To Selena, With Love (10 page)

Abraham was certainly angry. He started to walk away, his shoulders hunched forward and his hands balled into fists. Thinking,
Oh, man, please don’t let him try to do anything
, I followed him toward the back of the bus, where the generator was making a loud clacking sound.

Suddenly Abraham stopped so fast that I nearly ran into him. He wheeled around and pointed a finger at me. “Suzette just told me that she walked onto the bus and saw you and Selena holding hands,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on with you guys, but whatever it is, it stops right now.”

I remained silent as Abraham continued to yell and jab his finger in my direction, trying to intimidate me. “And one more thing!” he finished. “If you say a single word about this conversation to Selena, I will deny it and she’s going to believe me.”

What had made Suzette say something to him? To this day, I have no idea. It was probably just a rift between sisters—nothing serious, just a bad mood.

I could have denied holding hands with Selena. That was the truth, after all. But I didn’t bother. Abraham had good reason to be accusing me. Besides, I was tired of living with the worry that, every
day, Selena and I were doing something wrong by loving each other and hiding it from her father.

I had known that, sooner or later, Abraham would discover our secret, and this worry had been a constant thorn in my side. Here we were, so happy and so in love, yet there was this one thing that I constantly itched to fix. More than for me, I wanted to fix the situation for Selena’s sake. She worked harder and was more generous than anyone I’d ever met. She deserved to have her father’s blessing and have people be happy for her.

I didn’t want to lie to Abraham anymore. At the same time, I also didn’t want to defy him or make him any angrier than he already was. If there were any right words or right deeds I could have done to change his mind about Selena and me, I would have done them. I just didn’t know what they were.

So I just said, “Okay.” What else was there to say? All I wanted at the moment was to defuse the situation. My only other option would have been to tell him, “No, I’m not going to stop seeing Selena.” I had a pretty good idea how that would go over.

Thankfully, my response seemed to satisfy him. Abraham turned on his heel and stormed off. He must have thought he’d won. He didn’t know how serious my relationship with Selena already was. He certainly didn’t suspect that Selena and I were already lovers, or that we saw each other nearly every day when we weren’t touring. In his view, his daughter and I were just two kids who’d started flirting. In love? Impossible.

Once Abraham had huffed back into the building with the road crew, I rejoined Selena on the bus. “I think your sister told your father that she came on the bus and saw us holding hands,” I said.

Selena was furious; she wanted to go after Suzette and have it
out with her. I had to calm her down. I didn’t want Selena arguing with Suzette in front of everyone. What good would that do? Everyone we cared about except Abraham had already been told about us, or had seen us express our feelings for each other in some way—my mom, Selena’s mom, my friend Carlos and his mom, our friends, everyone in the band—so fighting out in the open could only make things worse with Abraham.

Things were incredibly tense on the bus in the days after that. I was trying to walk a fine line between keeping Selena happy and making everyone else happy, too, including her father and the band. I didn’t want to lose my job. And, stupidly, I kept thinking that once Abraham calmed down, we would all be able to talk openly about what was going on and he’d accept the situation.

That didn’t happen. Instead, Abraham grew increasingly difficult to be around. He was in danger of losing his little girl—and his star—and his guard was up. The band members, including A.B. and Suzette, turned their backs on me, scarcely speaking to me unless it was absolutely essential to the work we were doing.

Meanwhile, I continued to act like nothing was going on between Selena and me. I didn’t want to act disrespectfully in front of Abraham, nor did I want to jeopardize my position in the band. I loved playing with Los Dinos. I also knew how upset Selena would be if I weren’t able to play with them.

I was frankly surprised that Abraham let me stay. He must have assumed that I was going to do whatever he said. Everyone else did. Besides, how could I possibly be a threat, or worthy of his daughter’s affection? He was in charge of his family and his band. I was just a lowly guitarist, and musicians were a dime a dozen.

At the same time, Abraham was now on high alert for any
potential trouble within the ranks. He kept a sharp eye on us and made sure that, ninety-nine percent of the time, he was with Selena everywhere she went. Little did he know that Selena and I were still seeing each other in San Antonio and Corpus whenever the band wasn’t on the road.

Naturally, it hurt my feelings when the other band members shunned me. I thought we were friends, but now they made it clear that nobody had my back. On the other hand, what did I expect? Like me, nobody wanted to lose his job or mess with Abraham. They weren’t telling me not to see Selena, so I guess that was their way of showing some support for us, but that was about as far as it went.

At one point, A.B. and I were sitting together on the bus when we happened to notice Abraham pacing slowly back and forth on the sidewalk below, clearly moping. I wanted to go down there and tell Abraham how I felt about Selena, but I knew there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t provoke another fit of rage.

“Dude, I hate this,” I told A.B.

“Hate what?” he asked.

