Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (5 page)

T
hree years later, I sat down on the cold linoleum of my sorority house floor clutching the pile of mail that had built up while I’d been home over Christmas vacation. I wanted to turn inward, to shut out the seventy other sorority girls sitting on the floor around me, gathering for another planning meeting on recruiting freshmen into our fold. Their collective chatter was an ocean of noise that was familiar and suddenly annoying. There was one envelope I was anxious to open, the one with the international stamps and familiar handwriting. It had been months since I’d heard from my dad, and I wondered why my heart rate quickened just knowing the letter existed.

The meeting was called to order, and I was able to ignore the chipper announcements and rally cry from the front to focus on the letter. Tearing open the envelope, I saw more of the familiar handwriting. As I read, I wondered why he chose to use Spanish this time. Had I told him I was a Spanish major? My studies made it easy to decipher the language; it was his handwriting that was difficult to make out.

Like usual, I read through quickly, hoping there would be something monumental, an apology, a promise that a check for tuition
was on its way, an admission of some kind that he had failed me. The second read was always a disappointed combing through for details that would at least hint at the possibility of the monumentals that I didn’t catch the first time around. But this time I got stuck halfway through the first read. For a moment I felt the air stop moving in and out of my lungs. The blinking began, trying to stop the tears from happening in this room full of pep and cheer.

“A baby,” the letter read. A baby girl, in fact. He’d had another baby.

How could he? How old was he? Who was this woman, the mother? How old was
she
? I started looking around the room for an exit plan; the tears couldn’t be held off much longer. Stepping over the six girls between me and the door would draw more attention than staying where I was and wiping my wet face with my sweatshirt sleeve. I let the tears eke out slowly so my wiping could keep up with them.

I kept reading, looking at each word, making sure I understood every possible meaning. There was no mistaking—he’d had another daughter and he wanted me to come to Barcelona to meet her. How could he so blatantly fail to take care of me and think it would be a good idea to father another child? Was it possible to feel jealousy and pity for someone at the same time? Was it possible to be angry at a baby for taking what I thought should be mine? Obviously it was. And he wanted me to visit? So I could see what I was missing?

Though it sounded like torture, I knew I had to go. This baby could be my link. I pictured her as a teenager coming to visit me, her American big sister. I’d be married, with kids of my own. She would probably smoke since she was European, and I would make her smoke out on the back patio. I’d be cool enough to allow the smoking but responsible enough to keep it away from the kids. This could be my shot at a connection to the half of me that was still absent.

“And where are you staying?” the lady behind the Plexiglas asked me without looking up from my passport.

“With my father.” The words
my father
sounded less strange because the conversation was in Spanish. Everything in Spanish already felt forced.

“His address?” Again without looking up.

“I’m not sure.”

“We need an address.”

I felt the eyes of the people behind me in line, glaring as I scrambled through my backpack looking for something that might have his address. I was a minute and an escalator away from seeing my father, my heart already pounding.
She probably thinks I should know my father’s address. She thinks I’m lying, that I’m trying to sneak into Europe to hop trains for the next six months. Do I look like every other American college student planning to hang out in Europe for the next year? Filling up the subway stations, sleeping on my backpack? Can’t she tell I’m different? That I belong here?

“He lives here. In Barcelona.” Did I have an address book? I must have brought something. Shuffling through the textbooks I didn’t read on the plane, I thought,
I’m already behind on schoolwork.
What was I thinking when I packed them? This was my spring break, after all.

“Fine,” she finally said, peering over the tops of her reading glasses. “Go ahead.” She motioned her hand toward the top of the escalator.

As I rode the escalator down to the baggage terminal, the light from the three-story windows poured into the airport. I saw him at the foot of the escalator, standing alone, looking up, smiling. I wanted to run. Run away and run to him. At the bottom of the escalator, he approached me and put his arms around me. I pulled away and leaned in at the same time, resulting in an awkward hug. He lifted his hand and stroked his finger on my face. I felt rage
fly up from inside my chest to my extremities. I wanted to shout, “You have no right to do that! To touch me that way!” But instead I held it in and avoided eye contact. Why was this always so hard?

