“My mother knew Nahui Olin,” he said. “Or at least I think she did. I mean, I
know
she did, but she never told me as much. Anyway, they were close.”
“Close?”
“Very close,” he said with an undecipherable tone.
“And Nahui wrote this book?”
“Yes. That copy belonged to my mother,” he said.
I looked at the retablo again. My dad’s mother had been
very
close to this person Edward Weston took a photo of, to this avant-garde chick who wrote a book of poems? I wanted to know more, I wanted all the dirty little details.
“So,” I cautiously ventured further into the conversation, “Nahui was a poet?”
At this my father laughed.
“Nahui was a cautionary tale,” he said.
Huh?
“And she’s exactly the sort I fell for every time,” he added.
Wait, was my dad trying to talk ladies with me? I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or miserably uncomfortable. Regardless, my end of the conversation would be inherently limited. At that point in my life I’d messed around plenty, but I’d never really had a
girlfriend
—the entire prospect had simply seemed too complicated. But, considering what my dad had said, I had to wonder, if I ever fell hard for a girl, if it ever felt like something big and real and lasting, if that ever happened, would it be for a fire-eyed girl like Nahui? Would I follow in what seemed to be Cruz tradition? Honestly, the possibility of being with such a handful sounded enticing as all hell. In retrospect, I can’t tell you how many times I later wished I could go back to warn my naïve self:
Yes, she will be complicated. And, yes, it’ll be hot. But seriously, fool, brace yourself. Loving her will be the hardest thing you’ll ever know.
Like they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty. Right then, all I had was my own limited perspective and the nostalgic insight of a blind man.
The
every time
part of what my father had said echoed in my ears.
“Dad, you mean my mom, right?”
“And my ex-wife,” he said.
“You and mom weren’t married.”
“Not to each other.”
Okay, first he all but tells me that his mother had a secret lover. A woman. A totally hot woman who Edward Weston had photographed, for fuck’s sake. And now he was telling me he’d been married? To whom? When? Before he was with my mom? During? After? My head swam. What else could there be to find out? Did I have half-siblings somewhere? Was I adopted? What? Taking full advantage of my idiot silence, he continued:
Yes, he’d been married. Before he met my mom. And, no, my mother hadn’t ever known about it. “You know how she is,” he only briefly explained. “I didn’t want to lose her, so I never told her
.”
Anyway, it seemed my father and his wife had traveled on a rickety motorcycle up the West Coast for post-nuptial festivities. I tried to picture it. They were both young, but considering how bad my father’s eyes probably already were at that point, I was sure she had driven the bike. She must have been so
Easy Rider
foxy on their chopper. It was safe to assume my dad wore one of his suits, a fedora for a helmet. I was impressed.
“She and I loved each other entirely,” he said. “It was beautiful.”
But then when he smiled radiantly as he said his wife took the motorcycle and left with some other dude in Death Valley, I wasn’t sure if it was the codeine talking.
“Wait, what?”
“Exactly what I said. We stayed a few nights in Death Valley in this little cabin, she met someone else, and she left me.” His voice turned syrupy, “I’ll never forget that day …”
I scrunched up my face. Made no difference, he couldn’t see it anyway.
“She had long cinnamon-colored hair like thick flames that reached down her back to her hips,” he said and smiled even more, to himself, to the memory of her. “All morning we’d stayed in bed and made love.”
Sour spit filled my mouth.
“Dad, please.”
“There’s nothing disgraceful about love.”
“I just don’t want to hear any more, okay?”
“We were hungry,” he continued, “and we planned to buy some lunch at the nearby town store, something simple, some cheese and apples, maybe some honey and bread. We were going to picnic at the Devil’s Golf Course, everyone had been telling us we absolutely had to go there, they said it was surreal—sparkling rocky fields of salt crystals for miles and miles. The crystals made popping sounds in the hot sun, it’s simply one of the natural wonders of the world, so spectacular …
“So, we were going to take the motorcycle to get food and go there. But she wanted to take a bath first, just a quick bath to pretty up, she said. I told her there was no way she could be prettier than she already was. And she wasn’t simply pretty, she was beautiful. She was the woman who taught me the difference between ‘pretty’ and ‘beautiful.’ She was beautiful, Francisca. Extremely beautiful.”
