No Blowing Allowed

Pao's birthday is November 6th, and for the last four years she has asked to work that night. I found out by accident, reading the schedule taped to the wall at the nurses' station: her name is always there, on the night of the 5th into the 6th, even when the rest of her month is a mess of swaps, cross-outs and little arrows. A woman who will trade a shift for a piece of gum never trades that one.

I asked her why once. She said that way nobody throws her a party. At home they sing, they take pictures of her with the cake, they ask whether she has a boyfriend yet, and in the ER, at four in the morning, nobody remembers anything. This year it didn't work, and it was my fault.

The tres leches

I woke up at four in the afternoon, drank my coffee standing up and went to the bakery on Avenida Zaragoza, the one with a styrofoam wedding cake in the window that has been sitting there since I was in middle school. I ordered a small tres leches, the twelve-slice kind, and a little white chocolate plaque that said "Happy birthday Pao". The girl at the counter asked whether Pao was short for Paola or Paulina, in case I wanted the full name. I said I didn't know. She wrote Pao, which works for both.

The problem with a cake in the ER isn't buying it, it's hiding it. The fridge in the break room belongs to everyone, and Pao opens it every hour to check whether somebody brought something. So I showed up at ten to seven hugging the box against my chest like a sensitive file and handed it to Don Memo through the window of the security booth.

Under his desk Don Memo keeps a red cooler where he stores his lunch and, according to him, "security stuff". He didn't ask a single question. He took out two plastic containers, slid the box in sideways, closed the lid and set his green thermos on top like a paperweight. "Nobody touches it here," he said.

The night that wouldn't cooperate

The plan was midnight on the dot. At midnight on the dot three ambulances arrived in twenty minutes and Pao was up to her elbows in her own work, which isn't mine to tell. Not at one either. Not at two. I kept texting Don Memo from the bathroom, "not yet", and he kept answering with a thumbs-up, the same thumbs-up every time, as if he had it saved somewhere.

At three thirty the room finally went still. That strange ER stillness, which isn't silence but an even hum: the monitors, the coffee machine dripping, someone snoring in the waiting room with their head on somebody else's shoulder. Doctor Ruelas came out of his office and stretched, and I signaled him with my eyes. He already knew. The whole shift knew, except her.

The candles

Candles are out of the question. There is oxygen in the ER, in the wall outlets, in the tanks, in the masks, and a little flame in the wrong place makes the evening news. We all learned that in nursing school, so we had agreed on something else.

Don Memo carried the cooler all the way to the break room with both hands, very solemn, as if he were transporting an organ. We took out the cake, straightened the plaque and turned off the light. When Pao walked in for her coffee there were five of us squeezed between the fridge and the lockers, each holding a phone flashlight inside a styrofoam cup, pointing up. Five fat white candles, wobbling because our hands were shaking with laughter.

We sang her "Las Mañanitas" very softly, almost in secret, because twenty feet away there were people asleep who needed to stay asleep. A whispered birthday song sounds like a prayer. Doctor Ruelas went flat on "the day that you were born" and Don Memo covered it with an "all right!" that was far too loud, and five mouths hushed him at once.

Pao stood in the doorway holding her empty mug. She said "no way" three times, quieter each time. Then she covered her face with her forearm, the way we do when our hands are dirty, and stayed like that for a while.

Cold tres leches

We cut the cake with a tongue depressor, new and still in its wrapper, because nobody had a knife, and served it on napkins. The tres leches was ice cold from Don Memo's cooler. I took a big bite without thinking, right on the tooth Doctor Sotelo fixed, and waited for the live wire. It didn't come. Only the cold and the sweet came, and I was so pleased that I had a second slice to make sure.

Pao ate standing by the window, not saying much. She said that next year she would ask for the night of the 5th anyway. That it was worse now, because now we knew. Doctor Ruelas took a piece back to his office "for somebody's knee", and Don Memo took two, one for himself and one he said was for his wife, even though his wife was asleep out in Santa Rosa Jáuregui.

Before we turned the light back on, Pao wiped her hands on her scrub pants, walked over to the styrofoam cups still glowing on the table, and blew. Hard, with puffed-out cheeks, the way a six-year-old blows. The five of us just stared at her. Then, without agreeing on it, we each switched ours off, one by one, as if it had worked.