Forgiveness

by Chiquis Rivera

  Rosie was silent. Everyone else was saying good-bye as usual.

  “Okay, Juan, I’ll see you at home, then,” said my mother.

  “Don’t forget to call Gus later,” my grandma reminded Tío Lupe.

  Kisses all around, and everyone got into their cars.

  I didn’t understand. I shot a glance at Tía Rosie for a second, but she pretended not to see me.

  Okay, I thought. False alarm. Nobody believed it. The secret is still safe. Silly me. The secret was safe for a mere fifteen days, which is the time it took for my mother to figure out how to tell Rosie. Everyone else was frozen with the fear that the prophet’s suspicions were true, and too afraid to ask Rosie about it face-to-face. Everyone, that is, except for my mother, who was just waiting for the right moment.

  It was Wednesday, September 23, 1997, to be exact. How could I ever forget a day like that?

  We were with our cousins in the library doing homework. I had just started seventh grade, and my mom was very pregnant with Jenicka, the first of my two siblings who would come from her relationship with her second husband, Juan López.

  My mother was at work doing the accounting at my grandfather’s business, and she couldn’t come pick us up until much later in the day. But, to our surprise, the one who showed up first was my tío Juan’s wife, Tía Brenda.

  “Come on, come on, we gotta go,” she told us in a rush. We all piled into the car and instantly I knew it: It’s over. They finally found out. The look on my aunt’s face told me everything I needed to know. I couldn’t have been more nervous.

  We drove to the KIMOS offices on Market Street, which is where Tío Pete produced CDs of my grandfather’s artists. Even back then, the whole family was involved in the world of music in one way or another. Those who didn’t sing went into production or sales.

  My mother was waiting for us there, sitting behind a desk in one of the tiny rooms. With her hair dyed red and freshly cut in a stylish bob, combined with her late-stage pregnancy, she looked very mature, though she was only twenty-eight. From the look in her eyes, I could tell that she’d been crying.

  Sitting next to her was my tía Ramona, Tío Pete’s wife, squeezing her hands nervously.

  “Shut the door,” my mother said as Brenda disappeared with my siblings. “Do you have something to tell me?”

  I couldn’t answer. All I could do was burst into tears. The pain I’d kept bottled up for so many years finally came bawling out.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, mi princesa . . . I’m so sorry!” Her tears seemed to overrun even my own. “Tell me Juan didn’t do anything to you. Tell me that much, at least . . .” she implored, inconsolable.

  Juan, my stepfather, was also there, standing by the door. His eyes were flashing with both grief and indignation, clearly upset that my mother would doubt him.

  “No, Momma. Never. Just Dad. It was always just Dad. I swear . . .”

  Juan, the poor guy. He was never anything but respectful toward me!

  “Rosie just finished giving her statement. Now it’s your turn, mija,” my mother said, using her hands to smudge away the mascara running down her cheeks.

  Two uniformed Long Beach police officers were waiting for me in the next office down the hall. Rosie had just emerged, leaving the door open behind her. She simply looked at me with fear on her face.

  I went in and sat down. I wasn’t afraid of the two men in uniform. The worst part—the thing I had feared most in my life—had already been done: confessing everything to my mother. Now all I had to do was to tell these men what they wanted to know. My mother was by my side, and she loved me. Momma already knows and I can just be a kid again, I thought to myself. That was all I could think about: the feeling of relief, even while giving the most gruesome details about the constant abuse.

  I told them everything. Absolutely everything. Well, everything I could remember on that particular day. The officers were friendly, but didn’t express much in the way of emotions. That was their daily bread there on the streets of Long Beach: listening to horror stories from families fighting for survival in a new country, lost amid the discrimination, the poverty, the harassment, the gangs—my beloved city. Every now and then they would stop me and ask, Is everything okay? Are you doing alright? Of course I was okay! I was great! My mom believed me right from the start, and that filled me with a strange sense of calmness. I was no longer alone with the monster that I’d locked away for so long in my heart, well hidden by the shame and fear of being called a liar or worse.

