I Have Always Loved My Father

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You want me to go off to some bullshit Ivy League school and get a high-powered job just like you did so that I won't embarrass you whenever you play 'who has the better kid' with all of your snobby friends! It means that you're so shallow and selfish that you don't even care how much it hurts me to leave you! It means that you don't really love me!" I screamed, picking up two more suitcases and hurling them out into the hallway. My father closed the distance between us in three long strides and backed me up against the wall, his face only inches away from my own.

"Don't you ever say that I don't love you," he growled, his hands gripping my arms so tightly that I winced in pain. "You know I don't give a shit about what anyone else thinks; all I've ever cared about is you."

"If you care about me so much then why are you sending me away?" I sobbed, my cheeks wet with tears.

"Because you need to have a life outside of me Nila," he said, his voice resolute.

"Why would I need to have anything outside of you when everything that I'll ever want or need is standing right here?" I asked, staring up at him.

"Nila, everything that you know is standing right here, but who's to say that what you want or need isn't somewhere else?" he asked. The cold nature of his words frosted the air between us, chilling the blood that ran through my veins.

"So that's it huh? You think I'm going to go off to college and spread my legs for the first guy that I see, and forget that I ever loved you? How could you say that to me?" I screamed, drawing my hand back and slapping him hard across the face. He grabbed both my wrists and slammed me into the wall with such force that I nearly blacked out.

"You're so busy running your fucking mouth that you've forgotten how to listen," he said, his voice low and threatening.

"I'm all that you know, but am I really all that you want? Could you be happy living on the fringes of society, lying to everyone about me and what we mean to each other? I've already lived my life, so I know what's at stake. But how could I ask you to sacrifice everything in order to be with me if you don't even know what you're giving up?" he said, staring me hard in the face.

"But I love you!" I cried.

"We'll see," he said flatly before walking over to my pile of clothes and packing them all over again.

"I don't understand...I don't understand!" I wailed, sliding down the wall and crying into my hands.

"I want you to have a chance at a normal life. I don't want you to stay here with me just because I'm what you're used to. Go to college, make some friends, fuck someone else besides me, and then tell me if I'm still the right man for you. But I'll never believe that I am unless you've done those things. In fact, I won't touch you again until you do."

"DADDY PLEASE!!!!" I screamed, running over to where he stood and throwing my arms around him. "You're just upset right now, that's all. Let's go to bed and forget about this," I begged, kissing his neck and unfastening his belt buckle.

"Stop," he said softly, closing his eyes.

"I know you don't mean it Daddy. I'll make things right again," I said frantically, dropping to my knees in front of him. I unzipped his pants and pulled out his dick. It hardened as I stroked it, and grew in length when I opened my mouth and began to suck.

"Nila stop," he said firmly, a tear running down his cheek. I sucked him faster and harder, holding onto his legs as I pumped his dick in and out of my mouth.

"I SAID STOP!" he yelled, shoving me aside and zipping up his pants. I scrambled to my feet and reached for him again, and was shocked when he backhanded me across the mouth. The blow was so powerful that I flew backward onto the bed, where I curled up and began to cry.

"I meant every word of what I said," he panted, still winded from our struggle. "And if you don't believe me then you're only lying to yourself. You're getting on that plane to Princeton tomorrow, and I don't want to see you again until you graduate."

My heart imploded in my chest, and I doubled over in pain. The thought of being away from my father for four years was too much for me to handle, and I threw up in revulsion. Unfazed by my suffering, my father packed the last of my things and lined my suitcases up against the wall.

"Be ready by seven," he said before leaving the room, closing the door softly behind him.

"Nila, it's been a whole week since you graduated. Aren't you going to go home?" Rebecca asked, twisting my waist-length hair into a French braid. Rebecca and I had been inseparable since our freshman year of college, and she had helped me recover from the pain of losing the only man that I had ever loved. We shared everything, from a luxury apartment that was only a few miles away from the university to our deepest and darkest secrets, and my intense love of my father had been no exception. I hid nothing from her, and she repaid my honesty with compassion and understanding. "I don't think I'm ready," I said softly, chewing my freshly manicured fingernails.

