Never Too Real (13 page)

Oh Lord. Her own mama was a baby-mama.
Carajo!
This was a stereotype Luz had been working all her life to avoid. All these stereotypes. Fatherless, illegitimate, the sneaking around, raising another man’s child, the lies, the decades—the horror.

“Tomas. I need you to take care of her.”

Her brother rose to protest.

“Nah, nah, it’ll be fine. Just give me a day, okay? Just a day. Twenty-four hours.”

“We should do it together, right? Talk to them?” Tomas attempted to keep his responsibility alive.

“No! You have a father, okay? Your father has stayed the same! Mom owes
me
answers, not you. And he does, too. Dad.” Mom owed everyone answers, as Emeli’s introduction into their lives would mean a new sibling, and for Luz’s children a new
tía
or auntie, too.

Luz was tearing up now, in a way her brother hadn’t seen since their beloved
abuela
passed away more than a decade earlier.

“Okay, okay. Listen, just be by your phone,” he said.

“I can do that.” Luz pulled several tissues from her purse and blew her nose, wiped her eyes. “Shoot, you don’t have no Kleenex in this bachelor pad, or what?”

Her little brother ran to do his big sister’s bidding—just like old times. He brought her a new box.

“Does she have clothes, even?”

“Yeah, she came with a bag.”

“And feed her, okay? I bet you guys like the same stuff, like pizza.” Luz cracked half a smile and felt the dried salt tears on her cheeks crinkle.

Back in the living room, Luz was surprised to find her new sibling snoozing soundly on the couch, sneakers still on, holding the remote. On the obnoxiously big bachelor screen was a reality show about a cake-maker in Jersey—not what Luz would have thought she’d be watching.

“Wow, she must have been tired.” For the first time Luz thought of how it must feel to be Emeli. Fifteen years old, suddenly moved five class-rungs up in an apartment downtown, with a new stepbrother and half sister who weren’t exactly very nice to her. Her mother was dead, her father in jail, again.

Brother and sister hugged good-bye.

“It’ll be fine,” Tomas assured Luz, though in part he was assuring himself.

Yeah,
she thought.
Just fine.

Chapter 12

A
s she slid into her usual pleather restaurant booth, Cat was beginning to feel that her butt and this seat were getting too comfy. For maybe a decade now it was a repeat spot for all her close girlfriends, as well as several other urban tribes, including Long Island moms post-shopping. The upscale diner was easy access via subway, cab, or foot, open twenty-four/seven, solid comfort food—salad, too, for those cleansing days. And without faltering, pics of drag queens on the menus, hinting at the neighborhood’s past. Cat visited some memories of much younger visits, usually drunk before even walking through the door.

Maybe it wasn’t so comfy after all, she thought, as the memories piled a tad too high. Abruptly, Cat felt old and tired.

Gabi stumbled in, brows furrowed, but smiling. Cat wondered if she was just noticing that Gabi looked particularly harried lately? Burdened. And it wasn’t just the bags she was carrying in her hands; those were a constant.

“Hi, Mama.” They exchanged warm pecks on the cheek.

“
Ay,
Catalina, the traffic.”

“I know. Crazy.”

Cat brought up the heavy right away. “Gabs, I am
so
sorry to hear about Magda’s mom.”

Her friend sucked her teeth and shook her head at the same time, sighing.

“How is she?”

“Well, Magda is Magda,” Gabi answered. “She’s fine as far as I can tell, but she texted last night that the prognosis is not good. So, as much as she puts up that front, I’m concerned.” Gabi knew it wasn’t her place or her M.O. to dish further. She was a steel trap both professionally and personally.

“Of course.” Cat didn’t want to pry too much, but she also couldn’t resist some
chisme
—she wanted to gossip a little. Magda and her glamorous but tumultuous life was fascinating to even her closest friends. “And this has gotta be crazy with her family and her father not talking to her, right?”

“I’m sure. But unless I’m there with her, or she’s tossed back a few, we’re not gonna hear too much about it.”

Cat sighed in sympathy. A casualty of being Americanized was the loss of their mothers’ tradition of reaching out across every dimension of family and friends for support. It was like playing cat’s cradle—the more loops you made, the closer your hands came together and the stronger your network became. The flip side: Their mothers could be equally adept at hiding family secrets, dirty laundry, and everyone seemed to have some.

