I used to think that my father lived in a drawer. Literally. Until I was fourteen years old, my mother kept a drawer for my father. Even though he had been gone for as long as I could remember, a drawer full of his old sweaters, shirts and pants sat in my mother’s mahogany dresser. When the sock drawer threatened to overflow, I asked my mother if I could move my father’s things elsewhere.

“No. It’s your father’s drawer.”

On Father’s Day at my elementary school, all the fatherless children would make Father’s Day cards. Every year, it was the same card. On the front, I drew a shirt with a tie. My father didn’t own any ties but every Macy’s commercial leading up to Father’s Day seemed to suggest that he should. When I came home from school, I would show the brightly decorated card to my mother.

“See, Mami, I made a card for Papi in class today. Look, Mami, mira!”

Every year, my mother would pause, a faraway look overtaking her. She wouldn’t look at me.

“Put it in the drawer.” 

______


When I was fourteen, we were evicted from our one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. The apartment was nestled in a little building at the bottom of two large hills. Down the block was a nicer, more expansive building that my grandmother, Mami Aida, claimed was a brothel with a drug dealing ring next door. Somehow, we couldn’t make the rent in the Heights, yet, we were moving on up…to a big blue house, with a chain-link fence, an asphalt backyard, and a short, stubby, forlorn fig tree. Later, my mother would sneak the decrepit-looking fruit into our oatmeal, our cereal, and our peanut-butter sandwiches. Then she banned Fig Newtons outright because she said we were getting figs for free.

“¿Qué haces?!” What are you doing?!

I froze. My mother had silently crept up behind me while I was packing up the drawer. She was always lurking, always she seemed to be waiting to surprise us with a violent outburst or an even deadlier, more menacing show of affection.

In my hand, my father’s gray and white-striped sweater smelled of moth balls and cologne. I had the sneaking suspicion that my mother liked it that way, the cologne I mean, because she could smell my father even when he wasn’t there. Even though, he probably didn’t wear that kind of cologne anymore.

“I’m packing up Papi’s things.”

“No. You don’t have to do that. Bótalo todo.” Throw it away.

My hands, which had started to move again, stopped. I fought the urge to look up at my mother’s face. I fought the urge to ask my mother the question. Before it had been, why do we keep a drawer for Papi? And now, it would be, why don’t we? But we didn’t ask my mother questions. The red handprints she left on our faces were a reminder never to ask my mother anything.

My sisters were eleven and seven years old, but they didn’t remember my father. Even though we sometimes visited him in the Dominican Republic, those visits were so few and far between that they made little, if any, impression. But I remembered. In my father’s absence, I had filled the drawer with far more than Father’s Day cards and Christmas cards every year. The drawer was brimming with all my hopes and dreams. My father would come and save us, I thought, whenever I opened the drawer. He will come and save me. If my mother had known that I cared so much about that drawer, she would have thrown everything out earlier, if only just to spite me.

I didn’t, I couldn’t, throw anything away. Instead, I wore my father’s sweaters to school, underneath his old wool forgotten trench coat. 

_______


The same year my mother had told me to empty the drawer, I decided to stop speaking to my father…forever. We were visiting the Dominican Republic when it all came down.

“Maldición. Coño. Mira, m’hija, you can’t hang up the phone on your father,” he said.

“Oh. Yes. I. Can.” Only my fucking father would, fucking, call me up and curse at me.

And I hung up on him again. Again and again, all night. Until my father finally stopped calling.

I had woken up extra early that morning, put on my prettiest dress, wrestled my sisters awake. I had waited. For hours sitting on the stoop at the friend’s house we were staying with while visiting Santo Domingo. The area of the town was called Bella Vista, beautiful view. But all I could see for miles was emptiness.

It was night when my father finally remembered. That it was Christmas Eve. That he had promised that this time, he wouldn’t let me down. He would be on time. He was going to take us all out. Without our mother. I was going to tell him everything. All the secrets my mother had told me not to tell him, I would tell. I would conspire with my father to whisk us all away from her. She would never find us.

I had smiled, quivering with anticipation.

And then he had forgotten to show up. 

