We Googled Aunt Pilar before we left, of course, mainly thinking to find a current address on her, in an era where it is virtually impossible to be untraceable, and indeed we did. What we found in addition was that, in accordance with all the chattiness about art shows in her letters, she is . . . moderately famous, if visual artists can be “famous” anymore. The Internet holds a variety of photos of her: a heavyset, openly lesbian sculptor who looks nothing like anyone in our family. In every picture she displays a penchant for fringey scarves. Her sculptures blend burned books and parched tree branches and amber, and to say they are staggeringly beautiful and haunting sounds cheap. To my knowledge, Nick, no one else in our family has ever made anything besides children.
Despite our theory about the impossibility of anonymity in 2009, Miguel and I are not on the Internet at all. When we Googled ourselves, it yielded nothing except the revelation that people who are not us have our names, and are referenced on Spanish-language websites we don’t bother to decipher. Miguel and I live unambitious lives, off the grid. He’s loaded and I’m broke but the result is the same.
Aunt Pilar doesn’t expect us. We find her condo easily but no one comes to the door when we ring the buzzer. She could be having an exhibition in San Miguel de Allende, in Antigua; she could be anywhere. Our lack of forethought would not serve us well if we were applying for work as private detectives. We sit on the front steps to her condo, in the blinding sun, our suitcases in front of us, saying things like, “She’s an old lady, she has to come home sometime.” We both know that sometime could be in a week and a half, but neither of us says it aloud. Miguel seems patronizing or bored, I can’t tell which, and as the afternoon wanes so that the sun grows weak and the orange sky is tinged with gray, it occurs to me that my brother is too smart to have not planned this trip better—that he must have expected and wanted me to fail, and is only here to keep me from doing something crazy, though I have no idea what that might be.
A white van pulls up in front of the house, and simply because it’s the first vehicle to park directly in front of the condo in the last four hours, I mutter to Miguel, “Look, Auntie drives a rape van.” “Rape Van” is one of the fake band names Miguel and I have made up over the years, and whenever we see a white van we say things to each other like, “Rape Van opening up at the Aragon Ballroom.” I don’t think either of us expects the driver of this rape van to actually be Aunt Pilar, but it is. She looks at us carefully from across a stretch of lawn and driveway, and then drops a canvas she’s holding and breaks into a clunky, inefficient run that lists to one side, stopping several feet away from us, a look of grief and confusion contorting her face.
She says plainly, as though the possibility that we are not family has already been excluded, “I thought you were them for a moment. I thought I had died and my Javier and his beautiful Isabel were waiting for me.”
“Wait,” I said, “you knew Isabel had died?”
And at that, she sinks to her knees on the unfeasibly smooth Miami concrete, that does not at all resemble Chicago concrete, and begins to wail.
I don’t know whether Aunt Pilar eats Cuban food from the hood every day of her life, or if it’s for our benefit, but before Miguel and I have been in Miami for twenty-four hours, she has taken us to the same hole-in-the-wall for two meals. Miguel is happy as a pig in slop. My brother could live on ropa vieja and arroz con pollo, and never want for anything. This is the only indication, really, that Miguel grew up in a Latino household. Of course, if you say things like that around him, he will promptly inform you that when he lived in Barcelona, he read all of James Joyce in Spanish, thank you very much.
Um. I rest my fucking case.
We sit on purple benches at picnic tables in a parking lot. The place looks like it used to be a gas station, and I can smell the ocean but can’t see it. Seagulls circle and call overhead, and Miguel says several times that he loves “water birds,” though it’s a phrase I’ve never heard him use and a fact of which I was unaware. Miguel is the only member of my family with whom I have ever shared anything resembling intimacy, yet he seems, comfortably chatting with Aunt Pilar about ducks and cranes and geese and swans and loons, like a complete alien to me.
Aunt Pilar has a tendency to break into rapid-fire Spanish, but Miguel knows I can’t keep up, so he vigilantly answers in English. If she is disappointed in us, she has not let on. She keeps hugging us, and Miguel and I have banded together on one side of the picnic table, with her on the other, in an unspoken agreement between us to stay out of her arms’ reach. Thus far, we’ve said virtually nothing that needs to be said.
