30. If You See Too Much
30
IF YOU SEE TOO MUCH
Alejandro
The Past
T he kitchen is submerged in near total darkness, save the light above the stove. My hand skates the wall in search of the light switch and when I find it, I wait a few seconds before flipping it on. Sitting on a stool at the kitchen island is Dahlia, nurturing a half-finished glass of liquor and a plate of gingerbread men whose heads have been bitten off.
“I gave you as much space as I could. They’re starting to ask for you.”
“Tell them I drowned myself in the sink.”
“No one would believe that. You just got your hair dyed.”
The huff of laughter that leaves her lips surprises me but it’s short-lived. One of the smaller photo albums rests on the counter beside her and judging by the now depleted rum bottle tossed in the recycling bin, I take it she’s had a little too much to drink. Considering Dahlia has never so much as finished a bottle of wine by herself, the sight of her sitting alone in a dark kitchen makes my stomach twist with unease. I walk over and remove the cup from her grasp and she doesn’t object.
A beat passes before she finds her voice again. “My father was supposed to be an architect. Did I ever tell you that?”
I slide a hand behind her neck, fingers tangling in her hair as she leans forward. I brush my lips against her temple. “No. You don’t talk about him much.”
“No…I suppose I don’t.” The album is open to an old sepia photo whose yellowed edges betray its age. “Remember the book I told you about, the one that made me want to be an architect? It was his. He gave it to me for show and tell at school because he knew the textbooks in religion class were my favorite. They were the ones with all the cathedrals and ancient buildings in them.”
She sighs as she flips through the photo album and eventually slams it shut. Dahlia rises from the stool as if to stand but loses her footing on the way down. I catch her just in time but the chair tilts over, its fall impeded by a decorative side table tucked into the corner.
“Alex—”
“You’re okay, I got you.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need help. I don’t need anyone’s.”
Her words lack vehemence but they sting nonetheless. I feel her push against my chest and I release her, unsure of whether or not holding on would do more harm than good. Dahlia’s never been inebriated before, at least not in my presence. I can sense her awareness because her vision is focused when she looks at something and she’s able to lean against the counter for support. But there’s something else weighing on her, something intangible and without name.
“I want to be left alone,” she whispers.
“I don’t think you should be.”
She tilts her head at me. Her gaze travels the length of my body, studying me from head to toe, the look chilling me to the bone. “When are you going to break my heart…hm? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“I’m not. I won’t.”
“Yes you will. They always do.” She relieves me of the burden of her gaze and returns her attention to the album on the counter. “My life is littered with disappointments. I don’t see why you’d be any different.”
“Dahlia—”
“Please go. I’m upset and I drank too much. I’ll be fine in a little while.”
She grabs the album and a sweater from a hook near the patio door. She disappears into the night and this time, I don’t follow.
D ahlia doesn’t speak for the rest of the night or on the drive back into the city. She took the album with her.
When we get back to the hotel, Diego and Lettie disappear into their rooms, and Dahlia pretends to go to sleep. About an hour later, she crawls out of bed and slips into a robe, taking the album with her.
Time passes. Two hours, three, then four. Evening gives way to midnight and midnight to the early hours of the morning. Staring at the ceiling has lost its appeal so I get out of bed and shower, hoping to wash away both the exhaustion and the ache in my bones. Steam fills the room and I extend my open palms, healed and scarred and burning under the scorching water. All my muscles and tendons work and it no longer hurts to close and extend my fingers. I could easily forget the injury if not for the raised skin and discoloration.
Another hour passes and I decide to go looking for Dahlia. I grab my room key and think of all the places she can be—down at the bar, in the lobby, maybe one of the hotel’s sitting rooms—when I find her in the living room seated at the windowsill with her head resting against the glass. She has the album balanced on her knees and her arms crossed over her chest.
I sit on the other end of the windowsill and neither of us speaks. Her nose and eyes are red, cheeks marred with deep lines, a memory of every tear shed tonight.
“I’m sorry for what I said,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean it.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“Okay…so long as you know I’m sorry.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
A flicker of anguish dances across her features. In the dark blue light, her hair looks purple, tan complexion soft and muted. The tremor in her voice when she speaks makes my chest tighten. “Papi is…he’s very difficult to talk about.”
