Chapter 2 Chapter 2: The Contract of the Heart
I looked at her. Her eyes were red from crying, but not the old crying of a mother who's already said goodbye — it was new, fresh, touched up with foundation so she could step into the hallway. A woman who cried and then fixed herself to go cry again with dignity.
"Ma'am, with all due respect: it's not the time."
"I know. I'm Marcela Cavalier. Five minutes."
"Not one."
"Please. Please. Five minutes and I'm gone."
Her voice trembled on the second please, and that's when I understood she wasn't just the strategist, she was also the mother. I hated that something shifted inside me.
Carla, from the doorway, watched me ready to tear the woman's head off if I so much as moved a finger. I gave her a later gesture, and she stayed outside with her jaw clenched. Having Carla is like having a well-trained Rottweiler: she obeys, but she's aching for the order.
"Four."
"My son is dying this week. You're a nurse, you know what that means — being on the hospital list. They tell me your mother and my son are a match: same blood type, same size, same window. I'm telling you straight because I'm not stupid and neither are you."
"How kind."
"I'm offering you money. Whatever you ask for. Name your number."
"How unoriginal."
She hesitated, unused to anyone breaking her script. She took a step closer and lowered her voice, and that's when Marcela the strategist cracked a little.
"Miss, I'm begging you. I'm a mother. You'll understand this one day, God willing. I have one son, just one, and he's slipping away."
"Ma'am."
"Please."
"Ma'am, look at my mother. Look at her."
She didn't look. I did.
"My mother was the only thing I had. And there she is. I'm not going to sell her. Leave."
She nodded slowly, as if she'd foreseen it, but holding her composure was costing her more now. She took a stiff cardstock card with a handwritten number on it and held it out with a hand lightly touched by tremor.
"I'll leave it with you anyway. In case you change your mind in the next hour. Good people sign sooner than they think, miss."
I tucked it away without thinking, and I watched her go. What bothered me most was that she'd served me pain before money; rage is easier to handle when it's served badly dressed, and Marcela served it in a suit and a tear. That stung.
Carla came in the moment Marcela turned the corner.
"What did that one want?"
"My mom's organs."
"Son of a bitch."
"No. She's a mother, and that's worse."
"Laurita..."
"Carla, bring me a water, please. I need five minutes alone."
She didn't ask. Good friends don't ask.
When the door shut I stayed standing by the bed, and something I'd been holding back since the ER fell at my feet. I sat down in the chair. I took her hand. Cold. It wasn't my mom's hand anymore, it was the hand of a woman who looked like my mom, who smelled of antiseptic instead of her usual perfume, whose nails were unpainted — she always had her nails painted, even if it was just a quick coat while she watched her soap opera. That empty hand was what broke me. Not Dr. Miguel's words. Not the machine breathing for her. The unpainted nails.
"Mommy."
I said it quietly, like a five-year-old.
"Mommy, no, mommy."
I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and that gesture — which was hers, which was how she used to comb me before school — finished breaking me. I cried hard, ugly, shoulders heaving, no dignity at all. It wasn't the performative crying of the daughter in ICU. It was the other kind. The kind that comes out when you understand you'll never hear a voice again. That there won't be any more "call me when you get home." That the apartment I was going back to was an apartment with her clean clothes folded on the couch that no one was ever going to put away.
I kissed her forehead. I smelled her hair. It didn't smell like her. And that was the last thing I could take before I went silent.
Carla came in with the water, saw me, set the bottle on the nightstand and put her hand on my shoulder without a word. We stayed like that for a stretch of time I'll never know the length of. At some point I got my breath back.
"I'm about to be an orphan, Carla."
"You already are, Lau."
"Yeah."
She handed me a tissue, I blew my nose, wiped my face. I shut off my phone because I'd taken enough of the twenty-first century for one night. And then the door knocked for the second time.
Carla stood up with the efficiency of a nightclub bouncer.
It was Alex.
Spotless coat, a face of bad news, the full posture of condolence. Too perfect. Sofía had already warned him. I knew it the first second: guilty men smell different.
"Laura. Love. I just heard."
"Get out."
"Love, I know you're shut down, but let me be with you, your mom was like a mother-in-law to me, I loved her."
"I saw you fucking Sofía on the sink in your office, Alex. Pants around your ankles. Two doors down from the children's ward. That one taken out of context too?"
He blinked.
"Laura, don't start with this now. This is what you always do: every time something happens you attack me. I came up here because I was worried about you."
"You came up because Sofía called you."
"For months now you haven't..."
"Don't you dare."
"I dare. For months you haven't looked at me, you come home from your shift and go to sleep, you're no saint either."
"Alex. My mother is in that bed, dead. And you're telling me I deserve to be cheated on because I come home tired from work."
Silence.
And in that silence, because every good circus needs its second clown, the door opened and Sofía walked in.
Coat buttoned wrong at the neck — she'd dressed fast — hair half pinned up, and a smile on her mouth that turned my stomach more than anything else that had happened that night.
"Laurita, sweetheart. I heard about your mom. How awful."
"Out."
"Oh, don't treat me like that, we're friends. What happened downstairs was a slip, it happens all the time. Don't play the victim."
