When he cheats, it is summer. He is in the Philippines for vacation, and you are at home with the rest of the family, waiting for your turn to join him a week later. When you find out, it is nearing the fall. He is hung over from last night’s family dinner and walking down the steps past the closed door of your room to leave without a goodbye as Mom screams. After he leaves, it is silent.

 

You are sitting against the headboard of your bed as your younger brother Frank paces a trail on the carpet of your room, consumed with hurt and anger, the kind that would flare up over the years and fall back to a simmer, and now you know about the match that always lit the fire. It has been lit three times, but this is the first that you are aware of, the first you are able to feel the impact of, and it is the first time you can find blame in your father.

 

The day you find out is also the morning of your uncle’s funeral. A day and night at the hospital and a week later, you are blind from the sunlight with a face stiff and stretched from dry tears. You are happy to see Uncle Chad’s friends, his family, his mentors and guardians, and you know he’s gone because he is not here to enjoy them all coming together for him.

 

You are guilty because everyone asks you where your dad is, and you tell them you don’t know, that he isn’t feeling well, that he might be coming later, but you don’t know. You are guilty because you lied in church that day, over and over and over, and you are guilty because you would probably lie again.

 

When it’s your turn to read a passage Grandma Betty picked from the Bible, her favorite book, you hope you do the words she shares with God justice, because your faith has been shaken, and you hope hers will find a way to steady you in its place. You walk to the front to stand center stage, and you stumble on the second line, and you laugh into the microphone, and the rest is pie. But that relief only lasts for a moment.

 

When Uncle Jondi reads the eulogy, he thanks everyone in the family individually for helping Uncle Chad—you he thanks for love, Frank he thanks for support, your Dad he thanks for patience. When Uncle Jondi reads the eulogy, your brother is eighteen years old, and he is crying hard enough to make his shoulders shake and jump with hiccups he can’t control, and it pulls and jerks tears out of you again, again, again. Three times just this morning, but you promise yourself that this is the last time you will cry today. You reach out to hold his hand, and he squeezes yours hard enough to hurt. He turns to look at you while everyone else’s heads are bowed in grief, and his eyes are raised in anger. You squeeze his hand back.

 

Everyone retreats to the plot where Uncle Chad will be buried beside his father, and there are birds chirping, bees buzzing, flowers in full bloom, and it’s such a cliché of a nice day that it’s almost funny. Everyone is sad today, but they are smiling.

 

“He’s probably running,” says Aunt Carisse, the second of the six siblings that Mom and Uncle Chad belong to. “I can see him walking and running and with Papa.” It makes everyone smile harder.

 

Uncle Chad had been diagnosed with Wilson’s Disease when he was fourteen years old and was bedridden soon after. This disease is a rare, inherited disorder in which copper builds up in the body and eventually leads to eye, kidney, and brain damage. Because there wasn’t a treatment yet when Uncle Chad had been diagnosed as a teenager, the accumulation of copper in his body from birth affected him quickly and could not yet be reversed. He lost the ability to speak, could barely move, but he could always smile and laugh. He was the eldest of your mom’s siblings. He lived in the Philippines until he was forty seven, when the family was finally able to file all the proper papers and pay all the right people to bring him home to the U.S. He waited until everyone in the family got back from their separate family vacations that summer to be with him at forty nine, as he lied sick in the hospital before his breathing slowed, his eyes closed, and he passed away.

 

Aunt Carisse held his hand as he passed, and Uncle George, the youngest, cried without shame. He too has Wilson’s disease, the youngest sibling like a reflection of the eldest, but his condition peaked when a treatment was secure.

 

“Chady, can you come scare my wife as a ghost?” Uncle George joked, face and voice blurred by a curtain of tears.

 

“You can come scare me,” said Aunt Carisse, patting Uncle George’s shoulder. “Bring Papa!”

 

When they place Uncle Chad’s urn into the ground, everyone sings the fight song of Ataneo, the Filipino high school and college that everyone on your Mom’s side of the family attended. Fly high, blue eagle, fly and carry our cry across the sky. And everyone thinks about how your uncle Chad is finally at peace while you think about your Dad who left this morning without saying goodbye, who isn’t standing here with you and all the family for a different kind of goodbye.

 

+++++

 

On the night of Uncle Chad’s novena vigil a week after the funeral, there are columns of smoke raised in unison toward the sky. His siblings socialize as they smoke, siblings who’ve been breathing in the same air and toxic chemicals since they were all in high school. They talk about God with unshakable faith; they talk about their just passed brother Chad and the beautiful reception; they talk about relationships and cheating and forgiveness.

 

“Can you imagine Chad talking? Walking?” Carisse asks, still trying to imagine what was impossible. She juts her chin out and purses her lips upwards as she exhales a puff.

 

George, the youngest, drops his head under the cloud of smoke he’s just released and scuffs his foot. “I don’t like this,” he says.

 

Jondi, the only one of them never to have smoked, claps a hand on his brother’s shoulder even as he tilts his face away from the smoke.

