“I don’t think they were that bad.”
“Mira, I will shoot myself in the head if I have to go on looking at his corn teeth.”
“So you want to switch doctors?”
“Very astute.”
Doctor number three, Dr. Wu, was the one to give her the diagnosis. I didn’t go with her to the appointment. She showed up at my dorm afterward, buzzing my room from the lobby, without any prior warning that she was coming. When I went down and saw her, she had a lavender scarf looped into a small flounce around her neck and a manila envelope tucked under her arm. She was folding and refolding one corner of the envelope.
“I didn’t know you were coming today,” I said.
“I need to talk to you. Do you want to take a walk?”
Instantly, my stomach started kneading. By then, of course, I already had my suspicions. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you, but go get your jacket first. Hurry up.”
It was a brilliant Chicago day, the sun high in the sky, a bracingly cool wind echoing off the lake. We walked without talking. The tree leaves swished, like muffled static, as they were tousled in the breeze. I had on jeans cuffed up past my bare ankles, my black low-top Converse sneakers, and a green-and-white-striped long-sleeved tee. I hadn’t washed my hair in days, so it was greasy, held back with bobby pins. We walked down the sidewalks that fed out to the east, then under one of the stone archways that held above it train tracks, then across the grassy lawn surrounding the Museum of Science and Industry. When we got past the fence to the footpath that ran along the lake, my mother took a left. She pursed her lips and pulled them back again as she cast her gaze across the water, the sunlight shimmering wildly off the surface. Small black birds circled overhead, and every now and then one of them cawed. I fidgeted with the hems of my sleeves, stretching them over the heels of my palms, as I waited for what she had to say.
After about half a mile, I stopped. “Mom, come on. You have to tell me what you wanted to talk about. I can’t stand it anymore.”
She turned to look at me. We were face to face on the sidewalk, my mother with her back to the lake, the sounds of the birds still coursing through the air, the sounds of cars whizzing by on the street not far from where we stood. My mother crossed her arms and pinched her lips together. In the breeze, her hair-sprayed hair lifted all together at the sides like wings.
“I failed all the tests,” she said. “I have Alzheimer’s.”
Just like that.
I knew that she had gone for testing earlier, and that the doctor had wanted her to come back in six months, which was the appointment she just had. The tests weren’t about absolute numbers. They were about establishing a pattern of decline. They were things like puzzles and answering questions about a paragraph you’d just read and counting backward by sevens. We had practiced these things together over the phone. Her performance over the past few months had been sporadic. And there had been signs that things were off—the time she got frustrated to the point of tears because she couldn’t remember how to use the letter opener, the time she was late meeting me for lunch because she got lost driving to a restaurant we always ate at, the time she left the back door to the kitchen wide open overnight, the time I found her eating a peppermint candy with the wrapper still on. But I got good at convincing myself that these things happened because my mother was under a particular amount of stress right then or that what she was experiencing were isolated, and entirely normal, moments of forgetfulness.
“Dr. Wu said there was also a possibility it could be something called Pick’s. But he’s pretty sure it’s the other thing. I have to go to a neurologist. They want to do some scans of my brain.”
I felt as though my head had suddenly inflated. I felt fuzzy and hot.
“Anyway, I told Dr. Wu he was wrong. I told him I was too young to have it. Do you remember that first doctor? That’s what he said. But Dr. Wu said I have the kind called early-onset.” She twisted her body to look out at the lake and, when she turned back to me, said quietly, as if conferring a secret, “I think my mother had it. That must have been what it was. We just thought she was going crazy.”
My mother never brought up her parents. They had both died years earlier, but even when they were alive, we had no sort of relationship with them. I had never even met them.
She had a little spasm of a shiver.
“That isn’t what’s going to happen to you,” I said.
“It is. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to me.” She kicked at something invisible on the ground. “Damn it.”
My stomach was killing me.
“It runs in the family,” she said.
I didn’t think about it this way at the time, but I guess she was warning me. If it wasn’t exactly a warning, I believe that she was at least contemplating a future for me that caused her more despair than her own diagnosis had brought. She was casting it out in her mind, imagining the bright and capable daughter she’d raised felled by a disease that dissolved a person’s mind wholly and persistently. She must have been, because what she did next was so uncharacteristic it could have been prompted only by the most piercing anguish: She put her arm around me. She drew me to her. She circled her arms around my middle, her hands below my shoulder blades. And she held me there. I cupped her shoulders from behind and squeezed her soft arms with mine. I could feel her breathing. I could smell her hair spray in the breeze.
