by Jesse Jordan
“Excuse me, Mr. Rivera?” someone asks me, and I turn around, seeing a Lieutenant Colonel, his hair starting to go gray at the temples but still tremendously fit, a total Marine. “Are you Joey Rivera?”
“Yes, I am sir. Thank you for letting us see your motor pool. Your Marines should be proud.”
“Thank you. However, I had a question. We were just notified, and there's a lot of people with your name, but... was your father Staff Sergeant Tomás Rivera?”
I blink, trying to control the tears that are threatening my eyes. Dust, you can never fully get it out of motor pools, especially in the desert. “Yes... yes, he was, sir. Did you know him?”
The Lieutenant Colonel nods, offering his hand. “Sergeant Rivera was in my company back when I was a First Lieutenant. I even met you once, although I understand if you don't remember me, I wasn't his platoon leader, I was the company XO. Still, he was a good man, a good Marine. He used to talk about you constantly, I'm glad to see that you've grown into everything he wanted you to be. And I'm looking forward to the ball. My daughter has your songs on her iPod.”
“If you've got a CD at home, bring it by, I'll make sure all the guys sign it for your daughter,” I reply, shaking his hand. “Thank you, Colonel.”
“No, thank you, son. Enjoy the ball.”
“Wow, Andrea looked great,” Maria compliments as she goes through the photos on Andrea's laptop, looking over the shots from last night's ball. I'm still rubbing at my eyes after the ball went until nearly midnight, Andrea and I didn't get back home until after three in the morning, and I'm still sleep-addled. “You found yourself a knockout, big brother.”
“I know that,” I half yawn before draining the rest of the coffee from my cup. “It was hard to keep my focus on playing when she had Marines coming up to her all night asking her to dance.”
“And I turned every single one of them down,” Andrea teases, coming into the living room and kissing the back of my neck. “I'll admit, it was a bit much, but I thought you'd like it.”
“Andrea, the slit goes all the way up to your waist,” Maria says, pointing to the next photo. “You can get arrested in some places for wearing a dress that sexy.”
“It's yours then,” Andrea replies, coming around the sofa and sitting down next to me. She's got a plate with a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich on it that she's cut in half, and she offers me the slightly bigger portion, which I take gratefully. “Seriously Maria, we're close enough in size that you could wear it.”
“Maybe with eight-inch-high heels,” Maria jokes. “I'm a lot shorter than you.”
“Then we get it hemmed. You find a guy who you want to wear that dress for, and it's yours. Hey, check this out.”
Andrea reaches over me to the laptop and pulls up the videos, playing my guitar solo that started the ball. Maria watches silently as the video of me playing the Marine Hymn plays, and I can tell she's moved too. She doesn't remember as much about Papa as I do, but she still remembers him, and she's touched. When it finishes, Maria kisses me on the cheek and gives me a hug. “That was amazing, Joey. Papa would be so proud of you.”
Angel looks up from his coloring book, where he's been scribbling while the adults go over stuff that bored him by about the third picture, although he was slightly interested again when the pictures of us posing around the tanks were shown to him. “Andrea?”
“Yes, Angel?” Andrea asks, biting into her sandwich. “Would you like me to play the video again?”
“No... it's cool, but ….,” Angel says. “Do you know my Papa?”
Maria goes pale, and even I'm shocked at the question, Angel so rarely mentions his parentage. Andrea catches Maria's expression and sits forward, trying to maneuver the situation carefully. “No, I don't think so Angel. To me, Joey's your Papa, he acts like a father to you all the time.”
“Oh,” Angel says, sighing. “I just thought... well, we have the same color eyes. I thought maybe you knew my Papa.”
“Angel, hush!” Maria snaps before leaving the room. Andrea watches Maria go, and Angel follows her, upset that his mother was so strict with him. I can hear them both crying in the back after a moment, and I sigh, setting the rest of my sandwich down on the table, instantly forgotten. I'm not hungry anymore.
