I stay frozen, waiting for a stronger, better version of myself to know what to do, and how.
A social worker tells us. He was working alone on the roof. A guy walking his dog on Potrera Street found him. A few more minutes of bleeding, and he might have—
It’s a miracle, considering—
I think of Mary’s face.
I get angry.
The anger surprises me.
I try to stomp it back down.
It’s weird. My parents met because of a roof.
If you zipped around the world a few times—seventeen and a half rotations, to be exact—and ran about twenty miles north, to a bland office building in Oxnard, you’d see where my parents met.
My mom, estranged from her parents in the Philippines, working a freelance programming job for cheap bosses. My dad, giggling with his crew, there to repair the leaky roof for under-market rates.
My mom complaining my dad laughed too loud. Turning up the volume of her radio.
My mom’s radio breaking. My mom throwing it in the trash, sad and frustrated. My dad fishing it out. Fixing it for her. Leaving it playing on her desk, so she’d have music as soon as she arrived.
His voice plays in my head like he’s speaking now.
“I didn’t have toys when I was small. We could not afford. My toys were the broken things the rich throw away.”
My dad fixing everything in the house for us. Fixing our old cars, our hot water heater, our TV remote, our fridge.
All the laughing and fixing things my parents did together, from the moment my mom saw that resurrected radio.
Do those moments still exist? Will there be more?
My mom reaches for his left hand, the one with no needles plugged into it. He’s shirtless. I wonder if he’s cold. We need heat, he said, just a few hours ago. Sana umitin. Hopefully it warms up.
The tubes, carrying his breath for him, are dark blue.
“Para kang cyborg, o,” my mom jokes to him.
I don’t want to touch him. Touching him would make this real.
Doctors and nurses confer. Then they wheel Papa away for a scan. My mom follows close behind the head of his bed. I stand near a lobby couch.
The neurologist’s office. Dr. Chiu. She’s rushed over from a hospital in LA.
She picks up the model of a brain, passes it back and forth between her hands, takes it apart to show us layers. She says “precarious state.”
I want to throw up. My mom’s gaze stays steady.
The doctor says “neurons and axons” and “stretching injury.” She says “still waiting to determine” and “increased intracranial pressure” and “lack of oxygen.”
We drown in words. Mine jump up before I can stop them.
“Is he coming back or not?” I yell.
I feel my mom’s grip on my upper arm. The doctor pauses. She avoids my eyes and opens a brown envelope and sets a black sheet against a projection screen.
Papa’s brain.
Ma leans forward, a new shine in her eyes.
“We use something called the Glasgow Coma Scale, to measure where a patient is in terms of possible recovery,” Dr. Chiu says. “The best rating is a fifteen.”
“And?” I demand.
There’s no annoyance in the doctor’s face at me. Just sympathy and sadness. Which feels worse.
“Today I’d place him at a three. There is no lower score.”
We don’t move. We don’t speak.
The doctor goes on.
“We can’t be certain if—when he’ll wake. He may have deficits.”
Ma repeats the word “deficits” back to her.
I stop hearing her full sentences again.
Difficulty swallowing. Trouble recognizing. Speaking. Eating.
My father under the tubes, in the truck, at our kitchen table making my mom laugh, praying at Mass, limping, falling.
Monitor. Tests and scans.
My mom touches the edge of the CT scan, looking at the shadows across my dad’s brain.
“Rom’s mind,” she says.
Her voice stays steady, but water spills over from her eyes, leaving wet tracks on her cheeks. “It’s my favorite mind.”
Papa’s back in his ICU room, today’s tests done for now.
My mom and I are silent, listening to the murmurs of nurses, the hiss of machines. It’s like we’re leaving room where Papa’s consciousness should be.
A pale, older doctor steps through the door. He looks like a human mix of melting butter and a pug. His plastic name tag says JOHN MILLER, MD.
“Nurse Emilia?” he asks my mom. “I thought your shift was later.”
He looks at me, then back at my mom, who isn’t wearing hospital scrubs, and whose name is not Emilia.
“Emilia, is this someone close to you?” he asks.
I want to throw something, but there’s nothing to throw. I yell instead.
“Her name is Maxine! Christ!”
“Corazon!” My mom’s voice slaps me.
The doctor’s eyes cloud with shame. “Oh,” he says. “Sorry. You resemble one of the other . . .” His voice dies. “Excuse me.” He hurries out the room, down the hall.
My mom asks if I’m tired. I can’t answer. I’m awake with watching, and anger.
My feet ache but I can’t sit.
My mom taps her phone. Taps and deletes a text. Finally sends it.
She doesn’t leave our dad’s left side.
I don’t stop standing at the foot of the bed.
My mom leans her forehead on the bed next to Papa’s hand. Maybe she’s napping. But then I hear the familiar whispers of her prayers.
I still can’t pray. I can only watch. Inside, I burn.
Toward midnight, a nurse—not the mysterious Emilia—tells us we have family in the waiting room.
“Go na,” my mom says, sending me ahead.
I hesitate, then leave the ICU. The automatic doors whisper and shut.
When I see Tita Baby and my cousin Bea and my uncle Dan, I know I should be grateful. But a prayer finally comes to me instead: Please, God, make Tita Baby leave me alone.
Of course, God does what He wants, and He inspires Tita Baby to reject my hand for my elder’s blessing. She seizes my whole face instead, which she then presses into her combination jade-and-pearl necklace in her version of a hug. My mom’s younger sister has always been a hugger.
“Cory! Anak, naku, what a shock, what a shock for you—” The pearls make indentations on my right cheek. “I always told your daddy, he should get a safer job, go to an office so your mom can stay home, keep the house, and now this injury, naku God, why did your mom wait hours before texting us what happened? Have you eaten?”
“Mom, don’t suffocate Tito Rom’s only descendant,” my cousin Bea says dryly. “The family’s been through enough today.”
“I’m not the only descendant,” I mutter.
The full thought of him comes to me then: Kuya Jun, on the other side of the computer.
I assume my mom will tell him. I don’t want to be the one to face him.
Tita Baby releases me; she doesn’t seem to have heard my reminder. Or maybe she didn’t want to hear.
I rub my cheek. I look at Bea, as self-possessed here as she is on stages and runways. Lifelong example, standing tall, green-eyed, dark-haired, between her pale, sunburned dad and my bejeweled aunt.