“I hate it that it’s so hard for your dad to think about Selena and me being together.”

“Don’t worry,” A.B. reassured me. “Dad will get over this. You’ve just got to give him some time.”

Man
, I said to myself.
I don’t see that ever happening
.

Despite all of this exhausting tension, Selena and I were still happy together. We always had a great time going out to eat, hanging at my mom’s house in San Antonio, or visiting friends who knew about and accepted our relationship.

One of my favorite memories is of a time I visited Selena in Corpus Christi and we ended up taking a long walk by the water. We walked all the way to the tip of one of the jetties, where we sat and talked about our situation, promising each other once again that nothing could ever tear us apart.

As we sat there, Selena put her head on my shoulder and started softly singing one of my favorite songs, “More than Words,” by a phenomenal band called Extreme that I’d introduced to her not long before. Those lyrics seemed to describe our feelings for one another perfectly.

I had never been more content than I was at that moment, sitting on that jetty in Corpus and having Selena sing to me. How amazing it was, I thought, that this woman I loved so much would sing for me, and me alone, in her incredible voice, as the water sparkled silver beneath a wide blue Texas sky.

After Selena passed away, Extreme came to Corpus to play. The band dedicated that song to her because I had met them once and told the lead singer how much Selena loved the lyrics. But that was later, after everything.

The day that Abraham finally threw me out of Los Dinos started out like any other day. We were again traveling on the bus. We had just finished a show and we were all sitting up toward the front. The atmosphere still crackled with tension. The band members were clearly getting tired of this whole situation and mostly ignoring me. I’m sure they wished I’d leave so that peace could reign in their world once again.

No single discussion or event sparked Abraham’s anger, but his
blood was boiling. Looking back on that day, I’m guessing that he had been obsessing over the possibility that Selena and I were still sneaking around, and he just couldn’t take it anymore.

For whatever reason, as we were driving home from the show, Abraham hit the brakes, pulled the bus over to the side of the road, turned around, and started yelling at me from the driver’s seat. “That’s it! This is over between you and Selena! It stops now. This is not going to happen!”

I glanced out of the window, quickly weighing my options. We had been in a small town just a few miles back; Abraham had at least pulled the bus off the road. I could walk back to that town and call a friend to pick me up if things on the bus got too intolerable.

Still shouting, Abraham was now walking toward me, yelling at both Selena and me about how we’d tried to play him for a fool. “This thing between you and Chris, whatever it is, it’s not going to happen!” he shouted at Selena. “He has nothing to offer you!”

Selena started arguing with him. Meanwhile, I felt caught. I knew that if I reacted the way I really wanted to, by jumping in and shouting to express my own anger at the insults Abraham was hurling in my direction, things could only get worse.

I suddenly felt exhausted, thinking,
Really? This has to happen? Why?

It must have looked like I was just passively sitting there, taking everything Abraham threw my way. Finally I got out of my seat and stood next to Selena to show my support.

Abraham glared at me. “You know what you are? You’re like a cancer in my family!”

“Don’t talk to him that way!” Selena yelled. “I love Chris and he loves me!”

“Of course he loves you!” Abraham shouted back. “You’re beautiful and you’re rich!”

They went back and forth while I stood there. I was more hurt than angry that Abraham would say those things. I understood why he was afraid of losing Selena, but he’d known me long enough to know I wasn’t the kind of guy who would be motivated by money.

“If this foolishness continues between you two, I’m going to end this band!” Abraham declared when Selena wouldn’t back down.

I glanced around the bus. I knew that Abraham would never end the band. It meant too much to him. But I saw that everybody else looked pretty freaked out. I felt more exhausted than ever. I just wanted out. I was tired of having these nervous feelings, like I was doing something wrong by falling in love with Selena. I was sick of being around Abraham, who was doing everything possible to make my life miserable.

In the middle of the argument, just like that, I said, “I’m out of here. Screw this. I’ll find my own way home. I don’t want to ride in here anyway.”

“You can’t leave!” Selena cried.

I gave her a quick embrace. “He’s your dad, Selena,” I whispered. “I love you, but this is too much stress for me. I have my family. This is yours.”

She knew I was right. There was nothing else that could happen. Certainly Abraham and I weren’t going to be able to smooth things out by talking. He was too angry and upset for that to happen.

I got off, took a few deep breaths of cool night air, and started walking along the highway as the bus pulled back onto the road with a roar of exhaust.

I had left one of my guitars on the bus when I walked off that night. A few days later, I asked Jesse, a good friend of mine, to get the guitar for me when Selena y Los Dinos played in San Antonio.

Afterward, Jesse told me what happened. As he had searched out the road crew and asked for my guitar, Abraham approached him. Abraham knew that Jesse and Selena were friends, because he had heard a message from Jesse recently on Selena’s phone.