Stupid little lidless blue cup of coffee in hand, I was walking down the narrow aisle from the food car toward my seat just as the train lurched out of Newark. This giant dude getting up from his seat lost his balance and knocked into me. Coffee splashed on my hand and, without meaning to, I yelped. It was so embarrassing, that high-pitched squeal coming out of my mouth like I’d been stabbed or something. Oak-Tree Neck apologized profusely. I cleared my throat. “No problem,” I sort of grunted and nodded and continued down the aisle. I just wanted to sit down. Actually, I just wanted to be home already. Next stop was Penn Station. Give an hour or two, I planned to be in bed, blankets pulled over my face. Almost back at my seat, I heard a loud grinding noise, like a knife being sharpened at the hardware store, but a trillion times louder and more severe. Coffee splashed on my wrist again. This time I didn’t cry out. Or maybe I did. I don’t remember. Everything happened so quickly. Certain small details of the wreck are lost to me.
I do remember dropping the cup of coffee on the train’s dirty carpet. Next thing I knew, my entire body launched upward. My briefcase caught on a seat back and was ripped from my hand by the jerking momentum. I’m pretty sure my head slammed against the overhead luggage rack. And I must have tried to brace my fall with outstretched arms, because the distinctive noise of cracking bones announced my landing as I crashed to the floor. Some people screamed, but others, strangely, laughed. Personally, I focused all my efforts on trying to grip the bolted metal underside of a chair as the train started to tilt and roll onto its side. My left hand had no strength. A searing pain surged up my left arm and across my torn-tattoo raw chest. I slid into a crumpled ball on a horizontal windowed surface that should have been the wall next to my assigned seat. I tried to stand, but couldn’t. I opened my mouth to call for help, but found I was unable to make any sound save for a rasping wheeze. The lights went out. Not “the lights went out” like I died or something; I just mean the train cabin lights no longer worked.
Okay, you know how people say catastrophic situations bring out the very worst or best in people? Bullshit. The wreck did nothing of the sort. Everyone in that derailed and toppled train remained just as messily human as they’d been before. As for me, I’d love to say I did something poetic or noble as I lay there trapped in the dark wreckage. Something like even though I didn’t know if I’d live or not, I used my final reserve of strength to write
Nat love
or some similar cryptic sentiment on a seat cushion in my own blood. Or maybe: I dragged my broken body to another person and cradled their head in my lap as they died. (And, just to keep the facts straight, people did die that day—two, according to newspaper reports the next morning.) Shamefully, I would be lying if I claimed I did anything but whimper with bloody snot smeared on my face until either my head trauma or the pain or the thick black smoke filling the train finally, mercifully, caused me to black out.
So, no, I didn’t offer my help or comfort to anyone around me. I didn’t scream,
Over here, over here … no take her first, she’s worse off than I am!
when firefighters tore through the train walls with jaws of life to rescue people and to put out the fire. Hell, I didn’t even hear the emergency-response sirens when the teams arrived. And I most certainly didn’t realize the crash had been caused by a statistically improbable engineering glitch involving one seriously dented but intact Jeep Cherokee wedged between train tracks and one severely depressed but physically uninjured man’s failed suicide attempt. I didn’t see the tracks littered with luggage, clothing, and a bicycle. Nor did I witness the surrounding snow-covered gravel turn a muddy pink reeking mess of diesel fuel, oil, and blood. There wasn’t a single bit of my brain that pondered if maybe our wreckage resembled the derailment that had killed my father’s sister in Chicago so many years before. I didn’t pray for my father to watch over me like some sort of guardian angel, I didn’t hope my mother would care, and I didn’t wish for Nathalie to cover me in kisses.
I just lay unconscious in the demolished train.
A
loud thunderclap noise sounded and echoed. Fearing lightning or gunshots, I hit the ground. Floodlights snapped on overhead. I lay sprawled on my belly at the edge of a shallow stage. Sweat dripped into my mouth and I tasted waxy pancake makeup. Slow melancholy music played from speakers hidden somewhere off to my sides. A scratchy resonant voice said:
I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire.
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face as he gathered me up in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement …
The fabulous Ms. Peggy Lee crooned our song.
