Three Sisters

This is a story about three sisters. But, first, I wanna talk about me.

My name is Sam. I am a forgettable family law attorney in a small town where everybody knows your name and every chapter of your book. It is a thing of wonder.

I was born on one of three wintry days in the last one  hundred years in Smiley, south Texas, on a Friday in January 1962. Kennedy was still with us and the Beatles were yet to arrive.

I graduated Sendera High School in 1980; UT Austin in December 1983; U of H Law Center in 1987. I circled back to Sendera, looking for work,  married (the first one) and had two offspring. I went to work for a Legal Aid organization there in my hometown and we all lived in a three bedroom apartment until I couldn’t take it anymore. 

I moved us to Dallas, laid a down payment on a house (the first one),  putting myself on every money list I could find, criminal, CPS, Attorneys on Demand, a traffic ticket mill, anything. I didn’t advertise but I glad handed everyone I could and developed a good cadre of dedicated clients.

At the same time—in the town I left behind—there were three sisters. We will call them the Sanchez sisters: Amber, Cecilia and Trystan. Amber was a classic Hispanic beauty (think Eva Longoria); Cecilia was buxom (think Sofia Vergara), charming, funny and had a hundred friends; Trystan, though, was the jewel of the family. The thing about Trystan was that she had this kid, Robert Malcom Macias (a product of her first marriage),  that the family loved. He had this amazing curly hair. One of his uncles had an obsession with Bob Dylan. Every time he saw Robert, he exclaimed “Bobby Dylan, hair and all!” His mother hated the nickname “Bobby” but she thought “Dylan” was cool. Even when he got older and the curls shortened along the top of his head, the nickname stuck. 

Dylan was born with a congenital heart problem that promised to cut his life short, even as he laughed and joked and grew into a teenager, making a short life inconceivable. He was an invincible kid, full of laughter and sly jokes, even as—as he grew— his chest became more scarred from multiple heart  surgeries.

These two disparate worlds, separated by hundreds of miles, teased each other when I divorced my wife (She had a thing for Jesus that squeezed me out of the marriage.) and trudged back, humbled, to Sendera to go work for someone else.  I mean, I had just spent ten years working for my own funk, saving, spending, all in my own ball of yarn. Now here I was churning out my services out for Hunter, Davis & Wall because my first wife hated that I was Presbyterian.

Hunter provided me with a steady salary, a monthly health insurance stipend and my own private secretary. Her name was Amber. And she was some kind of hot.

Amber (Amber The Hottie)  cheated on her husband (the first one) with me. The  affair ended her marriage and it ended my tenure at Hunter. Seems they frowned on fucking the help.

So I went back into private practice (without the cadre of clients), a slight scar on my reputation (whisper, whisper) and I got re-married. To Amber, of course, the mid-life secretary (my favorite cliche). To this day, I regret nothing. I met her sisters Cecilia and Trystan and I met Trystan’s son. His name was Dylan. Dylan was light and sugar, rock and roll, sly jokes and wry smiles.

The boys’ lives intersected as well— at school. My son was a senior at Memorial East High; Dylan was a junior. Before my kid matriculated, the troubles at home escalated and Amber, left with few choices, filed for divorce. She had her reasons. They were good reasons. Amber didn’t leave me for another man. But she didn’t leave me to be alone, either.

There was a painful sixty day waiting period, during which Cecilia started working for me. Seems Amber didn’t want to help around the office anymore.

The hearing was set for April.  On the morning we got divorced and Amber headed back to her new job / man in Conroe, Trystan offered to buy me lunch after court. I accepted. In her truck on the way to the restaurant, after the small talk was over and we were headed north on 87, I took her hand in mine. We drove in silence the rest of the ride, breaking only when we got to the parking  lot of Tokyo Inn. I loved her and I loved her sister and I never have—before or since— felt more lost.

Trystan was good company.  I had the New York steak hibachi and five Heinekens. She had soup, salad and two white Zins.  I got through it by telling offensive jokes, rubbing her left leg when she laughed and avoiding Amber talk.

That July, Dylan was scheduled for his thirteenth open chest surgery. No doctor in Texas would touch it so Trystan and her husband (the second one) shuttled Dylan to California. They arrived three days early and made a mini-vacation of it.

After three days, they had an appointment at the hospital.  Then, the fun now just a memory, Dylan, wearing a black Let There Be Rock tee shirt, listened. He was 17 years old, his dark curly hair falling mid-way down his forehead as he leaned his head toward the doctor’s words, nodding occasionally.  He towered over his short mother. The doctor, standing in the hallway with the two of them,  just past the nurse’s station, slowly explained the procedure to him: your body has grown and the stint in your heart has grown, simply put, too small. Trystan grabbed her kid’s hand. Over the course of the sixteen hour surgery, the doctor continued, we will remove the restrictive stint and replace it with a larger one.  Trystan’s grip tightened (sixteen hours) around her only son’s hand. We will get started at oh five hundred hours.

And so it was.

At nine o’clock that evening, the surgery failed.

