Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  We showed her the spot in Pacific Grove where the monarchs spend the winter. I had first learned about monarchs in elementary school. I learned that the butterflies can’t survive the winter in cold places like Minnesota and so fly south. Then, when it’s warmer and safer, they fly back again. Year after year monarchs and their descendants find their homes again. In fifth grade I helped my teacher tag the delicate black and orange wings. I carefully brushed off a few scales the way he had taught me and then gently placed a sticker on the spot, a number that would identify that little insect for the next scientist who would find it in a warmer climate.

  The monarchs in Pacific Grove come from all over the western United States, looking for their winter homes, the same place their great-grandparents had wintered. They find the spot without the benefit of airmail or email, flying in haphazard zigzags until they make it to the grove of eucalyptus trees. Dave’s mom picked her way carefully over the carpet of fallen leaves below the branches on which clung hundreds—maybe thousands—of butterflies. We inhaled the spicy scent of the trees, pointing to the branches where, as a beam of sunlight passed a cluster of what looked like leaves, orange and black wings were suddenly aflutter like the dead rising. Dave’s mom stretched her head back to look up, and smiled as the monarchs flitted and swooped and rearranged themselves on their perches. When the sun passed behind a cloud they were still again, awoken only by the warmth of its rays. These monarchs, like the ones I had tagged as a child, had traveled thousands of miles to be in this spot, to spend the winter in a protected grove. They had a homing instinct that drove them and propelled them and gave their lives meaning. Home, their deepest urges called. And they listened.

  I understood their instincts; I ached to return to Minnesota. Around us, friends were buying houses and putting down roots, but I wasn’t interested in real estate. “When are we going to move back?” I began to ask Dave, knowing it was selfish, knowing I was asking a lot. He had a satisfying career and loved the rocky hikes. I began to worry, though, that something would trap us in San Jose. It seemed that we would get stuck in this arid Mediterranean climate forever, that we might never see scarlet-hued autumn leaves and spring’s delicate crabapple blooms again. Minnesota held nothing of the exotic or exciting, but there were my grandparents and, most important, my mother. A single mother and an only daughter. Even though I was no longer technically an only child, I needed my mother again.

  “We just met,” Silas said when I told him we were planning to move back to Minnesota. I didn’t understand then how devastating this news was for him. He had spent his life wondering about his sister only to find her in adulthood—and now to have her ripped away again. It must have been for him an uncomfortable refrain that had been repeated throughout his childhood: the anticipation of family and then the letdown. How could I explain to him that the reality I knew—my Minnesota family, friends, the constancy of winter, spring, summer, fall—tugged at me like an ornery toddler pulling at my sleeve? Although I never doubted the validity of our relationship as brother and sister, it still resided in the realm of what could be, not what was. Putting aside my urge to return to my childhood home required a faith in the future that I couldn’t quite muster.

  I told him it would be fine. I assured him it wouldn’t change anything, even though I knew it would. We barely knew each other, and with distance between us, without the benefit of daily interactions, our tenuous relationship would fall into the same category as mine with my father. Siblings in name only. Now I’m not sure why I was so eager to make that break. But even with a brother, I was an only child, selfish and used to making decisions with only my own needs in mind. Like a petulant homesick camper, I stamped my foot and scowled. I want to go home.

  “You can’t go yet,” my brother insisted.

  In 1976, my father must have said, You can’t go.

  I was a toddler crawling on the uneven flagstones of the patio of the haunted house in Popayán, and my mother might have told him, “I want to go to Minnesota.”

  It would have been a discussion they had had many times. During their nearly six years of marriage, my parents bounced back and forth between Minnesota and Colombia, searching for a place that would make them happy.

  “For a visit, fine,” my father would have said. “We have to live here in Popayán, though. This is where my work is. You know that.”

  A few months earlier, my mother had started teaching English to air traffic controllers, young and vibrant men who were learning the language of take-offs and landings, men who were able to guide you to safety. She had befriended one of them, a handsome one. “We should be with my family in Minnesota,” she said.

  “We tried that. It didn’t work. This is where I need to be. To paint.” He would have waved his arms, a gesture meant to encompass the haunted house, the baby girl, the mountains, the very air itself.

  Before I was born, they lived in Minneapolis, first in the basement of my grandparents’ rambler and later in a rented apartment in Uptown. My father had gone to school at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and so when our little family arrived in Minneapolis the summer of 1976, they took me to the campus, meandered the nearby art museum. There is a photograph of me with my father sitting at an outdoor café. He holds me in his lap even as I scowl in concentration at something just outside the frame.

  “Your parents left you with me,” my grandfather told me. “I think they went to a movie,” he said, laughing. “You cried your crazy head off. The longest movie ever.”

  Besides the movie, there was the German restaurant in Minneapolis, where they drank beer on a patio with my grandparents. My father didn’t know he was spending his last days with his daughter. And finally, at some point, safe on American soil and having retained a lawyer in secret, my mother gathered her courage and told her husband she wanted a divorce.

  “Nance,” he must have pleaded, “we can work this out.”

  “It’s no use.”

