Like Son

by Felicia Luna Lemus

  Ángel’s hungry ghost keeping me company, I had just taken the first bite of my sandwich when Nathalie’s unmistakable scream, coming from somewhere outside, pierced the quiet. I dropped my sandwich, ran to the door, and scanned up and down the street.

  A station wagon, seemingly the same one Nathalie and I had taken to the woods on Thanksgiving, idled one storefront over. From where I stood I could see that the vehicle’s driverside door was wide open, but nobody sat in the driver’s seat. In an accelerated split-second, a series of pragmatically useless questions swirled through my brain. Hadn’t Nat said she was going to spend the day in bed, drinking herbal tea with lemon to kick the last bit of her flu? What time was it? Was the sun always situated so low in the sky? Had the sunlight been strange like this when Nahui woke to find Ángel dead? As for the station wagon—paint it black, throw some velvet curtains on the back windows, and you’ve got a hearse. Goddamn, what had Nathalie done this time? And had she used my credit card to rent the car? Since when did she have a driver’s license? How could she pull off renting a car without a license on the day before a massive organized political protest? Did the rental place have any fucking idea just how many pounds of explosives could fit in the flatbed of a station wagon?

  Nearly overwhelmed by these knee-jerk reflex concerns, I wished I could be a kid again, or at least irresponsible and uncaring. If I’d had a magic wand to wave, I would have made a clean chalkboard materialize out of thin air so Nathalie and I could spend the day blissfully scratching our nails down a blank slate. But I had no wand. Perplexed, I just wanted to understand what the hell was going on. I ran toward the station wagon.

  Shivering in the freezing air, I noticed the tulle of my girl’s dress peeking out from under the back tire. More of Nathalie’s screams. People crossed Avenue A from the park to see what all the excitement was about. There was so much movement and response, and all I could manage was to stand there frozen in my body and wonder how the fuck Nathalie had driven over herself. It was like the scene when Dorothy’s tornado lands the house on Her Wickedness—I saw only Nathalie’s pettiskirt and thick heavy boots.

  Have I mentioned that I’ve always hated swimming? As a kid, water inevitably got stuck in my ears, and no amount of hydrogen peroxide dripped in with an eyedropper would loosen it out. I was never a tadpole or guppy—or whatever the fuck it is they call you when you take classes at the Y. So I’d never progressed to the swimming-lesson level where they teach you first aid and CPR. I saw Nathalie’s scrawny legs and big boots peeking out from under the back corner of the station wagon, and I knew she might die while the paramedics were on their way. She might drown, water in her lungs, and I wouldn’t know how to revive her. A gust of wind from Avenue A blew my way and carried the nauseating scent of pizza to my overloaded senses. Pepperoni pizza. Nathalie might be paralyzed or near death, she seemed to be stuck under a multi-ton vehicle, and there I stood, helpless, almost heaving from the stench of greasy pepperoni pizza.

  “Sniffle,” he said. “You stayed home from school sick, remember?”

  I was in kindergarten the year my father had to take an eye test at the DMV to get his driver’s license renewed. He made his appointment for a Wednesday, one of his custody days. He still had visitation rights at that point, but usually, if I was sick, I’d stay at my mother’s. I hadn’t actually been sick that day, and my father wasn’t supposed to pick me from kindergarten until after school. The morning we went to the DMV, my father had lied to pull me out of class early.

  “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience,” he told the lady at the front office to explain why he was collecting me barely half an hour into the school day. “Francisca’s mother forgot she has a doctor’s visit.”

  The secretary shook her head—those darned newfangled two-household families, they could never keep things straight—walked over to the intercom, buzzed my classroom, and requested that I report to the office with my backpack and lunch. I did as told, and arrived at the front office to find my father, particularly frazzled but impeccably attired as usual, waiting for me.

  Have you ever seen how suburban geriatrics freak when they have to give up their driver’s licenses? It’s like their final phase of independence has come to an end. They’ve run the race and their brittle bones done broke. Might as well get the rifle and send them to the glue factory. Well, even though my father was only in his late thirties when his license was almost revoked, he had that panicked air about him. He knew what the DMV would think about the fact that even with his layers of prescriptive lenses, he could barely see things that were fifteen feet or closer. He had no right to drive anymore, but he wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

  His kid retrieved from class, big hug given, kid strapped in passenger seat, the nearly blind man drove to get his license renewed. During our drive, he explained the plan to me. I listened carefully and, devoted kid love, took it all very seriously and planned to make him proud.

