It takes a full minute of Brando rubbing my back before I can stop the quivering in my lips and the sobbing in my throat enough to continue.
“My mom still had his address – the one he used for personal letters. I knew he checked them himself, rather than through a secretary. I started sending him letters, photos, cassette tapes of me talking mixed with the songs I was making. I don’t know what I thought would happen. Maybe that he would accept me back into his life. Maybe he’d see that I had his blood, musician’s blood, and realize he’d made a mistake.” I shake my head at my own teenage stupidity. “Yeah. I actually thought he’d realize he’d made a mistake. Maybe it was the drugs, the lifestyle, the career that got in the way. I sent him letters for five years. Five fucking years! Half a decade, hundreds of letters with my whole life in them. My deepest thoughts, my hopes and dreams. One hope and one dream most of all – to have a fucking father.”
I break down fully. The cracks too wide to close up. Pain and heartbreak flowing through every vein in my body. Brando pulls me toward him tightly, squeezing me as if he can push it all back out.
“Haley,” he says, as I weep into his chest, “I’m sorry.”
I gather the pieces of me that remain and stand back upright to breathe in the cool night air.
“Maybe,” Brando says, his hand still brushing my wet cheek, “he didn’t get the letters? Perhaps he had a different address? Or it just got stuck with all the other fan mail?”
“All he had to do was look, you know?!” I scream, loudly and angrily, as if it’s him standing in front of me rather than Brando. “All he had to do was look! We weren’t on fucking Mars; we were six hours away in Santa Cruz! Twenty-four fucking years and nothing. Not one fucking word! I thought maybe he was staying away, scared to come back after all this time. He had to know. Who could spend twenty-four years without checking once – just once – to see what his daughter looked like? And then tonight… He just looked right through me, like I was anybody, and I knew. I knew I was lying to myself.”
Brando says nothing, but his eyes show it. He wishes he could take this pain away, wishes he could do something, but he can’t. Instead, he reaches down to the six pack of beers he brought out onto the balcony, cracks two open, and hands me one. I gulp almost half of it, hoping the cold fizz and the alcohol will help clear away the bad taste that all the memories left behind.
“Thanks,” I say, drying the last of my tears with the edge of the blanket.
Brando nods and leans back against the balcony, twisting the bottle in his hands as he searches for something to say.
“You know, I can’t tell you how to feel, or how to think about any of that. I can’t tell you how to stop hurting – I’d be a therapist if I could. But the one thing I do know, for sure, is that it’s the shit that hurts the most, which hurts the longest and the deepest, that makes you tougher.”
I lean over the railing, dangling my beer above the empty street below, watching the shadows of strays slide around the garbage cans of the alleyway.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve just never really spoken about this before.”
“It’s okay,” Brando replies softly.
“Let’s talk about something else. Please. I don’t want to think about this anymore.”
“Okay, let’s see…” he says, moving closer and leaning in.
I look up at him, searching his gaze. “Tell me about you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. What’s your story? We spend so much time together, and I still have no idea where you’re from.” I snort a little laugh. “Did you just emerge out of thin air as the very charming, incredibly handsome ‘Brando Nash’?”
“Yes?”
I laugh. “Funnily enough, I’d believe that.”
“Actually,” Brando says with a sigh, “the truth is a bit messier.”
“Oh?”
He turns his face back toward the skyline, as if he can almost see his past still happening way off beyond the city’s lights.
“I don’t really know where I was born, or who my parents were. They gave me up for adoption when I was two.”
“Jesus.” For some reason, this was the last thing I expected to hear. I turn to look at Brando. “You didn’t try to find out?”
“I didn’t have time to try. The first ten years of my life are just a blur. One group home to another, friends you make and lose in a single day, foster parents I eventually gave up on hoping would be long-term. I was always the new boy, always the stranger. I got bullied pretty bad. I learned pretty quickly to just keep my mouth shut and get through the days.”
I study Brando’s face. He stares outward, his expression stony, as if reciting a history textbook in his deep monotone.
“I had nothing. Owned nothing. Even my clothes were ‘borrowed’ from other kids in the homes. Except music. That was free. You couldn’t steal airwaves.” He takes a long draught of beer.