I can hardly hear a word she says, each letter whispered through quivering lips. Her eyes glisten and she’s so desperate to keep the emotion at bay that she brushes the tears away before they even have time to fall. This is a side of her I’ve never seen before. One I wish I knew how to help.
I thought I knew all of Dahlia—her fears, her joys, every strength and weakness. Clearly, I know nothing at all.
“Why don’t you try?” I tell her. “So I can understand better.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t?—”
“Why?” I parry back.
“Because—” She opens her mouth to say more but stops herself. Lifts her hands to cover her face a moment before returning her gaze to the window. “What if you see too much?”
“So what if I do?”
Dahlia focuses on the snow on the windowsill.
“Is he alive?” I ask.
She nods.
“Do you know where he is?”
Headshake.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?”
Dahlia takes a measured breath. “He called me…earlier this year. I guess someone told him I was moving.”
I frown. “When? In January?”
She shakes her head. “A little later. Around March, I think. It was the week Lettie and I found all those paintings in the attic. I remember because when I went to call you, I noticed I had a voicemail. He’s the only one whoever leaves me voicemails.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She gives a light shrug. “It didn’t feel like something worth sharing.” She closes the album and lowers her legs so she can sit in an upright position. “He asked to see me before I left but I was already gone.”
“You told me he left after you turned eighteen. But you never told me how or why.”
Her jaw tightens and the effort she puts into keeping her composure is noticeable. “Alex, I don’t even know why he left. We didn’t exactly have time to discuss it when he packed his bags and disappeared in the middle of the night.”
“He didn’t leave a note? Never called?”
“He calls. Once a year on my birthday. It’s like a silent agreement between us; he calls and I don’t answer. He leaves his voicemail in peace and I can decide whether or not I want to listen to it.”
I wish I knew what to say.
The irony of it all. I have a dead father, she has a dead mother, and we both have living parents who are gone without actually being gone . Just lost to us.
“I hadn’t remembered how close we were…sometimes, I forget.” Her brows furrow as she speaks, each word out of her mouth a surprise to her. “He hurt me so deeply. I loved and resented him in equal measure but I had nowhere to put those emotions. Nowhere to lay them to rest. All I could do was bury them as deeply as I could and hope that with time, I would forget. I even hoped they might disappear but they didn’t. They planted roots and blossomed into something else.”
Her eyes shut and a single tear slips free. I don’t touch her, don’t reach for her. This is something she needs to feel on her own.
“I lie to myself all the time. I tell myself I had a father who wasn’t there because it hurts less than having a father who loved me and still chose to leave. One who picked me up when I fell and held me until I felt better. I’ve been alone so long…it felt so strange. To watch those videos and go through photo albums and be reminded of a family that doesn’t exist anymore. My parents were flawed; deeply flawed. But I know they loved me. And instead of being grateful for the reminder, I wish I could forget again. What do I do with all of it? What do I do with all the love and all the resentment when I have a mother who’s dead and a father who’s gone? Where do I put it?”
“You can let someone carry it with you.”
“You?” she replies skeptically.
“Si compartimos nuestras vidas, nuestras alegrías, nuestra felicidad, ?por qué no también nuestro dolor? ?Por qué tienes que cargar eso sola si me tienes a mí?”
“I don’t understand?—”
“Yes you do,” I tell her. “In fact, I think you understand a lot more than you let on.”
She drops her head and stares at her palms. “It’s not on purpose. Sometimes it just gets all jumbled up in my head.”
“You were fluent when you were little. What happened?”
Dahlia hesitates before answering. “My father never wanted to move to New York. He was a year out from graduating when my Mom found out she was pregnant with me. Her dream was always to live here and so she gave him an ultimatum—he could either stay on the island or go with her, but she was leaving either way.”
“That doesn’t sound very fair.”
She shakes her head. “Mom grew up in extreme poverty…she wanted better for me. For Papi, the island was home. It was paradise. For her, it represented all the insecurity she struggled with in childhood. I understand why she left.”