Four
Deflation
I
n the morning, a slice of sunlight cuts through the gap between the drawn curtains. Lying on my side in the bed, my hands palm to palm between my knees, I stare at it and wonder what’s going to happen today. I have absolutely no idea, but I hope it will be something significant. I already feel as though I’ve fallen behind, wasting all day yesterday like I did. It was my fault, too. Danilo was willing to go to the address until I made us detour. I cover my face with my hands and rub them briskly up and down a few times, trying to wake myself up.
Thirty minutes later, I head downstairs dressed in the best clothes I brought with me: a white blouse with scalloped trim around the armholes and a denim skirt with a column of oversized brown buttons down the front. The outfit is paired with my Converse, of course, which isn’t going to win me any fashion awards, but at least they’re black and white, so they sort of go.
I’m hoping to find Danilo milling around, but when I check the bar, there’s only a middle-aged couple sipping coffee at one of the tables. The man turns the pages of a newspaper while he drinks, letting the paper leaves collapse softly, like a failed soufflé. Outside, I crane my neck to scan up and down the street. Nothing. Then I see Hernán standing with his back against the building, his arms crossed, his cap drawn over his eyes. It looks a little like he’s dozing off. I walk down to street level and tap him on the arm. He startles, then brightens when he sees me.
“Good morning,” I say.
“
¡Señorita!
You look so nice. What can I do for you today?”
“Have you seen Danilo?” I ask.
“Danilo?” Hernán furrows his brow.
“Have you seen him this morning?”
“My Danilo?”
I smile. “Is there another one?”
“Why are you looking for him?”
I’m thrown off by his accusatory tone. “I was just wondering if you had seen him.”
“How do you know him?”
“I don’t really
know
him. I met him yesterday. He offered to help me.”
Now Hernán’s thick, dark brows fold toward each other, a long crease forming between them. “Help you how?”
“Just . . . nothing. If you see him, could you tell him I’m in the bar, having breakfast?”
Hernán hesitates. “Whatever you are trying to accomplish, you can do it without him.”
When he sees I’m at a loss for words, his face softens.
“Who should I say is at the bar?”
“Me.”
He smiles. “But what is your name?”
“Sorry. Miraflores.”
He looks surprised, but doesn’t comment on it other than to say, “Very pretty.”
“Thank you,” I say.
When I emerge again, after taking an hour and a half to eat two eggs and drink one cup of coffee until its bitter and very cold end, Hernán shouts cheerfully, “Time to go already? And unfortunately”—he shakes his head with mock ruefulness—“no sign of Danilo yet.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. I do feel disappointed not to have run into Danilo again, but I spent all of breakfast reminding myself that I can do this without him, just as I’ve been planning all along. It doesn’t matter who helps me or how it happens, but I want to find my father. I spent so long believing that he was someone who didn’t want to know me. But everything changed when I read those letters. My father cared about me. He cared about my mother. At least he did when he wrote them. But I believe that he still does. If I can find him, if he saw me . . . I’ll shock the hell out of him, I’m sure. But I really, honestly, think he’ll be happy to see me. After all this time, to know that I came for him and that I want to know him. And I could tell him that I think my mother never stopped loving him. He may not want to hear that. If he’s moved on already, it might be too much. Or he may be living every day of his life longing to hear that. And I could be the one to tell him. I could have him call her. She might tell him things she’s been holding on to for decades, things she might not even remember soon that she wants to say, thanks to the insidious disease that’s stalking its way through her brain. I could give her back that bit of her past, even though I’m not sure she deserves it since she’s the one who exiled that bit of her past to begin with. And of mine. It was such an inexplicably fucked-up thing to do. But with everything that she’s going through, hearing from him again might make her feel better. After all these years, I think she would finally talk to him again if the opportunity to talk existed. With or without Danilo’s help, I need to find him.
I start in the direction Danilo and I walked yesterday to catch the bus, my orange bag slung diagonally over my shoulder. I’m not far when I hear Hernán shouting after me, “Wait, please! Please wait!”
