Saturday, July 8: 44 days until I go home
Frankie and I were supposed to spend Saturday afternoon and evening together since he gets off work at noon, but Mamá has arranged for me to go to my grandparents in Las Condes. “One day with them, and that’s all you have to do,” she tells me over the phone on Friday morning.
I don’t protest because I have forty-four more days with Frankie—and a mother who will owe me big time when I want to see him after that.
On Saturday morning Tía Ileana drives me to the house where Mamá grew up and where she, Daniel, and I lived for the months between Papá’s arrest and our move to Wisconsin. Mamá’s two brothers, my tíos Alberto and Claudio, join us for la comida along with her sister, my tía Francisca, their spouses, and a bunch of their kids who I’ve never met before.
Tío Claudio brings his guitar and plays children’s songs for my cousins. During the week he’s a music teacher, so he knows how to get kids to join in, and before long, I’m singing, too.
“How’s your father doing?” he asks afterward as he sets his guitar in its case—leaving early because his four-year-old twins have a play date.
“Okay. Always working.”
Tío Claudio laughs. When we stayed here, he was always super nice to us and told us how much he admired Papá and wanted to help get him released from prison. I don’t think my abuelos know how cool he is, or they would have acted as stone-cold to him as they do to Mamá.
“Tell Nino I’m looking for him. We just moved out to La Florida, and the place has a clubhouse and a pool.” He snaps the case shut and lifts it. “We’ll have to wait on the pool until summer, but there’s a park with hiking trails and a zip line.”
I think of my long ride with Frankie to La Florida, the identical squat brick houses with shingle roofs and newly seeded grass. I can’t imagine Papá traveling all the way out there or hiking and riding a zip line, though my old papá would have done it for sure. “I’ll tell him you said hello,” I answer.
Tío Claudio’s dark brown eyes turn serious. “Tina, we have to get him moving. He’ll feel a hundred percent better.” I nod slowly. He’s right, but the only thing I’ve gotten Papá to do so far is let me go out with Frankie.
After Tío Claudio leaves, I find the Lego box in the closet where my abuelos kept them for Daniel and me, and play with Tía Francisca’s kids until it’s nine o’clock and time for me to go. On the way out, my grandparents comment on what a nice older cousin I’ve turned out to be.
“I was the coolest,” I tell Tía Ileana in the car. “Just call me the family hero. Mamá should send me a present.” In my mind I run through the possibilities: Metallica cassettes. Videos. Nintendo games. All stuff Frankie and I can do together, since he told me he has to stay in the apartment and can’t take me out to the movies or the arcade until his abuela returns. He said she’s worried about break-ins at night.
Back at the house Papá sits at the dining table, squeezing his rubber ball with his bad hand. In front of him is an open box of take-out pizza with one slice of mushroom left, an ashtray with three crushed cigarette butts, and an empty glass.
“Tío Claudio says hi,” I say. “He wants you to go out to La Florida and hike some trails.”
“Good for him. Maybe he should teach gym rather than music.” Papá pushes the rest of the pizza toward my aunt. At least he ate something. After a few more squeezes of the ball, he speaks up again. “I thought Tina should know what I found out from Sofia’s father.”
My insides clench. “You mean the other woman?” I ask, wondering if Papá has taken to spying on me now.
He lets the ball slide from his fingers and wiggles the glass at Tía Ileana, the fingers of his bad hand surprisingly nimble.
“You’ve had enough, Chelo. I don’t want you to get sick,” she says, as if he’s a little kid stuffing his mouth with candy. She brings a bottle of mineral water from the kitchen and fills his glass.
Papá gulps the water and frowns. His speech is slurred but understandable. “Your aunt asked if I knew Sofia Méndez or her family from the ‘NO’ campaign. She’s afraid this Frankie is a big-time womanizer.”
I don’t know whether to thank Tía Ileana for her concern or kick myself for giving her way too much information.
“In fact, I do know her father quite well,” Papá continues, sending another jolt through my insides. “We were detained together in a concentration camp right after the coup. He got tuberculosis there and has been in and out of hospitals ever since.”
Mamá told me my father had been imprisoned once before, for six months after the 1973 coup, and then blacklisted from working as a journalist, even though he only covered sports in those days. I was only a baby then.
“What did her father say?” My knees weaken, and I drop into a chair across from Papá.
