by Alex Sanchez
The afternoon of the appointment, he rode his bike as usual to Vidas’s office. His mom would drive to the court building directly from work.
While waiting, Diego told Vidas how she hadn’t wanted to come. “We got into an argument, and she tried to slap me. I got so angry that, um…I wanted to hit her. But then I stopped and thought. And instead I yelled into the pillow, like you taught me.”
“And how did that feel?”
“Good.” Diego tugged nervously at his fingers, cracking his knuckles one by one. “I was so mad.”
“How’re you feeling now?”
Without hesitating, Diego gazed across the room at the smiley face poster: “Nervous…worried…scared…”
The phone jangled and he jumped in his seat.
“Probation,” Vidas answered. “Thanks. I’ll come get her.” He hung up and gave Diego a steady look. “Keep breathing, okay? You’ll do fine. You’re going to take back the power that was stolen from you.”
Exactly what that meant, Diego wasn’t sure. But he felt too overwhelmed to ask. He was well aware of his breathing while he waited for Vidas to bring his mom. It buoyed him to know how much Vidas trusted him. If he could only trust himself.
The click of heels approached in the hallway and his mom came in, followed by Vidas. She’d changed clothes after work. She nodded to Diego.
He nodded sullenly back. They’d barely spoken to each other ever since she’d tried to slap him.
“Please, have a seat.” Vidas gestured and she eased into the empty chair at an angle to Diego, so that the three of them sat in a sort of triangle. On her lap she rested a small aqua-colored handbag—a gift from Mac.
“Thanks for coming in,” Vidas said. “I know it’s hard for you to take time off from work, but I also know you care about your son.”
“I care about him very much.” She flashed her eyes at Diego. “That’s why I’ve told him he has to stop getting into fights and acting crazy.”
Diego clenched his jaw, not saying a word.
“I think he’s made outstanding progress,” Vidas told her, “in understanding where his anger comes from.”
“That’s good.” She offered a tight, tense smile. “I’m happy to hear it.”
Diego watched her carefully.
“I believe the core of his anger,” Vidas continued, “comes from things that happened with your husband. Things that are important for you to hear.”
His mom grasped the handbag on her lap a little more tightly. “What…things?”
“I’d like for you to listen,” Vidas explained, “while your son tells you.”
He nodded encouragingly to Diego. But Diego didn’t know where to start. His mind was swimming with doubts. What if his mom didn’t believe him? What if she accused him of lying?
“Take a breath,” Vidas said calmly, as if sensing Diego’s confusion.
Diego drew in a huge breath, heart pounding in his chest. “Um, like, where should I begin?”
“Start when you first met Mac,” Vidas suggested. “When you stayed with him at the hotel. Tell us what happened.”
Diego gazed down at the carpet, unable to look at his mom. His voice came out low and quavering: “He started to touch me.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed her hands shift on the purse.
“Do you understand what Diego means?” Vidas asked.
“No.” She crossed her legs at the ankle. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
Diego chewed into his lip. What was the point of this?
“He means,” Vidas clarified in a clinical tone, “that your husband molested him, touching his genitals.”
The edge to Vidas’s voice caused Diego to look up. He watched his mom press her lips together, as if angry at being scolded.
“I understand that,” she responded. “But I don’t believe it.”
Diego glanced from her to Vidas. If she didn’t believe him, what was he supposed to do?
“Go on,” Vidas encouraged him, undaunted.
Diego grabbed hold of the chair arms and pushed himself to continue. “During that fishing trip he took me on, he…” Diego’s voice trailed off. What word should he use? Vidas and his mom both stared at him, waiting for him. He had to force the words out: “He raped me.”
It was his first time to use the word about himself. The room became silent, except for his heartbeat, thundering in his ears. He could barely breathe.
Slowly, his mom brought a hand to her lips, covering her mouth. Was she trying to signal him?
“Do you understand what your son said?” Vidas asked.
“Yes, but I don’t know why he’s saying that.” She leveled her gaze at Diego. “You know Mac loved you. After all he did for us, how can you say such things?”
“Because it’s true.”
“You must’ve dreamed it,” his mom said, dismissing it with a shake of her head. “You’ve always had bad dreams.”
Could she be right? What if it was all just another phantom shark? But that was crazy. He hadn’t dreamed it.
“You saw the blood on my underwear,” he argued.
In response, she glared defiantly back at him but didn’t argue.
“Keep going,” Vidas told him. “Tell her about the other times, after you moved here.”
Why bother? Diego wondered. He could feel the darkness once again creeping over him, pulling at him, drawing him toward despair.
“After Eddie was born…” he continued, mustering every ounce of strength, and proceeded to describe Mac’s visits to his room up until the night before the suicide.
While he spoke, his mom tightly clutched the handbag on her lap. Her gaze moved to the carpet, to the ceiling, to the walls, anywhere except at him. When he finally finished, exhausted, she turned to Vidas.
“What am I supposed to say to that? He’s talking about my husband.” Her eyes blazed at Diego. “If that happened, why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I tried!” Diego’s voice came out small and sad, like a child’s. “But you wouldn’t listen. All you cared about was what he was doing for us. You never listened to me!”
