Never Too Real (18 page)

Chapter 18

L
uz always brightened when she walked through the small iron gates of her parents’ Harlem townhouse, her childhood home. This time, though, as she shut the doors behind her, she heard its metal squeak in another way, another level. It felt like the opening and closing of a door in her life. The rusting iron spoke differently than it had when she was a child. Of course back then, she had barely paid attention, filing the groan away into her subconscious. The noise from the street also competed so loudly for her attention—kids playing on the sidewalk, and in the street, as if it were a schoolyard, water cascading from hydrants, Dominican neighbors yelling for
Anaaa!
Now the neighborhood was clean, quiet, all grown up. Just like her. A daughter with a new father.

Luz had never gone this long without speaking to her parents. She was close to them and her children were so close to them. But she also knew herself. She knew that she could be much too emotional—nasty, even—when prompted and perturbed. And right now they deserved better. She deserved answers, too, but it was hard to get honest answers when you showed up with guns blazing. So, Luz needed time.

As a mother herself, she understood the difficulty of figuring out when a child was old enough to know certain things. But why lie for over thirty years? What had that accomplished, beyond deceiving her into believing she was this proud sistah in a long line of proud sistahs? Had it saved her father—the one who raised her—from embarrassment? It certainly explained how the family had avoided giving her the exact date of her parents’ wedding. She had the pictures. Beautiful! But it had been a small shindig at the house. Luz thought it was that way because her mother didn’t like ostentation and waste. Not because she had been knocked up and it was a shotgun wedding.

But why would her father raise this other man’s child?
Cuckolded,
that was the word for it, yes? It happened often enough that it had its own word. How bizarre. Men.

After warm but guarded greetings at the door, Luz, her father, and her mother sat at the family breakfast nook, where all big talks traditionally happened. The clinking and clanking of tea being made echoed loudly above the silence hovering over them. Luz waited for her proud, stable parents to open this potentially painful conversation. But, they seemed to sit back in apprehension, waiting for their daughter to lay into them. Tomas had called them earlier to give them a heads-up as to why they hadn’t heard from his older sister and why she was going to the home today. Luz’s parents also seemed ashamed. That made the surly words waiting in her throat taste worse.

“So,” Luz said sourly. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

Roger and Altagracia seemed nearly beyond reproach in life. They had raised their children almost entirely without drama, much less trauma. Somehow this made Luz feel even worse. It was as if they’d saved up all their secrets for this one thing, this one day.

“Your mother did the right thing, Luz.” Her father’s voice was steady and caring.

“What did she do, Dad?” Luz knew right well what she’d done, and what he’d done. But she wanted to hear it from them. Their version.

“Don’t be mad at him,
m’ija
. He saved you.”

“
Saved
me? Saved me from what, exactly? Life as a drug dealer’s kid?”

“He saved you from being aborted.”

The air was sucked out of Luz’s lungs. She hadn’t considered that at all. She had never thought her mother would do such a thing.

Luz was stunned into silence. She sat, humbled.

“
M’ija,
” her mother said gently as she carefully placed her cup onto its saucer—a child of a revolution, the daughter of a married man and his mistress who came to this country with barely an education, barely a suitcase, but so many hopes and dreams, who placed her cup down as if she had stepped off the
Mayflower
itself. “I was young. And, I was es-stupid. But more than that, I was confused.”

Luz’s father sniffed and straightened in his chair.

“I didn’t know where I belonged and I was scared of everything. So, I made a mistake.”

Luz, who had been staring at the corner of the table, the crease in the tablecloth, slowly brought her eyes to her mother’s.

“Mistake?” she whispered.

“No, no. Ju are not a mistake. But at de time, it wasn’ de right t’ing to do.” She took a sip of her tea, carefully choosing words in her second language.

“And . . . and you were going to abort me?” Luz’s anger was gone, replaced by a desire to understand. To understand her mother at nineteen years old, pregnant by a man she didn’t love.

