Garcia's Heart (16 page)

In the weeks since he'd started at the store, Patrick hadn't said a word to Celia outside of conversation made necessary by working in the same place. But he watched her. Felt the excitement as the store opened and another day in which he might see her began. He loved her and it must have showed–Roberto knew, any teenage boy would know. That summer Patrick found himself wondering whether Celia understood English, as she seemed so completely inured to his presence in the store. Undaunted, he attempted sonnets and learned rudimentary Spanish just at the thought of one day being better able to express himself to her. He refused to think about her when he masturbated, and, in the bizarre, emblematic way of sixteen-year-old boys, that was love. He lingered around her whenever possible, making sure she knew how hard he was working for her father, for her, and with time Patrick imagined she noticed him as someone notices the arrival of good weather, the gradual acknowledgement that something surprising and pleasant has happened and could be counted on to happen again. Patrick did all of this only to overhear her speak on the phone, in perfect English, with a new friend, and say that she was in the store and had to be alert as she was alone with “the vandal.”

Before, a humiliation like that would have sent him, spray can in hand, to wreak havoc on the walls of Le Dépanneur Mondial, but now her judgment only had the effect of sanctifying his infatuation, spurring him to redouble his efforts to be worthy of her.

Even with Roberto's threats and Celia's indifference, Patrick still felt at home at Le Dépanneur Mondial. Marta García was mysterious, her attentions always divided between the book in front of her and the other world with its hazards and complications. And although she smiled at him, in those first few weeks Patrick knew she still had her suspicions, even more so after he asked to stay on and became part of the growing non-García staff contingent. And if the atmosphere in those early days ranged from indifference to low-grade hostility, Patrick reasoned it wasn't anything he couldn't live with, but he knew that something drastic would have to change for anyone but Hernan and Nina to like him. So when Gerry Delaney, a well-known small-time (meaning largely unsuccessful) criminal, showed up in Le Dépanneur Mondial late on a Tuesday night in August with his hands in his pockets and a furtive look in his eyes, Patrick's first impulse wasn't to call the cops but to watch and wait, sensing this could be an ideal opportunity for character rehabilitation. He crouched down behind some shelves and glided closer to the cash, the Pro-matic industrial mop like a javelin in his hands. The first, skittish strains of the overture from
The Marriage of Figaro
sang out from the speakers. Patrick poked his head up to see Gerry loitering around the front of the store, waiting for the final customer to leave. When the chimes above the door finally died down, Delaney looked up and subtly manoeuvred himself to the register, where
Celia's attention was focused on a magazine she was leafing through. His jacket pocket bulged, a non-specific shape and size; a ruse, Patrick assumed, as Delaney had a reputation in the neighbourhood for big talk and see-through bluffs. But then his two hands fluttered and in a surprisingly deft motion, he pulled a black ski mask over his face. The act was an unexpected kick-start: countless biologic cylinders fired simultaneously, throwing Patrick forward like a man electrified. The mask energized Gerry Delaney too, turning him from zigzagging crab to a truer predator, lunging at the counter and shouting at Celia to empty the cash. Patrick remembered Celia's face, that terrible fright and what it aroused in him, a feeling outside of anything he'd felt before, not just the need to intervene or to seem a hero to her, but the snarling, primordial need to defend family.

The Pro-matic industrial mop is rightly famous for its solid design. It weighs in at more than thirteen pounds, bone-dry, right out of the manufacturer's wrapping. Add another couple of pounds for soaked-up water, and raising the mop above one's head is a formidable task. But in those first few moments the mop was a butterfly net in Patrick's hands; the true heft and momentum of the mop became apparent only in mid-flight, as he was propelled forward, trying to hang on to the suds-soaked battle-axe aimed at Gerry Delaney's masked head.

