AINHOA PALACIOS
Emilio Alarcon Loved Pancakes
The first time he comes back, his skin is pale. Somewhere between a marble slate and typing paper that has gone through the wash. With a tinge of yellow shadowing his forehead. I ask if he is real and he says as real as the moon but when I look out my bedroom window, I cannot spot the moon.
His hair is graying and sparse at his hairline. It is unlike the thick black mane I’ve always known from the photos. The truth is I wouldn’t recognize him without his words hijita despierta. Sitting at the foot of my bed, his hands pat my ankles but it is the coldness radiating from his touch that wakes me from my deep slumber into what I am certain is just another dream. Still, even in my dream, I search for a word to call him.
“Papá?” I say.
“Si muñequa,” he says.
* * *
When I was a little girl, a much younger girl than the 25-year-old girl I am now, I began waking to a clawing at the foot of my bed. Sharp nails skidding down my knees and all the way to my toes. After several nights of lying awake in terror, I cried for my grandmother. Begged for her help but her prayer, padre nuestro que estás en el cielo, help the lost souls find their way, never soothed me in the way I wanted. Yet soon the clawing stopped and I quickly forgot the entire thing. Dismissed it as a childish imagination, ignoring the stories my grandmother often told us about spirits coming back to visit her— old friends who’d wronged her seeking apologies, her very own husband returning time and time again.
* * *
“What are you doing here?” I ask him.
He says he isn’t sure.
“Have you died?” I ask.
Still, he is not sure.
So we sit in silence observing one another for a long time. Maybe he is doing what I am doing, searching for the ways we look like one another. He has the same upturned wide eyes I do. Mine, a honey brown like my mother’s, his—solid and dark. Our eyelashes curl with the same intensity. His nose is not mine. His nose is hooked, that of an Incan man. But his hands, yes, those are mine. Just like my mother has told me all my life. The knuckles in our hands, the same depth, the same swirling shape. Our veins, protruding green below our olive skin.
* * *
In the morning I receive a message from one of the many half-sisters I never knew but share a last name with. It reads, Daddy has died. The word daddy strikes me just the same as the blows from my mother’s belt once did. I click on her profile and skim through posts I’ve never cared about before. The latest photo she’s shared is of her father. Our father. It is an image I have seen many times. A sturdy man with a chest so inflated you wish for his protection. A black mustache so thick you can’t see his upper lip but makes him perfect for a mariachi band. Above the picture, my half-sister has typed I’ll miss you, daddy. Rest In Peace. I never respond to her message.
* * *
That night, when I feel the coolness on my calf once again, I sit straight up to ask, “How did you die?” Again, he is not sure, but he tells me he’s been sick for a long time. The doctor said cirrhosis many years ago.
“I’m sure you’re not surprised,” he says. I am not.
Alcoholic is the defining trait I’ve always known him by. His inability to put down the bottle long enough to be a father. It is the reason my mother left him. The reason he is a stranger to me. The reason his name has always felt like a foreign language punching its way past my vocal cords and out of my mouth. The reason I had no need for it until I was fifteen and back in my birth city. Suddenly, the bits of curiosity that quietly floated inside me banned together, urged me to take the one chance I might have to meet him.
I ask him if he remembers my phone call. He says he does but I am not sure I believe him. I am not sure why I want to tell him I was nervous that day. That my hands shook as I pressed each number. That the phone rang five times. That the reason I remember is because I memorized the breaths I took alongside each ring. I tell him how the sky was gray that day, a thick blanket crowding the city, suffocating it and me.
“Do you remember what I called you?” I ask.
“Por supuesto,” he says. He clears his throat as if to recite something. “Se encuentra Emilio Alarcon?”
It is then I believe him and my heart vibrates. I recall saying my own name, first and last so there was no mistaking me. I recall his oh, his indifference, and the way I never admitted to anyone my stomach became paper and then a crumpled paper ball. A crumpled paper ball disclosing I’d quietly dreamed a bigger reaction. Something more in line with the telenovelas when one sees an estranged family member for the first time. Tears, gasps, fainting. Hand over mouth and throaty sounds meant to convey speechlessness.
Emilio Alarcon admits he was never good with emotions.
* * *
My mother told me I once followed him around like a shadow. A shadow cast only by his leg, waddling behind him in a diaper wherever he went. She said she’d asked him to please not drink around me but he ignored her and instead carried me on one hip as he headed for the pisco bottle. He was able to unscrew the cap, pour a glass, all while I curled into the curve of his neck and he sang arroz on leche, me quiero casar.
