It had been a sweaty and sticky summer, and even in the first days of October everyone still smelled sweet and a touch rotten, like peaches left too long on the windowsill.  

I got the phone call while having drinks with my cohort, walked away from Inu—a visiting post-doc from Alaska—to answer my phone. The numbers meant nothing. But it was a clear Saturday night; spiderwebs of string lights hung between gnarly live oaks and shone down on vintage patio furniture; frozen margaritas and zombies and mai tais skated on pools of their own perspiration, unaided; the breeze made my flowered skirt come alive; and tele-marketers, always busy, were focused on other time-zones, not mine. 

“Are you Diego José Brito’s daughter?” the woman’s voice came through the phone. I wondered if she had called my mom first, but Mami had changed her phone number long ago to make sure she got away from anything to do with my dad, this included. My number was the same, I was never able to sever that appendage. 

“Yes,” I said. I felt what was coming in my body before she said anything else. 

“I’m sorry to inform you that he is deceased. We have his body at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin.” 

I didn’t feel much of anything right then. And while I was surprised, it wasn’t because of Papi’s death; it was because I didn’t expect him to still be in Austin. I would look out for him—I had since that last night we shared in my apartment—every time the bus went by an encampment, or walking through downtown with my friends on a night out. My heart would stop any time I spotted a blue pit bull in the distance. But he had never contacted me again, so I figured he had moved on somewhere else, maybe back down to Florida where he knew the lay of the land.  

“Do you have Hugo?” It was the first question that came to mind. 

“Hugo?” the woman asked. 

“My dad’s dog. He’s a pit bull, grey with a white patch on his chest.” 

“Sorry, I don’t know anything about a dog. Are you in Austin? Can you come identify the body?” 

Billy, Karin, and Inu were sipping on their drinks. Karin laughed at something Inu said. 

“Yes, I’ll be right there.” 

*

Hugo came into our lives during “the good days,” the years stretching from my childhood in Caracas, to the first couple of years after we moved to Miami. The blue pit puppy ran to eight-year-old me from behind a palm tree in Todasana beach, lovingly nipping at my fingers as I pulled him to Papi, who, drenched in sea water, dragged his kitesurf out of the sea. We’d never had a pet—unless you count grandma’s potty mouthed parrot in her apartment in El Cafetal—so I was surprised when in place of a reprimand or a complaint from Dad, all I found were smiles and shrieks of joy, as he picked the dog up.  

We walked the beach looking for an owner, someone frantically calling for a lost pup; for a momma dog, some litter missing a furry sibling. “If we don’t find his family, we can keep him, right?” I kept asking Papi as we walked, the darling dog asleep in his strong arms. Eventually we took him to Mami, making dinner for us at the beach shack we always rented. 

It became clear, very quickly, that Hugo was to be Papi’s dog. Of course, he would hang out with me; he would lay his bucket of a head on my feet as I finished my homework, so heavy that my toes would tingle from poor blood circulation. But as soon as Dad’s car made the turn from the street into the driveway, Hugo’s block head would turn in a snap towards it. His ears perked up. He trotted to the front door and parked his butt just off to the left, his tail violently thumping the floor, a drum accompanying his pitiful whining.  

Once Papi entered, dusty with drywall, an armful of building plans, Hugo was his shadow. 

In Venezuela, my dad had been a real estate developer. He had taken my grandpa’s company after he died and kept it afloat. He didn’t love it, wasn’t the best with money, but he was good with the workers, got along with everyone, and was a decent enough project manager to keep the clients grandpa had. It was another time in Venezuela, when I was a child. There was still money to go around, regardless of if you were plugged into the government or not.  

But it couldn’t last long. Once things started to get more complicated, Papi’s lack of dedication to the family business started to show. Papi was relieved when one of my grandfather’s friends offered to buy the business from him, for a fraction of what it was worth. But it was still a huge chunk of money, enough that it gave us the room to start over and then some. 

“We can live by the beach,” Mami said. “We can start new away from all of this.” She gestured to the television: more marches, more protests, more students imprisoned. I had just turned twelve. 

Three months later, at the airport, Papi sat Hugo (sticking his purple tongue out, smiling in that way that only pitties do) on the tiled floor, and took a photo of him from above. His own take on what was already becoming a migrant cliché. The tiled floor of the main terminal was a world-renowned masterpiece of cinetismo, an art movement spearheaded by Venezuelan master Carlos Cruz-Diez: the yellow, blue, and red of the Venezuelan flag, made out of small square tiles, cut through by diagonal rays of black. Titled “Cromointerferencia de color aditivo” but known by every Venezuelan as the Cruz-Diez floor, it had become a kaleidoscopic sendoff for Venezuelans leaving the country with no return date. People laid on it; kissed it, the airport police had to appoint special guards because people had started to pry tiles off of the ground with chisels to take with them as souvenirs.  