______

It was three months after 9/11 and a month since American Airlines Flight 587 from Santo Domingo had crashed in Queens. No one wanted to get on a plane. Yet, all the Dominicans in Washington Heights seemed to have collected themselves together to board the same plane with me to Aeropuerto Internacional Las Américas. There was Christmas in chilly New York and then there was Christmas in Santo Domingo. In Santo Domingo, the palm trees twinkled with colored lights and there were no snowmen for miles.

I had boarded a much-dreaded American Airlines flight toward the Dominican Republic to visit him. I hadn’t seen him in eight years. I hadn’t spoken to him in eight years and yet, there I was boarding a flight that would leave me alone with him for an entire month.

When I called my father that morning to tell him that I was just about to board my first connection to Miami, he, whose face I did not even remember anymore, was abrupt. I wondered whether or not the man who had always let me down as a child would even remember to pick me up at the airport later that night. My anxiety was overwhelming.

“I’ll be right outside when you come out.”

“Where Dad? Where?”

No longer Papi and behind his back, I called him Father coldly.

“Outside the airport? Dad? Dad?”

“Right outside. You’ll see. I have to go. I’ll see you later, baby. Bye.”

Click.

He had hung up on me. 

______


When I finally reached the Dominican Republic, it was almost midnight. I quickly heaved my luggage together and pushed it all towards the exit. Packing had been a disaster. I didn’t know how to pack for a month’s vacation. I had never had a month’s vacation to go anywhere. This was the first and last break I would have from college. And I was going to have it in “DR.”

I glanced around as I walked throughout the airport to see if there was anyone looking for me, anyone who might look familiar. Finally, I pushed my luggage into a room full of happy faces greeting the passengers getting off the plane. I passed people holding up signs. I passed people who looked like taxi drivers but were not wearing suits like the ones seen in the movies holding up signs with someone’s name on them.

I smiled with hope, searching the crowd, but dismally, found no familiar face.

A half hour passed.

Finally, I spotted a light-skinned woman with “fine” features that seemed familiar. She was pointing at me and gesturing to a man in a yellow t-shirt whose face I could not place at all. My mother used the word “fine” whenever she wanted to refer to someone who looked white. If she was talking about someone who looked black, she would use a guttural word, grueso, thick.

For some time, I stood there trying to get the courage to approach the couple. All the while I scolded myself. Coward. Coward. But what if I went over there, and used my limited Spanish, to determine that they were waiting for someone else. What would I have then?

They were probably just laughing at my latest haircut. No one in DR wore their hair like mine. Just before the trip, I had my shaved head down to a crew-cut.

After all, I was going to war.

______

An hour later, I was still lost in the sea of faces. Exhausted, I pushed my weight against the luggage cart to get it to budge so I could double back and see if there were any faces I had missed. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I hadn’t seen a recent photograph of my father in the last eight years.

The man in the yellow shirt soon began to look at me, with some consistency, at 15-minute intervals, once it had started to look like all the passengers had gotten off the flight. For another hour, I pushed my luggage back and forth, my anxiety pounding in my ears.

I was stranded. I didn’t have any cash. All I had was a credit card that was over its limit. I hadn’t even been able to afford the flight to visit. My friend had gifted me the tickets, $800 tickets. You have to see your father, she had said, pressing the money, the tickets, into my hands. Now that the couple had stopped looking at me, I guided myself toward the payphones to call my father’s cell phone hoping I had the right number. Quickly, I found out that the calling card bought in New York, where I was assured it would work in the Dominican Republic, would not work in the Dominican Republic.

The fear inside me mounted as I pushed my luggage back toward the waiting area. Suddenly, I wished I’d paid attention when my mother had tried to teach me Spanish as a child. My hair and the words that would stumble out in broken Spanish would peg me as a foreigner. And that, my mother had always said ominously, would make me a target, easy prey for thieves in the Dominican Republic.

The man and the woman were still in the waiting area when I walked back, but neither approached me. I opened a book hoping that my father would see me in the crowd, remember how much I loved to read, and approach me. I had spent my childhood and most of the beginning of my adult life buried in books. In books, you could go anywhere and never get hurt.

Pages into pretending to read Anne Rice’s newest novel, my hands were shaking when the man in the yellow shirt—damn, was it bright—and the woman with the familiar face walked over. He was my father, after all, after almost three hours, and she was his older sister, Olga, a sister I had not seen since I had stopped waddling around in diapers.

“I knew it was you. Right away. That’s my baby. ¿Qué te hiciste con tu pelo?” No nice haircut, huh?