Cat decided to take a chance and break with her own everything-is-awesome routine.

Rolling her ice water in her hand, feeling the cold wetness of the perspiring glass, Cat began to be truthful for once, her eyes down in shame. “So, Gabs. I’m not doing so well.”

“Cat?” Gabi’s friendly empathy and therapy skills clicked into motion.

“Yeah. Well. Things just aren’t landing.” Cat continued to look down. Admitting that she needed help was like clean-jerking barbells. But if she couldn’t reveal her disquiet and dilemma with her friend, a best-selling therapist, whom was she going to do it with?

“But, is it just a matter of time in this business?”

“Well, that’s just it. It’s been a lot of time . . . and in my business, timing is so important. Too much time is dangerous. You fall off the radar, you’re screwed.”

Gabi let silence hold the floor for a moment. She disagreed with Cat, feeling more so that the real radar is you—you control the radar and you grab that light and beam it right back in your face. But she’d communicate that to Cat in a different, more customized way to her, just not right now. Right now, Gabi felt that there was something else that was eating away at Cat. Something just as big.

Gabi was right. “And my mother . . . she’s making me nuts,” Cat stammered out at a clip. “Gabi, I think that’s why I’m nuts . . . I think that she really just hounds me because she’s so upset that she’s lost the ability to brag to people about me and that’s where I feel her terror coming from—I’m feeling
her
terror!—but I’m not scared so much as she’s scared . . . and now she’s making me nuts,
more
nuts than I’d be on my own—I can’t hear myself!” It was one breathless, lifting-the-lid-of-a-pressure-cooker sentence.

“Okay.” Once the mother issue came up, it was all Gabi’s hands on deck. “That’s a good one—let’s hear you: I want to know, Cat, how do
you
feel here, now, about where you’re at?” Gabi pointed her finger down at the table.

Cat paused a breath, then her eyes opened wide with panic. “Gabi, I’m too old for this shit!”

Gabi was surprised and confused, which was rare. “Old for what shit?”

“For this! For sitting here and trying to reimagine myself! For not having a husband or kids or . . . just kids!”

The server was on his way to the table to take their orders. Protectively, Gabi waved him off.

“Okay. Now I totally get it, I get it,” she said. “It’s a sucky time for this to happen and you worked so hard to get where you are. It’s been sewn into your identity, deeply, work and succeeding and getting ahead, you straight-A bum.”

“You mean where I
was
.”

“What?”

“You said . . . so hard to get to where I am. It’s
was
.”

“No! I mean
are
. Where you are.”

“Gabi, I am nowhere right now.”

“Bullshit.”

“What?”

“I’m calling bullshit on you.” A Guru-Gabi specialty, calling out the real, breaking down narratives. “You are the sum of your parts, past and present, plus your potential for the future. No one can take that away from you, Cat. No one can take away what you’ve done—what you’ve built, and where you’ve come from.”

Cat’s eyes widened. Something sunk in. She was listening. “But, then why does it feel so crappy?”

“Because much of your identity is wrapped up in the sash someone else puts on you—a sash that can be taken away.”

Cat was offended at the analogy. “I’m not a beauty queen!”

“No, but you are a Queen. And you are one without anyone else’s permission or seal of approval. Your
self
doesn’t depend on who hires you.”

As if coming up against a wall, rather than a door, Cat deflated. “Yeah, yeah . . . I know. I hear you.”

“Don’t you dare ‘yeah, yeah’ me. I’m fucking serious,
carajo
.” Gabi suffered no fools as soon as even a hint of whining popped up its putrid head.

Cat’s eyes welled. She sniffed tears back as much as she could muster.

Gabi sighed. She didn’t want to hurt her friend, but she also knew that this was a crisis point for Cat. If she didn’t start infecting her with another way of looking at her lot in life, she could lose her like she’d seen the city eat up others. “Listen, remember that dumb
Blues Brothers
movie?”

Cat nodded.

“Well, I hated that movie—friggin’ white dudes with harmonicas—but my brother was obsessed with it, and his favorite line was, ‘We’re on a mission from God.’ These two tubby guys playing music—on a mission from God. Can you imagine?!”

