My Sister

by Selenis Leyva

  I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this person I had loved and cared for could have done something so terrible to me. I thought about how many beautiful moments we had had together, about the feeling of love I’d never ever felt with anyone else.

  My heart was in my throat. My heart was in pain for days, weeks, months. I became so depressed, but I still tried to take care of myself. Over the next few months, I spent a lot of time at my parents’, just trying to stay level-headed and focused. I thought about all of the things I could do now that I wasn’t wasting my time on him, like go back to school or get my GED. But I was heartbroken, and I started to let myself go.

  Chapter 27

  SELENIS

  If I had thought Marizol’s boyfriend was scum before, what happened on her birthday solidified all of the assumptions I had about him.

  That day, he sent me a string of horrible texts.

  You think your sister is so innocent, but you have no idea the kind of shit she’s done.

  He started to reveal all of these things about Marizol she had told him in confidence. The sex work. The porn. It was the first time I had ever heard those things, and it felt really awful. It felt awful to hear it spoken out loud. I had always suspected that she had been involved in that world at some point or another, but I didn’t know to what degree, and I never wanted to be fully aware of the specifics. I never approached Marizol about it because it was her life, and I knew that she needed to make a living. And to be honest, I really didn’t want to know. When I got those texts from him, it felt like such a violation of her humanity. She had shared this information with him in confidence, with him as a person she thought she could trust and confide in. And yet here he was, telling the people she loved the most just to hurt her.

  Another text came:

  She borrowed money from me, and somebody better pay me back.

  I never responded to him. I thought to myself, Go on. Keep sending me whatever you are going to send me, because I am going to use this as evidence against your ass.

  Then, he contacted my mother. I don’t know exactly what he told her, but I can assume it was the same. My mother was disturbed by the things he said and refused to repeat them.

  What she did tell me was that he asked her for money as well.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Mami had replied. “You can come here, but no one is going to give you anything.” My mother is always poised and calm. She never would have let him know how shocked or mortified she was by his words.

  Of course, he never showed up. He must have known that his threats wouldn’t work on us, but he betrayed Marizol anyway. What a cowardly, untrustworthy person. I had been right about him all along.

  A few months prior, right after that big fight on Christmas Eve, I remember looking at Marizol and thinking, Wow, he’s really got to you. After all these years you’ve been away from the family, you are going to choose him? In truth, I didn’t understand the extent of the abuse and manipulation until I received those texts, until he threatened my family. I didn’t understand how terrified Marizol was of him.

  When I confronted her about him after he sent us those messages, she was very upset. But more than upset, she was overwhelmed with fear. I said to her, “You have to go to the police. You have to file an order of protection.”

  But she refused.

  I was furious. “You can never, ever go back to him.” It was like the ultimatum I had given her so many years prior, when I dropped her off at the shelter. “I will not do this again. I will not pick you up from this place that he’s left you again—and now, it’s even worse because he’s involved your family!” I know it seems harsh, but I meant every word I said. If she went back to him, I was prepared to stay out of her life for good.

  A WHILE AFTER that, Marizol disappeared from our lives. This broke my heart, but I felt for her, especially after she told me they had broken up. I was glad that monster was finally out of her life, and we kept in touch—calling or texting almost every day—just to check in with each other.

  And then, one day over the summer, the communication stopped. I called her, and my calls went straight to voice mail. I texted, but got no response. I couldn’t get in touch with her that day, and I couldn’t sleep that night.

  The next morning, I had this horrible feeling of dread, like a cold shiver that moved up and down my spine telling me that something was horribly, horribly wrong. Something in my gut told me to go to her apartment, but I was terrified of what I was going to find. What if I find my sister dead?

  I called my sister-in-law Melodie and told her what was going on.

  “I need to go over there,” I said.

  “You can’t go by yourself! Wait for me—I’ll go with you.”

  After a short while, I called my brother Tony, and he was even more insistent that Melodie and I couldn’t go by ourselves. He was getting out of work soon, and he would take us.

  But so much time passed. First, I had to wait for Melodie. Then, for Tony. What if she needed us, and now it’s too late? I was panicking. I was shaking. I kept calling her phone over and over again—and every time, I got her voice mail. Finally, the three of us drove to her apartment in silence. I think we all had the same fears, but we were too afraid to say them out loud.

  Melodie stayed in the car, and Tony and I went up to the building. When we got to the door and reached for the buzzer, a guy with a hood pulled up over his head let us in. I stopped and tried to get a look at his face, but he was going out of his way to hide. Tony told him thanks, and the guy just looked to the ground, pulled the hood down further, and left the building.

  “Was that him?” I asked Tony. “I think that was him.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think it was.”

  When we got to Marizol’s door, I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. And again. And then we heard the sound of someone walking on top of broken glass. Tony and I looked at each other.

  Finally, we heard her voice. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Seli,” I said. “Open the door.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice startled. “You just have to give me some time. Hold on.”

  Tony looked at me. “I’m going back downstairs to see if he’s there.”

