WHO: Nadia and Alejo WHAT: it only took two decades, 5000 miles, and a zombie apocalypse for the Costas to reunite WHEN: 10.9, morning WHERE: The Hospital
He was alive. Somehow, Alejo Costa was alive and not bleeding out on the streets of Austin. He was amazed by it, he thought anyone who has seen the shape he’d been in just a few days ago would be equally amazed by his survival. Laying on what had once been a waiting room couch, he was curled into himself, hands over the dark bruise on his rips that panged with pain over. His knees were bloody from falling while he’d walked from the sewers with the ghouls to the hospital, and he was both sunburnt and dehydrated.
Eyes closed tight, he heard the soft beep of his hearing aids: low on batteries. He didn’t have any other batteries on him, he’d have to find a store that might have a large display of them. Funny enough, when the zombies hit, small silver batteries for listening hadn’t been on the list of things to grab on your way out of town.
Sitting up slowly, Alejo blinked and knew he needed to find a doctor. He wanted a cellphone too, to contact Marina. He’d only been able to borrow the stranger’s for a few minutes.
“Hola?” Alejo said, not sure if he was alone or not. He’d been let in, but between point A (the door) and point B (where medical help was) he’d gotten too tired to move anymore. His voice was loud, awkwardly so due to his inability to hear himself, the accent a mix of Brazil, Mexico, America, and deaf. “Hello?” he tried again. He stood- swayed- and sat right back down, moaning as he wrapped his right arm around himself to clutch the ribs at the left.
That energy spent, he stayed in the chair for a little while longer - how long, he didn’t know. But then, somewhere within the haze and the shadow of his closed eyes, a muffled voice finally broke through.
It was soft, so soft. Just the barest scrap of sound in the distance, but it sounded like another Hola.
“Hola,” it was saying. Maybe.
When he opened his eyes again he could see a face: tanned, curly dark hair falling into the woman’s eyes, her face creased into concern as she looked down at the blood caking his clothes. She looked like October; warmth slipping away into a comfortable, crisp, coolness. His mother had been like that- or at least his rose colored memories told him she had been. He must have passed the bite check if security had let him in, but evidently the man had fallen into a crack somewhere, not gotten to the medical attention he obviously needed.
Her hand was on his arm, and the stranger was speaking in Spanish: “I’m the woman from the network, who saw your post. Have you spoken to a doctor yet? It looks like you need one, amigo. Come on. I can help.” Alejo blinked and then shut his eyes hard, breathing through his nose and trying not to feel bile rise up into his throat. When he breathed more calmly and opened his eyes again, he felt slightly less dizzy.
“I haven’t seen a doctor yet, Miss,,” he said, wishing he could use ASL right then; using his hands was always easier than his words, he felt so much more confident with them. He leaned back in the chair and pulled at the neck of his shirt to look down at the bruising on his stomach and sides. It didn’t look good, he could see watercolor splatters of injuries. His mind reached, he could barely remember getting attacked. Just that a smooth pipe had been used, and he’d been surprised.
“I think I want to lie down,” he said once in English, half slurred before starting to say it again in Spanish.
“I’m not a medical professional,” the woman was still speaking in Spanish to avoid her own stuttering halting slowness, “but I don’t think you should lie down. You might fall asleep, and then you’ll just sit here bleeding. And that’s no good.”
His unfamiliar, slightly mangled accent gave her pause. She’d settled on the chair beside him, a tethering touch still reminding him that she was there, prepared to brace him. “Can you stand?” she asked. He nodded, and held onto the back of the chair as he rose up.
When Alejo had made his way through Austin, he’d had a goal: get to the hospital. He hadn’t allowed himself to feel the dizziness in his brain, or the scratch of dehydration in his throat. His body had moved because he demanded it. Now the only demands were the ones other gave him, and his mind was ready to take a break. Sleep, though deadly, seemed wonderful.
Alejo stood, clutched harder to the chair, and then fell right back down into his seat with a small bounce on the plush seat. A moan escaped, and he covered his eyes in a mix of shame and a need to make the room stop spinning.
“Agua?”
The stranger bit down on her , then fumbled for a moment, shifting to get at the small pouch slung across her shoulders. She always carried a water bottle on her these days—always, always, because you never knew when that precious resource would come in handy. She held it out to the injured man: an offering. He drank like an infant being given a bottle- greedily, and without the conceptualization to know it would end and be dry soon. He felt his throat unstick, but the moment the water was done, he wanted more. He looked at the flask.