  “We’ll go to counseling,” he tried.

  “I want a divorce,” she reiterated, as if by saying it over and over he would understand.

  “I don’t understand,” he must have said. Because for this man, infidelity was no reason to dissolve a marriage, estrangement could be cured, and love was worth it. Besides, Beth had already blessed their marriage, had told him they could make it, and he had loved Beth and believed her.

  “I don’t love you anymore,” my mother might have said, although I wonder if that’s possible—to say those words to someone you once did.

  “I love you and Anika,” he said. “Let’s make it work.”

  But her mind was made up. When she had first arrived in Colombia, she had wanted to reinvent herself; now she would do it again. I would never completely understand what it had been like for her. By the time my mother had decided on divorce, she had already imagined her new life, one that did not include a moody artist, one where she was free.

  “You can’t go,” my father must have said.

  But she did.

  And I would, too.

  22

  When Dave and I arrived in Minnesota to apartment hunt and interview, his mom had just come home under hospice care. She was fifty-two years old but looked ancient, frail, tiny against the white sheets of the hospital bed. Her wisps of hair just starting to grow back looked grayer than her previous blonde. Maybe it was all that absence of color that made her want me to paint her fingernails bright pink. I carefully brushed on the lacquer, one fine stroke at a time, holding her cold hand, the fingers pale with lack of circulation.

  My mother-in-law craved sensory stimulation during those final weeks. She cuddled with her husband in their big bed, held hands with her adult sons. She wanted me to massage her palms and knuckles with lavender-scented lotion. Her husband set up a microphone outside the bedroom window to capture the sounds of the early spring birds. The amplified voices filled the sickroom with an extra layer of unfounded optimism.

  One night, when we were all
eating a makeshift dinner on our laps surrounding what would become her deathbed, a delivery of flowers arrived. It was a vase of yellow roses the color her hair used to be, fair and innocent. She sat up in bed to look at the flowers on the bedside table.

  “Bring them closer, Dave,” she said.

  He stood up and held the heavy vase nearer.

  “Closer,” she said, and he moved the flowers almost in her lap. She leaned forward and dove her face into the blossoms, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeper.

  When I worked in the flower shop in college, I sold centerpieces to disillusioned housewives and single carnations to well-intentioned young men. I stripped the thorns off Colombian-grown roses and gave each stem a fresh cut before wrapping the flowers in butcher paper. Roses could be dangerous; anything that beautiful could hurt you.

  “My mother grew yellow roses,” Dave’s mom said, her voice weak, her nose still in the flowers. “They were in the front yard, by the fence.”

  I realized suddenly that I knew nothing about her, a woman who had had three sons but loved tea parties and flowers. I touched her hand as my throat closed with the bitter taste of guilt and sorrow. The what-could-have-beens piled around us.

  We had to fly back to California, but before our taxi arrived, she pulled one of the yellow roses out of the vase and laid it in Dave’s hand. He strapped it to his backpack, and we carried it home with us. The petals were just beginning to curl and dry when Dave’s dad called him.

  It wasn’t fair, I knew, this death of a mother. Dave’s mother. He was losing family even as mine seemed to be growing. The intensity of the loss increased the urgency to return to Minnesota, even though she was no longer there. We were young and untethered, free to return home. Going home was what people did, each of us with a homing instinct as strong perhaps as the monarchs’. The following winter, having been hired by a Minnesota company that paid for relocation, we left the eucalyptus trees and the ocean and the half brother. We jammed the Honda hatchback with plants and laundry baskets and headed across the country, the two of us nothing more than instinctual creatures flitting our way home.

  A few days before we left, when the movers had already packed our dishes and towels in cardboard boxes, Silas took me to lunch. It was December, but the day was warm and sunny, and I rode in the front seat of the Cutlass convertible. With the top down and the sun shining, the brown vinyl smelled like Colombia with its off-gassing and fine film of pollen dust. As he took the corners, I let myself slide across the slippery seats as off balance as a bottle floating in the ocean waves.

  I don’t remember where we went, but I remember sitting across a lunch table from Silas, talking without saying anything. He didn’t tell me how hurt he was, how abandoned he felt. Instead, he said, “When I was about eight, Renzo told me he would send me a ticket to go to Colombia. I was so excited.”

  I didn’t find out until later that Silas was the literal dark sheep of the family, that his blond-haired brother had a father who lived with them for several years, a parent he could visit, stay with on weekends, perhaps punctuating Silas’s lack of a dad. I had had a grandfather and uncles, a stepfather and stepbrothers, and learned that men will come and go. I didn’t make the connection until much later that he was still seeking an ideal of a father figure.

  “But he flaked out. I never went.”

  He was a boy who needed a father, who needed a connection to his Colombian ancestry. And when he finally found it in a sister, she left him.

  “You’ll have to visit us,” I said cheerily. Even though I had always been a pessimist.

  “You’re really going,” he said when we left the restaurant and walked into the white sunlight.

  He held open the heavy car door for me, and I nodded. I was sad and so happy at the same time. The sun beat down on our brown heads as we drove down the 101, leaving trails of invisible regrets.

