Take This Man (25 page)

“No, that's all right,” I said.

Minutes later, Kereny said, “There's a park near here. Do you want to drive there for a bit, maybe walk around?”

“I want to go to your house,” I said. “Everything's going to be fine.”

She drove down a long gravel driveway and then opened their backdoor security gate. Candido rose from his couch with an unguarded laugh. Seeing him, I felt a tinny electric charge of recognition, like meeting a celebrity: both my father and famous people were familiar only in pictures.

I hugged Candido tight. He clasped me like a work acquaintance showing me out of his office. We sat down in the living room, where we talked about the weather and soccer in a halting first-date back and forth.

My father wore church clothes: a fine rayon short-sleeve shirt, white narrow-toe lizard-skin boots, with rings on a couple fingers and a gold chain. His hair and mustache were inkwell black. I listened to how he spoke. I couldn't hear my voice in his, and there was a brief palpitation of panic. What if my mother had told Candido I was his but I was, in fact, another man's? What if my mother had exaggerated one last story and had executed her greatest lie from beyond the grave?

“I'm better than Houdini!” I could hear her say. “At least it's never boring.”

“Can we look at some pictures?” I asked.

In a stack of albums were pictures of Candy in fine dress clothes, his hair looking more or less now as it did in the seventies and eighties. His daughters morphed from happy babies into beautiful women. Their eyes—lucid and wide like a puppy's, like my eyes—are what convinced me my search was over. Here was all of Candido's history: the Christmases, the birthdays, the Disneyland trips, the graduations: the alternate life I could have had with him, and the lives that never would have existed had Candido stayed where he was. I spotted a picture of me as maybe a two-year-old on a pony, a duplicate of a photo in my mother's own collection.

“That picture's always been there,” Kereny said and laughed. “We thought it was just a cousin or something.” He hadn't forgotten me. He'd hidden me in plain sight.

When all the baby and holiday photographs had been exclaimed over and explained, Candido and I were left alone at the kitchen table to “talk.” I'd imagined that his family believed we had a lot to discuss. I thought we would too, but as I sat across from my father, I wondered what could I legitimately say to a sixtysomething man who ran away from a collapsing marriage and abandoned his kid when he was little more than a kid himself? I knew why he'd left and where he was now. He'd lived a quiet, decent life with no other broken families in his wake. Candido's family was proof that he was capable of being the dedicated day-to-day father I had tried to turn at least five other men into. His one crime was that he couldn't be that father to me. But who was left to pay for that crime? I knew what had happened, but knowing the past doesn't
fix
it. It won't even let you mourn for what might have happened instead. You cannot change the past. The past has already happened.

I recognized, sitting across from Candido, that in the years it took me to find him, my hurt had aged and grown old. My anger wasn't the vigorous youth it once was, able to topple a man with just one screed. My rage couldn't take the stairs two at a time anymore. My pain couldn't howl with a blood-on-the-fangs viciousness. My hurt had shriveled into something smaller, a sliver of glass embedded in my soul. I couldn't see it or feel it most of the time, though I'd have to work hard to forget it was there. My heart knew the past couldn't hurt me anymore—but, from long experience, it knew that what came next could. I wanted to broker a treaty for the future.

“I don't care what happened before,” I said in words part rehearsed and part spontaneous. “I'm glad I found you,” I said, “but I've been hurt too many times. So you have to stay in contact if you want to be a part of my life. You have to call and write and stay in touch. You have to do the work now. Okay?” I asked.

“Yes, I understand,” Candido said. “And you should feel free to come here whenever you want. We are your family. This is your home.” It didn't occur to me until much later that he'd never said, “I want to be a part of your life.” I had said it for him. Was I making demands of my father based on consequences he hadn't demonstrated he cared about? He'd abandoned me over thirty years ago, and, aside from returning my phone call, hadn't done anything about it until this very moment. I felt I was going much too easy and much too hard on Candido.

