Everyday People Read online

  Medusa. I was transfixed by our reflections, by how his back was turned to the street five stories below as if he intended to free-fall down to the pavement in perfect position to make a snow angel without snow. I willed gravity to invert. With my exhalation, his reflected feet found solid footing on the awning. Above me, I could hear him shift from left foot to right as if weighing whether to let go or to live.

  Live! He would never jump. Not Tomás.

  “No, Tomás! Stay—I’m going up to get you!” I banged on the glass, only for the reflected Tomás to turn his head up at the sky.

  • • •

  At the bottom of the ladder leading up to the roof, I made a sign of the cross, putting the Holy Spirit first and the Father last. Church has never been my strength. Neither has forgiving, nor forgetting. Fear of heights gripped me when the first rung bit into the thin soles of my slippers. Twelve rungs to go, and not a single apostle whispered in my ear. Like Peter at daybreak, I’d forsaken my husband. For three nights straight that week, we’d had our usual one-way. Rung two. Deaf-mute versus nag. I’d sent him to hell for playing Good Samaritan with the world while neglecting our heart health. Rung three. I’d enumerated every sin I believed he’d committed throughout our thirty-year marriage, his original sin being choosing me among all women. Rung four. I’d audited his lovemaking, a task he performed as efficiently as servicing an engine: oil change on time, never off-track, making scheduled stops on my lips, then exhaling a clean whistle on the finish. Rung five. Our marriage was coming to a dead end. There, I said it. Rung six. And Tomás had sat at his desk, taking notes without a word—rung six, no, seven—pausing every sixty seconds—rung eight—to relight his Siglo 21 cigar, which was put out by the glass of water I’d thrown in his face. At rung nine and a half, my left slipper dropped to the floor below, leaving me half-barefoot, half-slippered. And when Mia the Receptionist informed me that my own husband had started a patient file on his wife—rung ten—I told her that his left hand would be nothing without tracking me, his right. By rung eleven, I did not dare look at the depth below. The landing to the roof exit was now at my waist, and I could already hear the groan of the door to the roof as the icy morning wind repeatedly slammed it open and shut. The twelfth rung advanced me to the landing floor, where I remained on all fours to regain sensation in the soles of my feet and to catch my breath. God, I was getting too old for this shit.

  Shit. I should have brought a blanket. The wind was brutal out on the roof. Near the pigeon coops, I found the old broom I’d brought with me from Santo Domingo and leaned on it for support. It used to sweep white-dust brujería deposited by neighbors from my porch. Back before I replaced witchcraft with science. All the same to a broom. Dust is dust is dust. Shit is manure is guano is dust. Our pigeon coops were still empty. Raising carrier pigeons to deliver prescriptions—bad idea from the start, I’d told Tomás. But I went along, as I had with all his birdbrained schemes. For years he’d also nursed plans to grow a rooftop garden. To install solar panels. Windmills. We should breed unicorns, too, I suggested to my Don Quixote, their milk surely a cure for delusions.

  The delusion now was to face east, looking into a real sunrise, orange and milky and bittersweet as a cold glass of morir soñando as Tomás threatened to die behind his dreams. A slap of wind reoriented me westward, in the direction of the attic window and my husband.

  Tomás, there he was—below me, but out of my sight. I could see only his ten fingers grasping the roof ledge, fingernails the dirtiest I’d ever seen on him. Normally square, the nail beds were round. When had I stopped noticing the toll time had taken on him? I feared getting too close to the ledge and swallowed waves of dizziness as I calmly addressed the fingers.

  Me: “So this is your grand rebuttal, Tomás, to make me a widow.”

  Widow. A husband can respond to such a word only with silence. The beds of his nails alternated in color between white and dark pink. I tightened my robe against the infernal silence that always made my teeth chatter.

  Chatter was always how I shamed him: “¡Sinverguenza!” I hissed. “After all the CPR done. All the drug addicts rehabbed. The babies delivered.” My voice rose like a vulture riding thermal winds. “At least be more discreet.” He could have chosen to cross the street blindfolded. To fill the bathtub and slit his wristwatch. To eat raw yucca, cyanide being the choice of poets, politicians, and revolutionaries. “Instead, you hang out here like a flag of defeat.”

