At eighteen, most people were thinking of college––the people who hadn’t given up, anyway, the ones not yet smoking crack down in the bowels of El Barrio. Even community college was college, or so Reina Hernandez’s mother reminded her every other day. The youngest of four, Reina wasn’t exactly her mother’s last chance to have success in the family, but she was the only girl and the only one still at home. Like any good teenager, Reina ignored her mother’s wishes. College was a nice ideal, sure, a good goal for all the streetrats in East Harlem, but she had her own ticket out and she wasn’t blowing her cover.
For the past year, Reina had been skipping class not to do drugs or fuck other kids, but to fuck her thirty-two year old boyfriend in his Upper East Side apartment. Endo Yamanaka was a businessman of some kind, or so she assumed; he wore expensive suits, had a flawless modern style apartment, and was never in the country for more than two weeks running. More importantly, he liked her. He even told her, once or twice, that he loved her, and she knew it was only a matter of time before he was saying it every day and she was coming with him on the plane back to Tokyo, to London, to Berlin. She had started out as his maid and become his lover; anything was possible.
The only thing Reina didn’t think was possible was the only thing that ended up happening: she got pregnant. She didn’t tell Endo for a few months, hoping he would finally take her with him and then she could break the news, surprise him and ride off into the sunset on a private jet. What actually happened was that he noticed she wasn’t drinking, was getting round, and confronted her. When she admitted the truth, he gave her two thousand dollars and told her to get out of his life.
She was too far along to get an abortion, and under that pall Roka Hernandez was born in October 1995, just two months late for his mother’s nineteenth birthday. He was lucky enough to be young in the time his mother was judged most harshly, the skinny girl who still looked sixteen walking down the street with a crying, mixed-race baby. Roka wasn’t conscious enough to remember the fights between his mother and grandmother, the time his grandfather hit Reina so hard her eye was red with blood for a week, the comments his uncles made on seeing Roka’s slanty eyes.
By the time Roka was seven, the Hernandez family had more or less grown to accept and even love the child that no one had asked for or wanted. His mother had managed to find, after much harassment, an address his father could be reached at. However cruelly he had cut her off, Reina still had hope that everything would turn out alright, and Roka’s earliest memories are of decorating cards and letters his mother had written to his mysterious father, never knowing quite why he wasn’t around.
Reina hoped that these letters would awaken some kind of paternal feeling in Endo and convince him to come back and provide for his love, her, and his son. Unfortunately, things didn’t really turn out that way. Instead, Reina discovered that Endo was married and had been married for the duration of their relationship. She found this out because Endo was still married and his wife wrote to her demanding to know what was going.
After ten years of throwing away Reina’s letters unopened and ignoring the existence of his son, Endo was forced by his wife to go to the U.S. and make contact under threat of divorce. The visit was, at best, uncomfortable. Endo didn’t want to see Reina and he certainly didn’t want to see his son, and years later Roka still thinks of his father as a tired, frowning face that looked down at him and didn’t see anything worth keeping.
After the let-down of what Reina thought would be a tearful, loving reunion and was more like an exercise in self-torture, she lost some of her vivre. She finally had to accept that the future she wanted just wasn’t going to happen. The upside was that Endo was successful, wealthy, and had a knack for writing off everything he did in the States as a business expense. Roka was shipped off to a private Catholic school, and afterwards to Ashbury, where he resents every living person.
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