Sandi was the one to find the note, when she was sent home to pack the hospital bag. With all the commotion last night – awoken mid-dream, urged to dress and help get her mother to St. Mary’s – and her father never returning home, there was no opportunity for him to see it. The single sheet of faded loose leaf paper lay face up on the bedside table, Lourdes’s deliberate cursive filling half the page, the pen dropped mid-word, probably when the labored breathing woke Emanuel.
Sandi made herself leave the paper there and go about business. Over the last few months, Lourdes had been hospitalized many times, so Sandi didn’t have to think: from the drawers of the bedside table, the light blue long-sleeved nightgown with no lace; five pairs of white cotton briefs, garments kind on Lourdes’s sensitive skin; from atop the dresser, Lourdes’s brush good for coarse hair; from the rack on the closet door, terry cloth slippers easy on swollen feet; from Sandi’s room, the travel-size cocoa butter lotion Lourdes liked for the chafed areas on the backs of her hands. These, and a few more items, all went into the large canvas bag Sandi had gotten Lourdes, proudly embossed “Brooklyn College,” which Sandi had entered that fall, just three months earlier, Sandi's life leaping forward at the same time Lourdes's receded.
Bag in hand, Sandi was ready to go downstairs, but the note stopped her. She picked it up even as she told herself it wasn’t meant for her. No, don’t read it.
It didn’t begin “Dear Manny,” or “M—.” It went straight at it.
Look at you, lying there. Snoring. Drunk.
If I have to look at you one more day - at your
face, that face, that ugly face…
She had to sit down. The room felt hot – it wasn’t just the radiators hissing, working overtime in the winter. She had to keep wiping her overgrown bangs from her forehead. She wanted to stop reading.
I can’t stand even one more day cooking
your meals, cleaning your shirts, lying in
this bed with you. I’ve told you before,
I want ou-
The last word ended in the middle of the page, missing the “t.”
With a sharp crease, Sandi folded the note in half, then half, again and again, intent on making it disappear. When it didn't, she pushed the square into the right pocket of her jeans. Then she went downstairs to get the bus to St. Mary’s.
Emanuel looked tired; with no comb, his dark hair - the few curls he had left on either side of his head — stuck out over delicate ears. She knew it was wrong to have intercepted the note. But she was glad to have spared him.
When he took the bag from her hand, she thought, He’s touching the same hand that touched the note.
Lourdes's face stood out above the white sheet, which was drawn up to her chin, her face the gray of fine ashes. No longer was Lourdes the color of coffee with milk. She had lost weight and with this, her features had changed - her nose and lips were broader, like Alma’s, Sandi's Ecuadorian grandmother who was said, in a hush, to be half-African. It was as if in sickness Lourdes's distant blood had surfaced, making her face look like the one carved into the Yoruba totem pole Sandi saw once on a class trip to the Brooklyn Museum. Lourdes would be displeased. From the time Sandi was a child, on summer days when the sun called all the neighborhood kids to play in the park, Lourdes always instructed Sandi to stay indoors lest she turn darker.
“Mami,” Sandi whispered loudly enough to be heard over the whir of machines.
Slowly, Lourdes turned toward her.
So many times in her life, when it really mattered, Lourdes had been able to read Sandi’s mind. Sandi tried now, giving her a look that said: I know. I read it. How could you?
Lourdes’s eyes recognized Sandi, but with the morphine, Sandi was certain she had no memory of writing anything, let alone worries about anyone finding the note.
As hard as it was, Sandi tried to get herself to forget the note and just concentrate on the visit. She squeezed Lourdes’s hand. Lourdes returned the gesture faintly, unable to curl her bony pointer, which had a small device over the top half monitoring her pulse. There were wires passed under her nightgown attached to her chest, too, the monitor showing the steady blips of her heartbeat. Today, Dr. Pappas would try to replace the valve on her heart so her lungs would stop filling with fluid.
"Rest," Emanuel said.
Sandi checked her watch; in two hours and twelve minutes they would take her out to prepare for the surgery.
Because of the dry air in the narrow room, Lourdes's lips were cracked. Especially on the bottom lip, which was full like Sandi's. Lourdes had Emanuel spread on a special balm that Sandi had packed, which smelled like their aloe plant at home, its arms outstretched like an Indian goddess in all directions across the living room window. As Emanuel touched his finger to Lourdes’s lip, and Lourdes lifted her face expectantly, Sandi felt confused.
