“Into the gunnel? When you lost control?”
“Sí. I hurried down to him, but he was unconscious, and the boat was tossing so hard—”
“You let go of the wheel?”
“Just for a little while to see how he was.”
“No, I mean before, when you lost your balance.”
“Sí, señor.”
He stared at me.
“How is he now?” I asked.
“They are looking at the results of his CT and his MRI,” he said abruptly. “Your aunt is on the way,” he added, turned, and left me.
It was almost another hour before Tía Isabela arrived with Sophia. Amazingly, she looked bored, even angry, about being dragged along. She was behaving as if I had arranged all of this in order to be the center of attention and take the spotlight off her. From the look on Tía Isabela’s face, I knew that things were very serious. I almost burst into tears. She looked at the bandages on my hands and then asked me to tell her exactly what had happened, too. Sophia stood off to the side, staring down at the floor, her arms folded across her breasts.
“I just don’t understand how things always turn out bad for you, Delia,” Tía Isabela said. That was to be the softest, most considerate thing she would say to me about all this. “I’m going up to the OR waiting room. They took Adan in for an emergency operation.”
“On his brain,” Sophia added. “Ugh.”
“Maybe you should stay down here with Delia, Sophia,” Tía Isabela told her.
“I’ll go into the lobby and read whatever magazines they have or watch television. I don’t know why you made me come,” she said.
Tía Isabela shook her head and left.
“I heard my mother talking with Mr. Bovio,” Sophia said as she turned to leave the room. She paused at the door. “I could tell he blames you. He didn’t want his son to be with you in the first place.”
Her words were as painful as a dagger driven into my heart. She left, and I fell back against the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. He doesn’t have to blame me, I thought. I blame myself, my clumsy, stupid self.
As I lay there, I could think of few things worse than being trapped in this limbo of tension. I was afraid to move a muscle or call to a nurse to ask a question. I couldn’t even cry. My well of tears was long dry. Sophia came back once to complain about how long it was all taking. I turned away from her rather than respond, and she left quickly, mumbling to herself. Minutes moved like snails on a bed of dry earth.
Finally, Tía Isabela returned. It had been nearly four hours. She stood there just inside the doorway and looked at me when I sat up.
“Get yourself together,” she said. “We’re leaving.”
“How is Adan?”
“Adan died twenty minutes ago,” she said. “I’ve been holding Señor Bovio, keeping him from tearing himself to pieces.”
“Why?” I said, now replenished with tears streaming down my face. I thought my own heart had stopped. “Why did he die?”
She shook her head.
Sophia came up beside her, now looking shocked herself, looking more like a helpless little girl than ever.
“I listened to the doctor explaining it to Señor Bovio,” she said in a tired and defeated tone of voice. “There is no room in the brain for extra blood. The skull does not expand, so the blood presses on brain tissue, which is delicate, and with large amounts of bleeding, the pressure can make critical areas of the brain stop working. He had what they called a contracoup injury. His brain had microscopic tears. They went in to see if they could stop the bleeding, but…it was too late. Let’s go,” she concluded. “I’ll wait in the lobby.”
Sophia looked at me with less accusation than pity. Apparently, finally, there was some part of her that had reached the bottom of the pit, the end of the envy and belligerence. I was too pathetic to be worthy of any more of her anger. In her eyes, and truthfully, in my own as well, I was gone, diminished to the point of bare existence, as empty as a shadow, dark and enslaved to follow my skeleton about like a chained prisoner who lived only to die.
It was reflected in the way I moved—stunned, my legs following some reflexive orders because my brain had shut down. The nurses and the ER doctor looked my way with funeral faces, their eyes shrouded with sympathy. Did everyone blame me? Was I wearing some mark of Cain on my forehead? Señor Garman was waiting for us with the limousine doors open. To me, he now looked like an undertaker, and the limousine looked like a hearse. I was already buried in my own body, not quite awake but not quite asleep, trapped like a hopeless vampire eagerly waiting for a wooden stake to put me out of my misery.
Sophia snapped out of her moments of shock, moments when, for a little while at least, she had connected with someone else and had empathized, felt sorrow and pain, and was somewhat sympathetic. But as if that realization hit her, she slapped on her earphones and listened to her own rock music, trying to drown out the shreds of humanity that had bubbled to the surface. Tía Isabela was silent, staring out the window at the hospital. When we pulled away, however, she sighed and said, “That poor man.”
I shrank into myself, embraced myself, and hovered as close to the corner of the seat as I could. Tía Isabela did not look at me or talk to me until we were nearly home. Then she spoke in a voice that sounded like the voice of some judge sitting above the clouds and looking down at me.