Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around by Pagán, Camille (top novels of all time txt) 📗

He was attempting to make me feel better, and I guess he did, a little. But the minute I pushed the school’s double doors open, I was reminded of what we were up against. If the house had been hot, the school was a sauna, and the air was ripe with the smell of sweat and mildew. By the look of it, there were already several hundred people packed into the building.

I glanced around, expecting to see Milagros and the girls waiting for me just beyond the entrance, but instead I was greeted by unfamiliar faces every bit as weary and spent-looking as I must have been. Though living in New York for so long had given me a ninja-like ability to weave through crowds, navigating the halls felt like swimming through sludge, and by the time I managed to get into the gymnasium I’d grown frantic—where were they? Had something happened to Charlotte or Milagros? As I was scanning the crowd, I saw a woman wearing a bright yellow vest holding a clipboard in the middle of the basketball court. I was desperate to find my family, but as the cooler banging against my hip reminded me, I was just as desperate to find a power source. I made a beeline for her.

“Excuse me,” I said when I reached her.

“¿Sí?” she said, looking up from her clipboard.

“¿Hablas inglés?” I asked.

“Claro. How can I help you?”

“Do you have a generator here? A fridge? My daughter is a type one diabetic and I have to refrigerate her insulin, or it’ll stop working,” I explained breathlessly, motioning to my cooler.

The woman had a kind face, but when I asked her this she looked at me like I’d just inquired about catching the next iceberg out of town. “The generator broke during Maria, and they’re expensive to fix and run,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” I said, because I didn’t. How could an emergency shelter possibly be without a generator? “Where can I find a place with a fridge? What about a hospital?” I said, glancing around with the wild eyes of a trapped animal.

“In this storm? Lo siento, but no one has power right now. And there’s no hospital in Vieques,” she said. “Not anymore.”

I couldn’t respond right away. In fact, it was all I could do not to keel over and empty the scant contents of my stomach. Charlotte was going to die—and all because I’d been so desperate to fix everything that I’d neglected to do my due diligence and make sure there was still a hospital available for my sick child. Not only had I not turned out to be the mother my own was, I’d somehow managed to become the exact opposite of her. Because I knew as sure as I knew the sun would rise again the next morning, whether we were alive to see it or not, she never—ever—would have made this mistake.

“How can that be?” I finally gasped. “There was a hospital the last time I was here.”

“It’s been closed since Maria. FEMA was supposed to do something about it, but . . .” She shook her head with disgust. “There are a few health clinics you can try, but I don’t know if they’ll be open right now. If I were you, I wouldn’t go out in this weather.”

I thanked her, then pushed back through the crowd to find my family.

After nearly ten frenetic minutes, I finally spotted them in a kindergarten classroom at the far end of a hall. The girls were sitting on the floor beneath a chalkboard, fanning themselves with construction paper, and Hector was cross-legged on a colorful braided rug; Milagros was seated on a cot beside him. I ran to them, then knelt down and hugged the girls so hard that Charlotte sputtered a little.

“Weird, Mom,” she said. “Are you okay?”

The opposite, in fact, and seeing her only reminded me of my own stupidity and impotence. “I thought you guys would be waiting for me near the door,” I said.

“Sorry, Libby. I ran into someone I knew,” said Hector, nodding in the direction of an older man on the other side of the room. “He told us to come over here while there was still room. The school’s almost full.”

“It’s okay,” I said, because it wasn’t his fault our cell phones didn’t work, and it’s not like he could have left Milagros or the girls to wait for me. “Thank you for finding a space for us.” I turned to Charlotte. “Do you need to check your blood sugar? I have your kit here.”

“It’s not time yet,” she said, flashing her phone at me.

“You should leave that off,” I said. “I’ll watch the time for you.”

“Too late. My battery’s at two percent—it’ll be dead in another minute.” Her eyes scanned the room. “When are we getting out of here, anyway?”

“Soon,” I said, more a prayer than a promise. “Have either of you seen Shiloh?” I asked Milagros and Hector.

“Not yet, mija,” she said.

Isa looked up from the picture book she’d grabbed off a shelf. “Is Papi okay?”

“Fine,” I fibbed, because if they were somehow managing to stay calm amid this chaos, I wasn’t about to ruin that. “He’s just parking the Jeep.” That part was true, at least. The question was, what was taking him so long?

I shot Isa a tight smile, then turned to examine Charlotte. She was sweating, but so was everyone, and she didn’t look clammy. I began running through a quick mental inventory of the food we’d brought: the last of the protein bars, a couple of unripe pears, some cheese sticks, which we’d need to eat soon, before they spoiled. At any rate, we’d be lucky if it lasted through the next day. And while the emergency coordinator was handing out packets of crackers, they were pure, simple carbs—guaranteed to send her blood sugar soaring. I wished I could turn my mind off, or at least put it in low-power mode. Because the more I