“You’re going to be such a good boy on the plane. Yes? Yes?” Papi said in his baby voice to Hugo. 

Our new Miami apartment was close to the university, a short drive from Key Biscayne, where Papi loved to surf. He leased a shop front in Miami Beach, and opened Kite’s, a surf and skate shop. My mom enrolled in nursing school. For a while I had thought that the move had been all about Papi, about his dream to make surfing his livelihood. But now I know that Mami also took that chance to start anew.  

With Dad absorbed at Kite’s, and the coffers still full with granddad’s company money, my mom was left mostly alone to find her groove. She thrived in Miami, was doing amazingly well at The U, had a bunch of friends, and got praise from all of her professors. 

I was easy. I could skateboard with the boys and looked as good as any of the girls in my bathing suit. It took me no time to thrive in an environment where those things were important, and where my dad’s shop was its own form of social currency. 

For me, those first two years in Miami were perfect. My Dad would be gone by dawn to get some kite surfing in at Crandon beach before he opened the shop. On her way to the university, Mami would drop me off at school. It always went by fast. Before I knew it, I would be hanging out with my friends, going back and forth from Kite’s to the beach, my dad letting us use the rental skim boards. Hugo loved to run alongside me while I skimmed, jowls rippling with speed. 

On slow days (which, thinking back, were plenty) Papi would close early. I would say goodbye to my friends, and he would take me to the skatepark under I-95, just the two of us. After skating, exhausted, we would talk. 

“Do you miss it?” he asked me once. And I didn’t understand what he was referring to. “Back home, I mean?” 

I hadn’t thought about it, Venezuela being ‘home’ and Miami being something else. Inside, it didn’t feel like that. I didn’t see it in Mami, either, who was aglow with her newly found power. She couldn’t wait to put on her scrubs every morning. But it was obvious for me, even then, that for Papi it was different. 

* 

I thought the nurse would take me to a room full of dead people cabinets, like I had seen on TV. Square refrigerator doors that she would open, and then pull out cold bodies like utensils from kitchen drawers. But she did not. My Dad was on a gurney, in an otherwise empty room. It was clean and it smelled like hospital: over sanitized and a little bitter. 

“Yes, that’s him,” I said from the threshold. 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the nurse said, looking down. “Do you want some alone time with him?” 

“No,” I said. And immediately regretted it. But my pride swelled, and I couldn’t find a way to take the no back, even though the nurse looked at me and gave me another chance. 

“Are you sure?” 

I took a step back, still looking at my dad’s gaunt face, sleeping. Then another. And all of a sudden, I wasn’t in the same room as him anymore, and the nurse gently closed the door. And then I couldn’t see him at all. 

“Are you ok?” she asked me. 

“Is Hugo here?” I asked. 

“Who’s Hugo?” 

“My dad’s dog. He was always with him.” 

“I’m sorry, my love, dogs aren’t allowed here. They wouldn’t have been able to get a dog in the ambulance, anyways. Can I get you to sit for a minute in one of our rooms? Get you some water?” The woman guided me to a small space with two comfortable chairs. 

A rotund, very nice, shy man walked me through some paperwork. Some financial decisions had to be made. What to do with the body. I had two days to decide. 

“My Dad has a dog, Hugo, I need to track him down,” I said. “Can you tell me where they found him?” 

He looked at me with pity, and it made me angry.  

“An encampment by Town Lake,” he said. 

“Was it drugs?” 

“We won’t know that until blood work comes back, but official cause of death is cardiac arrest. With our homeless population you never know.”

“Who brought him in?” 

“An ambulance and two APD officers.” 

All I could think of was Hugo. How sad he would be without Papi. Was he alone? Hungry? Was Hugo looking for Papi? Sniffing for him in their usual haunts? Or was Hugo no longer? Was he dead and buried somewhere? Had Papi died of a broken heart because his only friend had gone? 

A cool breeze was blowing when I stepped out of the hospital building and walked to my car. The police precinct wasn’t far away. 