  “All right,” I said, and I waited outside her door.

  After about two minutes, I knocked again. “Marizol, you have to open the door.”

  She did, just a crack, just enough so that I could see the state she was in. She was completely disheveled, with dark circles under her eyes. She was thin, deflated. She looked tired. She looked battered.

  “Did he just leave?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  I knew it. I was so angry. “I need to come in.”

  She stepped to the side and I saw what else he had done.

  The apartment was totaled. Completely trashed. From where I stood and what I could see—in the kitchen, down the hall, in the living room—there was not one single corner of the apartment that did not look like a tornado had hit it. There were holes in the walls. Doors pulled from hinges. The paneling around the windows was barely hanging on. Someone had gone completely nuts in there, destroying everything in his path like a hurricane.

  My sister did not live like this. She took care of her apartment. She took pride in where she lived. I saw her little trinkets and decorations shattered across the floor. I remember feeling so uncomfortable in there, like a sense of darkness overtook my whole body. I finally had confirmation about all that I suspected about him: that he was a monster, that he couldn’t be trusted, that he was dishonest and sneaky and conniving and deceitful. Worst of all, I had confirmation of what I had always feared, but never said out loud: that he had gotten physical, that he had been abusing her. If he comes back now, I thought, this is going to end tragically. Now, I realize that God had kept me waiting to go over there for a reason. Because if I would have found him there, I would not have been able to control myself.

  “Mari
zol, what happened? I’ve been trying to call you.”

  She was hesitant to respond. “He broke my phone,” she cried.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  Getting answers was like pulling teeth.

  “A while,” she said eventually.

  “You look awful.”

  “Yeah, well, he didn’t let me sleep last night. He kept me up fighting.”

  Oh my God, I thought. I’m gonna kill him.

  I told her that if she ever put herself in this situation again, if she ever let him back, that I would be done. In retrospect, I know this wasn’t the right way to handle it. I had said this exact same thing to her just a few months before, and she kept a lot from me because of it. I didn’t mean to punish her for being abused or to further isolate her from the people who could have helped her out of it. Now I see that, in reality, I was just making things easier for him by pushing her away. I wish that I would have just said to her: “I don’t agree with this relationship, but I love you and I’m here for you no matter what.” But at the time, I was so angry with him. I just wanted her to be safe. And I wanted to be sure that he was out of her life. For good.

  In the next few months, things seemed to get better for her, at least superficially. She didn’t mention anything about him, and when I’d ask her directly if she’d heard from him, she’d say no. I assumed things were better simply because he was out of the picture.

  But I couldn’t help but notice a physical change in Marizol. She was falling into a depression, losing weight. Dark circles hung below her eyes, and she didn’t put any time or effort into her look. When I saw her, she wasn’t her outgoing, happy self. But I know what a breakup can do to a person. I know what it’s like to mourn the absence of someone in your life you loved. So, I didn’t think much of it.

  Little did I know that all of her old demons were coming back to haunt her.

  Chapter 28

  MARIZOL

  After Josh left, I heard a knock at my door. Was it him coming back? Was it a neighbor, who must have heard us fighting all night? I didn’t respond, hoping that whoever it was would just go away.

  But then the knock came again. And again.

  I tried to walk to the door to look through the peephole, but the result of our fight—the broken glass, knocked-over furniture, plaster from the holes that he’d made in the walls—made it so that I couldn’t be as quiet as I’d have liked.

  And then I heard her voice: “It’s Seli.”

  Oh my God, I thought. I couldn’t have her see my apartment like this. I couldn’t let her see me like this! What was I going to say?

  “Marizol, you have to open up.”

  “It’s not a good time,” I said.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said.

  I had no choice but to open the door. There was Seli, standing next to my brother Tony. And they saw it all. I was so embarrassed. I was so ashamed. After Josh had threatened my family on my birthday, Seli told me that I needed to be done with him for good. And I was—but in the past few weeks, we had been talking once again, seeing each other on occasion. I had kept this all from her, of course, knowing that she wouldn’t approve, and then he and I had this big fight, my apartment was trashed, and now Seli was here, seeing it all firsthand. I was relieved Josh had left when he did. Not because I wanted to protect him anymore—I was finally done with that—but because I feared, if Seli and Tony had found him there, no one would have been able to control themselves. The physical fight that had transpired between him and me would have then included my brother and sister, too. And who knows what would have happened.

  AFTER THAT incident, I went through a dark time. Once again, I found myself alone, lost and in a deep depression. It was like I had gone back in time to the period before I transitioned, when I didn’t have a stable place to live, when I was away from my family, when I was struggling with demons that would never leave me alone. It was like my time at Ali Forney never happened. All that I had accomplished, all that I had learned had just disappeared, like I had dreamed it all. I stopped eating. I stopped caring. For months, all I did was sleep and smoke weed. I saw my sister on occasion, and she could tell that something was wrong, but I didn’t tell her what I was struggling with. I was drifting through life high, trying to bury all of these memories and feelings that had been building up inside of me for so many years. Whenever they came to mind, I took another hit. And for a short time, until it wore off and I needed more, I felt good. I felt numb.

