Chapter 2 - THE HOSPITAL WING"What are you talking about?" I demanded, my hands dropping to my sides, useless and shaking. I looked at my mother. "Mom, talk to me! What is she talking about?"
Doña Elena slowly rose from her chair. She didn't look frail, despite her sixty-five years. She looked like a general inspecting the aftermath of a war she had orchestrated. She walked over to the patio table, pulled out a pack of Delicados cigarettes—a habit she had supposedly quit a decade ago—and lit one with a silver lighter that clicked with terrifying finality.
"Sit down, Alejandro," my mother said, exhaling a thin cloud of gray smoke into the fading sunlight.
"I'm not sitting down! Tell me what's going on or I swear to God I'll take Mateo and walk out of this house this second!"
"You can't," Doña Elena said flatly.
The words hung in the air, cold and immovable.
"What did you say?"
"You cannot take Mateo, because legally, and biologically, half of what you think is your life is a carefully constructed lie," my mother said, her voice devoid of maternal warmth. She looked at Valeria, then at Carmen. "I told you both, years ago. Secrets like this don't stay buried in the dirt. They rot, and the smell eventually reaches the surface."
Valeria collapsed into one of the empty folding chairs, burying her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook with silent, desperate sobs. "I tried... I tried so hard to be his mother," she wept. "Every single day, Alejandro. I raised him. I fed him. I stayed up nights when he had a fever. Does that mean nothing? Does the fact that I gave him my life mean nothing just because of genetics?"
I felt a cold sweat break out across the back of my neck. My breath caught in my throat. The words clicked together in my head, forming a sentence so grotesque, so unnatural, that my brain violently rejected it.
"Genetics?" I whispered, taking a step backward until the back of my legs hit the cold metal of the grill. "What are you talking about, Valeria? What does genetics have to do with Carmen?"
Carmen looked down at the sleeping boy in her arms, a tear finally cutting a clean path through the dust on her cheek.
"Do you remember five years ago, Alejandro?" Carmen asked softly. "Do you remember when Valeria was pregnant? Do you remember the complications?"
My mind raced backward through the fog of memory. Five years ago. Valeria had suffered a severe hemorrhage during the final trimester. The doctors at the private hospital in Zapopan had rushed her into emergency surgery. I had been pacing the linoleum floors of the waiting room for six agonizing hours, half-mad with fear.
"Of course I remember," I spat out. "They saved her life. They saved... they saved our baby."
"They saved a baby," Carmen corrected, her voice breaking.
The world tilted on its axis.
"What?"
"Valeria’s uterus was severely damaged during the hemorrhage, Alejandro," Carmen said, her eyes locking onto mine with a devastating intensity. "The doctors came out of the operating room and told you the baby didn't make it. They told you that Valeria’s life was saved, but the child... the child was stillborn."
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I stared at her, my mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. "No. No, that's not true. Mateo is right here! I brought him home from that hospital! I put him in the crib we built together!"
"You brought him home," Doña Elena interrupted, taking a slow drag from her cigarette, "because your wife went insane with grief, and your sister was young, vulnerable, and completely under my control."