"You're nervous about seeing him again, aren't you? It's understandable; you haven't even spoken to him in what—three years? I'd be nervous too. What if he's fat, or bald, or missing some of his teeth, or all three?" she laughed, tossing the finished braid over my shoulder.

"I'm glad you're enjoying my misery. At least one of us is," I said sullenly, fingering my braided hair.

"Aww, I'm sorry zeeb," she said, flinging her arms around me and giving me a tight bear hug. "Zeeb" was short for zebra, which was her nickname for me because I was of mixed race. Rebecca was Caucasian, with pale skin, short brown hair and freckles. She was intrigued by my exotic blend of African American, Native American, and French, and expressed a good-natured envy of my looks. "Oh my God, you're so pretty!" she exclaimed when she entered our dorm room on move-in day, her mother trailing close behind her.

"Are you Egyptian?" she asked, touching a lock of my hair. I rattled off my ethnicity and smiled at her wide-eyed wonder.

"So your dad is mixed and your mom was Native American? Wow, that's so cool. You're like a beautiful chameleon, or a zebra or something." I laughed uproariously at her likening me to a zebra.

"I wish I had a background like yours. Why couldn't you have had sex with an Eskimo or an Indian chief or something?" she asked, nudging her mother.

"Because your White father had green money, and plenty of it. He's also great in the sack from what I remember. He travels so much these days that he hardly has time to remind me of why I married him," her mother said, setting down Rebecca's bags and kissing Rebecca lightly on the forehead.

"Way too much information mom. Tell dad I love him whenever you manage to get him on the phone, and tell Mikey and Dave to stay the hell out of my room," she said as her mother exited. "Mikey and Dave are my little brothers. They're twins," she said, plopping down next to me on my bed.

"You're so fucking hot. If I were a lesbian I'd totally have sex with you, which is saying something because I'm picky" she said matter-of-factly, as if she had just told me the time of day or what the weather would be like. I quickly became accustomed to her brash demeanor, and relied on her quirky sense of humor to get me through my most difficult times. Years later, we enjoyed a close bond and considered ourselves to be sisters.

"Are you going to tell your dad that you graduated early?" Rebecca asked, curling her legs underneath her on the stylish sofa. I took a deep breath and began picking absently at a loose thread on my cotton pajamas.

"He already knows. I wrote him a letter a week before the ceremony."

"What did he say? Did he beg you to come back home? Is he coming to get you?"

"He never responded. Not with words anyway," I said, looking at the bouquet of long-stemmed roses that sat in a glass vase on our coffee table.

"Oh, the flowers again. He sent a whole bouquet this time. Doesn't he normally send just one?"

"Yeah. But on special occasions—like my birthday—he sends more." In the three years that I had been away, my father had never called, written, or visited. But every Sunday without fail, there would be a single red rose waiting for me on my doorstep.

The first rose arrived a month after my father had forcibly removed me from his life. Until then I had been consumed with anger and grief, because he hadn't returned any of my phone calls and had refused to entertain my suggestion of quitting school in order to be with him. I wandered aimlessly through my daily routine with him plaguing my every waking thought, wondering if I haunted his memory as much as he haunted mine. Every minute that I wasn't attending lectures or writing term papers was spent weeping into the receiver of a telephone, pleading with my father to talk to me. But no amount of 'I love you's' or 'I miss you's' could ever get him to pick up the other end. By the time Rebecca entered our dorm room holding a long-stemmed red rose, I had given up hope that my father still cared for me.

"Nila, I think this is for you. It was just sitting outside the door when I came back from that godforsaken 7am philosophy lecture," Rebecca said, placing the rose in my hand. I recognized the colorful ribbon that was tied around the rose's stem, because the same ribbon had been tied around my hair when I was a little girl. "Who's it from?" she asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

"My father," I said, my eyes welling with tears.

"You mean that insanely gorgeous fella over there?" she asked, pointing to a framed picture of him on my nightstand.

"That's the one," I said, my voice cracking with emotion as I fingered the ribbon's frayed edges. I placed the rose on my pillow and buried my face in my hands, unable to control the bitter sobs that escaped me.

