Mangoes

Chapter 6

I sit in the driver’s seat of Mom’s car, parked in a dirt lot overlooking a vast park populated by play structures and trails, both paved and gravel. One side of the park is bordered by a wide, muddy river and a steep bank. I spot Mason leaning on the railing of a large wooden gazebo built over the water. They’re smoking a cigarette and ashing it into the river, watching the ashes drift along. I get out of the car and make my way toward the water. Mason turns around when they hear my footsteps against the wooden planks. Their eyes are red and puffy. They’ve been crying. 

“Hey, man, what’s wrong?” I ask. I approach Mason as their shoulders heave with a suppressed sob. They flick the cigarette into the water and hug me, holding on for a good twenty seconds. When they release, there’s a trail of snot connecting their nose to my shoulder, a delicate mucosal catenary.

“Fuck, sorry.” They wipe away the trail. “Aunt Dee is in the hospital. A stroke, I think. She fell too. Just today. While visiting.” Mason’s mom died from a stroke.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry. Did you go to the hospital?”

“Yeah, but she’s in surgery now. No visitors.”

I hug them again, tighter. “I’ll go with you when she gets out if you want. My mom’s not expecting me home until this evening.”

“I’d like that, yeah.”

“Hey, follow me. I want to show you something.” I lead Mason out of the gazebo and down a trail that winds through the park, by a baseball field and some port-a-potties. The slope is steep enough that my feet slip with every other step. I haven’t put my laces back in yet, so my shoes flop back and forth. I can feel a blister forming on one heel. The forest closes in and an eerie quiet falls over us. We pass a couple of people making out on a bench. They don’t acknowledge us. As we ascend I begin to sweat. I’ve made this trip a dozen times before, but it takes a lot out of me each time. We reach a row of benches that overlooks the river from the cut bank, but this isn’t our destination. At the top of the hill, I take Mason through a small path overgrown with brush. After walking the path for a few minutes, we reach it, barely visible unless you know where to look. Just a short chimney peeking out from a mound of earth, peeking through the moss. I take Mason’s hand and bring them to a tree with a diameter as wide as I am tall. In the tangle of roots is a square trapdoor just big enough for me to slip through. A padlock lies broken by its side.

“Bee, what is this?” Mason asks. 

“I don’t know. I’ve looked inside but I’ve never been brave enough to go down there on my own. Do you wanna check it out?”

Mason thinks for a moment, then nods. “Fuck it.”

We open the door. It’s creakier than I remember. It leads to a pitch black hole with a single A-frame ladder as a means of descent. Mason goes in first, then steadies the ladder as I follow. I close the trapdoor after me and we stand there together in darkness. Across the room is a sliver of greyish light peeking through the chimney shaft. I get out my phone and turn on the flashlight. Mason does the same. We scan the room to see shelves of tin cans, all sealed, with the labels torn off. Some have burst, fountains dripping desiccated beans or chili or some other brown substance. The walls are plastered with multicolor graffiti. There’s a giant CRT computer monitor on a desk butted up against one wall. It’s been smashed and there is no PC tower in sight. The drawers of the desk are open. One has been ripped out and its contents strewn across the damp concrete floor. There’s a small free standing safe in the corner. It shows clear signs of tampering, probably someone using a hacksaw to scrape away at the hard plastic outer shell. Someone’s tried to break it open with a shovel or a pickaxe. The front is dented badly, but it’s still sealed. Mason walks over to it. They spin the locking dial a few times. Making their way around the safe, flashlight falling over its harsh corners. They attempt to pull the safe from the wall to get a better look at the back.

“This shit’s heavy. Mind helping?”

I join them, heaving with all my weight. It budges, just a bit, enough to wedge myself between it and the wall to push at it with my feet. We manage to move it just enough to get a view of the die against the wall. I point my flashlight at the safe’s back and see a trio of numbers scratched into the plastic. 73-74-31. I move around to the front as Mason takes a look at the other side. I play with the knob, inputting the code six times, then inputting it in reverse, then with the number orders shuffled. I try Euler’s number, Pi, the speed of light in meters per second. Mason tries another ten times. Nothing. 

