Beyond the physical discomfort with the apartment and the utter lack of privacy, which was psychologically draining, there was the emotional stress of being around her two parents. Even though they’d been unusually kind to each other in the wake of the accident, uniting in their worry and grief for the first time in years, they never left her alone. They watched her move around the rooms guardedly, her mother clutching a rosary, her father trying to avert his gaze.
She had to get out of there.
Matilda didn’t believe in God as much as she believed in signs. (She knew she’d gotten a sign the night of the accident in the front seat of Leo Plumb’s Porsche, the setting sun glinting off his wedding ring, and she’d ignored it and now look at her. God had taken her right foot.) She said a rosary every morning when she woke, praying to know what to do, where to live. So when she saw the billboard in front of a brand-new condominium complex on her favorite street, the one lined with cherry trees that bloomed exuberantly in the spring, she knew: The sign was her sign.
PRICES SLASHED it said. And in tiny print on the bottom: ACCESSIBLE UNITS AVAILABLE.
She bought two apartments. One on an upper floor for her sister who had three kids and a deadbeat husband, and a smaller one on the ground floor for herself. She paid cash, only asking her sister to cover her own maintenance costs. The leftover money had still seemed monumental. A lawyer-friend of Fernando’s helped her open a money market account attached to her checking. She was being as frugal as she could, but it went so fast! And someone in her family was always asking her for a loan: a down payment for a car, plane tickets to visit family back in Mexico, a new dress for a daughter’s prom. It never ended and how could she say no? She couldn’t. Because when she thought about why she had the money, she was ashamed.
And now she was scared, because she had to find a way to be more mobile. She had to get a job. Once the morphine from the night of the accident wore off, she admitted what she’d always known: She’d never be a singer. “You’re smart, Matilda,” one of the nurses in rehab said to her. “What kind of career are you thinking about?” Nobody had ever used that word with her before: career. She liked the sound of it. She liked imagining herself going to an office every day. After high school, she’d wanted to go to college but there was no money, and the day she’d come home, excited after her allotted fifteen minutes with one of the school’s overworked counselors, with community college applications and student loan forms her parents had been so negative, so discouraging. She knew they were afraid of their undocumented status, of being found out and losing their jobs. She heard them later that night arguing over whether to let her apply, her father becoming increasingly angry and volatile. The next day she’d asked Fernando about catering work.
Now she had some money; she could take classes if she wanted, but not if she was on crutches—or in constant pain.
Vinnie wasn’t the first person during her stay at the rehabilitation hospital to mention elective amputation to Matilda, not the first person to gently suggest (or in Vinnie’s case, aggressively suggest) that as far as amputations went, hers was a particularly shitty one and she should consider another operation to amputate below the knee, which would open up a world of better prosthetics. Matilda didn’t understand because at first everyone had seemed excited by how much of her leg had been saved. She didn’t remember much from the recovery room, but she did remember the surgeon triumphantly telling her that he’d taken “as little bone as possible.” When she repeated his boast to her physical therapist, who was examining her stump and frowning, the woman said: “Sometimes more bone is a good thing and sometimes it’s not.”
She was right. Matilda’s prosthetic foot hurt almost all the time. No matter how she paced herself or rested or how hard she worked to strengthen her body’s other muscles, no matter how many (or few) barrier socks she wore or how much therapeutic massage she had, after only an hour or two with the foot, her stump would start to throb, the