I think it was the next day, with the remains of the pizza still lying on the dining room table, when I came up with the idea of stealing the letter that my mother had left. It clearly wasn’t, as she’d said when she was going, something that had arrived for my father, but a letter Teresa herself had written by way of an explanation or a farewell. Even for a boy of ten, this was relatively simple inductive reasoning.
Since the beginning of the summer vacation, I’d been reading one of those slightly schematic mystery novels published in the Choose Your Own Adventure series. The books in that collection invited the reader to make decisions at the end of each chapter, choosing between different story lines. The one I was reading at that time was about a boy of my age who had to rescue his best friend from a cave, where he’d been held captive by a mysterious person whose identity had yet to be revealed. It wasn’t, of course, the first novel in the series I’d read. I’d already finished another that involved a similar mystery but was set in ancient Egypt, and one that addressed the disturbing possibilities of life in the year 2000: flying cars, extraterrestrial invasions, and so on. They all started with the same caveat that, among other things, said: “The adventures you take are the result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose.” I loved that emphasis on you, adored the idea that the book was speaking directly to me, that I was the hero of the story. The structure of those novels varied very little: the front cover announced the number of different endings (as many as thirty) the reader could achieve during the course of the book: some happy, others unhappy, and others just plain crazy.
It occurred to me that, with my mother’s sudden disappearance, life was offering me a not dissimilar mystery, one that I could do the detective equivalent of defusing, just as in the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The logical point of departure was, naturally, to steal the letter my mother had left on my father’s night table, lock myself in the bathroom to read it, and then return it to its place without anyone noticing. The main difficulty was finding the right moment to steal the letter. I thought the best idea would be to wait until my father went out to buy something. My sister would stay in her room listening to music, I guessed, and with Dad out of the way, I could open his bedroom door—it creaked—without risk of attracting attention. I could take my time reading Teresa’s letter and unraveling the mystery of her disappearance.
More than two decades later, what surprises me about the chain of audacious decisions I took at the age of ten is the fact that I never, not even for an instant, considered the option of asking either my father or my sister what the hell was going on.
While waiting for the ideal moment to steal the letter, I could, in true detective style, develop my hypothesis about my mother’s dis appearance. “Investigation is using your imagination to follow clues,” said the Choose Your Own Adventure book somewhere or other, and that definition felt inspirational, so I gave my imagination free rein in the almost total absence of clues on which to base my deductions.
Maybe my grandfather had died, I thought, and Mom had gone to be with my grandmother. My best friend Guillermo’s grandfather had died earlier that year. When he returned to school after the sad event, Guillermo had incredulously described his parents’ abnormal behavior: lies, secrets, unexpected departures in the middle of the night.
At the age of ten, I believed that bad things usually happened on Tuesdays. (Now that I’m an adult, I know bad things can happen any day, and even on a daily basis: they are ever present, the fabric that forms the backdrop of exceptional or positive events.) My grandfather might have died that Tuesday. It wasn’t a completely harebrained idea. Maybe Teresa was burying him at that very moment. I imagined her digging the grave, her favorite skirt all muddied and her nails black, like mine when I’d been playing in the park. Teresa was always scolding me for kneeling among the bushes, scratching holes with my nails and getting everything dirty. But now that I come to think of it, the problem wasn’t so much that I was dirty as that, she said, rats lived in the bushes, and they might bite me. Maybe my mom was burying Grandfather in the park, with her skirt muddied, her nails black, and her fear of rats in suspense until she finished her onerous task.
I took a break from the investigation to consider my progress. Something didn’t fit. If my grandfather had died, why had Teresa left a letter for my father? The previous year, when my sister had gotten her finger caught in the car door, Teresa had paged my father before dragging the two of us to the nearest hospital (where the vacant gaze of an elderly woman in a waiting room left me with a profound, almost animal sense of fear that I’ve never quite shaken off). If my grandfather had died, the usual, the expected thing would have been for Teresa to page my father, as she’d done then, or leave a message with his secretary at the bank. Instead, she’d taken the time to write a letter—a letter I had to read if I wanted to understand the reasons for her departure.
2
MAYBE I NEED START EARLIER. Before 1994, I mean, before that stupid Tuesday. Writing about the past is, as I’m beginning to realize, writing inward, not forward. Rather than
