Adriana, a schoolteacher with both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from UCLA, maintained the greatest composure because this revelation was not a total surprise. When she was nine (around when I started high school), she was told at a cousin’s birthday party, “I know something about your father. He has a son he ran away from. You have an older brother. Go and ask your father. Go and ask him about the son he never sees.” Adriana was sure it had to be one of those horrendous lies that kids say to one another to be cruel, yet she never forgot it. When Candido told her about me, she thought, Of course. She wondered what would have happened if she had asked her father about me when she was a little girl. Maybe, she thought, if I’d said something, we would have been reunited sooner. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to go my whole life not knowing that I had an older brother. Was this thing somehow my fault?
“I wanted to say thank you for searching for my dad,” Adriana wrote me. “By the way, the ‘my’ is just a Mexican thing. People always ask me why I say ‘my’ even when speaking to my own sisters. I think it’s a direct translation from Spanish, since we say ‘mi mama o mi papa.’ I know Candido is truly happy to have finally reunited with you. I am very happy to know about you and have you become part of the family. I always wanted an older brother. I am sorry this did not occur sooner in our lives, but it’s never too late, and we need to think of the now and the future.”
When I picked up Candido’s phone call, I was the last son in a dead-end family. When I hung up, I had a resurrected father and three new sisters. Their emails revealed them to be open, loving, generous, and willing to adopt me as a family member sight unseen. They were so unlike the women I grew up with. Their openness with a complete stranger was startling, like the way a cold, clear morning can leave you breathless. I had sisters who wanted a brother. They wanted me. When I last dreamed of siblings, I was playing in my magical stuffed animal forest, wishing for total strangers to give me a family I’d never thought I’d get a second chance to have. Here they were at last. I began imagining futures with Adriana, Kereny, and Natalie. Candido almost was an afterthought. He was their father, but these women were my sisters. I tried to keep my heart tethered to the ground. It didn’t do any good. I knew I was falling in love.
• • •
“Be careful,” Frank warned. He and I had been in sporadic contact over the past ten years, as each of us took turns not returning the other’s phone calls, but my “real” father’s reappearance seemed to rouse in him a dormant responsibility. It was May 2010, three months after my first letter to Candido. I had just flown into Los Angeles and was talking to Frank in a hotel room the night before I would finally meet Candido’s new family. Frank would then pick me up outside Candido’s house when the meeting was over.
“So where has he been this whole time?” Frank asked.
“Whittier,” I said.
“Huh,” he said. “So he could have sent you money for years or stopped by whenever he wanted. He was just over in Whittier.”
“That’s right.”
“Huh,” Frank grunted again. “So I guess you have a father now,” he said.
“Frank, this changes nothing between us. But I don’t even know what to call you. You’re so bound by rules that whenever I call you ‘Dad,’ you flinch, since you never married my mother.”
“How could I have married her?” he asked. “I never saw a way to make it work.”
“I know,” I said. “She wishes you had.”
“I know that,” he said.
“No,” I said. “That was one of her last wishes.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
My mother’s will was a typed letter addressed to me. It was in a box of papers I’d taken back to New York but hadn’t sorted through until several years later. She’d written her will like a suicide note, itemizing in specific detail which of her few possessions were to be left to whom. This was the first time I’d seen Frank in person since I’d read the will. She left Frank a handful of books, a framed Emmett Kelly clown print, a water-damaged Native American poster of a squaw riding on a horse, and some compact discs. These items were Frank’s only if I didn’t want them first, but there was one thing in her will that belonged to him and him alone.
“In my mother’s will,” I said, “she wrote in pen, ‘Frank, you should have married me.’”
“Huh,” he said. “I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m really happy with Stephanie. Things are great. It would have never worked out with your mother and me. But you know something? She was probably right,” he said, and started to cry.
• • •
Kereny picked me up at the hotel with her boyfriend Pedro, who’d come along to calm her nerves. Our first hug was more of an enthusiastic nudge. On the drive to Candido’s house, we struggled for small talk like picking up pennies wearing oven mitts.
“Are you hungry?” Kereny asked. “We can stop for breakfast at a Denny’s if you like.”
“No thanks,” I said.
A few minutes passed. “Do you want to get some coffee or something?”
“No, that’s all right,” I said.
Minutes later, Kereny said, “There’s a park near here. Do you want to drive there for a bit, maybe walk around?”
“I want to go to your house,” I said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
She drove down a long gravel driveway and then opened their backdoor security gate. Candido rose from his couch with an unguarded laugh. Seeing him, I felt a tinny electric charge of recognition, like meeting a celebrity: both my father and famous people were familiar only in pictures.
I hugged Candido tight. He clasped me like a work acquaintance showing me out of his office. We sat down in the living room, where we talked about the weather and soccer in a halting first-date back and forth.
My father wore church clothes: a fine rayon short-sleeve shirt, white narrow-toe lizard-skin boots, with rings on a couple fingers and a gold chain. His hair and mustache were inkwell black. I listened to how he spoke. I couldn’t hear my voice in his, and there was a brief palpitation of panic. What if my mother had told Candido I was his but I was, in fact, another man’s? What if my mother had exaggerated one last story and had executed her greatest lie from beyond the grave?