  Defeat in detail. To defeat the enemy by destroying small portions of his armies instead of engaging his entire strength. I’d have to tackle one of his fingers at a time, not the whole hand. “Details are always vulgar,” I said, quoting Tomás quoting Oscar Wilde. And here I became acutely aware of the infinite grid of windows on the surrounding buildings, some already blinking awake with lamplight. There I was: embittered wife standing at her own precipice. Reason told me I should go downstairs and wake up a staff member. The staff has always had a soft spot for Tomás, who had an even softer spot for the staff.

  Staff. Serpent. Which would swallow which? Were I to seek help, the staff would scorn me for leaving Tomás alone up here, for having put him in this predicament to begin with. Were I to stay, the staff would later question my efforts. A choiceless choice. Even the statistics had doomed him: one doctor a day attempts suicide, the rate of which among males nearly quadruples the national average. I’d ignored the article, certain that Tomás, who wrote didactic poems about the slow genocide of our body politic, would be the exception. No statistics on the doctor’s wife in tattered robe extending broomstick over roof ledge, praying that the grip of her single slipper could outweigh the pull of her heavy marriage.

  Marriage, a strong one, allows for the broomstick to sweep away past wrongs and scare away evil spirits, to accept the wife’s renewed commitment to her husband and to their home-cum-clinic. When my broomstick grazed his knuckle, thumb folded under palm and index finger pointed at me. And I wanted to tell him—

  “Tell me,” he croaked like a frog hiding in the roof gutters, “what is the point where height . . . meets depth.”

  Depth perception was impossible for me, standing so high above the ground without my glasses or the courage to get closer to the ledge. “That point,” I said carefully, “is where your left hand undoes everything done by our right.”

  Right? Consider the Hanging Gardens of Babylon he’d been dreaming about all these years. Was he going to throw all that away? Hadn’t it been me who fed the carrier pigeons each morning, despite my fear of heights? To sketch out ideas for his kingdom of castles in the air? To plant organic vegetables around our chimney vents? To collect enough discarded X-ray plates to build the greenhouse of his dreams? All his confections, washed away in the endless brainstorming of his mind.

  Mind him, today was Sunday, not Thursday—the beginning of a brand-new week, of a brand-new life. Our hands, our arms, were too compromised now to repeat Thursday’s battle scene, that final brutal tableau of a long-standing civil war in which heart-hurt doctor relights his cigar after wife throws water in his eye.

  “I . . . am . . . bli . . . chus . . .” The rest of his words were swallowed up by the roar of an airplane passing overhead.

  Overhead, overheard, because by then I’d trained myself to hear when his deaf ear was listening and his good ear was choosing not to. We’d long abandoned our ritual of coming up to the roof early on Sunday mornings to watch the sunrise, Tomás supporting my hips as I trembled up the ladder carrying a thermos of coffee that bumped the rungs, and then us languishing on a plaid blanket with just two steaming mugs between us.

  “Us,” I said aloud, marveling at how so short a word can be so plural. “Did you catch the western sunrise this morning, Tomás?” Already I could hear his good ear softening. “Did our bedroom get the trick of light too?” Thumb peeked out of palm. “Just like you, Tomás, I woke up thinking my world was ending.” Index finger stirred. “Then I looked out the window and, diablo, I saw the light
and owned up to my error in judgment.” I mustered the courage to lean over the ledge just so and caught glints of light on his sweat-beaded bald spot. Dios mío, how blinded I’d been not to notice the awful toll time had taken on him. I pulled away, shaken. “There I was, spooked by a multiplied blessing.” A pause to wipe my eyes. “What I’m telling you, Tomás, is that from now on our home will have two sunrises, one in the east and another in the west.”

  • • •

  Did he remember back in Santo Domingo, when we’d sworn to always luchar? Luchar, he’d said it himself, is one of those words that gets twisted in the ears of the un-Spanish as merely “to wrestle,” “to struggle,” “to fight,” “to go to war.” But to us luchar means “to survive.” And to help others survive. Tomás and I, we love each other hardest when seeing the other give to others.