Cat chuckled, remembering a music video where they danced around in black suits, fedoras, and shades, looking lumpy and frumpy, yet they were thought to be cool.

“Think about it: What’s your mission from God? Not the mission your mother sent you out on. That was a pretty cool mission, but it was
her
mission, right?”

“Yup.” Cat nodded. “But I liked it. I did good.”

“Oh, you did more than good! You killed it! But, you also had to pay a price.”

Cat nodded. “It was a big price.”
An empty home and an empty womb.

“So. Since you are a Queen and we are all on a mission from God, because why the fuck not, what’s your mission? Not yo’ mama’s, not the network’s.
Your
mission.”

“Good question.” Cat sat up straighter in the booth.

Gabi took a big bite of salad and winked at Cat. “You need to actually read my books, ya know.”

Chapter 13

T
he fluorescent lights of the hospital hallway reached into Magda’s scalp and squeezed. This was the side effect of polishing off three-quarters of a tequila bottle the night before combined serendipitously with the dry, metal-tube air of her flight to Miami. As soon as Magda had gotten the call from her father in her office, she rushed to wrap up only vital items at work. Then she drank too much, per usual, sobbed on Gabi’s shoulders, passed out—and caught the first flight out in the morning. As one of the few in her family who had escaped the southern peninsula of Florida, including cousins, only a hop-skip-jump away, Magda assumed that most of the immediate family would be there already. She hoped not. She was there to see her mother. Not the whole clan who barely acknowledged that she was alive.

As she approached the room, Magda made out light chatter in Spanish. Her stomach clenched in reflex as she rounded the door frame and gently peeled off her sunglasses. Three of her younger sisters were there: Inez, Veronica, aka Nica, and Diana. Inez and Veronica were sitting on each side of her mother’s hospital bed while Diana fiddled with a flower arrangement and an untouched breakfast tray.
All of their kids must be with their fathers,
Magda thought,
they probably don’t want to scare them yet.
On the vinyl recliner, overseeing it all, was Magda’s father. She hadn’t seen him in more than a decade.

But Magda’s eyes gave only a cursory scan of her family, focusing her attention on only one person, her mother. Tubes snaked from the IV pole to Carolina’s gaunt, chemo-burned hands, marked with rivers of iodine brown, her charred veins. She seemed pressed far too deep into her pillows than possible for her slight weight. It was as if the gravity of her being was so much heavier than her body. All this was shocking to Magda—the transformation—but curiously, what rose to the top of her mind was that she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her mother without makeup. Not her usual foundation, concealer, eye makeup—though she did have a slight gloss of color on her lips.
Sneaking in colored lip balm. That’s my Ma.

Carolina’s gray eyes connected with her eldest daughter’s and would not let go. And as Magda, dressed in a pale blue suit and rumpled white button-down shirt, stepped from the doorway toward the bed, everyone followed the patient’s line of sight and stopped talking. Magda’s sisters dropped their eyes, got up, and slowly carved out room for her as their father sat stone-faced for a beat, staring at Magda. She didn’t notice, though. Nor did she notice when he got up from the recliner and joined his other daughters in leaving the room.

The disregard for a sibling or a daughter, the lack of affection for Magda, or even attention to her, was as foreign an occurrence in a Latin family as an
abuela
making brown rice. At any other time, Magda would have made a snarky crack about it, something dour and pointed to turn the pain they caused her to right back at them. Magda’s heart had ached on many nights as she lay awake in bed scrolling through social media updates of her sisters and their growing families. Families she barely got to see but who so obviously enjoyed each other, far out of reach of their eldest
tía
’s sinful and shameful existence as
un gay
.

Unlike Magda, her sisters feared their father. When he’d shut Magda out, the whole family played along. Some, out of simple fear of his rage and personal rejection. Magda figured that at least one, probably Diana, was also too afraid of losing her inheritance. And though her father may have felt betrayed by his eldest daughter’s choices, the bigger betrayal for Magda was that of her younger sisters, girls whom she’d cared for so well, protecting them often from the furor of the parent they now sided with. Instead of gratitude for Magda, she knew that they resented their sister’s defiance and ambition. Precisely the features of Magda’s that had freed her from the patriarch—but at the same time distanced her from their love. It all stung.