"Sofía. Get out before I throw you out."
Her smile widened. She leaned against the doorframe with her hip cocked forward, like this was a bar hallway and not the ICU where my mom was dying.
"If you'd kept him happy in bed, he wouldn't have had to come looking for me, Laurita."
I crossed the room in three steps and my open hand landed on her cheek.
The sound was clean. Sharp. The kind you hear down the hallway. Sofía stopped smiling for a full second — and then, because she was Sofía, she touched her cheek, laughed softly, and said:
"Bitch."
I gave her the second one.
She came at me with her hands forward, but Carla appeared between us with the arms of a girl who runs marathons and pushed her against the wall with a forearm across the chest.
"Don't even try it, slut."
Alex got in behind her.
"Laura, you're crazy! You hit her! I'll report you to HR!"
I looked him up and down with the new calm of women who don't care anymore about any of it.
"Report me. Tell them how you were dressed when I walked in. Tell them Sofía is the nurse whose shift I covered tonight because she gave you a family emergency while climbing onto your sink. In detail, my love. Let's see how that goes for you."
He went red.
"Carla."
"Tell me, Lau."
"Get them out."
Carla got them out. Sofía was saying things I didn't want to hear. Alex was swearing revenge I didn't either. The door closed.
I stayed alone with my mom. My hands were shaking, not from the slap, but from after. I looked at my right hand: red. I sat down in Carla's chair.
"Mommy, I slapped Sofía. Twice."
My mom didn't say anything, but I heard her laugh. I swear it. That girl had never sat right with my mom. "That one's going to betray you, Laurita, she's got the face of someone who's going to betray someone in this life." She was right. Mothers are always right, and when they're gone you're left with no one to tell they were right.
I was still drying my eyes when the third knock came.
When hell opens its door to you, the polite thing is not to close it on the visitors.
The man must have been seventy-something: cane, expensive suit, the kind of eyes that do arithmetic on you while they wish you good evening. He looked at my red hand and said nothing about it.
"Good evening. I'm Manuel Cavalier. Could you give me ten minutes?"
"Five."
This time Carla stepped out with the coffee in her hand like it was a wrench.
Manuel sat in Carla's chair. He didn't look at my mom, and that already told me something.
"Miss Mendoza. My daughter-in-law was already here."
"Yes."
"She offered you money and you turned it down. You did well. My daughter-in-law is a mother, not a strategist. I apologize for her."
"And you're the strategist?"
"I'm the one who closes things after the rest of my family has broken them."
"And what are you here to close, then?"
"A deal. No checks, I leave that to my daughter-in-law. I'm offering you something else: donate your mother's heart, marry my grandson, five years minimum. At the end, if neither of you wants to go on, you get a drama-free divorce, a sum, a property, and the peace of knowing your mother's heart is still beating. I'll sign everything tomorrow at eight."
I blinked. I looked at my mom, as if waiting for her permission, but my mom didn't say anything, she was dead, it's what the dead do.
"Are you being serious?"
"I don't come to an ICU to crack jokes."
"I don't know your grandson."
"You'll know him."
"Why me?"
"Because I saw you. I saw that you stayed five seconds longer than necessary at my grandson's bedside before leaving. Because you're a good person, and good people, miss, don't do anything stupid. It suits me to marry my grandson off to a good person, and I'm not going to explain why yet."
"And if he doesn't wake up?"
"You still get everything. The next day."
"You're buying a fake widow."
"I'm buying an opportunity for my grandson."
We looked at each other, and that's when I knew: that old man was more dangerous than his daughter-in-law and his grandson combined. And my mom — cruel irony of the trade — had died under the wheels of a car to fit perfectly into the plan of a family that already fit together perfectly on its own.
"I need to think about it."
"Until seven. The lawyers arrive with me at eight. If you say no, we each go on with our lives, no hard feelings, I give you my word. But please, think carefully."
"Your word isn't worth that much."
"Yours is. That's why I'm here."
He stood up slowly with the cane and closed the door so gently I barely heard it.
Carla came in three seconds later.
"What the hell did that one want?"
"Carla. Sit down."
She sat.
"Carla. In one night: cheating boyfriend, whore of a friend — with a double slap — mom dead, a family offering me marriage, and a contract with weird clauses. What would you do?"
"I'd run out of this hospital and never come back, Laurita."
"Exactly."
I looked at her. Outside, somewhere down the hallway, Alex and Sofía were already telling their version to anyone they ran into. By tomorrow the whole hospital would know something — whatever they wanted to tell. Tomorrow I'd walk into my shifts with the nurses giving me sideways looks. Tomorrow my mom's clothes on the couch would be waiting for me. Tomorrow there was nothing in my life I wanted to stay for.
And tomorrow at eight, an old man with a cane was going to bring lawyers.
"Are you going to say yes?" Carla asked.
"I don't know."
I lied. I already knew. Signing wasn't accepting the Cavaliers; signing was getting out of this hospital, out of that apartment, out of this shitty city where my best friend climbed onto my boyfriend's sinks. And if on top of that my mom's heart kept beating, even better.
Tomorrow at eight I was going to stop being called Mendoza.