Under the Water

Ken and my father were arguing when my mother called me into the dining room. The dining room chair creaked under her weight as she sat down. She set an old photo album on the table and looked at the chair next to her. Spores puffed into the air when she opened the album. I’d never seen it before, so she started taking me through, page by page.The album started with my parents, newly married, toting Ken around Monterey, California, where my father went to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center.“Don’t you love it when the government names things?” she said, flipping a page.There were candids of my parents, taken by one another, or portraits of the two of them, taken by my father’s Olympus on a timer. They got classier and classier. My father went from a M*A*S*H t-shirt to a black suit to a black tux. Even in photos my father exuded strength and virility. Standing next to him was my mother: too thin, too-straight hair parted down the middle, wearing a simple dress, always looking up at my father.“This is when we moved to DC and started going to the parties.” Off my look: “It was the Cold War. We called them ‘embassy parties’, but most of the embassies are too small, so they were usually at some fancy hotel. Wherever the Soviets were, we went.”She flipped to another page and went on: “Most everything the KGB did in DC was in plain sight, you just had to know where to look. Your father’s job was to mix with these guys and learn what they were up to. But just like he knew who the KGB guys were, the KGB guys knew who we were.”“Wow.” We didn’t talk about my father’s work.“Yeah. It was so fun. I had this picture of your brother in my little clutch. I showed off his picture like a proud mama. I’d ask these men about their families, whether they missed their children. They’d tell me all sorts of things, just talking about their kids.” She looked at me, obviously proud. “Your father and I would come home in the middle of the night and he’d type up everything I told him.”My mother flipped to another page and frowned. She put her finger on a picture: my mother in a red dress, lovely, unrecognizable. She was laughing, holding a beer.“I was two months pregnant with you at the time, but I didn’t know it yet.”She peeled back the cellophane cover and the photo popped off the page. She handed it to me.“This was my last party,” she said. “My morning sickness was so bad they put me in the hospital for awhile so I didn’t starve.” She stared at the picture in my hand. “That was the last night that Abdullah called. One day, you’ll want to ask your father about Abdullah.”Taking the album, she struggled to her feet, her knees cracking under her weight.Three days later, she swallowed her hoarded benzos, ran herself a bath, and drowned.I was 14.

Why did my mother tell me that name? Even though she died days later, the conversation we had that day was the last time she said more than a quick “hi”, “hello”, or the “I love you” she shared every day.The funeral was a strange affair. My father sat alone, by choice. Ken and I sat with my mother’s parents, who raged at my father for having their daughter cremated. Soon all of the pictures would be gone, thrown out with her things.After the service, there was a luncheon in the church cafeteria, because for some reason we had to maintain appearances. We formed the traditional line and mourners came in to wish their condolences. Ken disappeared. There were more people than I expected. People from my mother’s work told me how wonderful she was before walking away, ignoring my father. I had this sense that they’d never met my mother and neither had I. No one said as much, but I realized that none of them were surprised.“Sir?” I said, sotto voce.He glanced down at me, but said nothing.“Who’s Abdullah?”His jaw worked. “Your mother?” he hissed.I nodded. He looked away. His hands formed into tight fists. I left the line, explaining I needed to find Ken.I found my brother where I knew he’d be, sitting in the gravel parking lot crying next to a six-pack of stolen beer. He handed me a can, my first, and we drank together, two underage half-orphans trying to get drunk.

When I went away to college my father moved into a one-bedroom apartment and Ken became my out-of-session home. I ran across my mother’s picture while unpacking one summer.“Have you ever seen this?” I asked.He looked shocked. “Mom. I thought Dad threw all of those away.”“Mother gave it to me a few days before she killed herself. She told me to hide it.”“I don’t understand,” Ken said. “Why?”“I don’t know. She told me to ask our father about Abdullah. Do you know him?”“No.” He stared at the picture. “I remember Mom being happy then.”My grandparents had pictures to share with my brother and I, but our only picture from home is the one of my mother in the red dress, drinking a beer, pregnant with me.