“I’m better than Houdini!” I could hear her say. “At least it’s never boring.”
“Can we look at some pictures?” I asked.
In a stack of albums were pictures of Candy in fine dress clothes, his hair looking more or less now as it did in the seventies and eighties. His daughters morphed from happy babies into beautiful women. Their eyes—lucid and wide like a puppy’s, like my eyes—are what convinced me my search was over. Here was all of Candido’s history: the Christmases, the birthdays, the Disneyland trips, the graduations: the alternate life I could have had with him, and the lives that never would have existed had Candido stayed where he was. I spotted a picture of me as maybe a two-year-old on a pony, a duplicate of a photo in my mother’s own collection.
“That picture’s always been there,” Kereny said and laughed. “We thought it was just a cousin or something.” He hadn’t forgotten me. He’d hidden me in plain sight.
When all the baby and holiday photographs had been exclaimed over and explained, Candido and I were left alone at the kitchen table to “talk.” I’d imagined that his family believed we had a lot to discuss. I thought we would too, but as I sat across from my father, I wondered what could I legitimately say to a sixtysomething man who ran away from a collapsing marriage and abandoned his kid when he was little more than a kid himself? I knew why he’d left and where he was now. He’d lived a quiet, decent life with no other broken families in his wake. Candido’s family was proof that he was capable of being the dedicated day-to-day father I had tried to turn at least five other men into. His one crime was that he couldn’t be that father to me. But who was l
eft to pay for that crime? I knew what had happened, but knowing the past doesn’t fix it. It won’t even let you mourn for what might have happened instead. You cannot change the past. The past has already happened.
I recognized, sitting across from Candido, that in the years it took me to find him, my hurt had aged and grown old. My anger wasn’t the vigorous youth it once was, able to topple a man with just one screed. My rage couldn’t take the stairs two at a time anymore. My pain couldn’t howl with a blood-on-the-fangs viciousness. My hurt had shriveled into something smaller, a sliver of glass embedded in my soul. I couldn’t see it or feel it most of the time, though I’d have to work hard to forget it was there. My heart knew the past couldn’t hurt me anymore—but, from long experience, it knew that what came next could. I wanted to broker a treaty for the future.
“I don’t care what happened before,” I said in words part rehearsed and part spontaneous. “I’m glad I found you,” I said, “but I’ve been hurt too many times. So you have to stay in contact if you want to be a part of my life. You have to call and write and stay in touch. You have to do the work now. Okay?” I asked.
“Yes, I understand,” Candido said. “And you should feel free to come here whenever you want. We are your family. This is your home.” It didn’t occur to me until much later that he’d never said, “I want to be a part of your life.” I had said it for him. Was I making demands of my father based on consequences he hadn’t demonstrated he cared about? He’d abandoned me over thirty years ago, and, aside from returning my phone call, hadn’t done anything about it until this very moment. I felt I was going much too easy and much too hard on Candido.
It was a warm day, so we moved under an outdoor garden canopy in the backyard. Candido was on one end of the table, while I was on the other. Aurora and Natalie sat near Candido. Kereny and Adriana sat by their respective significant others, Pedro, and Adriana’s husband, John, on opposite sides of the table.
“So why did it take you so long to find us?” Adriana asked.
I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. I’d focused for so long on whether or not I could forgive my father that I’d ignored what my acceptance into his family would mean for his daughters. There was a hurt in her voice that I misread as resentment and suspicion. She was guarding herself the same way I’d been guarding me.
“Part of me felt that I shouldn’t have been the one to do the looking,” I said. “Then a part of me felt that if I found my father now, he’d have nothing left for me that I wanted.”
With those words, Candy started to cry, dabbing at tears in silence with a tissue.
“Do you believe that now?” Adriana asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m really happy to be here.”
“Well, we’re really happy that you’re here too,” Adriana said. Then she started to cry too, a rain of gentle sobs. Pedro and John looked uncomfortable.
“Bet you guys wished you stayed home watching the game, huh?” I joked.
“This is where we need to be,” Pedro said. “We’re part of the family, and now you’re part of the family.”
For over ten years, I thought I had no family. Here was a group of strangers calling me “brother.” I cried then, too, though whatever sound I made was lost amid the wind chimes that billowed in the breeze.
• • •
When I left, I hugged Candy with a strength he couldn’t or didn’t feel comfortable returning. I noticed on my father’s left bicep a faded tattoo of the Virgin Mary. The Mexican I used to deny being thought that people were delusional if they claimed a sighting of the Virgin Mary accompanied something miraculous. The Mexican I was in that moment said: not anymore.
That night, Frank drove me to his friend’s house for dinner.
“Did he ask you what you’d been up to?” Frank asked. “All the things you’ve accomplished and done? Who you’ve dated? Where you’ve traveled to? What kind of things you want to do with your life?”
“Not really,” I said.
“He didn’t ask one thing about you?”
“He already knew I hadn’t made any grandkids for him,” I said. “But it’s fine.”
