Panic Attack

five

From the very beginning, the Blooms had been very good to Gabriela. Twelve years ago, when she came to New York from Ec ua dor, she was just nineteen and very shy, and she spoke only a few words of English, and she didn’t think she’d ever find a good job in America. But the Blooms hired her because Gabriela’s sister, Beatrice, who was working for another family in Forest Hills Gardens, told them that Gabriela was a good maid and asked them to please give her a chance. Gabriela was very grateful to the Blooms for giving her a good job when no else would, and she always told them how she hoped to repay them someday.

Although Gabriela had worked as a maid for two years at home in Quito, she’d never had to clean a house the size of the Blooms’. The first day she felt like such a fool; she didn’t even know how to turn on the vacuum cleaner. Some families might’ve lost patience and fired her right away, but the Blooms were very kind and understanding. The first few days, Mrs. Bloom cleaned the whole house with her, explaining how everything was done and where everything went, and she didn’t lose patience at all even though Gabriela couldn’t understand most of what she was saying.

When Gabriela started to work for the Blooms, Marissa was just ten years old, in fourth grade. Marissa had a babysitter who still took care of her part of the time, but sometimes when the babysitter was sick Mrs. Bloom would ask Gabriela to go pick Marissa up from school or take her to play with her friends. Gabriela liked Marissa, she was such a sweet little girl, and she liked Mr. Bloom, too. Sometimes he sat down with her in the kitchen and helped her with her English, teaching her new words. He was a very good man who worked hard and who loved his family very much. She hoped that someday she could find a man for herself like Mr. Bloom and have a family as nice as his.

Her first few months in New York, Gabriela was living with Beatrice and her family in Jackson Heights, Queens, sharing a room with Beatrice’s daughter. But then at a party one night she met a Brazilian man named Angel. He was very handsome and a very hard worker. He was a waiter at a diner in Manhattan, but he had big dreams. He wanted to open his own restaurant one day. He took her dancing in the Village a few times, and he knew how to do the mambo. They started doing everything together- going out all the time, going to Jones Beach, or just staying home at his apartment- and that summer he got her pregnant. He didn’t want to get married, which was okay with her. He was young, just twenty, and she knew how scared young guys got. She thought she’d have the baby and then in a couple of years they’d get married.

But when Gabriela was getting ready to have her baby, Angel disappeared. At first she thought something bad happened to him; maybe he got hurt or something. The people at the diner said they didn’t know where he was, he just stopped coming to work. She got Beatrice’s husband, Manny, to go looking for him, but he couldn’t find him anywhere, and then she called the police. They said that chances were he probably just ran away. She couldn’t believe that Angel would do something like that, but then, a few days before she had to go to the hospital, Manny found out from one of Angel’s friends that Angel was living in the Bronx with a new girlfriend.

Gabriela had her baby, a beautiful girl, Manuela, named after Gabriela’s grandmother. She was worried that it would be hard to work and take care of her baby at the same time, but the Blooms were so nice, letting her take Manuela to work with her every day. The Blooms got her more work with other families in the neighborhood, and pretty soon she was working five days a week, making enough money to move into her own apartment in Jackson Heights. For the next few years, Gabriela was working hard, making money, but it was hard not having a man in her life and a father for Manuela.

When Manuela was about five years old, Gabriela met Juan. He was forty- two, his wife had died of cancer, and he had two boys. He wasn’t very handsome- he was fat and had a big crooked nose- but he was a very good man and he loved Gabriela and always bought her flowers and told her how beautiful she was. When he asked her to marry him, she said yes.

Everything seemed so happy; she finally had a good man to take care of her and her daughter. Then, one morning, she was working at the Blooms’ when she got a phone call from her sister. Beatrice was screaming hysterically, “Dios mio, Dios mio, Dios mio!” and then she told Gabriela that a taxi had hit Juan while he was crossing a street in Manhattan. Mrs. Bloom took Gabriela to the hospital, but when they got there Juan was already dead.

