Black Cat Weekly #77

Chapter 5-2

But the walker knows.Even when they were young, the walker thinks, this person was not beautiful. As the target smokes and looks into their dream, the walker feels a strange pity, but not enough for him to walk away. A mission is a mission.

Even when they were young, the walker thinks, this person was not beautiful. As the target smokes and looks into their dream, the walker feels a strange pity, but not enough for him to walk away. A mission is a mission.* * * *

* * * *When people asked Reyna Gomboa Carson what she did for a living and she replied, “Doula,” there was always a smile until she added that she was not a birth doula but an end-of-life doula.

What? People did not like the sound of that.

What?She would explain: “You have many birthdays but you only have one deathday. I am there to make your deathday as easy as possible. I am there to see you off.”

When lockdown began, Reyna’s husband Doug insisted she stop working. It broke Reyna’s heart, because now of course her cell was ringing nonstop. On the news she watched how intensive-care nurses used iPads for patients and loved ones to say good-bye. She couldn’t stop crying.

“I have to do something,” she told Doug. “This is not how the universe is supposed to work.”

He said, “You are only one person, mahal. Just wait it out. This won’t last forever.”

mahalReyna was the youngest of seven and by the time she was sixteen she was ready to leave her tiny home village in Lanao del Sur, Philippines. Her mother had died a month after Reyna’s birth and she barely saw her father, who owned a construction company and had a mistress with a second family, so she was basically brought up by her older siblings. Benigno, the second child and first boy, was the smartest of all of them, graduating early from high school and getting into Wesleyan College in Connecticut, USA. When Beni started his residency as a pediatrician in Los Angeles, he sponsored Reyna and she enrolled in the nursing program at UC San Francisco, specialty geriatrics. Beni was good at youngsters and Reyna was good at oldsters, although, as Reyna often pointed out, sometimes there wasn’t much of a difference.

She met Doug at her first job at a nursing home in Santa Cruz. Doug’s mother, a former professional figure skater and to most of the staff “a princessy pain in the a*s” adored Reyna and set her up with her son. Reyna relocated to Boston, where Doug worked for the Harvard Foundation, and secured the position of head nurse at Belmont Manor which she kept until she retired.

Retirement did not suit her. The hardest adjustment for any first-generation immigrant, Reyna believed, was not having extended family around. She and Doug had no children and Beni and his family were still on the West Coast. Reyna was not close to her other siblings and had no desire to go back to the Philippines. Boston was her home, for better or worse.

Then a nurse friend had called in a panic and Reyna ended up attending a difficult death: pain, convulsions, hysterical family. Reyna was the calm center. She was over seventy but if you saw her from a distance she had the stride and energy of a much younger woman. She was slight but strong after years of hefting obese dead weight, and perpetually cheerful, not saccharine, but in the pragmatic way of a truly happy person. She had her faith. Unless a client was actively dying, she never missed Saturday evening mass at St. Cecilia’s.

The nature of her work was that Reyna was always on call, with no fixed schedule, no telling how long a job would last. Sometimes she would start to run home to grab a couple of hours’ sleep, only to be summoned to return. After she was done, no matter how exhausted, if the job were within a two-mile radius and it was before midnight, Reyna would walk home. It was her way of unwinding, of processing, discussing with God what she had just witnessed.

In 2021 after she had gotten the two boosters and sworn to Doug she would take every precaution, including a face shield, she began to accept jobs again.

Lenore Hastings died on a Friday afternoon at the beginning of the Independence Day holiday weekend, just about when the doctor on call had predicted. A fifty-two-year-old woman with third recurrence breast cancer, two daughters bedside. Mrs. Hastings was unconscious and there wasn’t much drama, but Reyna had done what she could, raising the top of the bed to ease breathing, talking to the daughters and holding Lenore’s hand and stroking it so that it made it more natural for the daughters to do the same.

Drained—she was always drained after a job—Reyna made her way to the Esplanade via Arlington Street, both her knapsack and the late afternoon feeling heavy on her shoulders. As usual when exiting a client’s she had stripped off the face shield but not the mask. It was so humid she finally gave in and walked barefaced on the Esplanade towards the Harvard Bridge and home. The sullen but strong sun bothered her so she pulled her hair out of its tight bun and put on an old baseball cap. She texted Doug and told him to order delivery from QingDao Garden. She did not feel well, didn’t need to check on her phone camera to see what her face looked like. Haggard, sick even. She hoped she could make it home.

The walkway was not crowded, especially for a holiday afternoon, although traffic seemed heavy on Storrow Drive. The people she could hear talking seemed frenetic. An uncharacteristic melancholy filled her heart. Her beloved Boston, her second home, was not the same. Was it Covid? Her age?

