On June 12, 1954, somewhere in McAllen, Texas, my father is born, with a full head of red hair that he will later lose due to a DHT sensitivity. His mother’s name is Olivia Quintana, and his father, who will take off for Veracruz, is named Juan Saucedo. They have a dog, an Afghan hound, who will witness most of my father’s childhood, including his independence at the ripe age of fourteen—but will miss by a few years the birth of his first daughter, Selina, when he is twenty-one.
But that is not what I am interested in.
My story begins when my parents meet. My mother and father meet when she is young, only nineteen. He is thirty-three. My mother is an adventurous sort; liberal, feminist, and she wants to see the Rio Grande. She is backpacking with a friend through the American southwest. They spend a few nights in Houston, and make a planned detour to McAllen, when the friend suddenly leaves for China. A family emergency—a grandmother has died in Nanchang. My mother accompanies her friend to the airport and offers words of support.
Within the hour, my mother has traveled back to downtown McAllen, finding herself sitting alone in front of a hotel on one Vasconcelos Street. The hotel offers cable TV and all the amenities, but my mother is immersed in her lonely planet guide, interested only in the hostels.
Enter my father. He is still handsome in his thirties. He is fair-skinned, Hispanic, with a European nose. He passes her twice, three times, on his bicycle, and finally gets up the courage to stop and talk to her.
“Are you here on vacation?” He says, talking to her yellow backpack.
“Yes,” she says.
He gets off his bicycle and sits down next to her. Who is she traveling with? Where is she from? The questions pour like water. She explains that she is Canadian, traveling through Texas on her summer break from university, and that her friend left less than a few hours ago. She points out the hostel listed in her guide and asks him if he knows where it is.
My father, with his local’s knowledge, explains that the hostel has been run as a halfway house for more than a few years, and it isn’t necessarily the kind of place where she wants to stay.
They talk some more, and he offers to walk her to another hostel that he knows of–one that’s decent and where backpackers stay. They serve breakfast in the mornings—a simple one of eggs and cornflakes—and he knows the manager who is Indian, like my mother.
“Sorry,” my father says, blushing. “I don’t mean to assume—”
“It’s quite alright,” says my mother in her most posh voice. “I am Indian.”
I am all feathers, lightweight as a stone, fleeting, momentous at the same time. I am a nighthawk as I walk into the same hostel where, twenty-one years ago, my mother decided to stay at the Avenues Hostel and change her life.
A friend had told her that sometimes at hostels, the management will let you work there and live rent-free. My mother took advantage of this situation, pushed it and pulled it into shape. She asked the manager if she could work there forty hours a week in exchange for free rent, and he said,
“I think that will work out.”
I’m not sure how much their shared ethnicity played into the decision. Maybe the manager simply saw something in my mother’s face, the flushed excitement of youth and being on one’s own for the first time, the falling leaves of adolescence leaving behind trees of adulthood.
In any case, it worked, and my mother became the receptionist at the Avenues Hostel. She intended to stay in McAllen for fifteen days. She stayed for five months and three days.
I take pictures of everything I see. The maps tacked to the walls offering tours to this and that location. The visitor’s guides piled up at the front desk. The words “danke schoen” written in dry erase on the whiteboard outside the office, left by some grateful German. This was her life, at least for a short while.
I’m seeing a man named Johannes.
Johannes is a tattooist, and I meet him when I go to get a tattoo done of my father’s signature. It is the signature taken from his passport, which he gets when he is nearly fifty and decides to visit Norway. He knows nobody in Norway. He has simply always wanted to go to a Scandinavian country.
“A signature, huh?” Johannes greets me and lets me in. We exchange kisses on the cheek, which is customary for Johannes. “Whose signature is this?”
“My father’s,” I say.
“You are his creation,” says Johannes.
“His and my mother’s,” I say.
“Of course,” says Johannes. I take a seat and he wipes down the inside of my forearm, where I am getting the tattoo done. We talk about the shooting that was recently in the news. Neither of us has any insights or solutions, but Johannes begins to rant about gun control laws and how the system should be doing more to stop shooters.
I know that I’m young, so it’s not expected that I have much to say. I agree with what he’s saying but am at a loss with how to deal with an issue so much bigger than my immediate concerns.
“How old are you?” Johannes asks me.
“Twenty-one,” I say. Johannes chuckles.