  There was a large paper bag in the backseat, and when we got to the DMV he handed it to me and told me to change into the extra clothes he’d brought. A pair of pajamas. My Snoopy slippers. Also inside the bag was a coloring book and a new box of crayons—the way-cool double-decker kind with a flap lid, four compartments, sixty-four colors, and a built-in sharpener.

  “When we go in,” he said, “pretend you have a cold.”

  He was banking on the fact that people couldn’t stand being mean to a nicely dressed father with a pajama-clad sick kid in tow.

  “Can I really use the crayons?”

  “Of course, Paca. That’s why I brought them for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Easily bribed, I did as told.

  8:20 a.m., exactly twenty minutes after the DMV opened, we walked in. By that time, my father figured, the employees’ cheap, bitter office caffeine diluted with powdered creamer would have kicked in. And, he calculated, only twenty minutes into a shift of municipal hell, the employees wouldn’t impenetrably hate the world quite yet. My dad knew what he was doing. And so did I. I dragged my Snoopy-slipper feet for dramatic effect. My Pink Panther coloring book and box of crayons in hand, we took a number and sat in orange plastic chairs with the four license-renewal stations in full view.

  “Okay,” he asked, “what do you see?”

  I was supposed to act nonchalant. Nonchalant. My father had taught me that word on the drive over.

  “Pretend you’re not reading the eye charts to me. Pretend you don’t even know what they are. Pick your nose or something. Sniffle. You’ll do great, you will,” he’d said. What he hadn’t said but had communicated loud and clear was: You’ll do great. You have to.

  My father didn’t really have anything to worry about. I wouldn’t have let a single detail go wrong. I was a perfectionist. Any chance to impress him and I turned out in full showoff kid regalia. I would be great. I knew I would. Besides, he’d promised me an entire pack of pizza scratch-’n’-sniff stickers if he got his license renewed. He knew pizza was the king of scratch-’n’-sniffs. Root beer and Dr. Pepper were pretty good, and gasoline scratch-’n’-sniff was cool if you were into that sort of thing, but pizza scratch-’n’-sniff was kiddy catnip. The stickers were hardly proper compensation for making me an accomplice to a crime, but I appreciated the promise of reward nonetheless. Sitting in the DMV, I could practically smell my synthetic pepperoni stickers already. That reminded me. I sniffled and picked my nose slightly. I whispered the first two lines of each posted eye chart to my father.

  “Station one, line one: E. Line two: F, P. Station two, line one: E. Line two: K, R. Station three, line one: E. Line two: N, Z. Station four, line one: F. Line two: B, C.”

  “Wait, station four, line one is F? Are you sure?”

  The anxiety in his voice frightened me. I suddenly questioned whether or not I really knew the alphabet. Of course I knew the alphabet. I’d gotten tons of gold stars from my teacher for learning it before all the other kids. I answered with absolute certainty.<
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  “Yes. Line one: F. Line two: B, C.”

  Cheating on the eye charts at the DMV was a piece of pie. Nowadays the whole operation is computerized to create fairly unpredictable eye chart variations, but back in the late 1970s, a finite and very negotiable number of variables was involved. There were four or five possible stations. Each station had one chart. And there were only about ten eye charts in the entire nation. Years later, my father told me that in preparation for that day he’d memorized the most common eye charts, or so he’d thought. For weeks beforehand, he’d sat on his couch working on the charts like flashcards. I doubt Dr. Hermann Snellen had meant to allow for such trickery when he invented his now familiar eleven-line charts. But then again, nobody drove back in 1862 when he printed up the prototype. Snellen had just been a nerdy ophthalmologist who wanted more accuracy in optical exams. My father was grateful for such simple aspirations. But then he found himself thrown by the Line one: F chart.

  “Line one: F? Damnit,” he said, his face turning red. “I don’t know that one. Read the whole thing. Slowly.”

  So I did.

