It felt good to be disoriented. She caught glimpses of the unfamiliar, weary faces of her fellow travelers as she carefully pulled her carry-on bag from the overhead bin and set it down in the aisle. She could feel the impatience of the other passengers as they waited for the opportunity to take steps forward and exit the plane. Her legs felt weak and heavy as she shuffled past the premium economy seats then the business pods before finally moving through the spacious first class cabin.
It was the first time in months that she didn't feel the wave of sorrow pulling her under when she awoke from sleeping. For the last two months, since she had buried her father, she had been conscious of her emotions constantly flooding her mind. She walked around numb like a dam about to burst, always trying to stay ahead of the grief that could wash over her at any moment. When it hit, it was hard to recover from the uncontrollable feelings of grief that welled up inside and came pouring out of her in warm, salty tears.
She tried to muster a smile for the members of the flight crew who thanked her and waved to her as she stepped onto the jetway. Most of the flight attendants were Japanese with a couple of American flight attendants mixed in.
She had downloaded an app that was a quick guide to speaking Japanese. Originally, she didn't think she would need it since she was meeting her new employers immediately after she exited Customs. Moments before take-off from O'Hare Airport, the tour manager's assistant had texted her to say their flight from Barcelona had been delayed on a stopover in Miami so she would need to wait for them at the Tokyo airport until they arrived. So now it seemed downloading the language app had been a good idea after all.
The smell of jet fuel permeated the blast of cold air that seeped in from the small separation between the airplane and the jetway. Before she had taken two full steps, a man in a sport coat and baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes stepped forward.
"Madli Abarrca?" Even though it was said in a thick Japanese accent, hearing her name pulled her into reality just a bit. She nodded.
"Taro Yoshimoto. I am Tokyo undercover police." He flashed a credential that hung around his neck but it was in Japanese so she had no idea what it said. He could have been anyone. He sensed her hesitation.
"Jaan, requested I meet you. He is waiting for you."
Jaan was of course the bodyguard of her new employer who was it seemed equally as famous as their VIP boss. Madli had found Instagram pages and Pinterest boards dedicated to Jaan. There was also fan fiction about him on different sites. Jaan was famous for his cyborg green eyes and his seven-foot arm span. On one fan site, she had learned that Jaan was Estonian like her mother's side of the family. Unlike her father's side where the tallest Mexican men topped off at 5'11", her shortest Estonian cousin at least 6'3".
"I will take your bags.
"Thank you."
She swung her laptop and her carry on over her shoulder and handed them to Yoshimoto. She hadn't brought much. Just a couple of pairs of jeans, leggings, T-shirts, a fashionable hoodie, pajamas, travel size toiletries and a single pair of running shoes. The only item she had carefully packed were her underwear. She had made sure to pack a month's supply of clean, comfortable new underwear.
Just past the gate, an electric shuttle cart was waiting for them. Yoshimoto stepped aside and gestured toward the cart so she could climb up into one of the seats. He turned on a flashing light and they made their way through the crowds, parting the way until they reached an escalator that descended down to the baggage claim.
Madli was an expert packer. She had become one as a pre-teen when her parents divorced and the court ordered she and her siblings spend four days living with her mother and the other three with her father. Even though she was the youngest of three kids, it was Madli who organized their twice weekly moves between households. Clothing, toiletries, medications, textbooks, special items for bedtime. She also kept track of food in both houses so none of them would go without their favorite cereals or snacks.
True to his Mexican nature, her father, Gonzalo was not the Mr. Mom type. He had once confused Pine-Sol for cooking oil and made them scrambled eggs with chorizo for dinner. They had tried telling him but he wouldn't listen to their complaints. When he realized his mistake he had grabbed all of their plates and thrown them into the sink, shattering them into pieces then taken Madli and her siblings to McDonald's for dinner instead.
The truth was they dreaded their days with their Mom. She was an unhappy woman who scrutinized everything about them. It could be anything from their penmanship to their homework to what they wore to the dinner table.
It was hard to imagine Madli's mom Kersti had ever been happy or capable of being charmed by Madli's father. In better times, Madli and her siblings had heard the romantic story of how her parents met. Her father would recount meeting their mother with romance and nostalgia even though it was meaningless since they typically treated one another with complete disdain. Her father still carried an old black and white photo of his beautiful young wife in his wallet even though they hadn't spoken to one another in years.
As the story went, her parents had met on the lake front beach the summer when her Mom was only nineteen. She had just enrolled in junior college with plans of going to medical school. Her Dad was a few years older. His caramel skin, dark wavy hair, full lips and big dark eyes were very alluring to her. He also very charming, a great conversationalist and a flirt. They saw each other at the lake every Wednesday when her Mom didn't have classes.
