You don’t know this, I read in my father’s email, but you have a brother.
My eyes moved down the screen.
There was an address. An address not far from our apartment. A quick jaunt down the 280. My breath came faster and shallower. There was a name. Renzo. The same name as my father. I could still hear the mumble of conversation in the next room, but a sound like ocean waves in my ears was roaring. An adult brother. In the United States. The sun sliced through the window, an irritant to my eyes, which were suddenly stinging.
Brother.
And then I was standing in the living room where the three of them—Dave, my grandmother, my grandfather—were lined up on the couch, that same couch where we had agreed to get married a year earlier, the same couch that we had picked out in Berkeley but that had been delivered late when it had fallen off the delivery truck. I wondered if we had received a replacement couch or if they had repaired this one. You never really know the provenance of things outside your line of vision.
Dave and my grandparents watched me hyperventilate.
“I have—” I gasped as if I were at high altitude in air depleted of oxygen. They stared at me, unable to guess what I was trying to say.
“I have—” I tried again. I felt like a caricature of a human, like Saturday morning cartoons.
“I have a brother.”
Dave was the first one to move. He stood up, and a bag materialized into which I breathed for several moments. The rough paper, as brown and wrinkled as my father’s skin, rattled with each breath. My grandparents didn’t say much. They knew the stories were complicated.
13
The quick, shallow intakes of breath typical of hyperventilation saturate the body with oxygen—too much of a good thing. The paper bag, I learned later, helps to even out the carbon dioxide in the blood. The next day, after my grandparents had returned to their RV, I thumbed through my old address book searching for the country code and meaningless digits that would connect my father’s world to mine. I almost never called him. First it was because I didn’t have a phone number, then I blamed it on the cost of long-distance phone calls. Once I had phoned after news reports of an earthquake near his city of Popayán, but he had been fine, and I hadn’t called again. Until now.
I entered in the country code and the string of numbers. On the rare occasions that he contacted me, Ceci generally placed the call. I would first speak in Spanish with a Colombian operator, who would say my name with her fluid accent, then I would be connected with the tinny voice of Ceci rattling off something to the operator, who would leave the line. Ceci put my father on the phone.
“My dear,” he said, his voice expectant.
I told him I had received his email.
“He wants to meet you,” my father said.
He. Despite having a name and an address, I couldn’t really comprehend a person who would be given the title of brother.
I thought of my unruly stepbrothers and the first summer we had lived in our house. They had taught me to play baseball with ghost runners. I was thirteen, a Little Women and Anne of Green Gables kind of girl, and knew nothing about baseball and even less about brothers. They had led me out into the vast backyard of our new joint home, where a tall pine tree called to me to be climbed. One of my stepbrothers had the fat plastic bat, the other a couple of orange plastic cones for bases. The late-summer sunset slanted through the climbing tree’s branches, and a few mosquitoes made their presence known. The grass needed cutting (a job my stepfather would eventually delegate to me, one of the countless reasons to despise him) and scratched my ankles when I swung at the Wiffle ball. I was two and four years older than they were, but they could each hit with more accuracy than I ever could or would.
“You hit,” the older one explained to me, “and run to first base.”
The younger one stepped in front of his older brother and in the process got closer to me than I liked. “If you don’t get out,” he interrupted, his voice quick and high-pitched with excitement, “your ghost runner holds your place at the base and you hit again.”
The older one jostled for his place back, impatient to begin. “Okay? Got it?”
Having never been to a baseball game or even watched one on TV, I didn’t really get it. My mother had had the luxury as a single parent to introduce me only to the things she cared about. I had gone to folk festivals and art museums. I often went along with her to see Garrison Keillor’s live radio show A Prairie Home Companion, long before it became a national institution. I trailed behind her as she explored art fairs, and I obligingly studied animals in the zoo. We spent weekends at her parents’ cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota, where she taught me how to paddle a canoe and jump off a dock. But she never took me to arenas or stadiums or tuned into broadcast games on summer evenings.
But I loved the idea of ghost runners—that there was a spirit out there who could take your place if needed, stand in for you, help you get ahead and win the game. Maybe ghosts are more appealing to only children, who are so accustomed to being alone. Ghosts were perhaps an extension of the affinity I had developed for companions I couldn’t see.
The sun sank lower as the three of us ran around in circles chasing our ghosts. I almost always missed the ball and was constantly in the outfield. From that position I was free to let my mind wander, to watch the cardinal that flitted to the top of the pine tree, to listen to the muffled laughter of neighbor children in other backyards.
“Your ghost runner is out!” one of my stepbrothers shouted at the other. As I came in from the outfield, I could see three big welts from mosquito bites on his face and neck.
“Is not!” the other screamed back, leaning forward in an attempt to amplify his voice in anger before slamming the plastic bat on the ground.
