PRISM is thrilled to share the winning piece of the 2022 Wreck Beach Prize for Prose. Here is Ronaldo Acuna’s story, “Fathers” published in Issue 60.2.
Fathers
Ronaldo Acuna
When you were in school studying to become a counsellor, you were given an assignment to provide therapy to a couple and write a paper to reflect on the experience. Your mom and dad were visiting at the time, so you thought this was serendipitous. There were articles online that stressed a counsellor should never give therapy to a family member. It’s too easy to blur boundaries, they said, too easy to slot your mother and father into their old, familiar roles without considering the ways they had changed. Despite this, you still ask. It’s only an assignment, you think, not a real therapy session.
“What am I supposed to do?” your dad says.
“Talk about what’s going on in your life,” you say.
Your reply is vague, and he searches your eyes for a fuller answer. You look away, so he can’t find one.
“Are we going to get deep, my boy?” he asks.
You shake your head. “It’s only an assignment,” you say. “No big deal.”
When you ask your mom, she takes your arm and walks you into your room, away from your dad’s ears. “That’s a good idea,” she says. Her voice sounds drained. You can barely hear her when she speaks. She tells you that she and your dad have been arguing about money lately, about how there is so little of it. She says their lives are different now they are both retired. Like you, she keeps things vague. But she’s fine, she says. She prays and goes out with friends, so that helps. But it’s your dad. He looks like he needs someone to talk to. You’ve sensed this. It was in his eyes when he spoke to you. But you turned away.
Back in the days when you would visit your parents in Fort St. John, your dad would play the piano downstairs and sing songs he used to cover with his bandmates long ago. By that time, his bandmates either lived in a different city or had passed away, and he was left to sing alone. And when he wasn’t singing, he would watch videos that his brothers from the Philippines would email to him. Videos of the village where he grew up. He would call you over to watch, and you’d sit beside him on the carpet and listen as he would recount stories from his childhood. You would feel the joy in his voice as he reminisced about a period in his life when time passed by so quickly that it took decades and decades for him to catch up and feel every sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell he experienced.
Your mom says that your dad wants to go back to the Philippines. He wants to take the whole family—you, your brother, your mom—but maybe he can go by himself for now for three months.
“It’s still hard because where are we going to get the money for his airfare?” your mom says. “We have so many bills to pay. Talk to your dad, and see what he says.”
You forget that this is supposed to be an assignment and no big deal. You forget that you are only supposed to talk about the easy stuff.
“Okay, Mom,” you respond.
***
You’ve gone into counselling to hold the space for others’ pain. You also have this thought that listening to others’ stories will help you understand yourself. You know that’s not a good reason to become a counsellor, but you’re not exploring that particular problem in depth right now. All you know is you’re tired of the same stories you’ve been telling yourself. The ones that you refuse to let go of because they’re embedded in your identity and allow you to explain to yourself why you’re closed off.
There’s the singular way you tell yourself you had a father who didn’t know what to do with your fragility when you were a child. You remember all the times you came home after school with tears in your eyes because you were bullied. Your mom comforted you but your dad had a different response. He furrowed his brow and made a sound: “Ah!” And then he walked away, frustrated, leaving your mom to deal with you. It left you frozen, questioning what to do with your suffering.
You tell yourself this story of a father who forced you to play the piano. He taught you the notes, the scales, and the songs, but you couldn’t play with grace. When your fingers struck the keys, he would stand over you. “Not like that,” he would say. “Play it with feeling.” But your feeling had already been buried so deep inside that you couldn’t bring it up when he asked. He would take over to show you what playing with feeling meant. You watched, witnessing the piano as an extension of his soul, one that communicated his silent emotions. “Like that,” he would say. And you would try to imitate what he did, but you would hesitate when you played the keys, stop, and then sob.
“Ah!” he’d yell.
He sent you to piano instructors, but they didn’t help you uncover the emotion you buried. You played the piano for seven years and desperately wanted to quit each week. You felt you had to continue because you were scared of the irritation he would show if you decided to give up. You kept it in. For years and years. Until you couldn’t.
You were both in the van, waiting to pick up your mom from work. Afterwards, you would get dropped off at your piano instructor’s home for a lesson.
You sat in the back seat and thought about going to that class.
“Dad,” you said, trembling.
“Mhm,” he said.
“I … don’t … want to play the piano anymore.”
