Family Man (23 page)

“Jesus, that’s so not true.”

“No shit. But it’s kind of like church, isn’t it? The fairy tale is what makes it all okay. There’s a big dad up in the sky who will take care of us so long as we color inside the lines. Take that away, and everything’s just a mess.”

“Marco would so kick your ass for calling church a fairy tale.”

“You telling me it isn’t? Believe it or don’t believe it. There’s no proof, and there sure as hell isn’t a line of logic or visible payoff.” She reached for her cigar and eased into her chair, looking up at the night sky where they’d see stars, if there were any to be seen in the brightly lit Chicago sky. “I wish there were a way to get them to see that it isn’t the fairy tale that matters. It’s the people who believe in it. The people they believe in it for.”

Vince looked up at the sky too, soaking in his sister’s words, her scotch and some damn fine Nicaraguan tobacco. “Maybe we can help them get their priorities straight.”

“Maybe.” Rachel reached for his hand and twined their fingers together. “Maybe.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

For the first time since I could remember, I was happy about my life. All of it, up and down and sideways, even with my mom and all the hell she put us through, past and present. I felt too good to let anything bring me down. I had a boyfriend, a hot, sexy, Italian boyfriend, one of the Fierros whom I had it on good authority were hard to catch. He took me to nice restaurants and held doors for me and refused to let me pay for anything. He kissed me until I could barely breathe. He gave me blowjobs I hadn’t known to dream about. He didn’t pressure me for anal sex, or anything about sex, letting it all evolve as it would. Plus, he wanted
me
to fuck him. Big macho Vincent Fierro wanted me to fuck him, and pretty soon I was going to. I felt like the king of the world.

I should have known things were too good to be true, that happiness couldn’t last. Not when my mom was around.

It started innocent enough, one Thursday after a particularly erotic goodbye from Vinnie that morning before we’d gone off to our respective jobs. As I arrived at the restaurant, Gram called. That was my first warning. Gram only called when there was an emergency of some sort.

“Honey, I don’t want to scare you,” she said, “but I thought you should know, your mom’s in the hospital.”

Again.
“What is it now?”

I knew I should have more sympathy. I should be concerned more than annoyed, but the number of trips to the hospital we’d lived through prevented me from becoming too alarmed.

“It’s kind of strange. We were having breakfast, and she kept saying the oddest things. Mixing up her words. I asked her if she was okay, but she was really slurring—”

“Had she been drinking?”

“That’s the thing. She seemed sober. Just confused. Anyway, I brought her to the hospital. They think her electrolytes are low.”

“That causes disorientation?”

“I guess. Anyway, they say they’ll give her fluids, and she’ll be fine.”

“Do I need to come down?”

“No, honey. Work your shift. They say we’ll probably be home by tonight.”

“Okay, Gram. I’ll bring dinner home so you don’t have to cook.”

I had a seven-hour shift that day, and I was busy the entire time. I barely had a moment to think about my mother, but when I did, it was mostly in passing. Gram had said she’d be fine. We’d been through enough of these incidents, they’d become routine.

I ordered some spaghetti and garlic bread to go. While I waited for it to be ready, I went to the employee break room to get my things from my locker. My phone was there, and it was ringing. A glance at it showed a number I didn’t recognize. It also showed five missed calls.

That couldn’t be good.

“Hello?”

“Trey, honey. You need to get to the hospital right away.” Gram wouldn’t use that tone unless it was warranted. When I asked what was going on, she said, “I don’t know, but it looks bad.”

I was lucky enough to catch a cab outside the restaurant, which got me to the hospital quicker than the EL would have. Gram had given me the room number, but all I could remember was that it was on the third floor. From there, I asked a woman in scrubs and eventually found my way to a room where my mom lay in a bed. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she was asleep. Gram sat in a chair at the back looking more tired than I’d seen her in a long time.

“What happened?”

“I tried to call, honey. Maybe I should have called the restaurant, but she seemed fine, and then everything happened so fast, and I tried to call, but you didn’t answer.”

“My phone was in my locker.” I went to the bed. My mother didn’t move. She had an IV in, and a Pulsox monitor on her finger.

“What happened?” I asked again.

“She started having seizures, one right after the other. Each one was worse than the one before. It was awful, Trey, the way she was thrashing around. They gave her some medicine to stop them.” She shook her head. “They don’t really know what’s causing it, but if you watch, you’ll see her feet shake every few minutes. They can’t get them to stop.”

“Did you tell them about the drinking? And the cough syrup?”

“I told them. One doctor said it could be related. Another said he didn’t think so.”

“How could it not be related?”

“I don’t know, Trey. They’ll be back in a few minutes, and you can ask them.”

“Okay.” I thought about my order back at the restaurant, likely in the trash by now. “Have you eaten?”

“There wasn’t time.”

I sat down. There was nothing to do but wait. Again.

I sent Gram to the cafeteria for dinner, and I called Vinnie.

“Do you need me?” he asked, then immediately swore. “Shit! Forget I even asked that. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Don’t, Vin. There’s nothing to do but sit here and watch her sleep.”

“Stop. I’m coming.”

“But—”

“Just because you’re used to doing this alone doesn’t mean it has to keep being that way. Now stop arguing and give me a room number.”

I gave in, secretly glad he was coming, even though I felt selfish for wanting him there. There was nothing he could do. It seemed unfair to make him deal with my dysfunctional family.

The doctors came in, but they didn’t tell me much more than Gram had already said. They didn’t know why she was having seizures. They’d been so prolonged and so severe, they worried about brain damage and cardiac arrest and so had chosen to sedate her. The problem was, the medications weren’t working. She wasn’t conscious, but the seizures hadn’t stopped.

