Page 28 of One Year Ago in Spain
She paused to consider it, then nodded.
“My mother used to sing to my kids all the time,” Armando said to Claire. “And since the doctor said that Matías might be able to hear us, I thought…” He choked up and couldn’t finish.
But his mom squeezed his hand, then took a deep breath and began to sing.
Her voice was rich and round, surprising from such a small, elderly woman who spoke barely louder than a whisper. Claire didn’t catch any of the words exceptRosa de Madrid,but she could feel the melody—light and almost playful, like a song sung by an old Hollywood starlet.
When she finished, Armando wiped a tear from his eye, and Claire clapped quietly.
More subdued clapping came from the doorframe, which was now filled with a doctor and Soledad, and Aracely and Luis behind them. Claire hadn’t noticed the rest of the family come in, because she’d been so focused on watching Matías for any signs of waking during his abuela’s song (though his eyelashes did not so much as flutter).
The doctor and everyone else filed in. Apparently, the visitation limit didn’t apply when the doctor was present.
“Hello, you must be Matías’s girlfriend,” the doctor said in English with the calming smile of a professional who was used to talking to loved ones in difficult situations. “I am Liliana Rodriguez, the physician overseeing Matías’s care.”
“Thank you for all you’ve done for him,” Claire said, her voice shaking.
“We are trying our best. The truth is that Matías is in very bad shape.”
“He looks worse than yesterday,” Aracely said quietly.
“The team in Valencia managed to stop the internal bleeding in that first series of surgeries,” the doctor said. “But a lot of damage had already been done. Matías’s body is trying to heal itself, but I cannot guarantee that it will be able to, or that he will wake.”
Silence.
Soledad began to cry. Luis wrapped his arms around his mother.
Finally, Armando was the one brave enough to speak. “What about my son’s brain activity? In the hall, you said there was a spike?”
“Yes,” Dr. Rodriguez said. “Last night, around 9:25p.m., there was a sudden increase in Matías’s vital signs. Brain activity, heart rate, and respiration rate all increased for a short period of time.”
Claire sat taller in her seat. That was around the time the sun was beginning to set.
And when she had seen Matías’s ghost yesterday.
“How long did the spike in activity last?” she asked.
“About a minute,” the doctor said. “Then everything returned to baseline.”
A minute.That’s how long Claire’s conversation with Matías had been. Could the spike in his vitals somehow be related?
But then she shook her head. It was just a coincidence that her hallucination aligned with a momentary blip in Matías’s heart rate.Come on, Claire. You’re too rational—you’re a lawyer, for heaven’s sake—to be trying to draw tenuous connections like this.
Dr. Rodriguez checked all the monitors attached to Matías and reviewed the notes on his chart again. She stayed and answered his parents’ questions, although they switched to Spanish because they didn’t know most medical terms in English. Claire didn’t blame them, of course. She was grateful that they’d spoken in English until now.
While they were talking, Claire looked again at Matías’s partially shaved head, his bruised and scraped face. The stubble from before was getting bristly now; in a few days, it would be a scraggly beard. His beautiful eyes remained closed.
This both was and wasn’t her Matías.
Claire fumbled for the journal Luis had found in the rental house. She needed to touch Matías’s most recent thoughts, the last things he’d wanted her to know before this terrible turn of events. She opened the book to the mere handful of other entries.
July 10th
Dear Claire,
I can’t help but think of you today, because this is the day Romeo & Juliet met, at least according to that novel you love.Remember how—on our second date—you interrogated me about the types of books I read? It still makes me laugh, how horrified you were when you found out that I sometimes read three different novels at a time, and that I dog-ear the pages or splay the books out on a table instead of using bookmarks.
Anyway, here is a doodle of Juliet’s balcony, to commemorate July 10th.