  When I finished with the officers, I spent a moment with Tía Rosie there in the office hallway. Her eyes, like mine, were red and exhausted.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry. I feel horrible. Your mother confronted me, and I couldn’t lie. Please forgive me. I don’t want you to have to live without your dad, but I just couldn’t lie anymore!”

  She was so nervous that I could barely understand her words.

  We embraced. There was no need to say anything else. The secret we’d carried for so many years and that was eating at us from the inside was now out, and nobody doubted us. That would give us tremendous strength, which we would need when it came time to face what was still in front of us.

  The next few weeks were like a long, strange nightmare. Detectives from the LBPD asked us to pretend that nothing had happened, that we keep going to school and work and that we tell no one. We didn’t want to flush the quarry before the hunt: my father couldn’t suspect that he was under investigation. The case was a complicated one, and they needed to collect more evidence before arresting him.

  If my mother hadn’t been pregnant at the time, we wouldn’t have waited for an investigation to be conducted and an arrest warrant to be issued. She would have gone and killed him herself. I’m pretty sure she never even would have called the police. She’d have gotten a gun, gotten in the car and shot him dead.

  And our dear, beautiful Jenicka managed to avoid a double disaster: during the fifteen days of silence that followed, my mother—and her massive, pregnant belly—were going absolutely crazy.

  One night I heard noises there in the house in Compton where we were living with my stepfather, Juan. I jumped out of bed and when I turned on the living room lights I was stunned by what I saw: my mother sitting there on the green leather couch, her face as hard as stone and her eyes fixated on the front door. She hadn’t even noticed me yet, and between her legs she was holding a massive kitchen knife. My blood ran cold! Quietly I crept off to wake up Juan.

  He embraced her and took the knife from her hands. The two of them cried in silence.

  “I’m afraid he found out, and now he’s going to come after us,” my mother said. “If he walks through that door, I’ll kill him. I swear to you, I’ll kill him.”

  She spoke in a very measured tone of voice, and I don’t have the slightest bit of doubt that she would have killed him. This was one of my biggest fears, and one of the reasons I was silent for so long: the fear of losing them both, one to murder and the other to jail.

  Halloween was approaching. My father was growing more impatient and starting to ask about why we hadn’t visited him for a month. My mother, on the other hand, was coming up with a thousand excuses for not letting us go to his house.

  And while we were anxiously waiting for the police to make a move, Jenicka arrived. The little one made her arrival two weeks early thanks to all the stress, but her presence gave us a breath of life and eased our pain.

  “She’s here! Our baby girl is here!” my grandma cried excitedly when I came home from school that day.

  Back at the hospital, my mother lay in her bed, crying and laughing with Jenicka in her arms. She never let her baby out of her sight, day or night, always keeping her clutched to her chest.

  On the great evening of Halloween, my mother was back at home with the most beautiful little baby girl in the world. And my father was on the phone, running his mouth about how much he wanted to take us trick-or-treating. We couldn�
��t keep hiding like this. It just wasn’t possible! The police were taking too long to act.

  “Trick-or-treating? Are you serious?” my mother shouted into the phone. “You know what? I know what you did to my sister and my daughter, you son of a bitch! You’ll be rotting away in jail!”

  “You’ll never prove it!” he retorted. The poor fool, he didn’t even deny it. He just went straight to playing defense, like all people do when they’re caught red-handed.

  “I have them, you bastard! I have them!” she screamed, and then she hung up and immediately called the police. There was no time to lose! But nobody came to our aid.

  On Halloween night, it’s impossible to get a police officer on the phone. They’re all out responding to emergencies or dressed up as Batman or Dracula enjoying the night with their families. Nobody was staked out, keeping a watch on my father during those crucial hours.

