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“In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen.” Eddie mutters, crossing himself.
The hospital chapel is dark, lit only by two sharp bulbs in the corners. It’s a surprise when the knife enters his side.
Eddie collapses onto the chapel’s floor.
Every survival instinct honed over the years comes roaring in as fast as the burst of bright sharp pain. Eddie listens to his own gasping wheezing as the stranger walks away, as he heaves himself onto his feet, as he stumbles out of the chapel and to the elevator with a hand clutched to his side.
There’s so much blood. It’s all over the elevator buttons, the floor. It’s all over Eddie’s side, oozing out of him at an alarming rate, and he can feel his vision fogging. Woozy, is the word that comes to mind. He grunts in pain as he tears at his shirt and staunches the wound. He wonders if he’s being loud enough. He thinks of the well, buried forty feet underground and yelling helplessly, knowing he wouldn’t be heard.
The elevator judders and stalls. Panic jumps up his throat and he fights for consciousness.
I’m still alive down here, he screams as the world fades to blood red.
Everything is orange-red. It’s how time passes; it’s who Eddie is. Orange slices on Abuela’s back porch. A ketchup stain on the orange checkered table cloth, Adriana’s guilty face, Mama’s annoyed one. Clean that up, won’t you? Mama tells Eddie, irritated: she’s tired, she’s annoyed, she’s always right. Eddie wipes up ketchup stains and bloody noses but can’t stop himself from bleeding out, little by little.
He doesn’t think Mama likes him that much. She cuddles him when he has nightmares, but she snaps at him when he wets his bed the day before his first communion, scared that it will go wrong. He’s 8 years old and he doesn’t think he deserves God’s grace.
Their church is orange, too, a permanent sunset behind the stained glass window with its tortured saints. Their mouths are open wide in their agony and Eddie wonders why God doesn’t save them.
His sisters watch the Disney channel before bed. Kid’s shows - girl’s shows, with princesses and magic and bright colours. Eddie sits on the sofa with a comic book and pretends he isn’t watching too. Mama catches him, sometimes, and sighs before telling him to clean his room or do his homework instead. Papi’s not as nice about it. He’s made of lectures and stern frowns and disappointment. He’s not home a lot but when he is, everything stills. The air bleeds red from the tension, sharp as a knife, a tightrope Eddie has learnt to balance himself on. He can see it, if he tries hard enough.
Don’t bother me, Ramon grumbles. Eddie takes it to heart and starts avoiding him, consciously or not.
Everything is an orange-red blur. It feels like his lungs are full of dirt. He plays baseball and scrapes his knees on the dry earth sliding to home base. They never seem to win any games.
Eddie is an altar boy after his communion. He doesn’t remember choosing it, but he must have. Right? He is dressed in a white cassock and surplice every Sunday. Like a wedding dress, except it’s nothing like a wedding dress. Wedding dresses are something special and beautiful in the family photo albums or on the television screen.
In his dreams he sees a wedding dress and the beautiful woman wearing it, her brown hair long and thick, flowers tucked behind her ears. She is lit from within. Sometimes it’s Eddie in the wedding dress but when that happens the dress is torn, satin ripped into strips, mud stains on the skirt and blood on the bodice, a steady drip drip drip from his nose. Or is it his torso? His temple, maybe, head wounds bleed a lot.
How does he know that?
He’s 9 when he becomes an altar boy, then he’s 10, man of the house, then he’s 11, then he’s 12. He tells Mom he doesn’t want to go to church anymore. She frowns and sighs and lets him stay home. Eddie’s heart is a cavern.
Life is a cavern. Or maybe it’s a coffin.
“I would have called you Isabel if you were a girl.” Helena tells him, laughing. She shakes her head and tells him to help her dry the dishes. The sky is a poisonous red. Eddie’s eyes are burning. He doubles over in pain.
Shannon is yellow sunshine and sky and stubbornness. Eddie feels like he’s known her his whole life. She doesn’t feel real, sometimes, like an apparition he’s conjured up, some twisted version of an invisible friend. She’s too good. Pretty dresses and a nice smile and there’s a spark that is thrown between them, chemistry or connection or something bigger. It doesn’t matter. All Eddie knows is that he’s 17 and Shannon is his best friend and she asked to kiss him so he said yes. She does it slowly, like she thinks he’s gonna run away, and Eddie stays very, very still.
She tastes like cherry lip balm and salt.
They don’t date the way a lot of their friends do. They just drive down to the lake and wade in the clear blue water. Shannon tips her head up and stares at the sky like she’s drinking it. She looks at everything like she’s trying to commit it to memory.
“In case I never see it again.” She tells him.
You won’t, he thinks, and he sees the car crash years before it happens.