“You look so much like your papi,” she says to Miguel over and over again. “Your eyebrows, this arch here, so strong—it’s like he is looking back at me, the last time I saw him.”
Papi was two years older than Miguel when he died. His sister had not seen her brother, it seems, for two years prior to his death. This coincidence was, obviously, unplanned.
There’s nothing truly vegetarian on the table. I stir food around and separate it with my fork. It is something like 111 degrees outside. Miguel is drinking beer in a rapidly condensing bottle. I could maybe kill him just for the dregs and feel no remorse, but I don’t even like beer. If I go out, it will be for something better than Corona.
We have looked at photo albums. Aunt Pilar is not lying about Miguel. He and his father could be the same man. I have seen very few photos of Papi—a fact that never concerned me much since he was only a reminder that the other children in the house were full siblings, whereas I thought of myself as something like a half blood, though technically I was no kind of sibling at all. Papi, in photos, looks like Miguel has put on period clothes and been filmed through gauzy light. His handsomeness is conspicuous, like a costume he was forced to wear everywhere. It may be because he is my brother, but Miguel, although beautiful, isn’t a particularly sexy guy . . . there’s something of Eeyore about him, some glum, shuffling, pessimistic quality that makes it hard to imagine him in sexual ecstasy. Papi, though—no. Papi smolders. He has a wicked, easy grin. The angles of his body are almost feminine in their grace; he has the habit of leaning on things in photos that makes him look languid and come-hither. He looks like a good time, not just in bed, but in general—the people standing with him in photos are always smiling in a spontaneous way, often looking at him. Nothing in these photos indicates that his children were starving, apparently eating sticks of butter to survive. Papi’s clothing is somehow both drab and debonair at once, as though in this period picture he’s been cast to play the poet revolutionary. He wrote poetry, Aunt Pilar has told us. She showed us some, though it was from his youth outside Havana, before he moved to Chicago or Venezuela. Miguel is spending a lot of time sitting on his hands.
“Eat,” Aunt Pilar urges me. “You’re too skinny!”
I think of Isabel, of the last time I saw her alive, a brittle stick about to crack. In her casket, her face and neck were swollen like melons overripe to splitting. I think of the sides of my ass that you grab and hold on to when we fuck—of the way you take my inner thighs inside your fists like you are crafting me from clay and every handful of me is precisely as you would form it. I say, “I’m not too skinny,” and Miguel says, “Well, if you’re dieting, fattie,” and starts shoveling my beans into his mouth without moving my plate in front of him.
“Grief,” Aunt Pilar says. “It is hard to eat. When your father died, our mother wasted away. Six months later she broke her hip and caught pneumonia in the hospital and that was the end. Javier was the sun around which our mother revolved. Always, even from South America. Her precious Javier.”
Miguel and I bob our heads. To some extent, we are both lost to the discourse about suffering mothers, about all-powerful motherlove.
“And what about your mother?” Aunt Pilar asks, furrowing her brows the way a stage actor would do to indicate concern or having eaten something unpleasant. “Did she and Isabel ever come to peace? Are you two
in contact with Wanda?”
I watch my brother’s eyes spring to life, almost like the rattling of a snake’s tail just as it prepares to strike. He’s woken up. He doesn’t care about the “water birds” anymore. I open my mouth to speak, and Miguel, very calmly, under the table so that Aunt Pilar cannot see, lays a hand on my thigh solidly, to silence me.
“Well,” he says slowly, as though measuring his words with great emotion. “We saw her at Isabel’s funeral, of course. It’s been very difficult, though.”
Aunt Pilar’s eyes shine. Prisms of the purple bench catch in the water of her eyes, or maybe I’m just starting to see things. My tongue tastes metallic, feels thick. It’s good Miguel is doing the talking because sometimes I can’t make words form when this starts, if something is starting. I should take an Abilify, but I don’t have one in my tote bag. Maybe my brain just feels like a wet rag because my brother is clearly up to something and I can’t tell what it is—his superior brain has left mine behind.