*

Every summer my dad would leave the store in the hands of his manager, we would drop off Hugo with one of mom’s friends, and we travelled back to Venezuela for a few weeks. And even though we lived on the beach in Miami, it wasn’t the same thing. Venezuela smelled different, looked different, felt different. Boys carrying trays of seafood cups would yell: ¡rompe colchón, siete potencias, vuelve a la vida! advertising the aphrodisiac and restorative qualities of their shrimp, scallop and fish medleys. Thick, chatty women would set up their bubbling cauldrons under the palm trees and fry up empanadas, fat with carne mechada and chicken and cheese and beans and plantains, their hands impervious to scolding oil. Men with machetes the size of arms would carve up coconuts in flurries of rusty metal and hand out nectar so sweet it felt like cheating Mami, who only let me drink two sodas per week. 

Mamama, Papi’s mom, was the most put together woman I’d ever met. She had a collection of flowered pareos that she would wrap around herself in magical configurations. I couldn’t believe someone could turn rectangular pieces of fabric into skirts, tops, even gowns with a twist here, a knot there. “Otra vez, Mamama. Otra vez,” I would say when I was a kid, and she would calmly and seriously repeat it for me, as many times as I asked. By twelve I could do it just as well as she did. 

And then there was Papi, who came alive in the water. Was obviously from the water, somehow, like Mamama had really married some Caribbean Neptune instead of the stern man in a suit I only ever saw in photographs. He cut through the ocean with a stroke so smooth he could have had propellers for feet. When he kite surfed the beach stood still, no one could believe people could fly that way. He skimmed the surface, and when his handsome face looked in at us, his curls bouncing, the dumbest joy stamped on his face, I could hear my mom swoon beside me. 

The protest summer, and the drowning summer, was two years before Papi’s accident. I was fourteen. 

“Don’t come,” Mamama had said on the phone to Papi. I remember my mom trying to convince him, too. By then, Mami was in her second year of nursing school, and had a life so full, it poured out of her in laughter and joy. She wanted to stay, had the opportunity to go intern at a clinic in Hialeah. But Papi pushed. “We have to go,” he said.  

We left Hugo with Mami’s friend, like we always did when we travelled. We went to drop him off without Dad, because the year before Hugo had barked and protested so much, we thought for a second we wouldn’t be able to leave him. 

I understand now why Papi had been so adamant about returning to Caracas, and even Mami would have had to admit he had been right. When we arrived at the capital, Venezuela was up in flames, and Mamama was very, very sick. It would be my last time seeing her. 

Mornings in Caracas that summer were amber. The sun fought through a noxious cloud of smoke, tear gas, gun powder and rage that hadn’t moved for a week. From Mamama’s balcony it looked like Ávila mountain had urinated on itself. Mamama coughed us all awake starting at six, and my mom and I would massage Vic Vapor Rub onto her freckled chest.  

I was happy and relieved when Mamama felt strong enough to take the three-hour drive to Todasana, where we could exchange the sound of beating frying pans, protest chants, and fireworks for the rhythmic lullaby of waves. It took us an extra hour to get out of the city; so many roads were closed, barricaded, or taken over. 

But when we got to the beach all that other stuff melted away. My grandma immediately felt better, no longer coughing as much. My mom shuffled her feet into the warm sand, burying her sour mood with them. And my dad found himself, metaphorically and physically, like he always did, in the water. The kite stayed on top of the car, the waves too big, the sea angry at something. So, my dad body surfed, bobbing and weaving through foam like a dolphin. The usual weekend crowd had been thinned by the chaos writhing in the cities. There were only a group of college students blaring Bob Marley from a beat up Toyota Machito; a family: a mom, a dad, and twin boys, ten or eleven, obsessed with building a castle in the sand; and us. 

Mamama had called us in for lunch, pulled out a large Tupperware full of colorful pasta salad: celery, apple, yellow peppers, grape tomatoes, and the greenest and most delicious avocado. Papi dripped sea water from his curls into his paper bowl; mom sipped on Pepsi; Mamama crossed her legs elegantly, watching us eat.  

We heard the first yells, then. The twins’ mother called out for Alberto. We could see one of the twins, by their half-melted castle, looking out onto the waves, and the woman taking tentative steps toward the water, as if something were lost. Then the woman ran along the shoreline, yelling and searching. I remember my dad’s pasta bowl falling in the sand, and the footprints he made, deep and so faithful to his feet that even the scar he had on his right heel—a surfing injury from when he was a teenager—was visible. 

Papi dove into the water and disappeared in the waves. They were fat and unruly, crashing into each other and on the shore in unpredictable intervals. Dad’s body was as lost to us as the boy’s was to his mother, impossible to see among the angry surf.  

Mami held to my shoulders tight, like at any moment the ocean could come twenty feet into the beach and claim me as her own. And then I saw Papi, floating on his back, holding a small body to his chest. I yelled, “¡Papi!” and my mother said, “Where?” and I pointed at my father and Alberto almost out now, my dad trying to find his footing while keeping the boy’s head above water, which didn’t seem hard, he was so limp, so easily maneuvered.  