“You could have
killed
him,” Hernan said later, when he sat Patrick down and read him the riot act in the wake of the mop-swinging incident. After the way the story was featured in all the papers–a photo of Celia and Patrick staring into the camera from behind the shattered counter with the accompanying story of a young hero acting to prevent a robbery of the store he himself had once vandalized, all
under the headline “Forget the cops, grab the mop!”–Hernan's anger caught him by surprise. Hernan made it clear how upset he was about the risks Patrick had taken. Gerry, it turned out,
did
have a gun and for once, according to the cops, had managed to load it correctly. Celia could have been shot. “You could have been hurt,” Hernan said. Only years later did Patrick understand how Hernan must have dreaded the publicity, the cops and reporters crawling around Le Dépanneur Mondial, taking down everybody's names. He
could
have killed Gerry Delaney too. The mop head did land, stoving in the counter with a wicked, splintering force, but it missed Delaney by a mile. It shocked the assailant, though, and as he recoiled, he slipped on the trail of soapy water the mop head had left on the floor and he fell, breaking his left hip. Patrick remembered Celia's scream twinning up with Gerry's alto yelp, calling out against Mozart's overture to
Figaro
, and then sirens, sirens, sirens. In someone else's fantasy, Patrick would be cool in the aftermath, he would have walked over to Celia and taken her in his arms but, in reality, Patrick was scared and shaking and instead, he turned his attention to Gerry. He knelt down to hold Gerry's clammy hand, hoping it would make the injured man stop screaming until the ambulance arrived.

And while the true mechanics of heroism were, in his case, distressingly banal, even inadvertent, they were dutifully ignored by all. He was a hero, celebrated by the community and, more importantly, by the Garcías, and allowed to revel in that tight-lipped, aw-shucks modesty that all heroes exude. Once Hernan got over being angry, he found it impossible to suppress a smile every time he looked at Patrick. Marta began calling him by his full name, Michael Patrick. Roberto let his
wariness slacken and, along with Nina, started calling Patrick “Mop.” So did Celia, which hurt a bit. But Patrick preferred it to what she had called him before.

By his second month at the store, he had assumed all the duties of stocking and cleaning up, inheriting most of the other jobs that Roberto balked at. He felt increasingly comfortable handling customers' questions about the produce, occasionally venturing an opinion on the quality of the mangoes, and in a pinch, he'd even be called on to operate the cash. And when the day was over and the front door of Le Dépanneur Mondial was locked, he ran deliveries on a ridiculously antiquated bike with a seat so uncomfortable he preferred to stand on the pedals and pump up and down the streets of
NDG
like a Tour de France
domestique
.

But above all, he was an anthropologist dropped into Le Dépanneur Mondial, permitted for a time to observe the Garcías and all their rituals. They weren't a perfect family, which made them more fascinating to watch; in their moments of raised voices and slammed doors, during the times when Hernan and Marta García didn't get along or when Roberto seemed to take pleasure in testing his father, Patrick only came to see them as more authentic, and more authentically happy. He understood that even though Marta was bored working in the store, the book she kept with her was not a mere diversion but a source of pleasure, her concentration returning to it as soon as the door closed on a customer.

With time, the Garcías began to reveal themselves. Hernan, who would go about his work and not say anything for hours, began asking Patrick questions about his family or about school. And, perhaps understanding that his teenage employee was less inclined to ask questions, volunteered facts about his
own life. He confirmed what Marta had already confided in Patrick; he had been a doctor, a cardiologist, before coming to Canada. Years later, Patrick would ask himself why Hernan would choose this bit of personal information to tell him. It couldn't have been boastfulness; Patrick suspected Hernan knew how much he admired him already, nor did he need to prove his credentials to a sixteen-year-old in order to give advice to the arthritics and asthmatics who frequented Le Dépanneur Mondial. The only answer that made sense to Patrick, at the time as well as retrospectively, was that as some people enjoyed discussing sports or politics or the weather, Hernan García truly loved to talk about medicine.