"Oh sweetie, what's the matter? I thought you'd be happy," Rebecca said, giving up her place on the floor to sit beside me on my bed. She put her arms around me and held me while I cried, soothing me as she would a lost, lonely child.

"I love him so much, and he won't even talk to me," I sobbed, my face pressed against her small breasts. "If it weren't for him dumping cash into my bank account every week, I wouldn't know if he was dead or alive."

"Why won't he talk to you?" she asked, stroking my hair.

"I can't tell you that. It's complicated."

"Wait just a goddamned minute. I told you all about my mother's eating disorder, and about my dad giving chlamydia to Mikey and Dave's fifteen-year-old babysitter, and about losing my virginity to a mall Santa, but you can't tell me why your dad won't talk to you?"

"Fine, I'll tell you. But if you ever breathe a word of it to another soul, I'll smother you in your sleep."

"Deal. Now spill it." She sat quietly as I related the story of my forbidden love, and comforted me as I sobbed over my fear of losing it. She was surprisingly supportive, and even offered to accompany me if I ever decided to make the six-hour trip back to the place that I once called home.

That first rose had been enough to answer all of my questions, and had explained my father's feelings better than he could have himself. "I still love you...I think of you often, because I remembered that the tattered ribbon wrapped around this rose's stem was your favorite...I want you just as much now as I did then," it said. But as time wore on and my tearful pleas to come home no longer crowded his answering machine, the roses that followed began asking as many questions as they answered. "Do you still love me? Have you forgiven me for doing what's best for you? Have you met someone else?" Each week I was asked a different question by a beautiful red rose, and each week I refused to answer. I no longer initiated contact, and by the time I reached my senior year I had trouble remembering what my father's phone number was. I still knew the address to our home, however, and decided to send him a letter a week before my graduation in order to tell him of my success, and to answer some of the questions that he had been asking for three years.

Dear Daddy,

I hope this letter finds you well. You're probably wondering why it's taken me so long to contact you, even though you wouldn't have answered any of my calls if I had bothered to make them, or any of my letters if I had bothered to write them. Although I realize that this letter will go unanswered like all of my other attempts at keeping in touch, I thought you should know that I've graduated from college early, and at the top of my class. Someday I might use the degree in Political Science to apply to law school, and someday you might be proud. But for now I plan to take a year off from studying so that I can enjoy life, or what's left of it in your absence. I also wanted you to know that I've made plenty of friends and even dated someone else, just like you suggested. At first I thought that I was only doing it for you, but later realized I was doing it for myself as well. I needed to be sure that I loved you by choice and not by default. I met a handsome, intelligent young man in the school's library, and we hit it off immediately. I'm sure my attraction had nothing to do with him and everything to do with you, since he was a mulatto boy from the south with big, bright green eyes. After only six months of dating I accepted his marriage proposal, but I called off the engagement when I realized that I didn't love him. I couldn't give him my heart, because it didn't belong to me. It always has and always will belong to you, and it was in your possession before I even knew what it was to give it away. I tried to be less unhealthy, less sick, less in love with you. I tried to force myself to want what others want, to have what others have, but it's no use. I'll continue to want what I've always wanted until I'm dead. And my desire for you will die with me, but not before me.

I've attached tickets to my graduation ceremony in case you'd like to attend. There are two tickets instead of one so that if you've remarried or moved on, you can use this opportunity to throw your relationship in my face and spare me the humiliation of coming home only to discover that I'm no longer welcome.

-Nila

His response to my letter hadn't been the phone call that I'd hoped for, but rather the twelve long-stemmed red roses that sat in the middle of our cherry-wood coffee table. The roses had arrived on my doorstep with an expensive bracelet binding them together at the stem, and I wore the magnificent piece of jewelry at all times. I stared vacantly at the shimmering diamonds around my wrist as Rebecca unraveled my French braid.

"You have to go home sometime sweetie. What else are you gonna do—hang around here until all of this beautiful hair of yours turns gray?" she asked, combing my bone-straight locks from root to tip with her fingernails.