My dad started compressions and immediately the boy coughed. Papi turned him to his side, and the water formed a small puddle next to Alberto’s head, so quickly absorbed by the sand it was as if he had never had the sea inside him at all. 

A few weeks later, in our taxi from Caracas to the airport—after we had said goodbye to Mamama for the last time—I remember thinking that if we had never come on this trip, if the protests, and the crime, and the food shortages, and the garbage collector’s strike, and the power outages, and Maduro the dictator, and the disappeared students, and the voting fraud, had kept us in Miami, then that boy would be dead, because Papi would have never been there to save him. 

It’s funny to think about it now, but even with everything that happened, that would be the last happy summer I remember as a family. Not two weeks after we got back to Miami, my mom found out that we were basically broke. The whole puzzle came together much later for me, but basically, Dad had spent the significant funds from his father’s company to hide how bad the shop had been doing the last two years.  

I remember listening to them argue from my bedroom. Hugo barking at mom whenever she raised her voice.  

“Put that fucking dog away,” I heard my mom scream, and soon enough my dad had brought Hugo into my room. 

“Is everything alright?” I asked him from my bed.  

“Everything is fine, mi amor. It’s just an argument. Keep an eye on Hugo for me, ok?” 

I hugged Hugo on my bed, but as the fight intensified outside he wiggled out of my embrace and went to the closed door, yelping and scratching at it, as if he could convince them from there to stop it. 

That fight was as if a page had been turned. Before we had been happy. After, we would never be the same. 

By that winter, with just a few semesters left to graduate, Mami had dropped out of The U and started work at a nursing home as an orderly; Kite’s remaining inventory was sold for pennies on the dollar, the sign taken down and replaced with a Jimmy John’s; and Mamama died. To save money, my dad was the only one that went to Caracas for the funeral. 

*

I thought I was going to speak to a detective; but after waiting for an hour in which more and more drunks were led into the back of the police building to dry out; a white officer, baby-faced and muscular, as tidy as can be, came out to greet me.  

“You’re going to have to file a FOIA request to get the complete case file,” he said.  

“Look, I’m not interested in knowing what happened. I swear. I just want to find my dad’s dog.” 

“The pit?” 

Relief came over me immediately. Hugo was alive. 

“Is he ok?” My voice was desperate. I felt sorry for myself. 

“He was fine when we took the body. He barked like hell when we took him, but a woman held him. She had him when we left.” 

“Do you know her name?” 

“Sorry, I know she gave a report so we have her name, but I don’t remember it and I can’t give you that without a FOIA request.” 

“Just tell me where it was, would you? Please.” 

My body felt slack, my hands and eye-lids heavy. I must have looked a mess. The officer took pity on me. 

“The encampment is here.” He pinched the map on his phone to show me a red dot.  

“Thank you. Thank you.” I grabbed the officer’s hand. “How did he look?” 

“He was dead when we got there, miss. I’m sorry for your loss.” 

I had meant the dog. 

*

The day of Papi’s injury, Mami was at the nursing home. Dad was at the construction site, his new job after Kite’s closing. And Hugo, instead of lounging with me like he usually did when I watched my shows or worked on my college applications, paced anxiously around the house. He had been nervous the whole day. 

Twenty minutes before my dad arrived, bent like a flower with a broken stem, Hugo sat by the door and whined, and it didn’t matter that I bribed him with pieces of ham, or pulled on his collar, he wouldn’t budge. Thinking back, I can say, with absolute certainty, that Hugo knew something bad was going to happen to Papi.  

Papi arrived early, before mom did, and Hugo welcomed him with a tail between his legs and pitiful whistles, submissively making circles by his feet. Papi held his lower back and leaned on whatever he could until I went to his side and acted as crutch.  

“What happened?” 

“I fell at the site. Landed on my back.” 

I helped him to the couch, and Papi lay on his side, knees curled. Hugo, tail still tucked, licked his hand. 

“I’m calling mom,” I said. 

“No. They’re short staffed today and they asked her to stay the night shift again.” 

“I don’t care, Dad! Look at you!” 

An hour later my mom was home and between the two of us we managed to move Papi from the couch to the bedroom. He was mummified in the fetal position, and any attempt to straighten his legs resulted in yelps and yells from Papi, and barks and growls from Hugo. He bared his fangs at us, the women of the house, and for a moment I wondered if he was capable of actually hurting us in order to protect Dad. 

