Sorry for another long wait :( Partly I've had a lot going on in my personal life, partly this was rough for me to write and something I feel like I've been building up to for a while, and wanted to do justice to. Warning for discussion of victim-blaming, childhood sexual abuse and trafficking, suicide, psychiatric violence, and reproductive coercion (that should, uh, be everything.)
Our water pressure is real strong, normally, the one good thing you can say about this falling-down house; today, it might as well be a shower of bullets striking my body, as I stand under the spray without moving. I still feel like I've been skinned alive or have third-degree burns all over, walking around exposed and raw and torn open. Nothing's helping me shake it out, either, not even the five cigarettes I chainsmoked out on the porch before I got in here.
Before I went to Big Mac, before my life exploded in a way I'm still picking pieces of shrapnel out of— I used to get this same empty feeling that sunk right down to the marrow of my bones and stayed there. I wasn't sad, exactly, revisiting bad memories or boo-hooing into my pillow at night. It was more of a terrible, unshakable fatigue, like when you're starting to recover from the flu but can't quite manage it— even waking up, brushing my teeth, running a comb through my hair, might as well have taken an Olympic gold medal's worth of effort. I wanted to lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, mostly, for hours and hours— to sleep and never have to wake up again, except I couldn't even really sleep right. I was scrubbed as blank as the roll of paper you feed into a typewriter, Santi's half-dead ghost cursed to wander the earth forever.
And now my dick's broken, too, just to put the icing on the cake.
I jerk myself, experimentally, a couple of times, draw on a failsafe arsenal of memories to help the process along— then realize that my misery getting, literally, self-masturbatory, might just mean it's time to get out of the shower before I rack up yet another bill I can't afford to pay, complete with FINAL NOTICE in red letters splashed across the envelope. I turn the handle to the side and just barely manage to towel off before the phone starts to ring. "I don't want to talk about refinancin' my truck, thanks," I snap into the receiver as I cradle it between my cheek and shoulder, trying not to drip water all over the already spongey floor.
"Tim?"
It slips from my hands like a piece of wet soap, bouncing an inch away from the floor by the cord; cussing up a Category 5 hurricane, I snatch it back up again. "Angel, that you?"
I told myself, if she comes calling on her own volition, I'm going to play it cool and not immediately jump to respond. Give her a couple minutes of my time, exchange enough pleasantries not to be glaringly rude, then pretend I've got somewhere important to be (which isn't even much of a lie— I'm almost always at work, and when I'm not, I'm supposed to be at work anyway.) And yet, all my determination to treat her like a persistent telemarketer vanishes once I hear her voice again; it feels more like she's a spirit who's been summoned by a medium, and this is my last chance to get a hold of her before she vanishes altogether.
"Yeah, hey, 's me," she says, crackly and distant like the reception's bad. "How are you, how's Neni doin'?"
"She's a baby," I say a little too drily, "I can put her on, you can see for yourself." I hold out the receiver for Neni in her walker to demonstrate one of her three distinct words; instead, she just gives me an 'are you shitting me' look I figured I had another twelve years before I'd be stuck facing. "Uh, yeah, anyway, she's doin' good— learned how to crawl backwards the other day, swear she really can talk a little, when she feels like it."
She fakes a laugh, which startles me, then makes my blood curdle on my left side. "Cristián got a promotion, on the rig, he's movin' on up to derrickman," she says. Well, if everyone in this family ain't striking gold like a miner forty-niner except for me, lately. "So that's more responsibility, and more time away, but the extra money'll be good for when…" She cuts herself off abruptly, like she's trying not to let too much slip. "It's what he's been wantin', for a while, he's real excited."
We're exchanging small talk like two old high school classmates who bumped into each other at Safeway, with about as much interest or warmth, and I already feel just as gauche and ready to flee as I would in that situation— hell, I think I was more engaged with Valeria the last time we spoke, and she gave me a rundown of the vacation to Acapulco she and her humble carpenter husband were planning, complete with detailed rankings of every hotel in the area by amenities and distance from the beach. Instead of keeping it up and telling her that I got a GED practice book out of the library, I just bite the bullet and ask, "why are you callin'?"
