Never Too Real (12 page)

Magda abruptly straightened herself up. “Gabi, Ma’s dying. Cancer . . . Gabi . . . I can’t lose her.” Now that words were flowing, the water stopped. Magda sniffed brusquely and wiped her face.

“Oh, Mags . . . Okay, okay,” Gabi responded. “
Ven
. Let’s sit down. I’ll get your drink.”

Magda lifted her head and snorted hard. “Actually . . .” She picked up her glass, jiggled it to distribute the melted ice and swung the contents down in one throw. “Can you make me another?” She handed the glass to Gabi.

“Go sit, I’ll be a minute.” Gabi wiped the remaining tears from one of Magda’s eyes with a matronly swipe of her thumb. This was no time to be scolding her for excessive drinking. If ever there was an appropriate time to drink like mad it was when you find out your mother is dying.

Magda dropped herself onto the wraparound couch. She settled back, ignoring the panoramic view of the city to stare at the apartment’s loft ceilings. She kept hearing a voice saying,
What? What? What?
—
What am I going to do to help her? What am I going to do without her? What am I going to do with my father? What are my sisters going to do? What are the kids going to do without their
abuela
? What? What?

“Here.” Gabi interrupted Magda’s despair with the bell-like sound of ice clinking in a new drink. Magda swiftly swigged the tequila and lime. Gabi watched with a tight chest. She knew, not only as a friend and former partner, but as a professional therapist, that Magda’s need for drink was formed by the appetite of the abyss in her heart built from a life of rejection from her unaccepting family. She had lost the love of her father simply for being essentially who she was born to be. And if she couldn’t win back her father’s love, then she’d show him. She’d make more money than him. She’d bed more women than him—she’d always known he was a Don Juan, sleeping with women who were not her mother, not his wife. She’d punish him by not needing him in the slightest and outperforming him completely. And all the while dressed in a man’s suit, a better suit. But all this wasn’t working right now.

And as grateful as Magda was for her mother sneaking around to see her daughter and grandchildren, she also was reminded each and every time that the visits and phone calls and e-mails were clandestine—just another secret, like her gayness had been a secret for so long. Magda was sick of secrets. And finding out her mother was dying meant the end of the secrets. Or did it?

Gabi handed Magda a tissue. “So, your father called you?”

“I know my sisters put him up to it. The man hasn’t called me in years.”

Gabi remained silent, allowing Magda to tell what she wanted to tell.

“When he got off the phone—because I couldn’t say much, I was just . . .” She jiggled her glass of melting ice. “He tells me which hospital and then says I should probably come down to see her . . . But don’t call her.
Don’t call her cell,
because she’s resting.” Magda’s sorrow stepped aside as anger took a turn at the wheel. “He had to say that, right? Had to tell me to not call my own mother!” Magda pushed herself up from the couch like a swimmer pushing off from a pool’s edge. She strode to the windows and stared at the twinkling cityscape around her, arms crossed.

Gabi spent the next hour finding out more regarding the diagnosis, more about what the family was doing, talking Magda down when she’d get riled up, and making another drink or two for her. Though the sadness remained, Magda was done with tears. She had filled her annual quota. Her heartache now turned into ire at her family, her father, and the universe. Magda got more drunk as she got tired. Her long limbs sprawled across the expanse of the couch, she wound down as Gabi sat upright and alert, needing to stay awake for her own family.

“Hon?” she whispered.

“Yeah?” Magda was officially
borracha
. She could barely lift her head.

“Mama, I gotta head home to the
familia,
okay?”

“Aww . . .” Magda flipped her right side over to face Gabi, eyes still closed.

“You’re going to be okay, yes?”

Magda nodded slightly in response.

 

“Want me to call Andrea to stay the night?” Andrea was Magda’s beloved housekeeper. A diminutive Ecuadorian and young grandmother, she was as trusty as they came. And with the bonuses that Magda gave her every year—Andrea had managed to put two girls through a local college, and her first grandchild already had a Magda-financed college fund—she would run through fire for her employer.

“
Ay,
mamaaa . . . Can’t you es-stay with meee?” Magda was now holding Gabi’s face in her hands, pulling it slowly toward her own. Pleading like the lost lover she was. Looking to assuage her psychic pain with physical pleasure.

“
Ay,
nooo, you know I can’t.”