They stick around after graduation. Get jobs, get an apartment. Get engaged. Keep working. They stay inside El Paso. Eddie’s not too sure why. Shannon doesn’t seem too sure why, either, because she writes a letter and puts it in an envelope with her engagement ring on Eddie’s bedside table.
Eddie can’t shake the feeling that something is missing.
He tries to call her Mom’s landline but the line buzzes with static. He stops trying eventually. He knows she’s in LA, looking after her Mom, but he doesn’t follow her. He goes to work. He’s 25 and everything is orange-red.
He has nightmares about bullet wounds and explosions and a million other things he can’t explain. He sleeps in a bed alone and breathes real hard when the nightmares wake him up. He’s 26 and his lungs are full of blood and dirt.
He’s 27 and he meets someone. She’s beautiful. She’s nice. She has a perfectly sensible job and a sensible sounding name and she’s very sensible. When they kiss it leaves lipstick stains on Eddie’s lips. He stares at his mouth in the hall mirror and kisses her again.
They marry in the autumn. Or is it spring? His wife is in a white wedding dress. Eddie swears he sees a blood stain on the hem of the skirt. He bends down to fix it and she laughs and she is annoyed when he won’t leave it alone.
They buy a house with a big backyard. “Room to grow,” his wife tells him and her smile is sweet like orange slices. They paint it, maybe blue, maybe green. Helena comes over and drinks tea in their kitchen and it’s all perfectly pleasant. The sky outside the window is burnt orange.
They have a baby, then another one. Eddie cannot for the life of him remember what their names are. He builds cribs and changes diapers and reads bedtime stories that don’t make sense and keeps wondering where his son is. But he doesn’t have a son, just daughters. He sees a little boy with curly hair and Shannon’s eyes anyway.
Eddie is 29 - when did that happen? - and the email arrives with the details of Shannon’s funeral. His wife is upset when he goes. “You’re just gonna leave me alone with him?” She cries. Eddie has no idea who she’s talking about. She doesn’t sound the way she’s supposed to. How is she supposed to sound? Eddie shakes his head but the cotton wool stuffing up his brain refuses to fall out.
The funeral is small, in Los Angeles. Eddie drives, or he flies. It doesn’t matter. He can see a little boy with red crutches standing beside him in the graveyard. Her gravestone says that she died seven years ago.
Eddie stays at Abuela’s house and she holds his hand very tight. She feeds him the warm spice of his childhood and soft murmured advice in equal measure; she tells him to climb out of his grave. He doesn’t know what that means. He’s not in a grave, he’s alive. He’d know if he was dead.
There’s a clock ticking away inside of him. His heart is a cavern and his lungs are full of dirt.
Eddie goes home and kisses his wife and hugs his children and lies on a bed of dirt. He sees Shannon sprawled on hot asphalt, dying, her hair laid out like a halo. He is hit in the shoulder and he falls to join her, bleeds out and lies on the hot asphalt of LA and stares at the blue sky. The sky stares back with a stricken face and blood splattered over his pale skin. Eddie is dying.
He is 31 and his wife is never happy. She wants him to go to therapy and she wants him to be more present and she wants him to be better. “Do better.” She begs. Eddie closes his eyes and keeps walking.
He is 32 and his wife leaves. She takes the children with her.
Eddie goes to work.
Everything is orange-red. Eddie’s nightmares are red with blood and so are his dreams and the clock in his chest is ticking, ticking, ticking. The exit sign on the way to work reads, FATIGUE IS FATAL. TAKE A BULLET.
He turns 33 and he is painfully, painfully lonely. There should be other people in the house. Two people with curly heads of blonde-brown hair. He’s not supposed to be this lonely.
When was the last time he saw his sisters? Or his mother?
He goes to church. There’s a priest with a handsome face who mumbles things about joy and forgiveness and hands Eddie a tube of lip balm.
It burns a hole in his pocket all the way home and goes tick tick ticking in his chest. He smears it over his mouth and starts to cry. It tastes like cherry lip balm and salt.
Shannon is alive in his house, flitting through the rooms, punching holes in the wall, haunting him. Wake up, she screams in his face. Eddie rolls over and can’t sleep.
Isabel, Shannon cries, Isabel. Wake up. She calls him Isabel. He would have been called Isabel if he was born a girl, after Abuela. You have to climb out of your grave, Abuela told him once. How long ago was that?
Shannon doesn’t let up. She screams and yells and gets angry at him. Get up, she says. Get up. GET UP.
WAKE UP AND FACE THE MUSIC, orders a billboard. Eddie’s not sure where he’s driving.
There’s an empty grave by the lake. Shannon’s ghost is here, temporarily sated. He needs you, Isabel. A boy needs his mother, she whispers. A different day: Isabel, you are so beautiful. It almost sounds like something Eddie can believe in.
Shannon tells him he’s dying. He tells her he knows. Her smile is sad. Do you know how to start living? She asks.
Eddie’s throat is tight and he cannot breathe.
