I Didn't Tell Him I loved Him

In the spring of 1997, my father and brother were murdered in Miami. I was on tour with a Broadway show when I got the call. I was 29 years old. These two pieces were written in the aftermath.

This first piece is that night. The second is two days later, when I found myself sleeping in my father’s place, in his bed, next to my mother.

I have never shared these before. Here they are.

For you to get the story told right, told with as much clarity and honesty as possible, you’re going to have to jump in, right in the middle, like the way it happened.

It’s Monday, April 30th, 1997, and I’ve just flown in to Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’m on tour with a national Broadway show. Traveling is the thing I hate most at this point, but it’s what I have to do, week in, week out, to perform a show I once loved with a passion that no longer applies.

I check into the Amway Grand Plaza hotel. It’s a monster of a hotel with separate wings and tons of connecting shops and restaurants everywhere.

Greg’s room, my boyfriend, is in the new wing, and mine is in the old. I don’t give a shit what wing I’m in. By this time, I’ve been living in hotels for almost two years, so I couldn’t care less where they put me. What I do care about is that it takes me fifteen minutes to get from my door to Greg’s door. How fucking stupid. No hotel should be that big.

Aimee and I are roommates this week. We drag our luggage to our room, unpack, and relax into our night off.

The next night, we open in the De Vos Hall, Grand Center. The show goes forgettably fine.

After the show, several cast members and I head over to a local gay bar to watch Ellen DeGeneres come out on her national TV show. The bar manager has taped the show for us and is hosting a private screening at his establishment.

We sit, order a few beers, and watch the show. The whole time, I have this feeling that something’s not right; my throat is closing up, I’m nauseous, like food poisoning, only not exactly. I feel chaotic, like I’m in the middle of an emergency room.

I try to ignore it, but it doesn’t work. I have no idea what’s up.

Also, earlier that evening, before the show, I had an overwhelming urge to call my father and brother and tell them I loved them. The urge felt physical, like someone was trying to forcibly move my body to pick up the phone. But my internal ‘fuck you’ was too strong. I didn’t call.

All this is happening in the background and foreground as we leave the bar and walk back to the hotel.

Aimee, another fellow castmate, and I hang out in my room. We talk, play music, and watch TV until 1 am, then we say our goodbyes and go to sleep.

3 am, the phone rings. I assume it’s someone from the cast joking around, so I ignore it and let Aimee answer. I hear her say, “Hello? … Yeah, hold on. Ana, it’s your brother.” I take the phone, still in bed.

“Hello?”

“Ani?”

“Yeah… What’s up?”

It’s my brother, Dani. My brother would sometimes call me in the middle of the night to talk, so I am assuming that’s what this is. In fact, I’m annoyed with him for calling me so late. Doesn’t he know what time it is?

“Alberto and Pop … They’re dead.”

I take in a sharp, very loud intake of air and shoot upright into a sitting position.

“How, what, what are you talking about? How? How? How?!”

I am convinced he’s going to tell me that they committed suicide, or that they were in some fatal car accident. Aimee has, by now, turned on the light and is looking at me with eyes that take up her whole face.

He tells me a cryptic version of the story: Dulce, Alberto’s wife, called our mom and woke her up to say Alberto wasn’t home yet and wouldn’t answer any of her pages. My mom looked over and saw my father wasn’t home either. She then woke Dani and told him to go to the warehouse to see what was going on. When he got there, he was met by Dulce and Sammy — Dulce’s father. Sammy and Dani went inside, thinking they would find them tied up but alive. At this point, he stops relaying his story and sobs a little.

“… Ani, pop’s hands were tied behind his back, and his mouth was taped shut.”

“Oh no, no, no, no, no…” That’s all I can say. I cover my eyes with my hand, and rock slightly back and forth, and say ‘no’ like a mantra.

“Ani, come home.”

“Ok.” I hang up. I get out of bed and tell Aimee a vague version of what my brother said. I start pacing the room, back and forth, ripping at my hair with both hands. I begin talking out loud: “Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I know!?” I do this for about ten seconds. I stop, look at the floor without really looking at it, and fall to my knees, crying out loud. “I didn’t tell him I loved him!”

I am out of my mind. I have no idea what to do, what to feel, who is in the room, or what time it is. I lose all sense of the physical world in that moment. I can feel my mind begin to spin round, and round, and round, trying to come up with something, anything, it can hold onto. Something it can do, or fixate on. What finally brings me out are my brother’s last words on the phone: “Ani, come home.”

I stop crying and get to work. I go to the phone and call the company manager.

“Adam, I need to go home. My father and brother were murdered.” I say this flatly, with no emotion in my voice. I feel the strangest thing in that moment: shame. Like I am telling a huge lie, and Adam knows it.

