The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  And suddenly Mia was there, pawing my bare leg, scratching me with her blunted claws.

  “Go away,” I whispered.

  She yipped and spun in circles. She knew she wasn’t allowed on the bed, but she wouldn’t leave. She kept scratching at my knees and ankles.

  “Mia. No!”

  She wouldn’t take no for an answer. Dancing with urgency, demanding to be noticed, she kept throwing herself on her back like she wanted me to pat her belly and pick her up. She insisted that I receive this love she was determined to give me. She pawed and licked and rubbed her face against me until I put the pills back in the bottle and sank down on the floor and held her, shaking like a leaf. She licked the tears streaming down my face and badgered me with affection until I was laughing and crying at the same time.

  When people ask me where my passion for animal rescue came from, I can trace it directly to this moment. Mia saved my life. If Mia hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been there the next day or the day after that. Or months later, when I finally started to feel like myself again. Or years later, when Gia finally found me.

  Amiir’s gift to me was motherhood. He taught me what a privilege it is to love someone more than you love yourself. He showed me that I was capable of sacrificing my own heart to protect my child. Amiir made a mommy of me.

  That was his gift to Gia.

  So now you know what happened. To me, anyway. What happened to me and my son. I can’t speak for my husband or describe what this experience was for him. I can only tell you what I observed through the haze of my own pain:

  Imagine a skydiver leaps from an airplane. He has the best equipment and does everything right. At first, there’s euphoria. He sees so clearly—blue sky, green earth, beauty without limit, a higher perspective. He has absolute faith that he’ll land safely and be a better man than he was before. But it turns out his parachute is tangled. He struggles to fix it, but the chute tears away and disappears into the sky. Panic grabs him by the throat, but still—faith. He has his faith. In free fall, he flails, trying to pray, but the force of gravity takes his breath away. He sees the hard ground coming at him, and he knows that if he survives this, he will never be the same.

    ten

  My husband wrote many songs inspired by or dedicated to our son. One that still wrecks me after all these years is “Comeback.” It’s the voice of Amiir’s daddy, alone with the echoed versions of himself, accompanied only by the quiet acoustic guitar I love.

  sweet wind blew not a moment 2 soon

  I cried when I realized that sweet wind was you

  In the unresolved chords at the end of this song, you can hear this man’s love for his child. It was bigger than him. We loved each other, but this child—we loved this child. He was everything to us. We would have done anything for him.

  “I smell him,” I told my husband.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. In the air when I wake up. I smell him. Like my senses can’t accept he’s gone.”

  “Don’t say gone. He’ll come back.”

  “He will. I know he will.”

  as sure as the candle burns

  every soul must return

  I begged him to put me under and talk to me about it, but he wouldn’t do that anymore. The deep connection created a door he was afraid to open now. We clung to our faith in eternal life and the great journey of the soul. We lay in the dark, talking about where Amiir might be now and how we could bring him back.

  We didn’t wait to try to get pregnant again, but this ordeal had left my spirit so empty, it didn’t surprise me at all when my period came each month, my body telling me it wasn’t time yet. My body was doing everything a woman’s body is supposed to do after she gives birth to a baby, but nature designed all that with a baby in mind. My hormones were speedballing, and my breasts ached, even after the milk was gone—and the milk wasn’t completely gone for a long time. I’d wake up from a dream about Amiir and find it soaking my shirt and the sheets.

  I’d been around the military all my life, so I knew about post-traumatic stress syndrome—shell shock, they used to call it—but it never occurred to me that there are all kinds of battlefields in this world. Now I see so clearly that we were both scarred and suffering for years, because we didn’t know how to deal with it in the moment. I was a zombie for months. It was hard for me to see past my own pain long enough to understand what was going on with my husband. Even if I could have, he was not the type of guy you can bring chicken soup to when he’s sick. He wasn’t accessible that way. As his wife, I could get closer than a girlfriend, but even after I had the phone numbers, there was a point of Do Not Enter. There were times when I knew better than to intrude. As cliché as it is for sexy older men to date younger women, I think his preference was more than physical; it was about the power balance. He didn’t like to be argued with. He wasn’t used to someone banging on the door and saying, “I’m coming in! I don’t care what you say.”

  Before we were married, he wrote to me:

  A secret—when have a disagreement with someone—it’s usually only one. Then they’re gone. don’t mind them (disagreement) with u because know we’ll always be 2gether. Although hate 2 fight, hope we are both better souls from the exercise. That’s how look at it—as exercise… The toning of the heart muscle so it’s strong and able 2 withstand anything when I’m a father!

  I’m going 2 be one u know. When ’m ready! ’m glad u’re young cuz u can wait 4 me. Well hope u do. only want your kids! We’re so much alike, it’s inevitable.

  If fighting was “exercise,” the last year of our marriage was a Spin class from hell, but there was a long stretch before that when I truly believed we’d be all right.

  At first, the best we could do was pretend to be all right. We didn’t know how to do this, so we just kept trudging forward, walking wounded, trying to look like everything was normal. Everyone has their own way of mourning, and my husband’s way of dealing with anything painful was work. Creating music and playing it for people—that was the only solid ground he’d ever known. A few days before the Oprah interview aired, “Betcha by Golly Wow!” was released. He had recorded the song while I was pregnant and started working on the music video in the aftermath.