“Jes. An’ I am very, very ashamed ’bout dat. I’ve prayed for years for God to forgive me for even t’inking of it.”

“But I wasn’t going to let that happen.” Luz’s father took the baton. “Luz, it wasn’t a great situation, but it was what it was. We had broken up for a short while and I didn’t want her to go through that.”

“And you knew the whole time?”

He couldn’t look Luz in the eye.

“You knew that I wasn’t yours?”

“Yes,” he said hoarsely, picking up his own mug.

Ma brought her napkin up to her tears.

“But how could you not tell me? I mean, at some point, like when I had kids or when I got married. Or how about while I was growing up, when all those kids made fun of how I looked different from you guys, from my brother?”

“It was a different time,” Luz’s father said after a moment. “We did what we thought was best.”

“For whom? You guys?”

Luz’s mother had brought her hand down on the table, sending a jolt through everyone, rattling the china. Her mother might usually be reserved, but she hadn’t made it this far in this country by being anything but a force of nature.

“Enough!” she barked, ensuring that Luz was awoken from her self-righteous stupor.

“Jor father saved jor life! Maybe ees not de story ju want to hear—maybe ees not de story dat sounds good or works wit’ jor job or jor friends, but das it!
Dis
ees jor father—dees man! Jor
real
father.” Altagracia pointed at her husband with her index finger. The rest of her hand clutched a very wet tissue. That hand would be holding a lot of tissues until this speed bump on the road of life was way off into a rearview mirror.

Tears poured down Luz’s cheeks. She looked at her father. As usual, Roger was holding it together. But his shoulders slumped more than usual, his posture now reflecting his true age, the age and weight of his history. His eyes glistened with softness and sadness.

It was her mother’s turn to be angry. For Luz’s mama, the one mortal sin was ungratefulness. Each and every day of their lives, she had made sure to teach her children gratitude for the bounty they enjoyed. To be grateful for the homes their parents owned, while most of their family lived in rentals. To be grateful they were healthy and educated—self-sufficient, unlike her aunt’s family. Luz’s cousins had never left the ’hood, at least in terms of their attitudes. At least they had a different last name, Luz often thought. Maybe no one would make the connection.

Releasing a sob, Altagracia got up from the table. She put her cup and saucer on the kitchen counter and made her way up the creaky brownstone stairs to another floor, another room.

Luz and her father sat in silence for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Luz said at last.

“It’s okay.”

“I’m just . . . trying to figure this out.”

He patted her hand. “Just know that you are always my daughter. From the moment you kicked in her belly, I was committed to you and to your mother, no matter how you got in there.”

They both chuckled softly through tears.

“Thanks, Dad,” Luz said. Then asked, “Does your family know . . . about me?”

“Well . . . I remember once when you were about four years old, Gran’mama came to visit, and she didn’t say this to me, but she said to my sister, ‘I bet that that’s not his chil’. But I’m glad he’s doin’ the right thing by that woman. She’s a good woman.’”

Luz smiled at the warm memory of her grandmother. Luz had always felt so much love from her—it was as if there was nothing else inside of her but love to give.

“That was the last anyone said anything about it.”

Typical, Luz thought, for that side of the family. “What about Mom’s side?”

“Now,
that
side.” Her father’s face lit up a bit. “Well, you know how they felt about your mother marrying me—a
moreno
.”

For a Dominican to marry someone even darker than herself, and here in the “J’united Es-states?” Sacrilege. This was the land of opportunity, of plenty, of... plenty of white people! Why not up your station and at least marry
un chino?
That was the Altagracia-family take on her father. They didn’t care how wealthy and educated his family was. All they cared about was that he was black. Black as night, they’d say.
Como Miles Davis!
Though he was much more Denzel.

Luz had to chuckle at the memories. It was a serious matter, but she and her father historically had a sense of humor about it because it was so absurd. And Roger had the healthiest ego of any black man she’d ever known. It would take a lot more than some racist Dominicans to nick his pride. Plus, he loved his wife much too much.

