PRICES SLASHED it said. And in tiny print on the bottom: ACCESSIBLE UNITS AVAILABLE.
She bought two apartments. One on an upper floor for her sister who had three kids and a deadbeat husband, and a smaller one on the ground floor for herself. She paid cash, only asking her sister to cover her own maintenance costs. The leftover money had still seemed monumental. A lawyer-friend of Fernando’s helped her open a money market account attached to her checking. She was being as frugal as she could, but it went so fast! And someone in her family was always asking her for a loan: a down payment for a car, plane tickets to visit family back in Mexico, a new dress for a daughter’s prom. It never ended and how could she say no? She couldn’t. Because when she thought about why she had the money, she was ashamed.
And now she was scared, because she had to find a way to be more mobile. She had to get a job. Once the morphine from the night of the accident wore off, she admitted what she’d always known: She’d never be a singer. “You’re smart, Matilda,” one of the nurses in rehab said to her. “What kind of career are you thinking about?” Nobody had ever used that word with her before: career. She liked the sound of it. She liked imagining herself going to an office every day. After high school, she’d wanted to go to college but there was no money, and the day she’d come home, excited after her allotted fifteen minutes with one of the school’s overworked counselors, with community college applications and student loan forms her parents had been so negative, so discouraging. She knew they were afraid of their undocumented status, of being found out and losing their jobs. She heard them later that night arguing over whether to let her apply, her father becoming increasingly angry and volatile. The next day she’d asked Fernando about catering work.
Now she had some money; she could take classes if she wanted, but not if she was on crutches—or in constant pain.
Vinnie wasn’t the first person during her stay at the rehabilitation hospital to mention elective amputation to Matilda, not the first person to gently suggest (or in Vinnie’s case, aggressively suggest) that as far as amputations went, hers was a particularly shitty one and she should consider another operation to amputate below the knee, which would open up a world of better prosthetics. Matilda didn’t understand because at first everyone had seemed excited by how much of her leg had been saved. She didn’t remember much from the recovery room, but she did remember the surgeon triumphantly telling her that he’d taken “as little bone as possible.” When she repeated his boast to her physical therapist, who was examining her stump and frowning, the woman said: “Sometimes more bone is a good thing and sometimes it’s not.”
She was right. Matilda’s prosthetic foot hurt almost all the time. No matter how she paced herself or rested or how hard she worked to strengthen her body’s other muscles, no matter how many (or few) barrier socks she wore or how much therapeutic massage she had, after only an hour or two with the foot, her stump would start to throb, the pain gradually working its way up her calf and then past her knee until there was a concentrated knot of tension and an almost unbearable ache at the top of her hamstring where it joined her lower gluteal muscles. (How blissfully ignorant she’d been of the infrastructure of upper thigh to ass before the accident! Only wondering if there was a cure for the tiny cellulite bumps that peeked out from her very short shorts.) Most days the pain would creep into her hip; many days her neck would start to ache by late afternoon and she’d end up in bed before dinner.
Her doorbell rang, loud and insistent, angry. Vinnie. Matilda opened the door to find him standing there with a pizza box balanced on his left arm and a full-length mirror tucked under his bionic arm. She eyed the long mirror warily when he came through the door.
“I don’t want that thing in here,” she said.
“Maybe you don’t want it, but you need it. Your foot is bad, right?” He could tell just by looking at her how much pain she was in. She would still laugh and smile, but her eyes would be unfocused. He understood.
“It’s not too bad,” Matilda lied. On good days, Matilda’s nonexistent foot would tingle or just feel like it was there, its ghostly presence driving her crazy. But on bad days it hurt to distraction. Today, it felt like needles were piercing her nonexistent foot. For weeks, she’d had a persistent itch on one of her missing toes. She found herself in the ludicrous position of fantasizing about amputating a foot that didn’t exist.
“Sit down,” Vinnie said, placing the pizza on her kitchen table. “Take a slice while it’s hot. You can eat while we do this.”
She reluctantly sat on one of her kitchen chairs. Took a slice and blew a little before she bit into it. “How did you manage to get it here while it’s still hot?” she asked him.
“Trade secret,” he said.