“You can probably imagine,” Miguel says. He is speaking in a tone I’ve never heard from his lips. Maybe you’d call it a “vulnerable” tone in a stage note. “I mean, Isabel practically raised us,” he says, and I kick his ankle not lightly under the table but he doesn’t flinch. “She protected us,” he says. “But then after she became so religious, she abandoned us, and I see—I hope you don’t mind my being this blunt, but I see from the dates of your letters, and when they all stopped, that she must have done the same to you. Lina and I were left without a mother.”
My heart pounds so hard it’s like a stopwatch in the middle of the table. What is he doing? What is he doing?
But Aunt Pilar reaches both plump, strangely smooth hands across the picnic bench, and Miguel and I quickly, like joining hands to pray around Mami and Carlos’s table, have to grasp her hands or lose whatever inexplicable moment Miguel has created.
“I loved Isabel as a daughter.” Tears roll down her face. Her eyebrows, I see now, arch identically to her brother’s and to Miguel’s; the effect is just different on a woman. “It tore me up when she told me her views on my . . . lifestyle . . . and stopped answering my letters. I was hurt and even angry—I’m sorry to say, angry—for a long time. I spent years meditating on it, and I understand better now. Isabel had not been given the freedom to choose. She spent her childhood covering up for your mother’s actions, facing loss after loss, and she needed the structure the church provided her. I am a believer, too—I tried to help her to understand that there is more than one way for faith to manifest. But such is the nature of the world, no? Everyone has a monopoly on faith. Everyone’s god hates everyone else’s. It broke my heart.”
“I’m surprised Isabel told you those things about our mother,” Miguel says, and for the first time, I understand clearly how he managed to get double promoted inside of a year of his move to Chicago, even though he barely spoke English. “Isabel was a deeply private woman, as you know. I didn’t think she had ever spoken of any of that with anyone but me. Lina knows, too, but not from Isabel—Isabel thought she was too young to handle the truth. But once she was grown, and Isabel had turned away from us, I thought Lina deserved to know her own past.”
It’s clear to me all at once. Miguel thinks Aunt Pilar is going to tell us who my father is.
“I’m so sorry,” Aunt Pilar says instead. “To have to wonder all these years if your mother got away with murder, and then was able to exile her own child because that child knew the truth. Isabel probably didn’t want to put Lina in danger.”
Miguel chokes on his beer. Aunt Pilar yelps, “Aye,” so identically to the way Mami says it that tears spring to my eyes—or maybe that has nothing to do with what is happening with my eyes, which have started to uncontrollably water, spilling down my face. My brother seems speechless, gaping—his plan has clearly been derailed and neither of us has any idea what’s going on. I’m crying like a ninny, and apparently this only lends credibility to whatever ball Miguel has set in motion, as Aunt Pilar strokes my hand tenderly. It is everything I have in me not to pull away, not to run from the table.
“That man they thought shot him,” Aunt Pilar begins, “he was nothing but a drunk. He had an alibi at whatever bar those men—your father among them—went to every night. He was there that very night, raving about Javier—about his wife bedding Javier, and I’m ashamed to say that everyone at the bar apparently knew this was true. They knew of this affair, and that the man’s wife was with child and it was Javier’s. The drunken man was shooting his mouth off—Wanda must have found out. Word travels quickly in such places.”
“But,” I begin, and I realize I need to say something to avoid tipping my hand. “I never really believed that story, Aunt Pilar. It sounds like some folk legend. If the man had an alibi in the bar, how would Mami have heard so quickly that she ran over to Papi’s house and shot him? With what gun? She didn’t even have a car.”
“I don’t claim to know,” Aunt Pilar says. “Only that it’s what Isabel believed, and is why she fled the house and was living on the street instead of going to your mother.”
“Then why wasn’t Mami ever arrested?” I demand, angry now. Not at Mami, to be clear—my pseudo mother barely has it in her to kill a housefly; she didn’t have it in her to protect her children; she didn’t have it in her to stop her husband from beating her or drinking; she is a wringer of hands, a weeper of crocodile tears, and also, fuck you, Isabel, you spiteful lying bitch, a peaceful, gentle woman. But Isabel already threw Mami under the bus to Ezme, passing her off as a whore who bore me out of wedlock. Why not a husband killer, too?