Gabriela knew that Juan had been her true love and that she would never find such a good man ever again. She was sad for a long time, and even though the doctors gave her medicine to make her mind feel better, it was still hard to get out of bed. She used to laugh and smile all the time, and people had always told her how funny she was, but after what had happened to Juan it seemed like there was nothing to laugh about anymore. Some days she didn’t feel like going to her job, so she just didn’t go. Many families would’ve fired her, but the Blooms were very kind. They sent her flowers and called her every day to check on her and tried to get her to talk to the doctors and take her medicine.

About a month after Juan was killed, Gabriela was finally able to get out of bed and go to work every day again, but she didn’t feel the same and she didn’t take care of herself the way she used to. She didn’t care how she dressed or how her hair looked, and she stopped putting on makeup and she got very fat. If she wasn’t so sad and so lonely and feeling so bad about herself all the time, she probably would never have wanted to be with a man like Carlos.

She met Carlos on the subway. He was sitting next to her and he asked her if she wanted a piece of gum. She said no thank you, and then he said, “Then how ’bout we go to dinner instead?” She didn’t think he was very handsome, but at least he made her smile, so she gave him her phone number.

The next night he took her to a very nice Chinese restaurant, and during the meal he held her hand and told her how pretty and sexy she looked. They went out a few more times, and then she went back to his apartment. In bed he asked her to do coke with him. She’d never done any drugs before, but she was a little drunk so she decided to try it. It made her feel good and- for a little while at least- like she didn’t have any problems at all.

She started going out with Carlos a few nights a week. He didn’t have a job, and she knew he was probably some kind of criminal, but she didn’t want to ask where all his money was coming from. She was just happy to not be alone anymore and she liked how Carlos bought her presents all the time- jewelry, clothes- and she liked having a man in her life again. They did coke sometimes, and then one night he asked her if she wanted to try heroin. She’d seen the marks on his arms and legs, so she knew he liked to shoot up, but she was afraid of the needle. But he kept asking her, saying, “You got no idea how good this shit feels, it’s gonna blow you away.” So she tried it one time, just to see what it felt like, and after a couple of weeks she got hooked.

Everything was good for a while. She was seeing Carlos all the time and getting high a lot and forgetting about all of the tragedy in her life. But then she started seeing Carlos’s bad side. It was like she was sleeping the whole time she knew him and then woke up and saw who he really was. It started that night they were fighting about something when they were getting high and he suddenly hit her hard in the face. No man had ever hit her before, and she couldn’t believe that this was happening to her. She couldn’t tell anybody about it, feeling too much shame, and she was also afraid it would only make Carlos hit her even harder next time. Instead she made up a story that Manuela had swung the bathroom door into her face. She just couldn’t leave Carlos, even though she wanted to, because she needed the drugs so bad. He started yelling at her and beating her and one night broke her arm. She had to make up another story to tell the Blooms and the other people she worked for, saying she fell on the street, but she knew she couldn’t keep making up lies forever. She also knew she had to get away from Carlos, but she couldn’t leave him no matter how hard she tried.

Then she got sick with a high fever and a bad rash all over her back and chest. She knew what was wrong with her, but she didn’t want to believe it. She went to church and begged God not to let this happen to her. She screamed, “I don’t deserve this, God! I don’t deserve it!” Then she went to a clinic, and they told her she had HIV. She was crying for days and couldn’t get out of bed. She was afraid of getting sick and dying, but she was also angry at herself for being so stupid, for believing that Carlos was clean. When she told Carlos she was sick, he still wouldn’t tell her the truth, saying he wasn’t sick and she must’ve caught the HIV from some other man. Then he beat her again, and she screamed at him to go away and stay out of her life forever.

Gabriella knew she had done such a bad thing to her daughter, ruining her life, too, and she felt like she wanted to kill herself. She almost did it one night. She had the bottle of pills, and she wrote a letter telling Manuela how sorry she was and asking Beatrice and Manny to please raise her daughter good. She put the pills in her mouth and was about to swallow them when she decided that she couldn’t do this to her daughter, that killing herself now would be even worse. She was still young and healthy, and maybe if she took her medicine she’d live for a very long time.