I turn around. A car stops in front of the hotel and honks, but Hernán ignores it and strides toward me. “Where are you going?” he asks before he even reaches me, his voice raised.
I tell him the address.
He makes a face. “Why?”
Like Danilo, he asks a lot of questions. But there’s a tenderness about Hernán, a protectiveness in how he treats me that I find endearing, unaffectedly sweet.
“I’m meeting someone there,” I say.
Hernán takes off his cap and slicks his sweaty charcoal hair back against his scalp, then replaces the cap. “It is not a good area,” he says matter-of-factly. The car that pulled up in front of the hotel honks again. Hernán whips his head around and throws up his hands. “Wait a moment!” he yells.
“How are you getting there?” Hernán asks.
“I was going to take the bus. I know which one is the right one.”
Hernán raises his eyebrows. “You know which one is the right one?”
“The one with Fidel Castro.”
“Ha! That is what you think? But they are all painted differently. There could be ten buses that go where Fidel goes! And then again, Fidel could be taking the day off. Those bus drivers work according to their own schedule, and you never know what kind of night the driver had last night”—he imitates someone throwing back a shot of alcohol—“that might make him skip a day of work today. I have seen it before. Ambitious guests try to take the bus to somewhere ten minutes away, and the next thing they know, they’re on a three-hour trip to a whole other province! And they don’t make it back to the hotel for days! No, I will call you a taxi. Do you have money?”
“Hernán, come on, that’s never really happened, has it?”
“It has happened. It hasn’t happened. What’s the difference? It could happen. Do you have money?”
“Yes.”
“Then you will take a taxi. Today, for me, please take a taxi.”
Before I can argue, Hernán whistles until he attracts the attention of what looks like nothing more than a regular car, an old brown Hyundai, idling across the street, which now makes a U-turn and pulls up to the curb. Gallantly, Hernán opens the back door and motions by sweeping his arm back and forth like a pendulum for me to get in. Then he pounds the passenger-side window until the driver leans across the seat and cranks it down.
“She’s going to Santa Ana. Across from the San José Church.”
“Five dollars,” the taxi driver replies.
Hernán balks. “The fare from here to there is two dollars.”
“She’s American, no?”
“No. Two dollars.”
The driver grunts assent and rolls up the window. Hernán waves at me as we pull away.
I know that Hernán said I wasn’t American because he wanted to get me a better fare. But it was still so odd to hear him deny it like that. No. She’s not American. And yet, to the taxi driver, I clearly didn’t pass as Panamanian. What does he think I am now? French? Portuguese? Dutch? When I was growing up, my mother never made any kind of point about my cultural connections, or disconnections. File it under A Topic That Came Too Close to My Father, and therefore A Topic That Would Not Be Discussed. But I do remember when, in fifth grade, a girl from Puerto Rico enrolled at my school toward the end of the year. Her mother and our principal had walked her out to the playground during recess so she could see who her classmates would be. I was kneeling in a patch of clover, looking for a sprig with four leaves, just like I’d been doing every recess since the snow had melted, while the other kids shrieked on the swings or played hopscotch on the asphalt. I looked up and saw the girl, skinny, wearing a white dress that was much too fancy for school. She was standing in front of her mother, not far from me. They surveyed the yard, and then her mother pointed at me and said, “Why don’t you introduce yourself to her? She looks nice,
mi hija,
and I bet you she speaks Spanish.” I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want her to approach me. I didn’t know why her mother would have said that about me. But I knew that I wasn’t who she thought I was. I wanted to be. I wished I could have said, in Spanish, “Hey, come over here and we’ll look for a four-leaf clover together,” but even though I knew a few words by then, I didn’t know enough. I felt embarrassed by my failings. I felt, even then as I still do now, like I’ve let everybody down, like there is supposed to be more to me than what I know, like there’s a hollow space carved out along my side that somehow never got filled in. So I stood up quickly and brushed off my knees and ran over to the kids watching hopscotch, trying my best to blend in and fade away. I remember standing there and trying to figure out what I was exactly, but when I started thinking about it, I got lost. Maybe I had always felt that way, at least a little bit. In between the two countries that were both part of me, I never knew where I was or where I was supposed to be.