Monday, August 14: 7 days until I go home
After a few weeks feathers grow back pale and soft in the spots where the birds plucked them out. Papá says they’ll eventually blend in with the rest. When I stroke the soft new growth, Pablo bites my finger.
“Ow!” The bird hops onto Papá’s shoulder. I shake my stinging hand. “Why’d he do that?”
Papá lifts Pablo onto his finger. “Because we don’t want to go back to that place, ever. Right, Pablo?” He stares into the little parrot’s eyes.
“Did I hurt him?”
My father shakes his head. “It’s more like an irritation. They live with a certain amount of pain. So any unusual sensation upsets the balance.”
A chilly wind blows Papá’s hair aloft, revealing a downy gray undercoat at his temple along with the crisscrossed scars that will never fade and that I’ll never touch. Víctor circles us and settles on a branch above my father’s head. Papá and I have figured out that Víctor can only settle on the tree’s firm branches. Our fingers and shoulders are not stable enough for a one-legged bird to balance himself.
The secrets of crippled birds take their place among my memories of my new papá.
A week before I’m supposed to return to the United States, Frankie phones the house. I’ve spoken to him several times since the day he left for the airport, hidden under a blanket in the backseat of Tía Ileana’s car. I know that he arrived safely in Costa Rica. And that he’s taking classes to become a doctor’s assistant, and English classes so that one day he can come to the United States. But after he moved from the lawyer’s home into a room in a boarding house, he hasn’t had a phone of his own or the money to call.
As soon as he says hello, I can tell something happened. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“My father. He died a week ago. I got a letter from my sister today.”
“I’m sorry.” But not surprised. And I can tell from Frankie’s tone that he expected the news as well.
“I wasn’t there.” For a few seconds, Frankie doesn’t say anything. Then, “I ran away.”
“That’s what you always wanted—to have a better life. One day you’ll be able to help other people. The rest of your family, too.”
Not doing the things he did. Sometimes running away is the right thing to do. And sometimes staying is hard, but right. “They can wait,” I say, echoing the words my aunt told me. “You need to save yourself first.” She said it’s a lesson she too has to learn.
“Is your father there?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Still sleeping a lot?”
“It’s all the exercise I make him do.”
“Can you wake him?” Frankie sighs. “He knows where my uncle went.”
I pull the phone into the living room where Papá lies on the sofa. I lift the blanket and gently squeeze his shoulder. He stirs. I hand him the receiver and tell him Frankie needs to speak with him.
“What’s going on, Frankie?” Papá motions for me to help him sit. His body is warm from sleep. If changing positions still hurts him, he doesn’t show it.
I make out every other word of Frankie’s tinny voice, telling Papá about his father’s death and asking if there’s any way his family can get in touch with Jorge Heider Bustos to let him know about his brother.
“He and his business partner fled to Paraguay,” Papá says. “There are warrants for their arrest for drug trafficking and bribery. He probably wouldn’t come back even if he found out.”
Frankie’s response is too muffled for me to understand. Then Papá says, “I don’t recommend it. They’ve charged you with beating up that musician. The two carabineros and three other gang members in custody will pin other attacks on you for a deal on their drug charges.” He clears his throat. “It’s best you stay where you are.”
I snuggle next to Papá, close enough to hear Frankie all the way in Costa Rica and to smell the aroma of smoke that clings to my father. Wood smoke rather than tobacco. One of the other things we’ve done together is build a fire in the living room fireplace. And he says cigarettes still taste strange, which, according to Tía Ileana, means his damaged liver is taking its time to heal.
People feathers don’t grow back so fast, she said. His body is showing us all how to be patient.
Frankie tells Papá about the last time he saw his father, when he didn’t stand up to the cops and his father called him a coward.
“Trust me. He wouldn’t have remembered it the next day. What happened to him or whatever he said to you,” Papá says. He maneuvers his clumsy left arm across my shoulders.
“But I let the cops humiliate him.” A pause. “And those were his last words to me.”
“Listen, Frankie. If it had been me”—and it really could have been him—“I would have wanted you to take me home, clean me up if I needed it, and put me to bed. Salvage what dignity I had left.” I feel Papá’s chest expand and contract. “Because you’re not responsible for his decisions.”
“Thank you, sir,” Frankie says.
“How old was your father?” Papá asks.
“Forty-one.”
“He lost a tough battle. I’m sorry.”
After Papá hangs up, he slumps. His body trembles, his breath comes in rapid gasps, and his heart hammers against my right side, the way it did two days ago when he tried to climb the Cerro Santa Lucía with me and only made it halfway. The guy who was euphoric at breaking into an apartment rented by the leader of a murderous gang is about to lose it because some alcoholic he never knew drank himself to death and they were the same age.
I grip his shoulder with one hand, clutch his wrist with the other, and place his hand on his no-longer-swollen belly. “Breathe when I tell you. Don’t think of anything else.” I move my hand from his shoulder to his back, to the space between his shoulder blades so he can feel each breath against my hand.
It’s what you do for family.