  His vision for this video involved children, as many of his videos did, dancers in white alphabet unitards that spelled out “betcha by golly wow,” a gymnast, and this whole very charming dance, all cut into a storyline about hurrying into the ER, where I’m sitting on an exam-room gurney in a hospital gown. At the end, when he finally gets to me, we embrace with joy, and you get that we’ve just learned I’m pregnant. It’s beautifully done. Incredibly sweet. People loved it, and everyone has always naturally assumed that this sentimental moment was captured while I was pregnant.

  It wasn’t.

  It was done in early November 1996, only a few weeks after we lost Amiir.

  When he told me about this idea and said he wanted to shoot the scenes at the hospital where Amiir had recently died, I wanted to shake him. I wanted to slap him and say, “Are you serious right now?” The idea of going back into that hospital made my legs feel weak. But he was so earnest about this vision. He wanted to return to a moment when he felt complete joy, complete faith, complete love, and he wanted to take me with him.

  I can look at it now and see the sweetness of it, but for a long time, I couldn’t look at it at all. I did it for the same reason I did Oprah: I didn’t know what else I could do to help him. If nothing else, I wanted to be in the same room with him. If that room was Studio B, fine. If it was our bedroom, even better. This man was my family now, and I was his. If he’d asked me to drive off a cliff with him, I would have done it.

  Mama had put off the surgery to remove a large tumor from her uterus as long as she could, but I urged her not to postpone it any longer. Having gained a whole new appreciation for Mama, I was determined to be there for her. I arrived at the hospital to find that, because the surgery was gynecologica
l, they had her in the maternity ward. The hospital was hard. This was too much. My husband found me sobbing about it and said, “We’ll get her a nurse. She can go home, and you can be with her.”

  The official release of Emancipation was also happening in November, and a huge part of the PR push was his live appearance on Oprah, so my husband went to Chicago to do the live portion of her show. He went on to do as many performances as he could wedge in for the next several weeks. I was relieved to see Emancipation quickly climb the charts—to number eleven in the United States and Top 20 in the United Kingdom. I knew it would do his heart good. So much of his vision for the future was riding on that release and the independent distribution deal he’d struck with EMI.

  He left on tour, which was a form of escape for him. Now it’ll hit him, I thought, and I worried about him riding alone on the bus and brooding in a hotel room in the dark hours before dawn. In mid-December, he canceled two shows, which is something he never did. When I went to talk to him about it, I found wine spilled on the rug in the hallway and vomit on the bathroom floor. I knew he was struggling. I knew he was in pain. But I was struggling myself. I never told him about my thoughts of suicide or how close I had come to actually doing it. The moment Mia saved me from myself remained a secret between her and me. I didn’t want my husband to worry about me, but I started to think he knew, because my Vicodin kept disappearing. The prescription would be filled, and a few days later, most of the pills would be gone. I assumed he was hiding them to keep me from hurting myself. In retrospect, I don’t know what to think.

  At that time in our life, he alienated a lot of people. As I got back into the business of living, I’d go to New York to visit Jan or I’d go to Miami to hang out with my mother, but it was unusual for them to come to Minneapolis. We rarely had guests unless it was work-related, and my husband was gone a lot of the time. It felt so strange to not be working, to be sitting there alone.

  The tabloid coverage of our loss rubbed salt in the wound. While the celebrity news cycle hadn’t yet reached the frenzied fever pitch of today, it was still in overdrive—and as one of the biggest pop stars in the world, my husband—and our tragedy—got a lot of play in some of the sleaziest media out there. One day at the grocery store, I was standing in line trying not to look at the twisted headlines, and some well-meaning idiot said to me, “Did you have your baby yet?” I left my tampons and Advil on the conveyor belt and cried in my car. The tabloids were full of speculation and ugly rumors. I’m not even going to address all that here. It was devastating.

  Creating music was my husband’s solid ground; dancing was mine. It’s not like I could just slide back into my skinny jeans like nothing had happened. I’d gained over eighty pounds while I was pregnant. Forty of that disappeared immediately, because extreme fluid retention was one of the symptoms that indicated serious problems with the pregnancy; it had been the first real warning sign that something was terribly wrong. The rest of that weight came from the normal weight gain of pregnancy, combined with months of inactivity. I refused to beat myself up about it, but I had to work it off.

  I’m built like my dad, with a body builder’s musculature. It served me well when I was dancing hard seven days a week, but as I lay in the hospital, I could feel myself getting softer every day. I had planned for this, but my plan was to go to work out with a personal trainer while Amiir giggled in his bassinet nearby. I planned to hike with him on my back and teach him to swim and play, play, play all day. Instead I was alone, trying to rebuild my body like a house after a hurricane.

  Christmas came and went, but we hardly noticed it. I told Mama, “Sometimes couples need a break. So this is going to be our break, and we’ll get strong again. We’ll find each other.”