"I need a reason to call my own brother?"
"Girl—" I suck a thin whistle of air in through my teeth— "you sent me a damn postcard for Christmas, didn't even pick up the phone. I got more holiday spirit an' good tidings out of Ma. I think I've earned the right to be a little suspicious."
She lets the suspense hang there for a few more moments, long enough that I wonder if she's already hung up and I missed the click. "I'm pregnant," she finally says, and my first instinct is to shoot right back with what the fuck, not again? and threats to hospitalize whoever knocked her up, again. Before I remember that she's remarried, and I guess she's not that cradle-robbingly young anymore, either— she'll be turning twenty before the baby's born. "I've known for a couple months now, we just wanted to wait before tellin' anybody, 'cause… well. I've got a history." Another long silence hangs in the air, waits to be penetrated. "But we're pretty sure it's safe, at this point."
Neni makes a strangled gurgling sound like an orange peel got caught in the garbage disposal, then gives me a gummy grin, once she's drawn my attention. I'm not the best or most involved daddy, and I know it, that I've got to start bringing more to the table than the pay packet I slap down onto it (though, hell, unlike half the other guys on my site, I've changed a diaper before and use a car seat.) When I look at my baby girl, I think about her mama hemorrhaging on the operating table, while I was completely helpless to do anything to save her. About Angela at that age, the way she squeezed one of my fingers with her entire fist, how all that wide-eyed, trusting innocence would be ripped from her by the time she reached double digits. About the land mine laying in wait inside her skull, ready to blow with enough provocation, and why my blighted bloodline should've ended with me.
What I say is, "you reckon you'll be comin' home soon, then?"
"It's not home anymore to me," she says, a thin thread of irritation starting to run through her words. "My home's here now. In Laredo, with my man."
"I ain't arguin' no semantics." A dull ache starts to form behind my forehead; I reach up with my free hand to massage it. "Nobody's seen hide or hair of you in two years, I'd be askin' for proof of life videotapes if you didn't pick up the phone on occasion— Christ, you ain't never even met your own nephew or niece yet, and Mike's comin' on his first birthday." Now I allow myself to indulge in a hint of resentment. "Gabi almost died, you know that? Things were real rough for us when she was still recovering, we sure could've used some help around here."
"Your wife don't like me none," she says, all clipped syllables. "And I don't plan on buyin' no bus ticket any time soon, no matter how much you try to guilt me into it, so don't hold your breath—"
"You don't think you've made your point clear enough yet, that ain't nobody can tell you what to do?" God, is she a stubborn one. "You really hate us that much?"
"Maybe I'll come back for Curly's funeral, how 'bout it?"
"Don't even joke about that, what the fuck is wrong with you?" I hiss; Neni lets out a high-pitched whimper, and I turn around to shoot her an apologetic look. Her chin still wobbles dangerously, like Jello freshly dumped into a mold. "Lil' girl—"
The phrase falls out of my mouth as easy as an apple drops off a tree branch, as I tell her to watch hers, the way it has a million times before. She makes a furious, choked noise in the back of her throat, like she wishes she could cross the seven hundred miles that divide us and slap me right through the line. "I'm not your fuckin' little girl no more, Tim, in case you ain't noticed, I'm a grown woman now. Don't talk down to me like you always do, like you're my boss, and then wonder why I ain't chompin' at the bit to keep in touch—"
"Bullshit," I deflect her words like I'm swatting mosquitoes away from my face in high summer. She's all full steam ahead bluster right now, replaying the same tired track from her childhood and hoping I take the bait. "I raised you, Angela, trust me, I can tell when you're lyin'. At least tell me the truth, I think you owe me that much."
"I tried to kill myself, last year," she says. "Again."
