Otro Día, Otra Vez

by Mathew Allan Garcia

The week after Papa passed away, one of his alebrijes nudged the door to my bedroom open, padded across the carpet, climbed the bed, and pressed the wooden stump of his head into my palm, the wood rough and unfinished.

He was a 12-inch-tall mountain lion with a lemon-yellow coat, orange streaks of painted fur along his body, red-lined musculature drawn with the finest brush Papa could make. His breath smelled of freshly-sanded wood and acrylic paint. His eyes were a deep lagoon-green, a color both frightening and wondrous at the same time—the color of deep ponds along railroad tracks out behind our house, of tadpoles wriggling in spring.

I picked him up, grunting a little from his weight, and laid him across my chest where he went to work immediately, purring and kneading my shirt with his claws.

This continued every night for the next week: a thump on my bedroom door, the calming purr and warm sandy breath on my face. One night a tearing sound woke me. The lion had ripped the window mesh and escaped into the cold night.

Walking along the cracked path on the side of the house, the beam of my phone’s flashlight shaky, I found him by the garage—Papa’s makeshift studio—pacing the length of the door, ears pricked back and tongue lolling, a low steady whine escaping his lips. He looked up at me expectantly as I approached, tail whipping back and forth.

Sometimes, in the weeks before he died, when the pain meds wore off and Papa would wake, he’d beg me to take him to the garage, to see his alebrijes. For his wake, we’d opened the studio up, let family and friends look at the alebrijes, awe at the expertly-carved creatures, the brightly colored animales. Mama and I refused to step inside, standing with hands clasped just outside the doorway, tears streaming down Mama’s face. I took a leave from work, moved back home to be with her.

In the daytime, Mama would float around the house, worrying about my job, about being a bother to me. I did what I could—cooking dinner for us, going for groceries, running errands for Mama, or cleaning around the house the best I could. Doing the best I could to not think about Papa.

Standing beside the garage now, I was filled with a slow simmering resentment, as the lion sat waiting for me to let him in. He was hoping to see Papa, hunched over his workbench, wood shavings in his white hair, like the countless times I’d seen him.

“He’s not coming back,” I hissed. “He’s dead. He’s not going to finish you.”

I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. The anger left me immediately, as cowardly emotions always do, and was replaced with shame—shame for not spending enough time with Papa, for always working, for endless otro día, otra vez Papa, for excuse after excuse. But time, man. It’s a real, solid thing and the longer I stayed away, the harder it was to come back. Harder still once the disease took all physical semblance of the man I called my Papa, withered him away to skin and bones. Until I couldn’t bear to look.

Sometimes, you have to look. I could hear Papa say the words to me now, like so many times before. Not quivering and frail like in his final days, but the deep, booming strong voice I remembered from my youth. Sometimes you have to look, or you miss it all.

The lion stopped dead in his tracks, sat on his haunches, stared up at me, the moonlight reflected in his glossy eyes. I could swear he was crying. The regal, proud strength that had surrounded him a moment ago abandoned him. He was no longer a solid piece of wood, he was frail—a hollow toy, a piece of driftwood marooned on shore. Finally, he lay down, resting his head on his paws.

I bent to pick him up and he crumpled down, his body flattening out on the pavement. As I crouched, dumbfounded, a cool breeze blew his splinters away in a trail of colorful flecks along the ashy star-strewn sky.

Throughout the funeral and weeks after, Mama’d remained unwavering, as strong and stern as I’d always remembered her. She kept her composure through the steady stream of visitors, relatives and friends who hadn’t come to visit during all the years Papa’d battled the sickness. People who I knew only from photographs that Papa kept in the dusty trunk under the bed, the ones that made Mama shed tears, the good kind that she didn’t know she was shedding as she flipped through the cracking, yellowed pages.

“This one was taken on the day your father asked me to walk with him around the placita,” Mama said, smiling coyly. The photo was not very good: a bright light whited out half of it, towards the bottom was a dark hole, and the rest… what looked like lattice and coiling vines.

She only looked at these photo albums with me, at night when we’d sit on the sofa, after the last visitor would leave. In the first few days we’d stare at the TV screen, at the novelas Mama’d religiously watch in the evenings and nights. When I found the trunk of photographs, I suggested we go through them, as a way to break the monotony. To my surprise she agreed.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“He was so nervous,” Mama said. “He had just started work in the city hall, and he had bought his first camera. He was carrying it with him that night—your father, the show-off—but he hadn’t really gotten the hang of it yet. Accidentally took a picture up his nose and up towards the roof of the gazebo.”

I laughed, and my chest throbbed, like working out a muscle you hadn’t used in a long time. It felt so good to laugh.

“That night didn’t end well, though,” Mama continued. The tears slid down the side of her nose, wrapped around the curve of her smile. “The flash of the camera must’ve woken the biggest moth I’ve ever seen in my life. I went running home screaming.”

The first of the tears slid off her chin and tapped the album sheet.