The next day she went to the police and told them how Carlos was beating her, and the judge gave her a restraining order so Carlos couldn’t come close to her or her daughter ever again. Then she sent Manuela to stay with Beatrice and she went away to a center on Long Island to get clean. It was very hard at first, but she listened to what they said and she got off the drugs for good. She went back to her life of working hard every day and helping Manuela with her homework and decided this was how she was going to live the rest of her life- being the best mother she could be.

She kept her HIV a secret from everybody, even her daughter. She didn’t want her daughter to think her mother wasn’t strong, that she wouldn’t be there for her someday, and she was worried that if people she worked for found out she was sick they would be afraid and want to fire her. She was good at hiding it from people, even her own family, but it got hard sometimes, like when Beatrice would say to her, “What’s wrong with you, Gabriela? Why do you stay home alone every night? Don’t you want to find a man?” Gabriela would say that she didn’t want a man in her life right now, that she just wanted to be alone with her daughter and be happy.

But sometimes it was very hard to be alone and she called Carlos and told him to come over. They were both sick, and even though she hated him for getting her sick and hitting her so much, she felt like he was the only man she could ever have. But then he’d start treating her bad and hitting her, and even hitting Manuela a few times, and she’d tell him to get out of her life for good or she was going to call the police. She’d stay away from him for another year or two, until she’d start to feel lonely and scared again and forget how bad he’d made her feel and how much he’d hurt her, and she’d call him up and start the whole thing all over again.

Gabriela was thirty- one years old. She knew her life would never change, that she would never be happy all the time, but her doctors told her her HIV was doing okay and she would live for many, many years. Manuela was eleven years old, in sixth grade, and was turning into such a beautiful young lady. Gabriela taught her daughter to stay away from drugs and the bad boys and to wait to meet somebody someday who would treat her good, the way she deserved to be treated. Gabriela just wanted her daughter to have a good, happy life; it was the only thing she cared about.

Then one day Gabriela was riding the bus home from work when Beatrice called her and was screaming and crying. It reminded Gabriela of that terrible day Juan had died, and she was afraid something bad had happened to Manuela.

“ No mi hija!” Gabriela screamed. “No mi hija! No mi hija!” Gabriela screamed so loud that everybody was looking over, and the driver even stopped the bus.

Thank God, Beatrice wasn’t calling about Manuela, but it was still very bad. It was their father in San Juan. He was very sick and needed a new kidney or he was going to die, but the doctors in Quito said he was too sick to get a new kidney from the hospital, so the only way was if they bought one on the black market.

Crying, Gabriella asked, “How much do they need?”

“Twelve thousand dollars,” Beatrice said. “That’s crazy money. What’re we gonna do?”

Gabriela didn’t have money to send him. The money she made from cleaning houses was just enough to pay for rent and bills and food. Sometimes she didn’t even have money to buy new clothes for Manuela.

“How much money you have?” Gabriela asked.

“We only have two thousand in the bank,” Beatrice said, “and we need it for rent and bills.”

Gabriela had no idea what to do. Twelve thousand dollars was more money than she’d ever seen.

When she got back to her apartment, she called home and it was sad to hear her mother crying and her father sounding so sad, and she felt so bad, knowing there was nothing anybody could do to help him. They just had to let him die.

“How much time does papi have?” Gabriela asked her mother.

“If they don’t do nothing, maybe a month or two,” she said.“They don’t know.”

Gabriela spent most of the next few days crying. She and Beatrice were planning to go to Ec ua dor, to be with their father for the last time. They wanted their whole families to go, but they didn’t have the money for the plane tickets.

Everything seemed so bad, and she didn’t know what to do, and then she was cleaning the Blooms’ house one morning when she saw a little piece of paper in a drawer in the dining room. The paper had some numbers on it, and on top she saw the words code new alarm.

Mrs. Bloom was home, right upstairs, and Gabriela heard footsteps in the hallway. Gabriela didn’t even think about it and put the paper in the pocket of her apron.

Later, at home, she felt bad. She didn’t even know why she took the paper, because the Blooms had been so good to her and there was no way she could ever steal from them.

Then, in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought: What if she gave Carlos the code? She didn’t ask about where he got his money, but she knew he probably knew how to rob places. And if he stole from them it would be different than if she stole from them. She didn’t want to do something bad to the Blooms, but she didn’t want her papi to die, either, and she didn’t know what else to do

She called Carlos and told him to come over.