My scalp prickles all over, my fingers rigor mortis stiff around the receiver. "Why?"
What I really have to stop myself from asking is the 'how'. Dallas and Jasmine found her the last time, covered in vomit from an overdose, her face tinged blue like an infant with an umbilical cord wrapped around its neck.
"Why do you think, huh?" She chokes out a small, mirthless laugh. "They didn't just pump my stomach and throw me out at the hospital, this time— they got me set up with a shrink, a woman. She's kind of young, but she knows her shit… helped me sort mine out. I wouldn't be tryin' to have the baby, otherwise."
When I hear the word shrink, I'm cast back in time to Big Mac again, the way the haldol paralyzed me like a tetanus infection— about the halfway house, the eggshell-white walls, the pine needle air freshener that sunk deep inside my nostrils and refused to let go. Tim, are you trying to make me dislike you? "I'm glad," is what I say, levelly, hauling myself out of that abyss of memory by the armpits. "I don't want the third time to be the charm, here."
(I knew all about your body not being your own beforehand, retreating to the sanctuary of your mind to escape. Turns out there's an infinite number of ways you can be broken down and controlled. That everyone breaks, eventually.)
"Our family's real screwed up, Tim."
"Manita, you needed to pay someone by the hour to tell you that much? Could've asked to see our child protection records and gotten the same answer for free."
"You think you ain't part of the problem, that you had nothin' to do with it?"
"Wait a minute, you paid some shrink by the hour to tell you that I'm the problem?" My sense of betrayal is so acute, she might as well have stabbed me in front of the Senate during the Ides of March. I still remember the time she was fifteen, crying in my lap with all her hair shorn off, and how my mind narrowed to a single beam of focused rage. My baby sister— I would've done anything to protect her, a hell of a lot worse than putting some high schooler in a hospital bed. "What the hell did I ever do?"
More like what I didn't do.
"Of course you got no idea, it was just some Tuesday for you," she scoffs, talking like a spider weaving a web and planning to eat me alive in it. "Made your opinion of me pretty fuckin' clear, when I told you and Ma I was pregnant and y'all put me on trial in that living room, and then you spend the next four years scratchin' the back of your head about why I don't want to be part of the family no more."
"You expected me to be jumpin' for joy, findin' out that my kid sister was gonna have her own kid six months after her quinceañera, with my best friend? Start plannin' a white wedding before the baby shower?"
"He raped me!" She says it like she's spraying pus from a cut-open boil. "I was fifteen and he was twenty, what'd you think happened there, Lolita batted her eyelashes and he came runnin'? Same way Ma reckoned I was comin' onto her boyfriend with my Tweety Bird nightie?" That sentence makes me take half a step backwards, strain the cord. "I don't care that he was your friend— he raped me, and he knocked me up in the process, and y'all just married me off to him without a second thought. You know the last year we was married, before I got my divorce, he was tryna do it again so he could get a draft deferral? I was spendin' the night at my girlfriends', at motels, just so I wouldn't really be stuck with him forever."
The steel wrapped around my ribcage comes roaring back, tightens so much that I struggle on the next breath; I wonder if this is what it's like to have a heart attack, remember that a sense of impending doom is one of the key symptoms. "Wasn't my signature, on that waiver from the court, it was Ma's," I manage to say, my chest hurting with every bitten-out word. "I wanted you to get an abortion, give it up at one of those mother and baby homes, at least. Don't rewrite history 'cause you're so desperate to make me play the villain, now."
"You sure gave in pretty fast when Tío Luis said I was damaged goods, though, didn't you? When he said this was probably my last chance to get married. It got me out of your hair, at least." I suck in another nervous, involuntary whistle of a breath that sounds like a teakettle coming to a boil. I didn't even realize that she'd been there for that conversation, overheard any of it. "The only thing you gave two shits about, was that you wouldn't be left holdin' the bag with the baby."