  He concentrated. To look at him, he was just humming and drinking his little Styrofoam cup of coffee. But his shoulders were tense. His ears twitched slightly. His feet tapped out a rhythm to my alphabet incantation. His focused expression reminded me of when we’d play Simon, the electronic Simon says game, at home. He’d sit with his nose practically touching the small circular computerized machine to memorize the game’s random patterns of pulsing lights. Blue, blue, yellow, green, red, blue, green, red, yellow, blue—cheap and tiny lightbulbs flashed through thick colored opaque plastic. Specific tinny sounds corresponding to each color were emitted through the unit’s crappy speaker as the light pulsed. I sucked at Simon, but my dad cruised his way through even the most complicated sequences. We always had extra AA batteries in the fridge. My dad was obsessed. His shoulders tight and ears alert, he could memorize anything first time around.

  “Station four, line one: F. Line two: B, C. Line three: P, T, E, O …” he repeated the eleven lines aloud.

  “Correct,” I said.

  He took another sip of coffee.

  “Thanks, kid.” He pretended to check the time on his wristwatch for show, to seal the deal. Anyone looking our way wouldn’t doubt for a second that his sight was fine. Truth was, he’d needed me to read the numbers on his watch to him since I was in preschool. Years and years later, when he was diagnosed with cancer, I would buy him a talking watch to help him stick to his medicine schedule. But even then, we would revert to our old habit of my telling him the time. I don’t know if the robot-voiced watch became emblematic of his illness, of being alone sometimes as he lay dying, but he wore it only a week or two before he finally left it in the top drawer of his dresser, tucked under carefully folded pairs of boxer shorts and rolled bundles of brown, dark blue, and black cashmere dress socks.

  The woman at station two called out my father’s name. He handed her his paperwork and flubbed line ten of the eye chart—on purpose, for authenticity’s sake. I sniffled. And rubbed my nose a lot. I didn’t pick it. I could tell Lady Station Two would think nose-picking was gross. I sneezed once. It was a real sneeze, but I was still proud of myself for such good timing. Masters of our game, my father and I walked out with his license renewed.

  Shortly thereafter, his driver’s license arrived in the mail. My father looked so handsome with his shiny hair and pinstriped suit. His smile radiated. Look closely enough and you’d notice his eyes were aimed slightly off to the right of where he was supposed to look—both in the photo and in person the day he slid the renewed license into his wallet.

  My dad delivered on the pack of pizza scratch-’n’-sniffs. The kids at school freaked when I told them I had three sheets of pizza. No matter what they had in their sticker albums—glitter race cars, velvet fuzzy puppies, even cotton candy scratch-’n’-sniffs—it didn’t matter, my three sheets were not up for trade. I coveted them, sealed in their thin shrink-wrap plastic to keep the stink fresh, until I couldn’t resist any longer. And even once I finally did peel open the pack, I didn’t actually scratch the stickers with my haggard bitten nails. I only rubbed them to get their chemical funk on my fingertips.

  A few days later, I was doing exactly this, rubbing the pizza stickers with my thumb, when my father and I heard the thud against the hood of his car. It was my father’s weekend, and we were off for a day trip to I can’t remember where. We had just stopped at 7-Eleven and I wanted a Coke from the six-pack my father had bought and placed on the floorboard at my feet. I tried a zillion times to wrangle one of the cans of soda, but my seatbelt kept locking.

  “Jeez, kid, hold on a minute.” My dad reached down toward the passenger floorboard, left hand on the wheel, head tilted up to see over the dash, his right hand rummaging around in the bag to wrangle me a soda. I don’t know, maybe he looked down for a second too long. Maybe he couldn’t have seen a damned thing in front of us even if he had been sitting upright with both hands on the wheel. Whatever happened, I was rubbing my stickers, he handed me a Coke, and we heard the thud.

  My senses alert but jumbled, I looked up and saw an old man slide down the hood and slump onto the road—and all I could think of was pizza.

  Eyes watering from the vomit I struggled to keep down, I ran to the back of the station wagon. I saw a blue uniform hat in the trash-cluttered gutter. Zoom in focus, I noticed the hat’s embroidered white eagle patch. And then there was the distinctive cart with two blue canvas saddlebags knocked over in the middle of the street. Letters and throwaway advertisement newsprint fanned out almost too prettily on the asphalt like paper napkins at a fussy cocktail party. George, our neighborhood mailman, was knocked out cold on the pavement under the car’s back fender.