It was a warm day, so we moved under an outdoor garden canopy in the backyard. Candido was on one end of the table, while I was on the other. Aurora and Natalie sat near Candido. Kereny and Adriana sat by their respective significant others, Pedro, and Adriana's husband, John, on opposite sides of the table.

“So why did it take you so long to find us?” Adriana asked.

I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been. I'd focused for so long on whether or not I could forgive my father that I'd ignored what my acceptance into his family would mean for his daughters. There was a hurt in her voice that I misread as resentment and suspicion. She was guarding herself the same way I'd been guarding me.

“Part of me felt that I shouldn't have been the one to do the looking,” I said. “Then a part of me felt that if I found my father now, he'd have nothing left for me that I wanted.”

With those words, Candy started to cry, dabbing at tears in silence with a tissue.

“Do you believe that now?” Adriana asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “But I'm really happy to be here.”

“Well, we're really happy that you're here too,” Adriana said. Then she started to cry too, a rain of gentle sobs. Pedro and John looked uncomfortable.

“Bet you guys wished you stayed home watching the game, huh?” I joked.

“This is where we need to be,” Pedro said. “We're part of the family, and now you're part of the family.”

For over ten years, I thought I had no family. Here was a group of strangers calling me “brother.” I cried then, too, though whatever sound I made was lost amid the wind chimes that billowed in the breeze.

• • •

When I left, I hugged Candy with a strength he couldn't or didn't feel comfortable returning. I noticed on my father's left bicep a faded tattoo of the Virgin Mary. The Mexican I used to deny being thought that people were delusional if they claimed a sighting of the Virgin Mary accompanied something miraculous. The Mexican I was in that moment said: not anymore.

That night, Frank drove me to his friend's house for dinner.

“Did he ask you what you'd been up to?” Frank asked. “All the things you've accomplished and done? Who you've dated? Where you've traveled to? What kind of things you want to do with your life?”

“Not really,” I said.

“He didn't ask one thing about you?”

“He already knew I hadn't made any grandkids for him,” I said. “But it's fine.”

“Really?
Why?
Why is it
fine
?” Frank asked.

“He missed that time to get to know me,” I said. “That's punishment enough.”

“No, that's not enough,” Frank said. “That's not any kind of punishment for someone who abandons you for over thirty years. He doesn't deserve to get away with it.”

“Get away with what?” I asked Frank. “He's an old man. It's not like he's a criminal.”

“Oh, I disagree, Brando,” Frank said in
his
best paternal voice. “I think you'd find a court of law would say that a father not supporting his son for years when he knew exactly where he was is a
very
criminal act.”

“Why are you making such a big deal out of this?” Frank's friend asked. “Brando's okay with it, so you should be okay with it.”

“Because it's not fair!” Frank said. “He doesn't have the right to get away with it!”

“Do you want me to say you're a better man than he is?” I asked. “There's nothing I can do now. He couldn't live with my mother, and I understand that.”

“I couldn't live with her, either!” Frank said. “She tried to drive me away for years, and I still came back. I'm a man that believes in taking care of his responsibilities. I
stayed
. I could've—” he said, and then stopped.

He stayed
, I thought,
because he could leave whenever he wanted.

“Could have what?” I asked. “Could have abandoned me too? Go ahead. Don't be afraid to say it.”

“I didn't say that,” Frank said. “I never,
ever
said that.”

• • •

A month later, I was back in Los Angeles, on my book tour at a reading in Pico Rivera, a city adjacent to Whittier. I arrived to the bookstore manager telling me, “Your father is already here.”

My father?
I wondered.

Inside, sitting two chairs apart and staring straight ahead, were Candido and
Frank. Candy had come straight from work. I called Frank away from his seat. Candido was my biological match, but I needed to talk to the father who knew me best.

“Did you speak to the bookstore owner?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Was that okay?”

“Well, he said my father was here. I assumed he meant you, but Candy's sitting over there next to you. Did you know that?”

“No,” Frank said. “Do you want me to go?”

“No, no, don't go,” I said. “I just didn't know who had said what. You're going to be nice?”

“Hey, you know me, right?” Frank said.

