The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

  “How?”

  “Remember when David Combs disappeared?”

  “Not really,” Freddie said. “I was kind of out of it, but I heard what happened.”

  “Right. Well, according to the voices, every time I heal someone, they ‘save’ other people by rapturing them or whatever you want to call it.”

  “And they chose a killer?”

  I held up my hands. “Don’t ask me why they took him—I’ve been working to figure that out—but four others disappeared at the same time as David.”

  “So they’re using you. That figures.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Freddie shifted so that her body was angled toward mine. “You’re their tool, Elena. They tell you what to do and who to heal, and you do it. Then they rapture fucked-up killers and who knows who else, and you don’t even get a say in it. You’re the one with the power, but they’re making the decisions.”

  “I can choose not to heal anyone,” I said.

  “Which is equally fucked.” Frustration vibed off of Freddie in waves. “They’ve given you an impossible choice. Either you’re their miracle-performing chimp and they take others without your permission or input, or you do nothing and people suffer and die. They rigged the game, Elena. You won’t refuse to heal someone in need because you’re sweet and kind, and these voices or whatever they are, are playing you.”

  I struggled to counter her argument, but she was right. I didn’t think I was actually that sweet or kind—though hearing Freddie say I was made me smile involuntarily, and I tucked that memory away to savor later—but there was never a real possibility I would have let Freddie die or Mrs. Haimovitch suffer or Ashlyn Akers lose her fight to cancer, and though I still hadn’t made up my mind regarding Justina Smith’s little brother, I was leaning toward helping him despite the consequences.

  “Does this mean you believe me?”

  “Yeah, no,” Freddie said. “But pretend I do for now.”

  The way she’d said it was less than reassuring. “Fine,” I said. “Then how do I keep from being used by the voices?”

  “You don’t.”

  “Well, that was helpful.”

  “There’s power in knowing that you’re being used. All you have to do is look for an opportunity to flip this shit on the pony and the siren and the skeleton. Maybe you can’t stop playing the game, but now that you know it’s rigged, you can figure out how to beat them.”

  What Freddie said made sense and reinforced my belief that I needed to understand why David had shot her. That by doing so, I could win the game or change the rules or at least understand what the voices were playing at.

  “You’re not who I expected you to be,” Freddie said.

  “Who did you expect me to be?”

  “The shy girl who spilled milk on her skirt in sixth grade and started crying so hard Mrs. Dawson had to take her to change.”

  My eyes flew wide and I covered my mouth with my hand. “Oh my God! I’d totally forgotten about that.”

  “I didn’t,” Freddie said. “It was sad but adorable.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, you’re not who I expected you to be either.”

  Freddie shoved herself to her feet and offered me her hand. “We should go.”

  It took us a while to find the path back to the road, and we didn’t speak while we walked. Before I got in the car, I leaned across the hood and caught Freddie’s eye. “Hey,” I said. “You never told me why you called me to come get you from the party.”

  Freddie paused. Shrugged. Then said, “You were the only person I knew who would come.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SUNDAY WAS A rare day off for Mama. She worked her second job on the mobile grooming van only three or four days a week, but sometimes she’d pick up odd jobs helping friends out, which meant there were stretches when she worked seven days a week for a month straight. She’d wait tables for Dom—the only one of her ex-boyfriends I actually liked—or help Elle clean houses. I asked her once why she worked so much and she told me there was no job she wouldn’t take to make certain we had a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and clothes on our backs. I’m ashamed to admit that I resented her for not being there all the time when I was younger, but then I grew up and realized no matter how much I’d missed her, she’d missed me more.

  I did my best to take care of the house, but Sean and the kids made more of a mess than I could keep up with, so we all knew what it meant when Mama had a day off: cleaning party! Sean, of course, always managed to have “somewhere important to be” on those days, but Mama said she didn’t mind because anything he did, she’d have to go behind him and clean again anyway.

  A cleaning party is exactly what it sounds like. Mama cranked up the music—mostly music from the 1980s, which adults her age seem really nostalgic for despite the fact that Mama wasn’t even old enough to listen to music when she was alive in the eighties; and sometimes Pancho Amat or Pedro Luis Ferrer when she was thinking about her mother, which didn’t happen often. Mama didn’t talk much about her life before she’d had me. She’d taught me to cook some of the Cuban meals she’d grown up with, but hadn’t taught me or Conor or Sofie more than a few Spanish words and phrases. She wasn’t ashamed of her heritage—Cuban from her mother and whatever white European mix my grandfather was—but rather was ashamed of the parents from which it had come. Getting to her roots required digging through the barren and rocky soil of her mother and father, and that was one of the few jobs she refused to do.

  I danced and worked on the kitchen, Mama sorted through a mountain of laundry, Sofie vacuumed, and Conor cleaned the toilet—a job he would own until he learned to stop pissing on the seat. It seemed like we’d only lip-synced with a duster to a couple of songs before we were finished and the house was spotless. Which was coincidentally around the time Sean returned and offered to help. Mama surprised him—and me—by telling him to watch Sofie and Conor so she and I could go out.