  The next morning, the police paid a trick-or-treat visit of their own to his house. They knocked on his door, but here was the trick: the guy had packed up his clothes and ran. In a matter of hours, he and his girlfriend had up and disappeared, and their relatives all swore they didn’t know anything about it. Everyone was as silent as a tomb.

  A few months later, when my brother Tongo had just turned eight, he confessed to us that he was ashamed of his father and everything about him. We could see the hatred in his eyes. He told us that the name Trinidad was no longer worthy of him, and that he had decided to change it. First he chose Max, like our dog, but then he settled on Michael, after Michelangelo, of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. All of his legal documents still show his name as Trinidad Marín, but ever since 1997, he’s just been Mikey to us. Mikey Rivera.

  I decided to stay with Marín. I was never ashamed of that last name, and I never stopped loving my father, no matter how sick people may think I am. My mother begged and begged me:

  “My princesita, you’re a Rivera. At least give me that joy. You’re Janney Rivera,” she would say.

  “Momma, it’s all I have left of him: the memories, both good and bad, and the last name,” I’d always say, convinced that I’d never see him again.

  Or so I thought.

  7.

  NO QUINCEAÑERA, NO SWEET SIXTEEN

  Life after the scandal didn’t stop there in the house in Compton where we were living. It was the first property that my mother ever bought with her own hard-earned money.

  Despite all the pain and sorrow we were left with in the wake of the atrocities committed by my father, my mother kept on pedaling the bicycle of life, just as she always had. The problem was that I was just beginning my bitchy phase—adolescence—when I was acting more rebelliously and spending more and more time on the streets. Meanwhile, for the first time, my mother was really starting to dream about being Jenni Rivera, the big shot, the singer. This wasn’t going to make things easy on either of us.

  And poor Juan was caught in the middle of the storm. I remember not liking him at first. I was barely eleven years old when I met him, and still suffering my father’s abuse in secret. Having another man around made me very nervous. On top of that, I was dying of jealousy at the idea of having to share my mother with another person. As if there weren’t already enough people in that house!

  The first day that Juan showed up with some of his belongings and started moving them into my mother’s room, I searched through the dresser drawers and ripped a few pictures. Talk about a welcoming. And, of course, I got it good. My mother, strict as she was, gave me a serious whooping and sent me to bed. The look on my face was more than enough for him to know that I was the one who had given him such a warm welcome.

  Much to my surprise, Juan didn’t get angry. He just picked up the picture pieces and gave me a mischievous, knowing look.

  And just like that—by always being cheerful and always having the time and patience to listen to us—he quickly won the hearts of my siblings and me. My new stepfather was very permissive with us and soon became our accomplice in nearly everything. For example, when my mother would put me on one of those super-strict, depraved diets, he’d secretly get me brownies and leave them for me under my pillow. Sneaky Juan! Maybe he wasn’t the best husband in the world, but my God he was loved, and he didn’t have an ounce of malice in that long, skinny body of his. He respected me so much and understood me so well that when my father ran off, I started calling him Dad. He deserved it. It’s a title you have to earn; it’s not handed out to just anyone who scores and gets his girlfriend pregnant. Being a parent is much more serious and much more important.

  My mother started being more strict with me around that time, but honestly, she always had been. That’s how the Riveras are with their children: never afraid to punish them or exact discipline, and you’d get whacked on the backside with a flip-flop before you could count to three. Sometimes I think it’s because I was a bit of a spoiled brat and would answer back to everything, sometimes because of what had happened with my father. After she learned about my abuse, my momma started treating me more harshly. At first I didn’t understand this, but as time went by I realized that she didn’t want to spoil me or pamper me because of what had happened; she didn’t want to treat me as if I were weak or a victim. That was one of her biggest fears. If anyone were to say, Awww, poor Chiquis, look what happened to her! it would seriously piss her off. Sometimes I think I was also a constant reminder of our family’s greatest shame—the feeling of everyone having failed me—and she didn’t quite know how to deal with those feelings. It must have been an incredibly difficult time for her, and I understand that it also must have been hard for her to deal with both me and with the past.