“We have her in a medically induced coma,” one doctor told me. “The amount of antiseizure medication we’re giving her is off the charts. Any more could kill her. We have to weigh the risks of continued seizures against the risks of giving her a higher dose. It’s hard to say which approach is safest.”

Vinnie arrived half an hour later with a bag of sandwiches, several bottles of Sprite, water and a thermos of coffee. He also had a change of clothes for me, some of the things I’d taken to leaving at his house: an old pair of sweats, a T-shirt that bore faint traces of his aftershave, and a soft, worn hoodie to wear over it.

“Hospitals are always cold.” He handed me a sandwich. “I figured you hadn’t had time to eat between work and coming here. Brought enough for Sophia too, and some stuff for later in case you need it.”

He was right. Even though I’d sent Gram to the cafeteria, my own hunger hadn’t registered yet in my brain. “Thank you,” I said, hoping I sounded grateful and not wooden.

Vinnie rubbed my back and kissed my hair, and for the first time in about an hour, I felt slightly human again.

He led me to the comfier love seat, which he had somehow shanghaied, and told me to eat. I wasn’t hungry, but I choked down half of the sandwich simply because I knew it would make him stop worrying so much.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m here all night.”

I opened my mouth to tell him he didn’t have to do that, but his fierce look shut me up. Despite what I would have anticipated, it made me feel better too. I finished my food, sipped at my Sprite and settled in against Vinnie to wait.

By midnight she took another nasty turn, so bad that for a moment her heart stopped beating. By one a.m. they had her stable again, only to have her seize so badly at three it felt like half the hospital came into her room.

By the time the sun rose, she was in Intensive Care. A respirator kept air moving in and out of her lungs. I let Vinnie lead me to the new waiting room, let him take care of everything, trying to stay distant, trying not to get wrapped up in this new nightmare, telling myself it would be over soon.

By the time Vinnie came back with breakfast, the doctors had already come to us with long faces.

“It’s time to prepare for the worst,” they told me.

My mother was going to die. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know when.

I only knew I couldn’t quite believe it.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Vince had been involved in long hospital stays before, several of them a lot longer and more involved than Mindy’s, but somehow Trey’s situation seemed worse right off the bat. On the third day of shuttling Sophia and Trey back and forth, it hit him what the difference was: he’d never done something like this without his family.

There’d been Grandma Marisa’s fight with cancer, ending in a coma same as Mindy, except first they’d endured several surgeries and two trips back home before the endgame. Amanda’s first birth had been seven kinds of hell, and they’d nearly lost both mother and baby. Not only had she been in the hospital for four months—three prior to birth, one month after—she’d needed help around the house for almost six months after before they were through. Walter’d had a heart attack just last year and needed quadruple bypass surgery. Grandpa Giorgio hadn’t been taking his pills and had eaten too many desserts, and his diabetes got away from him to the point where he had to lose a toe. He’d been lucky it hadn’t been his whole foot. The Fierros were no strangers to family medical emergencies. But whenever one happened, no matter what else was happening, the family stepped in and took care of them. They’d done so for all of Vince’s wives, even the ones they didn’t like.

Right now he needed them to pull together like that for Trey.

For a long time he sat in the hospital lobby, staring at his cellphone, arguing with himself. The truth was, he knew if he told them Sophia and Trey needed help, they’d help, because while they weren’t family, they were friends and neighbors. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that once they got here, he’d have to make a choice. He’d either have to put some distance between him and Trey, start treating him like a friend instead of a lover, or he’d have to let his family see. He’d either have to not be there for his boyfriend when his boyfriend needed him most, or he’d have to take a giant leap out of the closet whether he was ready for it or not.

Vince knew what he had to do, knew what he was going to do. He’d known less than thirty seconds after he’d realized what Trey and Sophia were missing and that he could give it to them. Even so, he sat in the lobby a long, long time.

Then he picked up his phone and dialed. “Hey, Mom? Do you have some time this morning? Because there’s something I really need to tell you.”

Lisa Fierro strode into the coffee shop as if she were considering taking it over, at least until she saw Vince as he rose from the sofa he’d commandeered near the side window. She opened her arms and embraced him even as her jaw took on its Italian steel. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Don’t tell me something isn’t wrong, because I can tell.”

“I know, Mom.”

“Because you’ve been acting funny for months. You always dodge me when I try and talk to you, and you’re evasive all the time about what you’re doing.”

“I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”

Her hands tightened like a pair of vises on his arms. “If you’re doing drugs—”

“Ma! I’m not doing drugs. Now will you sit? I got you an espresso, and if you let me talk for a change, I’ll tell you everything.”

Mollified, but only a little, Lisa let him go and settled gracefully onto an end of the sofa. She picked up the coffee he’d ordered for her and sipped carefully before nodding. “This isn’t bad. Full Moon Cafe. I’ve never heard of this place, but it’s good.”

“Yes, it is.” Mostly, though, it was familiar, faithful ground, and Vince had wanted as much ammunition as he could get.

“Do they roast their own beans? Because we could contract them for the restaurants—”

“Ma.”

She smiled wryly and held up a hand in surrender. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ll let you talk.”

At least for a few minutes.
Vince squared his shoulders and readied himself for the speech he’d been practicing all morning. “Awhile back you said you thought I was seeing someone. You’re right. I am.” When his mother threatened to burst into maternal joy, he cut her off with a look and continued quickly in case it didn’t last long. “And the someone I’m seeing is having a family crisis. Someone’s in the hospital, and it’s bad, very bad. I need our family’s help. My family.”