“I’m going to tell you something I don’t tell a lot of people. But it’s not about me. It’s about you. Okay?”
I nod. I don’t want her to let go.
“My brother died about a year after that photo. I thought it was my fault.”
I want to hold her face. I’ve never wanted to hold someone’s face before. I want to tell her she’s only capable of good things in the world and of course it wasn’t her fault no matter what happened. I want to put her glasses gently on her desk and climb into her lap and wrap my arms around her shoulders. I want to say the perfect, pain-banishing phrase, the thing that will heal her once and for all.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Why? It couldn’t—”
She lets go of my hand and waves my words away. My heart drops.
“My brother and I got into a huge argument right before he moved up to Santa Cruz. Broken dishes, broken windows kind of argument. So my parents—they’d been divorced since we were toddlers—they decided it was better that he live with my dad. The way I saw it for a long time, if there was no me, there would be no tree, no brother running into it in Santa Cruz.”
I don’t say anything. I look at the ground, not sure what feelings will erupt if I look up at her.
“But I had to learn after a long time,” Ms. Holden says, “sometimes . . . sometimes there are brothers.”
“And sometimes there are trees,” I say.
She nods. She’s quiet, deciding what to say next.
“Yeah. I want you to know that now. Because I didn’t know it then. There’s no grand scheme of fault designed to punish us. You don’t have to take that on. Sometimes there are roofs. Sometimes there are trees.”
My throat closes up. I talk to clear it. “Your tree tattoo,” I say.
Ms. Holden smiles. She pulls up her sleeve. It’s more detailed than I’d first glimpsed—a snaking, wounded trunk, the leaves still blooming along the skin of her upper forearm.
The details cover raised scars. I can see that close up now.
She tugs her sleeve back down toward her wrist.
“Do you hear me?” Ms. Holden says, solemn. “No matter how bad this might feel. This is not your fault.”
I nod. Though I’m not sure if I do hear her yet.
Then my body moves ahead of me.
I lean my head against her right shoulder and hear myself sob before I feel it coming. She wraps her arms around me and hums. It reminds me of my dad singing hymns while he and my mom worked in our little herb garden, pulling away dead leaves. But I don’t know what Ms. Holden is humming. I listen anyway. I close my eyes.
I enter the Emergency and Trauma Care lobby, then go down to the lobby of the ICU. My mom’s hair is still disheveled. But she’s wearing a sparkly gold sweater now—Tita Baby must have brought her a change of clothes from her own closet.
They look tense. Tita Baby’s face is cautious but pleading and insisting. My mom’s is set and hard.
“Not now,” my mom says in Tagalog. “Don’t trouble me with this now.”
“Xi-xi, we have to tell him,” Tita Baby says in Tagalog. “Maybe he’ll help, you need help—Dan and I can only help so much—and what about Junior?”
“You know he won’t lift a finger for me,” she says. “He’d rather die.”
“Maybe I can ask. Maybe he’ll help as a favor for me.”
“Stop, ading,” my mom says.
“Don’t let your pride—”
“She understands,” my mom reminds Tita Baby. My aunt is always forgetting, since she didn’t teach Bea Tagalog—she didn’t want Uncle Dan to feel left out of any family conversations, so her kids went English-only like him.
But Tita Baby’s pleading mission isn’t done, even with me overhearing.
“Kausapin mo na siya,” she says to my mom in a high whisper.
“Talk to who?” I ask. “Who should Ma talk to?”
“And what, ading?” my mom yells at her sister in English, ignoring my question. It’s a rare break in Ma’s stern cool. I jump. “You think if I ask, if I prostrate myself, he’ll suddenly change? He’ll show generosity? He’ll support his eldest daughter? That man will find a way to hurt me with it again, the whole family this time. Oh, ano? Gusto mo ba ng patunay? Kitang-kita naman sa buhay namin, eh! You have your relationship with our father, I have mine. Corazon, let’s go to Papa,” my mom commands, and we leave Tita Baby behind.
My mom walks straight into my dad’s dark hospital room, ahead of any of my questions. But I’m not that determined. I’m not that good. I pause in the doorway, frozen again, seeing him under all the tubes and braces.
I can only see half his face, his nose and bruised, closed eyes.
I forget about all the machinery and muscle that makes us move around every moment of the day, until I see how many machines my dad needs to keep all that movement going for his life. Maybe, instead of being mad, I should express more gratitude to God, for keeping my dad alive. Maybe if I’m grateful enough, He’ll let us keep Papa.
I remember Ms. Holden telling me it’s not my fault. But I still feel like I can do more.
My mom doesn’t pray, and she doesn’t ask me to, either, which surprises me. She talks to my dad like he’s awake. I feel too weird to talk to him—he still seems like an unrecognizable version of my dad, not my true dad, and I don’t know how to talk to this version. But my mom seems to know how.
“Baby wants Tatay to help us,” she says in Tagalog. “I keep telling her . . . I know, I shouldn’t complain about her too much, you always say she’s my family.”
My mysterious grandfather. The guy she never discusses with me, except to say they don’t talk. She rushes on, talking to my dad.
“Ay, Rom, I have to complain again. That client of yours, Manolo. I won’t take the calls of that man. He keeps leaving messages about the Potrera house. I told you he was a bad one. But you should tell me, no, if there are other clients I should call? I will take Cory with me to Mass today. I made sure she went back to school, I know you want for her to stay with her studies. Cory, talk to your dad.”
I try to visualize yesterday’s version of my dad—God, it was only yesterday.
I imagine how it might be if our roles were reversed, if it were me under all those tubes. I’ve never seen him cry. Not even when he got news from Manila that his mom had died. He just went into the garden by himself, not saying anything, and my mom joined him there until late into the night. They went to Mass every weeknight for two weeks, and then my dad never mentioned her again.
Maybe if it were me in there, under all the tubes, he’d try to make me laugh.
“Want to hear a joke?” I ask him.
I worry my mom will think this is the wrong thing to try, but she looks toward his swollen eyes. “Oh, mahal, Cory has a joke for you.”
“Yeah. What’s black and white and red all over?”
“A newspaper,” my mom guesses.
“Ah, no,” I say. “It’s a nun. A nun that fell down the stairs.”
My mom stares at me. This is the kind of joke my dad and I would have laughed at while my mom scolded us. The silence where his laughter should be is the worst.