Silhouettes by Kris Ann Valdez
CREATIVE NONFICTION
My father-in-law does not know where he was born, or the name his mother gave him at birth.
He and I have been piecing together his patchy childhood spent on a ranch outside Mexico City in the 60’s. He recalls the joy of his first soda and cross-country bus ride. His black eyes snap when he relives the day he was kicked by a burro while riding in a steep canyon and become moist as he mentions his baby sister who nearly died when she was stung by a scorpion.
Occasionally, he laughs. So do I. I never saw this coming—this closeness. I didn’t know he would share more about his childhood with me than my husband, his son, or wife of forty-five years. Still, he struggles to recall new details. The same stories keep emerging. I need more information, since I want his story to be accurately his, not my sugar-coated version.
As we sit at my kitchen table this morning, sipping coffee, he produces a cheap spiral notebook. In it, he’s begun to write everything he can remember. I suggested it to help him mine his memories a little deeper.
“I wrote it in Spanish,” he says, “but I will read it to you.”
Wonderful. I translate a few sentences myself, then glance up. “I’ll type, you talk.”
He closes his eyes, transported in his heart to his four-year-old self again. “My mother used to curl my eyelashes before school,” he begins.
I nod, hiding a smile. I’ve heard this one before. Sometimes he forgets what he’s told me.
I type his words anyway, so he knows they hold value.
“She used to put lotion all over my hands and legs too.”
That’s a new detail. Maybe it is a small, minute addition that doesn’t matter, but to me, prying open his memories like an antique trunk, every moment remembered, no matter how unassuming, is a victory.
He stops, suddenly. “Thank you, mija,” he says, his voice choking, “you have helped me. The more I write, the more memories come.”
My hands falter over the keys. What do I say? He’s welcome? He’s the one who’s done all the work. I’ve just been —I don’t know, listening?
I meet his sincere gaze. “Memories hold so much power,” I finally say.
And I have learned in the past two years that sometimes memories ask us questions we are not ready to answer.
Why would a mother choose her boyfriend over her son?
My father-in-law's shoulders hunch as he recalls how she abandoned him when he was ten years old.
How could she? Anger wells in me at his visible pain.
Yet as I hold space for my father-in-law's struggles, I must also make room for this woman of many children and little opportunity, whom I will never meet, but whose form takes shape inside my head as a thin silhouette of stories.
Later in the evening, I cradle my five-month-old close to my chest, breathing in the warmth of his cotton-soft skin, knowing that I am a woman of few children and much opportunity. For now, I am also flesh and blood, tangible, present. But someday, I, too, will exist in silhouette form. How will this child remember me? By my failures or the smallest minute acts of love?
Kris Ann Valdez is an Arizona native, wife, and spunky mother of three. Her work appears in Ekstasis, Motherwell, Freshout Mag, among others. Follow her @krisannvaldezwrites.
