Tiger, Tiger (39 page)
“Ricky—he always made a noise or gesture to say hi, but toward the end, right before he moved out, he looked uncomfortable whenever he saw me. I used to have such a crush on him, and what he probably thought of me . . .” I buried my face in my hands.
O
nly a few months after the September 11 attacks and the anthrax scare, when I was a semester away from graduating, Peter stuffed a large, thick envelope in my mailbox and left. I was at the college, taking a final exam in British Literature II. With the war driving up gas prices, many people were carpooling. This Wednesday, I was driving home my friend Manuel, a young gay man who wore black nail polish and who, after seeing the second plane hit from his bedroom window, kept having nightmares about being poisoned with anthrax. Anthrax paranoia was so common that some local diners had stopped putting powdered sugar on French toast and Belgian waffles.
Numerous shops on Bergenline were selling “Osama: Wanted Dead or Alive” buttons and T-shirts. Nearly everyone was posting American flags on the fronts of their houses and cars. A devout Muslim woman in my journalism class who had previously worn a hijab had taken to wearing jeans after three men in an SUV had tried to push her car into oncoming traffic at Jersey City’s worst intersection. When I told Mommy about this, she scribbled it into her latest Fact Book, which had about twenty pages devoted to September 11 alone. Poppa was disgusted by the way she insisted the kamikaze pilots were evil, without thinking about the events that led up to it. “They were brainwashed since children,” Poppa said. “It is wrong, what they did, but they thought they were being noble.” My mother then called hotlines to say that her husband supported the September 11 attacks.
When my mother heard our gate snap, she went to the window and saw Peter walking away briskly with his head down, hands in his pockets. She checked the time, because she knew I’d ask later; the only other time he had come over to the house that early was when he came to drop off all that memorabilia. I felt like my evil wish was at last coming true and wanted more than anything to take it back. For the past few months, Peter had been saying he would be ending his life any day now, so I was constantly on edge, feeling like I needed to watch him. But I’d had to take a final today, and I hadn’t fathomed he would really do it. “Why didn’t you stop him, Mommy?”
“I didn’t have time. He seemed like he was in such a rush.” I looked at the envelope, fat, sealed at the back with hasty Scotch tape since Peter disliked licking envelopes. On the table by the envelope was a brown paper bag of Chinese food my mother had gotten for our lunch; before I went out with Peter for the afternoon ride we often ate together. I opened the bag and smelled wonton soup and lobster fried rice, delaying the inevitable. I cut the envelope open with a pair of scissors as Poppa had taught me to do long ago, viewing the ripping of envelopes as barbaric. I eased out the thick stack of folded loose-leaf pages. The first paper I opened contained a crude drawing of some sort; I realized it was a map of Palisades Park. He’d drawn a car in the middle of an empty parking lot with an arrow above it, circled three times. As soon as I unfolded the other loose-leaf pages a key dropped into my hand. I realized it was an ignition key.
I shook as I read all ten suicide letters. They were difficult to read, the handwriting was worse than usual, and there were very strange misspellings scattered throughout. He spelled “Jesus”
Jesis
and “years” yares; he forgot the “e” on the word “shame.” He stated many times: “For the record, I never did anything to Ricky. But whatever he has to believe is up to him, I guess.” Every letter specifically instructed me not to contact the police or Inès.
I dialed Peter’s prepaid cell phone; it was the first of a hundred times I would dial it. And I wouldn’t stop dialing after the police found him on a foggy Friday, on his back. When Peter jumped from that cliff in Palisades Park, he had his cell phone in his pocket. Oddly enough, I found out later that it never stopped working. When I called that day it probably rang and rang 250 feet down at the bottom of the cliff.
“You have the title now,” he wrote. “Go get the car before it’s towed. I don’t want you to have to pay towing and storage; it will cost over a hundred dollars if they impound it.”
Later, when I checked the dates of the letters, I found that they were all dated differently, the earliest one almost a year ago. He must have been gradually building up his nerve to go through with it.
