Geovanny Hernandez’s quadriplegic mom finally gets to see him pitch for Cathedral

On the back of her right shoulder, close to the shoulder blade, Yovanna Guzman has a tattoo of a sun and a moon.

There’s no deeper significance to it. Guzman just likes the celestial bodies, particularly the sun. She remembers the days when a fairer-skinned, lighter-haired version of herself would stand outside, basking in its warmth.

Today, May 8, the tattoo is covered up by a long-sleeve gray sweatshirt as she sits in her wheelchair and watches her son Geovanny Hernandez pitch for L.A. Cathedral High in Elysian Park, the surrounding trees swaying gently under a blue sky.

Yovanna Guzman watches her son, Cathedral High School pitcher Geovanny Hernandez, warm up in the on-deck circle.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

On this Saturday afternoon, the sun’s rays are finally smiling down on her again. It’s the first time she’s been outside in years. It’s the first time she’s seen her son play in years.

Yovanna is quadriplegic since a traffic accident more than two decades ago, and has been in and out of the hospital for more than half her life with complications. Since he was 5 years old, Geovanny has taken care of her. He brings her food, cleans her room, opens her hand to give her a glass of water. He becomes her arms and legs.

Yet on this afternoon, she gets to see him in his element. Spreading his wings. And while wearing a smile barely shielded by a bright pink mask, watching him is the only thing that matters.

::

Geovanny Hernandez spends a moment with his dog Sparky while his mother, Yovanna Guzman, looks on at their home.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Hernandez, according to his uncle, Ruben Guzman, stands out. He’s goofy, constantly cracking jokes. He doesn’t like cutting his curly brown hair. He’s called “Geo” affectionately by family.

He’s been dressing like a “hipster” since junior high, his uncle says, when he’d strut around in a beige jean jacket with khakis. He now sports a shirt with a decal of singer Billie Eilish, his “girl crush,” the 17-year-old junior says with a sheepish grin.

His absolute favorite piece of attire, however, is a purple-and-black letterman’s baseball jacket in his closet, sporting Cathedral High’s logo.

“He’s a kid with baseball in his heart,” aunt Evelyn Guzman said. “If you go to the area where he lives, you say Geo’s name, Geo’s known. That’s all this kid does — he plays baseball.”

Geo’s brown glove sits on a white dresser in his room that separates his and brother Fidel’s beds. It’s his “treasure,” Evelyn says. He bought the glove with his own money, and has spent his own money to maintain it. At night, sometimes, he’ll put it under his pillow when he closes his eyes.

“I just think [if] you want the glove to do you good,” Geo said, “you’ve just got to sleep with it and get to know it.”

It’s in his DNA. His brother played a season at Pasadena City College. His father, an uncle and a grandfather all played.

When he returns home from a game, he pokes his head into his mother’s room, where she lies in a bed surrounded by a black guardrail. He tells her who won and how he played, because it makes him happy that she knows he’s doing well.

Yovanna cherishes that time with him. But inevitably, guilt seeps in. Self-resentment. She’s frequently beset by health issues, confined to a mattress, unable to watch her son play the game he loves so dearly.

“I told him, ‘I’m sorry that I’m your mother and I’m not able to see you,’” Yovanna said. “I missed out on a lot of things … it’s painful, but I had to deal with it.”

::

Geovanny Hernandez helps his mother, Yovanna Guzman, take a sip of soda at their home. His brother Fidel stands in the background.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Yovanna doesn’t go out often. Whenever she passes the tree on the neighboring street, she has flashbacks to that fateful car ride 25 years ago.

She was newly engaged to Geo’s father, whom she married and later divorced. Fidel, now 25, was 5 months old at the time. He wasn’t in the car.

Yovanna was in the passenger seat, her fiancé driving, the two coming home from a barbecue around 1 a.m. Just a block away from her home, she remembers, the car lost control, slamming into a tree on the passenger side. She never lost consciousness.

The putrid scent of gas reached her nose. “The car’s going to blow up,” Yovanna said she thought. She strained, trying to escape, trying to move. She couldn’t. A burning sensation tingled throughout her body.

