Shock Warning

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“Department of nuclear medicine,” said Celina S. Gomez into the telephone. Gomez was a technician in the radiology department at Mount Sinai Medical Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A technician was nowhere near as prestigious as being a doctor or a nurse, but for a girl who had worked her way across town and down eighty blocks from Little Santo Domingo on the West Side, it was good enough.

The S stood for Selena. Her mother had been such a fan of the late pop singer that she had, in effect, named her twice. “Just like New York, New York,” mamacita used to tell her. “The town so nice they named it twice.” Celina didn’t want anybody calling her Celina Selena, so she kept her middle name a closely guarded secret, but she enjoyed using her middle initial in honor of her mother and because it was cool.

If only mama could see her now. But mama couldn’t, because she had been killed six years ago, when she caught a stray bullet as she was on her way to the supermercado over on Broadway. Celina had still been in high school then, a senior at Mother Cabrini in Washington Heights, and was on a day trip to The Cloisters in nearby Fort Tryon Park when she heard the news. The easy thing would have been to drop out of school at that point and get pregnant, like many of the girls she knew, but she stuck with it, buried her mother, and went to King’s College in Brooklyn.

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