I kissed his brow. “Promise you...what? Anything. Tell me.”
“Take me back.”
“Back where?”
“Home,” he whispered, the last of his strength now depleted. “To...Manaus.”
The machine behind me had flatlined then, and a cadre of young doctors had rushed me away from the bedside as my mother enveloped me in her arms.
“He’s at peace now,” she said, holding me tightly. “He’s at peace.”
But he wasn’t.
In my heart—in my soul—I knew the truth:
Hewasn’t at peace. He died with regret.
In the final moments of his life, he wasn’t where he wanted to be.
His dying wish was to go “home,” which both confused me and broke my heart.
My father never really talked about growing up in Brazil. There were no fond memories shared about his childhood on the banks of the Amazon, or lullabies sung to me in Portuguese. His parents were long-gone by the time I came along, and I never met any of his family or friends from his early days in Brazil. We never spoke Portuguese at home because I never learned it. In fact, the Spanish I’d learned from a fancy private school was far more functional than any Portuguese I’d picked up from my dad. I knew a handful of words, of course, but they were either terms of endearment like “querida” or “anjinha,” or curse words that he’d mutter when he stubbed his toe or got stuck in our building’s temperamental elevator.
I didn’t know he missed “home.”
I didn’t know he regretted that I’d never seen it.
And I certainly had no idea what to expect when I boarded a plane bound for Manaus six weeks later, a silver urn with some of his ashes packed carefully in my carry-on bag.
“Por favor, aperte os cintos para o pouso. Estaremos chegando em Manaus em quinze minutos.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the flight attendant repeats in English, “please buckle your seatbelts for landing. We will be arriving in Manaus in approximately fifteen minutes. We hope you’ve had a comfortable flight and appreciate your patronage. Thank you for flying American Airlines.”
I glance at the champagne glass beside me and wonder if it’s too late for a refill, but my question is answered when another flight attendant sweeps up the aisle, whisking it away before I can ask.
I look out the first-class window at the scenery below, the wide waters of the Amazon dark and glistening in the afternoon sun. Until I started planning this trip, “Amazon” meant little more to me than the on-line department store where I bought e-books, electronics and toiletries.
I’d never really thought about the AmazonRiver,the world’s largest by volume, snaking its way through six countries, its tendril-like tributaries accounting for twenty percent of all river water that enters the sea. Covering an area of 2.6 million square miles, it’s a whole ecosystem of its own, hosting up to thirty percent of earth’s flora and fauna, with over 2,000 species of fish and 400 kinds of amphibians. Sloths, snakes, spiders, flowers and—get this!—ten millionpeoplecall the Amazon River and its rainforest home.
As the river falls out of view, we fly over a thickly settled residential area, the roof tops of businesses, houses and apartment buildings clustered below. With so much written about the river and surrounding rainforest, part of me expected to see primitive huts scattered sporadically through a jungle, mist thick like low hanging clouds, teeming with monkeys and orchids. But Manaus, a city that boasts a population of over two million, rivals any other large city situated in the middle of a rural area. It acts as the business and cultural hub of the Amazonian rainforest. Boasting world-class hotels, museums, a cathedral, opera house, zoo and botanical gardens, Manaus offers its visitors a rich cultural experience to bookend their wild Amazonian adventures.
I’m almost there.
The place where my father was born.
The city he called home for the first two decades of his life, before he left to make his fortune and never return.
The land he missed and mourned during his last seconds on earth.
Tears blur my view of the city and I blink rapidly to disperse them. He was only seventy-eight years old. He should have had twenty more years with us. He should have been sitting beside me right now, pointing excitedly at the window, and telling me everything I was going to see in his birthplace, in his long-missed “home.” Instead, I’m sitting alone, my phone clutched in one hand as the other touches the window gingerly, my fingers brushing over the rooftops of Manaus as the plane descends.
My phone buzzes as we land, picking up a local signal.
I’m not surprised to see that my mother’s texted me several times while I was in the air between Miami and Manaus. For all that we’re only twenty years apart in age, she’s a typical mom. She worries about me.
After my father passed away, she sold their Manhattan condo and moved back to Amarillo, Texas, purchasing a stunning $3.5 million mansion on Oldham Circle, an address she could only dream about while growing up in a trailer park four miles away.
She’s only forty-six years old—a fairly young, very pretty and extremely rich widow—and the controlling shareholder in my father’s business, which she will continue to supervise from her position on the company’s Board of Directors. Despite the grief she felt in his passing, she’s landing on her feet: exactly what he would have wanted for her.