“Ma,” Magda murmured as she reached gently to place her hand under her mother’s, feeling her skin barely as thick as crêpe paper. Magda’s eyes welled.

“
Ay m’ija
. . .
Ven,
” Carolina whispered.

Magda’s broad frame enveloped her mother’s shrunken one, petite already, now, like a fairy. Magda whispered a pained “Ma . . .” as she held her as tightly as she could without crushing her bones made fragile by the concoction that kept her alive this long.

Carolina pushed Magda gently off of her, comforting her eldest, though she was the one very much alive. Magda pulled herself enough away to sit on the recliner pulled as close to her mother as possible, contorting herself to keep both her elbows on the hospital bed, her now tear-slick cheek nestled in her mother’s right hand.

They sat in silence, Carolina offering her daughter a sad smile, until Magda stifled her despair enough to speak. She was going to set aside her pain and do what she did best: problem-solve.

“So, tell me, Ma, what happened?”

“
Ay m’ija,
I just got sick, that’s all.”

Magda’s forehead curled up with incredulity. “Ma, you don’t just
get sick
with cancer. It takes time.”

Carolina shook her head slightly and sighed, as if she couldn’t be bothered with being anywhere but in the moment, managing the present. It didn’t matter to her, the why or the how. Just the now.

But Magda continued. “How long did you know you didn’t feel well?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . . But the doctors are going to see what they can do.” Again, it’s today, or tomorrow, but no looking back for Carolina. The only way for Magda to get a clear picture of what was happening would be to talk to the hospital staff. And her much-estranged family. Difficult.

Magda pleaded just once more. “Ma, why are you so resigned to this right now? Don’t you want to live?”

Her mother just cast her eyes down. Her daughter’s gaze was so strong, such a force, just like her father. Her mother chose to win her battles quietly.

“
M’ija,
of course, but we’ll just have to see, okay?” She smiled the small, sweet smile she had always used to get her way with her macho, overbearing husband and her headstrong eldest daughter. She’d used it even with one of her other daughter’s teenage boyfriends, coaxing him to walk the dog on the weekends in exchange for some of her famous
limonada y pollo asado
to bring home to the family. Magda knew she’d lost this fight. She folded.

“Okay,” she sighed. “How’d you get
Papi
to call me?”

“Eh, that was easy. I told him to. He wanted your sisters to do it, but I asked him to. So he did.” Carolina paused. “And how are my little
angelitos?
”

Magda brightened at the mention of her children, the next generation, the ones who live once the old ones die. You hope. “They’re good. I asked Albita to swing them back here early.”

“
Ay, no!
I don’t want them to see me like this.” Magda’s mother ran her hands down her lap, smoothing out the sheets, then attempting to stroke smooth her undone, thinning hair.

“
Mami,
what they care about is you, not how you look. I’ll come by with them tomorrow. And Albita would love to see you, too, is that okay? I think it will help the kids if we’re here as a unit.”

“Magdalena . . . So efficient!” Carolina teased.

Mother and daughter chuckled.

“How long will you need to be here, Ma?”

“Just a couple of days. I told them if I’m going to die soon, then I want to die at home.”

“
Como?!
”

“What? It’s going to happen anyway and I want to be in my house.”

Magda knew there was no convincing her mother otherwise. She also knew that asking her questions about her treatment plan was a waste of time. Even with a physician as a husband, her mother didn’t want to know anything when it came to her own health. She was old-fashioned and took orders. They heard muffled sounds near the door.

“Looks like my time’s up, Ma.” Magda took her mother’s hands again and kissed them gently. “But I need to see you, okay? I’m not going to let them keep me away from you.”

“No, no, that won’t happen.” She swatted away the notion. They hadn’t kept her away from her daughter in nearly fifteen years. She knew now that her eldest would return the gesture.

“Yeeees, yes, they’ll try. But no worries, I’m back later tonight.” Magda stood up.

“Okay,
mi amor.
Be well.” She leaned to the right to let her daughter kiss her head.

“And I’m bringing you a full bag of makeup,” Magda scolded.

“Oh! Yes, yes,
por favor, m’ija
.” Her mother’s eyes grew large with anticipation—makeup was a welcome distraction from the maelstrom about to hit Magda outside. They blew each other kisses. Magda turned toward the door, her attitude transforming from love to hard concern.