“Oh, you are just a baby girl,” he says. Still he asks me if he can take me out.
The day after my mother gets the job at the Avenues Hostel, my father shows up at the hostel to see her. He asks for her at the front desk, saying he is here to see Anika, and my mother has luckily given him her real name. The manager goes up to knock on #17, where my mother is staying. My mother comes down.
I have seen photographs of my mother at this stage in her life, and she is beautiful. Her hair is luscious and full, a wild curly mane, her lips a perfect bow shape.
My father has gathered from the manager that my mother is now working there. He asks her if she is working that day, and she says yes, starting at four in the afternoon.
It is still early, only nine in the morning.
“Do you want to see McAllen?” My father asks hopefully. With me, of course, is the unspoken stipulation.
My mother consents and returns upstairs to dress. She considers her sari, which she has packed. My mother stayed close to her roots. She forgoes the sari for a t-shirt and jeans, and slips on a pair of sandals, bad for walking, but good for showing off small feet. She smiles to herself.
It’s the beginning.
Johannes and I go dancing. We meet outside his house—he lives above his studio—and I am coming straight from work downtown. Together we pile into a taxi and take it to UTA, the dance club with many rooms for all different genres of music—metal, electronic, goth, house, even R&B. We talk and joke in the taxi about getting too drunk, which both of us know I will not do.
I have told Johannes that I already had my party days, starting when I was sixteen. I told him I was wild, that I went out and drank too much, and that I slept with strangers. I was so wild that I contracted herpes at age seventeen. I learned my lesson, I told him. I cautioned him, rather. The possibility of us sleeping together is still floating up in the air like a luminous cloud, and I give him full disclosure.
He faces the window of the taxi. “It’s not like you have AIDS,” he says, and we change the topic.
At the club, we get beers and dance to the Cure. Johannes spots an old girlfriend and pulls her over to say hello.
It’s nice to see Johannes in a different context. I imagine him bent over his tattoos, working with one customer or another. I like seeing his world, knowing that I am on the periphery of it, standing on the edge, looking in.
After we leave the club, we talk about what we want to eat. It’s a nightlife tradition to get drunk at the club and go out for food, or go in for food, afterwards. We’ve picked up a girl and her boyfriend, an old friend of Johannes’, and they come with us back to Johannes’ house. At his house, we play reggae music and make macaroni and cheese. The song is something about the liberation of man, liberation of woman. A single tear rolls down my cheek because when I’m drunk, I experience things in hyperrealism, and I almost can’t stand the beauty of the whole thing.
“Why you crying?” Johannes comes over and wipes my tear. He sits down next to me on the bed in the living room and starts to braid my hair.
“Just happy,” I say, and Johannes asks me if I want to sleep with him in his bed that night, or if I want to sleep with the girl.
“I’ll sleep with her,” I say.
“Are you sure?” He asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
The summer flies by for my mother. Afternoons and long nights working the graveyard shift are spent at the Avenues Hostel, checking in guests. She spends her days with my father, and they see all of McAllen. Downtown. The thrift shops. The cultural centers. The forests. She tells him everything, especially about the manager at the Avenues Hostel, who pinches her ass and gropes her chest whenever there’s no one around.
“The manager harasses me,” she tells my father. My father, looking concerned, tells her that she should leave.
“And where will I stay?” She asks.
“With me,” he says simply, and she doesn’t hesitate.
One morning at seven, when the manager comes back to the Avenues Hostel to take over his shift, my mother hands him the keys and tells him that she’s leaving. My father is waiting outside with his father’s truck, and she loads her yellow backpack and jumps in the passenger seat.
My father lives in an apartment by himself. He works as a delivery boy for Domino’s Pizza at night. The apartment is in a tiny building with a winding staircase, and, as luck would have it, my father is also in #17.
My mother takes this as a good sign.
The apartment is small, with a bathroom, a bedroom, and a living space. He offers my mother the couch and she sets up her backpack, unrolling her towel which doubles as a blanket.
“You don’t have to use that,” says my father, taking some blankets out for her. She smiles.