  He wanted the same thing. On our first anniversary, February 14, 1997, he released Kamasutra, the music he’d composed for our wedding with the NPG Orchestra. I listened to it over and over and felt myself coming out of this thick fog of grief I’d been trying to find my way through. I listened to the new music he was working on, and it was full of love for me and Amiir. We agreed that we needed to go somewhere, make a place for just the two of us, far away from the business and the tabloids and the demands—a place we could retreat to and have another baby surrounded by peace and music and privacy. We considered Hawaii, but they said I’d have to leave Mia in quarantine for six months, and that was not happening.

  “What about Egypt?” he asked, and I was into that idea right away. My memories of Egypt—going all the way back to my childhood—were filled with mystic connection, more beauty than a pair of eyes could take in, and the rich scent of dreams coming true.

  “There would be a bit of culture shock,” I said, “but I would love to live there. And maybe we could do some good, you know? When I was a kid, the first thing was this culture shock. I’d never seen such poverty. The children run around, and their hair is light brown with dust. They’re out at midnight, because they swap times in the house. They rotate times to be out on the street. I mean, I’d come home and kiss the soil, grateful for what we have, and I do have a problem with the way women are treated, but I’ve always felt a connection to the music, the architecture, the people. There’s an energy there that I’ve never felt anywhere else.”

  He’d been soul-searching, reading books on various religions, consuming one thick tome after another on Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. He wanted me to read with him and discuss all the different types of scripture, and that was a conversation I was into. I was curious to learn about the world beyond the boundaries of my grandmother’s strict Catholic faith.

  He asked me about the Muslims in Egypt, and I said, “There’s something about it that appeals to me. I hear the music and the prayers, and it seems natural. Comforting. I never felt out of place there. You hear this amazing singing, and everything stops, and the people pray. I’ve been stranded on planes because it was prayer time.”

  “They stop to pray,” he said. “To observe that practice—to prioritize that in your life—it would change everything.”

  We decided to go house hunting that spring. While he continued touring, I went ahead to make arrangements. When he arrived, I took him everywhere. We bought oils in the marketplace, visited the musical instrument shops on Mohammed Ali Street, and sat in the nightclubs watching the belly dancers. We got henna tattoos on our hands and walked around the Great Pyramids. We looked at houses and visited mosques and ruins.

  At the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, we stood for a long time, looking at Akhenaten and Nefertiti, listening to the tour guide’s short version of their great love story. Akhenaten had desperately wanted a son, but Nefertiti gave him six daughters, so he had a male child with someone simply known as “The Younger Woman.” But his undying love for Nefertiti overcame her wrath. He raised her up as an equal, and together they revolutionized Egypt and changed the world.

  We stood there for a long time, taking it all in, fate and coincidence swirling around us. It wasn’t just that we looked like these people or the fact that they were called Children of the Sun by some. We felt connected to them in a way we couldn’t explain or speak about to anyone but each other. It was profound. It was real. We didn’t want to leave that room, and when we finally did, it was because we needed to be alone together in private.

  When we came home, it was as if we’d started a new life together, reborn to each other. We’d found each other again, and the miracle of that made us laugh and love each other even more. He had created a beautiful office for me right next to his office on the second floor, and I loved occupying it along with Mia and a tankful of tropical fish, all of whom had names, including Larry the Starfish. Outside the door, the doves were always billing and cooing softly.

  I went in every morning feeling loved and creative and energized, and I started tracking my temperature with a basal thermometer. My spirit felt ready to have another baby, and I wanted to make sure my body didn’t miss any opportunities.

 
In April, EMI/Capitol shut down, which pretty much screwed my husband’s distribution deal, and that was a bitter disappointment, but he was already on to the next thing—the Newpower Soul album and rehearsals for the Jam of the Year Tour—because moving on to the next thing was always his defense mechanism of choice. He had another batch of songs he’d pulled from the vault, and those were coming together on a project called Crystal Ball. He was also hanging around with Clive Davis, the president of Arista, engaged in the early stages of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, and I have to say, Clive had the best take on the never-ending question, “What do you call him?”

  “It’s like when you get married,” said Clive. “You can’t call your father-in-law ‘Dad’—that’s awkward—so you run around, looking for substitutions, and then you end up just saying ‘Hi.’”

  For a long time I’d wanted to do a major project of my own, and I felt ready. Ever since I saw the Joffrey Ballet interpret some of his music, I’d been thinking I’d like to form a dance company and take that idea to the next level.

  I told my husband, “I want to do something like the Joffrey did, but I want to make it even better.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” he said. “Tell me what you need.”

  “Just give me the music.”

  I sat dancer style on the floor in front of my fish tank with thirty Prince, , and New Power Generation CDs spread out on the carpet in front of me. This was only a fraction of my husband’s enormous body of work. In addition to all this music and everything still on the shelf and in the vault, he’d written a play and an opera, and he’d created the NPG Orchestra to do the music for our wedding. He’d always wanted to do something on Broadway. And then there was Kamasutra. I looked at the image of myself dancing on the cover. My shadow was the symbol that was now his name. This music was moving and told a story about a love affair between a rock star and a ballerina.