"I can't bring myself to face him Rebecca. So much time has passed that...maybe I'll look at him and realize that I don't love him anymore. It's likely that things won't be the same between us."

"I'm sure that's not true. And even if it is, don't you think you owe it to him to at least say goodbye...and to hand him a naked picture of me with my phone number written on the back?" she asked coyly, the corners of her mouth upturned in a mischievous smile.

"You're supposed to be helping me, not trying to replace me," I said, slapping her leg.

"What can I say? Your dad's hot. I've been masturbating to that picture of him on your nightstand since freshman year," she said, tossing her head back and pretending to pleasure herself.

"First of all, ewww. And second, you can't have him. If he and I do decide to go our separate ways, I'll try to fix him up with a nice churchgoing girl that bakes cookies and makes her own potholders, not some scantily clad she-devil like you."

"What's wrong with me?" she asked in mock defensiveness, picking her nose.

"If my dad hooked up with you, it would take years off of his life. He'd be running around chasing a bunch of foul-mouthed, freckle-faced kids with a butterfly net while you're out on a date with the mailman."

"Hmmm, I see your point. Now stop bullshitting and go home already. I was supposed to have this place to myself about a week ago."

"Do really think I should go back?" I asked, my voice fearful.

"Of course I do. It's the only way that you'll know for sure if things have changed," she said, giving me a sympathetic hug.

"Okay, I'll head home. But if things don't work out then I'm moving right back in here with you," I said.

"Sure you will...if you can pick the new locks that I'm going to put on the door. Now get in here and help me pack," she said, running into my room and tossing my clothes onto the bed.

I could hardly keep my hands from shaking as I fished around in my purse for a fifty-dollar bill. The meter flashed a total of $15.60 for a ten-minute ride in the backseat of the cab, but my growing anxiety had made me generous. I thought I might be sick when the cab came to a stop in front of the beautifully maintained house, and I fought the urge to tell the driver to keep going when I saw my father's car parked in the driveway.

"Is everything okay pretty girl?" the driver asked, taking the fifty-dollar bill from my trembling fingertips.

"Yes...I'm fine. Thank you," I said, grasping the door handle and trying to let myself out.

"Here, let me help you," the driver said after my second attempt at exiting the cab had failed. He jogged around the cab to my passenger's side door, and took my hand as I struggled into a standing position. He closed the door and popped the trunk, unloading all of my heavy luggage. I reached for the handles of two of my suitcases, but he shooed me away.

"No worries miss, I'll take all of your bags up for you. I'd never forgive myself if I let your beautiful hands get calloused from dragging these heavy suitcases," he said, smiling shyly at me. He rolled my luggage up the stone walkway and placed it near the entrance to what I presumed was still my home. When he had taken up the last of my luggage, he jumped in his cab and waved goodbye before speeding off. The sun bore down on me as I walked up the stone path, and I was grateful for the cool breeze that pressed my white sundress up against my curves and floated wisps of my shiny golden-brown hair on its lazy current. My feet felt unsteady in the four-inch stilettos that I wore, and I prayed that I wouldn't topple and ruin the glamorous look that had taken me three hours in front of a mirror to put together. I dug my fingernails into the soft flesh of my palms and forced myself up the walkway, but stopped cold when the front door swung open as I neared the wooden steps that sat at the foot of our veranda. My heart thumped loudly in my chest as our eyes met, each of us searching the depths of the other's irises for hints, signs, and clues as to what was felt, but couldn't be said. My memory and old photographs had done him a great disservice, because he was more beautiful than either had had the ability to surmise. We stood there, his hand on the doorknob, my foot raised above the bottom step, for what seemed like an eternity. We each had a decision to make; a decision that we both knew would be irreversible, unchangeable, permanent. My decision was whether or not to climb the wooden steps, and his was whether or not to close the open door.

"You never called me. You never wrote."

"It would only have made our separation more difficult," he said, gripping the doorknob.

"You wouldn't let me come home, not even for the holidays."

"If I had, then you wouldn't have finished school. I could never force you to leave here a second time," he said, taking a step forward.