Magda had tried several times over the years to rope Gabi into a lovers’ reunion, always when she tipped into intoxication. This time, as distraught as Magda was, Gabi knew she couldn’t succumb. She disentangled herself from Magda’s strong arms and legs, which then went soft and loose with rejection and exhaustion.

“But I looove youuuu . . .” she moaned.

“I love you, too. I’ll call Andrea—she’ll be here soon, okay?”

Magda didn’t answer. She had blacked out already. Head down. Gabi asked her cell to “call Andrea.” When Andrea answered, Gabi explained the situation as she picked up her bags.

I’ve got to help her. But I have to focus on Maximo, my
pobrecito.
It’s time to bring in the girls for help.

Chapter 11

“I
made it,” Luz muttered to herself as she stood outside her brother’s apartment door. Having flown in at the crack of dawn and cabbing it to the city as fast as she could, Luz was flustered. What the hell was going on? she’d asked herself nearly every minute since her brother had called her the day before.
The bastard
. She knocked.

“Hey, Tomas? It’s me.”

She heard the muffled shuffle of deck shoes on hardwood.

Her handsome younger brother opened the door with a “Hey” and quick embrace but could barely look Luz in the eye. That wasn’t good.

“So, what’s up?” Luz demanded.

Tomas remained oddly silent as he led her from the foyer into his minimalist bachelor pad. As her eyes adjusted to the bright lights of his loft-framed living room, all dark wood and angles, Luz was struck dumb with confusion.

Sitting on his leather couch was a young, gorgeous, if obstructively hip-hop-styled, brown teenager. This couldn’t be her brother’s girlfriend. Too young, barely legal, even for him, and too “street.”
Ay Dios,
Luz thought.
He had an affair and got this girl pregnant.
Luz stood across the low glass coffee table from the girl, jaw agape. She knew she should look at her brother for some answers, but she was awestruck by the fact that this long-limbed, lollipop-headed, door-knocker-earring-wearing creature remained seated, quiet, with her face in her phone, typing and scrolling, not acknowledging anyone around her in the slightest.

After thirty seconds of no eye contact, Luz snapped at the teen, “Hey!” Tomas had slipped quietly away, probably to get his sister a glass of water from the kitchen and move far from any potential explosions.

“Yeah?” The girl still didn’t look up. Her jeans were too tight, she had too much hair, the ends were dry, her mascara clumpy, her sneakers worn down at the heels. But she was gorgeous. Cocoa skin, just a shade less honey than Luz’s. Broad lips and nose balanced by the highest cheekbones Luz had ever seen.

Luz wasn’t in the mood to be sassed, and she still didn’t know who this girl was, so she stood still, taking it all in and waiting for either Tomas to get back or this
chica
to turn polite. Finally the girl raised her chin, tore her eyes away from her cell, and looked full on into Luz’s face.

“Hi.” It was a shy voice and even meeker eyes.

Dios mío,
Luz thought. Her eyes.

It was rare to see a blue-eyed brown or black girl. Luz remembered a cousin of her mother’s with emerald eyes and black skin, young and handsome in a suit, but outside of that, there was no one beside Luz in her family with eyes any color but shades of brown. Her mother chalked it up to recessive genes and a great-great-grandfather who was a German-Jewish plantation owner in the Dominican. But that was nearly one hundred years ago. And here was a girl who looked very much like a taller version of Luz at her age . . . right down to the eyes.

“Hi,” Luz responded, her voice catching. Something clicked.

“So you gals have met?” Tomas was back with a water for his sister. Luz held her hand out for it without moving her eyes from the girl’s. Luz breathed in sharply and commenced an investigation.

“Tomas. Who is this?”

Without meeting his sister’s drilling gaze, he said plainly, “This is Emeli. Your sister.”

Luz took another brisk breath. Your
sister?
she thought.
Not
our
sister? My sister?
The girl still sat, now biting her nails. Luz had mistaken her lack of manners for sassiness, but she realized instantly, as the girl’s eyes started pooling with tough tears, that she was fighting back and losing—that she was scared. Out of her element and scared.

How was this possible?

Luz sat down on a side chair. Emeli’s eyes finally dropped.

“My sister? Our sister?” Tomas shrugged and threw his eyes at the young girl. Luz turned to her. “Emeli?”

“Yeah.” The girl didn’t look up.

Luz turned back to the only person capable of more than a
yeah.
“Tomas. What . . . ?”

