Never Too Real (22 page)

Chapter 23

“H
ello. We’re here to see Eugenio Garces.” Luz and Emeli stood under the green-gray prison lights, surrounded by peeling paint, as Luz worked to pull their IDs from her purse.

The female guard was nearly as wide as she seemed tall, even sitting down. Luz looked at the woman’s knuckles, thinking,
she could knock a man out with those mitts.

The guard examined their photos, peered at them, jotted things down, scanned, stamped something and handed their IDs back.

“A’ight now, head down to 2B. Follow da signs.”

“2B. Thank you.” Luz’s politeness got a raised brow from the guard.

Luz’s new sibling followed quietly, slightly behind her. Emeli had been nearly dumb with silence on the three-hour ride up to the prison. She had put her earbuds in even before her door was closed and had yet to take them off. Luz wasn’t about to scold her, as she’d do to her own children—there was a no electronics in the car rule. After all, she wasn’t her mother. Just, her sister.

“Jewelry, headphones, cell phones. If it’s not a part of your body or covering your body, put it in here,” said another gruff guard. Luz was surprised a bit at the number of female guards. Then again, most of the visitors in line with them were women. And who would she rather have pat her down if necessary?

Emeli popped her earbuds out with dramatic flair, yet she continued to feign indifference at being there. Luz knew what the false confidence of a teenager looked like, though. She had been one herself. Emeli was still a kid, so Luz wasn’t going to call her bluff or embarrass her in any way, but the girl was hers now. Luz surely couldn’t replace Emeli’s mother, but she could try to love her like family. It wouldn’t be easy.

The women went through the metal detector, were patted down, and followed the train of fellow visitors to a large room with tables and chairs set up almost as if in a cafeteria.

“Find a seat on one side of these tables. Your inmate will be on the other side. Do not, I repeat,
do not
attempt to take a table all for yo’self. Tables must be shared and if you do not share, we will make you.” They let the visitors file in and kept reciting the rules as if they were a soundtrack to a macabre game of musical chairs. “Contact is regulated and minimal. We will be here with you, keeping an eye on you. We reserve the right to search you if we suspect that unapproved items have been exchanged. When time is up, there will be no lingering.”

“This one?” Luz wanted to check with Emeli to give her some autonomy. It was her father, after all, whom they were visiting. Luz wasn’t yet ready to call him her own father. Biology was not destiny. She’d have to remember that when it came to Emeli, too.

“Sure.”

They both sat. As Luz studied the room, she realized just how out of place she felt, how removed from this world. A world that was mostly brown and black like her. People who looked like her family, her cousins. But people she had always maintained distance from, not out of any effort but simply due to the luck of her birth and now she knew, due to the decisions her parents—all three of them—made. And then, coming up against the low expectations of many of the white folks and world around her growing up, Luz had worked so hard to prove that she wasn’t their stereotype. That she was an educated, well-spoken, high-learnin’ and high-earnin’ sistah. But she was also smart enough to know that she was but one step from all this. Nearing forty, she could be a grandmother by now, a young
abuela
like she’d see on the subway at times. Luz was humble enough to note that although much of what she’d received in life was through good choices and hard work, just as much was the result of opportunities, blessings, luck, and this scene where she found herself now reminded her of this deeply.

Luz had entered the prison feeling herself. Different from all the other people in line around her. Even far, far removed from her own flesh and blood, Emeli, next to her. But now plopped into an ugly orange institutional chair, hedged in by a cacophony of voices in several accents—little ones fussing,
mamis
giving “pow-pows”—she felt humbled, the air knocked out of her.

“Emeli, are you okay?”

This was the first time the girl had come here, too. Luz wondered which of them was more scared and put off.

“I’m fine.” Emeli was a tough cookie, Luz would give her that.

They both turned toward the doors as inmates filed in. Luz wasn’t sure whom her eyes were searching for—Emeli had shown her some photos on her phone of her father, but she still felt lost.