Her father in turn, was obsessed with the lithe blonde with big amber eyes he saw sitting on the beach with her sisters. Finally, one Wednesday he made his move and struck up a conversation with her. The next Wednesday he kissed Kersti on the lips before jumping into the water. On the third Wednesday, he asked her out to dinner and picked her up in a white Porsche. He explained he had restored it himself at the auto body shop he owned with his brothers.
He was an impressive, ambitious, hard-working immigrant from Mexico with big dreams. He and his two brothers were saving capital to open another shop.
Gonzalo and Kersti were two ambitious, young people. Even though they were from different countries, they shared the immigrant experience. She was the child of exiled immigrants who had fled Estonia during World War II. Her father was a professor and their home outside Tallinn in the countryside had been taken over, occupied by both the Germans and the Soviets. Kersti was an infant when she arrived in Toronto with her family then later settled in Chicago. Gonzalo was an illegal immigrant who had run across the desert to the border with his brother Guillermo then worked as a farm laborer in Texas and the mid-west before finally making his way to Chicago.
Even though they had completely different backgrounds, Gonzalo and Kersti understood one another and their experiences. They respected one another's ambitions. They both had the American dream in their sights.
On their first dinner date, Gonzalo told Kersti he was going to marry her. Before they had dated for a full year, he had gifted her his white Porsche and upgraded himself to a newer model. After two years, she had completed her Associate's degree and they were married. Her bigger ambition of becoming a doctor was put on the backburner when she became pregnant with Gonzalo, Jr. and all of her ambitions were lost when six months later, she became pregnant with Madli's sister Liisa.
Throughout their childhoods Kersti was not fulfilled by motherhood. She woke up raging, resentful of the needs of her children and her responsibilities as the lady of the house. There were explosive arguments about Gonzalo's long work hours and singular focus on growing his successful business. On the nights when their mother locked herself in the guest room, quietly sobbing on Valium, their father took them out for dinner and a Disney movie. It was their mother who was erratic, who disappeared, who left them and went to stay with one of her sisters or ran off to another sister's in Toronto after yet another squabble with her husband.
After the divorce, Madli and her siblings complained to their father about their mother but the courts refused to judge Kersti's mothering or limit their mother's access to her children even though she raged at them in the morning and bullied them at night.
Madli had inherited ambition on both sides but it was this, her chaotic home life which motivated her to work every summer at a deli restaurant to earn money and apply to top universities. More than anything, she needed an escape away from the criticism and the miserable evenings at her Mom's. She wanted to live on her own, on her own terms and carve out the life she wanted for herself.
As Madli approached the passport desk, she noticed an infrared camera mounted on a tripod. Yoshimoto noticed her perplexed expression. "Infrared Thermoscanners. Look for fever and influenza."
It was then that the irony hit her, as she handed her passport to the formidable agent behind the desk. All these years later, she had thrown away her accomplishments and achievements. She had signed away her whole life, thrown herself into chaos by running away with a pop singer the way people had once ran away with the circus.
2
Madli's whole world had collapsed like a papier-mache globe. One day she was at the office worrying about the fall out from a one billion dollar settlement for consumer abuses the bank where she worked as an investment strategist had committed. Her offer on a penthouse condo in Wicker Park had just been accepted and she was obsessing over how the bad press might affect her business leads.
When escrow closed forty-five days later, her father was admitted into the hospital for pain and jaundice and she and her siblings were given the news that her father was being placed directly into the Palliative Care unit at the hospital. Seemingly the next day she was gathered around her father's bedside with her brother and sister. It was almost impossible to manage her father's end of life care with purchasing and moving into a home. Madli was on information overload and thought she might lose her mind.
So many friends and colleagues had described the inevitable passing of their septuagenarian and octogenarian parents with acceptance. They were sad but resigned when their parents inevitable left this earth. Her father, who had over the years become known as "Fast Gonzo" because of his relentless drive and work ethic, had not been ready to let go of life. He was still a youthful sixty-two-year old man when his Pancreatic cancer symptoms first appeared. At Christmas, he was not well. He was uncomfortable and complained of inexplicable abdominal pain. He put on a stoic front but didn't want to eat his usual holiday foods, surprising everyone by turning down the traditional tamales and pozole opting instead to pop Pepcid. When pressed by his children, he alluded to constipation.
The pain was finally severe enough that he asked Madli to find him a General Practitioner at the University Hospital. By then he was slightly jaundiced so he was referred to a specialist who immediately checked him into the hospital for two days worth of testing.
Madli took the hospital stay as a bad sign. There were no results the next day or the day following. By the end of the week, her Dad had developed jaundice. She felt mildly nauseated all day and struggled to compartmentalize her feelings. Three days later, on an afternoon where had let her guard down and was joking around with one of the loan underwriters about how desperately they needed the three day Martin Luther King weekend even though they had just had almost two weeks off at Christmas, her cell phone vibrated. It was her father.
"Mija, their telling me I have cancer! Can you believe it?"