He shook with laughter. In the span of eight years, my father’s thick mustache had disappeared and been replaced by an expanding waistline. He didn’t look like a Santa Claus knockoff but more like an after photograph of John Travolta. Thin then. Chubby now.

The only photograph of my father that I still had was of him in his twenties. The three of us, my mother in a garish red dress, my father, in a white shirt opened down to his chest to show off a curly patch of hair and a gold chain, and me, in a little red dress that my mother had sewn together. All of us together sat on my mother’s bed.

My father was as cocky as ever. After he announced again that he had known my face instantly in the crowd, he proclaimed that I had always been a bookworm.

“Always you were reading something,” he said in English only ever so slightly tinged by an accent.

Too tired to argue, I fell into his open arms. It was less warm that I had hoped and more uncomfortable than I had dreamed it. During the car ride, I stared at him knowing that had I passed his face in a crowd in New York City or in the Dominican Republic, I would have never known it was my father’s face. With that thought, I closed my eyes. 

______

My father drove us to a pink building with red awnings. The buildings were a vivid Technicolor dream, blue stucco apartments sat next to sunlight yellow houses. The shopping malls were, of course, orange. In the years since he had left my mother, my father had never taken me to his home. What with my mother’s appetite for stalking, he had never wanted her to know where he lived. Stepping out of the car, my legs almost buckled. Now, finally, I would see the home that I had dreamed he would take me to all of my life.

At the door, my father helped my aunt with my luggage. Together, they lugged the big, black monstrosity, which now had a rip down the side, into a small bedroom. Something about the décor, the frilly comforters and the stuffed animals told me that this was not my father’s home.

I turned to him questioningly.

Almost sheepishly, my father responded: “You’ll be staying here the night with your Tía Olga and her husband and daughters. Call me tomorrow and I’ll pick you up.”

Though, I hadn’t covered my ears, I hadn’t heard him either. All I knew was that he was abandoning me, again! I had come to all this way to be left with strangers.

Two days later, he called. His creamy, smooth voice was now sharp with annoyance and fury. “Why have you not called me?! It’s been two days.”

“I don’t know, why haven’t you called me, Dad.”

“I’m coming to visit you tonight.”

“Fine. Whatever.”

My aunt looked startled when I thrust the phone back at her.

Later, Tía Olga would tell me that it had been her idea to have me stay at her house for the night. She had been anxious about leaving me alone in my father’s big house. He didn’t have a phone, internet or, well, anything. I wrinkled my nose in disgust and disbelief. If my father’s black SUV was any indication, his house could not want for limitless amenities.

And finally, the suspense was over. He was taking me home.

The house was short but sprawling. It was a nondescript color and it had a screen door in front of the door that I had to catch so it wouldn’t swing back at me.

The floors were littered with dust and debris, remnants of broken toys and broken baubles. I inspected the desolation that extended to the bedrooms and was surprised that I could distinguish between the boy’s and girl’s rooms. My father’s children from his second marriage.

In the boy’s room, an abandoned Nintendo videogame console lay abandoned next to a television that was turned backwards so that the screen faced the wall. In the girl’s room, there were doll parts and bits of clothing that could have been the dolls or hers depending on the girl’s age.

Again, I found myself looking to my father questioningly.

“She took a lot of stuff when she took them. I haven’t cleaned anything since then. I’m going to have to sell the house. Get a little place for myself.”

His voice was full of something like exhaustion and anguish.

It looked as if he hadn’t cleaned anything since the day she had left. Odors emanated from the dirty, mostly, empty refrigerator, the cupboards were stark and the floor had become home to bruised fruits and vegetables.

“Did you see Darling’s room?” he asked brightening.

I nodded. I had seen the little boy’s room, but I could not understand why my father would brighten up at the thought of such emptiness. The boy’s room, like the girl’s, had been ravaged, looted and only shattered bits and pieces had been left behind.

At last count, two families had been broken by the weight of my father’s wandering eye. 

______

Christmas Eve, I look at my father, dressed in his fanciest clothes, in disbelief. It always came back to Christmas Eve. The whole family was going to visit even more family for a big party. Here, amongst an unlimited supply of food, family, friends, fun, I would be no orphan. I could already picture the tanned, plump tigres on the street, in their opened collared shirts, chest hair on display, swigging back cervezas while whistling at passing women. My father had never been much of a drinker, at least. My mother always said she had watered down his beers.