  After we’d taken turns in the shower and changed into nicer clothes—jeans for me, jean shorts for Mama, who had better legs, which seemed unfair since I was basically a clone of her—we drove to a nearby animal shelter where her friend Lilah worked and where she sometimes volunteered grooming the dogs to help give them a better chance of being adopted.

  When I’d been younger, we’d gone to the shelter often. I’d loved playing with the dogs, who were stuck in their cages for most of the day, taking them for walks in the grassy lot behind the building and letting them run around. It’d been a while since Mama had brought me there. Once she’d had Conor and then Sofie, she’d had to work more to keep us afloat and there hadn’t been time for much else.

  I was tossing a ball with a dog called Meatloaf—a stumpy-legged pug who was eager for me to throw the ball but didn’t actually want to give it to me—while Mama walked an arthritic pit bull named Nell around the grass, whispering to her that she was a good girl and someone would take her home and love her for the rest of her days. She loved animals, and they loved her right back. Mama said that animals could see through our walls, straight to the heart of who we truly are.

  “How are you, mija?” Mama asked. She’d sat in the grass to rub Nell’s belly and let the old dog soak up some sunshine.

  “Fine,” I said. “I guess.”

  “We haven’t talked in a while.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “So have you.” There was an edge to her voice. A question that wasn’t really a question.

  On a day like this, it was easy to forget the shooting or that voices in my head wanted me to save humanity from an unknown threat. If I could have stolen this moment from time—the breeze soft with the last dying gasp of summer, the sunshine, the freedom from responsibilities and these moments with my mother—and existed in it forever, I would have been content.

  “I’m surprised you’re not with Fadil today,” she said.

  Meatloaf had grown bored with the ball and had decided to dance a
round Nell in an effort to lure her into playing. The old pit bull slapped a giant paw across his back, requiring him to wriggle free, which Meatloaf decided was an even better game.

  “I think we’re fighting.”

  Mama frowned. “That’s a shame. You two shouldn’t fight. Is it about a girl?”

  “Sort of. But not really.”

  “Does this have to do with you sneaking out with the car last night?”

  My head jerked up, but I avoided looking her in the eyes. Sean had been passed out when I’d gotten home, and I’d thought my nighttime excursion had gone unnoticed.

  “Helen told me you came home after one in the morning,” Mama said as if reading my mind.

  “Mrs. Haimovitch ratted me out?”

  “Don’t blame her. I asked her to keep an eye on you kids.”

  I found it impossible to stay mad at Mrs. Haimovitch, even though she’d turned informant on me after I’d healed her hip. And Mama didn’t seem too upset.

  “A friend was stranded at a party,” I said. “Her ride was drunk and couldn’t drive, and she asked me to pick her up. Fadil told me he was hanging out with his parents, but he was at the party because he’s totally into this girl, and I’m not upset he’s interested in her, but he lied to me about it.”

  Mama shifted to a more comfortable position, which earned her a grumpy look from Nell. “Why do you think he did that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It would probably be a good place to start.”

  Of course she would think it was that simple. Everything was that simple to her. When you had a problem, you faced it. When you needed information, you asked for it. Mama was blunt that way. She never made excuses for herself, and she did what she needed to do to survive. It was a quality I both admired and despised. She believed there was no obstacle in life she couldn’t bulldoze her way through, but it often blinded her to life’s nuances. Not every problem had a simple solution.

  “So who’s the girl you picked up?” Mama asked. “Do I know her?”

  I shook my head, not wanting to tell her it was the same girl who’d been shot and whom I’d healed only a couple of weeks ago. “Just a girl.”

  “Do you have feelings for her?”

  “Yeah. But I’m pretty sure it’s one-sided.”

  “What about Javier? Didn’t you go out with him Friday night? He was nice.”

  I laughed so loudly that it startled Meatloaf. He turned his pug bug eyes on me, and his ears twitched, waiting to see if I was going to play with him. When I didn’t, he returned to harassing Nell.

  “Javi is not a nice boy.”

  “I thought he was so polite when I met him.”

  “That’s because he wasn’t trying to convince you to sleep with him.”

  Mama’s lips turned downward, her smile gone. “Did you? If you need condoms, I’ll buy them for you.”

  “There’s a higher probability that I’ll be killed by a falling coconut than that I’ll sleep with Javi, but if I ever did choose to sleep with him, I’d prefer you pay for me to see a therapist rather than for prophylaxes.”

  My mind began to wander to Justina Smith and her brother. I still hadn’t decided what I was going to do, and, worse, I didn’t know how to decide. Fadil was in one part of my brain telling me that Allah or God or whatever wouldn’t have given me the ability to heal if I wasn’t meant to use it, but Freddie was in another part telling me the voices had rigged the game and that if I did what they wanted I was allowing them to control me. And then there was Deputy Akers hanging out in the shadows warning me that secret agents might come after me if I wasn’t careful.

  “There’s more going on than your fight with Fadil, isn’t there?” Mama said.

  “No.”

  “I can read you, Elena. Is this about Helen? She told me what you did for her.”

  “Please don’t be mad,” I said. “I know you told me not to heal anyone else, but she was in pain and—”

  “I’m not angry. Just worried.” She patted my leg. “Now tell me what’s got you all twisted up.”