He was right; towing and storage charges did amount to a hundred and forty dollars when we went to get the car, my father and I. Poppa drove me to the impound lot, which was a good thirty miles away. It was a miserable rainy day and Poppa, not used to driving anymore, went at least fifteen miles under the speed limit. I stared at the Hudson River half drowned by fog and cried silently as we entered River Road and started to pass familiar sights from my car rides with Peter: the River View Diner, a plaza containing a Barnes & Noble and the Wall music store, where I would occasionally buy CDs, the movie theater we went to. Every red light was occasion for Poppa to tell me to blow my nose. I had his white handkerchief, which wasn’t as comforting as tissues, but better than nothing.
Our first stop was the Palisades Parkway police station, located at the end of the scenic road. My father explained that Peter was his wife’s half brother, and we got directions to the impound lot.
“You need to sell that car as soon as you get it. You tell me he left you everything he had, right? Everything from his room? Right?” I nodded faintly, knowing he wouldn’t stop until I nodded. “Well, get rid of those things. Sell what is valuable, throw out the rest. You hear me?”
“No. He wants me to keep everything. That was his final wish.” Poppa turned up the wipers; the rain had gotten worse. Poppa was the only person I knew who preferred driving in the rain to driving in sunny weather, a fact that always baffled Peter. I looked at Poppa; his face was starting to show his age and, now that I was grown-up, any stranger could see our strong physical resemblance. I also noticed how much thinner he’d gotten over the years; his clothes seemed to hang on him now. It was probably because he did much more drinking than eating. I wondered how much he had drunk that day and how much more he would drink later that night.
“Let me tell you a story, Keesy. It is about me. Lately, I have been talking about moving. I have always disliked Union City and now I have begun to dislike my house as well. But the thought of moving . . . As a young man, I moved many times. In the army, there is no stability at all. I never minded that. Then, after I got out, I went here and there; I lived in Harlem for a while, Queens, I even moved back to Puerto Rico temporarily. When I was younger, I had nothing, so these moves were never a problem. But, as I got older, I started to collect things. I began to store items that were of no immediate use, yet they symbolized something. Exactly what each one means, I cannot always put into words. It is like that Beatles song about places and things. Anyway, when we moved from the apartment building, I tried to get rid of as many things as possible. But some things I found I just could not part with. Since my house contains a shed, I figured I could put all these things I do not want to part with inside it, where they will be no bother. Years go by and I go into the shed to take an inventory of what I have. I see novels I read when I was younger, some in English, some in Spanish, some in French; poetry by the greats that was beautiful at the time but that I will never again read and I know it . . . record albums, but I do not listen to Jefferson Airplane anymore . . . Some of these records are scratched anyway; I have no idea why I bothered keeping them. Old clothes; I even have a uniform from when I was in the army. Letters, so many letters and photos in shoeboxes, pretty girls whose faces I am sure I vowed never to forget but, looking at them now, sifting through these pictures, I have no choice but to laugh under my breath . . . There are several pictures of a young man, he must have been a good friend at the time, we stand arm in arm, but I see him now and my mind draws a blank. I must have been about your age . . . twenty-two . . . twenty-three?”
“Twenty-two,” I said.
“This rain is so depressing. Look at how it has tapered off again. I like strong rain that comes with force, torrents that seem to wipe out everything. You know what, I think we are lost. Let me turn around.”
We were on a suburban street somewhere; Poppa turned in a driveway to get back to the highway. He checked the paper I held for directions and said, “Oh, that’s it, now I see. That cop’s handwriting is like a doctor’s . . . Anyway, so much junk in that shed, souvenirs from trips I have taken, gifts I did not particularly like from people I couldn’t care less about. Even the birdcage that held my old parrot: what was I thinking, keeping that? At the time, about fifteen years ago when we moved, these things must have been important to me. I thought I needed them. But you know what, I moved into my house and put them in storage, and a few months later I had forgotten all about them. Each day, I got up in the morning, ate an avocado or a hard-boiled egg, brushed my teeth, put on my tie, went to work, then I came home, ate, usually some white rice and black beans by myself, brushed my teeth again . . . I never gave that junk a single thought, never!” But I knew this wasn’t true. Poppa was obviously thinking of those things now, and he still hadn’t thrown them away.