Aunt Pilar merely shrugs. “Caracas,” she says. “Who understands? Maybe the old woman your mother was living with gave her an alibi, just like the men at the bar gave the drunk his. Maybe Javier’s mistress had no alibi—maybe it was her. But your sister claimed it was your mother. She said the man had come by waving his gun, but Javier wrestled it away from him easily, and then when your mother arrived, there was the gun, poised for Wanda to act. It wasn’t premeditated, Isabel said, and your mother didn’t know Isabel was in the house. Then Isabel had to run, and she kept running until the police found her.”
Miguel and I sit, stunned. Whatever artifice and smoothness we were collectively mustering is gone.
“So wait,” Miguel begins at last. “So . . . you say my father was shot in our house, with Isabel right there in our old bedroom hiding? You say it was the gun of some man who later gets an alibi from fellow cronies at the bar, or maybe his wife did it, but Isabel says our mother did it . . . you’re saying . . . just . . . holy shit.” My brother’s head sinks into his hands. “There was no bridge, is what you’re saying. Nobody’s car, in this story, goes off any bridge.”
Aunt Pilar looks at us with surprise. “This isn’t Hollywood,” she says. “No, no bridge.”
MIGUEL
Miguel’s body bobs like a buoy: on autopilot, senseless. As long as he stays out here in the ocean, he doesn’t have to go back there. To the women. Neither Aunt Pilar nor Lina has accompanied him to the beach, so theoretically he is safe from them even on his flimsy towel on the sand, but it wasn’t enough. He felt driven—almost pursued—into and under the water: the imperative to submerge, to block everything out. Lina’s neediness for answers that are impossible to excavate, Aunt Pilar’s crack-brained theories, are as relentless as the sun. He knows he should call Mami and say, Hey, what the living hell—did you shoot my father? But of course that is preposterous. Mami did no such thing. In his grief over Isabel, in the unwelcome chaos of Guerra urban legends, Miguel isn’t sure he’s ever been more exhausted in his life.
Clearly he and Lina should have stayed home.
Clearly, going on some investigative mission to visit a family member of his crazy, violent father could not have been expected to yield anything . . . easy. Anything good. Poor Aunt Pilar doesn’t deserve his evasion—he and Lina came looking for her, and she has been remarkably hospitable, open, even lovi
ng. Especially considering that she seems to believe their mother is a killer. Their. Even that’s a lie. Aunt Pilar clearly has no clue that Lina is Isabel’s daughter, which is the one thing Miguel had assumed she would know. How does one embark on a fact-finding mission when “facts” are relative?
The waves. His body, bobbing. Spinning: shore, horizon, shore.
In two months, Miguel will be a father. Back in Chicago, that is Chad’s problem for the moment. Chad, who is ministering to Emily like a wounded bird, who talks to their surrogate—Miguel’s high school friend—far more often than he talks to Miguel, and who can blame him? Emily is kind; Emily is cheerful and interested and doesn’t rub salt in everything she touches. But Miguel was right from the get-go that Guerras should not be allowed to breed. With all the focus on what it took for a gay couple to have a child—on their right to have a child—somehow Miguel lost sight of the fact that his family tree is rotten from the roots, and everything it grows is poison. Isabel knew, but she distracted herself with fairy tales about sin and hell. She couldn’t face that god doesn’t have to be real for their family to be doomed.
Even the ocean feels a little ominous today. The current is strong for the onset of May. Miguel is a confident swimmer, though, even if his swim team days in high school were mainly a ruse to see other boys in speedos and naked in the locker room. Still, he life-guarded one summer for the eye candy, and actually saved a life one day, a kid: for years afterward, whenever he felt worthless he would go back to that day and remind himself that if he had never been born, the kid would be dead. But of course that was a false dichotomy: if Miguel had never been born, there would just have been some other Chicago teenager perched on the Foster Beach lifeguard chair, who most likely would, also, have rescued the kid. Only now, of his impending progeny, can Miguel finally say with certitude that if: I had never been born or I had committed suicide, then: this child would never have existed.
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