“Yeah . . . Um, Em, I’m gonna talk to Luz for a bit in the kitchen—need anything?”

“Nah, I’m good. Thanks.” The girl went back to her phone.

“I’ll just bring you another ginger ale, okay?” Tomas tapped the table in front of Emeli with assurance and turned to the kitchen.

Luz slowly peeled herself off her chair and then her eyes off this girl—her sister!—to follow her brother in search of some sorely needed answers.

“Tomas,
whaaat the fuuuck!
” Luz hissed, just past the doorjamb so Emeli wouldn’t hear.

“Give me a sec.” He was strangely focused on getting this girl a soda, Luz noted.
Ay.
He had to have known about this girl for a while. The eldest in the family—
the family I know
—Luz sat and drummed her gelled nails on the small table by the stove. Her back was to the kitchen door. She heard the glass set down on the living room table, his voice a tone of concern and reassurance to the teen.

“So . . .” Tomas began as he returned to the kitchen. He slid himself into the chair opposite Luz. “Here’s the really big news, though.”

“There’s bigger news than that person sitting out there?!” Luz’s eyes bugged. “That girl—teenager!?”

“Yeah. So, Dad is not your real father.”

“
What?
”

“Shhh! C’mon! She feels weirded out enough as it is.”

She
feels . . . Oh Lord.
Luz closed her eyes and shook her head. It throbbed and reeled.

After a beat she opened her eyes and stopped her preacher sway. “What . . . What are you talking about . . . Please, Tomas.” She didn’t have to work to whisper this time. The wind had been knocked out of her. She was tight with her father. She loved him dearly. She identified with him.

“Ma had an affair.” Tomas had the annoying habit of letting words out too slow to Luz’s liking. She felt he was cheap with his words, withholding. He wasn’t a bad guy. Just a bit controlling.

“More,” Luz demanded with her eyes closed.

“Mom and Dad broke up for a while just before they got married. Remember how she was kinda puffy in those wedding pictures?”

Luz nodded.

“So, that was you, she was pregnant.”

“I knew that. Everyone knows that she was pregnant with me when they got married.” She was trying to be patient.

“Well, so . . . While they were broken up—for, like, I dunno, six months or something—Ma had a fling with Vivian’s cousin.”

“Vivian? Mom’s friend from Claremont?”

Luz held her head in her hands, rubbing her temples.

“Who was this guy?”

“Well, that brings us to the girl—Emeli—sitting on the couch.”

“
What
does?
What
does, Tomas? Would you spit it out!”

“Emeli’s father is your biological father, Vivian’s cousin whom Mom had a fling with before she and Dad got back together and got married.”

“And what about Dad? Does he know this? Did he know all along that I wasn’t his?”

Tomas nodded.

“He knew this whole time . . . ? My whole life?!”

Luz sifted through her memories. She was particularly close to her mother. She looked little like her darker father. But, Tomas did. He looked very much like their father. His father.
But he raised me,
she thought.
And he knew. Why didn’t they tell me? When I used to ask over and over again why I looked different from the rest of the family, why didn’t they tell me?

“And this guy, this . . . Vivian’s cousin. Who is he? Why is
she
here?”

“He was . . . well, he’s alive. He’s just, like, a guy from the ’hood, ya know?”

“From the ’hood?”

“Yeah, Luz, like a gangsta.” Tomas leaned down to whisper so Emeli wouldn’t hear his politically incorrect phraseology.

Luz’s eyebrows went up. This day was getting crazier by the minute.

She shout-whispered back, “My father—my biological father—is a drug-dealin’ gangsta from the Heights?”

“Yeah, a Dominican guy.”

“Of course.”

“He just got locked up.”

“Just now? Locked up?”

“Yeah, but not for the first time.”

“I’m sure.” She paused. “Wait. Why is she here only now if he’s been put away before? Where’s her mother?”

“Yeah, well. She died four years ago. Aneurism. Hard life.” He shrugged.

“I bet it was hard.” As soon as she wisecracked, Luz regretted it. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Tomas was turning his glass around and around as it sweated further into the small pool beneath it. “It’s a lot.”

Luz pinched the bridge of her nose. There were so many questions. So many consequences.

“So, where’s he staying?”

“Who?”

Luz tutted. “The father.”

“Upstate. Long time.”

“How long?”

“Dunno. At least twenty.”

“Jesus. Did he kill someone?”

