When I Knew You (3 page)

"Oh my God, Mother! Did you see that? Katarina? Can you hear me?"

Mom? Is that you?
 

I couldn't form the words, couldn't open my eyes. It was too much, too much to do. I tried to squeeze her hand, it must have been her hand.
 

Don't let me go, Mom. Don't let me go.

There was a sob, a flurry of words, then as I drifted away, waves slowly dissolved the voices in a hissing foam that sent me back to sleep.

She brushed my hair away from my face. Her fingers were cold. They always keep hospitals so cold. She was here, though. I recognized the way she traced my eyebrows, running a slow, gentle line down my cheek. She used to do that when I was little, when I was sick.

I could hear her humming, she always had such a beautiful voice, but I couldn't quite figure out the tune. Then I heard a click and she began talking to someone. Or maybe not to someone. Maybe to me. But I couldn't hear the words, they blended into a murmur, thick and long, tangling with the ticking sounds of machines, the whisper of the air conditioner. Still, I felt safe. She was here, watching over me.

Wherever here was.

Hurts. That hurts.

"Kati? Are you okay? Do you want me to call the nurse, Kati?"
 

I tried to move my head. Oof. No, not just
that
hurts. Everything hurts. I groaned again, trying to open my eyes. I heard a chair creak, the clicking of heels on a floor.
 

"Antonia! She's waking up! Come here!"

I saw Abuela leaning over me, waving at someone off to the side. I tried to speak, but my throat wouldn't cooperate.
 

"Katarina?" My mom came into focus. It was her, wasn't it? She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back.
 

"Oh, Katarina. You're back."
 

Her voice. Something was wrong with her voice. And why was she calling me that? She hadn't called me Katarina in a dozen years.

"Wh...where?" I tried to speak, but the sound was raspy.

"I'll get you some water," Abuela rushed over to a table, returning with a tall plastic tumbler and straw.

"You're in the hospital," Mom said, tears flowing down her face.
 

Something was different. She was different. There was a ferocity in her eyes, a fever bright intelligence, primal and intense. It was as if she were gathering in every detail of my face, every line. I closed my own eyes for a moment, feeling the dull pounding at my temples.
 

Mom kept talking. "You were in an accident. You've been here for three days. But you're going to be fine. A little bruised and battered, but you'll be fine."

Three days? I opened my eyes again and tried to think.

In quick flashes I remembered a man jumping from a wooden tower, a woman running to embrace him on the ground, then Pilar and Mike, wrapping the ropes up, Pilar looking at me with concern as I walked to the lodge. I saw Pilar asking me about my mother, her intense gray eyes diving beneath the surface of our conversation and uncovering the quiet truths under the layers of self-deceit. I remembered Pilar looking away from me, looking out the other window graciously, understanding that I had grown uncomfortable. I drove over the hill and bend in the road, letting the silence cool my nerves. I had leaned forward to grab the phone. Then...

Pilar. She was in the car.
 

I looked at Abuela, not wanting to ask the question. I shook my head, fighting as tears blurred the edges of the room.
 

"Pilar?" I croaked.

"She's fine, she's doing fine." My mother's voice cut across the bed.

Abuela turned away, heading back to the table. Pilar was not fine.
 

I closed my eyes, then felt Mom squeeze my hand. "I knew you'd be all right. I knew it. They are so much better at all this now. So much more sophisticated."
 

I stared at her, trying to understand what was happening, why she seemed so different. She looked nervous, but held my gaze, waiting for me. Then I realized what it was. Her accent. She'd lost her accent.

About a year after the accident, her accident, a sweet southern accent crept into her voice little by little. By my thirteenth birthday, she sounded like she'd walked off the set of the Country Music Awards. I got so used to it that it had long since stopped being strange. It was just another weird thing about Antonia, another in a very long list.
 

Mr. Calderon. His face flashed in my mind, sitting in the leather chair, talking about Antonia, Antonia. 'She's back,' he had said.

This was the Antonia he was talking about.
 

"Mom?"