  Others, didn’t he remember? The new feeling of being newly engaged to the other. Then the first big fight that dragged others into the fray. Blame me for starting our long journey together on the wrong foot. I was just joking when I called him stingy for not taking me out for seafood at Mello’s. What was I thinking, demanding a farewell dinner at a fancy-wancy tourist hole the very week Tomás was to leave for Haiti on a vaccination campaign with the Jesuits? He wouldn’t talk to me for days. A word like “stingy” hits square in the elbow when you’re broker than a codfish. Especially when word gets around. Then, on the night before he left, it was as if Tomás had rubbed a genie out of his elbow. He gathered the neighborhood kids, whose mothers he’d asked to dress them in their Sunday best—ill-fitting shoes, starched shirts, and napefuls of talcum powder. My fiancé, he had the nerve to lead the poor little mice through the neighborhood en route to Mello’s, making sure to parade them by Mamá’s house that afternoon. And me, obedient daughter then, sweeping the porch in housedress and head wrap, stopping to lean on the broom, hand on hip and head cocked, to watch the ridiculous procession. Off they were, the fools, to gorge themselves on fried shrimp and french fries, best meal they’d ever had in their lives.

  Live and let live. I went back inside the house, having my own fish to bread and fry for my parents’ afternoon meal. I busied myself with sewing and other house chores, checking the window often for a glimpse of the pied piper on his way back from Mello’s, but he must have taken the kids on a different route to their respective homes. The moon was bright and clear when I blew out the lantern and finally left the porch.

  Porch movement at dawn the following day. I found the mothers gathered at our door, complaining. Their children had spent the night vomiting. What, by the grace of Virgen de la Altagracia, was I to do about this misfortune? The man I was to marry was nowhere to be found, son of a motherson of a mother. I made coffee. As it brewed, the women listed their children’s symptoms: chills, sweats, stomach cramps, fevers, hives. My diagnosis: food poisoning, seafood allergies, overeating, foolish pride.

  Pride was the last thing on my mind. I agreed to clean up Tomás’s mess. By now he had boarded the train out of town, leaving me to brew a large batch of ginger and anise tea, to pick up two buckets and a mop, and to follow the indignant mothers to their homes. All morning I spent working to atone for the man I would one day promise to love in sickness and in health. Once the two buckets were good and filled, I hung them on the ends of a broomstick and, with the load on my back, marched to Mello’s later that afternoon.

  “Afternoon,” I said once inside the bar-restaurant. Of the two owners, only Dismas was sitting at the empty bar, his twin brother, Gestas, likely still tangled in bed with a tourist. Dismas I found sucking on imported beer, a fact he advertised as a greeting. The shutters of the bar were still closed, and all I could see in the darkness was the glint of his Rolex, a fact he advertised by reminding me that Mello’s would open in precisely twelve minutes.

  A dozen minutes, one of which I spent setting down the two buckets on the spotless floor of Mello’s.

  “Mello’s served rotten shrimp to those poor kids yesterday,” I said.

  Just yesterday, Dismas had been a wretched kid himself, the kind to turn his eyelids inside out to scare me, a chicken-hearted little girl in his mind. Now he turned to really look at me, eyelids heavy. “And you expect me to serve lobster to Les Misérables.”

  “You’re a misérable. They were paying customers.”

  “Customers, not quite.” He rubbed his eyes as if to remember. “Tomás was grateful for my donation to his cause. The carajitos even got dessert.”

  Dessert bile from the first bucket spilled at his feet. My aim was bad. But the second bucket drenched his head and shoulders in his own sliminess. With that, I reclaimed my buckets and left Dismas retching, just as a delegation of businessmen came into Mello’s to seal some deal or another to suck our island dry.

  Dried up—Mello’s business was after that. Papá had to send me away to relatives in the campo until the scandal could blow over. Collective amnesia, too, stipulated I make myself scarce for a month or so. Two weeks into my exile, Tomás returned to town. He found tongues wagging about his commitment to marry this devil of a woman, whose temper had put a price on his head. Word was that Dismas Mello continued to reek of bile no matter how much he bathed, and that Gestas had vowed to avenge his brother. My parents advised Tomás to lay low. The Mello twins knew people in high and low places. Meanwhile, the mothers of the kids Tomás had taken to Mello’s continued to hold a grudge, competing among themselves for the crown of Concerned Mother of the Month. My parents nevertheless stood by the side of their future son-in-law, who had been treating their cataracts and arthritis at no cost. They saw to it that Tomás board a motoconcho, a bus, and a donkey to the campo. He was to claim back their firebrand daughter, whom they worried had burned away any prospects of marriage.