Get in the grave and dig yourself out, she says simply. Eddie shuts his eyes against his tears, throat clogged with soil, and when he opens them she’s gone. Just like that.
Eddie’s head is full of cotton wool. He stops going to work. It doesn’t matter. There are no bills, no rent, no taxes. Everything is a whole lot of nothing.
He sits on his bed of dirt and rots away at home for weeks that feel like seconds. He bleeds all over the sheets. He feels like he blinked and time passed, just like that. Snap. He’s 34 now and it’s getting harder to breathe.
He thinks about what Shannon said. He’s tired. He is so, so tired. His heart is a cavern and his lungs are full of dirt and his brain is stuffed with cotton wool. How are you supposed to exist when your heart is a cavern and your lungs are full of dirt and your brain is stuffed with cotton wool? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know.
The billboard says, TIME IS RUNNING OUT. THE END IS NEAR.
The lake is cold. Refreshing. A pretty sky blue. Eddie considers drowning. Jumping into the great, terrifying blue and letting the wet mud drag him down. Don’t drag him down with you, Helena said. Who was she talking about? What’s his son’s name?
His gaze falls on the empty grave. It’s waiting for him: it’s been waiting the entire time.
Shannon told him to get in it. To bury himself alive. It’s an appealing idea, he thinks distantly. Being alive. He’d like to stop dying. He’d like to stop hacking up dirt with every wheeze, bleeding everywhere. He’d like to take a big breath of fresh air.
His toes are right on the edge. When he looks down the nails are painted pink, and the image flickers like a mirage, giving way to beat-up combat boots. He doesn’t like that. He takes the boots off, then his socks, so his bare feet curl into the soil. Solid. Real. He strips off his jacket, his jeans, until he’s only wearing a shirt and boxers.
He starts to hum Old Time Rock & Roll. There’s an echo of a dance shivering through his skin. He is teetering on the edge of something and he can feel the weight of a million moments pressing at his back, pushing him forward until his toes curl over the edge of the grave.
The world around him is orange-red and bleeding. Violent. Choking. Eddie is choking. He’s been choking his entire life, in church and at home and at work and in marriage. He’s been choking the entire time he’s been in a man’s body and oh.
Oh.
Isabel.
That’s the name Shannon used. Like that’s the real Eddie.
His heart is thundering in his chest because he is terrified of living and he is terrified of the truth. But he has to be brave. He needs to be. Maybe life really is somewhere else on the other side of the grave, like Shannon said.
Eddie tips his head up to the orange sky and mouths, thank you.
Then she climbs in.
Isabel wakes in an elevator covered in blood.
She blinks against the light. Prays. Holds her hand to her side and pretends she is someone else. Someone braver. Prays and waits and prays and waits.
With a loud shudder, the elevator starts moving. Isabel gasps, her weak arms pressing on the blood flow. She wants, suddenly and fiercely, to survive. She desperately does not want to die in this body.
The elevator dings. Salvation; the doors open, people start shouting, Buck is here. Buck is here, kneeling beside her, holding her t-shirt to her wound, speaking frantically, you’re okay, you’re okay, just hang on, Eddie, please. She thinks distantly that she’d much rather hear him beg under sweeter circumstances. The thought is conflicting; it’s unimportant as she’s rushed through the hospital, it’s the most significant thing she’s ever felt, it changes everything, it changes nothing. There is a proud kind of exhilaration rushing through her that mingles with decades of fear and pragmatism.
You’re okay, Buck says again when she wakes up hours later, bandaged in a hospital bed, all her blood in the right places. For the first time, tentatively, like holding a butterfly you’d rather not crush, she grasps the thought that there are a lot of places in her body that don’t feel right. She can’t do anything more than that right now, but it’s okay. She’s going to be okay. Buck is by her side, holding himself with such relief Isabel wants to do impossible things. She wants to press him close to her and carry his baby and put a ring on his finger. If she had more bandwidth right now, she thinks she’d have a panic attack about that.
She’s exhausted, though, doped up on painkillers. Pepa brings Christopher to see her and she quickly becomes preoccupied with making sure her son is okay. She thinks she succeeds, because Chris leaves for a sleepover at Pepa’s house with a smile on his face.
“It’s sweet,” Buck says when they leave, fidgeting with his hands. He doesn’t look at her when he says, “He really loves you. You’re a good dad, Eddie.”
The words sting. Isabel lets herself feel the sting and it’s magnificent. It’s real.
“Hey, Buck?” She gathers her courage.
No one else is here, the curtains drawn shut around them. Isabel is in love with him. She thinks he might be in love with her, too, but it doesn’t matter either way: Buck’s her person, and she’s his.
He tips his head up from staring at his hands and looks at her, eyes bright and blue, “Hmm?”
Isabel breathes shakily and asks, “Can you help me research something?”