I stood in shock, blood frozen in my veins.
“Don’t touch her,” Luis said, but Arturo didn’t listen. He held his hand under Maribel’s nose to make sure she was breathing, then picked her up, her body limp as a rag doll, her head rolled back over one of his arms, her legs hung over the other, and said her name, over and over and over again, as if it was the only word he knew. She didn’t wake up.
The other men on the site started running over, asking what had happened, offering to help. Without a word, Arturo cut through them all, cradling Maribel, trying to keep her still, walking quickly toward the truck while I hurried behind them, afraid to look, afraid to know what I already knew.
There was no discussion. Luis got in the driver’s side while Arturo climbed in the back with Maribel, holding her across his lap. I sat in the front, staring out the window, my eyes unfocused, my palms sweaty, my breath catching in my throat.
At the hospital, Luis jumped out of the truck and came back not a minute later with a nurse, who took one look at Maribel and called for a gurney.
“We have to take her away now,” the nurse said. She was stocky and firm.
“We’ll go with her,” I said.
The nurse shook her head, and when someone else arrived with the gurney, Arturo laid Maribel down on it. As they started to wheel her away, I tried to follow.
Arturo put his hand on my arm. “Let them do what they need to do,” he said.
We sat in the waiting area, a small room with a cluster of wooden chairs. Arturo had sent Luis back to the job site. I trained my gaze on the floor, squeezing my hands. Once, I dared to look at Arturo. He had a wild, frantic look in his eyes. He saw me looking at him.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She fell.”
“But what happened to the ladder, Alma?”
“I don’t know. I—”
“You were supposed to be holding it.”
“I was!”
“Then how did she fall?”
“It must have slipped.”
“You were supposed to be holding it,” Arturo repeated.
“I turned around. Just for a second.”
“Why did you even let her go up there? It wasn’t safe.”
“I thought she would be fine.”
“But I told you!”
“I know.”
“And now she’s not fine!”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, the combined weight of horror and reproach pressing against my chest.
Arturo leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees, burying his face in his hands. I stared at the curve of his back and tried to remember: I’d had my hands around the ladder, and I had turned. Had I really let it slip? Was it my fault? Arturo had said as much, hadn’t he? My fault, I thought. My fault. Repeating it in my head again and again.
We waited. And waited. Until finally the doctor emerged from the bowels of the hospital and told us: A bruised tailbone. Two broken ribs. Minor injuries except for one. Her brain. Because of the way her head snapped back against the ground, the way it had snapped back up again and down one more time, her brain had been shaken inside her skull. “The brain is very tender,” the doctor said. “When it shakes like that, it can tear against a small piece of bone in the skull that acts as a ridge. It’s called shearing. That’s what happened here. And now her brain is swelling. We can’t let it keep swelling. There’s only so much room inside the human head. If it swells too much, well—” He looked at us both. He was an old man with a bushy mustache. “She might not survive,” he said. At the moment those words came out, someone—some spirit somewhere—snatched the air from my lungs. The doctor went on: “She’s intubated and on a ventilator. We gave her drugs to relieve the pressure, but they haven’t helped in the way we hoped they would. So now what we need to do—what I need your permission to do—is remove a small piece of her skull to make room for the swelling and to keep the pressure from building too much.” He stopped and looked at us again. “If it builds too much, she could die. And the longer we wait to relieve it, the more damage she’ll likely experience.” Neither Arturo nor I said anything. We were holding hands. Gripping each other’s fingers as if strength could be found there. “It’s the only option,” the doctor said.
They opened her head. They removed a piece of our daughter. And when it was over we realized that in that piece had been everything. Until then, I had believed that a person inhabited his or her whole body. I had believed that a person’s essence was spread throughout them. Who could think that a person’s entire being is housed in a finger or in a hip bone or in a small piece of a skull, and that the rest of the body exists for appearances only? But Maribel changed so completely after the surgery, what else could I believe? Of course, I knew better. Medically, scientifically, they had explained everything to us. It wasn’t the surgery that stole her from us. It was the accident. The moment her head snapped and bounced up and fell back again, her brain, like a mass of Jell-O, slid inside her skull. Forward and back, and it tore against bone. And when it tore, it destroyed some of the connections between neurons, which was a word the doctor had to explain to us. And then there was the swelling, which second by second was only making everything worse. No, the surgery wasn’t the thing that took her from us. It was the thing that supposedly saved her.
