“Because he was driving it,” I said. The words came out flat and quiet, and I was surprised how little they cost me. Detective Lena Archuleta did not move. Victor stood at the foot of my bed, his hands open in front of him, and for the first time in twenty nine years I watched his face try to find a story and fail. “Gloria,” he said, “my brother had nothing to do with this. Tomas was in Santa Fe.” The detective slid the traffic camera still back into her folder. “Mr. Trujillo,” she said, “your brother walked into the station Tuesday morning with a lawyer, and he asked to speak to me.”
She told it plainly. Tomas had been drinking, she said, and Victor had given him two thousand dollars and the keys to a dark sedan. The plan, Tomas said, was to scare her, to smash the cab, to leave her with a bad week and a good reason to retire. A buyer in Santa Fe was ready to pay sixty thousand dollars for the permits, and Victor would collect a finder fee of twenty. Nobody was supposed to be hurt like this. Tomas had been sick for a week. When he saw my picture on the news, with the headline about the fractured skull, he began to shake and could not stop.
“That is a lie,” Victor shouted. “My brother is a drunk. He would say anything.” One of the nurses, a calm woman named Danielle, stepped forward with her phone in her hand. “Sir,” she said, “I recorded you at the door. I record anyone who closes the blinds on a patient. You pressed on her staples.” She looked at the detective. “I also have the call button log. And the camera outside the room.” Victor looked from face to face. There was not one among them that was on his side. He backed away from my bed until he hit the wall, and he did not have anywhere else to go.
A traffic camera still and a nurse with a phone turned a hospital bedside threat into a case no one could deny.
They took him out without a fight. I thought he would shout, curse, throw something. He did none of it. The detective put the cuffs on, and he walked between two officers with his head down, and when he passed the whiteboard with the photo of me and my first cab, he did not look at it. I heard his shoes go down the hall, and then the elevator, and then nothing. Danielle sat on the edge of my bed and took my hand in both of hers, and I wept until my staples pulled. She did not tell me to stop. She said, “Let it out, mi hija.” She said it twice.
My granddaughter Mariah came at four, straight from school, in her uniform, with a drawing she had made in art class. It was a yellow taxi with huge wheels and a very big smile, and under it, in purple crayon, she had written, ABUELA WILL DRIVE AGAIN. I held it against my chest. She asked why I was crying, and I told her they were the good kind. I did not tell her everything. I told her only that Abuela had been very brave, and that sometimes brave looks like saying a hard sentence out loud, in front of someone who will listen.
The legal part moved fast. The transfer form was a forgery of a city document, and the buyer in Santa Fe turned out to be a friend of the brother in law of Victor, who was quietly investigated and fined. A judge granted a protective order that kept Victor fifty yards from me for the rest of his life, and my lawyer, a young woman named Inez Baca, filed for divorce on the afternoon I came off the morphine. Tomas pleaded guilty to aggravated driving charges and went to prison for five years. Victor was sentenced to eight, for conspiracy, battery, and fraud. I did not attend. I was learning to walk.
Rehabilitation took eleven weeks. I counted. Twenty two staples came out one Tuesday, and the scar above my left ear healed into a thin silver line like the road on a map. And the whole time, a miracle I had never asked for kept happening. The other drivers kept my cabs running. Rudy, our dispatcher, took the extra shifts, and Old Benny from the night crew, and a young woman named Patricia who had only been driving six months. Every Friday, an envelope arrived in my mailbox with my share of the fares, to the dollar. Not one of them skimmed a penny.
On the first Monday of June, with a cane and a physical therapist cheering me on, I climbed behind the wheel of Cab Number One. My hands remembered everything. At five in the morning I rolled out onto Central Avenue under a sky the color of peaches, and my first fare of the day was an elderly man in a Dodgers cap, going to the Sunport. He looked at the scar. He looked at my face. “Welcome back, Gloria,” he said quietly. “Everybody on this route has been asking about you.” I could not answer. I turned up the radio and drove.
In the autumn I did something that surprised even me. I formed a cooperative. Rudy, Old Benny, Patricia, and nine other drivers each bought a share of my three medallions at a fair price, on a payment plan with no interest, and the Trujillo Drivers Cooperative opened its office in a little storefront on San Mateo. Nobody who drives for us has ever had to ask permission to be sick. We have a fund for hospital bills. We have a rule on the wall, in my handwriting: Close no blinds on anyone.
Some mornings I still drive the first shift, before the sun is all the way up, when the Sandia Mountains turn the color of watermelon and the whole city looks like it has been washed. I take my hands off the wheel for just a second at a red light, to feel them, and I thank whoever was listening that I woke up. Mariah rides in the back sometimes on Saturdays. She runs the meter. She says, “Abuela, you drove again,” and I say, “Yes, mi vida, I did.”