The Shyster's Daughter, page 3
He hands her a slip of paper, a prescription order, probably a new medication to treat her diabetes.
“They’ll be expecting you at seven in the morning on Monday,” he informs her.
Dr. Simpkins pats her on the back, a swift show of consolation before closing the door and moving on to his next appointment.
As my mother stares at the slip before stashing it in her purse, I’m able to make out enough of the doctor’s scribbling to see it’s not a prescription for medication. Instructions are written down for the hospital’s technician to Check for demise of fetus.
“He’s dead?”
This comes out before I consider what it will do to my mother. I’m only thinking of myself, my own hurt, how my little brother, and I’m sure it’s my baby brother, might be gone before I ever get a chance to meet him. My father and I have big plans. In a couple years, when he’s old enough, he’ll fill the third seat at all the Angels’ home games. I will teach him how to throw, how to catch and how to bat like Rod Carew and heavy hitter Brian Downing. I think of my mother and how she’s spent her entire pregnancy decorating his room in yellows, not just because it’s a neutral color, but also because it’s a cheerful one. I think of how it took my father half a day to figure out the directions to put together the new crib. Just yesterday my sister helped my mother string up the safari mobile—little stuffed zebras, lions, and giraffes hanging by invisible string. The changing table is equipped with baby powder, cloth diapers, and Baby Magic lotion. Our home smells and feels like my baby brother already lives in it.
Her strength has returned because my mother hugs me hard.
“We don’t know yet. Dr. Simpkins couldn’t hear a heartbeat. He said it’s a possibility.”
“So he’s making us go home, not knowing?”
“There’s nothing more he can do.”
There’s plenty more he could do. He could admit her into the hospital. They could run the test right now and find out. Sending her home, not knowing if she’s carrying around a dead baby, is cruel.
By the time we reach the car, my mother stops crying, and even insists on stopping off at 7-11 for my favorite dinosaur egg jawbreaker as my reward for having to wait so long at the doctor’s. When we get home, my father is still at the office, and she secludes herself in their bedroom where she’ll rest until dinner.
My sister and I are in charge of making it and she actually comes out of her room without threat or force. I boil pasta for spaghetti and my sister chops tomato, carrots, and red cabbage to make a salad. Something stops me from telling her what happened at the doctor’s, how our brother or sister may be dead. Guiltily, I like making dinner with her, and if I say anything she’ll want to comfort my mother and they’ll freeze me out.
Tonight, instead of eating in the dining room, we set up at the kitchen table. Before my father has a chance to finish his salad, my mother breaks the news that Dr. Simpkins couldn’t hear the baby’s heartbeat.
My father refuses to believe it. In his line of work, there’s almost always a catch, a way out.
His reaction is exactly what she’s expecting and her face visibly tires.
“He tried a couple of times, Paul.”
“Well, he didn’t try hard enough.” My father stuffs a forkful of pasta in his mouth, ignoring the rest of his salad. “That deaf old man probably couldn’t hear his own heart with a stethoscope.”
Nobody else at the table seems so convinced, though my mother lets it drop. Rhea serves herself a plate of what we’re eating. Of course, she’s eating the spaghetti noodles plain, no Prego sauce, not even melted butter or olive oil. My mother nudges her plate of spaghetti away but forces down a glass of whole milk, hopeful the baby still might need the calcium.
Worry has taken over all of us. It keeps us in the same room when usually, after dinner, we scatter. Instead of sprawling out on the family room floor, just inches from the TV, the way my father always does right after dinner, he sits on the couch beside my mother. One arm is behind her on the cushion, and he gently rubs her neck. With the other, he holds out the remote, channel surfing. Rhea collapses on a black and white polka dotted beanbag she brought in from her room, and I take a couch pillow and lay belly down on the floor.
My father decides on Magnum P.I., my mother’s favorite show because it takes place in Hawaii. We’d planned a trip there this summer before we learned my mother’s due date is in late September.
