The swollen sun amplified the turquoise, yellow and orange storefronts of Oaxaca in December. I was thirty-two, and along with my maternal relatives, had rented a villa with a central courtyard, where we gathered daily. I was still under the impression that I had the perfect family. My grandfather sat on a tall wooden chair in an argyle sweater with a striking shock of white hair. My aunts cut avocados and squeezed limes into a giant ceramic bowl. My cousins lay on woven blankets with ear candles inserted halfway into their brains. These were cone shaped gadgets designed to burn slowly and draw the wax out of ear canals. My cousin’s wife read the instructions aloud emphasizing the fact that you shouldn’t be surprised to find bugs in the residue of your eustachian tubes. They all screamed and laughed hysterically at such a thought.
I was struck for the millionth time by how beautiful they were. A familiar stew of admiration and envy coursed through me. As children, I was the brunette in a flock of blonde relatives, the ugly duckling who didn’t fit. From my earliest recollections I was vaguely aware that one’s hair color dictated their status.
My veterinarian uncle was telling the story of how he had perforated his own ear drum after foolishly using a horse Q-tip one day. I yearned to join the antics, but I was on my way to my parents’ room for a family meeting, initiated by my father.
My brother’s door stood open to the patio, and I peeked in to see if he had left yet. His wife was nursing their new baby in an armchair by the window. I waved and scanned the shadows for Jed. He came out of the bathroom, stepped into a pair of flip flops, and squeezed his daughter’s foot for a moment. With an endearing smile and bright blue eyes, he was the one who resembled our cousins.
Stepping into the afternoon sun he asked, “What do think this talk is about?”
“Something ominous,” I said, recalling our father’s sober demeanor at lunch. We walked along terra cotta tiles and paused outside a rustic oak door. In the dimly lit room, our mother greeted us from the edge of a sofa, her long legs tucked sideways self-consciously. Our father fidgeted in a crooked chair. We sat on the crisp floral blanket that covered the bed. I tugged on a stray green thread that had escaped it’s embroidered leaf.
In my childhood home, during Star Trek, I perched on the couch with my parents and Jed, balancing dinner plates on laps. Awash in blue light from the television, we ate bean casserole or hamburger pie while the Starship Enterprise explored strange new worlds. My father, volatile as Captain Kirk, worshipped Mr. Spock’s commitment to logic and reason. I inherited a love for Vulcans and science fiction.
Occasionally we would go on outings, just the two of us, to the Stamford Diner or Baskin Robbins. He sipped a double chocolate milkshake while I licked a mint chocolate chip cone and speculated about whether a tree that falls in the woods makes a sound if there is nobody there to hear it.
“You make me feel smart,” I told him once and he was so charmed that he quoted it for many years.
In college I took a philosophy class called Theories of Knowledge and Reality. I couldn’t resist that title. Although I majored in photojournalism and graphic design, I enthusiastically took as many random electives as I could. It may not have been a great strategy for maintaining good grades, since it maxed out my credits each semester, but I was too curious to be prudent. I took everything from astronomy to scuba to History of Magic and Witchcraft.
The philosophy class was graduate level and I have no idea why an art major like me, with no prerequisites, was allowed to enroll in it, but I sat in a small metal chair attached to a folding desktop in a row of older students and had my mind blown all semester. I was my father’s daughter. He majored in philosophy and there was nothing he liked more than debating questions with no answers.
One day after class, I dropped my backpack in the hallway of my rental house and snatched a rotary phone off the credenza. Stretching the cord all the way into my room, I sat cross legged on my blue rug. Still out of breath from racing up the stairs, I dialed my father’s number.
“Have you heard of the Ship of Theseus?” I asked him, leaning back against my bed and kicking off my boots. It was a thought experiment that we had discussed in class that day, about a wooden ship. Over time, each plank decays, is taken away and then replaced. Despite the continual reparation, the question is whether it remains the same ship. If so, what gives it its continuity? And if not, when does it stop being itself? If somebody kept the old planks and reassembled them in the same order, would that be a second ship or the original ship?
“It’s an interesting paradox,” my father replied. “Do you think it’s the same ship?”
“At first I did, but later I wasn’t so sure. My teacher shifted the discussion to people. Am I the same Kendall that was once a baby even if all my cells have been replaced and my form has changed?”
“That’s the essential question, isn’t it? If you are still Kendall, then what is the enduring quality that makes you, you?”
“It must be something beyond physical. Is it my memories? My personality? My soul? My name? I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the same,” I said.
“What if you’re not a thing made of parts, but instead you’re a concept that persists even when all of your physical matter is replaced?”
I could feel my brain stretching to match his intellect and I desperately wanted him to see me as smart. In his world that equated to love.
“That would mean that my identity relies on someone perceiving me. Just like the tree falling in the woods that only makes a sound if there’s somebody there to hear it.”
“I hear you and I love you very much, Kendall.”
In the dim room in Mexico my father said, “I wanted to talk to you kids about something.”
On the street outside, a brass band wailed joyfully.