I didn’t sleep that night, and neither did my parents. Papi’s pain radiated through the house in shockwaves. 

The following months, as I sent out college applications—hoping that my last rebellious year, where I traded in A’s for joints, wouldn’t hurt my chances—Dad went in and out of doctors, had to stop working, and lived life from bed. My mom took extra shifts to try to keep us afloat, but we could feel it, the walls coming in. It fell to me to care for Papi my senior year: I brought Dad his food, his medicine, kept him company. When the oxy hit him the right way, we watched old skateboarding videos on YouTube, grainy and thrilling, Hugo on the foot of the bed, curled on himself. 

The surgery changed everything, and with Papi recovering, quite quickly actually, even Mami got a second wind. Her pity for Papi had softened her, even though she was struggling to hold everything together by herself. And once he got back to work it almost felt like his injury had served as a reset button in our house.  

“My buddy Brandon, from the Boca Raton development?” Papi said to mom as he swallowed his morning pill, chased it with O.J.  

“Yeah,” she said. 

“He needs a foreman on another subdivision.” 

“Yeah?” Mami was finishing the arepas on the pan. And I saw pride in her, and relief. 

“It comes with a pay bump—a big one.” 

“That’s great news, mi amor,” she said. Mami cut my arepa open with a swoosh, scooping some of the dough out of it, like I liked it. I was on one knee putting books into my backpack. Hugo licked my face. Anytime I went down to his level was an invitation for kisses.  

“Maybe enough that you can cut hours at the nursing home? Get back to your degree?” He said and smiled. He looked straight at her, waiting for her reaction, like a kid about to open a present they already knew they would like. 

Mami put the arepa down. When she turned, her face was a beacon. She started to cry. “Really?” She asked. 

“Really,” Papi said. “I need some time to get established, get a few paychecks in. But I think soon. By the time this one gets out of our hair, goes to college.” He said looking at me. 

The reprieve at the house gave me a chance to refocus, and my college applications were sent out with optimism. I asked my dad to come to the computer before I hit the submit button on my UCLA app. He stood behind me, hands on my shoulders. “You’re going to be so happy over there,” he said and kissed my head. “I’m so proud of you, mi vida.” I thought of all those times Papi showed me skateboarding videos of dirty teens on abandoned swimming pools. I remembered the first (of many) times we watched Dogtown and Z-Boys together, Hugo curled by our intertwined legs. I could sense he was thinking of the same thing.  

One Saturday morning my dad suggested we all go to Crandon to see his friends kite surf, and my mom agreed happily. I had been accepted to UCLA a few days before, and to UF Gainesville, and we were all still reverberating with the joy of it all. 

That morning was magical, and when a friend of Dad’s came to shore and offered him a turn, his face lit up like he was my age, and not forty-two. He looked at my mom. 

“My back’s been doing really well,” he said. 

She was concerned. Doubtful. But there was love there, too; for Papi, for what they had lost, and for what, maybe, they could get back. 

She raised her hands in defeat. “Be very careful. And keep it short,” she said. “And no air time.” 

“I’ll be good. I promise.” He looked like Hugo with a new toy. 

In just a few minutes he was skimming the surface, and it seemed like leaving Venezuela, like Kite’s, like mom’s school, like the back injury, had all been something that had happened to other people, and not us. My dad’s joy was doing something to me and Mami on the sand. It was healing something in us that had been broken, too.  

Papi noticed the gust of wind pick up behind him—it must have felt like he was himself for the first time in a long time. He applied some pressure with his back foot, tilting the nose of the board and leaning the sail so the wind could get under it. He angled the sail even further and, all of a sudden, he was lifted. A tan angel. 

When his board landed, flat on the water, Papi cracked in two. He might have drowned if he hadn’t reached for the board and miraculously held on through the pain, while other surfers came to his aid. I could hear him crying from the sand. And my mom looked away from the ocean and towards the high-rises of downtown Miami, sobbing quietly, desperately. Her dreams of finishing nursing school broken at the same time as my dad’s back.

An hour later she sobbed still, I could hear it under the sound of the ambulance siren, under the scratch the Velcro made when my dad’s head was immobilized by a neck brace. She didn’t say a word to him. 

My dad was at the hospital for a while, but he wasn’t the only one broken. Mami was empty inside. I cried when she told me. “As soon as your dad is on his feet, I’m getting a divorce. I’ve already told him,” she said. I couldn’t believe it at the time, and there was a lot of screaming and crying and pleading, but I understand it now.  