You hoisted a wall inside you to prevent the inevitable, but the tears fell through. You wanted to stop, but you couldn’t. You were already opened up. You looked down, trying to hide your face, knowing it was shameful to weep.
He paused for a long time. You took in deep breaths to calm yourself. Finally, he said, “Okay, you don’t have to play anymore.” Just like that. You stopped wailing. When you looked up, you expected to find a look of disappointment. Instead, you saw he had put his sunglasses on. He was trying to stop himself from crying. Neither of you said anything after that.
***
A therapy session in your living room. Your mom’s eyes are directed up, searching for the words she wants to say. You glance at your dad. His eyes are downcast. His shoulders are slouched. His posture is different from when you asked him to do this. Everything about this is different, but you try your best to make it the same. You try to make it seem as though these aren’t your parents and this is only a random couple going for therapy. You recite from a script. You thank them for taking the time to come in. You lay down some ground rules. “We’re going to go back- and-forth about the main topic you came in here to discuss with me,” you say stiffly.
They both nod.
“Dad, we’ll start with you.”
“Okay,” he says quietly.
“So about money?” you ask. You force the topic onto him when he isn’t ready. A mistake. One you need to reflect on.
He opens his mouth, then pauses. The feeling of homesickness that your mom observed in him trickles its way up. A howl of grief leaves his mouth. He faces you, but his eyes are shut. “I miss the Philippines,” he says. You see him try to calm his despair by taking deep inhalations and exhalations, trying to breathe it all back down or all the way out, never letting it sit.
You didn’t prepare for this. You think about what to say next, but nothing comes. You’re barely breathing. And you just keep sitting.
You’ve been silent for too long, so your dad opens his eyes to look for you. You want to meet him, but something inside you avoids his gaze.
“I’m retired and I don’t know where to go,” he says. “Depressed or something. Philippines is where I’m the happiest. But we’re retired and on a fixed income.”
“What if you sell our house in Fort St. John?” you ask, trying to solve things. Thinking life is as easy as that.
“I don’t want to sell the house because it’s the place where you grew up.”
“The memories?” you ask.
“Yes,” he says.
Buried moments reveal themselves, ones that don’t fit into the old narrative you tell yourself. How he would drive you to and pick you up from school every weekday, even when he was dead tired from working a night shift as a janitor at the college. How, when you would play- wrestle your stuffed Ninja Turtle, he would watch you, smiling, and pick up the little pieces of stuffing that fell out of the doll because you were clotheslining it a little too hard. How, when you were watching cartoons on TV, he would cook you a bowl of champorado—chocolate rice pudding—because he knew it was your favourite dish. Then, before you were about to eat, he would place his hand on your head and rub your hair, to let you know he was there, thinking of you, seeing you.
“Getting up with nothing to do is really hard,” he says. “I planned to retire for a long time but I don’t know if I made the right decision. You and your brother and your mom, that’s the only reason I stay in Canada.”
He sighs.
“There’s always hesitation. I want to bring the whole family because if I go to the Philippines by myself, after a week, I’ll miss you here. Sometimes I think you and your brother are still little boys. That’s why I want to bring you wherever I go. For many years when you were growing up, I didn’t think like that. But now that I’m older…” he trails off.
His words hang in the air, and you let them absorb into you and lightly touch on the locked part of your soul that you’ve allowed to atrophy. The part of you that wishes to express the plainness of how your emotions sit inside of you because it’s exhausting to have to hide them or dress them up with complexities. The part of you that wishes to say, ever so simply: Dad, you’re sensitive in the same way I am. I can’t shake it out of me no matter how hard I try. It’s a part of me. The same way it’s a part of you. Can I talk to you so we can share how we can live expressing this delicate part of our personality without burying it? Can you share what you’ve learned about it so I can tell myself a different story about how a man should be with his emotions?
This. This is all you wish to say. But it’s still all new to you, so you don’t. Instead, you do something different. You tell yourself this story of a father who needs someone to talk to. In that moment, you stop trying to become a counsellor and instead become a son. You set your hand on your dad’s knee and place every bit of love you have into that simple gesture. He takes in a deep breath and looks into your eyes. This time, you don’t look away. This time, you let him find you.
Ronaldo Acuna lives in Burnaby, British Columbia. He has worked as a counsellor, support worker, and remedial instructor. In addition to writing, which has been published in such literary magazines as Ricepaper Magazine, he has explored various facets of storytelling as a graphics artist and a filmmaker.