The only solid memory of my father I have before age six is the one where he's leaving. I was far too young to understand the logistics of divorce or the reasons behind my parent's, and in all honesty I've never asked. I've become kind of apathetic to the situation. Like it or not my father left me – that's all there is to it.
It was a hot July day and I'd spent the last 2 weeks listening to my parents argue while I played with my dolls in the yard. I'd make them have families of their own using cotton reals as the babies. The Mamis would stay home and look after their kids while the Papis went to find jobs just like in my own family. Our house was relatively small and I would listen to my parent's voices drifting out of the open back door on the haze of heat that accompanies a Lima summer. Everything had gone quiet approximately 3 days ago. That's the day my father packed a bag and left the house. He didn't even tell me he was leaving. For 3 days I had sat with my dolls in the backyard – too afraid to ask where Papi was. I was scared that he wouldn't be coming back.
Somewhere behind me, the doorbell rang and I heard the chatter of voices. I rose to my feet and moved, waif like through the screen door and into the kitchen. To me the kitchen seemed enormous, although my mother has told me a thousand times since that, "that house was a hole Santana! There was barely room to move". I'm sure if I went back now I would see things differently. I crept through the kitchen and hung at the corner of the arch into the living room. And there he was, my Papi. Re-appeared like some kind of ghost.
"Please", he said, "she's my daughter".
"Fat lot of good that'll do her when you're in Seattle", retorted my mother. Seattle? What was a Seattle?
"I just want to say goodbye. To explain to her. She's a smart kid-"
I didn't like this. I didn't like this at all. Goodbye? Why would Papi be saying goodbye? Maybe he really wasn't coming back. To stop all this nonsense talk I launched myself into the room, hitting into Papi so hard he stopped talking.
"Hola Mija," he said eventually, leaning to plant kisses all over my face. I remember the scratchy feeling of his beard and the way he smelled like not-Papi. Like he'd spent too much time somewhere else, using someone else's shampoo and laundry detergent.
"Hola Papi," I said extracting myself from him so I could look at him and try to locate the odd smell and feeling of not-Papi coming off him.
"How about you and me go to the park mija, we can get ice cream if you want?"
I remember my mother looking stern and my father arguing with her some more with me clinging on to his hand. The short walk to the play park down the block but there was no ice cream truck. That was something my father did a lot of from then on. Offer me things he couldn't deliver on. I remember him pushing me on the swings and pretending to be a lion when I slid down the tube-y slide so that he'd scare me when I came out. I remember the golden colour of his eyes reflecting the setting sun.
"Santana baby, come and sit down a minute, Papi's tired."
I plonked myself down on the bench, out of breath and flushed from my excursions. In my memories this is the most alive I feel. A kid, carefree, with her heartbeat only inches beneath her skin.
"Are you coming home soon?" I asked. The innocent question tumbled of my lips, full of hope and love. I watched as Papi turned his face from me, and then he looked back, a smile brimming on his face.
"Actually, I'm going on an adventure Santana. I'm going to move to Seattle, a hospital there wants me to work for them".
"Can I come?" I liked the sound of an adventure but only if it involved me.
"Mami wants you to live with her, here".
But don't you want me to live with you? But you and Mami are married, how come we don't all go? But I want to go on the adventure too. But-
"You can come and visit me, when things are a little more settled"
How long would that be? 3 more days? Or longer? 3 days is an eternity when you're six.
Turns out 3 days was a little bit of an underestimation on my part. 3 days after my father left I was crying in the back yard, collecting up the dolls and the cottons reels and dumping them in a box to go beneath my bed. It was almost six months before I saw my father again and even then I didn't get to go on an adventure. He came back to the Lima suburb where he and my mother had made their home and told me about all the things he'd seen in Seattle. As he left I told him I wanted to go with him but he handed me kicking and screaming back to my mother.
It continued this way for a while: my father turned up for special occasions, school shows, birthdays, Christmas, and then he'd hand me back to my mother and I'd watch the taxi drive him away again. Eventually his visits to Lima turned into my own to Seattle. My mother would drive me to the airport and hand me over to a woman with a plastic-cy smile and a voice like honey and I'd spend the hours colouring in pictures that my father would stick on his refrigerator when we reached Seattle. We'd go on ferry-boat rides and to circuses. If there was an emergency at the hospital he would dump me at the nurse's station or beg one of the candy stripers to take me to the cafeteria where I would sulk, feeling cheated that someone else got to spend time with my Papi when this was supposed to be our adventure. Eventually he'd drop me back off at the airport, into the arms of another Barbie-doll air hostess, with a look of slight relief on his face and a per functionary kiss on the forehead. Somehow in the time we spent apart he forgot to be a Papi and simply became a Father instead. Somewhere along the way, I guess I stopped being his little girl too.
Maybe I was stupid as a kid, to think that my father didn't love me or didn't want me, but when someone you love leaves you like that you don't have much cause to believe otherwise. My Father's leaving changed me. Moulded me. Made me believe there was something truly defective with me that made me un-loveable. But that's the thing about love. It's hard. It's tricky. It exists in a thousand different dimensions and refuses to abide to the normal laws of physics or time. Just when you think you've lost it, you'll turn around and it'll be staring you right in the face. I've never had a great example - maybe that's why it took me so long to get it right with Britt - but I know now, that even though he's the one who lay the first blades to my heart, my father would walk to the ends of the earth for me.