She gently brushed my hair away from my forehead. "It's me, Katarina. It's Mom." She laughed, the sound was thin as fishing line. "Did you miss me?"

"Antonia!" Abuela admonished.

Mom straightened, shooting a look at Abuela I had never, ever seen. It was exasperation. "I'm kidding, Mother."

But we all knew she wasn't. A doctor came in with a nurse hot on her heels, sparing us any more questions or, more importantly, answers.

Chapter 5

Twelve years ago, I sat in my room for a month after Mom came home from the hospital. I refused to go to school, refused to go outside, refused to do anything. Abuela had moved into our spare bedroom temporarily as she met with the physical therapists, the cognitive therapists, the social workers, and a parade of strangers coming in to figure out what could be rebuilt in my mother's head and what was gone forever.

Gradually, they created a routine for Mom, who would then forget it all by the next morning and they'd have to start from scratch again every morning.
 

"Your name is Antonia."

"Antonia?"

"Yes. This is your house. Let me show you where the bathroom is."

Abuela would lead her to the bathroom, showing her how to brush her teeth, her hair, lord knows what else.

For those first few months, we'd meet at breakfast, introduced like we were distant cousins at a family reunion.

"Antonia, this is Kati."

"Hello, Kati." Mom would beam a warm smile at me, no recognition in her eyes, just a polite acceptance of my name, as she politely accepted the names of everything. Toothbrush. Lipstick. Refrigerator. Kati.

Abuela would lean closer to her, emphasizing the words. "She's your daughter."

Mom's eyes would grow wide.

 
"Hi, Mom." I'd say, and look down at my cereal, the o's swelling in too much milk because Abuela didn't know that I didn't like milk with my cereal. I liked them dry in the bowl, milk in a glass.

Mom watched me eat like a traveler watches people when they're in a new country, careful not to mistakenly pick up the wrong utensil. She'd smile at Abuela and me, proud of her accomplishment.

I'd walk away from the table feeling like I was walking off a stage, where everything was paper thin and fake. The only problem was there was nothing real waiting in the wings.

After three weeks of this, Abuela talked about us moving into her house. They'd figured out that Mom was in no shape to take care of herself, let alone me. Everything was collapsing. It was as if the accident hadn't just knocked away Mom's life, it had crumbled at the foundation that supported all our lives, and now the structures all around us were crashing down as well.
 

I had sat on the backyard porch swing, kicking at the deck with my stained tennies, sitting on my hands. The back door slammed, but I didn't look up. I felt one of the dozens of strangers sit down next to me, saw her white shoes, worn on the edges. Margie.
 

Margie was my favorite of all the therapists. She was the same age as my mother and would often sit on the porch with me after a long cognitive therapy session. She had lived in El Paso all her life and her family was from Socorro where the cotton farms knelt at the dry lips of the canals. She had swath of freckles across her nose, a gift from her Irish grandfather, she said, and wore bright red sneakers. She always wore big hoop earrings that bobbed when she talked.
 

Margie told me stories about how, when she was thirteen, she used to drive down the caliche roads, kicking up dust tails in her dad's Impala. "Thank God they made cars out of metal in those days," she'd said, whispering to me as if she might still get in trouble. "Otherwise I'd have gone in the canal for sure. My new car, that little Toyota? It would have lost a muffler on the first turn," she scoffed.

 
In the beginning, all the sessions with Mom were long as Margie and the other therapists methodically drew a map of what exactly had been lost inside Mom's head. I envisioned countries colored in light colors, like the ability to walk, the names of her favorite salsa bands, and the memory of her Christmas at the coast when she was five. Within the borders of each country were huge black holes. And at the edges of the countries furthest to the north, where our life used to be, were the words
Beyond This There Be Dragons
etched in long slanting strokes.

"Aye, niña. It won't be like this forever, Kati," Margie had said, her voice low and steady, a little lilt of Spanish flowing in every word, much like it was with Abuela. "Right now is the worst of it. But your mother is very bright and she's fighting this. She's fighting to get back. In time, she'll keep hold of these things we keep talking about. Not everything, but some things."