“Sorry,” he said, even if she didn’t look particularly bothered by the loss. He felt as if he owed her now, owed her something he couldn’t even get for himself.
Concern was in her eyes, crinkling her brow. She didn’t know very much about the administration of this hospital, but suspected they frowned upon patients dying in a visitor’s arms.
“Are you a doctor?” he asked.
Alejo was repeating himself; he’d already posed this question. A desperately nervous laugh welled up in the woman’s throat, still muffled as if coming through water. “No,” she said. “But you need one very soon, gatinho. What happened to you?”
It was a Portuguese term of endearment, one that slipped out thoughtlessly without her considering it much. Too distracted by the question of how to keep this stupid man alive when he’d already made it this far into the hospital, only to keel over right at the doorstep of help. The word meant kitten. It rattled in Alejo’s brain- it loosened old eaves of memories, but his logic kicked in and he assumed he’d misheard her. Kitten. In the moment, it seemed to fit the man: feeble, falling apart, all his muscles slack and weak.
He wanted to lie down. This time when she hoisted him, jamming her shoulder beneath his, Alejo was able to stay on his feet. Together they wobbled across the hall and into the nearest examination room—she knocked quickly on the door, in case it turned out to be one of the repurposed bedrooms, but it was open. One of the rooms sequestered for actual medical checkups, then.
Alejo was only able to guide his feet, a few weak steps, and then a planned fall onto an exam table. It was softer than anything he’d slept on in months, and his body relaxed in the most minor of ways. He pulled his legs off of the floor one by one, his hand grasping like a babe at the jean knees.
The ceiling was white and had little pock marks. Alejo wanted to reach up and touch the holes, but knew he’d just brush against nothingness and air. He turned to the woman, the angel of hospital lighting. She reminded him of Marina.
Marina.
He needed to text Marina again. He smiled, thinking about Marina.
“I’m Al,” he said after what felt like a lifetime or reaching for nothingness through Latin America fields, through San Diego’s sands, through art school sketches, through piles of needles, through the dead. It was a long, long winding road, culminating in this hospital room, blood on these sheets. She kept asking questions and he kept not answering—but then again, what could she have expected? He was beaten to hell and back.
The woman took a seat beside his bed. From his left side, she was about to introduce herself, when he suddenly moved at a certain angle and his t-shirt shifted and tugged, the skin of his chest visible through the torn fabric, and her eyebrow furrowed as she caught the very edges of the tattoo’s cursive script.
“Nadia,” she said, both a question and an answer.
“My sister,” Al responded, his eyes brushing over the ink. He’d gotten it so long ago, it had faded to grays and scar tissue. He wanted to touch it, to feel it and brush over it and now the connection was still there. When the tattoo artist had heard his request to have the name tattoo, the man had laughed- told him how it was never a good idea to get a girl’s name put into skin in such a permanent manner. Alejo had ignored him.
He leaned his head back against the exam table, eyes closing for a moment as he tried to bite back a moan of pain. He hated how weak he felt, how pathetic and fully incapable of doing anything but sitting in pain and knowing it. With Torrie, underground, shock had owned his pain. Now, hurt more from the walk to the hospital than first attack, he felt weaker than ever.
“She’s dead now. It’s my fault.”
“No,” and the woman’s hand was resting on his arm, then peeling the torn shirt aside in order to look more closely at the tattoo, as if to reassure herself that she’d read it correctly. Alejo thought of other women who had done such things to him before, but they’d never been desperate or concerned.
It was an intrusive action, a rude one, something she’d never have done normally, but shock was strangling her throat and she was laughing. Incredulous, shocked, barely able to breathe with the way all the air fled her lungs. “Al. Is that short for Alejo? Alejo Costa? Brother of Nadia Beatriz Costa? Because if so, she isn’t dead, gatinho.” The man’s mind couldn’t follow clearly, it seemed like fiction; was his hearing aid already dead? This woman knew Nadia’s name, her full name. But how? It was simple to anyone watching, but to someone hurt and raw, the nearest explanation he could come up with was that this woman was an angel.
The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
And then her face was clearer in front of him: skin still mottled with a yellowing bruise on her cheek, a black eye still healing. But there was her curly black hair, dark eyes with their warm bright glint (extinguished over the past two years, but reignited over the last few months), and that impish dimple in her smile. The structure of her face was narrowed and hollowed, drawn thinner from both age and deprivation, but it looked, perhaps, like a ghost of that four-year-old he left behind.