He took off his blind man glasses. His white-fogged eyes started tearing up. I tried to be adult about it all. First hearing him talk about sex. Then him crying …
His voice quivered slightly and he said, “I guess I fell asleep while she was in the bath because all of a sudden I woke to a kiss on my temple. Just one soft little kiss. I opened my eyes. If I could have my eyes back for one single moment, I’d wish for her to be standing in front of me again like she was that day. Her blushed face, that fire hair licking at her shoulders, slick against her pale skin … She left that night, but for my entire life she was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” Staring toward me, his gaze aimed two degrees to the right of where I sat, my father added: “I knew she’d leave me. I figured we might as well go somewhere memorable to fall apart.”
I sat there, not sure anymore who was sitting across from me. I began to realize I liked him a lot more than the person I’d always assumed my father was.
He wiped his face dry with the back of his hand and put his dark glasses back on.
“There’s more,” he said. “In the envelope, I mean.”
I picked it up. My hands trembled. From frayed nerves. Overloaded brain. I sliced my wrist as I reached in. “Fuck,” I yelped, and pulled my hand back.
“What?”
“Nothing. Paper cut,” I mumbled. My dad was dying and tearing open his soul to share himself with me before it was too late, and I screamed about a tiny paper cut. I was pathetic.
I sucked a thin line of blood off my skin and shook the envelope gently. A key fell out and hit the coffee table with a clinking sound. Tied to the key by a small piece of string was one of those office supply silver dollar–sized circular paper tags with a flimsy tin border—the kind they write your car’s license plate number on at the auto shop. And on that tag, written in my father’s handwriting, albeit considerably smaller and neater than his writing on the envelope’s exterior, presumably from many years before, was the following:
Wells Fargo Bank. City of Orange. Old Towne Circle.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“Safe deposit box. Don’t go until after I die.”
I swear, he said that. It was so totally cryptic. Morbid. And narcissistic.
Given all the death and exhaustion floating around in the air, I was desperate for the safe deposit key to open a treasure box filled with uplifting fabulousness, a reserve of something extravagant and luxurious. In fact, I wanted to drive down to the safe deposit box in Orange right that instant to claim my prize.
“I’m serious, Francisca. Promise me.”
“For real?”
“Just leave it for later, okay, Paca?”
“Fine, I promise.”
“Put it on your keychain.”
“I will.”
“
Now
,” he snapped.
“Shit, Dad, you don’t have to yell.”
“I’m sorry.” He rubbed his temple with his hands. “I just don’t want you to lose that key.”
I reached into the overnight duffle bag at my side and found my keychain. I hooked the key on and dropped the metal jumble back in my bag.
“Done,” I said.
My dad stood, reached down, found my shoulders, and pulled me up.
“Come on, I’ll bake you a cake,” he said, with his best attempt at a bright smile.
M
y birthday cake was a disaster. Ingredients dusted the kitchen counter and floor. I ended up doing most of the work. And then the batter wouldn’t bake properly. It stayed raw in the middle. I blew out my candle with a wish that my dad, that we, wouldn’t have to know more suffering.
Unintended consequence of my wish come true, the next day cancer sabotaged my father’s brain. He stayed bed-bound for weeks. An IV drip in his arm was his only source of nutrients and hydration. In his hand he held the golden little pebble his mother had given him when he left Mexico. His fingers were white-knuckled for how tightly he gripped that worry stone. He giggled maniacally and rambled gibberish anytime he wasn’t sleeping. A month into this ordeal, two days before Father’s Day, I was sitting next to my father’s bed, holding his hand, keeping vigil, when he stopped his manic nonsensical chatter and turned his head to fix his blind sight on me.
“I love you, kid,” he said.
His succinct clarity startled the hell out of me.
Blind eyes locked onto me.
To memorize me.
To me more eyes.
Me.
“Love you, too,” I said.
Father’s Day Eve. I stayed up with him the entire night. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I knew he was going to die before sunrise. His skin was clammy and without color, save the gray tinge of sustained illness, and he seemed very distant, already gone in a way. At times I could barely discern whether he was still breathing or if his body only quivered from the trembling clutch of my hand holding his. I shook my crossed leg to keep awake and bit my dry hangnail fingers as I watched over him.
“Dad,” I whispered, “if you’re ready, it’s okay.”