Maybe she would make Doug go to mass with her.

Reyna heard an odd humming that she knew was the sound of her own blood. Even with the mask off, it was hard to breathe. Better sit down. The one bench in sight was occupied by a teenage couple. Her stomach gave an ominous lurch. Who would help her if she passed out? She walked carefully onto the grass, and then down towards the river. She needed air.

Better sit down

It’s almost full dark by the river. The Esplanade is never the walker’s preference, too close to home, but there’s something about this target. The target looks back at him and then lifts the brim of the baseball hat.

It’s almost full dark by the river. The Esplanade is never the walker’s preference, too close to home, but there’s something about this target. The target looks back at him and then lifts the brim of the baseball hat.“Okay.” A flat tenor.

“Okay.” A flat tenor.They both step off the path and begin walking, the target about a foot ahead, towards the field in front of the Hatch Shell. The target has done this before because now the steps are surer, the glowing cigarette making a bright arc as it lifts up and then down again. The walker’s heart begins to beat even faster. The wind has picked up another notch, as if it is going to storm, and now he can hear cheering from Fenway.

They both step off the path and begin walking, the target about a foot ahead, towards the field in front of the Hatch Shell. The target has done this before because now the steps are surer, the glowing cigarette making a bright arc as it lifts up and then down again. The walker’s heart begins to beat even faster. The wind has picked up another notch, as if it is going to storm, and now he can hear cheering from Fenway.Good. The noisier the better.

Good. The noisier the better.When they reach the field, the grass is spongey underfoot and the walker can feel the moisture through the soles of his sneakers. It seems that the target is headed towards the shell itself.

When they reach the field, the grass is spongey underfoot and the walker can feel the moisture through the soles of his sneakers. It seems that the target is headed towards the shell itself.Perfect, thinks the walker.

thinks the walker.

As the youngest member of the string section, the lockdown had been particularly hard on second violinist Nathan Lam. He wasn’t allowed to practice in the Beacon Hill apartment he shared with his sister Sophie, a creative writing adjunct at Emerson. It wasn’t Sophie that was the problem, but the co-op board, who enforced a complicated code of regulations that included noise.

As much as Nathan was thrilled to be a member of the BSO, he suspected that even at the best of times that city would not have been the best fit for him. He and Sophie had been brought up in Hong Kong and then Queens. Boston felt stiflingly provincial, despite the great universities and the BSO itself.

Nathan’s Julliard years had been rocky. He drank too much, dabbled in h****n. He blamed it on school pressure, as well as the internal pressure of his own sexuality. He liked both boys and girls. Sometimes he thought about becoming a girl, but not enough to do anything about it. Harry Styles was his idol, so well-adjusted. Some people were so much themselves societal norms held no sway. But those people were not children of East Coast Asian immigrants. Moving in with Sophie had been a mandate from their parents.

What did Nathan accomplish during lockdown? Basically, nothing. Sophie still had her same class schedule, Zoom and then hybrid. Covid did not prevent her from working on her novel; in fact, her writing thrived. She was happy getting into her PJs at nine p.m. on the nights she wasn’t with her boyfriend, an MIT grad student in nuclear physics.

Nathan kept close tabs on Sophie’s schedule because he would time his hookups to when she was occupied. Action lagged a little at the beginning of lockdown, especially when bars were closed, but revived when the weather got warmer. The only surprise was that he didn’t contract Covid sooner. It was Sophie who noticed he had something worse than a summer cold. She was furious at Nathan for being so careless, and even more so when she had to move to her boyfriend’s shared house in Allston during his isolation.

Although his only hospital time was that first visit to the emergency department, Nathan never felt the same afterwards. By Thanksgiving he still had not gotten back his sense of smell or taste. He moped, scored a fix here and there. He had not picked up his violin in months.

In early 2021 when the BSO recorded the Spirit of Beethoven series, Nathan was able to rouse himself from his funk to attend most of the rehearsals. By the first performance he was back to form, elegant in black silk shirt and trousers, his hair, long to begin with and which he hadn’t touched since the beginning of lockdown, in a neat bun. He even got a manicure although Sophie dissuaded him from putting color on his nails.

When the summer schedule email landed in his inbox in April he ran around the apartment like a maniac. The BSO would finally be in residence at Tanglewood again. He started Googling “practice studios Boston Cambridge.” He would travel if necessary. He would practice on the f*****g Boston Common if he had to. When he answered his phone and it was the orchestra manager he was feeling so confident he wondered if he were being promoted to first violin.