“I'm sorry if I handled that wrong,” Andrea whispers, setting her sandwich down as well. “I'll apologize to Maria when she's calmer.”
“There's no need to, you did your best,” I reply, taking her hand. “Just... Maria's got a lot of scarring from that. You didn't do anything wrong.”
“What happened?” Andrea asks. “I mean, I know the basics, so you don't need to tell me.”
I shake my head, standing up. “You deserve the story. Get changed into workout gear, I'll go make sure Maria and Angel are okay.”
“Workout gear?”
I nod, looking over my shoulder. “Every time I even think of this story I get so angry that I need to let it out somehow. The gym's a good place to do that safely.”
Andrea nods and gets up, going past me down the hallway to her room where she closes the door to her room silently. I check in on Maria, who's stopped crying while Angel hugs her, the two of them lying down on the bed. Maria looks at me with her eyes still rimmed in red when I come in. “Maria?”
“I'm okay, just surprised,” Maria whispers, obviously lying. “I heard what you told Andrea.”
“I won't tell her if you don't want. I just felt like she deserves to know a little more.”
Maria nods, blinking. “I love her too. Do it.”
“I love you, Maria. We'll be back,” I say, leaving her bedroom to meet Andrea in the hallway, her eyes full of concern. I nod, taking her hand and leading her out to my car. I get in, starting the engine and pulling out before I talk again.
“It was fall, Maria was fourteen and a few months,” I start, putting my car into drive and heading down the street. “We'd been back in school for long enough that the excitement of starting a new year had worn off, but before the grind got to us. I was in high school, a junior while Maria was still going to junior high, a weird trick of her birthday and the school calendar. It sucked for us, going to different schools. We'd spent so many years going to the same school or at least nearby enough that we could walk together.
“One night, it was a Wednesday, Ian calls me up. Rocky hadn't been with us long, in fact, those two were crashing together. There was a paid gig that Ian wanted us to really bust our asses for. Coming off the summer, where we could play more often, we had momentum going, so I said yeah, we could practice that night.”
“A Wednesday?” Andrea asks, and I nod, swallowing.
“Yeah, a Wednesday. Anyway, as I'm getting ready to go over to the Metro to catch the train that would take me close to Ian's, Maria asks if she can come along. I was going through a period where I was feeling like Maria and I lacked discipline, so I told her no. I said she had to stay at the apartment and left, not being a very nice brother when I did it either.”
“You were seventeen,” Andrea reminds me, and I know I’ve told her this before. “Most guys are jerks at seventeen.”
“Yeah well, I was a prime dickhead that night,” I sigh, turning onto Los Arboles and heading towards the gym. “Practice was practice, but when I got back, Maria was crying, sniffling and didn't want to let me near her. She started apologizing as soon as I asked her what was wrong, and she told me. She'd left the house, she had five dollars that she'd kept from a summer weekend job she helped me with, going down to the corner store. She got... she got trolled.”
“Huh?” Andrea asks, confused. “Trolled?”
“I'd heard the term around high school, I thought it was just an urban story, like the headlight thing or how on Halloween you couldn't wear Lakers gear at all since that was a signal that you wanted to be jumped into any of the sets around our neighborhood. It was one of those types of places,” I explain. “Trolling was supposed to be where girls, young girls especially, got picked up by
guys for sex. The ones that found Maria... they'd work in pairs the stories went, always two white guys. They'd find a girl, the younger looking the better, and it wasn't her choice when they'd scoop her up. Later, after Maria calmed down enough, she told me what she remembered. She'd decided to go down to the convenience store a quarter mile from our apartment to get some ice cream. She was walking down the sidewalk when she noticed the guys, but she didn't think anything until they grabbed her, knocked her out with ether or something. Her memories of the rape itself are hazy she says. Thank God for small favors, but she remembers little bits. He was older she said, and she remembered that he had eyes like yours. She's never told me more, I didn't ask. When she turned up pregnant... I never asked her about it again. It doesn't matter. I failed, I failed as a brother and as the man of the family.”
