True North

by Nicole French

  “Layla.”

  I look up, and to my surprise, my father stands in the doorway of the office. His face is covered with a sheen of sweat, like he ran all the way here from Brazil, but otherwise, he is dressed the same as always, in a button-up shirt and slacks. Relief slides over his face when I turn around.

  “Dad?” I wonder. “What-what are you doing here?”

  He shrugs. “I took the next plane after you––your mother wouldn’t have it any other way, and she was correct. You left. The boy left. And I…” Before I can say anything, he goes on. “I wondered what in the hell I was doing, allowing my daughter to travel to a strange country like this by herself. Not when I could come and help her.”

  I stare at him for a moment, and then, by instinct, fall against his chest to give him a hug. He’s still at first, then wraps his arms around me and strokes my hair, the same way he did when I was a child. I have to focus on breathing not to cry into his shirt. The people in the office are all watching us curiously, and I don’t think crying in the middle of the vital records office is going to help anything.

  I’m so angry at him. I was ready to leave Brazil and never come back. I was ready to leave my father, cut him out of my life since all he wanted to do was control it.

  And yet…now that he’s here, I’ve never been happier to see him in my life.

  “Please,” I say, handing him the paper. “Help.”

  He examines the denied application, then faces the clerk, who is watching him curiously out of the corner of her eye. I sometimes forget that for an older man, my dad is still quite handsome. That women notice him.

  I roll my eyes. It cannot possibly be as easy as that.

  And then I watch as he strides up to the counter like he owns it, cutting in front of the three other people waiting, and starts speaking in Spanish––a language I didn’t even know he spoke!

  No. They’re not going to let him get away with this. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I watch the clerk as she listens, watch the people behind him standing with their arms crossed, watch my father smile and laugh and gesture at me and the paper like he’s sitting across from the woman at an adorable bistro table instead of a dank government office.

  At one point, the woman laughs. My father reaches out a long finger and strokes her chin. The woman blushes, and I’m sickened slightly by the sight of my father being more affectionate with a stranger than he’s ever been with me or my mother in my life. A smile brightens his stern face, and for a moment, he looks pleasant. Kind. Handsome.

  I can’t hear what they’re saying, but the woman twists and turns from side to side, playing with her curly hair like a schoolgirl flirting with her crush. She keeps shaking her head, saying no, but her smile and body language clearly say otherwise. With his other hand dropped below the counter, my father beckons to me with a flick of his fingers. It takes a second for me to understand what he wants, but as soon as it registers, I glance around, then take some of the cash out of my purse and set it in his hand.

  He flips it onto the counter between him and the woman. She examines it for a moment, and my father whispers something else. I catch the word linda float on the air, and watch as the woman grins again and then slides the money under the counter. Then my father stands expectantly while she turns and disappears into a back room. He turns to me and winks. I’m still too shocked to reply.

  A few minutes later, the woman returns holding a flimsy envelope. She clutches the birth certificate against her chest for a moment, and a flash of fear crosses her face.

  “You can’t take it out of the coun––” she starts, but stops talking when my dad lays another stack of bills from his pocket on the counter.

  He leans back across the counter, and slowly traces a finger up her forearm. Even from my place on the opposite wall, I can see her shiver with desire.

  “Creo que está perdido, no?” he asks with a sly smile.

  The clerk bites her lip, then after looking around to see that no one else is watching, pulls the money across the counter and below with the rest. “Sí,” she says. “I think it was lost.”

  Dad plucks the birth certificate out of her hand and gives it to me. I promptly tuck it into a folder in my purse, treating it like the gold it is: Carmen’s salvation.

  “Gracias, linda,” Dad says to the clerk, who proceeds to blush all over the place. But to me, he resumes his stern mask. “Let’s go.”

  ~

  An hour later, I find myself sitting in a wicker chair in a square a few blocks away from the casa where now both my dad and I will be staying the night before the flight we are apparently both taking to Montreal in the morning. He’s taking no chances, or so he said, of making sure his daughter gets home safe. I sort of wonder if it’s because he wants to speak his mind one last time to Nico, but for whatever reason, he’s insisted on coming with me, seeing my apartment, inspecting the life I’m now living. I’m not sure what I think about it, but I accept. For the first time in a few years, my dad is actually showing some interest in my life again. Now it will have to be more on my terms, but I’m willing to try if he is.

  Music floats down the street, the casual cadence of Cuban salsa, with drums. There is music everywhere in this city––every time we turned a corner to get here, I would hear it, swimming through doorways and out of open widows. It’s not quite the same type you would hear in the Bronx, but the rhythms are similar and remind me of the parties at Alba’s apartment. I wish I were there now.

  The waitress drops a glass of rum for my dad and a coffee for me on the table before she winks at him. I roll my eyes. The attention he gets from women here really is ridiculous.

  We sit for a minute, and I watch as my dad pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one.

  “I can’t believe you are smoking so much now,” I say, watching the habit that’s been so strange to me since arriving in Brazil.

