklace of flowers he left around Jesus’s neck is dry too.
The word torments me: last, last, last.
My mom goes upstairs, fast, like she’s on her way to work. Her speed surprises me.
But she doesn’t go into their room right away. I hear her hesitate.
Then, when she opens the bedroom door, she sniffs and then weeps.
I hear the computer starting up. Then the dialing. The call doesn’t go through at first. She dials again. There’s the delayed, hollow sound of Jun’s voice. “Tita?” he says. “What’s wrong?”
She gets up and closes the bedroom door. I hear her murmur. Then, even through the closed door upstairs, I hear Jun’s voice rise.
“How?” he asks in Tagalog. “Paano nangyari?”
I can’t stand the sound of his hurt, his shock. It sounds too much like mine.
I go outside to sit and shiver near the little herb garden.
The Weeks of Waiting
Someone—maybe the Filipina nurses, maybe my Saint Ag’s teachers—alerts our church. So the first few weeks, there are visitors at the house every day.
I’d been on the other side of these crisis visits before: Someone would get terrible news, and then the whole community would descend on the house of bad fortune. Which I guess is our house now.
Titos and Titas—I can hardly keep track of who was who—drop off huge wheels of pancit, chicken and pork adobo, spaghetti with banana ketchup and hotdogs in it, bags of dry rice, boxes of doughnuts, bags of siopao. Even toiletries and cleaning supplies and clothes that don’t fit us.
Flowers fill glasses and old jars on the counter. We get prayer cards from my mom’s former bosses, my dad’s former clients, and stack them on top of the fridge.
We get bills too. They pile on the countertop near Jesus’s head. Bills for our utilities, the mortgage, from the hospital. My mom stops opening Excel to calculate our budget.
As weeks pass, the flowers get brittle. The food stops arriving. My dad doesn’t wake.
Only Tita Baby and Uncle Dan keep dropping off takeout for us, or, eventually, leftovers from their own dinners.
My mom accepts some remote programming jobs, taking her laptop to use the hospital’s wireless, cursing in Tagalog when the connection isn’t fast enough.
“Why don’t I apply to In-N-Out?” I ask one night, sitting next to her in the hospital. “To help.”
I thought the offer might make her happy, but it seems to inflame her. “Your job is school,” she snaps. “My job is the finances. Make sure you keep your grades up.”
At school, the teachers’ sympathetic looks fade into routine reminders of my duties to study.
The nuns have me visit Mrs. Scott a few times. Just my holy luck that the Morality teacher doubles as the school counselor.
I sit on the scratchy brown couch in her spacious office, under Mrs. Scott’s giant crucifix and motivational posters of kittens hanging by their paws from tree branches. I never quite know what to tell her. I wonder how soon I’ll become one of her Scott stories, warning other students about suffering.
We end each session with a prayer. I lower my head, but I don’t pray along.
The place where I feel most relieved is in Ms. Holden’s office. Here, she gives me a tour of heretics.
There’s the obvious one—Galileo, world being round and all. But there are other characters too. The bishop Nestorius, who didn’t believe Christ could actually be born from a human woman. Marguerite Porete, who wrote a book about Divine Love and got literally burned by a bunch of men for it.
“Why were people so scared of these new ideas?” I ask her once. “Like, burn-them-with-fire scared? Of new information?”
“Why do you think?” she asks me.
I can’t answer. She prods me. “How do you feel, when you’re uncertain about something? When something you thought was true is challenged as untrue?”
“Uncomfortable, I guess,” I say.
“Sometimes rage,” she says, “is born from an incredibly intense feeling of discomfort. Rage is easier for some people than facing the discomfort of something new. And if that kind of person is in a position of power?” She rolls her eyes.
I’m facing something new, even as Papa’s coma goes on. For seventeen years, my dad was my dad, whole and here every day. That used to be true. I thought it’d always be true.
Now my mom and I don’t know if he’ll ever come back. When I first saw him in the hospital, I wanted to destroy every religious statue I’d ever seen, and I yelled at a doctor. For the first time I felt something in me capable of wielding bad fire too.
Melissa and Rika invite me to an after-school AP study party out of the blue. My mom tells me to go.
Melissa and Rika live next door to each other in the same neighborhood as Tita Baby. Ten classmates sprawl around enormous couches and plush carpet in yoga pants and tank tops; I’m the only one who stays in the school uniform. They go through AP English and AP Chemistry and then on to AP European History, the only AP class I’m in. In between they gossip about guys from Saint Dominic’s and Oaks Magnus. I don’t try to join in.
“I’ll be so glad when Ms. Holden is gone next year.” Rika yawns.