Polita

It was the smell of scented roses and strong, leathery skin. Shredded chicken and hearty broth, green peas that became an unpleasant mush in your mouth. It was the wooden block she once gave me, with my name engraved in gold, the kids of Fatima and their sheep.

The feeling would always hit me riding the elevator on my way home from school. It was half anticipation, half vertigo, full terror. Surely something would have happened to her today. Bad things only happened on strange days, and that day had been anything but usual. I had felt a cramp in one of my toes during Math class. We never got blackberry juice in October.

Warm relief always came. I could smell and hear her from the entrance hall. Find her in the kitchen, starting to chop something for dinner. Mi chiquita. Llegaste. Some days she would be somewhere else in the apartment, and I would rush to find her, the elevator feeling warming to a boil until her cooling embrace.

There was nothing she could not protect us from. The men in dark green our parents would follow on TV after dinner. The three-headed monster that haunted our living room fortress. The way these two would join forces in our nightmares.

We would sit in the kitchen waiting for the day to be over. We shredded chicken, podded peas. We talked about saints and prayers, the life of the humble, thanked for every bone, every meal. Did the 7-year-old equivalent of gossiping.

I got the call many years later. I had been walking through a faraway city, having the most unusual of days. The world sank and seemed to level at an uglier, unsafer version of itself. I thought about the many school hours, the many elevator rides, I had spent fearing this call. How unready I would always be, despite years of a disease that had made her life unbearable.

A long time had passed after her death when I woke up sobbing one night. I had dreamt about the elevator ride, about the big yellow painting that stood between the entrance hall and the kitchen, right in the transition between panic and relief. I phoned my mom the next morning and asked her about the painting. It would come to hang in the middle of my living room, my mouth always arching into a smile whenever I realized I was expecting her to turn up in the next room.