His face was still very strange. After only a week, I had begun to find myself in it. I had always wondered how this funny nose had landed on my face. No one in my mother’s family had it, for they all had features that my mother considered grueso. My mother’s sister always complimented me on my little nose. She complimented it with so fervor that sometimes I wondered if she was trying to make me feel better for having such a little speck of nose on my face. My glasses always fell off the nonexistent bridge and I was forever pushing them back up.

It was this face. This face that I had always yearned for while growing up. I had built a shrine to it in my heart. And eight years later, I couldn’t even pick it out of a lineup. His face should have come to my rescue, but it never did.

I didn’t know what to expect from this trip at all. I had boarded the plane, gone along for the ride, and prayed that somehow all my abandonment issues, all of my endless issues with men, would be resolved the minute I stepped off the plane and found him, the virtual stranger who had left before memory could ensnare him.

The feelings were still. Unresolved. Then turbulent. I wanted to lash out at this man, to scream at him for all the pain I had endured at losing him. But, somehow, I couldn’t. The same way I had never felt safe to beg my mother to stop beating me, I couldn’t ask my father why he had stopped loving me. 

______

Late that night, I found myself, finally, alone with my father. We sat out back looking up at the stars together in the safety of our silence. I felt…almost happy. I should have felt happy, no? And then I looked at him again, trying to memorize his face, and my tears shattered the silence between us.

“Why did you leave? Why did you leave me?”

My father searched my eyes hesitantly.

I pleaded with him shamelessly.

“Why didn’t you love me enough to stay?”

For several minutes, my father seemed stunned by the force of my words, though not altogether surprised by the actual cross-examination. I wondered for a moment, if I, the eldest of his ten or eleven children (he’s never sure of the number), was the first to utter this stream of questions. This was an abandoned child’s interrogation. And then, I prayed with all my heart that each and every one of my abandoned brothers (oh, I hadn’t known until then that I had brothers!) and abandoned sisters (so many sisters) would have the chance they needed to get the answers they deserved. 

______

He had left when I was four years old, he begins to tell me quietly. Leaving me only vague memories of a father and nightmares of an incident.

In the nightmares, I am always holding a newborn baby in my arms. I hear yelling outside. She is struggling in my arms, wailing, and I am begging her to be quiet. Shh, shh, I am so terrified of my mother, even then. For some reason, the two of us are both terrified, my sister and I, we are strewn about the floor of my mother’s bedroom like forgotten, misbegotten rag dolls.

And then the room is flooded with light. My mother opens the door and takes her from me. I struggle to my feet.

And then, suddenly, we are in the hallway of the sixth floor of our building. There are faces staring at us from all directions. I look down at the doorstep and all I see is blood. Tears stream down my face. So much blood. And then, I feel myself being pulled away.

Always, then, there, I wake up. 

______

He says that they were having an argument. It was one of those earth-shattering screaming matches that made even the floorboards tremble. He says that after that, he, her very first love, never came back—at least not to live with us—ever again.

He didn’t remember why she had done it, why she had broken a ceramic platter on his head but I knew and didn’t say.

My father’s countless infidelities would slowly tear at the fabric of my mother’s mental instability throughout my childhood with, and without him, as I grew under her iron fist. At three years old, my voluminous, pregnant mother had grabbed me by the arms asking me to snitch on my father. Where did we go? Where had we been? What had my father said? What had he done?

I didn’t know what she had wanted then but eventually, something made sense to her.

A woman’s name kept coming up.

My mother told me later that I had come home with my father in a rage. I was angry, stomping around the apartment, because he had tried to let some woman take my seat, the front passenger seat of the taxi he drove at night around Washington Heights. 

_______

He tried for sympathy.

“I went to my sister, to my mother’s house, bleeding. Blood was spilling from my head onto everything, everywhere. The doctor said if it had been a glass platter I would be dead. She hit so close…. I could have died.”

Sympathy. A Christmas wish I refused to grant.

“I could have died, too, Dad. I could have died, too.”

He had left me, and my newborn sister, with this unbalanced woman because “a child belonged with its mother,” he said again hesitantly.

“How could you…how could you have left me with such a monster?”