Papi wouldn’t let us take Hugo, not that we could have pulled the damned dog hard enough to leave his side. We went to live with mom’s friend in Weston, which everyone called Westonzuela, the first hub of Venezuelan diaspora big enough to be christened. Every gas station sold arepas, and the Venezuelan flag flew alongside American ones in most front porches. When protests erupted in Caracas, men and women in Weston banged their frying pans with metal spoons, and hoped that if not the sound, its spirit would carry all the way across the Caribbean.  

In some time, my mom moved us to our own small apartment, around the same time Papi was being evicted from what had been our home. I deferred my admission to UCLA. With hospital bills, and my dad losing his job, we couldn’t afford the move or the living expenses, and Papi needed me. So, I took classes at Broward Community College in the meantime.  

My dad would come by after class and meet with me for coffee. He’d lean his crutches on the back of his chair and ask me about mom, Hugo laying peacefully under our table, licking my toes. He rarely took his pills in front of me, except when the pain was extreme. I could see him holding his breath, closing his eyes, readjusting in his seat. “I’m sorry, mi vida,” he said and pulled a baggy with tiny, pink, oval pills from his pocket.  

“You have to go to UCLA,” he would say whenever he saw me. Every week a bit thinner, smelling progressively worse, like forgotten milk. “If you like Miami, wait till you see L.A.!” I wanted to scream at him. I could have! If you would have kept your shit together! Mom’s anger was loud inside me, but my own anger could not be let out yet. I loved him too much. 

By then, Papi had started his year of another type of surfing all together, and he wasn’t as graceful on couches as he was in the water. Eventually he ran out of friends, and then acquaintances.  

The hardest decision I ever made was moving to Gainesville. My mom had scraped enough, and combined with student loans, a couple of scholarships, and in-state tuition, we had the money to make it happen. I didn’t want to leave Mami alone, that’s true, but she would be fine. She wanted me to go so bad, wanted me to have my own life away from everything that had happened to us. Away from Papi and what he was becoming. But it was hard for me to let him go the way she had. I hadn’t touched a skateboard for over a year the last time I saw him. I bought him a Cuban sandwich, and even though he probably hadn’t eaten a full meal in days, he was so high that all he could muster was a couple of bites. He gave half to Hugo and placed the wrapped leftovers neatly in his camping backpack.  

“You’re going to have so much fun in L.A. baby. I’m so proud of you,” he said, sleepily, as we hugged goodbye. And I didn’t have the heart to tell him again that I was going to Gainesville.  

But when I knelt to say goodbye to Hugo, and he pressed his hard, heavy, stupid head against mine, I lost it. I held on to him for a long time, and he whimpered and licked in the way good dogs do when the people who belong to them are in pain. 

*

I got in my car outside the precinct, less than a block from the I-35 underpass where just a few weeks before a homeless encampment had been thriving, hundreds of people strong. And it had been impossible not to think about Papi in Austin the last couple of years, since the last time I saw him. The city had taken steps to decriminalize homelessness: relaxing camping and panhandling ordinances, instructing police to stop harassing unhoused people, and injecting significant funds into housing and mental health policies.  

I felt proud of my new home. At the same time, I felt like a hypocrite. I hadn’t seen Papi since that night at the apartment, I hadn’t looked for him, I hated when he popped in my head, Hugo always by his side sweeping the ground with his tail. I first lived a block away from a little skatepark in Lamar Boulevard, and even though it was cheap and nice and a block from the bus stop that took me to school, I didn’t renew the lease. Hearing the familiar scrape of board to pavement hurt too much. 

As the homeless became more visible, made encampments downtown, close to the resources that were helping them, close to sources of clean water and food, the public conversation around unhoused people quickly became toxic. It didn’t take long for the city to cave to pressure, both from the inside: old hippies with million dollar homes in Hyde Park, worried about property values; tech bros, no longer able to walk to their favorite bars without being confronted with poverty; your average, run of the mill, pull yourself by your bootstraps, conservatives; and from the outside: Texas Republicans had finally found an issue they could get some traction on inside Austin. 

State troopers started clearing out camps by state-controlled roadways. Austin police got back to their preferred way of operating—arrest quotas much easier to meet again. And the unhoused started a familiar migration to abandoned buildings in the poorest neighborhoods, remote wooded areas, and riverbeds. Like the red dot on my phone, where they had found Papi. 

The phone felt heavy in my hand, and I clicked my way to Mami’s number. The clock read 1.12am, one hour later in Miami. She had been doing so well since Papi had left Florida. It had given her permission to stop worrying about him. It was true that they had rarely spoken since their separation, and the few times they did it always ended in terrible fights, in weeks of crying. But she had performed Herculean tasks without him even knowing, pulling strings through her healthcare contacts to get him into programs, find him housing, get money in his hands. With him gone she had gotten her life back, actually finished her degree, and was now working at a clinic that focused on addiction. Which, of course, made perfect sense. She was just trying to fix Papi, one stranger at a time. 