“Well shit, that’s disappointing,” Mason says. They kick the safe, then limp toward the ladder, taking a last look around. We both climb out of the hole, brushing the dust off of our clothes. We walk back to Mom’s car. I tell them about HeadScratcher and my system of graphs to explain it. I figure anything keeping their mind off Aunt Dee must be good for them. They don’t say much. 

When we reach the parking lot, Mason gets a call. Aunt Dee is out of surgery but hasn’t regained consciousness. We decide to walk to the hospital. We pass through downtown on the way, by a comic book store I used to frequent and the coffee shop where I had my first job. Mason stares at their feet the whole way, shoulders high and hunched forward. They sniffle periodically, though I can’t tell if they’re crying. We reach the hospital just as it begins to rain. We are followed in by a couple of hospital workers who were taking smoke breaks. We make our way through the lobby, bathed in the cool afternoon light. Mason makes a turn toward the gift shop. I tag along. We enter the store, a small, warmly lit corner of the lobby. The shelves are lined with toys and “get well soon” cards. Mason makes a beeline for the stuffed animals. They pick out a monkey plush that’s holding a pink heart with the words “love you lots” on it in red cursive embroidery. I browse the magazines as they pay for the monkey, looking through pages of some pop-science publication. A headline catches my eye: “Unveiling the Secrets of Maternal Mitochondrial DNA.” Before I can flip to its page, Mason is pulling on my sleeve, signaling that it’s time to leave. We walk through the maze of hallways, ending at the same elevator I took up to the psych ward. This time, Mason presses the button for the second floor: ICU. The elevator cabin jerks to life and we ascend. 

Aunt Dee’s room smells like bleach and sweat. She lies there, unmoving, connected to a ventilator that hums at her bedside. One foot is in a brace. Monitors display her vitals. From what little I know about medicine, I see that her blood pressure is elevated. Her heart beats a green curve on the screen. I imagine the component sine waves separating into a Fourier series, harmonics superimposed over each other, scrolling across the screen, playing alien tones. Outside the window adjacent to the bed, branches sway in the wind. The rain’s intensity grows, coating the glass with a layer of dripping water. Mason walks to the bed and places the monkey on a side table. They hold their aunt’s hand and stroke it with their thumb. There is no sign of awareness from her. A nurse enters the room holding a thick white binder overflowing with papers.

“Oh, you must be the family,” they say. They look femme, but have a buzz cut and a couple facial piercings, as well as a pride pin on their lanyard. “Mason, right? I checked the hospital records. You must be the nephew.”

“Yeah,” Mason says under their breath. “This is my sister.”

The nurse shakes each of our hands. “Your aunt had a hemorrhagic stroke in a critical blood vessel in her brain. We were able to control the bleeding. We’re giving her blood thinners and anti-seizure meds. We won’t know the extent of the damage until she wakes up.” Until, not if. I hope that’s a good sign. Mason’s eyes have glazed over. They shut down like this sometimes. I saw it a lot in the year after their mom died. I don’t know how to help. The nurse hands them a packet on post-stroke care. They put it next to the monkey without opening it. 

The nurse leaves to tend to other patients. Mason and I sit next to each other in large reclining chairs by the window. Mason hugs their knees to their chest and stares at the floor. I put one of my hoodie’s drawstrings into my mouth and chew on the plastic tip. It calms me.

“She’s like a mom to me,” Mason says. “We did everything together. I can’t do this without her.” They rock back and forth slightly in the chair and squeeze their eyes shut. “I can’t even look at her. It’s like, I don’t know how bad this is going to be. With my mom, she had the first stroke and she couldn’t talk. I don’t even remember her last words to me. How fucked is that?’ They look at their aunt, her chest rising and falling slightly. I take Mason’s hand in mine and squeeze. It’s the only thing I can think to do. I’ve never been able to comfort people in situations like these. I always feel like anything I say couldn’t possibly make the situation better, so why bother saying anything at all? Aunt Dee was like family to me too. Her apartment was our favorite hangout spot, before Mason moved back into their mom’s old place for college, where they live now.

“Thanks for coming with me, Bee. It’s getting late. You should head back home,” Mason says. 

I nod and stand up, hugging Mason again before making my way out of the room and down the elevator. I walk back to the car in the rain. I make it home before dusk, pulling into the muddy driveway. Mom’s asleep on the couch. I watch her until I’m sure she’s breathing.