He could not hesitate at a time like this. Still holding her close, he lunged toward the stove, flicked off the burner, and then barreled down the stairs.
“Ambulance! Somebody call an ambulance!” he yelled as they broke out onto the street. Startled passersby stared at him, and their faces all blurred together in front of him.
“Mr. Dax?”
His eyes zeroed in on the face of the afternoon doorman. “Billy! Please, please call 911 now.”
He leaned against the building’s entrance, shifting from one foot to the other in the quest to find the angle that held her head upright but didn’t let her face loll against his shirt. She didn’t stir, but he felt the hammering of her heart through the arm pressed against her back.
“Keep breathing just like that, love,” he whispered, and he repeated it to her until the red lights and sirens broke through the blur and jerked to a stop before them.
MINI GUAVA CHEESECAKES
Makes 18 mini-cheesecakes
1/2 cup butter
2 cups graham cracker crumbs
24 ounces cream cheese
1/2 pound ricotta
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
juice of 1/2 lime
1 pound guava paste
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Melt the butter and mix with the graham cracker crumbs in a small bowl. Press the graham cracker mixture into the bottoms of lined muffin tins to form the cheesecake shells. Bake the shells for 5–7 minutes or until lightly browned.
In a large bowl, mix the cream cheese, ricotta, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and lime juice. Spoon the batter into the cheesecake shells and bake for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, dice the guava paste and melt on the stovetop on low-medium heat. Pour over the cheesecakes. Let cool for 10–15 minutes at room temperature and then refrigerate until chilled.
Best served without bad juju.
28
Lumi
In the hospital bed, she faded from light to dark and back again, her mind taking a much-needed vacation. In the absence of her usual spool of anxious thought, she floated back to a vague memory of a taste from so long ago that it felt like an imprint on her tongue. There was vanilla, honeysuckle, the promise of forever love. The first taste.
Drifting in the lucid stream of memory, she found herself at the first and last slumber party she ever hosted. It was a sweltering ninety-eight-degree Saturday in Little Havana, and she had invited her three closest friends from seventh grade over. Amid tubs of Turkey Hill ice cream, the girls watched Dirty Dancing, oohing and aahing over Baby’s retro outfits and Johnny’s biceps. All of them wanted to practice the lift, so they turned on the ceiling fan and pranced in front of the TV, high on sugar, and looking like four raccoons until Inés had lumbered over, bottle of Bacardi in hand, and blocked the screen with her fleshy form.
“I just want you girls to know that all of this is make-believe,” she had said in a tone that still rang in Lumi’s ears twenty years later. “This is nonsense.” She raked her gaze over the confounded young faces. “In real life, Baby would have been pregnant by now, and Johnny would’ve been hightailing it to the border. Keep your eyes open, girls, and don’t believe everything songs and movies tell you about love. Love—”
Lumi was startled by an insistent hand shaking her unburned shoulder.
“Jesús Santísimo . . .” Inés whispered to herself.
The first thing Lumi saw when she peeked through her weighted lids was her reflection mirrored in her mother’s sunglass lenses. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut, and almost her entire face, chest, and arms were covered in gauzy white bandages, including the patches along her hairline where the hair had been singed off. The nurses had pulled her hair up and away from her face and tied it in a loose bun with the ends out; she resembled an obscene pineapple.
Lumi winced. As much as she knew she was supposed to appreciate the gesture of Inés flying up from Miami to be with her, she would have preferred to be alone. It would have been so much easier to convince the nurses to just keep feeding morphine into her IV nonstop until she went home. Under Inés’s watchful eye, every pill and drip they gave her would be measured. She was none too sad to discover that the bandages wrapped tight to her lips relieved her from the expectation of upholding conversation.
The worst part was seeing how the nurses, and now her mother, looked at her. Like she was a thing to be pitied. Like they were three steps away from crying at her funeral. It was too much for her.
Inés sat down in the chair next to Lumi’s bed, and for a while neither spoke. Finally, Inés cleared her throat.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” she said, and Lumi squeezed her eyes shut as if that would help drown out the rest of Inés’s speech. Thankfully, that was all she said. Inés leaned back in the chair and frowned as she surveyed the plastic tubing coming off the beeping machine behind Lumi’s bed that connected the IV to the underside of her arm.
“I got here this morning,” Inés said. “I got the call yesterday. The nurses were calling your emergency contacts.” She paused and then let out a long, heavy breath. “Ay, m’ija, sometimes I fear that I have failed you.”
Did her mother imagine that Lumi’s business and now her health had failed because she didn’t learn her mother’s lessons well enough? The thought gave her a twinge sharp enough to supersede the painkillers, and she shook her head from left to right as firmly as she could without agonizing her wounds. Inés watched her, and her eyes grew glassy with moisture before she turned away toward the street-facing window.
Lumi groaned and leaned back against the foam mattress, which a thoughtful nurse had propped into an upright position so that she could watch TV and gaze despondently out the window.
“Do you want anything?” Inés asked, the tone of her voice softer than before.
Lumi was about to answer her when the blond nurse popped her head back in the doorway. “Ms. Santana, there’s a Mr. Dax here to see you,” she chirped.
Lumi’s head shot up and she began to shake her head vehemently, but it was too late. The nurse had retreated, and in walked the man she least wanted to see this side of the universe.
His eyes were underlined by dark circles, and a carpeting of reddish stubble covered his cheeks and chin. She squeezed her eyes shut again as if by doing so she could make him go away.
When she opened them, he was still there, eyes trained on her. She stared tersely at the gray plastic tray table attached to her bed until Inés broke the silence.
“I’m Inés Rosario. Are you a . . . friend of my daughter’s?” she asked, gaze focused on him expectantly. Lumi heard her brief pause and knew Inés was wondering if she had slept with him. She sighed under her bandages.
Julien’s eyes widened for a second before he regained his good posture and polite expression. “You’re Lumi’s mother. I’m Julien Dax. It’s a great pleasure, ma’am,” he said, stepping to the side of the bed to shake her hand. “I only wish we were meeting under more, uh, pleasant circumstances,” he added, letting out a heavy sigh.
It occurred to Lumi that he hadn’t answered the question.
“Lumi,” he murmured, reaching out to stroke the fabric of the blanket alongside her hand. He leaned toward her, his broad shoulders curving slightly.