* * *
I begin to look forward to his visits. I begin to make a list of questions I want to ask him. Stories I want retold. I am digging for memories to make mine. Is that story of our Doberman dying true? Did we really throw it in the river? Where were you on my third birthday? Why weren’t you in the videos? Did you ever love my mom?
He tells me he did. He really really did love that crazy, fiery, hard-to-be-with woman. He starts on a memory. Sometime after she’d given birth to me. The c-section slash still bearing fresh stitches. They argued over flowers. Flowers he brought her when what she needed was diapers. She threw the vase at his head and he pinned her to a table. Anchored his palms onto her neck, when esta mujer said, “Kill me motherfucker, because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.” Emilio Alarcon’s eyes look nostalgic. Loving.
* * *
After we left him, my mother tells me, he promised to call every Wednesday at seven o’clock. And every day, I asked her if it was Wednesday because when it finally was, we’d wait by the living room telephone. One call came the first week. Then the second week. The third week, she says I waited until I fell asleep with my head on the table. I insisted on waiting on the fourth, fifth, and sixth weeks. But soon, I stopped asking if it was Wednesday. Soon, Wednesday became my least favorite day and I hardly remembered why.
And so I ask him, “Why did you stop calling?”
“I wasn’t cut out to be a father. You were better off without me.”
“All four of us? All four miscellaneous children were better off without you?” I say with indignation.
“I wasn’t a good man. I wasn’t a bad man, but I wasn’t a good man.”
He’s right but I do not want to pardon him so easily. I want him to flounder, to see the wounds I never knew he caused in me until now. But he’s right, my life was better without him.
Soon, our conversations turn to me. He wants to know about my life. My memories without him. He tells me he heard about me often from family members who followed me online. They were the little birds flying back to tell him when I was graduated from high school, from University. Strangers around the city congratulated him on his bilingual hija. La Americana who’d gone and made something of herself.
“Did you ever tell them you had nothing to do with any of it?” I ask.
* * *
I begin to wonder if I should pray for his passing. For his finding his way just like my grandmother prayed for those lost souls so many years ago. But I don’t. I don’t want him to go. For the first time in my life, I want him here. With me.
Instead, I work up the courage to ask him why he never showed up. After the phone call, the one where Emilio Alarcon was asked if he would like to meet his fourth born and Emilio Alarcon hesitated but agreed. I waited in the restaurant he chose halfway between his side of the city and mine. Three hours passed before I accepted I’d die without meeting him.
His reason makes me burst into laughter.
“Construction on that road was so bad back then,” he says. “I hardly ever went near the city center because of it. It was a real shame because I really loved pancakes. Really, it’d been years since I’d been able to eat a good stack of pancakes.”
And so we begin talking about pancakes. I tell him America has the best pancakes. There are even places named after pancakes like IHOP. He asks me to tell him more, and so I describe how fluffy and sweet and perfect they are. I tell him about the different flavors like blueberry, chocolate chip, strawberry. I tell him that during special holidays, there are special kinds too. Pumpkin, cinnamon, peppermint, pecan! He says things like, increíble! And wow, que rico! He looks at me wide-eyed and nodding. I pretend we are still talking about me.
Soon he has to go and this time I ask if he will be back.
* * *
Emilio Alarcon visits me every night for four months and five days. On his last visit, though I won’t know it will be his last and often wonder if this was the reason it was, I’ll make him pancakes. Thick, fluffy, the-size-of-my-head pancakes. I’ll drizzle syrup over his. Throw a thick chunk of butter atop the tower. I’ll make a platter of toppings and for each pancake he eats, I’ll make him choose a new one. We will sit on creaky Windsor chairs and laugh. He will give me advice about the man I am dating, my one day to be husband. He will tell me to always keep him on his toes. He will triple check he isn’t an alcoholic.
And finally, he will say, “Okay, but if he becomes one, you leave him. We addicts, we only bring people down with us. You’re too good to be brought down. You’re perfect.”
Ainhoa Palacios was born in Lima, Peru, and moved to the US at the age of six where she was raised by her mother, Abue, and sister. She graduated from the University of South Florida with a B.A. in journalism but soon after remembered it was a different kind of storytelling she loved. Since, her work has been long-listed in Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir contest, come as a finalist in Sunspot Literary Journal’s Rigel 2021 competition, and appeared in publications like Somos En Escrito, and WOW! Women on Writing. Ainhoa currently lives in Shenzhen, China with her fiancé, and her two dogs—a wild-eyed husky and tripod miniature pinscher. To connect with Ainhoa, follow her on instagram @noah_pal_