Halfway through the program, Kevin Cooper’s face suddenly appears on screen. It’s the same mug shot my mother and I saw the night we first heard he escaped. She turns up the sound.
“Paul.”
There’s no need for her to call out to him since he’s just in the kitchen, right next to the family room, and he can hear everything.
The female reporter is standing in front of a jail in Santa Barbara where Cooper has been arrested for raping a woman at knife point. My father comes back into the room, leaving the bag of popcorn he’d just popped in the microwave. After two months of running, Cooper has been captured. He was working as a deckhand for a couple and their five-year-old girl, with whom he’d sailed from Ensenada, Mexico, to Pelican Cove, just off Santa Barbara.
“I told you people he ran to Mexico,” my sister pronounces.
What she says isn’t what makes us laugh. We laugh for other reasons. We laugh in relief that Cooper’s finally been caught. We laugh that we’ll no longer have to blockade our sliders with big dining room chairs. We laugh at the awful dinner we just ate. We laugh at how I boiled the noodles for too long, how we didn’t even need to eat them with a fork since they stuck together in clumps like finger food. We laugh at how all of us ate the salad Rhea made even though she forgot the dressing.
My mother holds her belly and that’s when she cries out she feels it, buried deep inside the womb, the baby roused and agitated by the first sounds of family.
WHAT THEY TOLD ME AFTER HE DIED
I turned your father down three times for a date. I had to. He was a football star and girls gave him anything he wanted. First he asked me when we were at a dance, then after he ran into me with my girlfriends at the drive-in. Finally, at the park while I was practicing with my drill team, he got my attention by nearly ramming into the fender of my powder blue M.G.
It was the way he apologized that got to me. Both of us were sorry it had come to that.
—June Priamos, ex-wife
I don’t care what anybody tells me. That stripper chick was in on it. You don’t get it. I know she was.
—Rhea Priamos
Your father showed up here once with a real pretty girl. Sorry, I can’t remember her name. She reminded me of Halle Berry. Smooth skin, short dark hair. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Man, neither could I.
—Luis Martinez, manager of Boca Grande
You watch out for Gil. I mean it. With your father gone, there’s no telling what he’s capable of. He wanted your father’s approval like he wanted your pappou’s. He never got either. How could he? Everybody knows he’s a psychopath. You know what he said while standing over his own father’s grave? “How long will it take before the maggots come.” Nobody said a word. Maybe they were too shocked, so I told him, “Apparently not long. One’s already here.”
—June Priamos
It’s not uncommon to begin the embalming procedures on the same day the deceased is brought in, especially if requested by the family.
—Antonio Sanchez, funeral director at Chapel of Remembrance
THE INSANITY DEFENSE
My brother is born all yellow like his room. Two weeks overdue and with a bad case of jaundice, he is extracted from my mother’s body with the help of giant metallic tongs and a scalpel. By this time even her liver wants him out because it’s stopped cleaning red blood cells. Only my father is able to watch the birth. My mother is out cold.
Nicholas weighs in at nine pounds even with a tuft of dark wet hair and puffy little hands. My sister and I catch a glimpse of him from behind the glass in the nursery. The nurse cradles him as if we should be impressed. But his face is still unrecognizable, still swollen and squished from fitting for so long inside the walls of our mother’s uterus. His ears are pointy like Dr. Spock’s, and his tiny mouth is twisted in terror at being cut out and cut from her body. He’s my baby brother.
“He looks like an alien baby,” I say.
My sister shrugs me off. She doesn’t seem too concerned that our new brother is sick. It bothers me enough for both of us. Two other babies, two healthy babies are red-faced and squirming in their plastic bubble basinets. Especially under the fluorescents, I can see that Nicholas is the wrong color.
“I hope Mom’s okay,” Rhea says turning toward the hall. “Dad shouldn’t be the only one who gets to see her.”