  He looks up, curious. “You are? Everyone smokes in Brazil.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a doctor. You know exactly what that’s doing to your body.”

  He takes another drag, then examines the cigarette carefully, like he’s never really considered what it does to him.

  “I do,” he admits. “But…do you know, I do not think I care so much? Everyone is going to die in the end.”

  We lapse into silence again as we drink and my dad smokes, and I do my best to ignore his newfound nihilism.

  “We could have been like this,” he says in a low voice, gesturing around the square.

  There’s another cluster of military personnel in one corner, loitering in their green uniforms and berets, and a group of students in the other. It’s not a bad scene. People are laughing, cars are driving by. But it is strangely…quiet…for such a public place. Not silent. But you’d expect it to be a little louder.

  “Who?” I ask. “The U.S., you mean?”

  He darts a warning look at me that clearly says I need to be quiet.

  “No,” he says quickly. “Brazil.”

  I blink, unsure of what he means. In my classes, we learned about some of the destabilizing events of the sixties and seventies in South America, including the military coup in Brazil that was sponsored by the United States. But it’s a history that was always a little unclear. The coup ended the rise of socialism in Brazil, I thought. But then it became a military state for the next twenty.

  “When I was starting university,” my father continues as he sips on his rum, “that was when Jango was overthrown.”

  I nod, somewhat familiar with the events from my classes. João Goulart, also known as Jango, was the president during the early sixties, one whose proposal to nationalize a variety of social services earned him the ire of right-wing nationalists and the military.

  “My professor last year thought that was a reflexive maneuver,” I said. “He thought it was more because the U.S. saw it as another situation like, well…here.”

  I was hesitant to say Cuba out loud. Talking politics was frowned u
pon.

  Dad shrugged. “It was. I remember being very angry about it at the time, actually. My father, he supported it. But, like so many young people, I was very interested in what was happening here in Cuba and in Colombia. I liked the idea of people receiving free healthcare. Better social services.” He looks at me pointedly. “When I first became a doctor, I wanted to help, you know. I wanted to do more than clean up scar tissue or help women, ah, enhance themselves.”

  I smirk. I can practically hear Nico on my shoulder, urging me to say “tits” again in front of my dad.

  “So you wish that the coup hadn’t happened?” I wondered. “Do you wish that Jango had stayed in power?”

  Dad looks around, like he’s evaluating the state of the country. I’ve read plenty about Cuba, what information is available to Americans. My professor, clearly a leftist thinker, was always careful to temper the critiques of Fidel Castro with other facts: like that Cuba has some of the best public health records and highest literacy rates in the world. Its economic conditions, he argued, were due to the economic embargoes that came from U.S. pressure––not because of the way that Castro and the communists actually ran the country.

  I didn’t know. It was hard to say one way or another. But a country where people had to watch what they said for fear of being accused of being a government usurper also seems oppressive.

  Dad just shrugs again and finishes his rum. “Fifty years is a long time for one man to be in power,” is all he says, and I know he’s referring to Fidel. Then he turns to me. “I was angry, yes. But then we watched what happened in Argentina. In Chile. We watched as people disappeared, again and again. And I looked at my government, at the men who guarded every building with their guns, and the people who were scared to talk out loud…just like here. And I decided I would leave before maybe they wouldn’t let me.”

  It turned out to be unnecessary. Because, as I knew, Brazil held elections again in 1985, two years after I was born. But by that point, my father was well into establishing a practice in Seattle. He had married my mother, gotten his citizenship, started a life in America. A life that gave us all so much, but isolated him even more despite the freedoms he sought.

  It was a strange paradox. And one that explains his tight-fisted grip on our lives. He sought stability. He sought reassurance. He sought the knowledge that his family would never have to struggle to belong the way he did.

  “Why did you come here?” I ask finally. “Besides to keep me safe, I mean. You didn’t have to help with the records. You don’t like Nico at all. And you don’t even know his mother.”

  Dad’s dark eyes soften. “You talk like keeping you safe isn’t the most important thing. I am your father, Layla. That is all that matters to me.”

  I don’t say anything. My other questions still stand.

  Dad clears his throat. “I know what it’s like to grow up in a country toyed with like a figure in a game,” he says. “I don’t know this Carmen, but why should she have to come to a country she’s never known? A country her father left for the same reason I did––because in the end, it was being enchained by a country that claims to be the land of the free?” He shrugs and takes a long pull of his cigarette. “Free for itself, maybe. But at the expense of everyone else.”

  I frown. “Do you really think it’s as simple as that?”

  He shakes his head. Of course it’s not. But as he stubs out his cigarette and stands up, resignation falls over his stern face. It’s strange––this is the most honest conversation I’ve ever had with my father. It’s the first time he’s admitted that maybe his decisions in the past were less than perfect. That things didn’t always turn out the way he planned.

  “I don’t know this woman, this Carmen,” he repeats. “But everyone deserves to be free.”