And at first, it is all love. The process of falling in love is slow, and natural. Things start to come together not like puzzle pieces—no, much less contrived and arbitrary. Like two hands that fit together have started to play a melody on the piano, each with its own tune, but complementary. My mother, with no job, spends her days taking photographs and visiting art venues, watching free dance performances and taking a batik class. She goes to museums, frequents artistic neighborhoods. Mostly, though, she builds a life—whether she intends to or not—with my father. They go grocery shopping with lists, buying food that can be cooked simply on the hot plate that my father has. They shop for a birthday present for his niece. He helps her find a bookstore called Monte Ararat that she has long been looking for, which stocks feminist literature.
And like this, they fall in love.
It is my third visit to McAllen. My skin feels like it is translucent, at times, melting. I still have yet to see Monte Ararat. I’m more than a tourist. I’m a hunter of intimacy, of the tokens of a previous love.
What makes me so curious about my parents’ love life is that I thirst to prove that it’s real, that my parents are really my parents. I know that my mother is really my mother, but my father and I are holding on by a tenuous spider’s silk. He was never there. How am I to know that he is my father? Even after the paternity test on my second visit, which confirmed the truth spilling from my mother’s archive of old letters, I was afraid that a subtle wind would sweep my father away. This is how you lose someone you only barely found.
My father still lives in the same apartment that he did when my parents lived together. Twenty-one long years. Nineteen, when I found him, and he still subsists. His building even survived a small fire, and he still keeps an Afghan hound, a stubborn desire to cling to the past.
My mother had a rough childhood. She was born in Mumbai and immigrated with her parents to Vancouver when she was two. She sought a restraining order against her father at the age of fourteen because he beat her. She was sent to live with an aunt who saw her only as competition for her daughter, my mother’s cousin. She was raised strictly and received a scholarship to a prestigious university. Somehow, my mother contrived the idea to visit the US-Mexico border and see how the Global South lives.
I am not the only one to see the parallels between my parents’ lives. I am sure that it was part of their connection, which broke only because my mother chose to break it.
“Can I ask you something?” says Johannes.
We are lying in my bed. We have been kissing, and our legs are tangled together.
“Anything,” I say, thinking he is going to ask me something about my parents because I am preoccupied with the thought of them. This is just months before I am to leave for my third visit to McAllen.
“What are we?” He asks, and I am brought back to my own reality, the one where I am seeing someone named Johannes and he wants my time and attention.
“What are we?” I repeat.
“I want to make you my girlfriend,” he says, and I pause, and I say,
“You should have gotten me cupcakes.”
“No,” he says, offended.
“I’m joking,” I say. “I want to be your girlfriend.”
And because he is my boyfriend, Johannes and I get close, and it feels right. This should happen, I tell myself. He’s your boyfriend.
“I want to take you to McAllen,” I whisper to Johannes, because it is the most romantic thing that I can think of to say.
When I meet my father, it is not as I expected.
It is not difficult tracking him down, although not as simple as someone of a younger generation might assume. In my parents’ time, there was no email, no Facebook, no internet. They wrote letters to each other. At eighteen, when I started to care, I found some old letters that belonged to my mother in one of her drawers, carelessly filed with her taxes. They are addressed to a man living in McAllen, Texas, and one of them lists an address and a phone number. I call, hang up. Repeat. It takes a few weeks for me to get the courage to stay on the line.
I don’t know why my mother never told my father that I was born. When I confronted her about it, she said simply that she wanted to be a single mother, that she had always wanted a baby and no father, and that was the way it was to be. And hadn’t she raised me well? And with this point I could not argue.
But I wanted to know. And it was this wanting to know, this desire to have knowledge of this non-part of my life, the time before I existed that brought me into existence, that propelled me into the future where I tracked down my father.
One day, I caught my father on the phone. I knew it was him when I heard his voice. I asked for him, and he said,
“Speaking.”
My heart was hammering so hard it was if I had just volunteered for public speaking.
And he said,
“With whom am I speaking?” And I introduced myself and said that I was his daughter, that Anika was my mother and that I wanted to meet him. There was silence on the other end of the line.
When I leave the Avenues Hostel, I turn back towards my father’s house. I have been staying in McAllen for several days. I plan to stay for only a few days more. My father and I have agreed on sporadic and brief visitation once a year, building up to longer stays and more intimate conversations. It’s become our rite, since I was nineteen.
My father is now living with a girl named Melina, who takes care of him. He has anxiety. He takes Clonazepam drops for the anxiety, and they make him dizzy, and sometimes he wakes up at night with muscle spasms. He is thinking of switching to Quetiapine.
