Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [59]
“Danny. Danny. Danny.” It was a familiar voice, his mother speaking calmly, evenly. “Danny. Danny. Aquí estoy.”
He opened his eyes easily, naturally, without much effort at all. “Mamá,” he said.
She was standing over him, as was Sandra, the two women on opposite sides of the bed, each clutching one of his hands in theirs, rubbing his fingers and his palm with identical strokes. No one spoke. For the moment he merely looked at them—the familiar, round figure of his mother, and Sandra, who had changed in some way he could not put words to. Sandra stared at him with brown eyes swimming in a pool of tears, fixed on him with a strange and desperate intensity.
“You look older,” he said. Danny sensed that many days, weeks, maybe even months had passed while he was asleep. The skin of his arms and hands had turned soggy and the sunlight outside the hospital window belonged to a different, colder season than the one he remembered. The world had aged in his absence.
“She’s having your baby,” his mother said.
He lowered his chin to look at Sandra’s belly, which did, in fact, rise slightly with an unfamiliar roundness. She brought her hands to the roundness and cradled it.
“Our baby,” she said.
Danny felt the blood rushing to his skull, and let his head fall back on the pillow. Being awake was too complicated, so he closed his eyes and waited, in vain, to slip back into sleep.
“Hijo, hijo, are you okay?”
“I knew we shouldn’t have told him,” Sandra said.
“What do you mean? You think he’s not going to notice you with your belly?”
“We should have waited …”
The two women argued, the words bouncing back and forth over his prone body, until he spoke again.
“How long have I been asleep?” he asked with his eyes still closed.
“Three months,” his mother said.
“Almost four,” Sandra added. “The detective was here yesterday and he said he saw you open your eyes. So we came here to sit with you.”
“And to pray,” his mother said.
He fell asleep to the sound of the two women whispering Hail Marys in different languages, his mother’s “… y en la hora de nuestra muerte …” tangled up with Sandra’s “… pray for us sinners …”
Detective Sanabria sat at the foot of the bed, the round and vaguely Olmec features of his face molded into a tense mask of irritation and befuddlement. “Paralyzed. Both you and the other knucklehead, Beto Carrillo. Poetic justice. That’s what my partner called it. You guys shot your legs out from under each other. Good work, pendejo. Me and the D.A. figure you’ve both been punished enough already so there will be no ADW charges. Your friend Elliot’s in juvie—he’s going to do time for you … Yeah, I found out he gave you the gun. Won’t tell me where he got it, the little brat.”
Danny thought that he, too, would like to know where the gun came from. He thought of what the grip felt like in his hands, remembered wincing when he fired it, and wondered who else had touched it, what other damage it had done, which other children had played with it. On his back in this hospital bed, with his mother standing over him, Danny was starting to think of himself as a boy again. Somewhere there was a factory that churned out toy trucks and bullets for children, passing them on to toy stores, and to gun traffickers who operated in the alleyways of East Hollywood, selling them to boys like Elliot. The bullets in the gun Danny bought had cut the wires to another young man’s legs, just as the wires to his own legs had been cut, forever.
Forever