Patrick's medical education–not just the acquisition of facts but the realization that he was an able and eager student, the first dangerous primings of an autodidact's pump–began that summer under the auspices of Hernan García. While only one of the refrigerated sections in the store was dedicated to meat, this did not stop Le Dépanneur Mondial from occasionally taking delivery of a beef heart, an organ immediately commandeered by Hernan and taken into the back for an impromptu anatomy lesson. Celia and Roberto, perhaps having witnessed these back room demonstrations too many times before, would find other things to do when this occurred, relieved their father had another potential pupil to call on. And while Patrick wanted nothing more than to impress Hernan, he became squeamish and dizzy at the thought of watching a dissection–the high school ritual of splayed frogs and rats came to mind, anything worth learning lost amid the hilarity of jocks hiding animal parts around the classroom. But he composed himself, hammering down any qualms, suppressing the nausea that seemed to arrive from nowhere. When Hernan
peeled back the pink butcher's paper and exposed the heart on a table in the back, he swallowed hard and stared at the bloody mass, unblinking. Hernan took the heart in one of his hands and felt its heft. Patrick shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It occurred to Patrick that the back room was an odd place to conduct this sort of business, dark and cavernous, adding creepiness to the encounter. Hernan must have sensed this, and told him that the first anatomic dissections of humans were carried out in secrecy, in rooms much like the one they were in, as the act was forbidden by church law. “It was considered an indignity,” he said, “but over the centuries dissection has become part of what every doctor has to do. It is tradition.” Patrick remembered the authoritative first cut in the dissection of the organ, the thick, deeply red flesh sliced open to reveal the chambers of the heart and the stringy webs around the edges of what Hernan explained were the valves. Hernan would describe the orderly lub-dubbing of valves in the heart as a choreographed action of door closings, of ushering a crowd through the rooms of a house. The tone of his voice lifted and his arms acquired extra gestures to ease his points home. “Do you understand?” Hernan would ask in such a way that no one could ever doubt his sincerity.

And, as is the case for any hungry self-learner, what Patrick was not given, he took. This meant, in addition to asking Hernan more and more about signs and symptoms, diseases and cures, he took to spying on Hernan, observing how he dealt with the customers who came for advice, how he would sit and say nothing as their sagas of swollen ankles and sore backs were laid out before him. When he had something to say he leaned in and lowered his voice, then leaned back and invariably nodded when the response came.
Hernan had endless patience, perhaps because he knew it was often all he could offer.

“Do you miss medicine?”

The question caught Hernan off guard–they were in the back of Le Dépanneur Mondial, installing new fluorescent bulbs in the refrigerated produce shelves. Hernan was speechless. For a moment Patrick thought he had pushed too far, but then he could see that Hernan was considering his answer. Rather than being angry at what could have been seen as an impertinent question, he seemed surprised that anyone would ask it at all. Holding the long, fragile tube in his hands, he looked at Patrick with an expression on his face that was legible even to an emotionally illiterate sixteen-year-old.

“I miss it terribly,” Hernan said, and then leaned over to place the bulb in its socket.

Patrick had never heard anyone speak about their working life, current or former, with any sentiment other than resignation or outright dread. When he had his medical school interview years later, he was asked the standard question of when he first thought about pursuing a career in medicine. Patrick chose to tell the interviewers gathered around the table that he had come to the decision slowly–skipping any mention of Hernan and the back room anatomy lessons–believing that the interviewers would view a description of a reasoned, deliberative process more positively than the story of an epiphany in a refrigerated produce unit. But that was the first instance, when something about Hernan's dignity and honesty and the sense of loss that he conveyed made Patrick consider what he wanted to be.

In August of that summer Patrick's parents announced that they were going away to a rented cabin up north. Having had
thirty summers' worth of family holidays, first with his two older sisters and then with Patrick, his parents were now weary of any vacation requiring much in the way of planning or activity. Both parents had hinted broadly that an ideal vacation for them meant that Roger would fish and Veronica would play solitaire in a different kitchenette for three weeks. And that was okay with Patrick; he was of the opinion common to teenagers and their parents that extended family trips were a variation on a hostage-taking, with each party assuming themselves, at different times, to be the victim. And in that spirit, his parents' vacation plans were presented to Patrick on the understanding that, while he was invited, he probably wouldn't want to take them up on the offer. He was given the phone number of the cabin for emergencies. Everyone was relieved and no one's feelings were hurt.