“Okay.”
“Do you understand? She gave birth to her baby at her house, but left the hospital with me. Not knowing I wasn’t their son. She had no idea her biological child was…”
“Where?”
“We don’t know. We didn’t know any of this until last October, when we did DNA kits for fun. My sister won them in a silent auction, we did it for laughs, already knowing what the results would be. But when the kits came back, my parents, sister and brother all matched up, but I was this crazy blend of Italian and Spanish. My father is Jewish, but I had no Jewish ancestry at all. None. We thought it was a mistake. We took the test all over again but it came back the same way. Nothing matched. They weren’t my real parents.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“And then,” Jude said. “Oh God, there’s so much to tell.”
He looked helplessly at Tej, who, lost in the Spanish, just held up his sign higher.
“My father was fucked up in the Villa Grimaldi. Six weeks of beatings and torture. The DINA guards dumped him in the street and drove over him with their jeep. They broke every bone in both his legs. He never walked normally again.”
“Jesus, I’m so sorry,” Alex said, the tight, angry knot of his voice finally unwinding. “I don’t understand how this… Never mind, go on. Your father was released, what then?”
“We got on a ship in Valparaiso and sailed back to Vancouver, where my mother’s father lived. We stayed there until I was seventeen and then we moved to Seattle. This was my life story. I had no reason to think otherwise. None of us did. When my parents found all this out, when they found out their baby was taken or switched or given away, they—”
“But where is their baby?”
“We don’t know. We only started looking. I just found you tonight.”
“Oh my God, what the fuck happened?”
“Where are you, where am I calling?”
“New York. I live about two hours north of Manhattan.”
“How did you get out of Chile?”
“I had an uncle in the States already. We had our papers all ready to leave but then my father was arrested. First him, then my mother. Our mother. Jesus, I can’t get my head around this.”
“Right? I’m freaking the fuck out. So, they were arrested but what happened to you?”
“I hid in the apartment.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten. Almost eleven. Papi got out somehow. He came back for me and took me to the American embassy. He made me leave without him because he needed to look for my mother. I never saw him again. Never knew what became of him and Mami until last year when my DNA matched up with the remains they found at Patio Twenty-Nine.”
“This is crazy. Are you married?”
“I’m married. My wife’s name is Valerie and we have a daughter.”
“I have a niece?” Jude practically shouted it, with no idea why this struck him as miraculous.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” Alex said. “I’ve been wondering about you my whole life.”
“I had no idea. I’m sorry.” As the words left his mouth Jude was swamped, inundated with a remorse that didn’t seem to belong to him, yet it squatted in his heart and took up defiant residence.
“Wondering if that baby survived,” Alex was saying. “If I had a sibling in the world who didn’t even…”
“Alejandro, lo siento.” Jude sank to one knee. Then to both. “I didn’t know.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“I’m sorry.” He couldn’t understand why he felt like an utter failure.
Tej crawled over. He put his back to the couch and pulled Jude between his knees like a bobsledder, squeezing Jude between his legs and holding him tight against his chest.
“I got you,” he whispered. “It’s all right.”
“Alejandro, lo siento mucho,” Jude said, and then he couldn’t anymore. He wasn’t crying, he was just unable to go on. His fingers opened and the phone nearly toppled. Tej caught it just in time.
“Hi, my name’s Tej, I’m…” A pause. “Alex?” Another pause. “Hello?”
A long pause now. And then Tej started laughing softly. “Hi, Val. It’s nice to meet you. I know, right? It’s unbelievable. I know. I’m crying, too. No, no, tell him to take his time. We could use a minute over here and— What’s that? A minute and a drink, no shit. This is incredible…”
Penny cried when Jude called her back. She put Cleon on speaker and he cried.
Serena cried. Hewan and Bert cried.
Tej was a mess.
Jude was dry-eyed and numb. And wondering what the hell was wrong with him when an email came in from Alex.
Jude,
Last year, when I got the call that my our parents’ remains had been identified, I thought I knew what “surreal” meant. When I read the DNA report, when I finally held those urns and touched those ashes, I thought nothing would ever shock or surprise or shake me up again.
Wrong.
This is the most surreal night of my life. I can’t stop shaking. I can’t stop saying “I can’t believe it.” I keep walking around the house, twitching and telling the furniture, “I can’t believe it.” The dog is looking at me like I’m nuts and Val’s putting orange cones around my desk.
God, I don’t even know how to explain what’s in my head tonight. I’ve been wondering about you my whole life. If I’d had the first clue what happened when you were born, I would’ve never stopped looking. I would’ve taken the world apart. But of course, I had no clues. I couldn’t begin to look. But I never stopped wondering.
You have been with me every day of my life since I was eleven. I rarely talked about it, rarely voiced it aloud, but every day, I imagined you. Both as a brother and a sister. I wondered if you were out there. I wondered if you knew who you were or if you had even the slightest feeling you didn’t quite belong where you were. Mostly, I just hoped to God you were all right. Every day of my life. And it’s like a whole new life starts tonight.