Neither of my surviving grandparents is at the hospital. My mother didn’t want my yia yia or Uncle Gil here. Can’t say I blame her. Yia Yia’s face could scare the life out of any newborn. Her wrinkles are deep and unforgiving, from a lifetime of holding grudges. She was widowed young at forty-four; her husband fifteen years her senior had been hand-picked by her father one summer on a trip to the islands. Their love was learned, practiced over time through the birth and raising of three boys. But his heart was bad and when he was taken from Yia Yia too soon, it made her old and bitter beyond her years. This is how my mother explained it to me one night after she caught me dipping into her Oil of Olay night cream, slopping it all over my cheeks and forehead. Since I was half Greek, I figured I’d better start early, seeing I stood a fifty-fifty chance of one day looking like my yia yia.
In order to be fair and avoid my father sulking, my mother also didn’t ask her mother to be present for the birth. Both of their fathers passed early, my mother’s father from cirrhosis of the liver and my father’s from a heart attack. “It’s a man’s job to provide for his family, then die before retirement,” my father often says, usually when paying the bills.
He appears from behind the swinging doors. The paper booties he wore in the operating room still cover up his dress shoes. This morning he had been called out of a bail hearing after my mother’s water broke.
“Have you seen Nicholas?”
My brother is named after our Greek grandfather, our pappou, a man my father still mourns decades later at holidays, especially Christmas. Pappou delivered more than fresh fruit to the Central Market in downtown L.A. for his wealthy brother-in-law who owned a produce company. He delivered the best one-liners that kept his family both in hysterics and in check. He had a practical habit of using a bar of Ivory soap on his head full of white hair, claiming the suds were why he never went bald, a habit my father eventually picked up. But what pappou is known best for is the time he grew desperate at the thought of his unmarried youngest son at twenty-three still living at the house. Somehow he snowed Helena Stamapolous, the bright young daughter of a family friend, into marrying Gil by telling her that a boy who never strays far from home is one who will never stray from his wife.
My mother doesn’t even get to choose Nicholas’s middle name because he’s named after my father. Obviously, I am too, with just an added vowel attached at the end.
“How’s Mom.” Rhea says this more like an accusation than a question, as if our father is to blame for the birth being forced and unnatural.
My father sneaks a look at the other babies, maybe hoping his own will somehow be lying in a plastic bubble on wheels too instead of where he really is, his tiny vitals all wired up in an incubator.
“She’s fine, but she won’t come to for another hour or so.”
Rhea takes a seat. When the news hit, she was pulled out of first period at her new school, a Christian academy in La Verne. She tells our parents she likes it, but she tells them a lot of things she doesn’t mean. She tells them she eats too, and I’ve caught her twice tossing out the noodles, finishing only the broth.
“You two go,” she decides for us. “I’ll wait.”
On the way home, my father pops a cassette in the tape deck. It isn’t Pavorotti or even his favorite country singer, Eddie Rabbit. It’s a foreign sounding voice, broken from nerves, from his Middle Eastern accent. It’s the voice of Bared Garrata, my father’s client, who has just been arrested for murder. Intermittently, his voice is interrupted by the loud creak of an office chair, the interrogating cop leaning back. They never give the comfortable, reclining seat to the suspect.
“Again,” the investigator states louder into the speaker, for the record. “You’re waiving your right to counsel.”
There’s mumbling and then Bared blurts out, “I have no choice. I have to shoot.”
“Bullshit,” my father says. “You hear that, Paula Girl?” He points to the cassette player. “That’s exactly the place where I can get this tossed out. He’s a goddamn foreigner. He’s not even sure what they’re saying.”
I’ve heard this man’s confession before, and I find that part hard to believe. His English sounds crystal clear to me. It’s my father’s first homicide and he’s played the tape countless times since the murder occurred. He’s moving up in the legal world, from the DUIs and drug offenses, where nobody pays much attention, to a murder that has made the local paper in Orange County. Even the birth of his first son can’t stop my father from thinking about the case, debating whether he should try and get the confession thrown out or use it toward an insanity defense. Either way, my father is behind the eight ball. The hearing earlier today was for Bared and because he holds dual citizenship in Armenia, a country that is considered by many to be the northern extension of the Middle East, bail is set at half a million.