"Because you got absolutely no idea how much responsibility it is to raise kids, you didn't then, and you still don't now— you figured it was like playin' with a baby doll that wets itself. I didn't have no childhood because I had to bring y'all up, though it'll sure be a cold day in hell before either one of you acknowledges that—"
"Lord, I don't know what I would've done with myself, without you around to tell me to put on longer skirts and wash that shit off my face, before somethin' real bad happened to me one of these days."
That's how she's breaking our relationship down to its bare essentials? That's what she remembers, not the Barbies I stole so she'd have something to open on Christmas that wasn't from a church donation bin, not the way I spent hours combing her tangled hair out before school so the teacher wouldn't have to? "You're lucky I didn't tie you to the fucking radiator!" I'm yelling, now, and it's been a long time since I've done that; only subordinates have to raise their voices, is what Luis always taught me, but I'm nobody's leader now and definitely not hers. "Why am I bein' held to the moral standard of Mahatma fuckin' Gandhi here, huh, when I ain't even your actual parent? Why am I the only one you're callin' to the carpet, you think when I was some eighteen, nineteen-year-old kid, I had the first clue how to handle this either? You were doin' heroin and runnin' around with pimps by eighth grade, for God's sake—"
"That's my fault, too, huh? You was in the courtroom when they sentenced him, but I guess you thought the judge was too harsh. Or maybe that I should've been up on the stand with him."
They stabbed Joe to death in the showers at Big Mac, six months after he got sent upstate. In a prison full of murderers, arsonists, and thieves, raping little girls was just a step too far. "What do you want from me?" I finally ask, brought low and raspy in my defeat. It's embarrassing to admit, but I'm shaking, and though there's no way I could bring myself to ask, I wonder if she is too. "What the hell did you want me to say?"
"That I didn't do anything wrong! That they made the choice to hurt me, it wasn't mine!" Her own shout is like a Molotov cocktail thrown right at my ear. "You're so fucking arrogant, Tim, you think I blame you for not bein' my knight in shining armor, for not protecting me well enough. You wish. I blame you for everything that came after."
And how could I tell her something I've never been able to tell myself? My scar thrums with poisoned blood, its own heartbeat; I twist my head, as though turning it away from her, though she can't see me to begin with.
"I've got a big scarlet letter plastered across my chest, whenever I'm in Tulsa." She sounds like she's been sprinting around the block, struggling to catch her breath. "I thought I could really run away from myself in Laredo, you dig? Become this perfect housewife who bakes lemon bars for her man before he's home from work, the way Ma never was, be anybody other than me. And I can't do that so easy no more— but that don't mean I'm comin' back to Oklahoma, neither. There's nothin' left for me there."
"You wasted a lot of words tellin' me that you're an ungrateful little bitch, Angel." I'm speaking with someone else's voice, disconnected, a ventriloquist's dummy. "Don't call here again."
It's the first time I've managed to hurt her, this entire conversation, and the first time I've ever really tried. "You're right," she says slowly, "that shrink, she don't know everything, I guess I painted her too pretty a picture of you. She doesn't know how you're so proud, you'll burn relationships to the ground before you'll apologize or admit you were wrong. Why the hell did I expect any different?" Then she goes in for the kill. "I'm glad you're out of the life now, Tim, I really am. But that still don't make you a good person, or a good person for me to be around."
I want to tell her that she, more than Curly, was always the real 'Tim in miniature'. That she'll never let anyone love her because she'll never let anyone hurt her, following my example, that we've got big, gaping holes where our hearts are supposed to be. Instead, I just wait for her to hang up.
"Fu… fu…" Neni decides to start parroting, waves her hand in the air as she tries and fails to make the hard sound at the end. If Gabi hears this, I won't have to worry about getting it up ever again, because she's going to roast my balls on a stick over a campfire. "Fuck!"
The phantom scent of incense hits me like a blow to the jaw. "Mija—" I crouch down and brush one of her loose curls off the side of her face— "you ain't gonna ever do me like that, are you?"
She just gurgles, then spits up all over her front, in response.