Then she got sick with a high fever and a bad rash all over her back and chest. She knew what was wrong with her, but she didn’t want to believe it. She went to church and begged God not to let this happen to her. She screamed, “I don’t deserve this, God! I don’t deserve it!” Then she went to a clinic, and they told her she had HIV. She was crying for days and couldn’t get out of bed. She was afraid of getting sick and dying, but she was also angry at herself for being so stupid, for believing that Carlos was clean. When she told Carlos she was sick, he still wouldn’t tell her the truth, saying he wasn’t sick and she must’ve caught the HIV from some other man. Then he beat her again, and she screamed at him to go away and stay out of her life forever.

Gabriella knew she had done such a bad thing to her daughter, ruining her life, too, and she felt like she wanted to kill herself. She almost did it one night. She had the bottle of pills, and she wrote a letter telling Manuela how sorry she was and asking Beatrice and Manny to please raise her daughter good. She put the pills in her mouth and was about to swallow them when she decided that she couldn’t do this to her daughter, that killing herself now would be even worse. She was still young and healthy, and maybe if she took her medicine she’d live for a very long time.

The next day she went to the police and told them how Carlos was beating her, and the judge gave her a restraining order so Carlos couldn’t come close to her or her daughter ever again. Then she sent Manuela to stay with Beatrice and she went away to a center on Long Island to get clean. It was very hard at first, but she listened to what they said and she got off the drugs for good. She went back to her life of working hard every day and helping Manuela with her homework and decided this was how she was going to live the rest of her life- being the best mother she could be.

She kept her HIV a secret from everybody, even her daughter. She didn’t want her daughter to think her mother wasn’t strong, that she wouldn’t be there for her someday, and she was worried that if people she worked for found out she was sick they would be afraid and want to fire her. She was good at hiding it from people, even her own family, but it got hard sometimes, like when Beatrice would say to her, “What’s wrong with you, Gabriela? Why do you stay home alone every night? Don’t you want to find a man?” Gabriela would say that she didn’t want a man in her life right now, that she just wanted to be alone with her daughter and be happy.

But sometimes it was very hard to be alone and she called Carlos and told him to come over. They were both sick, and even though she hated him for getting her sick and hitting her so much, she felt like he was the only man she could ever have. But then he’d start treating her bad and hitting her, and even hitting Manuela a few times, and she’d tell him to get out of her life for good or she was going to call the police. She’d stay away from him for another year or two, until she’d start to feel lonely and scared again and forget how bad he’d made her feel and how much he’d hurt her, and she’d call him up and start the whole thing all over again.

Gabriela was thirty- one years old. She knew her life would never change, that she would never be happy all the time, but her doctors told her her HIV was doing okay and she would live for many, many years. Manuela was eleven years old, in sixth grade, and was turning into such a beautiful young lady. Gabriela taught her daughter to stay away from drugs and the bad boys and to wait to meet somebody someday who would treat her good, the way she deserved to be treated. Gabriela just wanted her daughter to have a good, happy life; it was the only thing she cared about.

Then one day Gabriela was riding the bus home from work when Beatrice called her and was screaming and crying. It reminded Gabriela of that terrible day Juan had died, and she was afraid something bad had happened to Manuela.

“ No mi hija!” Gabriela screamed. “No mi hija! No mi hija!” Gabriela screamed so loud that everybody was looking over, and the driver even stopped the bus.

Thank God, Beatrice wasn’t calling about Manuela, but it was still very bad. It was their father in San Juan. He was very sick and needed a new kidney or he was going to die, but the doctors in Quito said he was too sick to get a new kidney from the hospital, so the only way was if they bought one on the black market.

Crying, Gabriella asked, “How much do they need?”

“Twelve thousand dollars,” Beatrice said. “That’s crazy money. What’re we gonna do?”

Gabriela didn’t have money to send him. The money she made from cleaning houses was just enough to pay for rent and bills and food. Sometimes she didn’t even have money to buy new clothes for Manuela.

“How much money you have?” Gabriela asked.

“We only have two thousand in the bank,” Beatrice said, “and we need it for rent and bills.”

Gabriela had no idea what to do. Twelve thousand dollars was more money than she’d ever seen.

When she got back to her apartment, she called home and it was sad to hear her mother crying and her father sounding so sad, and she felt so bad, knowing there was nothing anybody could do to help him. They just had to let him die.

“How much time does papi have?” Gabriela asked her mother.

“If they don’t do nothing, maybe a month or two,” she said.“They don’t know.”

Gabriela spent most of the next few days crying. She and Beatrice were planning to go to Ec ua dor, to be with their father for the last time. They wanted their whole families to go, but they didn’t have the money for the plane tickets.

Everything seemed so bad, and she didn’t know what to do, and then she was cleaning the Blooms’ house one morning when she saw a little piece of paper in a drawer in the dining room. The paper had some numbers on it, and on top she saw the words code new alarm.

Mrs. Bloom was home, right upstairs, and Gabriela heard footsteps in the hallway. Gabriela didn’t even think about it and put the paper in the pocket of her apron.

Later, at home, she felt bad. She didn’t even know why she took the paper, because the Blooms had been so good to her and there was no way she could ever steal from them.

Then, in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought: What if she gave Carlos the code? She didn’t ask about where he got his money, but she knew he probably knew how to rob places. And if he stole from them it would be different than if she stole from them. She didn’t want to do something bad to the Blooms, but she didn’t want her papi to die, either, and she didn’t know what else to do

She called Carlos and told him to come over.

After she told him about the code, he said, “You got the key to the house?”

Gabriela hadn’t even thought about this. She was so worried about her papi and getting money that she hadn’t thought about anything else.

“No, but I can get it,” she said.

The next day, at the Blooms’, when she went out to get lunch, she took the keys from the drawer in the kitchen and went to a locksmith. She found out she couldn’t copy the keys to the front door because they were some kind of special locks they couldn’t copy without some kind of card.

She thought that was it, her papi would die, but then the locksmith told her she could copy the keys to the back door. This was okay, maybe even better, because it was darker in the back of the house and nobody would be watching.

Everything was looking good, but not for long. When she got back to the Blooms’ she remembered that Carlos still had the paper with the code on it. She’d been so busy talking to Carlos and thinking about the keys that she forgot to ask for the paper back.

When Mrs. Bloom went out to do something, Gabriela called Carlos and asked him to bring the paper to her apartment later on.