Since he didn’t drive, we took a cab back to his apartment, where the baby and her mother were waiting. We walked past the doorman, and I wondered if he knew who I was. We stepped into the caged elevator to go up to his apartment. I looked at my father standing next to me. He looked older than ever now, his hair whiter and thinner than at our last visit, more age spots on his face and neck. What business did he have fathering a child?

I was curious about this woman. How could she find this old man attractive? But I wanted to be kind. To both the baby and her mother. It wasn’t their fault my father had ignored me, disappointed me in so many ways for so many years. I pitied them that they were at the beginning of this journey. I was afraid I might know how their script would play out. Despite my jealousy, for their sakes I hoped it would be different.

We walked through the apartment door, and a dark-haired woman, probably in her thirties, stood facing us. She held a baby against her chest. Her dark eyes moved quickly from me to my father and back to me. I kept walking toward her. I knew I needed to take control of the awkwardness and show her I was willing to be the first one to reach out. I smiled, and her shoulders relaxed. I put my finger out for the baby to grasp.

Once introductions were made, it was hard to take the conversation anywhere else. Should I follow up with, “So how did you two meet?” There was no natural lead-in to getting to know each other. My Spanish was better than it had ever been, but her native language was French. It was easier to focus on the baby, so I moved my finger up and down, and the baby’s tiny fingers wrapped around mine and moved with it. The baby put my finger in her mouth, and her mother and I both laughed. Making eye contact, we smiled and understood neither one of us wanted to be angry
with the other. We had a strange set of circumstances connecting us, but there was no hostility.

After lunch, my father and I went down the caged elevator to his studio. Despite the years apart and my entire childhood to catch up on, we had nothing to say. Finally he motioned to the ceiling and his new family a few stories above us.

“She wanted to have a baby.”

As if that explained everything. The years of absence. The months with no contact. Fathering another daughter when he continued to fail me. I felt the anger in my fingertips.

“Your mom. She wanted a baby too,” he continued.

I knew that was a lie. My mother loved me, but she’d always made it clear I was a surprise. But I didn’t care if a smidge of what he said was true. Did he know she had a scar on the back of her right thigh from trying to protect me? Did he know that twenty years earlier she was carrying me in her arms down a Barcelona street and tripped, and as she felt herself falling face forward toward the fence and the glass bank window it protected, her mothering instincts took over, and she swiveled her body and sat on the wrought-iron spoke, stabbing a hole in her leg? Did he know that a man—certainly not him, but a stranger—was passing by in a cab and stopped and took her to the hospital to be cared for? In her adrenaline rush, she was so concerned that I was okay she didn’t even realize she had punctured herself.

Or how about the everyday, the getting up, the taking me to school, the doctor’s appointments, the recitals, the parent-teacher conferences? Taking on a second job so she could pay for my flute when I was in middle school, and again to pay for caps on my teeth when I was in high school? My life was filled with millions of opportunities to tangibly love me, and my mother showed up. She chose me above everything.

Did he know
that’s
what a parent does? That’s the kind of choice a parent makes? That’s what love looks like?

I
walked into our off-campus house and threw my backpack on the orange velour sofa. Keeping my raincoat on, I continued into the kitchen, wondering if there was anything in the fridge I could mooch off my roommates without them noticing. As I passed by the house phone, I glanced up at the whiteboard above it on the off chance there was a message for me. “ALEX, your husband called!!!” was written in red dry-erase marker. I knew just who the message was referring to, and my heart rate quickened.

“You should look at the Dale House,” my friend Corynn said in our sorority house living room a few months earlier. Corynn had graduated the year before and was back visiting campus. She stopped at the sorority house during our weekly chapter meeting, knowing she’d catch lots of people at once to say hi. We snuck out of the meeting to talk about the stress surrounding my impending graduation and my total lack of plans despite my search for something meaningful. Though much of my faith talk through college
still focused on the outward, the dos and don’ts, I was growing bit by bit in the understanding of a deeper calling.

