They turned the corner, making their way around the block where the plague of emptying houses hadn’t seemed to hit yet. Everything on this street was fine and dandy. For now.
Sam fiddled with the necklace her father had given her. A gold heart on a gold chain—ironically, the same thing that failed him was the thing he had gifted her with.
“Can I ask you something, Raul?”
“Of course.”
“Do you ever think about your dad?”
“The one who left my mom to raise me alone?” Raul shook his head. “No. He’s dead to me.”
“Are you sure you got all the facts? You know how important facts are,” Sam reminded him.
“I got all the facts I needed when he never looked me up all these years, never reached out. I’m the kid, he’s the dad. It’s his job to prove his love, not mine.”
“Don’t you want to know why he left? If there’s more to the story?”
“Well, my mom’s dead, so there’s really no way for me to find out, is there?”
If Sam had learned anything from Raul, it was that there was always a way to find out the truth. “If you want, I could help you. I could look through old obituaries, or see if he’s listed in the phonebook. Anything you can think of that can help me track him down. I’d do anything for you, Raul.”
Raul’s pace slowed, and Sam’s matched his. “I know, Sam, and that’s exactly why I don’t want to know more. Because I’m afraid to find out he is not worth the effort.” Raul reached across the space separating them and wrapped her in a hug. “But I appreciate the offer.”
When Raul told her he had no desire to meet his father, he only meant it in that way that any abandoned child does. Meaning he wanted his father to find him, not the other way around. Raul often dreamed of the day a knock on the door would reveal his father on the other side, who had overcome every obstacle to be reunited with the son he had crossed seas and climbed mountains to meet.
No matter how convincing Raul sounded that he didn’t care, his father was always waiting on the outskirts of his mind. Plenty of people had let Raul down in his life, but only one of them mattered. And that one person hadn’t found Raul yet, and Raul doubted he ever would.
Only one document, one picture, and Raul’s blood proved that Raul’s father ever existed. The single page had given the stranger a name, though Raul had only a vague memory of the man claimed on his birth certificate: Gabriel Smothers.
It was a faded memorial of a time when Raul was too young to fully remember but old enough to cling to the pieces. The details were scraps of an incomplete picture. The black and white tile bathroom floor of his childhood home. The yelling—his mother at his father, his father at his mother, the shouted words unclear. Raul gripping the glass doorknob, turning, finding the door locked. No escape. Just like his mother had been unable to escape Gabriel. When the lock finally clicked and the door opened, Lilith Smothers stood on the other side, arms open, smile comforting, and promise flooding his ears:
“He’s gone, Raul. You’re safe now.”
Raul couldn’t remember anything before that day, like his father’s atrocities that Lilith later confided to him, or the reason his father one day picked up and left, leaving no forwarding address. All Raul knew was that his father was there, then he wasn’t. And he never heard from him since.
The picture Raul kept in his wallet was a yellowed newspaper clipping of a child-version Raul standing next to his adult-version duplicate who could only be his dad. The man wore a newsboy hat and was plainly dressed, none of which fit with the severe New York City skyline. His face was kindly looking, which didn’t match the narrative Raul had created in his head of his ruthless, runaway father. The article headline from the clipping read:
Smothers Smothered the Competition in Local Newswriting Contest
The article went on to explain that Gabriel Smothers, husband and father, won a local newswriting competition for the New York Herald Tribune in their search for the next great news writer. His piece covered the polio epidemic of 1952, and the promising work on a vaccine. A curious irony, as Raul would unknowingly follow in his news-writing footsteps.
Raul clung to that lone memory along with the lasting grudge against the man who had helped give him life, but in the end was dead to him. Over the years Raul asked his mother about the man who abandoned them, the husband who turned her cold, and the father who turned Raul competitive. If his father could win an award for news writing, Raul would win two. Even beyond the proverbial grave Gabriel still drove Raul to succeed.
“When’s Daddy coming back?” Raul had begged his mother the day his father left, wanting more than anything to know why, what Raul had done to push him away.
“He’s never returning, honey,” Lilith had replied simply, turning away to look out the window.
That day, Raul trudged slowly to his bedroom, watching his father hail a taxi, which a moment later drove away. For endless nights afterward he conjured ways to make his father return. He first tried acts of deviance—talking back at school, playing hooky, smoking cigarettes—which only earned him beatings. Then he tried his hand at overachieving, which barely caught his mother’s notice but at least served him well in life.
It was biological, a parent’s impulse to care for their young. If nature abounded with examples of this instinctive phenomenon, wasn’t humankind even more so inclined? But the only way his father ever showed up was on the front page of the newspaper, his name printed in ink, his stories covering everything from Rosa Parks’ unjust arrest to the threat of a nuclear holocaust.
Raul devoured each of his father’s stories as if they were his sustenance, filling his soul with the same words his father tapped into, until one day the articles stopped, and his father disappeared.
When Raul was sixteen, he had looked his father up. Found his address listed in the directory. Then he took one trolley, two buses, and walked six blocks to his father’s apartment. When he arrived outside the building, his father was walking out… holding the hand of a young boy. And so Raul was forced to accept that not only had his father ended one story—the one with Raul in it—but he had written a whole new story with a whole new ending, replacing Raul with a whole new family.
By this point Raul, Sam, and a grass-nibbling Fido had made two more left turns and were briskly walking back to Sam’s house. An unfamiliar car sat in her driveway, and an unfamiliar man waited on her porch.
“Who’s that?” Raul asked with the slightest hint of jealousy that Sam hadn’t detected.
“I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.” Sam marched up to the porch, eyeing the man dressed in head-to-toe burgundy, wearing a messenger boy cap. “Can I help you?”
The man glanced down at a paper in his hand. “Are you Samantha Stanton?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from Western Union and I have a special delivery for you.” A moment later he began swaying and snapping a beat before belting out an offkey version of “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes. He had just finished the first verse in a pitchy crescendo and was fumbling into an eardrum-agitating chorus when Sam cut him off.
“That’s enough, thank you,” Sam interjected, glancing over at Raul for an explanation. He was the only man Sam could think of who would send her a singing telegram about love… and even that was a stretch.
Raul shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t hire him.”
“Shall I continue?” the messenger offered with a sway and a snap.
“No, thank you. I’m sorry, but who sent you?” Sam asked.