“
Papi!
” Emeli popped up to embrace her father, tall and olive-brown, his too-big orange jumpsuit wrinkling under her hug. A guard was stationed right by them. He watched them embrace, glancing up and down, watching their hands.

“
Ay, mi linda, dejame verte
.” His voice was rough, that of a smoker. He took his daughter’s face in his hands, admired it, and kissed her forehead. She was beaming. Luz had yet to see her so happy. “Ju look beautiful. Beautiful.” He dropped his hands to hold hers, and called out to his right, “Rico,
mira! Es m’ija!
” The guard, a dark-skinned Latino with a
cerveza
belly, shook his chin up with a “S’up.”

So,
Luz thought,
he’s a charmer. Dominican all right.

This was her father, her biological father. He was probably sixty years old. Hair cut into that almost skull-cap wave that was popular uptown, his eyes were Caribbean blue—how fitting—and his smile wide and warm, his chest and arms broad and sturdy like a
beisbol
player. He loved his daughter, it seemed. More importantly, she clearly loved him. Luz needed to know where Emeli’s soft spots were so she could be sensitive to them going forward. It would get Luz out of her own head.

“And dis . . .” he said as he swung around to his side of the table. “Dis must be Luz.” He didn’t hug her or even offer a hand to shake. He just looked at her, nearly through her, with intense curiosity. “Well. Ju are much prettier in person.” A backhanded compliment, Luz thought, though his smile was one of relief, not sarcasm.

“Thanks.”

All three members of a shared gene pool breathed each other in for a few seconds, the noise of the rest of the room (arguments, crying, laughter) well to the background.

Emeli then gave Luz a side-eye and started speaking Spanish to her father. Their body language helped Luz keep up.

“So, can I ask you some questions?” Luz interjected. They only had ten minutes or so left.

Eugenio moved his eyes slowly over to her. He took her in and leaned back. “Sure.”

“Tell me about your time with my mother,” she said.

The father raised his brows.

“Do you want me to leave?” Emeli asked deferentially.

“Oh no.” Eugenio moved forward, putting both arms on the table. “This is a family conversation and we, we three, are family.”

The women looked at each other.

“Luz. I loved your mother,” Eugenio said.

Luz breathed in deeply. She knew this was going to get very real, but the reality of his feelings, she was not ready for.

“I loved your mother so much. So so much. But she made de right decision, marrying dat guy.”

“My father,” Luz said.

“Right. Jor father. Da one who raised you. Roger.”

Luz nodded in approval. Gotta give the man respect.

“Why did you let it happen? Let me be raised by someone else.”

“Aiii, listen.” He ran his hands from the front of his head to the back. “Look at me here. I’m no good. And jor mother was so good. So white. She didn’t belong wit me and my family, she belonged with da best people.” He leaned back a bit.

Luz’s stomach twisted. She couldn’t even look at her new younger sibling. So much to process.

“How did you know to contact my brother?”

“Oh, heem? C’mon, I’m a smart guy—stupid in some ways, in my choices—but I am a resourceful man. I’ve been keeping up on you, just knowing a bit how you were doing.”

“How did you do that?” Was he a stalker, spying on her?

“Jor mother would forward me da news on you and sometimes pictures of de kids.”

“The kids?
My
kids?”

“Ya ya, nothing too crazy. Don’ worry, okay?”

“Okay.”
Calm down, girl,
Luz told herself.
He’s your father, not some guy off the street. But he
is
a guy off the street. He feels like a guy . . . who happens to be my father. Shit.
Mami
has been communicating with him this whole time? Oh God, the lies, the deceptions, the double life. I can’t take this.

“I was always so proud of you, Luz. So proud.”

Luz tried to swallow the acid of anxiety rising in her throat and instead focus on the agenda at hand, which was to get as much information out of this man as possible before their time ran out. She didn’t want to have to come here again. “Did the rest of your family know about me?”