  No one knew what I was going through or what I was thinking about. I was completely alone. In fact, I didn’t tell anyone until we began working on this book. What I did do, though, was ask Mami if she had Jose Sr.’s information.

  She didn’t. I called Seli and asked her if she knew how I could get in touch with him. And she didn’t, either.

  I remembered how, when I was growing up, he’d call Mami and Papi’s house. How I would look at the caller ID, see his number, and hang up the phone. Those calls continued through the years, up until I was sixteen or seventeen, when I was discovering my community and who I was. Whenever I saw that name, or the long number that must have been the number of the prison in the DR, I was reminded of what had happened to me when I was forced to leave Mami and Papi’s and live with Jose Sr. and Ruth and Yvette. I tried, for so much of my life, to erase those memories, to block those images from my mind. Images of a dark bedroom. Images of being forced to spend the mornings in the bed with Jose Sr. while my two-year-old sister was left unattended in the living room. Of him trying to hug me and kiss me and me trying to get away but being locked down by his legs. Of him not letting me get up for the whole day. Of him forcing me to do things that, as a little kid, I didn’t understand. Things that made me uncomfortable and afraid and angry. And so when he would call, and these memories would return, I remember being overcome by such a feeling of anger that I tried whatever I could to make myself forget.

  But no matter how much I tried to bury it, part of it was always there, eating away at me. When I was in my relationship with Josh, and he would tell me that no one else would love me, that no one would accept me for who I am, I believed him. He made me feel small. He made me feel like I wasn’t worthy of being loved. And the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse he subjected me to triggered a lot of memories about my biological father. Whenever I was reminded of Jose Sr., or whenever my thoughts drifted to him, I remember thinking, Why are you coming up in my mind now? I continued to bury it, trying to pay no mind to the mound that was growing taller and taller until it was impossible to ignore. It wasn’t until later that I put these pieces together and saw a pattern in how these two men treated me.

  So many times, I thought that it must have been my fault. That I must have done something to deserve all that had happened to me as a little kid, as a young woman. At one point, I remember thinking: Why is this all happening to me? Why did God choose me? What did I do? Why do I have to live this life? Why do I have to be transgender? It was all so difficult to deal with. Discovering my gender identity was one thing, and it was something I was able to overcome. But being molested by my own father was another. I decided to focus only on discovering my gender identity; it was something that would enrich my life, something that would make me happy. And it did. But still, part of me couldn’t forget the dark memories that haunted me. And as much as I tried not to confront them, I think that they were the cause of much sadness in my life.

  After the incident at my apartment, I started to process everything—the downward spiral I fell into after being in such a good place, the abuse, the isolation from my family—and all of those memories came rushing back. I realized, then, how much I had missed having Papi in my life. Papi, who had always been there for me. Papi, who never abused me, who never ever put his hands on me. I thought about my transition, how I had to essentially relearn how to live in the world as a trans woman—and how I wished that Papi had been there to give me advice, to guide me toward the right path.


  For so much of my life, part of me has felt almost programmed to duplicate the traditional roles I saw Mami and Papi carry out in our household. Their relationship was full of love, compassion, and support, and they served as an example for how I wanted my relationships to be. Papi was the working man who provided for our family, and he was also present, wanting the best for us. He was there when we needed him most. I wanted to find a man who could care for me in the same ways that Papi did, and I wanted Papi to give me advice like he had given my sisters. I wanted him to tell me to pick a good man, a man who wouldn’t put his hands on me. I wanted him to reassure me, to make me feel protected and safe and loved. I wished that he had been there before all of this mess with Josh had happened.

  I no longer feel that my relationships need to fulfill these roles. In fact, I now recognize how dangerous the ideal of this traditional structure was to me as a trans woman. Because I wanted to feel cared for and provided for by my man, I was able to write off moments of abuse and control as love and support. When Josh demanded I stop working, for example, he told me that he wanted to take care of me, that he didn’t want his girl to have to work. Now I see it for the abuse that it was; though I had my doubts at the time, I was willing to let myself do whatever he thought was best, even if it meant losing part of myself in the process.

  At the same time, for many years, I couldn’t help but think that the traditional family structure—and the love and support it can provide—didn’t apply to me because I was trans or that I, for some reason, didn’t deserve to be a part of it. Growing up, I always watched how my brothers and dad protected my sisters, defending them against boyfriends and men. My brothers defended me when I was picked on, of course, but I couldn’t help but think: What if it had been Isa or Seli? What if one of my sisters had been in the kind of relationship I had been in, one where they were abused? The men in our family would have been livid. Papi would have told my sisters that they were better than that. And Tony and Tito would have stood up for them, maybe even fought for them. But what about me? No one knew about the abuse, of course. But every time Josh put his hands on me, or emotionally manipulated me, I almost felt like I wasn’t validated as a woman. That part of him knew that he could get away with it because I wasn’t protected in the same way that cis-women are.