Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

So yes. Vinnie was lucky. Fortunate. He was still strong, mostly healthy. He could take over the family businesses whenever he wanted, not only the pizza place but also a nice Italian grocery across the street, mostly imports, that his grandfather had opened on Arthur Avenue back when the neighborhood was all Italian, only Italian, before the ever-increasing influx of Mexican families over the decades. He had family around who were helpful and supportive. Fuck Amy. Maybe he got too angry sometimes, but he was working on it. He was trying.

Now that the kids had left the pizza joint (snickering at him, he knew it), he was a little calmer. Calmer that is until he saw Matilda Rodriguez coming down the street and his fury smoldered anew because there she was, walking down the street, again on the crutches, swinging herself around like she was the fucking Queen of fucking Sheba and Arthur Avenue in the Bronx was her kingdom. Waiting for people to move out of her way, hold doors open for her, offer to carry her bags. What was next? A rickshaw? A fucking velvet cape over an icy puddle?

It wasn’t right. She should be walking.

He put his head down, took a deep breath. Rewind, rewind, rewind. He tried to employ an imaging technique using a positive historical frame of reference .

He thought about when he met Matilda, during her first weeks at the rehab center when he was there doing the tedious work of managing his new arm. He thought about how upbeat and determined and flirtatious she’d been then, not just with him — he wasn’t an idiot — with everyone, but still, it had been nice. How she sang a lot and called everyone Mami or Papi, no matter his or her age in relation to hers. He remembered her swinging dark hair and bright smile, which reminded him about a particular pink sweater she wore during those first weeks. He thought about how that pink sweater would pull across her breasts when she was positioned on the crutches, making it apparent that she hadn’t bothered with a bra, riding up to reveal her tiny waist. He thought about how he might like to touch that pink sweater, which made him think of his mechanical arm and how if he did touch the sweater, the material might snag and maybe even rip and start to unravel. Matilda would look down at her damaged sweater and her face would fill with regret and maybe even a little disgust. And then she would look back at him with her lovely almond-shaped eyes and — he could see it perfectly — they’d fill with pity.

“CORPORAL!” MATILDA, inthe doorway of the pizza place now. She was with her cousin Fernando, the one who’d visited her repeatedly in rehab when he was on break from law school. He was carrying her purse and all her grocery bags. Her eyes were watery with cold, and her smile was tentative; she knew how Vinnie felt about the crutches, about her not using the prosthesis.

“I’m so hungry. I swear I could eat five slices right now,” she said, moving into the restaurant, toward one of the booths. He watched Fernando help her sit and get comfortable, slide her crutches beneath the table. Vinnie concentrated on a nonjudgmental greeting. He counted to ten before he approached, tucking the damp dishtowel he carried into the waistband of his jeans. Matilda sat and looked up nervously as he came closer, wiping her slightly runny nose with a Vito’s Pizzeria napkin. He leaned a little on the table with his good hand, moved his face closer to hers.

“Where the fuck is your foot, ” he said.

The night of the accident the previous summer, Leo had sat in the Emergency Room bracingly, horrifyingly alert. Hung-over. Petrified. He kept replaying the moment of the crash, Matilda’s screams, and the far more frightening moment when she’d stopped screaming and he was afraid she was dead.

They were in adjacent rooms in the ER, he and Matilda. He could hear her occasional moans and the doctors talking about the possibility of reattachment. Her right foot had been nearly severed at the ankle. A hospital translator was talking to her parents.

An old family friend from the sheriff’s department had made a call to George Plumb from the accident site around the same time that Leo had called Bea. George and Bea left the wedding and arrived at the hospital together.

George immediately discussed containment with Leo. “I don’t care what you remember,” he said to him softly. “At this moment, you don’t remember anything. You’ve had a head trauma.” He nodded toward Leo’s bleeding chin. “Got it?”

Leo was watching Bea listen through the curtain, not knowing whether to hope that her Spanish was still strong or had, along with many of her talents, diminished to ineffectual. She was listening hard; her head was bent, and Leo noticed that the tops of her shoulders were slightly sunburned. Her dress, like almost everything she owned, was vintage — short, black, and sleeveless — and she was clutching herself, as if trying to stay warm in the chill of the air-conditioned hospital.

Bea wasn’t cold; she was concentrating on understanding as much of the conversation as possible, which was pretty much everything. She was losing some medical terms, but she understood when the translator explained to Matilda’s parents the slim possibility of a successful reattachment. He detailed the complications, the chances of rejection, the powerful pharmaceuticals and lengthy hospitalization and rehabilitation Matilda would need in the coming weeks and months. The very, very long road ahead with a reattachment that could still result in an eventual amputation. Matilda’s father told the translator they had no insurance, that they were, in fact, in the country illegally.

“That doesn’t matter right now,” she heard the translator say, his tone urgent but kind. “You are entitled to the proper treatment.”

One of the nurses gently interrupted. “We don’t have much time to decide if you want to reattach. We’d need to prepare the foot.”

Bea could hear Matilda’s mother address the doctor and her husband in heavily accented English. “What is a life without a foot?” she said. The anguish in her voice was harrowing. “What kind of future will she have? How will she walk? How will she work?”

“No, Mami, no.” Matilda spoke from the bed, her voice slurred and dreamy, from shock and morphine. “The man from the car is going to help me. He knows people. Music people. It was just an accident. A bad accident. He is going to help me. No more waitressing.”

“Your music?” the mother said, incredulous. She reverted to Spanish, her tone bitter and scared. “You lose your foot and this man is going to make you a star?”

“I need to get out of here,” Matilda pleaded.

The translator was speaking to the doctor, but Bea couldn’t make out what they were saying. Bea walked over to Leo, who was still clutching a bloody piece of Matilda’s white blouse in his hands. The nurse had cleaned the wound and left to get sutures so she could stitch Leo’s chin. George pointed to the curtain. “Pick up anything interesting?”

Bea hesitated. What she’d just heard wasn’t her business; the information was not hers to pass along. She knew George.

“Bea?”

“Kind of,” Bea said. “They’re deciding whether to amputate.”

George sighed. “Not great news.”

Bea turned to Leo. In the fluorescent light of the ER, chin split, eyes bloodshot and watery, gaze unfocused, he looked beaten and scared. He tried to smile. He looked, for a minute, like a little boy, and she took his hand.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said to her. “One minute we were going—”

“Shhh.” George stopped Leo by raising a palm. “Time for all that later.”