That was the last time she felt anything in her arms or legs.

“I thought I had chopped off my arms,” Yovanna remembered. “I had my eyes closed, and I told [my fiancé], ‘Did I chop off my arms?’ He’s like, ‘No, no, no, you didn’t.’”

Her parents slept in the waiting room of the hospital for three months. Ruben still remembers shuttling back and forth day after day from school to the hospital to visit his sister, seeing her in the intensive care unit with a tube in her neck.

Yovanna didn’t accept her situation. She was in denial. She thought she’d be able to walk again. Physical therapy didn’t work. She had to relearn how to speak, to eat, to breathe.

After she was finally released from the hospital, Yovanna didn’t go out for a year. She spent her time alone in the bed in her room. She was severely depressed.

Six years after the accident, she gave birth to Geo, which she labels as one of the best days of her life. Yet motherhood wasn’t easy. Confined to a bed or wheelchair, she couldn’t always help raise Fidel and Geo.

“At first, they thought my mom was their mom,” Yovanna said.

But things got better. Yovanna would ride to a local park in her wheelchair with them on her lap. As they grew up learning to take care of her, she in turn guided them.

Gangs, Fidel says, would come into their neighborhood often, looking to recruit members. Maybe it was just his fear of the dark, but Geo got scared at night. There were drive-by shootings. Taggings. They had to be careful. So Yovanna started enrolling them in baseball when they were as young as 5.

“It could have been easy for any of us to be dragged into that kind of life,” Fidel said. “But my mom was always putting us in baseball continuously, in summer ball, travel ball … her keeping us active, we almost didn’t have a choice because she didn’t want us out there.”

The two brothers credit their mother for teaching them right from wrong. They’ve never seen taking care of her as a burden; they were born into it. Yovanna will be forever grateful to them.

“Even after he returns from baseball practice or a game, he’s there, helping me out,” Yovanna said of Geo. “Anything that I need, even though he’s tired. Him and his brother have always been there for me.”

::

Geovanny Hernandez helps his mother, Yovanna Guzman, with her hairband.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

A heap of flowers sits on a table in Yovanna’s dining room, bouquets of varying sizes and colors. They’re from her friends for Mother’s Day, she says appreciatively. But she couldn’t visit them. She spent the previous week in the hospital.

Sometimes it’s the flu. Sometimes it’s dehydration. Sometimes it’s low blood pressure. She’ll wait stubbornly until she can tell she’s not going to feel better, and then Fidel will help her into the family truck and drop her off at the hospital. She spends time there maybe once a month, Geo says.

“It’s been tough, because lately, she gets sick a lot,” Geo said. “That’s what worries me, because she has to go to the hospital a lot, and [COVID-19] is bad in the hospitals. It gets me kind of terrified, and knowing that if I bring it to her … her body probably wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

A sign is taped to Yovanna’s bedroom door that warns a guest to enter only if they’re wearing a mask.

Ruben said in the early months of the pandemic, he would come by and drop off supplies at the front, waving to Yovanna from outside her window. Geo, who transferred to Cathedral before his junior year, was wary of interacting with his new teammates and still often wears a mask around his mom. Fidel, who works as an employee for the city of Glendale, would come home from work, take a shower and disinfect his clothes.

A week after the May 8 game, she lay in her room quietly, underneath a mirror shaped like a sun on her wall. A scar on her throat, marking the tube Ruben remembered seeing from her stay in the ICU, moved up and down with each breath as she watched an ASMR YouTube video on her television. She likes watching those, and vlogs, and videos of people dancing. Sometimes, Fidel will come in and show her a video he likes.

“This is what I do the whole day,” Yovanna says. “Just lay down, watch TV, or on my phone. That’s it.”

She’d just returned from the hospital the night before. Earlier in the day, she’d blacked out for 20 minutes as her blood pressure dropped. Geo had just brought her a bag of chips and water from the store, and Fidel stood next to her bed, adjusting her pillow and placing a towel behind her head so she had more support.