 

George is overcome with sadness again, like he was in the hospital when they all gathered around the bed to be with their brother in his last moments. He had cried unabashed, without shame, and without restraint. Jondi had held his shoulder like he does now, as George begged for Chady-boy to stay, don’t go, don’t leave. And you remember that; it’s something you won’t forget, because in the midst of his pleas and the flat-lining beep of the heart monitor and the whispered words of consolation, the room was silent because of its emptiness.

 

Rita sighs and blows her breath in the other direction. “He’s happy now. His body only restricted him here. Can you imagine living for forty nine years trapped inside a body that can’t move? Can’t allow you to speak?”

 

Mom doesn’t tilt her head away in the fog of gray her siblings create, just stands there with her arms folded across her chest to keep in a bit of warmth in the summer night air. Her expression doesn’t give away any subtle denotation of desire for a cigarette; she is fifteen years plus strong, but you can still clearly remember now at twenty one a time when the backyard of your old townhome was littered with beige butts.

 

Out of nowhere, it seems like, Rita says, “Are you leaving him?”

 

They turn in unison toward Mom, faces blank but eyes cloudy with thoughts that are carefully devoid of judgment, because they grew up together, knew everything about one another, loved each other unconditionally, and always, always stood in solidarity over any feelings that would break that family-forged bond.

 

Your own face is directed steadily ahead into the darkness of the back yard. You sit there, a silent shadow at the bottom of the balcony’s steps watching the younger kids run around and tumble in the grass.

 

“No,” Mom says. “He’s leaving. I’m helping him find a place.”

 

You know this already. You talked about her plan and her stance on the situation on the ride back from the burial plot to the reception, but Dad is having trouble finding a new place to live. He is stuck in limbo at Grandma Tessie’s house, sitting alone in the dark of her basement, uncomfortable on plush and squishy couches, cold beside the electric fireplace. He is stressed and tense when he’s taken off work, and he’s lonely with his mom and step-dad wandering softly around their own home as if they have to sneak around to make extra room for him and the presence of his mistakes.

“Do you know what you’re going to do?” That’s Uncle Jondi, trying to stay detached because otherwise he’d break the whole of their ring of siblings into little fragments of anger and hate and frustration.

 

“No,” Mom says, and it’s almost like defiance.

 

+++++

 

Before you, your mom and Frank went to the novena vigil, Dad rode his motorcycle to meet you during the day while Mom was at work. He showed up at the door after a text asking if you’d mind if he came by. He said he texted Mom to see if it was OK, and she said yes, and of course you said yes too. Then Mom called you and told you in a wavering voice that she can’t deny him a visit to his own home and daughter, God, but please just make him leave before she gets home from work at 5:30 p.m.

 

Your brother Frank left after you told him Dad was coming over. Frank said he couldn’t see that motherfucker without wanting to punch him in the face, and you told him to be quiet if he was just going to swear at you. With three years more experience, you thought you still held a certain authority he would abide by, but he usually rebelled against it instead. He laughed condescendingly and asked, “How can you let that asshole come here, to our house?” You said, “It’s his house too. He’s paying for it. And he’s our dad.” And Frank said, “He’s not mine, not anymore.” Then he walked out.

 

You didn’t cry alone in your house waiting for your Dad to show up in the vacuum he created because he would be here soon, and you were surprised to find that you were supposed to be the strong one. It was like standing on an empty path that has been cleared by a natural disaster, but it’s anything but natural for all that it has wreaked disaster. It has turned Dad into a wavering shadow, Mom into a helpless, tangled mess, Frank into a firecracker with sparks escaping in an array of anger and hate, and you into a median, trying to keep apart yet somehow find a way to align the cars about to crash on either side of you together in the same direction again.

 

Dad didn’t take his car because he’s hoping to sell it. He needs to if he’s going to get a place of his own around here because apartments and new lives don’t come cheap. He rang the doorbell like a guest, waited for you to step to the side and tell him to come in.

 

“Where’s Frank?” he asked, looking around as if your brother was hiding in one of the corners.

 

“Out with friends,” you said, and you both knew that your words were half a merciful lie. He nodded, took a seat on the couch, tilted his head all the way back so that his Adam’s apple protruded from the front of his neck, and you thought he looked so vulnerable like that. You watched him swallow a few times, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and you watched his face, and you saw tears leaking out from the sides of his sunglasses, which he had yet to take off.

You were kind of glad because you didn’t want to see the eyes behind those reflections of yourself in shadowed lenses. Yesterday, when you visited him at Grandma’s, he looked just like this. A lone figure in a dark basement, his body sprawled but tense with his head titled back. But without sunglasses on, his eyes were red-veined and seeping from the sides, and he looked like he does after drinking too much or after playing tennis, which you learned not too long ago is code sometimes for getting high with your uncle.

 

“I want to come home,” he said, voice a defeated exhalation of breath.

 

“I know,” you replied, deliberately light in the face of all things grave. “You don’t like staying at places other than your house. Even if the hotels are five-star, Mr. Hotshot.”

 

He pretended to smile. “Is your mom OK?” he asked.

 

“Yeah,” you said, but she wasn’t.