I called, but she didn’t answer. Her phone on silent, most likely. I heard her voice on the answering message, but couldn’t bring myself to deliver the news that way. It felt unfair to her— unfair to Papi, somehow. I went back to my map app, turned on the car, and drove to the encampment. 

*

The last time I saw Papi was the year I started my Ph.D. at UT, when I had just moved to Austin. I had gone to Gainesville, fallen in love with biology, and buried my dreams of Venice beach. I had traded skateboards for rock climbing, and when it came to looking at grad schools, I only applied to landlocked places. I tried to see Papi whenever I went back to Miami, during summer and winter breaks, but it had become more difficult with every passing year, not only because of his state: in and out of rehab programs, bouts with homelessness, the pain of his injuries always on his face—whenever he wasn’t flying high—but because he was nowhere to be found, sometimes. Lost to us. 

Papi knocked on my door at the ratty apartment complex on Lamar; three-day B.O., leaning on filthy crutches, a curly beard, gray on the whiskers. I didn’t even know he was in town. We hadn’t spoken since he called from some jail near Tampa, asking for bail money, months ago. Hugo was immediately on me, a flurry of tail and tongue, as happy as I had ever seen him but much grayer on the snout. I hugged him first, crying, and then hugged Papi. He cried too. While he showered, I went down to the gas station and bought him a razor and some shaving cream, Gatorade, and a Keep Austin Weird tie-dyed shirt, the only one they had (I hoped that it wouldn’t deplete my checking account). I made some arepas, filled with cheese, ham and tomatoes, that were ready by the time he was out of the bathroom. He fit into my sweats, he was so thin.  

We talked, or more aptly, he talked: friends he’d made on the road, the most dangerous places he’d camped, the time Hugo saved him from getting all his stuff stolen. I really wanted him to stop talking—I was terrified—but I couldn’t say anything, do anything, except nod my head and look at him. I was trying to find him in there, the man that taught me how to pop an ollie, how to tie my shoelaces, how to treat my elders with respect. Hugo had his head on Papi’s lap, and for every couple of bites Dad took he would pinch a bit of the fluffy arepa and feed it to him. Dad told me he had a job lined up, that he had put in an application at Foundation Communities, a housing organization in town; but those were lies. I knew it immediately, from the twitching that started in his eyeballs and traveled across his sinewy frame; from the speed of his speech, one word trampling the other to leave no space for doubt. Even if he hadn’t asked for money at the end of his monologue: “just to cover the next few days before the job starts,” I would have known. I saw his shame flood out of him, lapping at my feet, as he asked. 

“I don’t have any money.” I told him. And it was true. My salary from the university was measly and part of my survival depended on attending all the university events I could where they offered free food. I had two hundred dollars cash, for emergencies, that I kept in my nightstand, and didn’t even consider giving to him, which I was proud of that night. It felt like growth after everything he had put us through. He didn’t push, which I appreciated, but it did end the conversation. 

“I’m tired,” he said. “Do you mind if I run a load of laundry, I haven’t been able to wash my stuff in a few days.”   

“Of course,” I said, and gave him a few quarters to run the complex’s machines, and while he was out, I hung out with Hugo. He sniffed every corner of the apartment (it didn’t take him long), and whenever he smelled something interesting, he would linger and then look up at me. It broke my heart how much I had missed Hugo and his tilted head. I jumped on my bed and called him, like I did when I was a teenager, and he came quickly as if moments had gone by and not over a decade since I first brought him home. He nestled into me, the little spoon, and I didn’t care that he was filthy, the white patch of fur on his chest caked in dirt. He still smelled like Hugo, a little cheesy around the ears, a little musky, but it didn’t repulse me, it never had. And then I had a thought I didn’t expect. Hugo would never be disappointed at Papi, never blame him for what he did to our family. Hugo was only capable of loving him, and nothing else. Hugo would always be fifteen-year-old me, who thought Papi was a superhero. He had taken my spot as dad’s child. I was angry at him. Still, I held him, took him in, cried into his back. 

“He looks healthy,” I said when my dad came back from the laundry room. “In need of a good wash, though.” My Dad might have been wasting away, but Hugo was wide and muscular. Dope and dog food, the only things Papi spent money on. “I missed him so much.” 

“I know,” he said. “He missed you, too.” And those were the first real words he had said to me all night.  