Bared works as an assistant manager at a fan manufacturing plant in the city of Orange. He is not a terrorist. Neither is he a religious zealot. He is a family man with two daughters and an American wife. One afternoon Bared is set off when he’s convinced he overhears subordinates and his boss laughing in the break room about his small penis. He must not be able to sexually satisfy his fair-skinned wife, they say. She needs a white man or a Mexican or Black, like them.
The next morning Bared shows up at work, walks right into his boss’s office and fires one shot, square in the chest. The bullet blows clear through, burying in the back of the dead man’s chair. Security doesn’t tackle Bared on his way out of the building because he never runs. There are no other casualties since the act, as he sees it, has little to do with violence. He is defending his manhood, defending his marriage. Talk of pleasuring another man’s wife in his culture calls for immediate and unrelenting measures. After the shooting, Bared leaves the weapon by the body and waits in his office where he phones his wife, explaining that something has come up. Save him a plate. He won’t make it home in time for dinner.
My father wants to argue that the voices Bared heard are really his own, that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic and needs psychological help, not incarceration.
“He isn’t crazy,” I say. “You’d better come up with something else.”
We’re almost home and out on his front porch, I see Moses Murillo, our neighbor, dousing the grass with his own brand of weed killer, a can of gasoline. He’s chosen the worst possible time to pour flammable liquid on his yard, considering it’s early fall and everything is still hot and dry from summer and the Santa Anas have already begun to stir.
But nothing Moses does ever makes any sense. He’s a Vietnam War vet with irrational moods that must make his family want to duck from the swing. Even with the windows closed, we can sometimes hear him yelling at his two boys with the kind of rage that has made my parents anonymously call the cops more than once. In the Murillos’ one acre backyard stands a baseball diamond with real bases and a pitcher’s mound, and by the time the police arrive, Moses will be crouched behind home plate, catching his sons Cheech and Rigo’s slow pitches, patiently instructing them how to improve their throw. Moses used to beat on his dog too, a beautiful German Shepherd named Dexter, until my father convinced him to sell it for big bucks to a client of his who owned a guard dog business.
I point to Moses.
“Now that’s crazy.”
My father chuckles and waves. In response, Moses lifts up the gas can like he’s making a champagne toast.
Bared’s rambling confession is still playing as we pull into our driveway. “They want to take her from me. He say they sleep with my wife. I buy handgun for two hundred dollars. A Filipino man, by bakery. Say it’s okay, I buy for protection. Those people, they insult me, they come for my family.”
The cop grills Bared some more, getting him to admit he purchased the stolen gun the night before the shooting off of some gang bangers while cruising the streets of Artesia. He conceals the gun in his Tupperware lunch box.
“What makes you think he’s sane?” my father asks.
He sounds irritated at hearing the prosecutor’s likely argument out of his twelve-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
I’m surprised he’s even listening, and I open the car door, sorry I brought it up.
“He sounds too nervous,” I say. “You can hear it in his voice. He knows what he did is wrong.”
At dusk, my father orders me out of my room to go and feed the horses. Through the chain link fences, I can see Rigo and Cheech are still out playing ball. Rigo’s at the plate and Cheech is pitching. Overpowering the hard pop of a Louisville Slugger or the even harder punch of a caught ball is the electric sound coming from the oleander bushes. Not to be mistaken for high tension wires, these are horse flies, a genetically pumped up version of the house variety, that buzz and bat against the leaves. It doesn’t matter that they don’t bite. They are dangerous in other ways. They live around horses, hoping to swarm on any scratch, laying eggs inside until the scratch turns into an infected flesh wound. If even one fly gets tangled in my hair, I’m petrified it might feast on my scalp, and I may just have to grab the horse clippers my mother keeps in the hay barn and the Murillo boys can watch me shave my head bald.