Maribel stayed in the hospital for weeks. She regained consciousness shortly after the surgery and woke agitated and confused. With the tube in her throat, she couldn’t speak. She looked hysterically at us, asking with her eyes where she was and what had happened. We explained everything. We explained it and told her we loved her until she calmed down.
Most nights we slept on a blanket on the floor of her hospital room. When we slept at home, we trembled and huddled against each other in our bed in the dark. Many times, we cried. My parents came over and cried with us. Our friends came and wrapped their arms around us. I woke up every morning and knelt on the floor, praying to God to heal her. I might have questioned God, I suppose, about how He could have allowed such a thing to happen, except that it didn’t just happen. It wasn’t an earthquake or a gust of wind that knocked her to the ground. It was me. I believed that completely by then. So I prayed for forgiveness and for God to bring her back to us. I wanted Maribel to grow up and get married and have children and friends and find meaning in her life. I wanted to see her graduate from high school, and I wanted to see how shy she would become when she introduced us to the man she had fallen in love with, the man that one day Arturo and I would welcome to our family. I wanted to sew yellow, blue, and red ribbons into her wedding lingerie for good luck. I wanted to see her grow round with a child and hold that child in her arms. I wanted her to stop by the house for meals and laugh at the television and rub her eyes when she was tired after a long day and hug me when it was time to leave again, her husband waiting in the car, her child’s hand in hers. I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world. The implicit promise, I thought. I said every prayer I knew.
After the surgery, a therapist came to Maribel’s room and administered tests, to make sure she could move, to make sure she could understand basic instructions, to make sure that her brain could still tell the rest of her body what to do. The doctor was pleased. She had a brain injury, but it could have been much, much worse. We began to hope. Would she come back to us? Our Maribel? The Maribel we had known for nearly fifteen years? They said perhaps. In time. But more likely, there would be something about her that remained permanently changed. They couldn’t say for sure. Every brain injury patient was different. We heard that too often. It began to sound like an excuse for ignorance. It made me want to scream, “What do you know?” After weeks of rehabilitation, after working with a psychologist and a speech language pathologist and the doctor, all they could tell us was things like: She struggles with finding the right words sometimes, and that will likely persist. Her short-term memory is erratic at best. Her emotional affect is flat, which may or may not change. She has trouble organizing her thoughts and her actions. She gets easily fatigued. She might be more prone to depression, even long-term. But she’s young, which gives her a better chance at recovery. “Besides,” they all said, “the brain is a remarkable organ. With the right attention and exercise, it can heal.”
Neither Arturo nor I knew what that meant. We thought, We’ll be gentle with her. We’ll be patient. And when she was released from the hospital we sent her back to school with the idea that a learning environment was exactly what she needed. Get her using her mind again, we both thought. That would be good.
But day after day Maribel came home frustrated and depressed. The teachers talked too fast, she said. She spent hours in the nurse’s office, complaining of headaches. Even when the teachers tried to be accommodating—giving her extra time to take tests, repeating things for her benefit—it was of little help.
After two weeks, we went back to the doctor at the hospital and asked for advice. He told us that if we could find her the right kind of school, a school with a strong special education program, it would help immensely. There were a few in México City, he said. But the best were in the United States, if we were willing to go. He gave us a list of schools that he knew, schools with good reputations. Which one we chose was just a matter of where Arturo could find work.
I said, “Well, why didn’t they tell us that earlier!”
“The United States?” Arturo said.
“You can get a job there, can’t you?” I was energized now that a solution was within sight.
“But this is our home,” Arturo said. “It’s always been our home.”
“It would only be temporary.”
He furrowed his brow in his particular way. “Why are you so sure she can’t get what she needs here?”
“?Qué vergüenza, Arturo! I’ll take her there myself if you won’t go.”
“It’s just … So much has changed already. We’ve been through so much.”
“So it’s just one more thing.”
“I don’t know if she can handle one more thing.”
“Well, she can’t stay here, doing this. Don’t you want her to get better?”
“Of course.”
“Then … ?”
He nodded. But when I looked at him, I understood. He was the one who wasn’t sure he could handle one more thing.
“We have to do this,” I said. “All I need is for you to say yes, and I promise I’ll take care of everything after that. You won’t have to worry about anything.”
“I want to do what’s best for her,” Arturo said.
“I know. This is it.”
And finally Arturo agreed, and the decision was made.