Didn’t she remember what she wrote? Didn’t she remember she was finally leaving him?
Of course people could have feelings that fluctuated, but the emotion in that note was clear. It had been there in Lourdes’s furious eyes last night at the family party they were having, as Emanuel launched an empty Corona into the garbage and helped himself to another bottle.
Sandi couldn’t stop watching the tender movement of Emanuel’s finger even though it felt like something private. Lourdes then had an itch too far down on her back. Emanuel slipped his hand down her nightgown until she had him stop just beneath her right shoulder blade. Lourdes closed her eyes slowly. "More. Ay,” she moaned.
When Lourdes opened her eyes again, Sandi looked into them, trying to understand. Slipping her hand into her pocket, she felt the note.
Look at you, lying there.
The disgust was undeniable. Sandi squeezed the note hard.
At the wake, the room was filled with flower wreaths, the more elaborate ones sent by the white lawyers Sandi's mother had served every day, nine to five-fifteen, for over a dozen years, doing paralegal work for the federal government, mostly translating immigration documents to and from Spanish. With the events of the last two days, Sandi felt gutted. Why had everyone - Emanuel and Alma- expected her to be stronger than them? Strong enough to pick out the casket - ivory, swinging open in the middle for a waist-up view - and the clothes - the black pants suit worn religiously to work - that Lourdes would have wished to be buried in. Why was it she forced to look through dozens of family photos to find the most flattering recent snapshot to use as a reference so Mr. Crevez could restore her looks? Viewed with the note in mind, every picture Lourdes appeared in over the last years seemed a document to marital misery, and Sandi was aghast that she’d been so blind. Eventually she found one usable photo from Sandi’s eighteenth birthday, where Lourdes posed with relatively less hostility in front of a Carvel cake, and Sandi handed this over with Lourdes's rose lipstick. Why was everyone so sure Sandi could handle all this?
The room was small and hot, filled with salmon-colored oval-backed chairs facing the open casket, making it impossible not to see death. Sandi was seated in the front row beside Alma, who was mourning ostentatiously over the loss of her only child and attracting a big audience. On Sandi’s other side was Lourdes's favorite cousin who wept quietly, like Sandi. A family friend came over and crouched beside the cousin. "Ay, our poor Manny," the cousin said. "How he'll miss his Lourdes. What a marriage. Twenty-one years!"
The two traded stories: how Manny and Lourdes had fallen in love when Lourdes, fifteen -- a classmate of Emanuel’s younger sister -- showed up at a family party held at Emanuel's house. How they eloped against the wishes of both mothers convinced that, at eighteen and twenty, they were too young. How Lourdes had followed her beloved to Ft. Briggs, then overseas to Germany, where Sandi, their only child, the joy of their lives, was born at the army hospital.
Emanuel came over, knelt down and laid his head in Sandi's lap. She was glad because stroking his head, so smooth on top, gave her a better focal point than the casket. Still, she cried steadily, from time to time lifting a hand from Emanuel’s head to briskly rid her face of tears. She wept partly because she missed her mother - how at this age, could she be expected to manage alone? - but partly because she couldn't stand to listen to the stupid stories about true love.
Emanuel’s cheek rested against the hip pocket of her dark skirt, pressing against the note, still folded into the tiny square. She wished she hadn’t seen it. But even if she hadn't, she should have known. She just hadn’t wanted to know. There was one image of Lourdes that rose to the surface, like oil in vinegar. Lourdes was in the kitchen, doing the dishes, dousing them with hot water from the tap while her hands - as her illness progressed, shaped ever more like claws around the edges of the dishes - scrubbed with a ferociousness that Sandi could never understand. Lourdes was mad about something. Each night, for as long as Sandi could remember, she'd done the dishes this way.
Once, when Sandi asked Emanuel why Lourdes was so mad, his lips rode up into a bemused expression. "Life.” Then, when he saw how dissatisfied she was with the answer, and ready to stomp off, he pulled her to him, promising to explain everything.
He had her look at the framed photos on the living room shelf of Manny and Lourdes as a couple over the years. One in particular always caused her to pause and study the image in pure wonder. In it, he was younger than Sandi now. He wore a tan wide-lapelled suit, his thick hair parted on the side and his arm around Lourdes, who wore a peasant-style blouse of white embroidered cotton. The way his hand was positioned on Lourdes's shoulder told everything: he was touching her so delicately, afraid she might break.