Andrea sits silently, taking it all in. When she speaks again, she's quiet and I can hear the same anger and self-doubt in her voice that I've heard many times. “Did I... did I hurt her with my statement about the dress? I mean, talking about her finding a boyfriend. I was stupid.”
“No, that wasn't anything that hurt her,” I reassure her. “Maria's tried to have boyfriends sometimes, but once they see that she's got a kid, they jet. I don't know if she's been intimate since then, some things I don't ask, but I don't think she's scarred in that way. But no Andrea, you didn't hurt her with that. I was the one who hurt her, by being a bad brother.”
“No, you made a choice, not even a mistake. Maria didn't make a mistake either, and Teresa didn't make a mistake by working her job,” Andrea says, her voice stronger but still angry. “If anyone is to be blamed, it's the sick fuck who took your sister's innocence.”
We pull up in front of the gym, and I put my car in park, my pulse pounding. “Perhaps, Andrea. But still, I swallow a lot of that anger and blame. I can't help it, that's who I am.”
“And I'm here to give you a way to share that anger and blame,” Andrea says, taking my hand. “For now, though, I'm angry too. So... let's go work some of it off.”
“You're driving home. I probably won't be able to walk.”
We get out of the car, slamming the doors closed, and Andrea nods, holding out her hand for the keys. “Deal. Then we go home and hug your sister.”
“Our sister. She wants to be your sister too.”
“Our sister, then.”
Andrea
Despite my best efforts, Maria and Joey are still in major funks the next day, Teresa understanding when I explain to her quietly what caused it. Teresa says that she'll help Maria, but I'm more worried about Joey. “Teresa, he's still so angry at himself, this is something that's been boiling inside him for a while. Yesterday, I thought he was exaggerating when he said he wouldn't be able to walk out of the gym.”
Joey wasn't the only one who was angry though, I think to myself. Last night, I had nightmares, green eyes chasing me in the darkness while the words 'trolling' and 'ordering in' echoed around me. I woke up with a scream barely held behind my lips, twisted up in the sheets of my bed, panicked thoughts running around in my head. Ordering in? That's what Mom used to say Dad did and trolling... it's too horrific to think about. They can't be connected, they just can't. Even now an hour after waking up, having breakfast with Teresa who studies me with her sad, soulful gaze, the words gnaw at my head, and I have to do something to get them out.
Teresa sips her coffee and nods, her dark eyes glancing towards the garage door where Joey's lying in bed, still sleeping. “He was like this back then, too. Andrea, your heart and your beauty have captured my son's heart, but yes, your eyes have obviously dredged up memories that both of them prefer to not be reminded of. Of course, since Angel has those same eyes, I doubt they will ever be fully rid of them. I hope.... well, I hope that they will find peace with their pain.”
“Can that happen?” I ask, and Teresa nods. “How?”
“I would say through the grace of God, but I probably come off sounding too religious that way,” Teresa says quietly. “But I have my own anger and pain, Andrea. I have watched in the past thirteen years as my husband was taken from me, my son had his childhood ended far too quickly, and then my daughter became what some people would say is just another barrio statistic. I watched the pain my son and my daughter have been through, and I've been able to do little more than hugging them and make empty promises. This house, this coffee I'm drinking right now, that's from Joey's genius, not my hard work. Before you start, I don't discount my efforts, I'm saying all the effort in the world would not make a guitar player able to do what Joey did for those Marines two nights ago. That takes a genius that I was only able to.... perhaps the best word would be, assist.”
At the mention of music, I think, then nod. “I think I've got an idea, for sure for Joey, maybe for Maria too. Teresa, would you mind if I took them for the day? Can you watch Angel?”
Teresa's eyes sparkle as she nods. “Of course, Andrea. Grandmothers always have time to play with their grandbabies. We can spend the day making cookies. Are you going to tell me what the idea is?”