After she told him about the code, he said, “You got the key to the house?”

Gabriela hadn’t even thought about this. She was so worried about her papi and getting money that she hadn’t thought about anything else.

“No, but I can get it,” she said.

The next day, at the Blooms’, when she went out to get lunch, she took the keys from the drawer in the kitchen and went to a locksmith. She found out she couldn’t copy the keys to the front door because they were some kind of special locks they couldn’t copy without some kind of card.

She thought that was it, her papi would die, but then the locksmith told her she could copy the keys to the back door. This was okay, maybe even better, because it was darker in the back of the house and nobody would be watching.

Everything was looking good, but not for long. When she got back to the Blooms’ she remembered that Carlos still had the paper with the code on it. She’d been so busy talking to Carlos and thinking about the keys that she forgot to ask for the paper back.

When Mrs. Bloom went out to do something, Gabriela called Carlos and asked him to bring the paper to her apartment later on.

“Too late,” Carlos said. “Threw it out.”

“Why’d you do that?” Gabriela said. “I have to put it back in the drawer.”

Again Gabriela felt like the whole plan wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t be able to rob the house, and her papi would die.

“I thought the paper was yours,” Carlos said. “I thought you copied the shit down. I thought that’s why you gave it to me.”

Gabriela, starting to cry, said, “Why’d you have to throw it away, Carlos? Why’d you have to do that?”

“I didn’t wanna be walking around with the code to the alarm of the house I’m gonna rob in my pocket. So I just memorized it, got it all up here now.”

He touched his head with his finger.

“Where’d you throw it out?” Gabriela said. “Maybe it’s still there.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, “near the subway or whatever. Garbage man probably picked it up already.”

“That’s it,” Gabriela said, crying. “We’re going to have to forget the whole thing now.”

Carlos laughed and said, “Damn, you gotta stop all your worrying ’bout everything and shit. Let me do all the worrying, all right, baby?”

“But if they see the paper is gone they’ll know I took it.”

“Why they gonna know that? Use your head, baby. You know how many people they probably got coming into their house? Big house like that, they probably got people coming and going all day.”

This was true, Gabriela thought. Men were painting the downstairs bathroom and were in the house all day long, and sometimes the plumber and the electrician were in the house, too, and what about all of Marissa Bloom’s friends? Why would the Blooms think she took the code when she’d been working for them for so many years and they had so much trust in her? Maybe not putting back the paper was even good because maybe they’d think for sure that some stranger must’ve taken it.

She didn’t know if this really made sense or she just wanted it to make sense, but it made her feel better anyway.

That night she and Carlos talked about the rest of the plan. The Blooms were going to be leaving for Florida next Tuesday, all three of them, so it would be a good time to rob the house. Gabriela knew where the Blooms kept all their expensive things, their rings and jewelry. After Carlos stole everything he was going to sell it to somebody called a fence.

“Is the fence okay?” she asked.

“Hell yeah,” Carlos said. “My man’s Freddy’s cool, know him forever, gonna give us a good price, too. Third what the shit’s worth.”

“And then you’re gonna give me half the money, right?”

“Nah, we’re gonna split it three ways,” Carlos said.

“Three?” Gabriela didn’t know what he was talking about. “How does it make three? Me and you’s two, not three.”

“You think I’m crazy?” Carlos said. “I ain’t gonna rob the place alone. That’s the way you get caught, wind up back upstate and shit. I ain’t goin’ in there without no backup.”

Gabriela didn’t like the way this sounded at all. She’d already been feeling very bad, stealing from the Blooms who’d been so good to her. But it seemed more okay when it was just her and Carlos because she knew Carlos, and even though he’d gotten her sick, she felt like she could trust him. But she didn’t like trusting some man she didn’t even know.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“You don’t gotta know,” he said. “If the cops come around, it’s gonna be better that way. Can’t talk about what you don’t know.”

She still didn’t like it, but she knew nothing she said was going to change Carlos’s mind.

“I don’t care what you do,” she said, “long as I get the money for my papi.”