I don’t know if you’ll ever know what it means to finally find you. I can’t believe it.
I cannot. Fucking. Believe. It.
Attaching a picture. Christ, it was like I was creating a dating profile, the way I agonized about which one to send. Finally Val threw me out of the chair and picked it herself. Story of my life. I can’t wait for you to meet her and Deane. I can’t wait to meet you.
You.
Holy shit, you. Are you real??
This is insane.
Please send me your picture. I won’t sleep until I see your face. Who am I kidding, I might not ever sleep again…
A JPEG file was attached.
“Holy shit, look at that,” Tej said.
At the first sight of his brother, Jude didn’t burst into tears. He exploded. His entire life—his birth, his name, his height, his near-sighted blue eyes, his dimples, his broken bones, his blood, his genes, his DNA… It all socked him like a punch to the heart and came pouring out his eyes and nose. He cried until he thought his face would fall off.
“Look,” Tej was still saying, one forearm crossed around Jude from behind, the other pointing wildly. “Would you fucking look at that?”
Jude’s gaze was clogged with tears but he had no trouble seeing himself within Alex’s face. In the shape of the forehead and the line of the eyebrows. How the ears stuck out a little. The dimples. The tilt of the eyes behind glasses and the curl of the smile.
My God, it’s my smile.
He opened the other attachments. Snapshots in black and white or faded Kodachrome. Then Jude fell apart all over again, trying to simultaneously reach out and embrace his people while holding onto the loyalty to his people. Constantly choosing from a dropdown menu of vindication and guilt, joy and sad
ness, wonder and shame.
Here was Clementina Vilaró, dimpled and devilish.
“Her smile,” Jude cried. “Look at it. Look at her. Both me and Alex have our mother’s smile.”
Mami, I’m sorry, not you, you’re my mother you’re always my mother, but…
Here was Eduardo Penda, tall and bespectacled, with an air of shyness.
“Look at him. Look at his eyes. That’s my father. I look like just like my father.”
Papi, my compañero, you’re my only father and I don’t want to be anyone else’s son, but…
But.
But look.
Look at them.
“I can see it,” Jude said. Over and over, picture after picture. “I can see me. Jesus fucking Christ, do you see it?”
“I see it.”
As they gaped over the shots, another email came in from Alex: This is the one and only family portrait. August 1973. (I’m ten.)
In the attached picture, Alex stood between his parents, mugging for the camera. Eduardo’s arm was around his shoulders. His head tilted a little toward Clementine, who was pregnant.
“Oh my God.” Jude barely breathed as his finger reached to touch that round belly. An overhead light switched on, lighting up an Andean Mother Earth in a diamond sky. Her arms legs and hair swirling around the glowing orb of life she carried within.
“Jesus, that’s you,” Tej said.
Over and over, Jude’s fingertip traced the arc of his mother’s stomach.
There I am. I’m in there. I’m right there.
They talked every day. Emails and phone calls and texts. Pictures going back and forth, life stories told. In between, they endeavored to re-examine the research and the clues and the history, trying to determine where Jude could’ve been born.
“My father was arrested on October tenth,” Alex said. “Our father, I mean.”
“Let’s just leave the pronouns alone,” Jude said. “I won’t be offended if you won’t. We know who we mean.”
“He was arrested and taken to the Estadio Nacional. Four days later, maybe five, the soldiers came in the middle of the night and took my mother. The date is a little fuzzy in my head because I wasn’t paying much attention to time.”
“Of course not.”
“When I tell the story, I say I was in the apartment alone for a week. Was it precisely seven days? I couldn’t say. But my father came back and found me. He took me to the embassy and handed me over. I arrived in the States on October twenty-fourth. I had to surrender my Chilean passport when I became an American citizen, but I know for a fact the entry stamp was dated the twenty-fourth. It’s on all my legal paperwork.”
“The birth date on all my papers is November twenty-fifth,” Jude said. “I’m not going to stop celebrating, but I’m trying to accept the fact it might not be my actual birthday.”
“I hear you. I’m trying to manage expectations. The chances of us finding a piece of official documentation showing when and where you were born, are slim to none.”
“Do you have any knowledge of your parents’ whereabouts after you left the country?”
“My father’s assistant, Milagros, kept in touch for a while. There was one sighting of Papi back at the Estadio Nacional. And one of my mother at the Villa Grimaldi.”
“When was that?”
“Maybe at the very end of November? I definitely remember it being after my first American Thanksgiving. I read the letter from Milagros sitting by a Christmas tree.”
They looked it up on the Internet—Thanksgiving 1973 was on November 22nd.
“I could’ve been already born,” Jude said. “Clementina could’ve given birth to me in the Estadio. Then I was transferred to Hospital del Salvador while she was taken to Villa Grimaldi.”
He told Alex about the conversation with Roberta Cáceres, how her mother witnessed a woman give birth in the swimming locker rooms of the Estadio. The recurring nightmare it triggered, with its vivid imagery and pervasive smell of chlorine.
