echoes

nina patricia martinez

IN HIS LAST DAYS AS AN X-RAY TECHNICIAN in Our Lady of Guadalupe Children’s Hospital, Francis tells me his plan for catching the ghost. It’s a complex scheme, requiring him to walk across the checkered tile of our small office to act it out for me. The x-ray itself, about a decade out of date, with a bowed white head that holds its projector, that can be pointed down at the table for hands and feet, or up to the screen on the wall for chests and heads—he’ll turn it toward the table, where he’ll lay a little pendant necklace, any will do. Our lone gray locker where our gear is kept, heavy lead suits to wear over our scrubs, here he’ll hide the sage, bible, whatever other protective measures. All the way to our shared desk with our computer, kept behind a trifold wall of thick glass to shield us from radiation, where he’ll stay as he waits, patiently, through the dead of night, for the ghost to appear. 

And then what? 

“I haven’t thought farther than that,” he admits, drawing with his finger on the glass. “I guess I’d just want to meet her. Haven’t you ever wanted to meet a ghost?” Before I answer, he pulls his finger away from the glass and snaps. “I forgot. I need a necklace. Lucia,” he clasps his hands in latexed humility, “will you help me?” 

I lean back in my chair, swiveling from side to side using my tiptoes on the floor, while Francis watches me. I smile at him, which means no. 

“Fine!” he waves, “I’ll find one myself, then.” 

GUADALUPE IS A SMALL HOSPITAL on a dry, frayed patch near the West Coast, a brown block of ‘70s architecture serving the few thousand families of a manufacturing town. It’s an odd ethnic blip in this stretch of desert: over the decades, Filipino doctors, both American-born and immigrant, slowly came to replace the old white men on the board of directors in a form of reverse colonization. It gained a reputation for hiring residents and employees straight out of the Philippines, something US hospitals rarely did. People from home applied in droves, served here for a few years, then escaped coastward to better places, hospitals with glass and gleaming tiles and movie star inpatients, in cities with massive football stadiums. 

I’ve been an x-ray technician on the night shift here for seven years. Night shifts get the unfavorable emergencies: the children tumbling down the stairs as they sneak to the kitchen after bedtime, the sudden assaults of pneumonia. The daytime techs are privileged with the heroically fractured toes at soccer games, the screening of healthy, growing bones. 

We’re made to work in pairs so that someone is always providing bedside assistance. It’s usually not necessary: in my experience, kids are incredibly excited to be getting x-rayed, and it in itself serves as consolation for whatever malady they’ve been struck with.

I’ve had four partners over that time, various imports from across the sun-baked map of home. Amelia, from Cebu, whose true ambition was to be an artist, and had deceived her family with the long con of earning a radiology certificate and moving here, before vanishing into the gallery scene in Baltimore. Howard from Manila, who was just as sickly as the young patients we tended to, and after his brief stay was fetched by his mother and flown back home, skinny and stooped. Belen from Baguio, who had come here pursuing a boyfriend who was pursuing his M.Sc., before she came to realize that she loved the work better than she loved him, and soon followed her vocation to an even more rural town with even needier children.

They had all been my friends, at least from nine in the evening to eight in the morning. They trusted me enough to tell me their stories, and I listened and advised. The dark, cool room where we worked echoed with the inside jokes we composed together until their destinies came to collect them.

Francis, from Cavite, is my favorite. He’s been my longest partnership thus far, despite his being years younger. He arrived on a February morning, baffled that deserts could have winter. Like me, this was his first job out of school. As I showed him around our x-ray room, he told me what he’d left behind—two sisters, a grandmother—and what lay ahead—hopefully, a job in Los Angeles, where people paid preciously for x-rays purely in the name of self-discovery.

“What about you?” he asked. “Don’t you want something better? To move on from here?”

No, I thought. I like it here. I like most hospitals—to me they smell tangy and clean like an upscale hotel. You’re even welcomed into them the same way, to the crinkling chorus of plastic as new, sterilized amenities are unwrapped for you.

I was brought up in one, too: my parents were both nurses, and when aunts weren’t free to look after me I would be smuggled into the lounge and doted on by colleagues. I grew to like my breakfast on a plastic tray in the communal kitchen, to tell the time by the creases in everyone’s scrubs. Patients and their names slipped quickly in and out of my periphery. Loss was not a conclusive tragedy, it dotted life like rain on a window. When my parents scraped their savings into something resembling a tuition, it seemed obvious to choose a degree that took me back to the place that raised me. And when Guadalupe stretched its hand across the sea, willing to shoulder the gritty work of visa processing and on-the-job training, I found myself agreeable to a life where I was always looked after. My college friends organized a small going-away party for me in a smoky corner KBBQ, peppered my cheeks with kisses goodbye, then as soon as I turned my back and boarded the plane, held weddings, and had babies and continued to exist. The glimpses I could gather of their lives fit inside my glowing palm. 