On the day of the robbery, Gabriela had to go to work for the Seidlers, another family in Forest Hills. Carlos didn’t want her to call him all day, or even later on. He’d said, “Don’t do nothin’ stupid, just sit by the phone and wait for me to call. Cops track calls and shit. We don’t want them seein’ we been talking the day the house got robbed. Comprendes?”

Not talking seemed like the right thing to do, but it was hard, working all day long, keeping all the wondering and worrying in her head.

Later, she came home and had dinner with Manuela and called her parents at the hospital in Ec ua dor. Her mother said that papi wasn’t doing very good, and then she put Gabriela on the phone with him. Gabriela could hear it in his voice, how sick he was. He just didn’t sound like the papi she knew. She kept telling him to hold on, that she was gonna get the money for him real soon. He told her don’t worry, he was gonna be fine, but she heard the lying in his voice. That’s the way her papi was, always wanting to be strong.

Manuela spoke to her grandfather, too, and after she was crying and said to Gabriela, “How come you told him you were gonna get the money soon? Where you gonna get it from?”

Gabriela hugged her daughter and said, “God is going to get us the money. You’ll see.”

Around eleven Manuela was asleep and Gabriela was alone, waiting for Carlos to call, even though they weren’t supposed to rob the house till the middle of the night, like two in the morning. She didn’t know how long it was gonna take to rob a house, but she didn’t think it would take too long. Maybe by three they’d be all done, but then how long would it be before he called her? Knowing Carlos, he’d want to do drugs after. She wished she had some heroin right now; that stuff used to keep her very calm.

She tried to watch TV, but it was too hard, so she spent the whole night just walking back and forth in her living room. She’d never seen a clock move so slow. It seemed like it took forever till midnight came, and then one and two o’clock came even slower. But finally it was time- the house was being robbed, and soon, hopefully tomorrow, she’d have her money and her papi would be having his operation and everything would be okay.

The only problem was she had a horrible empty feeling in her stomach, like something was gonna go wrong. She kept telling herself, Don’t think about that. That’s stupid. Nothing’s gonna go wrong. They’re gonna get the ring and the necklace and all the jewelry and sell it, and soon you’re gonna have the money for papi. She kept telling herself this, but she didn’t believe it. The bad feeling was still there; it wouldn’t go away.

At three thirty, she knew it should be all over by now. They should be out of the house, back at Carlos’s or wherever. Then how come he wasn’t calling her? He’d said he’d go to a phone booth after the house was robbed and call her with a calling card so the police couldn’t find out. Maybe he didn’t have a chance to make the call yet. Maybe he was just making sure they were safe and everything was okay; then he’d call her.

But when four o’clock came, Gabriela didn’t believe that Carlos had forgotten about anything. He and his friend were ripping her off, that’s what was happening. They weren’t going to split the money three ways. That had just been more of Carlos’s lies. They were going to split it two ways, and one of the ways wasn’t going to be hers. She didn’t know how she’d been so stupid, trusting a man who’d already lied to her so badly, getting her so sick and ruining her whole life.

A few times, she was about to call him on his cell, but each time she stopped herself at the last second. She knew if he was going to steal from her, he wouldn’t answer his phone when she called, and she was still hoping she was wrong, that something happened, like he didn’t have a chance to get to a phone yet to call her, and everything would turn out okay.

Then, at five in the morning, she was still in the living room, waiting for the phone to ring, when Manuela came out and said, “Mami, what’s wrong?”

“I just been worried about your abuelo,” Gabriela said.

“I thought you said God was gonna save him?”

“I don’t know anymore, baby,” Gabriela said. “Maybe God’s too busy today.”

Gabriela made Manuela breakfast and lunch, then kissed her good- bye. She was so glad she had such a beautiful daughter, and she knew if it wasn’t for her daughter she probably would have killed herself a long time ago.

Manuela went back to sleep, and Gabriela turned on the TV, just to keep her mind busy. She watched Cada Dнa on Telemundo for a while and then switched to an English news channel, hoping to find out something about the robbery. She didn’t think there’d really be anything about it on TV, she thought she was just being crazy, so she couldn’t believe it when she saw the reporter standing in front of the Blooms’ house.

