From that day on, I worked every day all day until I wanted to fall down (and you know I’m used to work). Meanwhile, Beezie didn’t get better . . . she got worse.
As soon as we were settled, I spent what little money we had to take her to a doctor at Mercy Hospital. He barely had to look at her to tell me the problem: that the dust had damaged her lungs so much that they couldn’t flush the bad things out. That’s why even though we’d left home, she was still as bad as ever.
He told me that with time, they could heal, but to watch for fever because that would mean infection. He said if that happened to rush her to him right away. The only thing we could do in the meantime was give her rest, and food, and air—none of which are all that easy to come by here.
When I wrote to Mama that night—just one quick letter, nothing more—to tell her where we were and that we were okay and to ask her to pass that on to you, I didn’t tell her what the doctor said. I don’t know, now, looking back, if that was the right choice or not. I didn’t apologize either. My anger was still too sharp; it outweighed my guilt for leaving. Then again, if she’d known we were leaving she never would have let us go.
Those first weeks, the thing that shocked us most about the city was the absence of the sky. You can’t see it unless you make a point of looking for it—maybe you remember that. Even right now I’m looking out my window at bricks. For someone who grew up with an endless view, it still unsettles me. And I can’t get used to the grayness.
But there are good things too: in place of space there is endless electricity. So many lights you’d think we were living in a constellation. And theaters, music—people gobbling life up like it was about to disappear. You can stay out all night if you want and nobody cares. You can do just about anything and nobody cares; it feels like even God can’t see you. It’s a place that breaks your heart and makes you giddy at the same time.
It was so cold some of those early days that I could swear my blood froze solid. I thought Kansas could be frigid, but it has nothing on the wind tunnels of the avenues. And as fall marched on into winter, Beezie got more lethargic and more sick. It drove me half-crazy having a life—the dearest life I know—balanced in my hands like that, with no one else to lean on. It was like hot coals in my stomach all the time.
Whenever Beezie was at her worst, I talked her through it by talking us to Canaan. I’d describe the day we’d get to go home, riding down the highway, or maybe on a train first class if we were lucky and suddenly, inexplicably rich . . . walking around the bend of Jericho Road that leads to the first sight of the house. In real life I’d take her for walks by the Hudson River to breathe the air until our faces were so cold they felt like they’d fall off.
The truth is that from the first, New York didn’t feel like where we were supposed to be. “It’s not like I pictured,” Beezie pointed out one of those afternoons. “We’re not sparkly here.”
I laughed and said that didn’t make sense. But I do believe, now, that places change you, and that while the city was lit up all around us, we were growing flatter and smaller by the day.
“We need Mama,” Beezie said.
I couldn’t forgive Mama enough to agree yet. I’d think about Lenore, who’d loved me and loved Mama too.
And then I lost my job, by falling asleep on my feet after a long night comforting Beezie. I couldn’t find another one after that—too many desperate people wanting the same thing. I cried the first time we waited on a breadline. It was both the humiliation and my sinking realization that the city was defeating us.
I began to plan our trip home.
But that’s when we met Sofia Ortiz.
LATER—
She swept into our rat-infested apartment one morning with a suitcase and her chin lifted up like she was walking into a palace. She had hair as short as a boy’s, and a bag full of clothes, and nothing else, but it was like she owned everything in sight.
“Sofia,” she introduced herself, giving me and then Beezie a handshake that could break bones. She’d just arrived in the city and rented a corner of the room, which she decorated with anything—sticks she found in the park, pieces of junk from the street—and made it something like home.
She threw herself into cleaning the entire apartment, even the areas that belonged to other people. Instead of annoying everyone, it won them over. When one of our apartment mates asked her why she’d cut her hair so short, she said simply, “It was in the way,” and blew a breath at her bangs. Then she disappeared for hours at a time, and she came back one afternoon with a job at a stable uptown.
She’d often try to help people around the house, offering advice, giving them her undivided attention, talking politics, sharing the news from the papers with people who didn’t read, or who only read Spanish. It was Sofia who first told us about the government projects they were doing back home, buying back big parts of the plains and reseeding them with grass, showing farmers how to plant to keep the soil in place like it used to be.
After that we would see her come and go, but with all of us so busy surviving (I was down to almost nothing of my shrinking savings), we didn’t really talk until one night, when Beezie coughed for hours without letting up.
Sofia emerged from her sheets, disheveled and, I thought, annoyed, and disappeared into the kitchen. When she returned she had a metal bowl full of hot, steaming water in her hands.
“Can I?” she asked, her hair standing up all over the place and her face still smushed from sleep. I nodded.
She knelt by Beezie and unrolled a blanket from under her arm and laid it over Beezie’s head like a tent, putting the bowl of hot water underneath.
“Breathe,” she said, and Beezie did, sucking in air, pushing it out in rattling bursts. “Try to breathe as deeply as you can.”
Beezie began to breathe more slowly and grow calmer.
“I’ll be right back,” Sofia said. She returned with a little brown bag, pulled out a small jar of some kind of spice and another jar of honey, and poured a little of the hot water out into a tin mug, mixing it all together.
“Saffron helps,” she said.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked. Though she was young like me, she moved with the confidence of someone who knew everything.
Her hands worked in her bag, going through this and that jar as she looked for what she needed. “I’m a veterinarian,” she said, giving me a rueful smile. “I’m a lot of things.”
Beezie had calmed down by this point, and her breath was coming clearer, and Sofia pulled the tent off of her head.
“Beezie? Can I listen to you?”
“Yes,” I said quickly, and Beezie widened her eyes at me accusingly as Sofia put her stethoscope to her chest, then pulled back and put her hand on her forehead. Before Beezie could protest she pulled up her shirt and slapped a mustard pack across the middle of her rib cage.
For a moment Beezie poked and prodded it with her fingers, deciding whether or not to be outraged, I suppose, and then she leaned against me, exhausted.