IN HIS FIRST WEEK, FRANCIS ASKED ME FOR GHOST STORIES. 

“Every hospital has ghost stories,” he’d said to my raised eyebrow. But those tended to be one-size-fits-all. The doctor gets on the elevator with a strange lady, the doors open to a strange man, he’s wearing the bracelet meant to mark the deceased, turns out the lady is wearing it too, insert hospital name here. 

But, alright, I said. Guadalupe does have a ghost story. I confessed it to him one quiet night shift, after we’d spent hours undisturbed by calls from ER. It happened right here, in the radiology unit. 

“Right here?” Francis echoed, glowing. 

One evening, the lone working tech, Filipino like us, let in a little girl whose chart said she needed a chest x-ray. As she helped the patient out of her cloth gown, and tapped settings into the whirring machine, the girl asked what the brassy pendant was hanging from her neck. 

It’s an agimat, said the tech, a charm from home, meant to protect me from evil.

How? asked the girl, who blinked up at her with blue eyes and blonde lashes.

It’s supposed to ensure I go to heaven and not end up in limbo, the tech laughed, as she tucked it back under the v of her scrub top. I’m supposed to keep it hidden.

That’s okay, the little girl said, now I know what to steal from you. The tech laughed again. Kids loved to joke.

After her shift, the tech retired to the locker room to change out of her scrubs, only to pat around her neck and realize her agimat was gone. That girl! She rushed to the pulmonary unit, asking the nurses for her—there was no one by that name, they said. The tech was in disbelief. She knew she’d met the little girl that night, read her chart, positioned her gently against the screen on the wall. Then she remembered her computer. She raced back to the x-ray room and searched the girl’s name in files from the last twenty four hours—nothing. She expanded the search to the entire database—and found her fifteen years back, long dead from a rare lung disease. The tech opened her folder, and there it was glaring on the screen: the ruined image of a chest, clouded with milky bursts of white, and, outlined sharply at the neck, the shape of a pendant, dangling heavily from a chain.

“Ugh,” Francis grimaced. “That’s a good one.” We were used to a dark room, but he switched on the light to feel better. “Funny, I remember agimat growing up. Vendors sold them outside churches. But I never knew anybody who owned one.”

I shrugged. Ghost stories are like that. Their humans are just a little bit as odd as their ghosts.

Over the years we spent together, Francis would ask me again about the story, picking it up and dusting it off every few months. “Would you remember the little girl’s name?” “Or the tech’s, for that matter?” “What happened to her after that? Did she tell you this?”

I’d grin and improvise: this story was passed down to me from the last tech, who heard it from someone else. Even if I remembered either of their names, they’d pull up blanks in the system. 

They’re both gone without explanation, and no one remembers them. Then Francis and I, sufficiently creeped out, would both cringe in delight. 

He did this often, asked me things, challenged me to invent more details as we whiled away the patientless hours. Where exactly was the tech from, what she liked, who might go looking for her if she had disappeared. He started repeating his questions after the tale had been emptied of possibility, but I didn’t mind, I liked retelling, and it was nice to be listened to. 

There were times when the story ate into his good moods, its memory bubbling up during our more peaceful shifts. 

“It’s not fair,” he mourned, as he shut off the machine for the night, “that that x-ray tech is trapped in limbo.” 

She hadn’t been doomed to limbo, to be fair. She’d just lost her protection from it. Still, his affection for her warmed my face. I gathered our gear to stash away. 

“Do you believe in it?” Francis asked behind me, his voice thinning as he stretched. “Limbo?” 

I turned and smiled—no. My parents didn’t teach it to me growing up, when yet another hour in the hospital was marked by loss. It was better to think, after all this, there would simply be peace. 

Francis looked at me softly. “They sound like they were good parents.” 

They were, I thought, standing in front of the locker, my palm on the cool metal. They are. I remembered how I saw them last, shrinking smaller behind the turnstiles at the airport. They had rung every relative and pieced together every discount to get me on this plane, and as they kissed me they whispered in my ear to think of Guadalupe as my home, just as their hospital had been. They let me go, and after that continued to age and stoop and forget things, except I was no longer there to run their errands and write them notes. 