“Do you have an illegitimate child or something?” My brother joked.
He often got sarcastic in uncomfortable situations. My Dad leaned back in his chair and glanced at my mom. Something unspoken seemed to tumble in the air between them. I squinted my eyes and funneled my awareness onto my father, the abstract planes of light reflecting off his glasses, his black and white beard, his round nose.
“Actually, yes, a daughter,” he answered.
A jolt went through me, as if all the organs in my body were running for cover.
“Holy shit,” my brother said, with an incredulous laugh.
Suddenly I had the disorienting realization that all the planks in my ship had been rearranged. My father began to explain, but I was on the ocean trying to reconstruct the only boat I had ever known.
“Long before I met your mother, I had a romance with a woman from Brazil. At twenty-one, I had no capacity to take care of anyone, let alone myself. When she became pregnant, I offered to help, but she insisted on returning home and raising the baby without me.”
The pressure in my ears shifted, muffling the sound in the room. I couldn’t assimilate this new information into our family story, and I didn’t want to. It meant two things about my father that were too incongruous to fit my understanding of him. He condoned secrecy and he was capable of abandoning his child.
I turned to gauge my brother’s reaction. His high cheekbones and clenched jaw revealed only stoicism. I tried to imagine how it would feel to have a child you didn’t know.
“Did you ever wonder about her?” I asked.
“No, you’re my family,” he insisted. Perhaps he thought that this was what I wanted to hear, but he was generally not in the habit of appeasing others. He was honest to a fault, and he had carried on for thirty-nine years without thinking about his daughter. Somehow this called into question his love for me. I felt inexplicably adrift. Abandoned. Fatherless.
He was still talking, his beard moving in rhythm with the words. Tucked into the awkward chair, he seemed unusually small. I was processing bits and pieces. Her name was Tania. She was eight years older than me. She lived in California with her husband. They had five children and several grandchildren.
My mother interjected, “That means that Dad is a great grandfather. Can you believe it? They all had teen pregnancies.” Disdain has a way of being contagious. I wrinkled my nose in solidarity with my mom.
Outside a stray dog let out a yip. Then came a canine chorus of call and response.
“Why is this coming up now?” my brother asked.
“Because Tania called me of the first time, and I went to San Diego to meet her.”
“Damn, how did that go?” Jed leaned forward, feet planted on the floor, elbows on his knees.
“They all live in a trailer park with bunches of kids,” my mom interjected.
I noticed how that made it sound more like an infestation than a family, but it would take me years to recognize that she was packaging the story to discourage me from getting involved.
“Their car was broken down, so I gave them a little money to get a new one,” my dad said. “What do you think they did? They gave it to a friend instead.”
“Well you can’t keep giving them money if they’re just going to piss it away,” my brother swiped the air with one hand.
“My thoughts exactly,” my dad agreed. “And her husband is bad news. He’s a manic depressive. A real loose cannon.”
All at once a memory snuck up on me. It was a refrain that my father often repeated in affectionate moments. You’re the best daughter in the world, except for all the daughters in Brazil. It had seemed ridiculous at the time, and I never understood where it had originated, but even as a child I was unnerved by it.
“Wait a minute,” I said, disgusted. “That thing you used to say, except for all the daughters in Brazil. Why did you do that?”
He paused. His eyes stuttered, right then left. “I suppose it was a humorous nod to your mother. A private joke, if you will.”
“A joke?” my voice was sharp, and my mind ricocheted with accusatory questions. “Why did you keep this a secret our whole lives?”
“Your mom. She asked me not to tell. Left to my own druthers, I would’ve told everyone.”
“I wanted my parents to have a happy, non-judgmental view of my fiancé.” My mom pinched a lock of her hair between thumb and forefinger and twisted it fiercely enough to make a gritty sound. Her nervous habit. “My father wouldn’t tolerate breaking the rules of sex and marriage.”
“And now?” Jed asked. “Is it still a secret?”
“Yes, absolutely yes,” my mother said.
He nodded, appearing to capitulate.
“So you break this news to us on a trip with the whole extended family and now we’re supposed to guard the secret?” I didn’t fully understand my fury, but it overtook me. “What if I don’t want to?”
They all spoke at once.
“Calm down.”
“You’re being too sensitive.”
“Come on, Kendall, be reasonable.”
“No, I’m not reasonable,” I snapped. “Fuck that.”
We were all speechless. We sat and let the silence in the room expand. I could feel the pulse in my neck find its rhythm again.
“Would you like to see photos?” My father asked.
I nodded, my mouth still tight.
He lifted a folder from the table, removed a handful of pictures and fanned them onto the bed. They varied in size. I reached for a black and white one and recoiled. It was like looking straight into my own childhood. She was an elementary aged kid with a reluctant smile and enormous teeth. The very same ones that had caused me seven years of braces. I picked up another. She was in high school with feathered brown hair. She was my twin, awkwardly closing her mouth over those unwieldy teeth. Her bottom lip was full and the corners turned down in a perpetual pout that I knew well. In another picture she was an adult, her hair tumbling down in a wavy cascade. She had my eyebrows, dark and arched. I had never looked like anyone before. A sister’s life story was in this pile where only moments ago she hadn’t existed at all.