  “Have you ever had to make a choice, but you weren’t sure what to do?”

  Of course she had. I doubted there was a fool alive who hadn’t been put in a situation where they’d needed to make a choice, and I’d expected Mama to tell me so, but she took a breath and watched me thoughtfully for a moment before saying, “I had you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Come on. I’m being serious.”

  “So am I.”

  I’d never considered that my mother had thought about not having me, but it made sense. “I get it, I guess,” I said. “You were sixteen, enjoying your life and then—bam!—miracle baby. I suppose it would have been easier to abort me so you didn’t get kicked out of your parents’ house.”

  “It was more complicated than that.”

  “How so?”

  Mama scratched Nell behind the ears. The dog lay there with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, looking happier than it had ever been. “Mama was Catholic and felt that my claims about the nature of my pregnancy were a way of mocking her devotion to la Virgen, while Papa was Baptist and thought everything I did was a sin, and though they didn’t agree on much, both adamantly opposed abortion.” She sighed. “The moment I found out I was pregnant with you, there was no way for me to go on living in their house.”

  “Wait, so they threatened to kick you out for getting pregnant without being married, but they would have also kicked you out for ending the pregnancy?”

  My mother nodded. “That’s the way my parents were. I had to make up my mind whether to wind up a homeless teenage girl or a homeless teenage girl responsible for a baby. It would have been easier to finish high school and find a way to go to college and become a veterinarian without a child, and I worried I wouldn’t be able to provide you with the life you deserved.”

  “So why did you have me, then? Your life might have been so much better if you hadn’t.”

  “Different,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My life would have turned out differently, but who’s to say it would have been better?”

  Mama and I were sitting in the grass at that moment because of a decision she’d made before I was even born. Her choice to keep me had directly affected every choice she’d made since then, like dominoes lined up and knocked over. If she’d chosen to abort me, she might have stayed in school, might have even convinced her parents to let her move back in, and gone to college and met a man with a job who didn’t drink. She never would have had Conor or Sofie. My mother’s entire life would have unfolded differently.

  But it wasn’t solely her life that would have changed. If I’d never been born, Freddie would have died at Starbucks. David Combs might have gone into the store and kept shooting until he ran out of bullets. Or, if the voices had instigated the events of that day, he might have stayed home and played video games.

  One choice in the past had set off a chain reaction with repercussions still being felt sixteen years later. Mama said it wouldn’t have necessarily been better, but I wasn’t so sure.

  “Fine,” I said. “Different. But you still haven’t told me why you chose me.”

  “Even though I didn’t know how I’d wound up with a baby in my belly or why, you were still my responsibility. I didn’t get to choose whether or not to become pregnant with you, and I didn’t get to choose whether or not my parents threw me out of their house, but I couldn’t live with my first act as a mother being to strip you of the ability to make your own choices. To decide your own future. I committed myself to making sure you had the freedom to choose your own path through life, and I don’t regret it. I am proud every day of the young woman you’ve become.”

  “Without me, though, you could have gone to college and become whatever you wanted to be.”

  “That’s true. And I would never judge any woman who might have made a different dec
ision, but you were my choice. I chose you. I chose your future.”

  I was the same age Mama had been when she’d sacrificed her future for mine, and I doubted myself capable of acting so selflessly. I’d long considered my mother the strongest woman in my life, but now I knew she was superhuman. As proud as she was of me, I was equally proud of her.

  I’d wanted to tell her all my problems. The voices and Freddie and the end of the world. Mama would have known what to do. I was sure of it. But she’d given me life, she’d given me the freedom to choose, and I needed to honor that by making this decision on my own.

  “Have you talked to your parents?” I asked. “Since they kicked you out, I mean.”

  Mama rolled her head on her shoulders like she was trying to exorcise the tension from her neck. As if she feared the mere thought of her parents might summon them. “They called me after Dr. Milner went public with the proof that you were conceived parthenogenetically.”

  “And?”

  “They apologized,” she said. “We were living in this disgusting, tiny efficiency. The roaches were so bad I covered your crib with mosquito netting and slept with wax in my ears so none could crawl inside and lay eggs.”

  “Gross!”

  “Be thankful you were too young to remember,” Mama said. “Your grandparents offered to take us in. They said they’d been wrong and that you were a miracle sent by God and we were welcome to live with them.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I forgave them for what they did,” she went on. “But I refused to allow them the opportunity to hurt me, or you, ever again.” I waited for her to say more, but she stood and we walked the dogs around for a few minutes more. Then we traded them out for a lazy Pomeranian named Chewie, who resembled a furry football, and a golden retriever named Guster, who had patches of his coat missing and was so skinny I could count his ribs.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That I’m the reason for all the crap you’ve gone through.”

  Mama scowled at me. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not. Look at all you’ve accomplished. You’re as beautiful as your mother but smarter than I ever was. You’re kind and sensitive. You saved a young woman who’d been shot and healed Helen’s hip.” Her frown morphed into a soft smile. “No matter what you’re going through, I’m Team Elena all the way.”