Carolina’s hospital room had been dim. As Magda entered the hallway, her eyes needed to adjust to make out what family members were still there, waiting for her to leave.

It was her father, on his cell, and her sister Nica. The grumpy one. The only other bossy, headstrong one in the family besides Magda. Nica had inherited their father’s worst quality, his brash, judgmental demeanor. And she had seemed all too relieved when Magda was forced out of the family, so she could take her place. Nica saw herself as a queen bee—and as everyone knew, there can be only one queen bee.

“How is she?” Nica asked sharply. “You didn’t get her too upset, did you?”

“She’s fine,” Magda responded, ignoring the second part of Nica’s question, a trap. Instead her eyes were on her father, anticipating when he’d get off the phone. Magda sniffed at Nica and turned away from her sourness.

Nica glared at her older sister’s back and entered their mother’s room, leaving Magda and her father alone in the hallway. He looked up at her as he tucked his phone into the pocket of his linen pants.

“So,” he said, chin in the air.

“How long did you know she was sick?” Magda’s tone was accusatory.

“She hasn’t been sick long. This cancer comes on fast.”

“Bullshit.” Magda was taller than her father by an inch or two and she had no trouble stepping into his personal space, her anger radiating. She hoped her father could feel it searing his skin, burning him as much as it was blistering her.

“Listen, you . . . you . . .” He couldn’t say it as he pointed at her face, the nasty slur he was looking for. “Don’t you come in here now and cause trouble.”

“
I’m
causing trouble? How, Pa, huh? Because my presence offends you so much?”

“It does offend me. It offends the whole family! Your sick lifestyle.”

“Sick?!” Magda smirked—she was bemused by his words as they stood in a building filled with people who were actually sick, people so sick they were dying and wouldn’t be on this earth anymore, people like her mother. “Well, too fucking bad,
Papi!
Guess what? I exist. And I am her daughter, just as much as those three there.” Magda pointed to the hospital room. “I don’t have to be
your
daughter, but I am hers. And I have every right to be here for her, no matter what you think of me and my
sick
lifestyle.” Magda hissed that word, hissed it for the poison it tasted of. Like it was such an easy choice to make—the real sickness being hiding who she was for so long and being disowned for it.

Her father’s face was frozen into a grimace. But he didn’t say a word. He glowered and seemed to be calculating where to take this next.

Magda took the moment. “Why did you fucking call me anyway? Why didn’t you have one of the girls do it, huh?”

“Only because your mother asked me to . . .”

They both paused. Then, both reminded of why they stood where they were, what circumstances had brought them face-to-face, many wrinkles ago, Magda’s father directed his anger at the impotence of them all in that moment, that place, right at his daughter.

“So what?! So I did—I did call you! I didn’t have to, but I did it for her! And now you come here and get me upset and get her upset and embarrass this family even further . . .” His arms swung madly as sweat beaded on his tanned forehead. Magda’s father’s anger was explosive, always had been. There was a calm, then a storm. If the storm took a while to come, you might think you’d gotten away with something. But no, the storm always came. And hard. However, this time Magda was ready to stay on her feet.

“And what the fuck did she have to do to get you to call and tell me what was going on? Because you can
not
tell me that woman hasn’t been melting away for months and you didn’t notice a thing.”

He tried talking over her, but her voice was younger, stronger, her passion and rage too old and deep.

“I bet you
didn’t
notice! I bet you didn’t notice because you had your head up some
puta
’s
chocha
in your office, right?” Gut punch.

“Like you are no different, eh? Like you can judge me, huh?! Thinking you’re a man, having children with women . . .”

“You were too busy taking care of yourself and your needs to know your grandkids or love your own daughter!” Magda drove her index finger into her own chest.

Her father wasn’t moved. “Don’ you fuckin’ talk to me like that, you transsexual!”

“Oh, that’s a new one! Good one, coming from a doctor! I’m a fucking tranny now!”

“You are an embarrassment to this family, an embarrassment to me, to your mother, to—”

By now the nurses were calling security and Nica had reemerged from the room. Inside, Magda’s mother lay crying quietly at the sound of her family fighting, Inez and Diana holding her hands, trying to soothe Carolina against the rumble of her husband speaking so hatefully to their daughter.