  The fact of the matter is that whenever there was a problem, Juan would be the one to stick up for me and save my behind. He was a good father, but an unfaithful husband who turned out to be a bit of a womanizer and ended up putting my mother through a tough stretch of life.

  But before he became a ladies’ man and the fighting began, the daily relationship between Juan and my mother was an easy one. My momma could spend more time with us while Juan was working at a nearby factory. Back then, the kitchen in our Compton house made the place smell like a real home. Jenni the businesswoman was now cooking, taking care of us and looking after us. Juan was born and raised in the Mexican state of Nayarit, and like his fellow Mexican people, he was a huge baseball fan, and on the weekends he’d take us to play in all the neighborhood league games. My mother really enjoyed watching us play, and she had a great swing of her own as well. Baseball had always been another one of her passions.

  In fact, Juan and Jenni shared many hobbies. Beyond the love they felt for one another, I saw them as two great friends. They laughed often, and liked to watch movies cuddled up in our huge green couch that took up the majority of the living room. Those were the days where I felt like I was a part of a normal family, which was something I never had before. But as was the case with everything else in our lives, those calm days only lasted for a short while.

  That home sweet home suddenly came to an end thanks to the divine invention of caller ID and modern phones. My mother called an unknown number she found, and caught Juan on one of his adventures with a coworker. She kicked him out of the house in true Jenni style—revenge included—taking his clothes and starting a bonfire right there in the yard. Some time later, though, she forgave him, and Juan would be a part of our lives for a few more years, during which time he would give us another little brother and help push my mom to succeed. At this point she was working her way up the music industry ladder and discovering how much of a man’s world it was. Neither of us really knew how to deal with it. And I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but my mother was also going through so much.

  The Compton house was also the stage for the first big Jenni vs. Chiquis bouts. The living room with the huge green sofa became our ring. I was growing more and more unbearable by the day, and my mother’s patience was wearing thin. Our relationship wasn’t the same as it had been
before the scandal.

  I was in my freshman year of high school by then, and my grades weren’t all that great. Straight Cs. And to my super-studious mother, Cs were akin to failure. When she was my age, she never got anything below an A.

  “I was always the smart one in the family,” she’d snarl at me when she saw my report cards. “Why does my brother Gustavo have all the sharp kids while I get the dumb ones?” I know that was her way to try to motivate me, but it still hurt and I wouldn’t even dare to answer a question like that.

  My first language, ever since I was a little girl, had been Spanish. Classes taught in English were hard for me, and I had trouble focusing on anything. I had so much responsibility. I had to clean and feed the kids before even starting my homework. And after everyone learned the secret about my father—that is, my own secret—I felt that the world owed me something, and that I deserved to be left alone.

  And to top it all off, aside from being a great student, my mother was more of a nerd than a party girl and never had much of a social life, so when her first little boyfriend ended up getting her pregnant, whatever party there might have been was over before it started. But I was popular. I had a lot of friends, and it didn’t take much for us to decide to skip class and go hang out. I was into the boys (though from afar, for obvious reasons). I liked dark lip liner and huge earrings. Like I was a little chola gangster! My mother would get frustrated and yell, “Who do you think you are? Take that off, don’t be ridiculous!” It’s hard to believe, but the woman who would go on to sing “Las Malandrinas” and really let her hair down had never been the sort of girl to hang out on the streets. Instead, she was a well-behaved daughter and a demanding mother. It was the men in her life—combined with the tough world of the artistic career she was just getting started on—that gradually turned her into the edgy, risqué Jenni. Later, we would see her become known as “La Diva de la Banda” and finally, simply, as “La Gran Señora.” The thousand metamorphoses of the butterfly from the barrio were perfectly captured by her songs, and I happened to have first row seats to the show, and lived it with her each and every minute.