“Really? Why? Why is it fine?” Frank asked.
“He missed that time to get to know me,” I said. “That’s punishment enough.”
“No, that’s not enough,” Frank said. “That’s not any kind of punishment for someone who abandons you for over thirty years. He doesn’t deserve to get away with it.”
“Get away with what?” I asked Frank. “He’s an old man. It’s not like he’s a criminal.”
“Oh, I disagree, Brando,” Frank said in his best paternal voice. “I think you’d find a court of law would say that a father not supporting his son for years when he knew exactly where he was is a very criminal act.”
“Why are you making such a big deal out of this?” Frank’s friend asked. “Brando’s okay with it, so you should be okay with it.”
“Because it’s not fair!” Frank said. “He doesn’t have the right to get away with it!”
“Do you want me to say you’re a better man than he is?” I asked. “There’s nothing I can do now. He couldn’t live with my mother, and I understand that.”
“I couldn’t live with her, either!” Frank said. “She tried to drive me away for years, and I still came back. I’m a man that believes in taking care of his responsibilities. I stayed. I could’ve—” he said, and then stopped.
He stayed, I thought, because he could leave whenever he wanted.
“Could have what?” I asked. “Could have abandoned me too? Go ahead. Don’t be afraid to say it.”
“I didn’t say that,” Frank said. “I never, ever said that.”
• • •
A month later, I was back in Los Angeles, on my book tour at a reading in Pico Rivera, a city adjacent to Whittier. I arrived to the bookstore manager telling me, “Your father is already here.”
My father? I wondered.
Inside, sitting two chairs apart and staring straight ahead, were Candido and Frank. Candy had come straight from work. I called Frank away from his seat. Candido was my biological match, but I needed to talk to the father who knew me best.
“Did you speak to the bookstore owner?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Was that okay?”
“Well, he said my father was here. I assumed he meant you, but Candy’s sitting over there next to you. Did you know that?”
“No,” Frank said. “Do you want me to go?”
“No, no, don’t go,” I said. “I just didn’t know who had said what. You’re going to be nice?”
“Hey, you know me, right?” Frank said.
My sisters arrived and seated themselves around Candy. After the reading, Frank chatted with them while Candy stood in line to buy a book I knew he couldn’t read without great difficulty and presented it at the autograph table. What name should I sign with? Signing it with “Skyhorse,” as it was on the jacket, seemed rude, but signing it Ulloa would be a lie.
I signed his copy, “Brando.” Frank got a book signed too, but he and Candido didn’t meet each other.
Candido drove Adriana’s baby, Dillan, home while Frank and I invited my three sisters out to a family-style dinner amid an archipelago of strip mall restaurants. I was leery of mixing Frank with my new unknown family, but he made the combination seamless. He told jokes about me as a child, asked engaging questions, volleyed conversation like a beach ball, and offered laughs at his own expense.
“Your dad’s really funny,” Kereny said.
He was my father that night. And for all of our awkward, introductory choreography, Candido’s daughters felt like full—and not half or abbreviated—sisters. Why?
Frank told me, “Maybe you found your father to find them. Those girls are ready for a brother. And you’re ready for a fa
mily. Maybe you don’t need to overthink this. Sometimes love happens that fast.”
• • •
I was about six or seven when my mother took me to a psychic friend who told me I’d lived past lives. She said I’d once been a Scottish prince who was trampled to death by horses in his thirties and, in a more recent life, a soldier who died in the Vietnam War from stepping on a land mine. Not long after, I had vivid dreams of falling off a carriage in what my seven-year-old mind dreamed Scotland looked like—everything was made from marbles—and of my legs being blown off in a faraway delta I’m sure I remembered from a Hollywood movie. The explosion would snap my legs on my mattress and wake me up.
In both of these dreams, I was a father. I never saw my child’s face or heard its voice, but I knew I had left a child—a son, I think—behind somewhere.
I’d spent most of my twenties in a relationship with someone in her thirties, unable to commit to fatherhood even as I knew that her chances at a baby dwindled with each passing year. I told her, “I’m too young.” Then I told her, “I’m too poor.” When I got to my thirties and told her, “I’m too crazy,” she said, “You’re right,” and had a child with someone else. I never had any doubt she’d become the great mother she is today, but I wonder, still: Could I be a good father?
It’s presumptuous to assume I’ll be a father at all. I’m forty years old and childless. Part of me waited this long because I knew I was an unstable man who’d make an unstable father. I didn’t want to pass on my depression to my children genetically or by example. And how could I take care of a child when I had no model for what a good father was? Remembering my fathers, individually, they lied, drank, cheated, stole, and abandoned their loved ones. I know I can claim no moral high ground with them: these are the people who taught me. I’ve cheated on lovers, stolen people’s time, and abandoned friends. I lied for years about who I was and made up stories in college about a thuggish life in an inner-city jungle that was never really that rough. My own brief sojourn into “storytelling”—inventing a life as a Sunset Strip club kid; seeing someone shot in the head at point-blank range—always rang out like the bullshit it was.
Take This Man: A Memoir Page 24