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By Gabriella Navas
The hospital didn’t smell like a hospital.
It smelled like hairspray and new textbooks. Like plastic sofa covers or the wax of an unscented candle. My mother’s room, in particular, smelled of buttercream frosting and anise.
I inhaled deeply, suddenly reminded of the last Noche Buena I spent at home: how Mami and I stayed up late making coquito, stealing sips of rum straight from the bottle.
“Conoces el secreto?” she asked, already tipsy. “Mira.”
She opened the cabinet above the sink and took out a jar full of star anise, shaking it like a makeshift maraca as she popped her hip slightly and stuck out her tongue.
“Este.” I watched her add half the jar to a pot of boiling water, followed by a handful of cinnamon sticks. She paused, looked inside the pot, then at me. “Demasiada?”
“No hay tal,” I shrugged.
“No hay tal?”
“No hay tal,” I repeated, my tongue heavy with alcohol.
“Bueno,” Mami said. “No más coquito. Este año, estamos haciendo jugo de canela.”
It wasn’t funny, really, but we were drunk together for the first time in our lives, so we broke out laughing: hers a wheezing, hearty laugh and mine an anxious, overcompensating one.
I was two weeks post-suicide attempt, which of course she knew nothing about.
During my college years, she’d witnessed my depressive episodes, but she always chalked them up to the devil or technology or both, often saying that you couldn’t have one without the other. I never bothered to correct her. I wanted to prove to her that she didn’t need to worry about me, though I knew she always would.
“Incluso en la otra vida,” Mami told me once. Even in the afterlife.
I won’t talk about the empty hospital bed. At least not yet.
After we finished making the coquito and cleaned up the kitchen, Mami and I sat on the front steps of her house, unfazed by the cold. We watched the neighborhood go quiet around us: a still life interrupted only by stray cats skulking down the street and the passing of booming cars. A few doors down, a neighbor came outside to turn off his Christmas lights and gave us a slight wave, then disappeared back inside before we could return the gesture.
Mami took my hand and said something about how small it made hers feel, a subtle way of reminding me that I took after my father. I studied her profile: her upturned nose, her cleft chin, the beauty mark near the corner of her eye.
She was the kind of person who turned everything into a love story: the way doors fit perfectly in their frames, contracting and expanding depending on the season; the way the wheels on her shopping cart squealed like giddy, crushing teens; the way her necklaces tangled together in the small wooden jewelry box she bought with the first paycheck she ever earned.
“Querida,” she said after a while. “Qué pasa?”
“Nada, nada. Estoy bien.”
“Mentirosa,” she teased. “En serio, hijita. Qué pasa?”
“No se si…me gusta quien soy,” I whispered.
“Y por qué?”
There were plenty of reasons to not like myself. But my mother understood this only as an insult to her motherhood and, even worse, an insult to God. And maybe it was.
“No importa, Mami. Lo siento.”
We stayed like that for a little while longer, knowing full well that it was safer to remain unspeaking. For Mami and me, silence was always a selfless act—never a weakness. It was a meal we could prepare together, a delicacy, something we could chew on without ever having to worry about it breaking our teeth.
“Se está haciendo tarde,” my mother said, standing up. She walked up the steps and I heard her open the screen door, then stop. I turned around to look at her.
“Estás bien?” I asked. She gave me the same soft smile I imagined she gave her students when they told her they wanted to be astronauts: like she was afraid of what gravity would do to them once they realized they were powerless to it.
“No tienes que amarte a ti misma ahora mismo. Sé que es lo más difícil. Créeme.” She put a hand on her heart. “Pero…deja que mi amor sea suficiente, Valeria. Hasta que aprendas a amarte bien. Puedes hacerlo? Para mí?”
I wanted nothing more in that moment than to make her feel like her faith in me wasn’t wasted. But I hesitated for too long. The sheer weight of her love was paralyzing.
“Okay,” she said. She wiped her eyes and went inside. I stayed there for a while longer, nervously scratching at my wrists, waiting for her to come back, but she never did.
I realized then that some separations are anticlimactic: they end with a conversation, not a fight. Sometimes they end simply because one person is tired of trying to escape the maze of the other person’s obstinance. Here is the truth: our relationship was built on avoidance, a lifelong plena carefully choreographed to keep the peace. But avoidance is not the same thing as being unaware. Mami saw it all—my suffering, my defeat—even if she said nothing about it.
I was gone in the morning. I thought that my leaving would let her out of the maze, but maybe it just created a new one. Maybe my leaving was what made her sick.
That was three years ago.
Back in the hospital, nurses flickered around me like fireflies: there one moment and gone the next. None of them could get me to talk or move. I just sat there, collapsed on the floor, staring at the empty bed, hands numb, breath shallow.
There should be an afterlife just for mothers, I thought. A place where they can finally rest, where they can’t remember or miss the children who left them when they were alive.
Where Mami couldn’t remember me.
Gabriella Navas is a Puerto Rican writer hailing from Jersey City, NJ. She is the author of What the Locusts Leave Behind,a collection of short stories about what it means to rebuild. Her poetry has previously appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Tulane Review, and AERIE. She is easily distracted, frequently smitten, and always willing to talk about the healing powers of Chavela Vargas’s discography.