If a daughter grows up in Brazil and there’s no father there to hear it, does she make a sound?
“As far as I’m concerned,” my brother said, tossing a photo onto the bed. “You’re just a sperm donor. They’re not our family.”
I felt a stab for the buck toothed girl. How could a new father be so callous? Didn’t paternity carry any weight for the men in our family? I wished that I had an ally in my brother, someone with whom I could process this strange experience, but we were strangers in this room.
My father looked directly at me. “Tania asked if she could contact you.”
I braced against a speedy current.
“No,” I responded hastily, overwhelmed by the splintering of our family’s ship. “She cannot.”
I must have levitated through dinner that night, barely present. I remember tortilla soup with cilantro. I remember a parade in the street with children in angel wings riding donkeys. When the sun came around the next morning, we were walking on faded grass among the forlorn ruins of the Zapotec city, Monte Alban. Its carefully laid out pyramids and temples still had a commanding presence even though their time had come and gone. The wide swath of stairs monopolizing the exterior of each building made me think that the whole point was to reach the sky. I tested the uneven stones through the soles of my sneakers, cautiously setting my toes on each step. They weren’t deep enough to accommodate my heels which hung precariously over the edges. I tiptoed up each small riser to the flat summit of a soaring pyramid. The centuries and the elements had erased any signs of the human sacrifices that had occurred there. Gazing back down, my ascent looked as steep and wide as an Olympic ski jump. My family was scattered in tiny cliques on the ancient plaza below. The Oaxaca Valley fell away for miles and was trimmed by hazy mountains. I was dizzy with vertigo and the weight of my parents’ confession. I considered leaking the blood of this secret to the whole clan, but I didn’t dare. I hadn’t fully excavated my own feelings yet. So I turned inward instead of lashing out.
During the next several days at the villa, even with our secret contained, family ties unraveled. I observed it with uncharacteristic detachment. The recent death of our matriarch, my beloved grandmother, amounted to removing the keystone and unlocking a rockslide. My aunts competed to be the caretaker of their widowed father. Significant others complicated the dynamic and fights erupted more impulsively than ever before. My mother wove herself over and under the drama, muttering about how everyone was on their very worst behavior. I was grateful when it was time to fly home to my life in Colorado.
Over the years I thought of Tania. Somewhere in California there was a half sister who shared my face, but the picture my parents painted had dissuaded me from reaching out. Her husband was a loose cannon. They had lost custody of their oldest daughter. They squandered the money my father gave them.
Still, a current of curiosity lurked at my core and led me to type her name into the search bar on Facebook. There she was metamorphosing over the years. A skinny buck toothed little girl. A self conscious teen with lonely eyes. A wavy haired young mother. A plump grandma surrounded by nine grandchildren. Her dream was to see the Eiffel Tower. She adored stray dogs. She quoted Star Trek often. She was a sucker for conspiracy theories. She hated Muslims. She loved guns. She was vehemently opposed to abortion and she demanded a Christian in the White House. Most perplexing of all, she despised immigrants, although she had moved here from Brazil. I decided we were polar opposites. To be honest, I was a little scared of her, so I let the years pass without contacting her. I married, moved to a house in the mountains and had two babies.
My father gave me the occasional update. She was in nursing school. Her mother passed away. His voice in the phone always sounded like mahogany, smooth and resonant.
“I thought you might want to know,” he said one day. “Tania has cancer. They’ve given her six months to live.” I searched his demeanor for any sorrow and found none.
“Do you feel any emotions for Tania?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t as impervious as he
seemed.
“I think what I feel is a sense of duty,” he replied.
All at once I longed for the little girl in the black and white photos who had never been loved by her father. In my mind I began drafting an email to Tania. How do you introduce yourself to a dying sister you’ve never met? Fifteen years ago, I had rejected her. Perhaps she hated me for everything I had and everything she lacked. A father, financial security, a future. Why me and not her?
At bedtime, lying on the blankets with my children, I said, “Once upon a time, there was a young woman who thought her life was normal until the day when she discovered she had a sister she’d never met.”
“Will this story have a firefighter in it, Mama?” Rowan asked.
“And a fairy?” Chloe added.
“Of course. All of our stories do,” I replied.
After the kids went to sleep, I sat at the desk in my office and nudged my computer awake.
“Dear Tania,” I wrote. “I hope that you are OK with me contacting you. I’ve been curious about you. We share a father who is a very interesting and unusual character. He’s smart, funny, anxious, bossy, creative, articulate, obnoxious, loyal, combative, critical, enthusiastic, talented, tortured, philosophical, musical, loud, obsessive-compulsive, quick-witted and rebellious. And he dances an impressive Mambo. That picture of you as a little girl looks just like him.”
I tried to look into the darkness beyond the window pane, but it was impenetrable. I leaned toward the desk and read my message over and over, while the wheels of my office chair slowly crept out from under me. Finally I hit send.