“Oh no.” He looked at Emeli. “Did you know about Luz?”

“Nope.” She kept her head down.

“No, see?”

Eugenio seemed miffed. Luz had questioned him, and as a fairly senior
abuelo
—one in prison, no less—he obviously wasn’t accustomed to that. Interrogation from authority, yes. But from a woman in the family, no.

“Two minutes!” a guard shouted.

“Look. Luz. I know dis is all a big surprise to you. But ju gotta know dat was the past and now I need you to take care of Emeli, okay?”

She looked at her much younger sister, a teen going on thirty. “Right.”

“You can be angry at all de secrets, but what jor mother did for you and what I did for you and jor father even, it all helped get ju where you are today. And jor mother was the one who made everything happen. I loved her, but she loved you the most. She gave you the greatest opportunities by doing what she did.”

Luz was still looking at him sideways. But she was listening. It was compelling. And there was so much more she wanted to know and understand.

“I’m so proud of you, even if I can’t take a lot of credit. But, but!” His finger pointed to the sky. “Now I need you to do the same for your sister.” He pointed at Emeli. “She needs the same chances as you, and unfortunately . . . Well, she’s also in a very tough circumstance.” He gestured around the room. “With no mother now, can you do for her what your mother did for you?”

Bzzzzzt.
Time was up.

Startled, Luz moved quickly up and out of her chair as everyone else did the same. Emeli embraced her father. Eugenio kissed her cheeks over and over as if she were four years old. When he turned to Luz, she held out her hand. He looked down at it.

“I’ll take care of her. Thank you,” she said.

Looking a bit dejected, but moving his chin up, above it, he shook her hand.

“No.
Gracias a ti,
” he said sadly.

As everyone filed out, Luz was slightly embarrassed at the handshake and her palm burned with its memory. Had it been insulting to him? Should she care? Why did it linger and feel so bad? What about Emeli? Had Luz hurt her feelings? Ugh, she could be so snotty sometimes.

After the inmates left and Eugenio had blown a kiss to his girl, the visitors filed out. Luz really didn’t want to come up here again. But something told her she’d be back soon.

 

“So, I thought it better that the kids weren’t here after that,” Luz said to Emeli as she turned the lock and opened the door. “I’m sure this is pretty overwhelming, and adding a bunch of screaming kids . . . to coming back from where we were . . . well . . .” She gestured for her much-younger half sibling to enter.

The light in the loft-like townhouse was almost as strong as on a beach, and the girl tipped her head back to see where it was coming from. Luz saw her jaw go slack and her grip on her bags loosen a bit. She stood very still, clearly very intimidated.

“It’s nice,” she said in the flat affect of a teenager, wrapped in the accent of an American-born Dominican who almost never left her neighborhood.

Until that moment, Luz hadn’t realized just how much she wanted this girl to accept her. She had thought of acceptance as a one-way street: I’d better like this kid or she’s out. But that was her tough side talkin’, the side that did the deals, that did the work. Luz’s other side, the loving den mother and family advocate, was there, too, and she needed approval.

“Let me take those for you.”

Emeli hesitated, seemingly unable to believe she was awake right now, and alive.

“Okay,” she said finally, though her face showed concern for where her few belongings would go.

“I’ll just put them down right here in the kitchen, okay? We can set you up in your room after I give you a tour,
sí?
”

“
Sí,
okay.” As her bags were set down within her sight, she relaxed.

“So, this is the kitchen—the epicenter of our family madness.”

Emeli’s face was flat, unchanged. Luz told herself,
Tone down the thesaurus words there, sister. You’re gonna freak her out even more.

“The kids are running around here all the time.”

“Oh, right.” Emeli’s eyes were darting between the fancy chef’s stove, the stainless-steel fridge, and the kitchen island that was probably as big as her bed.

“Please be at home here. Want something to drink?”