He waited a few awkward seconds before introducing me. “Oh, and this is Maya. She’s…a…” He hesitated and looked at me, seeming to wish I’d respond for him, before finishing the phrase, “She’s a friend.”
I don’t know what I thought he was going to say, but that designation—friend—disappointed me. And it made me wonder if there were worse surprises in store.
Lucas and I had been going out for three months. We’d shared a home, a bed, and our deepest thoughts and feelings. But we’d never actually defined our relationship. It didn’t have a name or label. We had never asked whatwewere, or ifwewere anything at all. So I didn’t have a justification for getting mad. But who can control their feelings?
“Hi,” I greeted her, and she smiled silently in response.
“How is he?” Lucas asked.
“He’s still in the ICU. He’s been there since they operated. His doctor says all we can do is wait to see how things develop.”
“What about Mom?”
“She’s in the waiting room. We spent the night there.”
Sliding his hands into his pockets and gazing lost around the cafeteria, Lucas asked her, “Does she know I’m here?”
Lucía nodded and asked if he was going to see her.
“I don’t have a reason to hide,” he responded.
“If that’s what you say,” she told him, and the room seemed to darken a bit. Those five words concealed a profound resentment, I could tell, but Lucas didn’t respond. He looked down, trying to restrain himself, on the edge of lashing out, and I almost wanted him to. He didn’t deserve to be treated that way.
Lucía led us to the waiting room, which was on the same floor as the ICU. All through the hallways, I felt uncomfortable. I remembered my own week in the hospital, the pain I felt in my body and soul. The smell was the same. Maybe all hospitals smelled the same. Of disinfectant, fear, uncertainty.
There were around twenty chairs in the waiting room, a few tables, lots of people. But I saw her right away, and I knew who she was, though I’d never seen her. She had the same eyes as Lucas, the same nose, the same mouth. The same posture. And her perfectly calculated appearance and her coldness reminded me of my grandmother. She stood when she saw Lucas and glared at him as he approached.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, and she inspected him as if he were a stranger before her eyes filled with tears.
“Two years, Lucas. Two years…” She groaned. “How could you do this to us? After we sacrificed so much for you.”
“Mom, we agreed we wouldn’t talk about the past,” Lucía whispered.
“How am I supposed to not talk about the past?” Angrily, his mother stood close to him and looked up into his eyes. “Just running off that way, without saying a word, dropping all your commitments…”
“They weren’t my commitments, Mom. They were commitments you made for me,” he responded.
“You had obligations, Lucas! We could at least have talked it over.”
“What was there to talk about, Mother? What did you expect of me?”
She admonished him, “The Lord commands us to forgive.”
Impatiently, Lucas fired back, “He also commands us not to lie or bear false witness, but you would rather do that than let people know Dad’s best friend’s daughter had been sleeping around on me.”
She pretended not to have heard him, squeezed the little cross hanging around her neck, whimpered again, and continued. “We could have worked it out, but you only thought about yourself. You vanished, and people started asking questions. Just imagine how ashamed I was when we had to call everyone and tell them the wedding was off. And Claudia…”
“Don’t you dare, Mother.” Lucas stopped her, his voice cracking like a whip. “I’m your son. I’m the one you were supposed to be protecting. How do you not understand that? And you wanted to force me to keep going in a relationship that was a lie.”
“The poor girl, she made a mistake, and she regrets it. And she has to live with what she did.”
I had to bite my tongue not to intervene. Lucas was tense, and he didn’t look like himself. His shine was gone, a cloud was castinga shadow on him, and all his energy and verve seemed to have vanished. That was normal, in those circumstances, but it still struck me as unjust.
“She regrets exactly one thing, and that’s the truth coming out, goddammit.”
“How dare you speak like that in my presence,” his mother murmured, and all at once, all the tears, all the pleading, were gone.
“People are watching us,” Lucía remarked.
