Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

The smell of the nursing home hadn’t changed: urine and age and tasteless steamed food all blended together with a dun wash of antiseptic. He bypassed the patient information desk and walked down the spotless hall to his grandmother’s room. He was carrying a bunch of carnations he’d picked up at a nearby supermarket.

It was still hard for him to believe that she was the one who was ill. All through his childhood, whenever he was sick, it was his abuelita, not doctors, whom his mother called. Abuelita would sit beside his bed and explain that being sick meant that your alma, your soul, was a little lost. Even fear, she’d say, could shake the soul from a body. So what they had to do to make him well was to call it back. He remembered being wide-eyed with wonder as she explained that his soul had not traveled far—it hovered near his pulse points: his wrists, his temples, his throat, his heart. Solemnly, she would touch these points, calling his alma back into his body. She would then supplement this therapy with candles and incense, soups and fruits and herbs, hot compresses and her omnipresent prayers to la Virgen. Her cures had never failed him.

The door to her room was open. His grandmother sat in a wheelchair, a thin crocheted blanket wrapped around her shoulders. When had she gotten so small and wizened and gray? She used to be so round. He remembered sitting next to her in church as a boy, leaning into the soft warmth of her body.

“Abuelita. It’s Enrico.”

There was no movement or response. Her eyes, he noticed, seemed focused somewhere beyond the room.

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “I brought you red flowers,” he said in Spanish. Red was her favorite color. “Do you want me to put them in water?” He did not ask her how she was feeling. That would have been absurd.

He busied himself filling a drinking glass with water and attempting to arrange the long, green stems inside it. He put the carnations on the night stand where she could see them. When she’d first come here, his mother had brought her one of the tall votive candles, with a decal of the Virgin on the red glass. She never even got the chance to light it. An aide informed them that the nursing home forbade candles.

He sat down on the neatly made bed. “They told me you had another stroke last night.”

A trickle of saliva ran from the corner of her mouth. He grabbed a tissue and dabbed at it gently.

“Are they treating you okay here?… Can you hear me at all?”

His grandmother’s only response was to continue to drool.

“Mama’s in Mexico with Tía Carmen,” he told her. “So it’s just going to be me visiting for a while. Is there something I can get you? Something you want?”

As far he could tell, she didn’t even know that he was in the room with her. He laid his fingertips against her wrist, as she would have done for him. But he detected nothing beyond her heartbeat.

He glanced at his watch. He’d been here fifteen minutes. He’d stay another ten and then he really had to take a look at that wash.

He sat with her in silence, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning system, to the sound of medication carts being wheeled down the hall. Neither Dr. Donovan nor Ms. Mitchell appeared, and he had no desire to seek them out.

When the twenty-five minutes were up he got to his feet.

“I’ve got to go now,” he said. “But I’ll be back later this week, okay?”

He was halfway to the door when she spoke. “Te…” Her voice was weak and slurred.

“Qué?” he asked. “Digamé, abuelita.” He tried in English, “What? Tell me.”

She never once looked at him, but she struggled to speak. “Te… te… ten miedo,” she said at last, her voice a whisper.

He listened for more, but there wasn’t any. He waited another five minutes, until he was convinced that it was all she would say. He wondered if she were sensing her own approaching death. If her soul had been shaken loose. What she’d struggled so hard to say was: Have fear.

He stroked her cheek. “No miedo,” he told her, and kissed her once again before leaving.

“You related to her?” A voice stopped him as he walked down the hall.

He turned to see a tall, black woman dressed in a nurse’s white uniform. A blue cardigan hung from her shoulders.

“I’m her grandson,” he answered.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” she said pointedly. “What’s your name?”

He told her.

“Guess you’re not him.”

“Who?”

“Yesterday afternoon, I went in to give her her medication. She was in a state. Very agitated. Kept repeating, ‘Elbooho, elbooho, elbooho.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. I checked her elbows—nothing. So now I see you coming out of her room and I think, maybe his name is Elbooho.”

He shook his head. “Sorry.”

The woman gave him a long look. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Guess I can’t tell a grown man he ought come around and visit his grandma more often, now can I?”

“Point taken,” he told her. “You’re very subtle.”

She finally smiled at him. “It’s my talent.”