  “I thought it was a trashcan, I thought I’d hit a trashcan, I kept going. Fuck, Frank, help me,” Nathalie yelped.

  Crying and hyperventilating but unscratched, Nathalie crouched over George all frantic gesticulations and giant eyes. My father’s blind man dark glasses kept sliding down her nose, her face a mess of blotches, dripped snot, and smeared makeup. The glasses. Shit, had she been wearing the glasses when she crashed into George? And what the hell did she mean, she thought she’d hit a trashcan? Nobody in Manhattan actually hauled trashcans into the street anymore. What did she think this was, fucking Sesame Street? Damnit, how could she see anything with those glasses on? As it was, she was still sort of sick. What was she doing trying to park a vehicle outside the shop when she should have been home resting? She had no right to be out and about and driving and wearing my dad’s glasses and crashing into innocent people. Again with the useless thoughts. Shit.

  “Nat, I’m calling 911. I’ll be right back.”

  “No, no, don’t,” she said, still on her knees, arms reaching out to grab me, the sour scent of fear detectable on her sweatslicked hands. “No, Frank, please, no,” she begged.

  George hadn’t moved or opened his eyes the entire time I’d been standing there. I thought I could see him breathing, but his lips were starting to turn purple and his face was as pale and green as a dark brown complexion can get. Maybe the sickly hue was just from the cold, but I didn’t want to assume anything. I wouldn’t listen to Nathalie’s pleas. She’d clearly lost her mind.

  I sprinted back to the shop and, more nerves than physical exertion, was totally winded once I reached the phone.

  “911. What is the emergency?”

  How could the operator sound so bored? Other people’s tragedies were a dime a dozen to her; she answered the call like she wanted a coffee break.

  I struggled to catch my breath.

  “Hello? Caller? This is 911. What is your emergency?”

  “Frank!” Nathalie wailed from the street. “Come back. Don’t call. Omigod, Frank!”

  Her voice seemed so far away. I could almost tune her out. Almost, but not quite.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Here.” I handed
Nathalie my father’s dark glasses. Like some sort of weeping statue, silent tears trickled down Nathalie’s stone face. She slid on the glasses and slumped against the shop counter as I wrapped up early and made a sign to hang in the window—Gone Saturday for Protest. Open Sunday. Register closed out and door locked behind us, Nathalie hooked her arm in mine and leaned on me as we walked home. When we passed the station wagon I’d parked on Avenue A, she sighed deeply. And when we reached our building’s second-floor landing, she stopped. I pulled on her arm slightly to continue up the stairs, but she wouldn’t budge.

  “Where’s Johnny? Have you seen him lately?” she asked, tears streaming from eyes still hidden under oversized glasses.

  We were standing directly in front of Johnny’s door. I didn’t like the possibility he might hear us talking about him.

  “No, I haven’t seen him recently,” I whispered, and tugged on her arm again.

  “Well, where is he?” she asked, too loudly, and held her ground.

  “Maybe he’s visiting family,” I replied quietly.

  “No, he isn’t. He doesn’t have family. Where is he, Frank? Where?!”

  I had no idea where Johnny was, but as far as I could remember in that quick moment, the last time I’d crossed paths with him had been when I’d helped him up the stairs on Chinese New Year. He’d come stumbling home just as I was getting back from the shop. It seemed he’d had a particularly long shift on a barstool. It’s our year, kid, Year of the Black Sheep, he’d said with a wink, his whiskey-and-beer breath hot on my face, his laugh echoing in the stairwell. Chinese New Year. February 1. Almost two weeks had passed since I’d seen him. Nathalie had a point. Going two weeks without seeing Johnny—at the mailboxes, walking around the neighborhood, whatever—was strange. I felt like a shit for not having noticed sooner, but I wasn’t his keeper. Hell, I was having a hard enough time tending to my own life, let alone making sure my neighbors were accounted for. Besides, Nathalie didn’t know if Johnny had family or not. But I wasn’t going to push it. She could just win this one: We hadn’t seen Johnny for a while; I was a jerk for not having noticed earlier. Agreed. Done.