With the Fire on High(15)
“You were the same way, you know? When you wanted something, you let the whole world know.”
I don’t turn to ’Buela, who stands in the doorway. She doesn’t enter the room. ’Buela lets me handle the tantrums by myself. At first, I used to get mad at her: What the hell did I know about making a baby stop yelling? But I’ve learned to appreciate her lack of intervention. She lets me be the mom.
“Babygirl,” I say, walking up to the crib. “We can read the story four times tomorrow. I love that you love reading. But right now, it’s time to go to sleep.” She responds by throwing a doll at me.
“That’s enough, Emma,” I say. I don’t use my no-nonsense voice often, but I bring it out now. “Just because you’re angry doesn’t mean you throw things at people.”
She curls up, still crying loudly but clearly exhausted. Her small body heaves with sobs, and everything inside me wants to run my hand down her little head and just read her the damn story again. Just give her what she wants to stop her from hurting. But I keep still until she quiets down, until her breathing turns heavy. Once she’s asleep I pick up the stuffed animals and place them neatly at her feet, then wipe the wetness off her cheeks. I turn her night-light on and close the door to our room. Thirty minutes wasted and it’s all the bunny’s fault.
’Buela follows me downstairs into the living room, where I replace The Runaway Bunny with Applied Mathematics: Equations in the Real World.
“I’m sorry we interrupted the game,” I say, and sit on the couch.
“It was halftime, nena. And we are looking terrible; I sure hope my boys can get it together soon.” She sits down next to me and removes the book from my hands. I sigh and put my head on her shoulder. She pats my face and I snuggle more deeply into her side.
“You want me to read to you?”
“I don’t think the Applied Mathematics textbook will allow you to practice your character voices,” I say, closing my eyes. She shifts a bit and I hear her pick up the book.
“‘Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.’”
Fickle Fatherhood
My father has always loved to read to me. I may question a lot of his actions, but his phone calls from San Juan and his attempts to instill a love of knowledge into me aren’t among them. Even my earliest memories include his voice in my ear reading a passage from whatever book he was currently into. Julio didn’t believe in children’s books. He believed whatever he read, he should read to me. Always nonfiction, and rarely fit for a child, but I loved listening to his voice.
These days, he doesn’t read to me when he comes to visit, and he visits at the same time every year. Julio arrives at the beginning of July, usually with a full agenda. This past summer he rented a chair at the barbershop down the block and cut a couple of heads in the morning, volunteered at the cultural center in the afternoon, and attended summer lectures and readings at whichever one of the universities in the city was having an event.
Every day he invited me to come with him on his afternoon adventures, but I’m not one for lectures and my relationship with my father is complicated. Not to mention my new job didn’t allow me to just drop work whenever he asked.
In the evenings, he was the perfect houseguest.
He helped wash the dishes even though he was always too late to eat dinner with us. He picked up ’Buela’s medicine at the pharmacy or anything we needed from the grocery store. He played with Babygirl and pretended he was going to buzz-cut her hair until she squealed with laughter and batted at his clippers. He was one of the few people who could stop her from crying when she was throwing a tantrum. I had a glimpse into the kind of father he might have been if my mother had lived.
If he had chosen to stay.
But Julio never stays long and he never gives notice. At some point when August starts rearing its head, Julio begins rearing his toward a flight back to Puerto Rico.
At the end of July this year, when ’Buela and I got home from the supermarket, all his stuff was gone from the living room. His suitcase wasn’t in the corner. His blanket was neatly folded over the couch. The case with his barbering tools was nowhere to be seen. Babygirl was at Tyrone’s house that weekend, so not only did he not say goodbye to us, he didn’t even say goodbye to her. And by that point she’d gotten attached to “Pop-Pop,” as she called him.
But poof! Houdini in the flesh. Or rather, in the disappearance. He didn’t leave a note, he didn’t text goodbye. He called a week later like nothing had happened and asked if I could send him Angelica’s Netflix password so he could watch a documentary on the Young Lords.
And maybe because I struggle to learn certain lessons, this one has taken me years and years to learn: You can’t make too much space for a father like mine in your life. Because he’ll elbow his way in and stretch the corners wide, and when he leaves all you have is the oversized empty—the gap in your heart where a parent should be.
Exhaustion
“Santi, you were really quiet in Advisory today,” Malachi says. I don’t know when he decided he had a right to nickname me. But I’m too tired to correct him. It’s only the middle of the second week, and although we see each other in class, we haven’t spoken much.
“Yeah. I was up late doing work. And Ms. Fuentes gave me a shi—crapload of edits on the college essay draft.”