“Or you could’ve been born in Villa Grimaldi,” Alex said. “We just don’t know.”
“But the Villa is all the way out in La Reina,” Jude said. “If I was born there, wouldn’t it make more sense for me to be taken to Hospital Militar, which was five minutes away?”
“True,” Alex said. “You’re right.”
Frustration like a beast roared in the silence, constantly upsetting the pieces Jude was trying to assemble into a truth he could live with.
What the hell happened?
But then, inevitably, it would occur to one that he was actually, for real, talking to the other.
“I don’t believe I found you,” Alex would mutter.
Or, “I can’t believe this is happening,” Jude would say.
They nearly always talked on speakerphone, Alex’s family chiming in as they passed through. Tej wandered in and out, interjecting, chatting, contributing. Jude couldn’t have made it clearer they were lovers and partners and Alex made no comment, other than to ask how long they’d been together and how they met.
“I want to meet you soon,” Alex said. “I want this to happen.”
“I might bring Tej with me,” Jude said.
“I want him, too.”
Jude and Tej walked out of the baggage claim and into the throng of waiting chauffeurs and loved ones. Tej had the video on his phone running. Jude was sure he was going to pass out any moment. His eyes swept the crowd, seeing everyone and no one. Then his eyes locked onto teenage girl he recognized from pictures and video calls. With one hand, she held her phone high. In the other was a hand-lettered sign:
¡¡TIO JULEÓN!!
!!UNCLE JUDE!!
(!!HOLY SHIT!!)
“Dude,” Tej mumbled. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in person.”
The girl was flanked on one side by a blonde woman and the other by…
“Oh fuck me,” Jude whispered, walking toward his brother, now the only face he saw. A stunned, half-open mouth. Eyes swimming with tears. Dimples winking in and out of sight. Arms held wide and glasses dangling from one clenched fist.
“Por Dios, no me lo creo,” he said, shaking his head.
Look how tall he is, Jude thought stupidly. He let his backpack topple off his shoulder onto the ground and walked straight into the embrace.
“Oh my God,” Alex said, dropping his glasses and holding Jude’s head in his hands. “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jude said, tossing aside his own glasses now.
Two pairs of myopic eyes stared. They kissed each other’s faces—left cheek, right cheek, left again. Then stood wrapped in arms, hands fisted tight in jackets and shirts.
I can feel your heartbeat, Jude thought.
“I knew it,” Alex whispered. “I knew you were alive. I knew you were somewhere.”
“¿En serio?”
“No.” A sniffling laugh. “I’m full of shit, I had no idea. I believed it was possible but I figured the chances were nil.”
“I can’t believe it and I’m standing right here.”
I can feel your heartbeat. A heart pumping blood. Blood filled with cells. Cells containing millions of strands of DNA.
And all of it matches mine.
“I keep thinking about the last time I saw you,” Alex said. “I mean, sort of you. After our father was arrested, I slept with Mami in her bed. Right up next to her big belly.”
Your heart against my heart. Born of the same woman.
“I’d put my face against it all the time. Hear a million things going on in there. I couldn’t see you but I could hear you. That was the last time… Ah, fuck, here I go again. I’m going to be crying for a year and a half, I swear.”
Jude squeezed him. “I’m sorry.”
�
�You don’t—”
“Just let me be sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”
“I know,” Jude said. “I don’t understand why I need to say it, but I do.”
“It’s all right.”
“I had no idea. I had no fucking idea who I was.”
Jude the Obscure.
“Mine,” Alex said, roughly taking Jude’s head again and pressing their brows together. “You’re mine and I can’t believe I found you.”
“I didn’t know I was lost.”
Hidden in plain sight.
“Come meet my wife and daughter.”
Deane, Val and Tej stood in a circle of held hands and arms around shoulders, chattering and laughing like they met in kindergarten.
“Cosita, ven aquí,” Alex called.
“Holy crap, Dad, you have a mini-me.” Deane gave Jude a hug thick with perfume. “Look at him.”
“Look at me.”
“I’m Deane.”
“Hi, Deane,” Jude said, swiping his soaked face on his sleeve.
“Her middle name is Vilaró,” Alex added.
“And I’m Val,” the blonde woman said. “My middle name is Holy Shit.”
“We’re keeping her,” Tej said. “She’s my best friend now. Dibs. I touched her.”
Val whacked his shoulder as if he were a little brother, then opened arms to Jude. Her embrace smelled more subtle. A hand touched the back of Jude’s head as she rocked both of them side to side. “You have no idea,” she said. “No idea what this means to him.”
“I want to find out.”
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You did the most important thing.” She held him away and mopped the tears dripping down his face again. “You let yourself be found.”
The town of Guelisten spread like a picture postcard on the east bank of the Hudson River. Alex led a walking tour through the pretty streets, showing Jude the house where their uncle Felipe Penda lived. Followed by the house where Val grew up and where Alex had been taken in after Felipe’s death, raised and loved like a son.
A Scarcity of Condors Page 32