"Cara is sleeping. I gently coo her awake.
“Baby, can I show you something?”
“Daddy?” She rubs her eyes.
“Comon baby,” I hand her a favorite pacifier, even though I've been weaning her off it for the past year. My mom is better at disciplining kids than I ever was.
“Is grandma here?” Cara looks around, as if it's forbidden to be awake without my mom. I'm always at work, so Cara never sees me in the morning- if you count three A.M. as morning.
“Shh, it's a secret. Grandma doesn't know we're awake.” I put my finger to my lips, and she mimics the motion. She tries to stifle a giggle and I ignore her. I motion for her to put the pacifier to her lips and she complies.
I was twenty when I purposely hit black out status and to a more accidental degree, got Kelsey pregnant. She was nineteen when she gave birth, and to a more deliberate degree, disappeared from the face of the earth.
My mom knows my kid likes the color green, her favorite bedtime story, and her shoe size. I hardly know how to cut hot dogs into bite sized pieces, let alone show my unplanned kid how to use a fork.
I've always hated kids, but it’s a damn good excuse for college dropouts.
“Daddy, where are we going?”
“It's a surprise, remember?”
“But daddy, we're going! Where are we going?” Cara's hands are clamped above her head and she keeps kicking her heels against the car seat.
I turn on the radio. “Maybe this guy will tell us,” I suggest for the sake of keeping her entertained. She's quiet for a minute, listening to the talk show host ramble on about how they're thinking of raising the bridge toll for the Golden Gate again. California is broke. I'm broke. The Golden Gate doesn't sound like a bad idea.
“He's silly,” Cara announces, kicking her bare feet. I hate little shoes.
“But listen. Sometimes the silly guys are the smartest ones,” I bullshit. It gives her something to think about.
“Daddy, you're silly because you're smart.”
I ignore that.
Cara was named by her mom. Someone complimented it, once. They said Cara was a cute name because it means ‘one who is loved’. For all my fuck ups, I try not to lie. After I heard that, I started calling her baby.
“Surprise, from, grand, ma,” Cara is bouncing in her seat to each syllable of the sentence. “From, grand, ma, from, grand, ma” she repeats, somehow managing to fight her seatbelt a good three inches each time she bounces.
I’m amazed at how lively she is. It’s 3:26 A.M. and she’s happier than I’ve been my entire life.
“Baby, don’t talk about grandma right now,” I say. Thinking about my mom just makes me wish I could sink into the driver’s seat. Getting swallowed up by the fabric of a metal transportation device sounds like a science fiction story. I decided I like this, and then take the exit to the Golden Gate Bridge.
“It’s a surprise!” She shouts excitedly about the place we’re going to go.
I stay apathetic.
Cara’s first Christmas was a nightmare. I didn’t know where Kelsey had run away to. She showed up, left the kid I wasn't even aware existed in my apartment and ditched San Fran. I have a hunch she went to LA but I honestly don’t care. I like not knowing where she was.
There was something comforting in the fact that she wasn’t definitively anywhere.
Kelsey’s dad called me on December 23rd and kindly let me know he found pieces of his daughter strewn across the bathroom floor as the tub soaked up her blood. I drank so much I ended up in the hospital, and as my mom pointed out; better the hospital than the bathtub drain.
The signs say five bucks and the toll has gone up. Fucking politicians. They’re all greedy jerkoffs.
I have a ten in my back pocket. Why I chose to wear jeans is pointless. I actually got dressed as if I was going somewhere important.
“For the guy behind me,” I hand the guy at the tollbooth the ten and concentrate on the road.
“Who is behind you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you giving things to him?” Cara is keeping herself entertained by counting the green dogs on her jammies.
“Because it’s nice.”
“I am nice because my daddy is nice.”
“Not exactly,” I sigh. “Dads can be nice and their kids can be mean.”
“I am nice because my daddy is nice.” She isn’t listening to me. Her fingers are tracing her legs, bouncing along each green dog, smiling at the personified animal. “Six, seven, eight.” She keeps counting those three numbers, as if the repetition was linear.
There’s this report on the radio about some woman in Walnut Creek who forced a Peruvian chick into being her indentured servant. The things immigrants go through makes me queasy. “No person should ever be forced to live in a world of fear, isolation and servitude.”
“Six, seven, eight, six, seven, eight, six…”
My dad was shot by my suicidal uncle when I was three. I grew up without him.
At one point in time I had an older brother, too. He couldn’t concentrate in school. He was an army kind of guy. At eighteen he shaved his head and enlisted.
After his training he was deployed to Iraq, and six months later he was caught in a suicide bombers attack. It's weird to me that the men in my family have always been involved in suicides.
I guess the first girl in our family is about to be involved in one.
“Daddy, how fast are you going to go!?” Cara is laughing and throwing her hands in the air. My knuckles are white and the steering wheel is guiding itself. Whenever it wants to, it’ll careen through the guardrail.
I turn the radio up again, and that’s when Cara realizes this isn’t normal.
“Daddy, are you crying?”
I’m not.
“Daddy, where are we going?” She pulls her hands to her chest and begins to get frightened. Kids are so easily molded by their surroundings. They get excited when you get excited. They are calm if you are calm. Maybe they get suicidal when you get suicidal.
I’m watching the road. The radio is talking to me about artificial women that get breast implants in Hungary. I think altering your body is stupid. Hungarian women are artificial and stupid.
“Slow down,” Cara is nervously rocking back and forth clutching her pacifier to her mouth. It's supposed to calm her down. “Don’t cry.”
I’m not crying.
“Contestants showed off breast implants, nose jobs, and face lifts as Miss Plastic Hungary 2009 strove to promote the benefits of plastic surgery in a country where artificial enhancements are viewed mostly with a wary eye.”
I wish I was artificial."
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