When I was younger, I would get out of things by making up elaborate lies. I lied often enough, and these lies were dramatic enough, that people obviously began to catch on. I had this one teacher who was just nasty about it. He would call me a loser and yell at me. It got to the point that no one believed me, even when I was telling the truth.

This is how I feel right now. Like, I am telling a huge, whopping lie to get out of going to school, and Adam is going to scream at me and tell me I’m a fraud.

“Oh my God, Ana. Oh my God … I’m so sorry. … Do you need me to do anything?”

This question floors me. He’s been telling me what hotel, flight, theatre, dressing room, and bus I am going to be in or on, week in week out, for the past two years. I stupidly assumed he would take care of everything for me and tell me what it is I’m supposed to do here.

“Uh, no … But thanks.” Thanks?

“Ok … Call if you need anything.”

Call if I need anything. Call if I need anything? Call if I need anything.

I don’t understand. My mind fixates on this sentence because it sounds to me as though it was spoken in tongue. It strikes me as the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard. I wonder if I’m insane. Call if I need anything. What does that mean?

“You should call Greg,” Aimee says, and I notice there’s someone else in the room.

“I can’t call him. He can’t handle this.”

My response is instinctive; Greg is emotionally slow and flat-footed. What the fuck was I going to do with someone like Greg around me right now?

But I hear how absurd this sounds, and call him. I tell him my father and brother were murdered. He says, “I’ll be right there.” I know it’s going to take him at least fifteen minutes to get to my room because we are in the biggest, fucking, stupid, hotel on the face of the earth.

I begin calling airlines. The first time I say to an airline agent that I need to fly home because my father and brother were murdered, the word “murdered” gets stuck in my throat, and my blood pressure drops so suddenly that I almost black out.

Aimee takes over phone duty, and I begin to pack.

She finds a flight that will get me into Miami at 9:30 am, but I have to leave at 5:30 am, which is in two hours. I book the ticket and continue packing.

Greg gets to my room, and we barely say anything to each other. He stands there looking for something to do. I finish packing, and he and I leave.

It’s 4:10 am. We go and get the first cab we see outside. We head to the airport.

About fifteen minutes into the ride, I notice that we aren’t on the highway and we’re moving at a snail’s pace. Not only that, we’re on a one-lane road with torn-up ground and abandoned construction equipment on both sides. I ask the cab driver why we’re not on the highway. He tells me the highway is closed down. I can’t take in his answer. I begin repeating this sentence over and over, as I did with Adam’s, the company manager, only not in my head. I am yelling it out loud, trying to understand something incomprehensible to me.

“What do you mean the highway is closed? The highway is closed down!? The WHOLE highway is completely closed down!? There’s not ONE stretch of it that’s open!? How can THE WHOLE ENTIRE HIGHWAY be CLOSED DOWN!!? I don’t understand that! Isn’t there any other way, besides THIS ROAD, that will get us to the airport!? I NEED TO BE THERE! Don’t you understand that I NEED TO BE THERE!? What is wrong with you!?”

I grab Greg’s arm while screaming at the cab driver through the rearview mirror and say, “Greg! Help me! Tell him!”

“Calm down, Ana.”

I turn toward Greg with barely contained fury, feeling as if I should lunge at his throat and rip out his trachea. The look in his eyes stops me cold. He’s terrified. Of me. He thinks I’m crazy — and I am, I am — but I feel completely justified in my insanity.

I look at the driver through his rearview mirror again, and he’s looking at me the same way. The expressions on both their faces make me want to scream and never, ever stop.

I am alone in that moment — abandoned, really — and start to get an emotional glimpse of everything, besides my father and brother, that I’ve lost. I feel like an alien. In a few moments, they’re going to drop me off at the airport and go on living a life where no one has called them in the middle of the night to tell them their father and brother were murdered.

I look at Greg with my mouth open, willing myself to find the words that will help him to understand me, will somehow help him come over and hold me in the world I’m in now, but can’t find them. I try a few more times to speak, pathetically masticating on the untranslatable, but can’t get past the look I see in his eyes.

I lean back against the cab seat and stop trying. I look out the window at the stretch of torn-up roads and abandoned construction equipment and stop fighting.

We arrive at the airport about twenty minutes early. Greg tells me he’ll handle the cab and that I should get my ticket. I cut the line and go straight to the next available ticket agent, shoving all my paperwork and information at him. He studies my papers for a moment, looks up at me, and then softly asks if I have any luggage. Greg joins me and places the luggage on the conveyor belt. The agent hands me my ticket without saying a word. Greg and I rush to the gate to catch the flight. When I glance at my ticket, I see that the agent has upgraded me to first class. I start crying as I run to the gate.

We get to the gate and sit down. They’re not boarding yet, so all we have to do is wait.

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