For the first two months after Peter died, my days were marathons of sleep, waking up, eating a little, and trying to sleep again. In the daytime, I slept on my mother’s bed in the kitchen extension. Only at night would I go upstairs, forfeiting my mother’s bed because she would never have been able to sleep in that big bed upstairs. I didn’t mind the master bedroom at night. At night, nothing mattered.
During the day, as I wrote in my latest diary, I wondered if I’d
really
done my best to talk him out of it. I remembered him saying he’d jump off a cliff, and I’d warned him that if he did, he needed to find a spot where there were no trees. And why, despite my depression, had I just gotten my hair highlighted for the first time? I was also planning on getting a tattoo next week; if he’d seen one on me when he was alive he’d have sobbed. Had I been denying myself all these years? How much of what I’d assumed were my own tastes were actually his? Six months ago, I wouldn’t have considered coloring my hair, nor would a tattoo have even crossed my mind. I felt scared. Where exactly did he end and I begin? This was the crazy question that caused me to go back and reread his suicide notes and comb through his notebooks of love letters, to remind myself that he was the one whose life had been a tribute to mine. Everything I’d inherited from him was proof that I was the one he’d held most dear. Yet a line from one of his suicide notes troubled me: “Margaux, I leave you my car because Inès can’t drive it anyway.” So was it a consolation prize? A thousand-dollar car that he’d bought with my and my father’s money? I told myself he hadn’t been thinking; his mind was all tangled.
One day my mother shut the blinds and then came back over to the bed. She sat down on it. “Margaux, I just hope you’ll be okay with taking those exams. I checked the calendar. They’re coming up soon, you know. You don’t want those incompletes to turn into Fs.”
“I know this is a selfish thought,” I said. “But I wish he would have waited until after the exams. After I graduated. I don’t know. Maybe he had to. Maybe there were reasons why he couldn’t wait.”
“He was suffering so much at the end. And everything happens for a reason. God works in mysterious ways. Believe me, nobody cared more about your college education than Peter. Peter was always your biggest cheerleader. Whenever your father put you down, he lifted you back up again.”
“I just wish he were here now.”
Mommy was stroking my hair. “Well, God always takes care of things. He did for me. God put loving people in my path. Like when you were little, I had trouble getting you to eat lunch. We went to Maria’s and Maria fed you; she did the airplane for you, remember?”
“Yeah, she had that little boy. He was sweet.”
“It was God’s will that I lost those house keys. I firmly believe He made me misplace them that day so we could meet up with Peter again. I know you’re hurting now, but you had years and years of joy and he took you to so many places and he taught you so many things.”
“Where do you think Peter is now?”
“In heaven. Looking down on you, your very own guardian angel. Sometimes, you know, I still think it’s possible he could have been the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. He was so wise and so pure of heart. I just wish he had gotten good psychiatric help. Maybe if he had just been on the right drugs, none of this would have happened.”
“It would have happened anyway. Believe me.”
“Well, you know him better than anyone. You two had a special friendship. It’s a shame he was so old and had so many health problems. But it’s like I always said, you can marry him in heaven.”
“He died like a man,” my father said a month later in the kitchen. “At least I can say that for him. It was not a coward’s death. He did not go like a sissy. How he found the courage I do not know. You have to be crazy to do such a thing.” Then softly, wrapping his lips around his Heineken, “I could not have done it.” I was surprised because Poppa had always been so critical of suicide. Then I realized his voice had varied slightly in pitch, meaning that he’d said those words in a rare effort to comfort me, probably not really believing them. Or did he see something honorable in Peter’s jump? Poppa cut up a papaya as he spoke; I watched the black seeds spill. I watched my father eat a little of the papaya, smacking his lips. He set it in front of me on a blue plate that was chipped with age and I started eating, if only for the chance to occupy my hands and mouth at the same time.
“That car, are you sure you want that thing?” I watched as he leaned into the kitchen cabinets, smoking energetically. He fanned the smoke away from his clothes, dragged, fanned, dragged again. “You should sell it, get my money back. That car is cursed now. I would not want to drive that car. I would walk ten miles before setting foot in that black car.”