As if in response, the briefest choking sound escaped his lips. He was choking on air, not for a lack of it. No warmth exhaled on my fingertips when I checked his nostrils. The pulse was gone from his neck and wrists. The sun rose. 5:45 a.m. 18 June 1995. Father’s Day. My father was dead.
I sat in the chair next to my dad’s bed, hating myself for feeling relieved. I wanted to nudge him over to the metal rail edge of his rented hospital bed and climb in to join him. I wanted to sleep. Deeply. But I couldn’t. Not yet. Details needed tending to. There were things to be done. I lay down on the floor.
Prone on the carpet, I closed my eyes. A bedpan over my shoulder, the acrid stench of dried urine at my nose, my legs under my father’s bed, there, right there, I lay. I pulled a cord and dragged the phone off the nightstand. It fell with a thud on the carpet next to me. I made calls. And when the funeral home guys rang the doorbell an hour later, I was still on the carpet. Eyes shut, I listened as two men with loud feet hesitantly entered the house.
“Hello?” a man’s deep voice called out from the entryway.
“Upstairs,” I shouted in my natural high octave, too tired to give a shit how my voice sounded.
“Ma’am?” the voice asked from the base of the stairs.
I didn’t answer.
“Ma’am?” he asked again from the bedroom door. “Oh, sorry,” he cleared his voice and apologized when he saw me sprawled miserably on the floor next to the bed.
He and his assistant entered the room with their supplies. They readied the stretcher they’d brought and rolled it over to the bed’s side.
“Son, would you like to say goodbye?” the one with an empty body bag tucked under his arm looked down at me and asked.
Hadn’t I been saying goodbye for months?
“Already did. Thanks,” I whispered.
The brawnier of the two guys reached his thick meaty hand toward me.
“He was holding this,” he said.
The worry stone. I took the pebble and squeezed it hard in my hand. Certain only the sensation of its polished worndown surface was keeping me conscious, I focused on my oxygen intake—one breath in, one breath out, repeat—as I watched them wrap my father’s body in a white sheet and put “him” in the body bag and then on the stretcher. I hated that those guys were seeing my father in his pajamas. He would have wanted to go in one of his suits, his brown three-piece linen, probably, and his fedora, the cocoa straw one. Instead he was bareheaded and wore flannel and cotton.
My thoughts looped dizzily.
He was dead when I got here. Officer, I swear, I didn’t do it. It wasn’t my fault …
The funeral home dudes took my father downstairs to the front door, to their hearse, and to a refrigerated morgue. A research lab that my father had contacted soon after his cancer diagnosis met them at the morgue and took my father’s eyes. The rest of his body was no use to anyone all rotted like it was, so the funeral home stripped it down and burned it up and made bulky ashes. All of this happened as I barely managed to prop up the top half of my body’s weight on shaking elbows, my legs nailed to the carpet on the floor next to the bed on which my father had died.
T
hree days later, I woke at 5:45 in the morning—both the time my father had died and an absolutely ridiculously early hour for me, especially considering how fucking zapped I felt. But there I was, awake with the rising sun blasting through my bedroom window and directly into my eyes. Try as I did, I couldn’t fall back asleep. I lay in bed for an hour, head cloudy and limbs aching to the bone, until there was no more delaying it—my father’s ashes would be ready for pickup soon. “Come by any time after 8 A.M. ,” the man at the funeral home had said pleasantly when he’d called the day before, like it was a cake or business cards or something totally innocuous I was scheduled to take claim of. All I wanted was to go back to sleep. Instead, I got up, showered, and drove to Disneyland for the Dead.
Forest Lawn in Glendale, a place like no other:
A concrete cherub boy pissing fountain water greeted me at the entrance. As I pulled past him and into a parking spot, I looked up toward the cemetery’s rolling and insidiously kellygreen landscaped hills. I knew that tucked up in those hills was a sculpture garden that included a scale-accurate replica of Michelangelo’s
David
, sluglike uncircumcised dick and all. Michelangelo must have been rolling in his grave. And as for graves, I was grateful my father hadn’t decided to be buried in one of the plots on those hills, thankful that I wouldn’t have to attend some impersonal assembly-line memorial service in the Little Church of the Flowers, a place that encapsulated all that I hated about Southern Californian insincerity and its bullshit happy sunshine for everyone. It was bad enough my father wanted Forest Lawn to cremate him.