“Is too!” The other kicked second base out of alignment until it was more like one-and-a-quarter base, and the game ended for real when they both went stomping back into the house.
I stood in the pink light of dusk, slapping mosquitoes, an only child with no one but the ghost runners for company.
“He didn’t talk to me for a long time,” my father said when I asked why he had never told me about this brother.
I stood in the middle of the living room, where the relentless sun beat down. The roof of our apartment building was uninsulated, and in the heat of late spring the furniture in the apartment felt warm to the touch as if it had been sitting outside. I laid a hand on the back of the futon couch and let the warmth soak into my palm while my other hand gripped the cordless phone. I could feel my teeth clenching and my tongue pushing against them. A thick and angry saliva gathered in my mouth, and I could barely murmur, “But why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought I had lost him forever.”
In the hollowness of the long-distance call, my father explained that this person had stopped corresponding with him around the same time I had sent my first letter. In the echoes of his voice, I could hear the choice I had made as a teenager reverberating into the future that was now my present.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
I was silent. This was not the answer I was looking for.
“But now we can all be family again.”
“What about my mom? Did she know?”
“Nancy knew,” he said, without missing a beat.
I said nothing. I knew she wouldn’t lie to me. I knew no such thing about my father.
My father put Ceci on the line.
“You know,” she said in Spanish to me. It was a statement, a fact.
“I know.”
Then Ceci spewed a rush of words that with the distortions of the phone call and my rusty Spanish I thought I misunderstood.
“¿Qué dijiste?” I asked, confused.
She repeated: “Now we can be a happy family!”
I thought of Ceci longing for a baby, getting another adult child instead. I thought of her handling her Suzuki jeep like a race car driver, handling the rest of
us with just as much aplomb.
After I hung up, the words in my father’s email duplicated behind my eyes the way looking at the sun can produce its replica everywhere you look. They swirled around my head like a preposterous cyclone. I paced the apartment and finally collapsed into the desk chair in the office, twitched in my seat. Was my life a lie, then? What was truth? What was reality? The chair began to rotate. My father repeated the name (the same as his!), explained nothing over and over while all the time I wondered. I could hardly tell whether it was the chair spinning or my world. Did I really have a brother? Did my mother know? Did I exist? And still the goddamn birds chirped outside the window, and the California sun shone.
14
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know the answers, but the next day I called my mother. I lay across the bed on my stomach, propped up on my elbows, and dialed my mother’s number, one that could have been mine if I hadn’t chosen to move to California, hadn’t married Dave, hadn’t lived the life I was living. I knew something that I didn’t know before. Something, I was beginning to understand, other people did. It had begun to gnaw at me in the night—had my mother known about this brother? Had she also lied to me? How deep did these secrets go, and where did they stop?
“You need to sit down. Are you sitting down?” I asked her. “I got an email from Renzo.”
My mother, on the rare occasions that she talked about him, always referred to him as Renzo, never “your father.” And without siblings to discuss him with, it was easier to refer to him by his first name. After all, for many years the concept of father was quite abstract. It was a word, nothing more.
“I got an email,” I said, “that says I have a brother.”
There was a pause, a silence that felt as vast as the distance between California and Minnesota.
“Did you know that?” I asked.
In that unspoken space, I could feel my life taking another turn. It reminded me of the time my mother and I had sat (inexplicably) on the floor of the bathroom in the first house she bought. I was twelve at the time, and she had explained that she was getting married, that we would move, changing my life’s course. And then again when, six years later, when I was a senior in high school, we sat on the carpeted stairs (again, the floor) and she told me she was getting a divorce, shifting my life yet again.
“Wow.” That was my mother’s response.
I explained everything I had learned from Renzo. That the boy’s name was also Renzo, that the mother’s name was Beth. And then it was my mother’s turn to explain to me that almost as soon as she found out she was pregnant with me, a choice that had been a poorly thought-out plan to repair their marriage, she had left Renzo for the first time.
“We weren’t getting along, so I moved to Cali. He stayed in Silvia.”
Silvia is a little village about ten miles from Popayán founded, coincidentally (or not), on my birthday in 1562. The town in the Cordillera Central of the Andes is populated mainly by the Guambiano Indians, who live on a reservation higher up in the mountains. The Guambianos are artisans and farmers, weaving beautiful tapestries and growing crops that can withstand the Andean terrain. My father had told me that they were one of the few groups legally allowed to grow coca, that they chew on the leaves to counteract high-altitude symptoms. My parents had lived for a time among the Guambianos and the Colombians descended from colonial Spaniards. They lived in a rundown adobe house that had no heat or running water, and I don’t know whether coca leaves helped them tolerate their lives. My father ran a small factory there that produced his artisan wooden toys and carved ducks.
“Beth was my roommate in Cali,” my mother said. “She was nice. I crashed with her and a couple other American friends. Beth had work in Silvia, so she was up there a lot.”