Corynn’s description of the Dale House, a group home for troubled teenagers in Colorado Springs, was intriguing. It seemed to put Christian faith in action in a way that was different from short-term service trips I’d taken in college, which did good work but gave no credit to the source of love. At the same time, I was skeptical of missions trips that focused on growing people’s faith though they lacked basic needs. What I heard was a description of a place where action and faith were inseparable. I wanted to hear more.

“And Derek Kuykendall is there. Do you remember him?”

“Oh. . . . Yeah.” Conscious of my facial expression, I tried to look as nonchalant as possible.

“He went right after graduation and stayed.”

Derek Kuykendall. I’d watched him from a distance. There was a small, tight Christian community on campus, and though we were both part of that group and attended the same weekly gatherings for our two years of overlap, we’d only spoken a few times. He had always made me swoon a little, because unlike many of the other guys in the group, he was soft-spoken, not drawing attention to himself. In his quiet confidence he stood out. There was no question I knew who he was.

Despite the distraction of hearing Derek’s name, I was drawn in by Corynn’s description of the Dale House as she talked about living with kids who were aging out of the foster care or juvenile corrections systems. Graduation was only a couple of months away, and panic about the rest of my life was setting in. There is something just a tad stressful about having the option to do “anything you want.” I was feeling the burden of choice and opportunity.

My Spanish/International Affairs major pointed me in the direction of living overseas after graduation like my mom did. But my semester studying in Mexico the year before was lonely, and I
didn’t feel I needed the globe-trotting adventures my classmates were planning. They wanted to explore the world they’d learned about the last four years. I’d spent my childhood exploring that world, and I wanted the opposite: some stability. And I wanted to start this grown-up life on a certain trajectory, trusting God to take me to unexpected places. But mostly I was panicking and looking for something to do, somewhere to go.

I packed my bags with my cutest grunge-inspired slacker clothes and flew to Colorado Springs to stay for a weekend, to see and hear and feel the community. When I got off the airplane, Derek was waiting at my gate. Even though I’d known his friends and where he sat in our campus cafeteria years earlier, I’d never spoken more than three sentences to him. As we walked to the baggage claim, I tried to sound interesting and profound, again in a nonchalant kind of way.

The staff was consumed with running a household of thirty, so I spent the next three days following them around as they did their work: cooking dinner for the masses, mopping the floors, arguing with a kid about curfew, and driving another kid to Walmart. This group of mostly twentysomething recent college graduates was actively caring for kids who’d never lived in a stable home. And though many of the “adults” were just above legal age themselves, they took on the responsibility of reframing the world for these teenagers. Showing them that some people did follow through with what they said, forgave when teenagers made teenager mistakes, offered consequences that fit the offense with emotions that were tempered and without their fists.

Sitting on the airplane on the way home, I watched out the window as my bags were loaded into the cargo portion below. As I started to pray, asking God to show me if I was meant to come back, I knew I already had the answer. I felt God impressing it on my heart: I would come back. And for more than one purpose: to be at the Dale House
and
to be with Derek.

There is only a smattering of times I’ve felt God’s clear direction. This was the first of those experiences.

Tears rolled down my cheeks, and I was overwhelmed at the thought of having direction from the Artist who had formed the Rocky Mountains in the distance. There is a difference between saying God knows me and believing it. And an even greater difference between believing it and having evidence of it.

As the tears flowed, I absorbed God’s provision through the details of the Dale House. Of being sent to a place that seemed to so perfectly fit who I was and what I was looking for. The staff trusted that their actions spoke of God’s love with more clarity than any words. Where extending grace came first, and changed behavior was expected only after kids knew they were in a place where they were safely loved. And the possibility of a man who was pulled in the same direction, to the same place, for more than just service—for me. I’d found the starting place for my grown-up life trajectory.

A month later, looking up at the whiteboard in my college house kitchen, I laughed at my roommates’ nickname for Derek. I could feel my heart rate rise at even knowing he’d thought about me. He’d probably called for some clarification on my application, but I could hope there was something more. A reason it was him who called rather than someone else. That he was as expectant as I was about what the next year held.