Chapter 14
Chapter 14
From everything I can remember about my father, he was a good man. He loved us, Lolly and me. No matter what came later, I always knew that. I always knew that he loved us more than anything else in the world.
When we were little, three or four, he used to bounce us on his knee and sing, “Pony boy, pony boy, won’t you be my pony boy. Don’t say no, here we go, ride away with me. Giddy up! Giddy up! Pony my boy, hey.” Then he’d throw us in the air to fits of giggles.
When we were a little older, he would make us elaborate pancakes for breakfast. Mickey Mouse, puppy dogs, gingerbread men, and big flowers decorated with icing.
As I got older and more independent, he let me cross the street to my friend’s house by myself but would stand at the corner, watching me until I was safely at the door.
No one made us feel more secure than Dad, not even Mom. Part of it, I’m sure, was that he was a cop. A big, tall, handsome hero, who left home every day to fight the bad guys. He was the one we ran to after a bad dream. He’s the one who would check for monsters under our beds, making a thorough sweep with his flashlight, shouting, “All clear” to prove it was safe.
He was the one no other man could live up to, not even Big Al Rosario.
Big Al was Dad’s partner and the second most important man in our lives. Big Al could brighten a room just with his smile. It was electric, Mom used to say.
We loved him almost as much as we loved Dad.
I can still remember the days when Dad and Al would come home for lunch. Al tucking Lolly and me under each of his arms and carrying us across the living room, sideways, then dropping us on the sofa, making us laugh so hard, we’d pee our pants. Mom yelling at Al to knock it off, but she was laughing, too.
Al and his wife, Gloria, didn’t have kids of their own, so Lolly and I became his surrogate ones. On our birthdays and Christmas, he’d buy out the toy store with gifts. My first Easy-Bake Oven, my third or fourth American Girl doll, and more electronics than I knew what to do with. The man would’ve bought me a pony if we’d had the room for it.
But for Mom, he gave her the biggest gift of all.
“I know you’re safe out there,” I once heard her telling Dad as she stood at the door, kissing him goodbye before he started his shift. “I know Big Al will never let anything happen to you. He loves you like a brother, Chris.”
And even now, I know he did.
Once, they foiled a liquor store robbery. It was on Ventura Boulevard near Woodland Hills in broad daylight. A man, strung out on meth, went into the store and at gunpoint ordered the cashier to give him all his money. Luckily, the liquor store owner had recently installed a panic button under the counter and had trained all his employees how to use it. This particular cashier was the first to put the new panic button to the test.
When the call went out for a 211, Dad and Big Al responded. Dad liked to tell how he and Al were just two blocks away, eating hoagies outside the best sandwich shop in the valley. They’d put their soft drinks on the top of their patrol car and left so fast that when they got to the liquor store, the cups were still there; not a drop of soda had spilled. I doubt it really went down that way, but Dad never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Inside, the robber had forced two customers behind the counter while he held the gun to the cashier’s head as the poor man tried to open the safe. Dad and Al were supposed to wait for backup.
According to Dad and Al’s version of the story, they rushed in anyway, entering from an alleyway at the rear of the store and using a small storage room for cover. It was a tricky operation. With hostages, anything can happen, and Dad and Al weren’t exactly a SWAT team. And neither of them had hostage negotiation training.
As Dad liked to tell it, they’d just gone in, “guns blazing with their heads so far up their asses, they didn’t stop to think about the ramifications.”
What happened after that isn’t completely clear, as Dad and Al changed the story so many times—with each new telling, they got more and more daring, more and more clever—that we’ll never know for sure how it really happened. But by the time the calvary showed up, Dad and Al had successfully handcuffed the robber without firing a shot, according to the official record. No one was hurt, everyone lived happily ever after, and Dad and Al got commendations.
That night, Mom and Gloria threw a big barbecue at our house, and all the families on the block came to give Dad and Al a hero’s welcome. I remember Lolly and I being so proud that we took turns sitting on Dad’s and Al’s laps for the entire party.
It was after that that Al started coming around even when Dad wasn’t home. I remember, even at eleven and twelve, wondering if things weren’t good with him and Aunt Gloria.
Gloria was the opposite of Mom, who stayed at home, always baking cookies and volunteering at Lolly’s and my school. Even back then, it was a novelty to have a stay-at-home mom. Most moms worked. Los Angeles is an expensive place to live, and one salary isn’t usually enough to cut it.
Sometimes, to add a little to the coffers, Mom would freelance for a neighbor who had her own organization business. Together, they would go to people’s homes and whip messy garages into shape or reorganize closets and storage sheds. Once, they even did a hoarder’s house, Mom regaling us with stories about how the woman had taken over an entire bedroom with shipping pallets of every shape and size. She told Mom that she couldn’t stand the thought of throwing away perfectly good wood.
But the organization jobs were few and far between. And Mom liked it that way, because she wanted to be home for Lolly, Dad, and me.
Aunt Gloria, on the other hand, owned her own hair salon. Lolly and I loved sitting in the swivel hair chairs and spinning around until we were dizzy. The shop had six stations and a waiting area with cheetah-print couches and every fashion magazine under the sun. Before she got famous, Charlize Theron used to go there.
Where Mom was traditional—always in jeans and a crisp white blouse—Aunt Gloria liked to push the limits. Red leather pants, cropped tops, high-heeled shoes, and big hoop earrings. Her hair color changed with the seasons. Platinum-blond in summer, auburn red in fall, inky black in winter, and chestnut brown in spring.