“I checked some of the arts and entertainment websites, I read a mention that the City Art Museum is doing a special on California Music. I know that Joey would like it, and from the online review I read, the Art Museum also has a big exhibit of natural photography, maybe he'd like that too.”
“That sounds very nice,” Teresa says, nodding. “Maybe sometime, I'd like to go too, but not today. It would be nice to have some private time with the woman who has captured my son's heart and has my daughter calling her sister. You are far from the guera loca that Maria teased Joey about you being before meeting you.”
“Guera loca?”
“Crazy blond, or hot tempered blond. It's Mexican slang. Don't worry, Maria was joking with Joey the whole time with that. But I would like to spend some time with you if you don't mind.”
“I'd like that, Teresa. Maybe we can give them another little break, cook dinner together? I'm not very good with recipes, but I can chop and mix and slice just fine if I have a good mentor.”
“I would like that very much. I can teach you how to make jibaritos, Joey has never gotten the plantains down correctly. And I'd like to speak some Spanish with you, I feel like it's going to be important in the future for us.”
After Maria and Joey wake up, they are willing to go with me to the museum, although I can tell that Joey's legs are still in serious pain. He walks like an old man as we cross the parking lot at the museum, his hand on his right hip as he groans, using the wheelchair ramp to the door. The walk pulls Maria out of her bad mood a little, and she smirks as we wait for him at the top of the steps. “Just what all did he do yesterday?”
“Timed leg press sets,” I explain. “He took six big plates and put them on the machine, then used a timer set to thirty seconds that kept repeating. He'd do thirty seconds of leg presses, then rest thirty seconds, then repeats. Basically, he fried everything, and that was before all the other stuff we did. Low back extensions, hamstring curls, in other words, he killed everything from the waist down.”
“Everything? Shame on you,” Maria teases, and I smile, seeing a bit of her deeply hidden sauciness come back. “Andrea... thanks.”
“You're welcome,” I tell her, putting an arm around her shoulders and giving her a squeeze. “Come on, let's help Joey, so he doesn't need a wheelchair to get around.”
“I heard that,” Joey grumbles, but despite the pain, I can see that he's happier to see Maria smiling a little bit as we go into the museum. It's fifteen of my last twenty dollars in 'my' name, but I don't mind as we go in, taking a flyer as we go.
“The history of music in California,” I read, handing it over to Joey. “See anything that might be interesting?”
Joey's eyes gleam as he reads, and we head into the big display hall. I had thought that the exhibit would be mostly a lot of old images or a few artifacts, kind of a pumped up Hard Rock Cafe, but instead, I'm pleasantly surprised to find that
while there's plenty here to look at, there's just as much to listen to. There are at least a hundred different stations of headphones around the exhibit, each of them playing recordings on a loop of different sounds, different genres that have come out of California, and sometimes famous artists. Joey's quickly enraptured by the different sounds, giving Maria and me little insights on what makes each of the recordings unique and special.
Of course, we tend to listen more to the rock sounds, with Joey even air guitaring some of the different tunes for us while Maria and I listen in, impressing both of us with how quickly he adapts to the loops.
“Whoa, I didn't know Metallica was from Southern California,” I note as Joey fingers his way through Master of Puppets. “I seriously thought they were European or something.”
“Metal's been a European thing for about twenty years now,” Joey says, pulling the headphones off and setting them back, “but yeah, thrash metal started mostly here in California. Man, this place is awesome, I've gotta get Rocky to come down here with Cora. He'd be a kid in a candy store.”
“And you?” I ask, smiling. “It seems to me that you've air guitared about twenty different songs. Your forearms are pumped right now.”
Joey smiles, nodding. “Rocky's just so much more into music theory and history than I am. But yeah... it's just what I needed. Thanks, beautiful.”
“You're welcome,” I say, giving him a hug just as Maria comes over, hopping up and down.
“Hey guys, guess what's over on the other side of the room!” she says, pointing. “It's Brown Boy!”