  Marriage. Ours really began as Tomás went knocking from door to door in that campo until the sound of screams led him to the house of a pastor’s wife. There, he found me helping a midwife deliver a stillborn. We had no words when he entered the bedroom, a man uninvited. My look of abject defeat when our eyes locked compelled Tomás to roll up his sleeves without question, to wash his hands in the basin by the bed, and to work at keeping the mother stabilized. “Lucha,” he growled at her, at me, at himself. “¡Lucha, carajo!”

  • • •

  Carajo, the roof of our long-ago commitment had serious leaks. Still, my husband’s fingers would not grasp the broomstick I’d extended to the ledge. Many had been my failures.

  “A failure, I am,” he repeated and repeated, the first time I’d ever heard Tomás refer to himself in the singular.

  In the singular was how I’d been existing for some time. A marriage surrounded by so many people inevitably gets lonely, a silent bubble in the noise of suffering. And I realized that this silence must have been worse for Tomás, who was already deaf in one ear. I suddenly understood the depth of his own loneliness and reminded him of what he once told a patient: “A damaged cochlea hears the word ‘failure’ as a logarithmic spiral.”

  Another spiral of words issued from his fingers: “Pointless, pointless, pointless . . .”

  “This is pointless!” My patience was spent, my bare foot numb from the cold. “Open your goddamned eyes!” And I had to close my own to imagine what lay within his range of vision on the other side of the roof ledge.

  Ledge, and four stories below it, yellow pumpkin flowers burst from the planter on the stoop of our brownstone.

  And the other brownstone across the street to the west, the one we’d pressured the city to repair.

  Repaired, and parked at the corner southwest, the ambulatory van gifted to the clinic by an anonymous donor.

  Donated, too, was the mural on the corner lot to the south, depicting Saint Lazarus, painted as in-kind payment by the street artist whose father our clinic had saved.

  Savior, walking due north, a youth volunteer on his way to our clinic for his Sunday-morning shift.

  Shifting, I opened my eyes and saw four.

&
nbsp; “Four right angles, Tomás. Even your failures form a perfect square.”

  Square into the ears on the back of my head, the sound of footsteps. Behind me, purposeful. I did not dare turn around, focused ahead on the fingers that were at last wrapping around the broomstick. Whoever the staff member standing behind me was had better get a good look at me saving a life and restore my good name.

  “Lena, there you are.”

  This “you are” sounded more plural than singular, spoken by a familiar baritone, with its scent of coffee and spearmint and Siglo 21 cigar, made flesh by the feel of strong, warm fingers whose nail beds were square-shaped rather than round, with whistle-clean nails, hands that wrapped around mine on the broomstick. And then me and this unnamed apostle who whispered in my ear were pulling hard together in a tug of war between death and life, me laughing and crying from the realization that the man on the precipice had never been my husband but the man into whose chest I now leaned had always been, and we pulled and pulled together as if powered by a third rail, against a last stop, shifting gears under the screech of brakes, my slippers ripping and my body being propelled forward by a monstrous force broken only by the arms of the real Tomás wrapped around my ribs to keep my torso from being pulled over the ledge, where, trembling, I came face-to-face with the crossed eyes of a stranger.

  • • •

  Doctors spend a good part of their practice drowning to death in stories. Fail to listen patiently, and the story of the patient becomes the story of the doctor.

  Doctors form the good habit of following their wives’ orders to the letter. Tomás had only done what I’d asked of him and given away those horrid boots. The beneficiary happened to be the homeless man who liked to sit on our front stoop on Saturday nights nibbling on the pumpkin flowers. I of course forgave Tomás for the near-mortal scare inflicted on me by his doppelgänger. And Tomás forgave me “for underestimating our will to live and overestimating our will to die.” But I could not forgive myself for inadvertently playing executioner by choosing to ignore what Tomás humbly called “the six differences” between my picture of him and that of the man whom the staff had fondly baptized the Doppelhanger.