She Walks in Shadows (21 page)

When Sara started kindergarten, I got a good job at the regional hospital. Doctors dictated; I transcribed. There wasn’t enough of anything in particular to specialize, so I heard a bit of everything. Most of it went in one ear and out the other, but sometimes, I slowed down a little so I could listen.

My turnaround on toxicology reports was never as good as on other things. Autopsies, either.

“
Me siento extraña
,” complained Abuelita as I rubbed the oil into her skin with my gloved hands. “
Y huelo mal.
”

I fished around for the words to ask, “Is the bad feeling tingly? Are you losing sensation?” But my Spanish isn’t all that good, so I just said, “
Es el regalo, abuelita. Lo que pidió
.”
The gift you asked for.

“Ah.” Her blind eyes lit up. “
Muerte.
”

It was during our first winter in North Dakota that things started to go wrong for the Herreros.

Grandpa Estéban was excited about the cold. No urban heat island, no tall buildings to break the fierce prairie winds. Dirty, gray snowdrifts buried the shelter-belt trees up to their lowest branches.

He knew we’d get frostbite if we stayed out in the snow unprotected. But what if Abuelita stayed out on the back porch of this farmhouse? Someone had put up screens against mosquitos at some point. They would hold out most of the snow.

“Think of how it could slow the deterioration,” he said, eyes wide as a child’s.

“I don’t like it,” I told him. “Abuelita won’t, either.”

But Sara was too little to know what was going on and Tío Gaspar never said a word against Grandpa Estéban. Grandpa and Abuelita sat out there one night, over her bitter complaints.

When they tried to come in the next morning, Abuelita’s left leg, frozen and brittle, broke clean through. Grandpa Estéban developed a cough that didn’t go away until there was nothing left in his lungs.

The next time he shaved, his whiskers didn’t grow back.

The month before Abuelita’s birthday, one of the two HR reps caught me on the way back from lunch. The door of the office next to hers was closed, so I knew what was coming when she sat me down.

“I’m sorry to tell you that your position has been eliminated,” she said. “The doctors are going to start using dictation software, instead.” She pushed a folder across the desk to me. “You’re not being singled out.”

The folder included a list of positions and ages of the newly unemployed. There were no names on it, but a glance showed that it was the whole department. The hit list went from the recent college grad up to my manager and me, the only ones in our fifties.

“I know you’ll do well, Melissa. You have great skills. Excellent skills. And this is an excellent severance package.”

I read the whole folder’s worth right there at her desk, taking my time. Somebody told me once that I “wintered well,” and although they might have meant “plump,” I liked to think it meant I could wait anything out. The HR rep sat there with an expectant, apologetic smile.

The severance was better-than-decent. I signed the papers and walked out of her office without saying another word.

My manager, Debbie, was leaving the other HR office. “I guess they took us in order of seniority,” she said. “At least they didn’t make me lay anybody off.” She laughed mirthlessly. “I’d feel like a murderer.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, walking toward anesthesiology in no kind of hurry. “I don’t think you would.”

Sometimes, Grandpa Estéban talked about moving further west.

“It’s getting too settled here,” he said one Sunday. All of us had gathered in the so-called living room, the living standing in our coats and the dead sitting down, to listen to Mass on Internet radio. “I keep reading that the state’s population is climbing.”

“That’s out west,” Gaspar told him. “It’s the crude. There’s no fracking here and we’d have to drive through all that activity to get anywhere quieter.”

“Nobody would care about us passing through. And who says we should go somewhere quiet? We can get lost in a city.”

Sara perked up at that. She hadn’t lived in a city since she went to medical school in St. Louis. “Portland, you mean? Or Seattle?”

“Maybe. The best place would be Alaska, but that’s a hard journey.”

He looked at Abuelita, hunched in her wheelchair. She was stroking the velvet and the lace on the jewelry roll I’d made her, although she kept it empty. She held it almost as often as her rosary, these days.

With Abuelita’s broken leg that could never heal, it took two of us to even move her from bed to wheelchair and back. Alaska was out of the question.

I took turns with Tío Gaspar in the garden that summer, stinking of mosquito repellent and raising the healthy vegetables I didn’t much like. They soaked up the long summer sun and got big. Huge.

My hands grew callused and clumsy. My arms and legs grew strong. I ate the big vegetables, and the plain rice, and the boring barley soup. I shed the soft layers of myself.

I did not want another winter.

One day in September, I went to town to pick up a shipment of our supplies. We have a little lab at home, and Sara’s very handy, but you can’t make everything from scratch. Luckily, you can get almost anything over the Internet.

I was standing in line at the post office when Debbie spotted me. “Melissa! Oh my gosh, I didn’t recognize you!”

She was doing okay, she said, working in a doctor’s office as an office manager. Bit of a pay cut, but when you added in the severance, not too bad a year.

“And you look great, Melissa! You lost so much weight! What are you doing?”

“Oh, you know. Lot of gardening,” I said.

“You working?” She eyed the slip in my hand, maybe hoping the carrier couldn’t drop off packages because I had a new job. Truth was, we just didn’t answer the door.

“No, I’m on unemployment. Good until almost Thanksgiving, as long as I keep looking.”

I did look, but there wasn’t much for middle-aged women with excellent skills in medical transcription, skin care, and poisons.

Autumn was a brief, brown season. Years ago, when we still went to Mass in town on Sundays, we used to drive a special route in the fall. There were blocks and blocks lined with birch trees, their white trunks striped with black and their branches arcing pale-gold overhead. It was like driving through a cathedral. I was always sorry that Abuelita didn’t get to see it.

Bronze birch borers took all the trees a while back. By then, we weren’t going to Mass anymore, so it took us a few years to notice.

“Abuelita’s not doing good,” said Tío Gaspar to me over lunch one day of that last October.

Sara was at work, and Abuelita would be at her rosary. We could hear the compressors chugging along through one of the last warm lunchtimes in a season tinged with cold at the edges of the day. Grandpa Estéban would not come out into the unchilled part of the house in this heat.

“You mean the way she’s slowing down?” I said cautiously.

“Uh-huh. It’s been a long time coming and I think she’s ready.” He locked eyes with me. “You know, she never wanted to live the way we do. She thinks it’s a sin.”

After me, Abuelita spent more time with Tío Gaspar than anybody. And his Spanish was better. I nodded and spooned up some more potato soup.