Roger continued. “Then, when you came out as light as you did, they were so damn relieved, it was even more insulting. But I took it in stride. And no one dared question a thing.”

I’m so grateful for this man,
Luz thought.

“Plus, when she married me, your mother told everyone to go to hell. She gave up a lot and I gave up some, too. But I never see it that way.” He paused and looked at Luz directly and with warmth. “I got the best thing of all. My girl.”

“Shit,
Papi
. . .” Luz went into his arms. She wasn’t that much closer to figuring things out, but at least one parent was happy. She’d try to reach her mother next. Each character in a story has her own story.

 

“Ma?” Luz knocked gently on the door of her parents’ room, which her mother had left ajar.

Sniff. “Yeah.”

As Luz entered tentatively, her mother was dabbing another tissue at her runny nose. She sat on her bed, an aged and frayed cardboard box to one side of her and what looked like handwritten letters that she had seemed to be sifting through. Altagracia patted the bed on the spot next to her for her daughter to sit down. Luz did and then they were quiet for a while.

“So. Dees are letters jor father, dis man downstairs, wrote to me when we were apart and I had gotten pregnant with ju.” She handed an envelope to Luz. Her mother’s name was written on the front, in what was unquestionably her father’s handwriting. It was so rare to see handwriting these days, to know your parents’ hand. Luz missed it.

“Oh, how he loved me—well, he’s always loved me. But oh, dose days . . .”

Luz smiled at her mother.

She continued. “But it was hard, you know. Mama,
Abuela,
was so worried about me, but at the same time happy I broke up with dat
moreno
.”

They both rolled their eyes.

“Luz,
amor
. Ju know, dose days were hard. Dose times were hard. It was choose him and lose much of my family. But! But gain
his
family. Great family. An American family who really understood history and education.”

“I know.” Luz felt her mother needed to be egged on a bit, supported. But she just had to ask: “So, no chance he’s really my pop, huh?”

“Pffft.” Her mother waved a wet tissue. “
Ay, mi linda,
nooo . . . I wish, but not biologically.”

She handed Luz a small sepia photo that looked like it had been taken in the ’30s or ’40s. It was of a striking, long-faced, very light-skinned man with nearly translucent eyes. Only the waves in his pomaded hair and his full lips hinted at his blackness.

“Dis is your biological father’s father,
tu abuelo
. Tito.”

Luz took the picture gently. Wow. Looking at members of your family for the first time was like discovering treasure. And not all treasures were equal. But every one had value, as each closed a gap in your knowledge, your legacy.

“He’s so handsome,” Luz whispered. And he was. His shirt and tie and jacket were impeccable and looked expensive. His skin, glowing, even decades later.
And those are my eyes,
she thought.

“Jes, well, he was a tailor in Santo Domingo. Always dressed so, so perfect.” Her mother sighed. “Ju know his son could have been just as amazing, but he chose another path.” She straightened herself a bit, preparing herself for the turn this conversation would now take.

“Was he good when you met him?”

“Good? Well, he had promise . . . and passion.” She wiped her nose. “But, your father, of course, came with much, much more that was good.”

“Did he know about me? I mean, did he always know that I was his?”

“Jes, he knew. De whole time.”

Both cast their eyes down. Luz’s mother was choosing her words carefully.

“He wanted me to haf an abortion.”

“He did?” Luz croaked.

“Jes, he did. But jor father just would no’ let dat happen.” She pointed to the sky for emphasis. “He said: ‘I will take care of her’—or ‘it,’ because,
m’ija,
at dat time we didn’t know—‘and I’ll raise it, I don’t care whose it is.’ So he did.”

“Did you guys keep in touch? Did his family know?”

“Who?” Her mother’s mind was still on Luz’s father, the selfless one downstairs.

“The other one.”

“Oh. Well, no. But once in a while I’d hear through Carlitos about him. It was too bad how his life turned out.” Carlitos was her mother’s cousin.