“What happened after?”
“He followed her and they got married. From what I remember, it was hard for him. He didn’t speak English so he couldn’t enroll in any colleges here and he had a pregnant wife to take care of. A family friend helped him get a job in construction and as far as I know, that’s what he’s been doing ever since.”
“What was their marriage like?”
“Passionate. Tumultuous. Sometimes they were happy and other times, it was chaos. My father followed wherever there was work. I remember one year he spent an entire summer in Texas working and spent almost an entire paycheck on a flight home for my birthday. He was here less than twenty-four hours before he had to leave again.” She wraps her arms around her legs and rests her chin on her knees. “All the traveling made Mom jealous. He had a bit of a wandering eye but I don’t think he acted on it. They never legally divorced but they were on and off for years. The fighting worsened as I got older.
“I was ten years old when it happened. I always knew when Papi was about to leave for a trip because he’d do it at night. He’d come into my room, kiss me, and then close the door behind me. Mom hated it because she knew I needed the light from the hallway to sleep but the hall closet was across from my bedroom. Papi knew if my door was open, that I’d hear him getting his suitcase from the top shelf.
“The way they fought that night…my God, it was awful. I don’t think I even remembered how awful it was until just now. They said such horrible things to each other. I cried all night under the covers and prayed for it to be over. Finally, the apartment door slammed shut and I knew he was gone. Not gone forever, though. I still expected him to call, to come back eventually. Days turned to weeks turned to months. On my birthday that year, I waited for him to show up but he never did.
“Time continued to pass. I was devastated. Heartbroken. So much so that I think even my mother had reached a point of no return with him. A year later when he returned, she didn’t welcome him back into the house. At least, not to live. He was allowed to see me in the mornings before school and he came over in the evenings for dinner. Nothing was the same. I was so angry with him. I wanted him to feel as alone and isolated as I had the entire year he was gone so I iced him out the only way I knew how; I turned language into a weapon I could use against him. Papi only ever spoke to me in Spanish because he never learned to master English—not really. He could get by on the basics but that was it.
“I spoke English all the time and when he spoke to me, I’d pretend I didn’t understand. At first, he found it annoying. I think he thought I was going through a phase—Papi had always been very insistent on teaching me about our culture and our history. Mom wanted to raise an American daughter but Papi focused on raising a Puerto Rican one. They were very different that way; neither of them agreed on identity and cultural expression. So I thought the best way to hurt him was to reject him and the things he taught me. No more Spanish music, Spanish books, or Spanish news. But then, everything changed.
“Years passed and I wasn’t pretending anymore. Papi’s visits became less frequent. He came less often and for shorter periods of time. All we did was fight in a language neither of us could understand. I was really starting to forget. Whenever he spoke to me, it all just turned into a mess of words and sounds in my head that I couldn’t translate anymore. The distance I put between us made us hate each other. He was no longer the same father I had in childhood and I wasn’t his little girl anymore. We became strangers.
“Mom died a few months before I turned fifteen and our relationship had taken a turn for the worst. Most of my teen years were hell. It simmered down a little bit after the whole thing with Peter and I had my abortion. I thought things were getting better between us until I turned eighteen. Not long after, he packed his bags, left a note on the counter, and I haven’t seen him since.”
She turns to hide her face but I reach out and cup her cheek. Dahlia closes her eyes in an attempt to hide the hurt behind them. When a tear slips past, I brush it away as if it never fell in the first place.
“You have no idea how lucky you are to have the family you have. To never know what it’s like to truly be alone. All I do is wait for the people around me to abandon me again. I wait for Karina to decide Brent is more important than me and the day she never calls back. I wait for my friendship with Lyss to crash and burn again. I wait for you,” she says quietly. “I wait for the inevitable. Nothing good in my life has ever lasted very long and this relationship is no exception. I push it back, I ignore the voices, my instincts. I keep them at bay for as long as I can but it’s always there…ticking like a time bomb ready to go off.”
“Are you so confident things won’t work out between us?”
“I don’t know.”
Dahlia pulls away from me and rests her head against the window, transfixed once more by the sight of falling snow.
“Ask me again in a year from now.”