Even 25 years after the accident, Yovanna gets intense periods of anxiety, slipping back into that pit of depression. Frustrated she can’t move. When that happens, she says, the two are always there to listen.

Geo is a homebody, Evelyn says. He’s either at home or playing baseball; he prefers sitting with his mom to going out with friends. The two like to watch movies together. Geo’s favorite is “Racing Stripes,” an animated film about a zebra that believes it’s a racehorse.

When Yovanna gets frustrated, Fidel is the one to try to calm her. He’ll tell her about his day at work, or plans he has for his motorcycle.

Both of her sons had to grow up quick, but Yovanna feels her eldest, in particular, never really had time to be a kid.

::

Geovanny Hernandez looks on as his mother, Yovanna Guzman, has her mask adjusted by her brother Ruben. It was the first game that Yovanna attended in three years. “I’m so proud of him,” said Guzman about her son.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Geo grimaces as he was asked after the May 8 game about Fidel, the baseball prodigy in the family before him.

“My brother could’ve been good,” Geo said, looking away. “Yeah. Damn.”

In 2016, while still living at home in the middle of his freshman season at Pasadena City College, Fidel noticed his mother was stressed, worrying about a kid in college and a kid growing up while she was in a bed or a wheelchair.

So he dropped out, leaving behind dreams of a career that had only ever involved baseball. He got a job at the city to help support his mother and brother.

“If I had a little extra support, if I stayed in school and continued playing ball, I definitely think I could’ve gotten a little further than where I stopped,” Fidel said. “But that’s why I still continue playing baseball wherever I can, to show Geo to never give up and if he really wants to, he can still continue to play for however long he wants to.”

Geo has dreams to play at Mississippi or Clemson while studying sports medicine. He’s not only a starting pitcher with a 3-2 record and two no-decisions in 34 1/3 innings, but he plays left field, third base and second base while batting .355 with 17 RBIs.

When he thinks about it, the potential of leaving his mother at home seems scary.

“I think about her even when I go on travel ball, out of state,” Geo said. “Because even when I’m out of state, she can go to the hospital that week, and that’s kind of terrifying. [It’s] in my brain rent-free. …”

Yovanna knows it would hurt if her son left. But she doesn’t want a car crash from 25 years ago to set her youngest son’s dream off course the way it has Fidel’s. She doesn’t want Geo to sacrifice for her. Neither does Fidel, who sees a bit of himself in his brother, but thinks Geo can go further in baseball than he did.

As they discuss Geo’s future the afternoon of May 15, Fidel glances at his mother.

“I think we both can come to an agreement that we both will try our best for him to continue school, to finish it,” Fidel said.

Yovanna agrees. She still wants Fidel to go back to school too.

“I tell them all the time,” she said, “if I pass away, I would like them to be stable.”

::

Yovanna Guzman watches son Geovanny Hernandez pitch during a game against Serra.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Geo asks his mom almost every day, she says, if she can come to his next game. She usually says no. But her nurse gave her permission to come May 8.

Yovanna was nervous beforehand. She hadn’t seen her son play in three years. Yet at the same time, she was excited. He needed his mom, she thought. After years of guilt, of hurt that she couldn’t watch him take the field, this was her chance.

Yovanna didn’t have a job before her accident, dropping out of high school. She had two things on her bucket list when she was younger, she said: travel and become a police officer. She thought, five years ago, about trying to return to school to get her GED, but couldn’t muster the effort to do it.

Instead, her dreams manifest in the curly haired, braces-wearing, lean kid snapping off fastball after fastball for Cathedral.

“I’m so proud of him,” she thought, watching Geo take the mound.

Geo’s Aunt Evelyn asks if he hears her cheer for him at his games. He told her he doesn’t. He blocks everything out and just plays.

But as Geo walked off the field between innings, he saw his mother for the first time near the bleachers. Cheering him on, with her eyes, at long last. And for a moment, the spell of the game was broken.

“He just gave me his big smile,” Yovanna said. “Like he always does. And his smile says it all, to me.”

Cathedral High baseball coach Javier Burruel fist bumps Yovanna Guzman at the end of a game.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)