Young Master Dylan, however, was not told that his body was inexplicably rejecting the implant. He fought. For two days he fought, while the California team of doctors, nurses and parademics kept consulting, trying, refusing to stitch up his chest until finally, exhausted, Trystan’s husband called me and asked for Trystan’s Final Decree of Divorce, the one indicating that she alone had the power to make medical decisions regarding Robert Malcolm Macias and—more pointedly—that the kid’s father had no such say. I put the thing in PDF and e-mailed it to him, from Texas to California in a matter of seconds. And, thus, I am complicit.

The next day, Dylan’s body was flown back to Texas.

I have never, until now, tried to imagine the drive back with Trystan and her husband. Slipping through southern-most Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and finally breaking the border back into Texas. Did she cry the whole way or was she too stunned? Did they talk about what they were going to eat for supper while they were having lunch? Did she hate him, the amazing stepfather, for not doing more? Did she hate herself? Did she lose her faith?

She buried her teenage son on a hot summer day in mid-town Sendera. She carried herself well, both on that day and in the ensuing months.

Life returned to normal.

On Wednesdays, Cecilia and I usually jet across the street to Haligan’s  around 4 to get an early start on the evening’s drinking. I’d cry about my ex-spouse and she would cry about her current one.  This particular Wednesday, however, a few months after the funeral, was Trystan’s birthday week and Trystan had  convinced Cecilia to buy dinner for them at Tokyo Inn. Cecilia invited me to carouse with them. I accepted.

We had a respectable amount of food and alcohol. We should have gone home. Trystan’s husband called. Seems she stayed at Tokyo longer than she said she would. We stayed.  My jokes got funnier and my hand, whenever Trystan laughed, moved further up her thigh, her initial resistance gone. We could have stayed all night. But when Trystan’s husband started calling Cecilia’s phone, Cecilia (of all people) called for the tab, which I dutifully paid. She decided she would take Trystan home (in spite of my fervent offers to do the same) in the family truck and worry about her own car later.

The three of us walked to the front porch of Tokyo Inn. I watched Cecilia forcibly prevent Trystan, turning around repeatedly, from walking back in to Tokyo for “one more.” I just smiled. Cecelia, growing increasingly agitated with her older sister, trying to tame both her and the ceaseless notifications from her cell phone, told us to wait there while she retrieved the truck. Cecilia was already talking to her ex on the cell. We would be waiting a while.

Trystan tapped her right shoulder while we waited. That was her signal for me to massage her. I hesitated. We were not in some darkened bar. We were outside in the sunlight. People driving by. I did not want to massage her. “Samuel,” she said, while tapping her right shoulder urgently. I sighed. I stepped behind her and massaged her shoulder muscles as hard as I could. She let out an audible moan of enjoyment. Then the Sanchez family truck was in front of us. I walked Trystan to the passenger side. She said, “no,” taking a step back. There in the parking lot of Tokyo Inn,  the sun inching lower, she grabbed me into a bear hug, her sister looking on from the driver’s seat, talking, glancing at us through the tinted window. You would have thought we were lovers, Trystan and I, if you were just looking on, her grip on me undeniable.

Cecilia put the phone down, lowered the passenger side window of the truck and said, “Get in the fucking car.” Trystan did not loosen her embrace of me.

And then it happened. There at the passenger side door of her husband’s crew cab.

Trystan’s body in my arms began trembling. I realized how truly small she was, the trembling now turning into sobs and then, finally, into these words: I can’t believe he’s gone. Everything in his room is still there. My son. (She leaned further into me and then down. Like a person melting. The sun inched down more. I could not hold her up and she ended up seated, there on the gravel, just short of the truck’s cooling interior.) My son. (She looked up at me.) He’s gone.

Her body had stopped trembling; the sobbing had stopped. She  was just sitting on the ground outside Tokyo Inn, staring ahead, and I was crouched down in front of her—never (before or since) more helpless. She looked at me then, waiting for me to say, no, Dylan isn’t dead; he’s just waiting at home for you, listening to AC/DC in his room. Let’s get you home, babe. I wanted to have the ability to say that.  But I didn’t say anything.

Cecilia came around the front of the running truck and opened the back door in front of us. “Get her in,” she commanded me. I moved to get my hands under Trystan’s arms while Cecilia glared at us. “I’m fine,” Trystan said, pushing me away, putting her hands down on the pavement and hoisting herself up. She was unsteady and leaning into me again.  I instinctively hugged her. She said, “He’s not there.”

Cecilia broke us up and more or less shoved Trystan into the back seat, explaining that her husband was going to be mad. Cecilia was angry but when she looked at me she gave me a rueful smile. “You’re a fuck up,” her eyes said, “but you helped.” They drove off, Sissy driving, Try in the back seat. I watched, trying to process what had just happened, as the taillights of the truck faded into the humid Sendera twilight.

I slowly walked through the Tokyo Inn parking lot to my ride.

I sat in my vehicle, an orange Chevrolet Colorado, and stared out the front  window. Some time went by; I don’t know how much.  I do know it got dark. I do not know what it is like to lose a child.

I imagined Dylan somewhere, no longer of this world,  rocking his head back and forth, his long curly black hair, now fully restored, falling in front of his dark brown eyes, his left hand in the air, horns up, an invisible microphone in this right hand near his mouth. He pushes his head backwards and that dark hair goes flying in the air. And this is the joyful noise I heard Dylan singing:

In the beginning, back in 1955, man didn’t know about a rock and roll show.