It was very hard to understand what was going on. Not because her English wasn’t good enough- she didn’t speak fluent but she could usually understand most of the news on the TV- but because she didn’t believe that a house getting robbed was such a big news story, on the TV news, it just didn’t make any sense. But then she heard what the lady was saying, how one of the men who’d broken into the house had been shot and killed by Adam Bloom. Mr. Bloom himself was on TV, talking about why he used his gun. Gabriela still couldn’t believe it- she thought she had to be asleep, having a bad dream. Then she heard the reporter saying,“Police are identifying the dead man as thirty- six- year- old Carlos Sanchez of Queens.”

Sitting on the couch, she stared at the TV for a long time- maybe for seconds or minutes or hours, she had no idea. Finally she was able to think. She couldn’t understand how this could have happened. The Blooms were supposed to go away; the house was supposed to be empty. And why did Mr. Bloom shoot Carlos? She knew he had a gun- she’d seen it in his bedroom closet when she was cleaning, and sometimes he even left it out on the little table near his bed- but she couldn’t imagine that kind man killing somebody even if his house was being robbed. It just didn’t make any sense.

Then it hit her, what this really meant, and she started crying like she was at a funeral, but she wasn’t crying for Carlos. She didn’t go to church very much lately, but she still believed in Jesus Christ and that even bad people like Carlos had some good in them somewhere. But she still couldn’t feel bad that Carlos was dead, not after all the bad things he had done to her. The one she was crying for was her papi. Carlos wasn’t the only man Mr. Bloom had killed with his gun, because now her papi was going to die, too.

Gabriela was still sitting on the couch crying when Beatrice called and said, “Did you hear what happened at the Blooms’ house last night?” Beatrice said she was in Forest Hills, at work in another house, and everybody was talking about it.

“Yes, I saw it on the news,” Gabriela said.

“The guy who was killed,” Beatrice said. “They said his name is Carlos, Carlos Sanchez. It’s not your old boyfriend Carlos, is it?”

“Don’t tell anybody you know that,” Gabriela said. “Please.”

“Why?” Beatrice asked. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Gabriela said.“I just don’t want the police coming, asking me questions, when I’m so worried about Papi.”

“You okay?” Beatrice asked. “You don’t sound good. I’m worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” Gabriela said, crying. “But please, please don’t say anything to the policнa. I’m begging to you.”

Gabriela was scared, even more scared than she was when she found out she had HIV. At least there was medicine she could take for HIV, but she couldn’t think of any way to make this okay. So many people knew that Carlos was her exboyfriend. The Blooms and the other people she worked for didn’t know because she never wanted them to find out about the drugs and the HIV, but Beatrice and her whole family knew, and Manuela knew, and neighbors in Gabriela’s building knew. And what about all the times over the last couple of weeks that Gabriela had talked to Carlos on his cell phone? There was no way the policнa wouldn’t find out.

Gabriela was thinking about killing herself again- she could jump off a bridge or take pills. Pills would be very easy. She had a new bottle of sleeping pills and could take all of them and be dead very quickly. If she was dead it would probably be better for Manuela, too. It wasn’t going to do her any good having a mother in jail. Beatrice could raise her good and give her a happy life.

At seven thirty, after Manuela left for school, Gabriela got the sleeping pills out of the cabinet. She was planning to text- message Beatrice, to tell her what she was going to do, so Beatrice could discover her body and not Manuela. She just hoped that she died before Beatrice arrived at her apartment. The worst thing would be if she woke up alive in some hospital bed.

She was about to type the text message when the doorbell rang. She looked through the peephole and saw a man with dark hair.

“Who’s there?” she asked, and the man said, “Police.”

She was surprised. She knew the police would come, but she didn’t think they would come this fast. She was going to lock the door and take the pills, but she was afraid the police would break the door down and call an ambulance and save her.

She opened the door, hoping she could convince him to go away so she could have a chance to kill herself.

“Yes?” she said.

“You Gabriela?” he asked.

He was in a leather jacket and was wearing dark sunglasses. He didn’t look like police.

“Yes,” she said. She couldn’t remember ever being so scared.

The man reached into his jacket for something. She thought she’d see a badge, but it was a gun. She looked into the dark hole and saw her poor papi’s face.