Nadia was smiling at the man on the exam table: a little hopeful, a little desperate. Los Nahuales had implied that he was here. Here. Was it actually him?
Alejo reached up and touched the soft hair, felt her face for a moment. He didn’t feel his sister’s face, but rather their mothers- thin and hollow after the death of their sister. He felt the pain of growing up in Rocinha, felt the hunger.
“Nadia,” he repeated. “You’re Nadia. I thought I’d killed you by sending Antón to get you, after the zombies broke out,” he was trying to sit up now, his mottled mind couldn’t even convince that this woman might be tricking him. All he knew was that this was Nadia- the angel he didn’t want to wrestle, but instead draw into his arms and hug tightly. “You’re here,” he began to say, first in Spanish and eventually in broken Portuguese. This man was a stranger to her, but as before, as always, as with Marina—she let herself be pulled into that hug, hanging onto him just as strongly.
In his mind, when he’d first sent out Antón to find Nadia, they would have reunited at the airport, or a few miles away from the border. Alejo would have scooped her up, spun her around, and laughed madly. But there, in the broken hospital room with nothing but one another and a blinking light, Alejo just held onto her body and stared at the white wall behind them. His body felt numb, and his mind was too slow to really understand anything other than the fact that Nadia Costa was with him.
She couldn’t remember his face, of course; all she knew of Alejo had been family photographs, a young boy captured in still-life, standing grinning beside the tired lines of their father.
“Estou aqui,” Nadia confirmed, and how lovely it was to finally speak Portuguese. She’d used so much Spanish lately. His own was stilted, atrophied, she could hear it in that shaky lilt, but it was better than nothing. So much better than nothing. “A little late, irmão, but I’m here at last.”
His shoulders were thin and narrow, so narrow; both siblings felt like skeletons clutching at each other, their bones moving beneath their skin. The Lovers of Valdaro. But he was warm, and her brother’s blood was staining her shirt. Perched on the side of that table, she held him as if she could never let go. This stranger, but her blood. The last of the Costas.
“Antón made it,” she tried to explain, buried into his shoulder. “Two years and change, but he got me to that damned border. And I have been asking about you ever since. I found Marina—” but then that was all Nadia could get out, her husky voice rattling and shaky, because then the tears were flowing, the leaky faucet turned back on, all the pent-up emotion letting loose again. He was a mess. He was an utter mess but he was alive and here and she could finally get to know him.
Antón. Marina. He knew those names, he knew them as well as he knew his own and Nadia’s, the name he’d had etched into his skin. But right then, all that mattered was that he had his sister and she was crying and for the first time in over two decades, he could comfort her. He could hug her back and kiss her hair and speak in the same soft voice Juan had used during toothaches and bellyaches.
“Please don’t cry,” he said in Spanish, sounding much more fluid. “Nadia- my hearing aids are going to run out of batteries, and I have… I have so much I want to hear. And tell you. But I think I’m going to get into trouble if I do not find a doctor.” It was hard to use any reason, in particular when a doctor might not let them keep clinging together. His words might have been smart, but he was still holding her as tightly as his tired limbs could, still feeling and counting her breaths against his shoulder. He counted them the way a child counted the seconds moving on a clock before summer break began. Each tick a promise of freedom and life.
“Hearing aids?” And that made another piece click into place: some of his inability to focus on what she was saying, that slurring edge to his speech. She drew another shuddering breath (tick), then exhaled and tried to brush the tears from her eyes (tock).
At his words, alarm had shot through her, and Nadia reluctantly disengaged herself from that desperate hug. It had been a bit over four months since she crossed the border, and she’d been looking and asking and hoping all this time—he’d been a will o’ the wisp hanging just out of reach. For Alejo, Nadia had been a fact, a big scientific concept he’d known was real and known he could get if only by some stronger understanding or with help. Anton’s help. And now she was there, eyes wet and big and brown. And Alejo was there, but he was horribly injured, and he’d just reminded her of that fact.
“Good point. We cannot have you fall over, when I still need to get to know you.” Nadia’s smile was a fleeting thing, quavering at the edges, the joke a bit too close to home. “I need to get you a doctor immediately. Just—just sit there, yes? I’ll go and come right back. I am not leaving.”