Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Manheimer

them. Halfway through one book she switched into Spanish, rather than herSpanglish or vernacular English. She entered into her other self completely. No shadow here lurking.
Abuela
had created the one safe and trusting space in her life. This wasn’t multiple personality disorder, but dissociation for survival. But here there was a kid with a life and a home—half of it imaginary, but all the more real.
    Ana, my social work conscience, emailed me one day to call her as soon as possible. I broke off from rounds and found a quiet place to make a phone call. “Ana, what’s up?”
    “Ingrid and I have talked to Lila Pagan, together. She wants to meet with you. She says she knows you. I will send you her cell. Sorry, you are the social work department now. We have taken it as far as it can go. Let’s hope that this is the one-in-a-hundred chance. Then it is 100 percent.”
    I was startled and very jittery. This was too much for anyone, too much responsibility. I was used to all kinds of issues and trauma, death and dying, organ donor calls, blood, and cardiac arrests. The heart and soul of a teenager was something else. If I fucked this up, there would be no place to hide.
    “
Señora Lila Pagan, soy el Dr. Eric del Hospital de Bellevue
.” Lila said she was a Dominicana who spoke poor English, was embarrassed by her English despite the decades she’d spent in Flatbush. “
Yo sé, Doctor, yo sé bien. Esperaba su llamada
.” She’d been expecting my call. We talked in generalities for a few minutes and agreed it was necessary to meet “
cara a cara
,” face-to-face. I told her I had a meeting in Brooklyn in two days and would be honored to visit her at her home if that worked out for her. “
Por supuesto, Doctor. Mi casa es su casa
.” Kings County had opened their new psychiatric building and I was getting a private tour from the director of psychiatry, a friend of mine. It had been a long time since I had worked in G Building—all the way back to the Son of Sam era. I could still recall the weight of the heavy key that let you into and out of the units.
    Since I was making extra stops, I took my own car to Clarkson Avenue. I went on my tour then spent another hour catching up with my colleague in psychiatry, trading a little gossip and sharing some war stories. For lunch the burrito truck on the corner had the biggestline so I made a beeline and ordered “
un poco de todo
”—a little bit of everything platter—sipped my Snapple, and decided to walk to Lila’s apartment, an easy twenty-minute trip in the bright sunshine.
    The apartment building was well maintained and looked like a hundred others I had passed on the way. The area was slowly gentrifying. It had the telltale signs, with increasing numbers of the Haredi, ultra-Orthodox Jews, spilling over from Crown Heights and young women in skintight jeans pushing designer strollers speaking into the earbuds hooked to their iPhones. “The Bean” coffee shop sat comfortably adjacent to a Latino bodega. I could sniff the impending Starbuckification. Like a heavy hint of rain, you could smell and feel it before it happened.
    I buzzed Señora Pagan from downstairs and was buzzed in immediately. The apartment was on the second floor of a four-floor walkup. A middle-aged woman greeted me with an open door, music filtering from around her, and an easy smile. Her hair was blond and the roots were gray. It was swept to one side. Her makeup and clothes were perfect. The living room was just as meticulous. I could see heavy wooden furniture, dark rugs, a TV off to one side, and heard several-generations-old
bachata
music on a CD player. I recognized “
Muero contigo
,” a classic tune by Rafael Encarnación, and remembered what Tani had told me about Lila’s mother. As she lay dying, she wanted the music on all the time, because she would dance in her head, even if she couldn’t move. Lila had looked after her and ensured that she was the center of the universe