“I can’t believe Mac would do that.” His mom’s lip trembled. “I don’t believe it. Can you prove it?”
“Is that the most understanding thing you can say?” Vidas intervened. “Your son just told you something horribly painful.”
She immediately flushed pink, withering at the rebuke.
“Sorry,” Vidas continued, though he sounded more angry than sorry. “But if you had any suspicions of what happened, you need to admit it to help your son get through this. We’re not in court. No one is going to punish you. You need to address this, so you can both move on with your lives.”
Diego listened quietly, assured by the confidence in Vidas’s voice. He watched his mom’s eyes grow wet, until a teardrop rolled down her cheek. When she spoke, her voice rasped in a whisper: “Sometimes I thought maybe something was happening, but…What could I do? He was my husband, Eddie’s father. What was I supposed to say? How could I have stopped it? We were a family.”
Each word hit Diego like a punch. Was she admitting she’d had an inkling of Mac’s abuse? Then why hadn’t she at least tried to confront it? How could she just look the other way? He was her son; she was supposed to protect him.
Her eyes were flowing with tears as she faced him, red with shame. “I guess I thought if something were happening, you’d get through it. You’ve always been strong. Stronger than me. All I wanted was a better life for us.”
Diego leaned back in his seat, speechless, numb, trying to absorb her words. Should he feel vindicated? Furious? Relieved? It felt as though her admission were turning his life upside down…or perhaps finally right side up.
“I think,” Vidas said softly, “you owe your son an apology.”
She wiped her cheeks with a tissue, taking a moment to collect herself. “If I could go back and undo it, mijo, I would.” She swallowed her sobs, trying to k
eep her voice steady. “I’m very sorry.”
Diego stared at her, in too much shock to accept her apology.
“The next few days,” Vidas said, “will probably be very, very hard for both of you. You’re bound to have a lot of feelings. You’re going to need to learn to trust each other again and build a new relationship.”
Diego only half-listened. He was mostly wondering, who was this woman sitting beside him? And why did he feel as if she, like everybody else, had left him all those years ago?
CHAPTER 25
IN THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED, Diego stumbled through each day as though staggering out from a very long war. For over ten years, two sides of him had fought a constant battle: one side desperate to say something about Mac’s abuse while the other side struggled to deny it. War had become his inner default. With his mom’s acknowledgment of the abuse, the battle had ended, but the victory had left him dazed.
His mom seemed equally disoriented, neither nagging him about his chores nor scolding Eddie to gather his toys. At night, she quickly withdrew to her room, emerging in the morning with red and swollen eyes.
Diego retreated in turn, leaving for school early in the morning and closing his door upon hearing her come home at night.
Their distance became like a wall between them. She was a stranger living on the other side.
“You look like you got hit by a truck,” Kenny told him the day after the meeting with Vidas. “What happened? You okay?”
“Yeah,” Diego replied. “Just stuff at home.”
Thankfully, Kenny didn’t press the issue. At lunch, they mostly made small talk. On Sunday, they watched TV and biked to the beach without saying much. Diego didn’t feel the need to. All that mattered was that they were still friends.
Ariel noticed the change in Diego right away too. “What’s going on?” she asked at his locker. “You seem so far away.”
He felt far away—even from her. “I guess I am.”
“How can I help?” she asked.
The words jumped out of his mouth: “Just don’t leave me?”
He felt kind of pathetic saying it. But she merely smiled and said, “Okay.”
It almost made him want to cry. He felt that way a lot as he went through each day: constantly on the brink of tears. Even in his dreams he felt sad, as they changed too.
One night when the nightmare shark appeared, Diego was again in the open ocean, but this time he was in the safety of a fishing boat.
He watched as the familiar fin approached slowly, unthreatening—almost peacefully. Instead of attacking, the creature rubbed itself alongside the boat, as if marking its scent—more like a cat than a shark.
Diego felt enthralled rather than afraid, and as the shark swam away he felt an odd sense of loss that it was leaving.
One afternoon in his room, he began looking through old photos and stopped at one taken when he was eight years old, on the day that Eddie had come home from the hospital. In the picture, Diego smiled proudly, holding his newly born brother in his arms. Their mom stood on one side of Diego and on the other stood Mac.
Even with his face torn out, Mac seemed massive compared to little Diego. How could he have done such things to a boy? And how could his mom have suspected and kept silent?
As Diego stared at the photo, he felt tears rise, along with a tightness in his throat. His breath quickened. He couldn’t get sufficient air. He put the picture down and ran to the window, hurled open the sash, braced himself on the sill, and took in huge gasps until he finally calmed down.
At his next probation appointment, he described the experience and Vidas asked him to bring the picture in.
“Here.” He showed it to Vidas the following week.
Vidas cradled the photo in his palm, studying it carefully. “What do you feel?” he asked Diego. “When you see yourself as such a little boy and think back to what Mac did?”
“Sad…more than sad…” Diego inhaled a deep breath. “Like, what did I do to deserve it?”
“You didn’t deserve it, Diego.”