“Nah, three strikes. Just dealing.”

“Oh, gee, I’m so relieved.” They both chuckled slightly.

“Um, can I plug this in somewhere?” Emeli peered shyly around the door frame, her big hair defying gravity. She held out her phone and waved it at Tomas.

“Oh! Sure, sure. Over here . . .” Tomas led her back into the living room. He wasn’t gone thirty seconds before he returned, from his sort-of-new sister to his now technically half sister. Luz hadn’t moved from her seat.

“So, help me with this,” Luz commanded. “She’s here now because her mom’s dead and her father’s in jail?”

“Yes.”

“But why is she
here?
”

“Well, her dad ended up sending me a Facebook message through Vivian. I thought he was full of shit, you know, just wanting money, but I knew he was for real because he knew stuff about the family years ago that’s not online, ya know?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“So we traded e-mails and then he put me on with his mom, who was just rambling and rambling
en español, sabes?
”

Luz made a
pffft
sound and a cut-it-out sign. They had grown up speaking Spanish, but Tomas had been so sucked into preppy culture that he couldn’t even roll his
R
s. His Anglo accent drove Luz nuts.

“So she begged me to take Emeli in. She said she lived in a studio apartment in the projects so she couldn’t take her—being so pretty and all—and that Emeli’s father didn’t want to cause trouble for Mom after so many years, and that I was the son, so I should be the man and take care of family business.”

“Well. Wait, because you’re the son—the man?” Machismo was rare in Luz’s life and she wanted to keep it that way. She thought it was the scourge of their culture. Tomas gave her his tenth shrug of the day. Luz scoffed. “So does Ma know?”

“I wanted to tell you first . . . It’s killing me, though!”

Luz had no sympathy for the newly single bachelor and regular withholder. “When did she get here?”

“Yesterday. Right after I called you.”

“So she was alone with you last night?”

Tomas nodded.

“Good thing you’re divorced.”

“Yeah, Jeanne would have hit the roof with this girl.”

Luz let out a big breath. They heard the television turn on. Emeli’s cell must have run out of juice. Tomas started to get up to help.

“Sit. Leave her be. She’s not a baby.” Luz didn’t know what these feelings were in her. Her thoughts and emotions were kinetic and confused, a swirl. There was a lot of negativity roiling and she made a note to temper it. She knew much of it was selfish. She was a mother and the oldest—she was used to taking care of people. But not a foreign fifteen-year-old who looked like Luz if she had been brought up back in the ’hood— had never been “saved” by her Vineyard-legacy, black-elite father, the one who plucked her mother up and out of uptown Manhattan. Her mother, a beautiful, brown Dominican woman, younger and “exotic.” Her mother used to love that word, “exotic.”

“Luz, I can’t keep her here.” It was Tomas’s turn to plead.

“What?” Luz snapped back into the here and now.

“It just doesn’t look good. She’s a teenager and all, and . . .”

“And, what?” She wanted him to say it.

“And she’s your, like, sister, technically as much as I’m your brother.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tomas.”

He shrugged. Luz understood: the gorgeous, trashy Dominicana hanging out in single brothah’s bachelor pad, lookin’ suspect. And she was really young. A teenage girl. What would he know about that? But . . .

“You have to keep her,” Luz insisted.

“What?!”

Luz waved him down from his panic. “Just until I talk to Mom. And Chris. And the kids. And Dad.”

“Luz, I can’t wait that long!”

“Well, it’ll happen fast, okay? I’m not like you, Mr. Secret Man. I mean, how is this even possible? That we have a sibling and the man who I thought was my father is not my father and my mother doesn’t even know about this girl and I’m supposed to just pick up my life and . . . and . . . I don’t even know what the fuck!” She was standing now, gesticulating.

Tomas just looked at her.

“Shit, man,” Luz said. “Shit.” How could her mother have kept this secret all these years? How could her father have done the same? And how could her “real” father be someone she considered a low-life? She knew a lot of black men and the good ones knew what to do, how to act. How to take that target painted on their backs since birth and throw it to the wind, where it belonged. Like her father had done, and had done with Tomas. Sure, her grandparents, her father’s parents, were professors and he came from a long line of free, Northern, educated blacks, but still, he was a black man who had lived through times even more dangerous than the present. And he did it, he made it. Shoot, her brother did it. He kept himself straight and didn’t knock anyone up, had no baby-mamas—