"Like me?" I said miserably.

She put her arm around me and held me close. I could smell the almond scent in her hair that curled around her shoulders like a throw. "Yes, Kati. Especially you." She leaned back and took my face in her hands. "We have to build bridges in her mind. New bridges, you see? Brick by brick, plank by plank. We won't be able to build them for everything, but the things that really matter, you'll see, those we'll be able to build."

Margie was right. And wrong.
 

Maps only show the outlines of place. The streets, but not the people who live there. The mountains, but not the smell of the yucca in bloom. The border, but not the children who swarm the bridges between countries, selling candy to tourists waiting to get across.

The map of my mom's mind was as shallow a dinner plate. She couldn't remember anything for more than a week if it wasn't reinforced. She couldn't learn to read. But these were the smallest things, sand on the shore of the ocean. In the deeper waters of her mind, the change was total. Mom had gone from a forceful, impatient, and (even her friends would say) unpleasant woman, to a sweet, kind-hearted child. She wasn't merely a woman who had lost her memory and the ability to read. She wasn't even close to being the same person anymore.

In that first year, she did begin to hold onto some things. She learned the basics, remembered who I was, as long as I saw her every day, managed to cook simple meals. She even began to act like a mom in little ways, worrying about me, asking about school. But the woman who could do the Sunday crossword in pen and silence a room with a look—that woman was gone.
 

After that year, my mom became Antonia to me. I liked to think it was easier on both of us when I started calling her Antonia, even though I could tell it made Abuela unhappy.

The terrible thing, the bit I never said out loud, was that in a way, after a couple of years, I didn't think this was all bad. The pressure Mom had put on me for years to do more at school, more at home, more everywhere...that pressure was gone. I had choices I'd never had before: freedom to pick my after school activities, my clothes, opt to have cookies after dinner. Even Pilot was allowed to sleep on my bed, his orange fur establishing a permanent rust-colored circle on my comforter no matter how often I used the lint brush. It was like getting away with a whole host of crimes because no one even knew they were crimes. It definitely had its upside.
 

I felt guilty about even thinking this way. My mother had effectively lost her life while I had gained another one. I kept my thoughts to myself as we worked our way through a new world.
 

"Katarina."

Mom
?

"Katarina, I don't know how much longer... Damn it, I'm losing, losing again." I heard her sniffing quietly, but no matter what I did I couldn't pry my eyes open. She was touching my hand and I tried to squeeze it, to let her know that I could hear her. But she moved her hand away too quickly, to my face, my hair, my shoulder.

"I just want you to know that I love you."
 

I heard a brief, soft thumping, the sound of someone placing their fist on their chest.
 

"
I
love you. You understand? Me. Even if I'm... gone, or whatever. Oh, damn it." The sniffling was back, muffled, and fading.

I know, Mom. I know.

Chapter 6

The sounds of rapid-fire Spanish filled the room, a brief burst of overly dramatic music punching through the words. I knew immediately what it was. Abuela was watching novelas.

She preferred the Mexican novelas that were on the believable end of the scale, without alien abductions, although she didn't mind a saint visitation now and then.

I hated the novelas, only because I'd get sucked right into the ridiculous story line. Before I knew it I was rushing home from class to find out if Hortencia had caught her airline pilot husband sleeping with her beautiful but greedy half sister who was plotting to kill Hortencia by poisoning her with exotic herbs she'd gotten from an evil "curandera," a witch of sorts, who had hated Hortencia since she married the witch's cousin, the pilot who was, actually, afraid of flying.

"Isn't there something else on?" I said, opening my eyes, blinking rapidly as I adjusted to the light.

"It's almost over and—" Abuela said, then whirled in her chair to look at me. "Kati? Kati! You're awake!" She rushed to my side, beaming.

We fussed over the television and bed controls, and soon the novella was gone and I was sitting up a bit. I looked around the room, but we were alone. "Where's Mom?"