Sandi turned to Emanuel expectantly. These pictures were not new. Obviously, he was going to tell her something that went beyond these images. She felt nervous, her palm damp, knowing that she was finally going to get the truth.
“See, your mother, she's got a few complaints," he began.
Then he told her Lourdes didn't like that it took him so long to do house repairs. She also didn't like all the time he spent with his mother – like Sandi, Lourdes was an only child so of course she wanted all his attention. And lastly, she didn't like him having more than one beer at a time, he said with a laugh.
“That’s it?” Sandi said in confusion, having heard what sounded like minor grievances. “That’s why she’s so mad?”
“Right.” He tousled her hair.
He has it all wrong, Sandi thought, her mind returning to the room filled with mourners. What was in the note was different. It was hate.
She reached into her pocket, disturbing Emanuel, and tore the note into smaller and smaller pieces, mincing the words, letting them fall on the carpet, some landing in Alma’s open pocketbook, some on the sleeve of the cousin's draped coat. “Look at” might go in one direction, “lying there,” in another.
"Stop it," Emanuel said, raising his head from her lap to see what was going on. “What was that?”
When she didn’t answer, she thought his eyes held a peculiar expression and for a moment she wondered if he’d seen the note that night, there on the table, after all. He couldn’t have, not in the rush to get Lourdes to the hospital.
“You know, she really did love you,” Sandi said, not knowing whom she was trying to console more - him or herself.
Hearing this, he reached his hand up to the neckline of her dark blouse and touched the necklace she wore, finding Lourdes’s small wedding band, which hung at the center, the metal cold against Sandi's skin. He held it in his fist.
”This is for you,” Lourdes had said, during that last visit, shortly before being wheeled from Sandi. From her thumb – the only finger thick enough to hold it -- Lourdes drew off the wedding band. Without looking – Lourdes had once pointed it out -- she knew that the inside was engraved in fancy script with the date 4-11-80 and E.A., Emanuel’s initials. The ring felt heavy in Sandi’s hand.
Sandi reached up now to the necklace and laid her hand over Emanuel’s, over the wedding band, clasping his hand long enough to say a silent prayer, then again, more tightly, for even longer.
What was she to do with this knowledge? she thought. How was she to lead her life, navigate college, have boyfriends, marry someday, knowing what she knew?
Emanuel rose and joined Lourdes's favorite priest Father Palau, who'd appeared at the entrance to the room. Father Palau came to the front and read a passage from the bible, whose words were comforting because Sandi had heard them recited at every wake. Then guests were instructed that the viewing was over, they were to pay final respects to Lourdes Arenez. Sandi watched the mourners line up to say goodbyes in their own particular way. Stout Mrs. Carter, from her mother's office, rested her plump hands on the side of the coffin and swayed back and forth on her short heels, Sandi aware from an earlier conversation that Mrs. Carter would no longer have anyone at work to turn off her computer for her, allowing her to slip out of the office unnoticed at 4:45. Sandi's best friend Nellie, who had never had a mother of her own, rose onto tiptoes, reaching in to stroke Lourdes’s copper hair and kiss a cheek, probably remembering all the times Lourdes had let her come over after school, stocking corn chips for snacks. Nellie, whimpering and holding on too tightly, had to be discretely tapped on the back so she’d let go.
Sandi remained seated. As she watched, she reached behind her neck and, with both hands, unclasped the difficult latch on the necklace. The band fell into her hand. She rested it in her lap for a moment, then put the necklace, lighter now, back on. She moved her neck slightly from side to side, aware that something was gone. When it was her turn to go up and say good-bye, Sandi saw Lourdes's hands were no longer gaunt. Bloated, they were restored to their original size. They were crossed, the right, which held a pink rosary, over the left, with each finger bare. The arrangement was so perfect, any change in detail would be noticed, especially by Emanuel who was coming up to stand beside her. Carefully, Sandi reached over the coffin. Lourdes's hand was so cold. Sandi moved the right hand aside and, lifting Lourdes's ring finger, slid the band all the way down.
From beside her, Emanuel said, “What are you doing?”
“I’d rather not keep it.” She looked up at him. “I know she’ll understand.”
Karen Regen-Tuero's fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, The Literary Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and other journals. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and works in long-form TV.