For a second, my father’s cool veneer, the cavalier attitude he seemed to carry into every situation, wilted. I saw my father hurt in the way I had wanted to make him hurt after retelling him all the jumbled up stories from my twisted childhood. I almost smiled as the words spilled from my mouth like venom frothing over my lips.

She beat us. She beat us every day. With telephone cords. With telephones. With fists. With brooms. With belts. With shoes. With anything within reach. She beat us more during the school vacations that all my friends seemed to love and I had learned to dread. She said the walls were spirits, spirits that spoke to her. She said she always knew when we were lying because the saints told her. So she beat us.

“Why didn’t you save me?”

Slowly, he whispered: “I didn’t know.”

In all the daydreams where I had told my father that my mother was a monster, he had known. He had known all along and he had been waiting for the right moment. He had always been waiting to take us from her. Forever.

It had never occurred to me that he might think we were happy with her. That in the forced telephone calls she would make to the Dominican Republic, where she told us to sound happy or else she would beat us, where she told us to ask for money or else she would beat us…he didn’t know. He never knew.

“But you knew that I needed a father. I needed you. I needed you. Why didn’t you know that I needed you?”

“You didn’t need a father.”

“I did. I needed you, Papi. I needed you. How could you think that I didn’t?”

“I never had a father, and I turned out okay.”

______

Ah. My grandfather. Abuelo. Except that he wasn’t the kind of grandfather that you called “Grandpa,” even in Spanish. Everyone knew him as Blanco, though he was surely no white knight. I had met my grandfather only once when I was eight years old. My mother had told us crazy stories about him like she had told us crazy stories about everything. But some of the tall tales about him were true.

My grandfather was nothing short of charismatic. A charisma that oozed from every twinkle of his eye, every smile and secret sidelong wink. In my one and only meeting with him, he had seemed to smolder and radiate. His smile was the widest I had ever seen and when he bequeathed to me a little toy cow, I had shuddered, I was seduced.

Oh, what pleasure. What ecstasy.

My grandfather had, in fact, given so much ecstasy to so many women over the years that it wasn’t until his funeral that all of his children, handfuls of children, really knew how far reaching my grandfather’s love had been. They met there at his funeral.

All of my questions had been answered to some extent. My father never had a father and he, the consummate womanizer, had turned out okay. No, they were not the answers I had anticipated the nights I ran from my mother and hid under the dining room table, looking up at the wooden slats, praying and begging to understand it all.

In a crescendo of pain, I had unearthed some of the questions buried so deep inside me that I hadn’t known they were still there. But I asked. And asked. This could be the only chance he would ever give me to ask. I found myself at a loss when my father was unable to remember the answers. Almost seventeen years clouded his memory of one of the most devastating experiences of my life—losing him.

For the very first time, the first of many, I looked at my father with new eyes. Eyes marred by pity. My father, the hero, was nothing more than a very lost, fatherless young boy. And so when my father—having inherited from his father nothing more than that throbbing magnetism—finally reached adulthood, a little fatherless boy remained, and still lingered, despite the wrinkles above his brow and the quicksilver hair.

I closed my eyes and then opened them. Yes, that was my father, ever the jester. And there he sat with me and wept. And with that one surge of overwhelming emotion, the little girl’s cries stilled inside me and began to fade.

As I sat with him, I could not touch him, knowing that my touch would never comfort him in his loss. As his touch, would never be able to comfort me in mine.

______

There was so much my father had forgotten about our past. Questions that I had waited years to ask, he only answered with a shrug. He had wanted to forget, and indeed he had, or so he said.

It has been hard to reconcile the man who left me with the man whose hands shook as he gave me my Christmas present late that night.

Una cadena de oro, he said while he worked the clasp closed. A treasure. A symbol? A gold necklace with a lush, liquid brown pendant made of amber, the stone of the Dominican Republic. I had begun to cry again as soon as I had felt his hands around my neck.

Looking back, I had landed in the Dominican Republic twenty-one years old, scared and alone. But after a month, I left my father and all my many aunts and uncles and cousins to go back to real life in New York with less baggage to push my weight against.

And now, I would recognize every single one of them in a crowd. Every single one.

And yet, some things can never change. They are so broken that they cannot suffer to be repaired. And so, when I lost the necklace, my father never offered to replace it.