Once upon a time, I saw Peggy Lee get into a limo on Broadway in Midtown. The limo was chipped white and its dark window tinting was bubbled and peeling off. Peggy Lee was well past her glory days, but goddamnit, she rode around town in a limo. Tacky and in need of repair or not, it was still a limo, and she refused to go shopping without chauffeured fabulousness. Her arms weighed down by a trillion boutique shopping bags—linen bags, silk-ribbon-handled bags, fancy bags which surely held even fancier pirate loot—she was the definition of elegance itself.
Truly, Peggy Lee was totally stunning. Her famous face was painted-on radiance and her hairdo was … oh lord, there is no way to appropriately describe it, but her dyedblond bird’s nest was teased high and big, like an aura and a halo and all the heavens woven into a single crown for one very troubled but very gorgeous lady. Watching her step into a limousine was like seeing my fairy godmother glide by on a sparkling Pegasus. Strike me dead if I’m lying, but once she was inside the limo with the door closed, Peggy Lee rolled down her window, looked at me, winked her tired wink, and blew me a kiss.
I didn’t wash the air ever again.
… I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames …
A trick to try:
Stand in a doorway. Any narrow doorway will do. Let your arms hang at your sides. Push. Press the backs of your hands against the doorframe with as much strength as you have, and then some. Do this for at least three minutes, five minutes if you can. Push. Hard. Focus. And when your egg-timer trills and your time is up, step out of the doorway. Move into an open space, either enclosed or outdoor will do, but be sure it’s a space free of obstruction. Stand and relax. Your arms will float skyward. From memory embedded in your muscles, your arms will levitate without your consciously intending them to.
Your body has memory.
And so there I was, onstage, blinded, two safe deposit keys hanging from my neck. A headache crept to the base of my skull. I wanted to rip off the twine metal necklace, rub the stage makeup from my face with my bare hands, run out of the theater, and be done with it. But the show had to go on. There were no other options. So I hit my mark. And my arms floated upward in front of me. The weight of those damned keys around my neck was the only thing keeping me from floating away outright. But I couldn’t control my inherited phantom limbs—my father’s naïve heart, his mother’s burning lips, Nahui’s bloodshot eyes begging for blessing from an unforgiving and burning sun …
I sang.
And when it was all over I said to myself, “Is that all there is to a fire?”
Is that all there is?
“Francisca?” an unfamiliar voice addressed me.
A hand tapped my right shoulder and introduced me to the throbbing pain pulsing throughout my body. Centralized epicenters of ache located in my left arm and a spot directly above my left brow, I woke, startled, with only three limbs I was able to control and a crackling voice that no one would put onstage.
“Yeah?” I croaked.
I opened my eyes to find that I was lying in a bed with a nurse standing at my side. At least I thought she was a nurse. I wasn’t sure. She was wearing lavender scrubs. Don’t doctors wear white coats over their scrubs? And more dignified scrubs? Don’t they walk around with stethoscopes hanging from their necks? But if she was a nurse, or even a doctor for that matter, why was she being so familiar? Why had she used
that
name?
“Have we met?” I asked.
I wasn’t trying to be funny, I seriously thought maybe we knew each other from somewhere else and some other time. Where was I anyhow? … Forget where I was, if she called me “Francisca” again I was going to start wondering
who
I was.
“I’m so happy you’re awake,” she said, and smiled a sincere and huge smile.
Her cheeriness freaked me out.
“Now, sweetheart,” she continued, “you’ll be a little groggy. It’s just the painkiller. It’ll wear off by morning. We want to keep you here tonight to make sure you’re okay.”
Again, where was “here”?
My lips were thick and chapped. It was a battle to keep my eyelids open. My thoughts fuzzed in and out of focus in the most floating-cloud pleasant way. What meds had they given me? I wanted more.
“I’m okay,” I said. A beat too late I realized my statement was in no way a response to anything she had said.
“Yes, of course you are,” she laughed, in a friendly way, like we were pals. “But you sure gave the medics a scare when they found you. That tattoo on your chest was a mess. At first they thought you had some horrible chest wound.”
If she only knew.
“Are you thirsty?” she asked. “Can I get you some ginger ale or water?”
