Clap When You Land(31)
“Who is this, Ma? A cousin
I don’t know about? Who is this?”
But I can see my guesses are wrong.
“I know he was your hero, Yahaira.
& I tried my best to make sure he would remain so.
But that girl that girl is the daughter from your father’s other family.”
My father not only had another wife.
He also had another child.
I have to close my laptop because all my shaking hands want to do is sweep the entire thing off my desk.
I want to see the image of my father & this girl shattered against the floor.
How could an entire person exist who shares half my DNA
& no one thought to tell me?
In all the time I held
what I thought was a massive secret I never imagined there could be a child from my father’s secret marriage.
Or perhaps, my father’s not-so-secret marriage since it seems everyone else still knew more than me even Mami
who I was trying to protect.
It’s taken me almost twelve months to deal with the truth of who my father was but even that was a lie. My stomach churns, & I feel myself about to be sick.
I bend my face forward, & Mami puts a hand on my back. But I pull away from her.
All these lies that we’ve all swallowed, they’re probably rotting in our stomachs.
“I knew about his wife,” I tell Mami.
“I can’t believe no one told me.”
She shakes her head. “But how?
We didn’t want to burden you.”
I wave my hand at the computer.
“This I didn’t know about.
This—person—I couldn’t imagine.”
I am taking big, gasping breaths.
Mami does not try to rub my back again, but she gently whispers to me: “Respira, Yahaira, respira.
Así, nice, big breaths.”
I feel like a spool of thread that’s been dropped to the ground.
I’m rolling undone
from the truth of this thing.
A sister. A sister. A sister.
Ma tries to explain things to me, but I feel like I’ve been dropped into a part of the story
where all of the characters are unfamiliar.
“She was my friend. His other wife.
I actually met him through her.”
He married the other woman
after her, so it wasn’t technically legal.
But the other woman didn’t know that until much, much later.
Mami married my father
against her own father’s wishes.
My maternal grandfather was high up in the military & wanted Mami to marry someone of rank.
My mother says she almost died
when she learned of Papi’s betrayal.
All the people she dismissed when marrying Papi, only to have him betray her a few months after they wed.
She cannot get through the story
without her voice breaking
my entire heart. & then she tells me what I did not expect.
“She’s dead, his wife. Did you know?
Almost ten years ago. Your father never got over it.
Neither did I. I used to wish she’d go away, but it was unthinkable, the way it happened.”
I want to hate this dead woman. For the way even talking about her twists up my mother’s face.
This dead woman, who made my father visit, & have a child, & board a plane that fell into the ocean.
I am slow to put the pieces together.
I want to hate a dead woman, & her daughter who most likely hates me for making my father leave her in the first place.
Without thinking, I ask Mami why.
Mami sifts through her thoughts
as if trying to figure out what I’m really asking.
& I mean all of it. Why would Papi do this to her? To us?
“He told me once, with me,
he felt like he had to perform,
become a character in a play,
he had to prove he was good enough.
That he had earned the right
to marry the heralded general’s only child.
But with her, with the woman who was my friend, who was his childhood friend, he could take off the mask.
I was an aspiration, a flame he wanted to kiss.
But for her, he would have lit the entire island.
I was a smart decision. She made a dreamer of him.
& well, for the child that came, he sacrificed it all.
He loved you both. Understand that.
A part of me even thinks he might have loved me & his other wife too.
Yano was a complicated man.
After she died, I refused to have the child here.
It was all too much. I don’t know! I can’t explain.
Your father refused not to be in her life; he would not abandon her completely.
I know now,
I should not ever have asked it of him.
So he created a theater of his life & got lost in all the different roles he had to play.”
Mami seems so tired after telling me what she knows & I feel so tired just hearing it. I do not
want to speak to Mami
anymore. She must
realize I need a break
from her, from this, because she kisses me good night & only sighs when I do not say the words back.