My father’s heartbeat slows. His breaths synchronize with mine. He sits up straight and blinks a few times, as if waking from a deep sleep. Then he hugs me and says the words I’ve waited far too long to hear: “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Papá.” And with those words I have another good memory of my new papá.
That evening as soon as Papá leaves with Tía Ileana for his meeting of Alcohólicos Anónimos, I dial home. Evan picks up.
After our usual hellos, I ask him how the house is coming along.
“Kitchen cabinets went in today. They’re delivering the stove tomorrow.”
“What color did you decide on for the house?” It feels strange, speaking only English.
“Yellow.”
“‘Mellow Yellow,’ huh?” I hum the opening bars. “I guess Petra was doomed the minute you guys played that song at the wedding.”
“She tried her best.”
“So when do we move in?”
Evan names the things that still need to be done: sand and seal the floorboards, tile the bathroom walls, hang curtains, carpet the stairs. I want him to say the house won’t be ready for a while. It will make the next part easier.
“Is my mother around? I need to ask her something.”
“Vicky!” Evan calls. “It’s Tina.” He says good-bye and my mother comes to the phone.
First, she thanks me for calling. She’s the one who’s phoned every time so far—despite all the times I almost called or wrote to beg her for a ticket home.
I gulp a mouthful of air. “I’d like to stay here an extra couple weeks. Until the start of school. Papá and Tía Ileana said it’s okay.”
“Don’t you want to help with the house? And pack your things?” She’s surprised. I expected her to be.
“I don’t have so much stuff. There’s something I have to do here.”
“Something you have to do?” She doesn’t sound pleased, and I wonder what she’s thinking. She knows Frankie is in Costa Rica. I told her he’d gone there to study as a high school exchange student for the year. Maybe she thinks I have another boyfriend already. That life in upside-down-land has made me totally boy-crazy.
“Yeah. It’s kind of like the house. My project.”
“Marcelo’s house is new. It can’t be falling apart yet.”
I glance at the clock. Seven fifteen. Tía Ileana will be back soon from dropping Papá off. And if I don’t quit stalling, their phone bill will be huge.
Papá, Tía Ileana, and I had agreed not to tell my mother about what happened last month. So she wouldn’t think that I misbehaved, Papá went out and did something dangerous when he should have been watching me, Tía Ileana couldn’t manage her family, and Frankie came from a family of killers. But Papá still isn’t strong enough to return to work full-time, and it’s not fair for Tía Ileana to take vacation days from her job because of him and me.
“It’s, uh, Papá. He’s . . . not doing too good.”
“If it’s his drinking, you need to come home. You can’t change him.”
“It’s not.” I listen to the static on the line. “He got hurt. In an accident.”
“What? What kind of accident?”
“He doesn’t want to talk about it.” Tía Ileana says he needs to talk about it if he wants the nightmares and panic attacks to stop, and she and his doctors are looking for a psychologist that he’ll agree to see. But we can’t force him.
“Let me speak to him,” Mamá says.
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he?” Her voice breaks.
“At a meeting. He had to give up alcohol. Because of the”—I twist a strand of hair around my finger until the circulation cuts off—“the accident.”
“When’s he getting home?”
“No, Mamá,” I say. “Whenever you two talk, he ends up getting drunk and you end up crying. That won’t work anymore.”
She doesn’t answer—I think she’s too shocked to say anything.
“Frankie’s father died last week of liver failure. Papá will, too, if he doesn’t take care of himself. And what’s Evan going to say if you keep crying over the husband you divorced?”
Mamá sniffles. “He was my first love. You never forget your first love.”
“It’s over, Mamá. From now on, talk to me only. Papá, too, when he calls. None of this, ‘Hola, Tina, how’s school? I need to talk to your mother.’”
That gets a little laugh out of her. Good. In our tiny apartment Evan won’t be able to eavesdrop and think I’m acting like a jerk to my mother.
“How bad is he?” she asks.
“Some broken ribs. Liver and a kidney messed up. He was pretty sick for a while, and he gets tired.” I shake out my hand, where the circulation still hasn’t returned to my index finger. “The doctor thinks he’ll be well enough to ride a zip line in two weeks. There’s one where Tío Claudio just moved, and I want to ride it, too.”
“Claudio? My brother?”
“We talked about it when I went to Las Condes.” And we’ve made him swear not to tell her what really happened to Papá.
“How does he get to sleep at night, without . . .?”
“Warm milk. And lots of exercise.”
“That’s super.” She sounds genuinely happy. “So are you taking care of him?”
“When he’s not working. He still has his show.”
“I’m sure he’s a terrible patient.”
I grin, though she can’t see me. “I’m up to the job.”
At home I’d be sanding floors and hanging curtains. I have no skill at tiling bathrooms or carpeting stairs.
And I can’t solve all of Papá’s problems, either. But I can help him climb to the top of the cerro without collapsing and bake treats to fatten him up before he gets stuck forever with the nickname El Esqueleto, the skeleton. And we can have some more good times together that we’ll always remember—good times the way we are now and not the way we used to be.