She lay her hand kindly on my right shoulder. I sort of wished she would reach down and hug me. Or spoon-feed me applesauce. She wasn’t so bad. She was really sweet, actually.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sally.”
“That’s a nice name.”
Stoned as I was on pain meds, I listened with considerably strained effort as Sally put the pieces together for me. Most obviously, my upper left arm was broken and in a cast. Sally said a busted humerus was no big deal, happened all the time, it’d heal just fine. And she said not to worry about the two stitches that tugged on the skin of my forehead either. They’d dissolve away all on their own. I wasn’t concerned, but I did wish the stitches were from a frontal lobotomy. That would have been so soothing. And as for the new tattoo on my chest, she’d cleaned and bandaged it while I was still passed out. The top layer of scabs, she said, had been rubbed right off, but it should be no problem.
As far as I cared, my injuries were neither here nor there. I would heal. What sucked was that, besides Sally, I was alone. I had no one to call. No one would know something was wrong.
Sally smoothed a thin hospital blanket over my legs.
“I’ll be back. Rest,” she said.
I fell asleep for I’m not sure how long and woke to once again find Sally at my side, this time offering me something to drink from a plastic cup. I adored her for holding a bendy straw to my mouth and smiling proudly like my drinking ginger ale was the most impressive accomplishment the world had ever known. She wiped dribbled soda off my chin. If my heart hadn’t already been taken by another, I swear I would have fallen in love. We could make a happy home here and … wait—
“Sally, where are we?”
At first she looked at me like she thought I might have a concussion, like she needed to call in a neurologist to check on me. And then she laughed and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I guess I forgot to tell you. You’re in Newark, New Jersey—University Hospital.”
I swear the fates have some sort of giant industrial titanium filing cabinet filled with manila folders for every human who has ever existed. Like uptight little socialite dinner hostesses, inside each folder they log notes on what feasts they’ve cooked up for each guest. Clearly, all the Cruz files kept getting mixed up. I was so completely over having my family’s traumas served to me like re-plated tepid leftovers. University Hospital. I was being schooled, no doubt about it. Question was: Had I finally learned my lesson?
17 February 2003. President’s Day.
E
yes stung by gusts of snow, shoes soaked, coat and clothes thoroughly ruined, I stood outside Penn Station and tried to hail a ride home. Getting a cab at Penn Station is never easy—during rush hour in the middle of a blizzard and looking as thrashed as I did, it was near hopeless. By the time a cab finally stopped for me and delivered me to my building, the sun had long set. As if the past two days hadn’t already provided enough drama to last a lifetime, four police officers, plastic-slicker-covered and shivering, blocked me at the sidewalk.
“I live here,” I said, pointing up toward my apartment.
In response they eyeballed me suspiciously, and one asked to see my identification. Too exhausted to ask why or what was going on, I simply obliged. Driver’s license shown and returned to my wallet, they let me continue to the door. Someone had shoved soggy rolled-up newspaper as a makeshift doorstop under the vestibule door. I started to push the newspaper aside with my foot so the door would shut and lock behind me. The cops shot me a look that wasn’t a reprimand exactly; it was more equal parts caution and horror. Downtown cops who’d seen it all—finding that look on their faces was unsettling. I left the doorstop in place and stepped inside past the door. The same expression the cops wore instantly plastered itself across my face.
Holy mother of all things miserable, the stink that infiltrated my nose was beyond description. Truly. Humans should not know such odors and are therefore incapable of explaining them accurately. I pinched my nose between my fingertips and breathed through my mouth as I walked up the stairs. Another sour-faced officer stood guard at the second landing. Johnny’s door was wide open; I learned the smell of death.
I remembered Nathalie’s freakout about Johnny a few days earlier. I should have trusted her intuition. Something
had
been wrong. Terribly wrong. Sorry to be crude, but from the smell of things, Johnny had probably been dead the entire two weeks we hadn’t seen him. And the building’s radiator had been on full blast for at least as long. His dead body rotted the entire time. He’d been alone. All alone. No one had known he was dead.
If there aren’t at least five people you can depend on, you are in deep murky waters
and
I don’t want to die alone,
I heard my father say. Standing in front of Johnny’s door, I understood.