My sisters arrived and seated themselves around Candy. After the reading, Frank chatted with them while Candy stood in line to buy a book I knew he couldn't read without great difficulty and presented it at the autograph table. What name should I sign with? Signing it with “Skyhorse,” as it was on the jacket, seemed rude, but signing it Ulloa would be a lie.

I signed his copy, “Brando.” Frank got a book signed too, but he and Candido didn't meet each other.

Candido drove Adriana's baby, Dillan, home while Frank and I invited my three sisters out to a family-style dinner amid an archipelago of strip mall restaurants. I was leery of mixing Frank with my new unknown family, but he made the combination seamless. He told jokes about me as a child, asked engaging questions, volleyed conversation like a beach ball, and offered laughs at his own expense.

“Your dad's really funny,” Kereny said.

He
was
my father that night. And for all of our awkward, ­introductory choreography, Candido's daughters felt like full—and not half or ­abbreviated—sisters. Why?

Frank told me, “Maybe you found your father to find them. Those girls are ready for a brother. And you're ready for a family. Maybe you don't need to overthink this. Sometimes love happens that fast.”

• • •

I was about six or seven when my mother took me to a psychic friend who told me I'd lived past lives. She said I'd once been a Scottish prince who was trampled to death by horses in his thirties and, in a more recent life, a soldier who died in the Vietnam War from stepping on a land mine. Not long after, I had vivid dreams of falling off a carriage in what my seven-year-old mind dreamed Scotland looked like—everything was made from marbles—and of my legs being blown off in a faraway delta I'm sure I remembered from a Hollywood movie. The explosion would snap my legs on my mattress and wake me up.

In both of these dreams, I was a father. I never saw my child's face or heard its voice, but I knew I had left a child—a son, I think—behind somewhere.

I'd spent most of my twenties in a relationship with someone in her thirties, unable to commit to fatherhood even as I knew that her chances at a baby dwindled with each passing year. I told her, “I'm too young.” Then I told her, “I'm too poor.” When I got to my thirties and told her, “I'm too crazy,” she said, “You're right,” and had a child with someone else. I never had any doubt she'd become the great mother she is today, but I wonder, still: Could
I
be a good father?

It's presumptuous to assume I'll be a father at all. I'm forty years old and childless. Part of me waited this long because I knew I was an unstable man who'd make an unstable father. I didn't want to pass on my depression to my children genetically or by example. And how could I take care of a child when I had no model for what a good father was? Remembering my fathers, individually, they lied, drank, cheated, stole, and abandoned their loved ones. I know I can claim no moral high ground with them: these are the people who taught me. I've cheated on lovers, stolen people's time, and abandoned friends. I lied for years about who I was and made up stories in college about a thuggish life in an inner-city jungle that was never really that rough. My own brief sojourn into “storytelling”—inventing a life as a Sunset Strip club kid; seeing someone shot in the head at point-blank range—always rang out like the bullshit it was.

Succumbing to my mother's mythmaking made me realize that every storyteller needs more than good stories. He needs to understand
why
he's telling the stories he tells. Narrative is breath. My mother lied in her stories for the same reason I've told the truth in this one. From the breath my grandmother gave me to the breath it takes for you to read this sentence, stories sustain us. They carry us through the lives we convince ourselves we can't escape to get to the lives we ought or
need
to live instead. They create out of endless chaos a beginning, a middle, and an
end
.

It took the writing of this book, which I've been thinking about for almost twenty years, to understand what made my mother tell such incredible tales. Stories can help you survive. They can transform your life—they can transform
you
—from where you are into wherever you want to be. My mother turned her cage of a bedroom into a castle. Her prison became a launch pad for escape into a whole new identity. Perhaps that's why my mother was such a fan of killing herself off in her stories. She'd reveal that her brain tumor had taken one last fatal turn for the worst and, with time so short, revel in the temporary attention I gave her, over and over again. Whenever I hear that someone “dying” of an incurable disease has tricked an always disbelieving public through a fake Facebook profile, I sigh and think,
Mom?
But I understand.