 

She talked to you late last night because she didn’t know how to sleep without him in the same bed and without his late night TV shows lulling her to sleep—because she was afraid of the silence of night time when people feel most alone. She talked about being lonely for the rest of her life and afraid. She talked about not having any more adventures because he’s the one who likes to do new things, likes to go to new places, likes to take vacations. She talked about how she thought he’d easily find someone else, because he’s the young-looking one, the charismatic one, the athletic one, the partier and the drinker and the smoker. She talked about how she’s quiet and loves her family and loves to stay home and loves her dog and how she doesn’t want anyone else. And you sat there and let her hug you and let her cry, and you pretended that this wasn’t the worst moment in your life, seeing the future she saw for herself without your father.

 

She told you what you had only found out from Frank on the morning of Uncle Chad’s funeral and the day Dad left—Frank told you what he had always known, what Mom had always known, and what you had always been protected from. She told you it has happened before, two other times, and she hid it from you and your brother because you were kids, and she didn’t want to bring you into it. But you’re old enough now, she said, you’re old enough to maybe understand, and she was thankful that you were here, and that you were also with your father because he needed you too. And she told you that she just couldn’t take it anymore. She said it wasn’t fair.

And for a brief moment, you hated him, your best friend and protector, because sometimes he’s just so stupid. You know, you just know that he doesn’t love that other woman. He later told you that she was a mistake, said he was flattered that she was interested in him, and you know that he did it because he’s been going through his mid-life crisis since he was twenty years old, one of those quirks of his that you think you’ve already inherited. He feels trapped in an older body that can no longer competitively play basketball or tennis due to knee injuries, caged within the confines of a life full of responsibility and accountability, stuck in a routine and a cycle that he feels he suffocated by and cannot break. And though you can see this in the disappointment you can see that he tries to hide from you and from himself, you can’t understand how he could ruin everything good in his life for the sake of quenching, just for a moment, the dissatisfactions of everything wrong in his life.

 

He is like Uncle Chad in his restrictions—though his are seemingly psychological limitations he can’t surpass where Uncle Chad’s were physical. Uncle Chad was physically trapped within his own body at fourteen, kept stiff and still by copper flowing in his blood and overtaking his entire body. Your dad, however, still has the ability to go in new directions, physically, mentally, but it is his mind that keeps him as stiff and still as Uncle Chad, stuck in one place without a clear path in sight to escape toward. The one direction he did take was possibly the only one he could take wrong.

 

And despite the similarity in you both—the one that was born from seeing his regrets and finding a parallel in your desire and his desire to stay young and to have opportunities and to do new things—you can’t ever do what he’s done, especially not at the point in his life in which he’s done it. You can’t see yourself throwing the things you value away, can’t understand how something like that could be called an accident, can’t even imagine that something like that could happen without the consequences somewhere in your mind, and you can’t possibly fathom tossing away the thought of those consequences in the face of something that is flattering.

You know it was a mistake because he is like a child; he seems like the youngest in your immediate family—like Frank in his love for drinking and smoking and taking sick days from work to sit on the couch and watch TV or play sports or video games. He’s like you in how he likes to stay out and up until the morning, out with friends and making a fool of himself. And he’s young for his age with his motorcycle and his pot stash and his juvenile jokes and his knowledge of all things new and upcoming.

 

You know it’s a mistake because how could he want to alienate his own son, hurt his wife, force his daughter to hold it together because this is all she has, and it can’t fall apart or there won’t be anything left to come back to. When the school day is over, when weekend trips away with friends are done, when soccer practice is an hour past, where will her roots find familiar soil she knows she can rely on if there’s nowhere else to go?

It’s as if you blinked, and suddenly you could see the man he was, the man he wanted to be, and how that gap between the two made him lose his sense of self because he couldn’t find a way to cross that divide.

But you didn’t say anything. You took a seat on the arm of the couch, patted his shoulder, and asked if he wanted to eat leftovers. Mom cooked dinner last night, and he loves Mom’s food. And it was so sad that he seemed to be like a guest in his own home, that he felt like he was mooching food from the refrigerator he stocked just two weekends ago, felt lonely even with you sitting right beside him.

“Can I just take a short nap, Mik? I’ll leave before your mom gets home.” You pretended you didn’t hear his voice crack, and you knew he wanted to close his eyes and not speak because he couldn’t without his voice breaking like this.

 

“Sure, I might also, on the other couch. I’m tired too,” you said, because you knew he was asking for your company and a moment’s peace in his home where he was now just a visitor.

And you went to the other couch to lie down, to close your eyes because you didn’t know if he was watching you through his sunglasses. But you weren’t tired, not a bit. Last night at three thirty in the morning after Mom said she thought she could finally fall asleep, you stayed awake and pretended to read a book, because although didn’t want to hear her crying through the door you left open, you wanted her to see the light from your room down the hall and know she’s not the only one awake. And when she left for work, you slept the day away until your dad texted, asking to come over.

On the couch adjacent to him, you pretended to fall asleep immediately, because you knew your dad hadn’t been sleeping and couldn’t sleep a night through anywhere but in this house, and if you were out like a light, then maybe he would be too.

 

Then maybe there would be a different kind of quiet, one less like silence than like peace, one less like goodbye than like goodnight.