“Sofia never dated anyone named Frankie, or Francisco, Zamora. So if the boy tells you he and Sofia were ‘just friends,’ he’s probably right.” Tía Ileana’s lips are pressed together, so I try not to make my sigh of relief too audible.
Papá shoves another cigarette between his lips and fumbles with the lighter. “On the other hand”—he glances at Tía Ileana—“he didn’t know anyone from the colegio with that name who volunteered for the ‘NO’ campaign. He said Sofia went to visit friends in Concepción, but he promised to check with her when she gets back. She was one of the captains for the school.”
Papá takes a puff and blows out a stream of smoke. “It could be that he goes to another school, or was in a different level. Or he wanted to make it seem like he did more than he did. Everyone wants to be on the winning side.” Another puff, another stream of smoke. “Or he may not be who he says he is.”
My throat closes, and I can barely swallow. Sofia called him Pepe, not Frankie. I bite my lower lip to keep from telling Tía Ileana and Papá that nugget.
Papá bats the ball with his weak hand. It hits the pizza box and bounces back. He stops it with his splint. “My guess is that he was in a different level. That colegio is quite large and in a very mobilized working-class neighborhood. It had one of the largest contingents for the ‘NO’ in the city.”
“I don’t want Tina to get hurt,” Tía Ileana says.
Papá leans forward in his chair. “And because you nagged me to check the boy out, this guy thinks I can’t control my daughter.”
And does the guy have any idea what his daughter looks like when she leaves the house for work? I can’t control my giggles.
Papá turns toward me so quickly he nearly falls out of his seat. “And what do you think is so funny?”
I lower my gaze. “Nothing.”
“Fine.” Papá slaps the table. “I’m going to feed my birds, which I couldn’t do before because of this little investigation.” He stands, knocks his chair over, and stumbles into the door to the kitchen.
Tía Ileana rushes to him. “Let Tina do it. I’ll take you upstairs.”
He waves her off. “My responsibilities, okay?”
He lurches through his office on the way to the backyard. My aunt takes off her jacket and hangs it in the entryway. She turns her face away from me.
“I’m sorry, Tina,” she finally says. “I only wanted to protect you.”
“I know.” But it’s okay. Frankie isn’t going out with Sofia, and no one’s going to keep me from seeing him. Still, I feel bad for Tía Ileana because Papá acted so mean to her. And I remember what she asked me to do when she showed me around Valparaíso—stand up to Papá so he’d change. “I’m going to check on the birds. And Papá.”
“Be careful, amorcita.”
Outside, the light mist sparkles in the floodlight. Papá throws birdseed around the cage. I never took my coat off inside, so I’m still warm despite the damp cold. Papá’s face is flushed even though he wears no coat, only a wool sweater. When I slip through the wire door and squeeze past him, I smell the whiskey on his breath. He sets down the bag of seed, leans against a scrawny tree, and takes a bottle from his back pocket. It looks like the one Frankie found in the drawer, and it’s nearly empty. He gulps the rest and tosses the bottle toward a corner of the cage. It pings when it hits the wire.
If he gets sick because I didn’t stop him, I don’t want to see it. I step toward the cage door. Víctor flutters to the branch above my head, startling me. I have nothing in my hands, but I pretend to pass him a grape.
“I like Metallica!” he screeches.
“I . . . like . . . Metallica,” Papá repeats in heavily accented and slurred English. “Where’d he learn that shit?”
“Frankie,” I answer. “That’s how we met. He showed me this record store, and it turned out we both liked the same music.” I don’t tell Papá what else we have in common.
I wish Papá would talk about how he and Mamá met and fell in love. I already know the story because Mamá told me. They were students at the university—he in his first year, she in her second. One day, he gave her his seat on a crowded bus, and when the bus broke down, they had a lot of time to get to know each other. If he told me the story, though, it would show me that he still knows how to love.
“What is it?” Papá’s eyes are half-closed, and leaning against the tree in the rain, he appears relaxed, comfortable. Fine droplets of water cling to his hair and glow silver in the light.
“Do you think a person has to love himself before he can love someone else?”
“No,” he says sharply. “Why?”
“Tía Ileana said—”
“Tía Ileana said,” he mocks. He bends forward and spits onto the dirt floor of the cage. “Hasn’t she caused enough trouble for one day?”
“She’s only trying to help. Anyway, I’m the one you guys were spying on. If anyone should be mad, it’s me.”
Papá stares up into the fog. “Just shoot me.” He turns his back to me and stumbles from the cage into the house, leaving me alone with the birds and the cage door open.