I once heard Big Al tell Mom that he wished Aunt Gloria wouldn’t dress that way. That it embarrassed him. I loved it, though. She was brash and bold and, in my eyes, glamorous.
Every Easter, she would do Lolly’s and my hair. First, she’d shampoo us in the sink bowls in the back of the salon, then take an inch or two off our long locks and add in a few layers. She spent at least forty-five minutes blowing each of us out with a large round brush that made our hair big and fluffy. No one did it like Aunt Gloria.
But even to a little girl, it was clear that Al and Gloria were on the rocks, their marriage on life support. The thing was, Big Al loved her. Even to a little girl, that was clear, too. He used to follow her with his eyes wherever she went and brag about her accomplishments to my parents.
That’s why it was doubly sad when we’d find him sleeping on our couch on a random morning or find him scrounging through our refrigerator when Lolly and I got home from school. Dad had been promoted to sergeant and was home less and less, whereas Big Al was there more and more.
As I remember everything, or at least everything a twelve-year-old has the capacity to understand or process, I think about Knox. I think about Knox and Brody and Sienna. I think about Austin and me. Mary. I think about Sadie. I think about the countless couples I’ve counseled. About all the love triangles I’ve seen in my practice, none of them ending as tragically as the way it did with my parents.
Mom had taken Lolly and me to visit Uncle Sylvester. He and the show’s developers had just finished a teen television series, and we were getting to meet the cast. Afterward, Uncle Sylvester was taking us out for a fancy dinner to celebrate, and we were staying the night with him in his Century City apartment. Dad couldn’t come because he had to work.
It was an exciting day, our first time on a Hollywood set—at least, Lolly’s and mine. Mom had been to others with Uncle Sylvester. Although the actors weren’t on our radar at the time, the idea of meeting famous people, movie stars, put us over the moon. I’d changed my outfit for the big occasion at least three times. Even the dinner was magical. Uncle Sylvester let us order anything we wanted, and Mom even let us have small sips of her champagne.
We were outside the restaurant, waiting for the valet to bring around Uncle Sylvester’s car, when Mom got the phone call. Big Al had been injured on duty, and no one could find Aunt Gloria. Could Mom come to the hospital?
We raced across the Westside, taking Laurel Canyon to the valley, where Mom dropped us home in Porter Ranch, asking a neighbor to watch us while she went to Sherman Oaks Hospital. She couldn’t find Dad, but that wasn’t unusual. He worked the night shift, often supervising arrest scenes where he was unreachable to anyone outside of the department.
Only through my own memories and police reports have I been able to piece together the sequence of events that led to what happened in our family home the next day. What led to the shootings of both my parents.
Big Al had ripped his calf open and hit his head on a cement bollard while trying to jump a chain-link fence during a foot chase in Canoga Park. Apparently, there’d been a string of break-ins there, and Al wanted to relive his glory days from when he and Dad had busted the liquor store robber. The hospital was keeping him overnight for observation.
He was expected to make a full recovery. And he eventually did, at least for the torn calf and concussion.
After a long visit with Al, my mother went to his house. Her mission was twofold. Find Gloria and pick up clothes for Al, so he’d have something to wear home from the hospital. No one was there when she got to Al and Gloria’s, but she had a key. We took care of the Rosarios’ cat, Tweety, when they went on vacations. They in turn watered our plants and picked up our mail when we went out of town.
We were two families that shared everything, and that was our undoing.
My mother made her way up the staircase to Al’s bedroom. And when she opened the door, she found my father in bed with Gloria.
Lolly and I were asleep when Mom got home, but in the middle of the night, we were awakened by yelling. I remember Lolly getting out of her bed and climbing in with me.
Mom was shouting at Dad that she was going to tell Al everything and that she wanted a divorce. I heard the front door slam. And when I ran to the window, Dad was driving away.
But when Lolly and I woke up Sunday morning, he was there, in the kitchen, ready to make his famous pancakes. Mom hadn’t gotten up yet, so we had breakfast without her. Dad said he’d clean up and told Lolly and me to go outside and play.
Then Dad shot Mom in their bed. Even from the sidewalk, we could hear the gunfire. Three loud pops . . . then a fourth one. When the police arrived, they found Dad lying next to Mom, with his service weapon still in his mouth.
Later, Gloria told investigators that she and Dad had been involved for more than a year. The night I saw him drive away, he’d gone to Gloria’s to end it. To end it for good.
Neither Al nor Gloria came to the funeral. I remember waiting for him. I remember hoping he would take Lolly and me, that we could live with him in our house instead of going to Uncle Sylvester’s. Not that we didn’t love our uncle; we just loved Al more.
But we never saw Big Al Rosario again.
Last I heard, he and Gloria were divorced, and Al retired from LAPD and was living near Reno, Nevada in a gated community.
I think back on that day with so many what if s. And so many questions. Ultimately, I could never understand why he’d done it. Why Dad took Mom’s life.
Knowing my father the way I did, I can see his shame, his abject misery. I can see how he believed there was no coming back from his infidelity with Gloria. Maybe from my mother. Maybe with time, she would forgive him for the affair.
But Al never would. And he couldn’t live with that.
I like to think that he couldn’t live without my mother, either, and he knew that she couldn’t live without him. So in those final minutes, with his finger on the trigger, he committed the ultimate act of love. The ultimate act of sacrifice.
But I keep coming back to the same brutal truth. It may have been love, it may have been sacrifice, but ultimately, it was an extreme act of selfishness. And no matter how much I try to romanticize it or even exonerate my father for what he did, every fiber of me knows it was warped and unforgivable.