“How much do we have?” I asked one night, late, after my mother had finally fallen asleep.
He looked at me with eyes that had given up pretending. “Not enough.”
“How much do we need?”
“More than we can get.”
Three weeks after the notice appeared, my father collapsed in the stairwell.
I was in my room trying to study for a Property Law exam I hadn’t prepared for, and the irony wasn’t lost on me. Learning about tenant rights while my family was being evicted. My textbook was open but the words wouldn’t stick and everything felt distant and unreal.
My mother screamed—a sound I’d never forget.
I ran and my textbook hit the floor.
He was on the fourth-floor landing, clutching his chest, his face gray and his lips tinged blue. My mother stood frozen beside him, hyperventilating, her hands hovering over him like she wanted to help but couldn’t remember how.
“Call 911,” I said.
She didn’t move, didn’t even seem to hear me.
“Mom. Call 911.”
Still nothing. She was somewhere else entirely, lost in panic.
I knelt beside my father and pressed my fingers to his neck to find a pulse. It was there but wrong, too fast and too weak and erratic. His eyes found mine and I saw real fear in them, the kind of fear that makes your stomach drop because you know something terrible is happening.
“It’s okay,” I said, lying through my teeth. “You’re going to be okay.”
His hand gripped mine and squeezed once. I squeezed back, holding on like it might anchor him here.
I called 911 myself with my free hand, gave them the address, and tried to sound calm even though my voice shook. The operator asked questions I could barely answer. Was hebreathing? Yes. Was he conscious? Mostly. Did he have chest pain? Yes. History of heart problems? I don’t know, I don’t know anything.
Stay on the line. Help is coming.
The ambulance took seventeen minutes. I counted every second. Kneeling beside my father while my mother rocked back and forth against the wall, whispering prayers in Spanish I hadn’t heard since childhood. Prayers for protection, for mercy, for miracles that never came.
The paramedics moved fast once they arrived, questions fired rapid, vitals checked, loading him onto a stretcher with practiced movements that should have been reassuring but just felt terrifying.
My mother tried to follow, but her legs buckled beneath her. I caught her before she hit the stairs, her whole body trembling like she might shake apart.
“Come on,Mamá. We have to go with him.”
She looked at me like she didn’t recognize me, like I was a stranger whom she wasn’t actually seeing.
We rode in the ambulance because I didn’t trust her to make it otherwise. I held her hand, ice cold despite the heat, and watched the paramedics work on my father. I watched the numbers on the machines, tried to understand what they meant but couldn’t make sense of any of it.
At the hospital, they took him away immediately. Crash cart. Code blue. Words I’d only ever heard on TV. A doctor told us to wait in a room with plastic chairs and fluorescent lights that hummed too loud, that someone would update us soon.
We waited two hours.
My mother sat perfectly still—no tears, no words—staring at the wall like looking away might make something even worse happen.
I filled out paperwork. Insurance information, medical history, next of kin, and my hand shook so badly my writing was barely legible.
When the doctor finally came back, her face told me everything before she said a word. That careful expression, that sympathy.
“I’m very sorry. We did everything we could.”