“Then why did it happen? Why me?”
“I don’t know.” Vidas let out a weary sigh. “Sometimes bad things just happen—really horrible things. That doesn’t mean we deserve them. We didn’t choose them and we can’t undo them. We can’t change the past. The best we can do is accept what happened and make a new future.”
Vidas handed the photo back. “If little Diego was here with us, what would you say to him?”
Diego gazed at the photo of his eight-year-old self. “That he should’ve fought harder, that he should’ve gotten away, that he should’ve made his mom believe him.”
“And what do you think little Diego would tell you?”
Diego stared into the lonesome eyes and his breathing faltered. “That he fought as hard as he could. But that he was only a little boy.” As he spoke, his voice cracked painfully. “That he’s sorry, and to please stop hating him.”
“Can you do that?” Vidas asked. “Can you stop hating yourself for what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Diego said, choking back sobs. “Sometimes I just feel so angry. I hate myself so much.”
“Of course you feel angry,” Vidas responded, “but you don’t have to hate yourself for what happened.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Diego asked, wiping his cheek.
Vidas gestured to the photo. “Ask your little boy.”
Through a blur of tears, Diego stared at the picture, and in his mind he listened as the boy spoke. “He says for me to stop trying to kill him, that he didn’t mean to do the things he did, and he just”—Diego struggled against his tears—“he just wants me to love him. All he ever wanted was to be loved.”
“Can you tell him you love him?” Vidas asked.
“I don’t know.” Diego sobbed.
“I believe you can,” Vidas said. “Imagine yourself holding him, the same way you held your baby brother, and imagine saying ‘I love you.’”
Diego did as Vidas suggested. His eyes clenched shut and he brought his hands to his face as tears poured down his cheeks uncontrollably—crying for the boy he might have been, the childhood he might have had, and all that the little boy inside him had survived….
Diego had no idea for how long he wept. When at last he finished, he wiped his eyes, embarrassed. “Man, where did that come from!” It was an exclamation, not a question; he already knew the answer. Apparently, so did Vidas.
“How’re you feeling now?” he asked.
“Good…weird…like I’ve been holding my breath underwater for years and I’m finally surfacing.”
With the mention of water, Vidas poured Diego a cup from his desk. Diego downed it thirstily and asked for seconds, feeling like he needed to replenish himself after all the tears. They sat quietly for a while until Vidas asked, “Do you feel all right to go or do you need more time?”
“I think I’m good,” Diego said.
Vidas walked him down the hall and told him, “Be careful biking home.”
Diego nodded, regretting the time he’d lashed out at Vidas, saying not to touch him. At this moment, he would’ve given anything in the world for a pat on the back.
CHAPTER 26
“YOUR MOM PHONED ME,” Vidas told Diego at their next meeting. “She said she’s tried to talk with you but you ignore her.”
It was true. If she knocked on his door, he wouldn’t answer. When she made Sunday breakfast, he ate it but didn’t acknowledge her. And on payday, when she’d brought him a new pair of sneakers, he took them without a word.
“Why should I talk to her?” Diego asked Vidas. “She didn’t talk to me all those years about what she suspected Mac was doing.”
“You’ve got every right to be angry,” Vidas said calmly. “But if you let your anger trap you, you’re hurting yourself.”
His response made Diego madder. “So, I should just forgive and forget? Pretend like it never happened?”
“No, I don�
��t think you should pretend anything. And I doubt you’ll forget it. But she said she’s sorry. Do you believe her?”
“I guess.”
In fact, she’d been showing a new deference toward him—maybe because she felt guilty, or maybe because he’d finally had the courage to confront her.
“So what am I supposed to do?”
Vidas rolled his chair across the carpet to the bookshelf and pulled the dictionary out. “Look up ‘forgive.’”
Diego propped the book onto his lap and turned the pages till he found “forgive.”
“What’s it say?” Vidas asked.
Diego read the first entry aloud: “‘To give up resentment.’”
“Good,” Vidas told him. “Now, what does ‘resentment’ say?”
Diego flipped through the pages again. “‘A feeling of ill-will and deep bitter anger.’”
“Is that how you want to go through life?” Vidas asked.
Diego frowned in response. Of course he didn’t. But how could he let her off after what she’d let happen?
That evening, while talking with Ariel on the phone, he asked, “Remember what you told me about your dad hitting your mom and all that? Like, how did you forgive him?”
Ariel became quiet and Diego wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have asked.
“Well, it wasn’t easy,” she replied. “That’s for sure. For a long time I didn’t forgive him. I wanted him to feel bad for how much he’d hurt Mom and me.” She paused for a breath. “But after a while I realized that I was mostly making me feel bad. I got tired of it, you know? I wanted to feel happy. The only way I could do that was by forgiving him. It’s how I set myself free…. Besides,” she added, “we all do stuff that hurts people. I’m no saint. If I can forgive others, I figure it’s good karma.”
Diego pondered what she’d said. Maybe he should forgive his mom—not so much for her, but for himself.
He was lying on the living room sofa, still talking with Ariel when his mom arrived home.
“Hi,” she said after he hung up. “How was your day?”