“Oh,” she said, wiping the tears away. She dabbed at the teardrop on the glossy cover sheet with her finger, smearing the page. She stared at it a moment, eyes wide, then cupped her face in her hands and sobbed.

I’d only seen her cry three times before. The first time when I was eight years old, when she’d miscarried while pregnant with my little sister Alma. The second time when she’d lost both her parents—my Nana to cancer and my Apa from pneumonia a year later. Now Papa. I don’t know if the tears will ever stop for Papa. It was too much heartbreak for someone I loved so much.

“I don’t know how to live,” she said, in between sobs. And I understood it not as a dependence on Papa, but as a testament to their long years together. How do you begin to live when the person who’s filled so much of your life is gone, leaving behind a dark, gaping hole? Papa wouldn’t have known how to live without Mama, either.

I’d spent the last few years learning to live without Papa. As his health deteriorated, I drew back, shoring up my defenses, waiting for the inevitable. Mama rushed in, spending countless hours bedside.

My solution had been to give him a laptop a year ago, create a Facebook account for him, teach him how to use it. Told myself it’d bring us closer—separate but together.

To my surprise he’d picked it up quickly, commenting on my posts, oftentimes captioning old photos I uploaded with the place and time. Little notes like of the picture of us at Disneyland (you cried so much when we tried to take a picture with Mickey) and private messages on a myriad of topics. From “Mijo, you have a letter here for you. Looks important,” to “your Mama got the TV stuck again. Can you come and fix it?” to the last one, the one I read over and over, a message on my birthday, probably sent after I’d ignored their calls:

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.

Each word was punctuated with a music note.

love you mijo from me and your Mama.

I’d spent my life not looking, too afraid of what I’d see, and I’d missed the last four years of Papa’s life. I think of the garage, Papa’s studio, a space he’d spent so much of his final years in, that’d filled him with so much joy—a space Mama and I were too afraid to enter.

I held Mama, and I wept with her. Time didn’t matter, there would be no more excuses, and I don’t know how much time had passed when finally her breathing calmed, and slowed. I thought she’d fallen asleep.

“Mi palomilla,” Mama whispered.

“What?”

“That’s what he called me from then on. His little moth—his Palomilla.”

After Mama went to bed, I went out to the garage, rolled the door open, the pungent smell of wood shavings and dusty paint wafting out. I flicked the light switch, and the fluorescent lights hummed on, bathing me in orange glow.

On the left side, on dusty shelves were Papa’s unfinished carvings: blocks of wood with a raven’s black button eyes peering out from within the grain, a panther’s claw reaching out from oblivion, a turtle still trapped within its shell.

Papa always told me the animals were trapped in the wood, so you had to pay close attention to it, find out what was inside. He’d said he had boxes full of carvings he’d mistakenly identified—foxes that were porcupines, rabbits that were hummingbirds, a tortoise meant as a fortieth anniversary present for Mama that pined to be a cheetah.

I walked around the room, remembering the countless late nights as Papa finished off a piece, refusing to stop until it was done, or until Mama came in yelling at us to go to sleep. He’d taught me everything; the type of paints he used, that the best kind of paint was the natural kind you can make yourself with tree sap, and lavender, ashes and honey. How heavy wood was the best—copal, or oak. So you knew it was full, it was solid, no gaping holes, no termite-hollowed chunk that you’d begin to work on only to find out it was rotted through.

On one of those long weekend nights before the diagnosis, he talked about Mama, how she was the prettiest girl in her village. That he’d learned to make alebrijes for her, to impress her, to remind her of home, climbing a lamppost and leaving them on the windowsill of her room.

A wooden box sat on his workstation. It was carved too, painted a bright grass green with a fire-engine-red lid. A heart, the symbol he used for all his carvings, was etched into the lid, my name carved at its center.

I opened it and the lion lay inside, posed in just the same way I’d seen him last, head contemplatively laid on his large, powerful paws, his eyes gazing up at me. The pride was still gone, but that didn’t make him weaker.

A note was tucked inside next to him. It read:

Un leon para mi Leoncito. Take care of him for me. Love, Papa

I pulled the lion out of the box, rubbed the unfinished part of his head. In the desk, I found Papa’s paints, his custom brushes, carving instruments, each meticulously cleaned and arranged. Holding the alebrije up to the light, I felt it purr, a soft hum reverberating between us. My fingertips itched, and a pleasant chill ran down the nape of my neck, as the tears spilled from my eyes.

Pulling a piece of sandpaper from Papa’s desk, I began running it over Leoncito’s head. I could almost feel him smile.

On the shelf behind the desk, I heard something move and I came around, setting the box and Leoncito down, the lion’s eyes beaming in the fluorescent glow. A lavender chest fastened with a bronze latch was laid atop some blocks of wood. I lifted it, placed my ear to the wood. The susurrus of velvety wings beat from within.

In the early hours, the garage doors slid up again. A few minutes later, in the orange predawn, the most beautiful cloud of moths in existence dotted the sky, Mama at their center, a beacon, smiling.