time even her liver wants him out because it’s stopped cleaning red blood cells. Only my father is able to watch the birth. My mother is out cold.
Nicholas weighs in at nine pounds even with a tuft of dark wet hair and puffy little hands. My sister and I catch a glimpse of him from behind the glass in the nursery. The nurse cradles him as if we should be impressed. But his face is still unrecognizable, still swollen and squished from fitting for so long inside the walls of our mother’s uterus. His ears are pointy like Dr. Spock’s, and his tiny mouth is twisted in terror at being cut out and cut from her body. He’s my baby brother.
“He looks like an alien baby,” I say.
My sister shrugs me off. She doesn’t seem too concerned that our new brother is sick. It bothers me enough for both of us. Two other babies, two healthy babies are red-faced and squirming in their plastic bubble basinets. Especially under the fluorescents, I can see that Nicholas is the wrong color.
“I hope Mom’s okay,” Rhea says turning toward the hall. “Dad shouldn’t be the only one who gets to see her.”
Neither of my surviving grandparents is at the hospital. My mother didn’t want my yia yia or Uncle Gil here. Can’t say I blame her. Yia Yia’s face could scare the life out of any newborn. Her wrinkles are deep and unforgiving, from a lifetime of holding grudges. She was widowed young at forty-four; her husband fifteen years her senior had been hand-picked by her father one summer on a trip to the islands. Their love was learned, practiced over time through the birth and raising of three boys. But his heart was bad and when he was taken from Yia Yia too soon, it made her old and bitter beyond her years. This is how my mother explained it to me one night after she caught me dipping into her Oil of Olay night cream, slopping it all over my cheeks and forehead. Since I was half Greek, I figured I’d better start early, seeing I stood a fifty-fifty chance of one day looking like my yia yia.
In order to be fair and avoid my father sulking, my mother also didn’t ask her mother to be present for the birth. Both of their fathers passed early, my mother’s father from cirrhosis of the liver and my father’s from a heart attack. “It’s a man’s job to provide for his family, then die before retirement,” my father often says, usually when paying the bills.
He appears from behind the swinging doors. The paper booties he wore in the operating room still cover up his dress shoes. This morning he had been called out of a bail hearing after my mother’s water broke.
“Have you seen Nicholas?”
My brother is named after our Greek grandfather, our pappou, a man my father still mourns decades later at holidays, especially Christmas. Pappou delivered more than fresh fruit to the Central Market in downtown L.A. for his wealthy brother-in-law who owned a produce company. He delivered the best one-liners that kept his family both in hysterics and in check. He had a practical habit of using a bar of Ivory soap on his head full of white hair, claiming the suds were why he never went bald, a habit my father eventually picked up. But what pappou is known best for is the time he grew desperate at the thought of his unmarried youngest son at twenty-three still living at the house. Somehow he snowed Helena Stamapolous, the bright young daughter of a family friend, into marrying Gil by telling her that a boy who never strays far from home is one who will never stray from his wife.
My mother doesn’t even get to choose Nicholas’s middle name because he’s named after my father. Obviously, I am too, with just an added vowel attached at the end.
“How’s Mom.” Rhea says this more like an accusation than a question, as if our father is to blame for the birth being forced and unnatural.
My father sneaks a look at the other babies, maybe hoping his own will somehow be lying in a plastic bubble on wheels too instead of where he really is, his tiny vitals all wired up in an incubator.
“She’s fine, but she won’t come to for another hour or so.”
Rhea takes a seat. When the news hit, she was pulled out of first period at her new school, a Christian academy in La Verne. She tells our parents she likes it, but she tells them a lot of things she doesn’t mean. She tells them she eats too, and I’ve caught her twice tossing out the noodles, finishing only the broth.
“You two go,” she decides for us. “I’ll wait.”
On the way home, my father pops a cassette in the tape deck. It isn’t Pavorotti or even his favorite country singer, Eddie Rabbit. It’s a foreign sounding voice, broken from nerves, from his Middle Eastern accent. It’s the voice of Bared Garrata, my father’s client, who has just been arrested for murder. Intermittently, his voice is interrupted by the loud creak of an office chair, the interrogating cop leaning back. They never give the comfortable, reclining seat to the suspect.
“Again,” the investigator states louder into the speaker, for the record. “You’re waiving your right to counsel.”
There’s mumbling and then Bared blurts out, “I have no choice. I have to shoot.”
“Bullshit,” my father says. “You hear that, Paula Girl?” He points to the cassette player. “That’s exactly the place where I can get this tossed out. He’s a goddamn foreigner. He’s not even sure what they’re saying.”
I’ve heard this man’s confession before, and I find that part hard to believe. His English sounds crystal clear to me. It’s my father’s first homicide and he’s played the tape countless times since the murder occurred. He’s moving up in the legal world, from the DUIs and drug offenses, where nobody pays much attention, to a murder that has made the local paper in Orange County. Even the birth of his first son can’t stop my father from thinking about the case, debating whether he should try and get the confession thrown out or use it toward an insanity defense. Either way, my father is behind the eight ball. The hearing earlier today was for Bared and because he holds dual citizenship in Armenia, a country that is considered by many to be the northern extension of the Middle East, bail is set at half a million.
Bared works as an assistant manager at a fan manufacturing plant in the city of Orange. He is not a terrorist. Neither is he a religious zealot. He is a family man with two daughters and an American wife. One afternoon Bared is set off when he’s convinced he overhears subordinates and his boss laughing in the break room about his small penis. He must not be able to sexually satisfy his fair-skinned wife, they say. She needs a white man or a Mexican or Black, like them.
The next morning Bared shows up at work, walks right into his boss’s office and fires one shot, square in the chest. The bullet blows clear through, burying in the back of the dead man’s chair. Security doesn’t tackle Bared on his way out of the building because he never runs. There are no other casualties since the act, as he sees it, has little to do with violence. He is defending his manhood, defending his marriage. Talk of pleasuring another man’s wife in his culture calls for immediate and unrelenting measures. After the shooting, Bared leaves the weapon by the body and waits in his office where he phones his wife, explaining that something has come up. Save him a plate. He won’t make it home in time for dinner.
My father wants to argue that the voices Bared heard are really his own, that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic and needs psychological help, not incarceration.
“He isn’t crazy,” I say. “You’d better come up with something else.”
We’re almost home and out on his front porch, I see Moses Murillo, our neighbor, dousing the grass with his own brand of weed killer, a can of gasoline. He’s chosen the worst possible time to pour flammable liquid on his yard, considering it’s early fall and everything is still hot and dry from summer and the Santa Anas have already begun to stir.
But nothing Moses does ever makes any sense. He’s a Vietnam War vet with irrational moods that must make his family want to duck from the swing. Even with the windows closed, we can sometimes hear him yelling at his two boys with the kind of rage that has made my parents anonymously call the cops more than once. In the Murillos’ one acre backyard stands a baseball diamond with real bases and a pitcher’s mound, and by the time the police arrive, Moses will be crouched behind home plate, catching his sons