She couldn't believe it. One day her father was fine and the very next day he wasn't.
"Do me a favor. Talk to the doctor."
Her Dad handed the phone straight to the doctor, who told Madli in no uncertain terms that her father had Pancreatic Cancer. She could tell by the doctor's measured words he was holding back. She immediately went into problem solving mode.
"Wow do we fix this?"
The doctor was silent. The rest of the conversation was blur. Madli marched straight to her office and Googled Pancreatic cancer. She spent the rest of the afternoon calling every major hospital, cancer center and research hospital in the United States. She took detailed handwritten notes of every conversation she had with countless patient care coordinators about their respective referral and in-take processes.
Later that day, her brother picked up their father from the hospital and drove him home. Madli left the office early and took an Uber straight to her childhood home, clutching the notepad that sat in her lap. Her father looked exhausted and had seemed to have aged five years over the course of a few days. He surprised Madli with his doubtfulness of his diagnosis by his American doctors. The next day, without a word to anyone, he hopped on a plane to Laredo, Texas then rented a car and drove himself across the border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. He checked himself into a small but modern hospital hoping for a more benign diagnosis like IBS or Celiac's Disease.
Suddenly the expatriate Mexican who had fled his home country without ever looking back, was nostalgic, sentimental and proud of the Mexican medical schools and their doctors. American doctors had abruptly become second rate. He recalled the time a few years ago when an acupuncturist was able to resolve his high cholesterol with Chinese herbs instead of pharmaceutical drugs that had plagued him with a short list of annoying side effects.
Madli's mother was of little comfort. Her words were sharp as always. She unnecessarily highlighted Gonzalo's struggles with his weight and reminded her daughter that Gonzalo had the disgusting habit of smoking in the bathroom every night after dinner. She also observed that Madli's father had worked at a dry cleaner when he first moved to Chicago then spent years inhaling the toxic chemicals at the auto body shop where he had started as the sweeper. Even as the owner of the multiple shops, Gonzalo had spent his days exposed to hazardous automotive products that contained petroleum and Benzene.
He returned a few days later from Mexico where the advanced testing of the hospital in Nuevo Laredo had duplicated the results of the hospital in Chicago. It was too late for surgery or chemotherapy. Her Dad was in excruciating pain and after only a couple of days at home with Madli, Liisa and Gonzo Jr. looking after him, he willingly returned to the university hospital where the American oncologist concurred with the Mexican doctors that it was too late for surgery or chemotherapy.
They were all – including her father, in shock. His pain was so terrible that after just two days in the hospital, the oncologist recommended her father be placed in the Palliative Care unit. It was a dismal day. Madli, Liisa and Gonzalo watched the inauguration of President-elect Trump's in their father's hospital room where he lay in bed on a hydromorphone drip for pain.
As she sat in the spartan wood framed chair next to her father's bedside, she was in disbelief at what was happening on the television and all around her. Reality television star Donald Trump was being sworn in as the 45th President of the United States and her father was dying. The morphine was making her Dad giddy. He had proudly voted for Trump and cheered as Trump placed his hand on the Bible.
Madli understood how Trump's raw Pancho Villa machismo and showmanship, his "shoot first and ask questions later" bravado appealed to her father. He had always identified with Republican ideals of self-sufficiency and the right to bear arms. He had grown up in squalor in Mexico and used his own scrappiness and wit to survive. Stealthily drowning neighbors hens in neighborhood wells so he could eat them and building ramps across flooded walkways in Guadalajara so he could then charge pedestrians to keep their feet dry as they crossed the flooded streets of colonial city.
Gonzalo didn't trust career politicians or the religious leaders his mother had revered in Mexico. Priests at the Catholic church where they were parishioners, explained to him as a child that his family was poor because God loved them. This made no sense to him then or now. He saw Trump's raw attitude as that same grit that had helped him survive his childhood and succeed in the United States.
Her boyfriend Luke who was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, had a different way of explaining Trump's defeat of Hillary Clinton. He was both hilarious and astute as he explained Trump's popularity as a response to global immigration patterns and a base fear that once the gun rights of Americans became limited, socialism would inevitable take over the country.
Luke had been noticeably absent since her father's diagnosis. With Trump's election, Luke's field of study of how group influence shaped politics was a trending topic. He was being asked to present papers at universities all over the country and political science associations were asking him to guest lecture. He had even gotten a couple of phone calls from NPR and nightly news shows asking him to appear as a guest commentator. This week, he was in in London for a meeting with an NGO funded by DFID to map out areas of conflict in Baghdad during the parliamentary elections in the spring.
The time difference between London and Chicago made it difficult to reach him. He had posted selfies from his flight on Instagram including one with a Golden Retriever occupying the seat next to him. On Facebook, she saw pictures he had taken of the Parliament buildings accompanied by his usual witty remarks. Other than that, she hadn't heard from him.