I tried to imagine my mother, pregnant with me, sharing an apartment with hippie girls and watching one of them travel to the town where her husband was.
“I knew they slept together.”
There are many things about our parents that we don’t want to know. I thought of the first day I awoke in Cali, in Ceci’s sister’s apartment, on my trip five years earlier. The night before had been a blur of Spanish and the besos and abrazos from Ceci’s relatives. I had spent the night in the hard twin bed of one of Ceci’s nephews, the unfamiliar and scratchy sheets tangled in the tropical heat. In the morning, I walked through the open door into the room where Ceci and my father had slept.
“Anika, my dear,” my father had cried, a large cup of coffee in his hands and a bigger smile on his face.
And I froze. Ceci was in white pajamas on the bed. My father was on a makeshift mattress on the floor below her. He sat amid the rumpled blankets in nothing but brown men’s bikini briefs. He was skinny with a sunken belly. My mother had told me that he had had part of his stomach removed when he was a teenager, a remedy for chronic ulcers that the doctors then had elected to remove rather than treat. His illnesses and the resulting complications had made him somewhat delicate, she had told me. And skinny. And naked.
“My dear,” he said again, patting the sheets next to him, “come here. Have you had coffee?”
I didn’t know what to say or do. I tried not to be embarrassed at my father’s nakedness; he was my father, after all. But there were things I didn’t want to know about him.
“I knew they slept together,” my mother repeated across the distance, “but I didn’t know Beth got pregnant.”
I slid to the floor and sat with my back leaning against the bed frame, staring at the shoes on the floor in the closet, the blossoms of dust caught in the runners of the sliding doors, the Post-It note stuck under the leg of the nightstand. I gripped the receiver like a life ring.
I don’t know what else I said or how we left things that first time, but I remember that she said, “It was the seventies. You know that song? ‘Love the One You’re With’? That’s how it was back then.”
This did not comfort me.
15
I couldn’t be angry with my mother, and I couldn’t be angry with a person that, at this point, might not even exist, the brother I had never known about. But I could be angry with my father.
The birthday parties, the Christmases, the summer vacations. I began to seethe. I pictured myself walking down the aisle of my graduation ceremony, at my wedding. All those significant moments as an only child. Was my life a lie, then? What was truth? What was reality? Angry, I thought. I was angry.
Before hanging up, my father had said, “He can’t wait to meet you, my dear.”
He.
“Tell him I’m not ready to meet him,” I had said. I enunciated each word, my voice already raised to be heard across the international phone lines. “Tell him that.”
I thought of that lonely trip to Colombia.
How could this have been kept a secret? The existence of a brother.
My brother.
“I told Renzo I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet,” I said to Dave as we sat together on the futon.
“That’s good. Wait until you’re ready.”
Dave reached for my hand across the mattress, which was already growing lumpy from so many overnight guests. We had been in California for almost five years by now, and our friends and families liked to use our apartment as a free vacation spot.
“I’m not ready,” I said again.
“I know.”
He knew a lot. My marriage was the opposite of my parents’, who had barely known one another when they got married. Dave and I had been together for years, since we were children, really. We were eighteen when we fell in love the summer of the Great Midwest Flood of 1993, an apt beginning I now think. The Mississippi River had endured record amounts of rain that spring, and as tributaries overflowed their banks, rodents drowned in their nests, baby rabbits were left for dead, and sapling trees choked to death. The rains beat down, saturating the soil from Minnesota to Ohio. The raging waters damaged houses and crops, displaced bystanders, and disrupted life. The
water washed out paths and roadways, leaving behind a film of mud and muck, a high-water line to mark the occasion.
I remember sitting in Dave’s car one night, his hand reaching for mine across the emergency brake. We had spent the day along the flooded riverbanks. Dave had hauled our bikes to the park, and I watched his sinewy arms as he unloaded the car. I pedaled after him down muddy trails bumpy with the intruding root systems of poplar and maple. We biked through brush and puddles, splattering our shirts with muck while the flooded trunks of trees stood firm in the water like bathers afraid to take the plunge. Then the topography sharpened, undulating into ups and downs, until I found myself following him down a steep turn, rocks and fallen branches rattling my tires. I was afraid, but I trusted him. Peddling behind him, I watched his long, thin figure strain and push. The wind whipping at his T-shirt exposed his pale back, a sight that seemed somehow slightly provocative and immensely endearing.
At the last curve, he reached the bottom first and stopped to watch my progress. With his eyes on me, I lost control on the incline and went down. As I fell, I watched him watching me. He stood at the bottom of the hill, straddling his bike, coated in dirt, a scrape on his hand brilliant red with fresh-drawn blood. I tumbled down faster than my bike, and his toppled as he lurched toward me, trying to catch me.
Magical Realism for Non-Believers Page 7