I have met my father’s entire family. His mother, who is still alive and living out the last years of her life. His daughter, Selina, who works as a bank teller in Plano and is married to a pastor. His brother, who has a massive family replete with three daughters and several fish. Everyone assumes that I am dating my father as he takes me on the rounds to meet his family.
“She’s so young,” says his brother, looking askance at my father, who explains that I’m his second daughter, who was raised in Vancouver.
My father practices yoga in the mornings, in complete seriousness and utterly without pretentiousness. He rolls up his mat and goes to the park in his gym shorts and leggings, balancing on one knee and one leg. He asks me seriously if I can teach him more about it, as I am half-Indian, and yoga is an Indian practice. I tell him about the breathing routines that he can do, and he is gratified.
My father tells me that when my mother left, he had no idea that she was pregnant. She said that her papers had expired, and she needed to return to Canada. She promised to return after saving up some more money and visiting her parents. She never returned, although she wrote letters. She never mentioned that I had been born. My father, heartbroken, moved on after a few months, dating women sporadically.
My father talks to me as if I am his friend, telling me about his failed romances, his inability to find somebody who wants to spend the rest of their life with him. My father tells me that he is happy that I am here, that I wanted to find him.
When my mother leaves McAllen, she buys a bus ticket out of the city to Minneapolis, where she will fly to Vancouver. She tells my father exactly what day and what time she will be leaving. She shows him the ticket. On the day that she is leaving, an hour before she leaves, he goes to his brother’s house because he does not want to see her leave. As soon as the door slams shut, she knows that she will never see him again.
And for eighteen years, a few passionate letters and some late-night long-distance phone calls are the only remnants of that summer she spent in McAllen. She returns, drops out of school, has me. Works in a restaurant. Lives on her own, paying for her own things. A real woman. She slowly forgets about him, even though the separation is as painful as that of the fetus from the womb.
When I turn eighteen, I am not the only one who finds a small piece of happiness, although mine lies in the past. Hers is a new future. She looks forward to getting married for the first time, to a Canadian. And here I am, reaching for a man that she left behind.
My father drives me to the pharmacy.
It’s an unusual father-daughter bonding ritual. We leave early in the morning, making sure to bring our papers. My father packs a sandwich, practical as ever. He tells me he’s going to get some beers while I step into the pharmacy. We cross the border into Reynosa at about six AM, when the sky is still lavender, and echoing with bird cries.
I can see why my mother fell in love with the southwest. There is a magic in the air that caresses my cheek. I imagine it’s a loving partner kissing my face through the open truck window. The wind whips my hair, and my father plays corridos on the truck’s CD player.
We’re a little too early, so we have to wait for the pharmacy to open. We sit in my father’s truck and play cards. We smoke cigarettes. My father tells me about his childhood–the English classes, doing mushrooms in the park. I laugh. I make a mental note to write down these stories someday, so I can tell them to my children. I stop myself and wonder if I will ever have children.
When the pharmacy finally opens, it’s two pills, and I take the first one, and it causes an early-term abortion. There are no classes, no fuss. No signatures required, no doctor’s note. I save the second one for a few hours later, and we leave the pharmacy.
As I am passing through Reynosa in my father’s truck, I see the prostitutes carrying candles on their way to the shrine. They are going to the shrine of Lady Death, who is their patron saint, the one who promises to release them at the end of a very long life.
I see them crossing themselves in front of the shrine, and one of the girls has a tattoo of Lady Death on her back. She lives close to death every day. They all do.
I thank God that I am not bringing another life into this world.
On my last night in McAllen, my father and I take a different turn when we’re walking the dog. We start crossing a bridge. It’s a small one, and it crosses over the freeway.
My father turns to me and tells me that he knew from the moment he saw me that I was his daughter. I have his eyes, after all, and we both gush like a little spring when we cry.
I say of course I have his eyes. Shit-brown and wide; who could deny it?
And we stop and stare over the traffic and I think of Johannes, who remains unaware that I have taken mifepristone. Maybe I needn’t tell him; maybe I could be like my mother, who kept her reproductive choice to herself for nineteen years until it burst forth.
“What are you thinking about?” My father asks me.
How could I tell him? That I felt as deep as a cenote, bottomed out like a freshly dug grave. That I longed to bury my actions deep inside me for later excavation, like my mother did.
“Just the moon,” I say, and we turn our faces to it.
