Page 71 of A Winter in New York

“My mother had that choice too,” I say, looking at her picture.

“She picked you,” he says. “The band hit the skids pretty much as soon as she found out you were on the way. She got sick most days, Charlie got scared. They couldn’t be in the same room, let alone the same band.”

I hang on to Felipe’s every word as I set the photograph aside to look through the others. Some of them I’ve seen before but many are new to me; it’s such an unexpected gift to see her again.

Felipe does his best to supply locations and anecdotes as I work my way through them, and after a few minutes he passes me a box of tissues.

“It’s the ducts,” I mumble.

“You said.”

I smooth out a rolled-up poster for a gig in some downtown L.A. club, a silhouetted outline shot of my mother onstage. It captures her essence so well that a small noise escapes my throat, and I cough a couple of times to clear it.

“She found out she was pregnant the day that was taken,” he says. “I can see her now, shoving the test in her back pocket as she ran out onto the stage.”

I study the poster closely, and sure enough you can just about make out the white tip of the plastic test sticking out of her pocket. I turn to Felipe, knowing I must be a mascara-streaked mess.

“I’m in this picture,” I whisper. “Right there, probably no bigger than a grain of rice, but I’m there.”

I demonstrate the minuscule rice size with my thumb and finger, and he puts his arm around my shoulders and pullsanother tissue from the box for me. I’ve never seen any photographs of my mother during her pregnancy, this is a precious first.

“I’m going to frame it.” I blow my nose. “Hang it on my wall forever.”

He pats my shoulder.

“There’s something else, but given your…ducts,” he gestures toward my face, “I don’t know if we should hold off for another day. Tomorrow, maybe.”

I dash my hands over my face and stare at him. “No. No way, I need to see it all now. Felipe, please, I’m okay, honestly I am.”

He lifts one shoulder and sighs. “If you say so. Drink some coffee first at least.”

I put the papers and photos carefully back into the envelope and lay them to one side.

“Thank you,” I say, reaching for my cup. “For all of this.”

He lifts his eyebrows. “Viv was one hell of a girl,” he says.

I hesitate to ask my next question, not wanting to be insensitive. “Do you know much about what happened between her and Santo?”

He casts his eyes to the ceiling and laughs softly. “We were all a little bit in love with your mother back then, but we were chopped liver as soon as she laid her baby blues on my brother.” He shakes his head. “He came by for a few beers before a gig one night and that was that. For the next two days they were love’s young dream. I hardly recognized Santo, he was so entranced by your mother.”

He speaks slow and low, remembering in his own time.

“And then it was time for us to hit the road. Gigs lined upacross the country, heading toward L.A. and the big time, if Louis was to be believed. In truth, I wasn’t so sure she was going to go. Thought she’d pick my brother over us.”

“But she didn’t,” I say, because this is the one part of the story I know.

“It was touch and go,” Felipe says. “The bus waited five minutes, then ten, before she came running around the corner and got in, tear ducts overflowing just like yours are now.” He waves his hand toward my face. “Didn’t speak to a soul the whole way, she just slunk to the back of the bus like a wounded animal.”

We sit in contemplative silence, punctuated by my tearful sniffs. I’m so incredibly saddened to think of my mother caught between love and ambition, far too young and fragile to make such life-changing decisions. Yet she didn’t hesitate for a moment when she found out she was pregnant, Felipe said. She always told me that the day she discovered she was expecting was the happiest of her life, because she’d finally have someone to love forever. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, especially now I have all this new knowledge of how much she gave up to be a mother. She must have gone out on to that stage full of swirling emotions. Perhaps that’s why the photograph seems to capture so much of who she was—she was literally caught between her old life and her new one.

“You said you had something else to show me?”

Felipe scrubs his hand over his bristled cheek and then gets up and crosses to the television. I watch him, perplexed, until I notice the VHS slot beneath the screen.

“Felipe…” I say, my hand over the base of my throat. “Is there film?”

He turns back to look at me. “You sure you want to do this?”

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