My father never visited and he never invited me over. Imposing a visit was a struggle, but I did, hoping that one day, I’d have my chance to ask about Abdullah. The only person I ever brought along was Tracey, a girl I thought I might marry one day. Tracey didn’t share my mother’s brown hair— Tracey was a blonde— but otherwise she looked very much like my mother’s photo. And, like my mother, Tracey’s moods were always balanced on a knife’s edge. My father adored her.One night, unprompted, my father told us about Abdullah for the first time.“Abdullah delivered tea to offices in Beirut. He had a little cart that he wheeled around. Everyone was so used to him he was invisible. Even terrorists have offices, so he was a pretty useful friend to have.”“You were friends?” My father had no friends and, as far as I knew, never had.“He thought we were. When we found out the Israelis were about to bomb Beirut, I told him to leave town. He called me after that to thank me.”“How did he know where to find you?” I asked.“We had local numbers all over the world. I had to let the CIA know where I was at all times, so when Abdullah called they could patch him through to me. He’d call all the time, too, just to chat. There were a couple times when I was at a party and the hotel staff came to find me. Your mother would have to handle things on her own. She struggled with that.”He scowled at me, looked away, fell silent. I knew not to ask anymore.After that visit, I broke up with Tracey. When I called to tell him about the breakup, I thought my father was going to cry: she was someone to protect, vicariously, through me, and I’d taken that away.

Years later, I visited my father in his one-bedroom apartment. He didn’t sleep much by then, so his doctor had given him Ambien. She’d probably told him not to drink on it, but that wasn’t going to make a difference. That night I sat with him as he drank. I counted the empty highball glasses next to him. Even when drunk he didn’t slur: you never could tell when he his normal state of dangerous or his lowered inhibitions state of dangerous.I took a risk: “do you remember Mother’s funeral? What I asked you there?”He shook his head.“I asked about Abdullah. You told Tracey and I about him, but there was more, wasn’t there?”“I got carried away,” he said, searching for his drink among the empty glasses. “I shouldn’t have started that story.”“Why did Mother tell me to ask you about him?”He swirled the ice in his glass.“Please,” I said.He grimaced. “I got to know Abdullah right before Hezbollah blew up the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. It was a disaster. Abdullah helped us track the guys down so that the Marines could go in and kill the guys who planned the attack. But the operation— ” he waved his highball in the air— “it got fucked up. Abdullah helped us find their safehouse, but they’d left. They were there, but not anymore. All the guys we killed, they were nobodies.”We sat, silent for a beat.He set his glass down. “We’d just gotten back from another party. She had this red dress. She was drunk by the time he called. He was scared. Hezbollah was everywhere, looking for the guy who spilled. I told him to lay low. He just needed to stay quiet, because Hezbollah was certainly looking for an Israeli. Abdullah wanted us to get him out.”“But you didn’t,” I said.“No,” he said.“Why not?”“I wasn’t about to risk American lives for some Arab,” he said. “Your mother was convinced I could have Abdullah extracted. I refused to even try. Her mind was going so fast, though, her head so out of control, and she was smashed, she screamed I was leaving him to die.”“Were you?”He turned icy eyes on me. “Of course I was.”“Could you have saved him?” I asked.He took a drink, pondered. “I told myself he was dead the first time he called me.”His head nodded, as if he was falling asleep.“So,” I said, “Mother.”“She kept saying that he thought I was his friend. But I refused to consider helping him, because— ”“American lives.”“Like your mother, or your brother. Or you,” he said. “She decided I’d betray her too. I never did convince her that I was doing this for her.” Big inhale. “She grabbed the kitchen phone, demanding the switchboard number, jamming zero repeatedly. I had to pull her away. Her screaming woke up your brother.” His jaw worked, as it always did when he was angry. “I’d never seen her that bad before.”“So you knew about her mania?”“I didn’t know what it was at the time. I just knew she was out of control. And dangerous, more to herself that anyone else.” He paused and took a deep breath before going on: “The hospital told us she was pregnant. They tried shocking her head to get her under control. They tried lithium. None of it worked. They advised us to terminate so that they could move on to some other medicines, but we refused.”I waited for what I knew was next.“Given what happened after,” he said, “we should have.”

My father didn’t remember anything the next day: Ambien is a remarkable hypnotic. He didn’t know why I was eager to leave, but he made no effort to stop me. I called my brother on the drive home. I thought that I’d get some sort of closure, knowing what happened to Abdullah, but nothing about the story surprised me. Of course he let Abdullah die. That was no shock to me at all. I shared this with Ken.“You’re not surprised,” he said. “I’m not surprised. But mom was.”“She hated him,” I said. “Why didn’t she just leave? Take us with her?”“Well,” Ken said, “she did.”My father hated me because my mother weaponized me. That’s why she left that name with me and not with Ken. My father already struggled with my provenance and she made him struggle with my existence. She made sure that I’d never be able to have a relationship with him. She made sure that— as long as I was around— he could never move on. There was only one thing to do: I did him a mercy, and never spoke to him again.

John W. Treviño