  ~

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Nico

  You know that saying, “like sitting ducks?” It’s a dumb saying. I’ve barely ever seen ducks sitting, you know? They’re usually paddling or waddling around Central Park. Sometimes they quack at you because you had the balls to interfere with their fishing or whatever. But they don’t really sit, and if they do, it’s in some bushes or someplace like that where people won’t be able to get them. They don’t just sit there, waiting to be shot. Waiting around like idiots for the firing squad.

  But right now, that’s what I feel like, sitting with my family in a row that feels strangely like a church pew, while we wait for my mother’s case to be called into the small courtroom. The room is packed––full of other people nervously waiting for their fates to be sealed by a couple of judges who sit on the immigration courts in the city.

  It’s two o’clock. Layla’s flight was supposed to arrive early this morning from Montreal, but I haven’t heard from her in more than four days. Her phone must be dead––the calls have been going straight to voicemail since we left.

  I rub my chest, the spot where her name is tattooed over my compass. I miss her like crazy, but it’s really the not knowing what’s about to happen that’s the worst part of all. Is she okay? Is my mom going to be okay? The only thing I had to do the last few days was work, pulling a forty-eight-hour shift at the firehouse. I have twelve hours off, but then I’m right back on at midnight for another three days. I should be tired––well, I am––but I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.

  “Somebody tell me again how the fuck this happened?” I whisper to Gabe.

  That earns me a sharp look from Ma, who’s sitting quietly with the lawyer that Cheryl hired to represent her. I have to hand it to Cheryl––for someone who’s basically just been a housewife for the last twenty years, she knows how to come in and put shit together. And damn, it really is a whole different story when you have money for someone to go to bat for you. A whole bunch of papers were filed, phone calls made, things I can’t even name, but in the end, Christina, the lawyer, got the court date moved up several weeks to today.

  She rolled her eyes a little at the plan to get the birth certificate, which made me want to punch through a wall all over again. Ma was probably eligible for relief, she said. The biggest issue would be that she had worked under the table for so many years and hadn’t paid taxes. Still, documentation wouldn’t do anything but help, and if my mother can prove she’s a Cuban citizen, she’s covered under the Cuban Adjustment Act to apply for permanent residency.

  But, of course, that means my girl needs to get here fast. Because if this hearing starts and we don’t have documentation…that means more court dates. More lawyers. More possibilities that in the end, my mother might still be forced to leave.

  Fuck. I can’t think about that right now.

  “Relax,” Gabe says. “Christina said even if they start deportation proceedings, it takes months, maybe even years. And unlike Ileana, she actually thinks she has a good shot at getting relief because she’s been here for so long.”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, how did we end up here? I want to know how exactly immigration ended up tagging Ma.”

  It’s a story I’ve asked for over and over, and no one seems to be able to give me a good answer. Maggie was at home with Allie. Selena was at work. Gabe was in class. We know that at some point after attending a Wednesday Mass by herself, which she doesn’t normally do, Ma was cornered and arrested in the space of five minutes on her walk back to Alba’s apartment. And from there, a message was left on Gabe’s cell phone before she was taken to Albany.

  When she came back with Gabe and my sisters, she didn’t want to talk about it. Shut herself up in her room at Alba’s for over an hour before she would come out.

  She’s ashamed. After being careful for so many years, she’s ashamed that she was caught. That she’s putting us all through this. But most of all, more than I’ve ever seen her, my mother’s scared.

  I glance down the row, to where she’s sitting in her Sunday best, flanked on one side by Maggie and by the lawyer on the other. On the other side of the lawyer sits Cheryl, blonde
and stiff while she looks over the room. She looks taller than everyone else, but it’s only because she sits up straight, whereas most of the people in here are slumped. Fear does things to your posture, I guess.

  Cheryl and I still haven’t quite figured each other out. Layla’s mom is a lot like her––soft spoken and a good listener, and the kind of person who looks you right in the eye. She wasn’t surprised, for instance, when I told her about the engagement or about the fact that Layla is pregnant, since Dr. Barros called her that night. She was, however, pretty damn surprised to find out that I had been Layla’s new roommate for almost four months.

  ~

  “If it wasn’t a problem, why do you think she hasn’t told me?” she keeps asking as she walks around the apartment that, slowly, Layla and I have made our own.

  I hop up on the counter after getting myself a big glass of water and watched her pace, trying to see what she sees. It’s not the empty place she left Layla with in August. We’ve hung pictures. Bought a few more pieces of old furniture. We have mail on the counter and food in the cupboards. Coats hanging from hooks I installed after Christmas, and a bunch of framed photos of the two of us placed on bookshelves and a few windowsills. We’ve made it a home. Our home.

  Cheryl picks up one of the pictures––one of me and Layla at another of Alba’s parties, just before Christmas. Layla loves my family’s parties. I taught her some more salsa moves, so that when we go, we can rip it up a little. I don’t even care that it means my sisters tease me like crazy because I fell in love with a girl who likes Marc Anthony now as much as they do. I just really, really like the way Layla sways her hips.

  I look around the apartment, suddenly aching for my girl. It’s not right, being here without her.