  The house we bought in Minneapolis six months later had a small front porch, oak built-ins of the kind you never see in California, the kind that made us repeat how glad we were to be back in Minnesota. The foursquare two-story also had three modest bedrooms, one of which a friend had suggested would make a good nursery. At first we hadn’t been sure about having children, then, as we passed thirty, we—especially I—felt the stirrings of a desire so strong it was like a violent undertow pulling me toward motherhood.

  There was something about homeownership, too, that made me feel domestic in a way I never had in California. Everything there had felt so impermanent and malleable. During our last month in California, while I was flipping through the pages of some magazine, an earthquake struck. Probably not any worse than a 5.0. We had felt many tiny movements of the earth, but this one was our strongest. Even before I felt it, I heard a whoosh of wood siding and slamming of termite-chewed beams. From my perch on the olive-green futon, I watched the walls swell in and out like some living, breathing creature. The earthquake had lasted less than thirty seconds, but in those moments I could feel the uncertainty of life in this land where the ground literally moved, however minutely, under our feet. Even though the tremor was too small to cause damage, I realized that the apartment building in which we lived was more like a boat floating on a lake than solid construction with deep footings. We were all at the mercy of plate tectonics and the natural world.

  Now I craved permanence and even responsibility. In Minnesota, buildings are erected on solid bedrock, limestone and shale, sandstone and dolomite. These buildings don’t have to withstand the kind of rocking and swaying that happen in places where the earth is less firm, places where, I was beginning to think, reality itself was less solid.

  And in that solid darkness of our quiet bedroom, one night the world shifted again, showed itself again to be less immobile than we thought. Dave rolled over in bed to face me, his features blurry and familiar. “Let’s make a baby,” he whispered in the glow of Minneapolis streetlights.

  And within three months, we had a beginning. Is this how it happens? I wondered. When I had asked Ceci if she wanted to have kids and she told me of her miscarriages, I didn’t connect the dots then, didn’t consider that she had held grown life—however briefly—within her. Life that would have been evidence of her and my father’s union. That’s what pregnancy felt like, especially at first, like physical evidence of love, a bit of magic and reality.

  Not that I found it all magical.

  “What did we do?” I asked Dave those first few weeks. “What the fuck did we do?”

  But as soon as we had our first ultrasounds, I took my mother out to lunch and pulled the sonogram picture from my purse.

  “I have news.”

  Even as I pushed the black and white image across the table, she was already in tears.

  “I was starting to think you two would never have a baby,” she said.

  Me too, I thought.

  And six weeks later, on Easter Sunday, I called Renzo. My father. To tell my other parent I was going to be a parent.

  It wasn’t, I told myself, that I had forgiven him. It wasn’t, I was certain, that all my anger had dissipated. But there was something about the beginning of a life that puts other things in perspective.

  “My dear Anika,” he said, the delay between each sentence an echo that bounced our words around.

  “Guess what?” I said before he could broach any topic, before he could ask me how I felt or what I was thinking. I didn’t want to talk about his secrets and lies. I wanted to tell him my own news. “We’re having a baby,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”

  My father began to laugh and said, “Wow.” He laughed, and I assumed it was from joy.

  “Wow, I’m so happy for you, my dear,” he said.

  And despite the remnants of my anger, I felt proud, like I had done something amazing. I thought of that time I had played Poohsticks with Ceci and María Fernanda and how proud I had felt of my little stick, even though I had nothing to do with its progress.

  23

  The first time t
he ob-gyn squirted gel on my abdomen and ran the fetal Doppler over the slight rise in my belly, a frantic pounding suddenly filled the exam room. It was quick like a butterfly caught in a jar flapping uselessly to escape. The sound coming through the speakers of the machine pulsated in the tiny room.

  “That’s the heartbeat,” the doctor said, smiling.

  When my mother was pregnant with me, there were no Doppler monitors listening for heartbeats and almost no prenatal care in Colombia. She read a book about natural childbirth that my grandmother had sent her and ate conscientiously. She wore sandals—Earth Shoes—that gave her toes wiggle room and her arches support. She told me once about an Indian she had met in the mountains who had never worn shoes. The Indian was a maid, who flapped around the house in flip-flops, the only footwear that would accommodate her spread-out toes, which had never been confined by leather or canvas. I remember my mother spreading out the fingers of her hand to demonstrate the appearance of this Indian’s toes.

  I pictured my mother reading her book on childbirth and feeling the first flutters of life, realizing that she was growing a baby inside her. I imagined her packing a satchel and boarding a bus to Cali, where she would live with a few American girls in a pink- or salmon-colored building with tile floors the Americans couldn’t quite keep clean. She would have worn a thick wool ruana, hand-knit perhaps by a Guambiano woman. She might have removed her wedding ring made of a bent spoon handle, although this might have had more to do with prenatal water retention than marital discord. She wouldn’t have been showing yet, her stomach just a little swell under her peasant blouse, and as the bus rattled down the Pan-American Highway and the climate shifted from mountain region to steamy valley, she would have shed the poncho, folded it as best she could and placed it with her luggage at her feet.