There had been a call, once, where my father asked me to pick up a loaf of white bread before I returned home that evening. I reminded him that I had been in Guadalupe for several years now. 

There was a long pause, and then a quiet oh, and he continued to tell me about the green beans in his garden.

“There has to be something we can do,” Francis said after another night, a turbulent one that saw one of the desert’s rare rains, and storm-swept sidewalks had sent multiple kids hobbling in. We were slouched over in our chairs after sending the last one on her way, our lead suits still on. “There must be a way to help her.”

I was pulling my heavy gloves off, puzzling over his words. People in ghost stories weren’t for helping. You watched them through your fingers, and then at the end felt grateful they weren’t you. There was no reaching through the veil and plucking them from their fate. I could see he was tired: his curly hair dripping out from his bonnet, his lashes nearly touching his cheeks.

He came in the next evening, refreshed and large-eyed, his strides wide and strong. “A new agimat would do it, right?” he asked. “Save the ghost from limbo?”

It was the little girl who was the ghost in the story, I reminded him, not the tech. But now he’d found his solution, and there was, it seemed, no stopping him. 

HE PRESENTS ME WITH THE AGIMAT SEVERAL DAYS LATER.

“It’s not real,” Francis confesses. “I bought it online from a Fil-Am artist in New York.” He tiptoes his office chair closer to mine. “What do you think?”

I take it in awe. It’s heavy and warm in my hands, a divine eye radiating at the center of a triangle, the Latin prayer around its borders rubbed soft. The braided leather chain swings down past my fingers. It’s a little too new, too pretty, too brass-plated, but it’s more real than any fantastical plot device I could fabricate on my own.

“Even if nothing happens,” says Francis, “it’s going to be fun.”

I close my hands over the dainty agimat, as if blessing it myself. Willing it into power, into serving its purpose: to protect this moment in time, from danger, from wear, from slipping out of my grasp.

HE TELLS ME THE NEWS NOT LONG AFTER. A clinic just outside Los Angeles has hired him. No more injured children, no more sudden, sad losses—their main business is annual corporate checkups, all conducted during the sunny light of day. 

“You could come with me,” he says. He tells me this through the protective glass as we end another shift, as I clean the imaging table and he puts away our gear. Our lead suits are folded over his arm. “There’s another vacancy.” They seem to pin him down, heavy as stone. 

I finish wiping the table. I take the bowed head of the x-ray and gently raise it above us, like an elephant. I smile at him. 

The truth is I could never leave Guadalupe, not for cooler shores or sleeker rooms. To reach for great heights, to put my hard-won visa on the precarious line, is to move on from the safe and stable fate my parents had toiled to shape for me. It’s to move farther away from them, and my friends, to shrink smaller in their palms until all they have of me is my past and nothing of my present. It’s to move on from a place filled with faces I recognize, belonging to people who understand what a titanic feat it was just to get here, what quiet and wounding loss it required, to somewhere else in this strange land where I’ll be asked repeatedly who and what and why I am, until I’m unsure of it myself. It’s to move on, completely. 

FRANCIS NEVER DOES GET TO SUMMON HIS GHOST. Paperwork and moving and farewell parties all call him away from our x-ray room. On his very last night shift, we sit at our desk together. He’s silent as we remove his name from the system, gazing into the bluish light, the hum of machinery and air conditioning all around us.

I ask him if he still wants to talk to the ghost, and he shakes his head. 

“Even if,” he stops, then starts again, “even if I have no part in it—I hope she finds a way to move on.” He turns to me. “Do you think she will?”

If I could rewrite the story from when I’d first told it, carve a tunnel through the aging hospital walls and beneath the endless ocean to get this woman back home, I would. I nod, yes.

“Good.” He pushes back from the desk and pulls out the drawer: our agimat clinks against a corner. He lifts it carefully out—then tilts it towards me. “Do you want this?”

I feel my shoes on the cool ground, my hands gently cupping my knees, my lungs full of steady air. “It’s yours. To remember Guadalupe by. Keep it.”

He holds his hands out a second longer. “Alright.” He gathers the last of his things, then stands up and flips a switch, flooding our little room with light. It’s just us in here. I watch him give it all a last fond look—the old machine, the tiled floor and white walls, our fortress of a desk, and then start for the door.

“Hey.” I stand up. Francis turns back. “Tell me about everything. About where you’re going.”

His hair curls around his smile. “Sure.”

I take up all my things, too, and we leave the x-ray room together.