“You can sleep with him if you want,” my dad told me, but as soon as Papi got on the lumpy futon mattress, Hugo went to him, stretched out beside him, and let out a long sigh. They were both asleep and snoring in a few minutes. 

I grabbed the two hundred dollars from my nightstand and put it inside my laptop, stuffed my computer under my pillow, and went to sleep. 

The next morning, my dad and Hugo were gone with my small flat screen TV. I didn’t even know how he could carry it, with his back the way it was. “I love you. I’m sorry,” read the note in his beautiful penmanship. 

* 

The encampment where Papi had been found was past MoPac, close to UT’s Brackenridge Field Lab, where some of my friends did their experiments, and where every month I helped host Science Under the Stars, an event open to the public where different scientists would present their research to the community at a layman’s level. I wondered if my dad was ever close enough to hear my voice on the microphone as I introduced Inu’s research on Alaskan Musk Oxen, or Billy’s diving expedition to see coral spawn in Thailand.  

As my car pulled up to the red dot on the phone, all I could think about was Hugo. I spent ten minutes trying to figure out the trail that led to the homeless encampment. I could hear the sounds coming from it before I saw the lights: the rumbling of a generator, and a few different sources of music scratching at each other like cats in an alley. The brush opened into a gathering of about ten tents, plus a few other structures built out of a mix of materials: wood, cardboard, plastic and tarp. Three small campfires and a set of string lights coming from the generator illuminated the tiny village. People gathered, chatting, smoking, and drinking, enjoying the October night. It looked both like a normal evening in any outdoor patio in Austin, and like a scene from a post-apocalyptic TV show. I froze, suddenly afraid of what they would do to an intruder; that toxic image of the homeless person as dangerous, crazed, murderous, coming to me unfiltered. 

A dog barked, the first to notice me. But it was a sharp bark, much smaller than Hugo’s. The man next to the dog saw me, but I must have been just a shadow coming out of the brush to him. He stood from his lawn chair, a can in his hand. A few others looked my way. I took a few steps closer, into the soft glow of the encampment. It smelled like dirt and smoke. 

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. The dog was a small chihuahua mix who barked a few more times, but as the man came closer, retreated to the safety of the campfire. 

More shapes, farther back, had also stopped and were looking my way. 

“Can I help you?” His voice was deep and scratchy. He was a tall black man, wearing jeans and no shirt. Wide-chested and strong, he had a sharp, inspecting stare. 

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. 

“This someone have a name?” 

“My dad. Diego,” I said. And I looked at the tents, hoping that if I said his name, Papi would emerge from one of them, tan and strong, with the swagger he had when he came out of the sea. 

“Oh, shit,” he said. He looked down, not quite knowing what to do. And I knew my dad was dead. And I knew that this man thought he had to break it to Diego’s daughter that her daddy had been taken in an ambulance. For a moment longer I looked at the tents, but nothing. No one came out. Papi didn’t come out. 

“Sorry, I’m not looking for my dad. I just came from the hospital.” 

“Sorry, honey. Is your dad…” 

“Dead,” I said.  

“Oh, shit,” he repeated. 

“I’m looking for his dog. Hugo?” 

“Yeah, Hugo. He’s around here somewhere,” he said, looking back into the encampment. “He was with Reina, your daddy’s friend, but I haven’t seen her for a second, since they took your daddy.” He pointed towards the tents, and further back, towards the river. 

I felt my heart in my chest again, as if it had stopped beating the moment I got the call and all of a sudden it had restarted. “Hugo!” I yelled. I walked away from the man and into the encampment. “Hugo!” 

I passed the first tent. A man and a woman were sitting across from each other inside. I averted my eyes, not because they were doing anything wrong, but because I felt like an interloper.  

I whistled the way I did when I was a child. “Hugo!” 

I passed more dwellings, some empty, some inhabited, but none by Hugo. The moon shone bright all of a sudden, clouds parting in the sky, letting it illuminate a beige camping tent at the end of the clearing.  

And I saw him there, laying on a sleeping bag, my dad’s crutches next to him. His head rested on his crossed front paws. His hind legs were spread out like a flattened frog. His eyes were far-away and sad. I ran to the tent’s entrance, kneeled. 

“Hugo.” 

He looked, not knowing me. His block of a head tilted to one side, his snout completely white, his eyes, cloudy. Hugo was an old dog. Older now that he knew what it felt like for his father to die. His nostrils opened wide, taking me in.  

And then his tail thumped against the sleeping bag, once. Then twice. Then so many times it felt as if the earth shook, like the thumping of Hugo’s tail was the beginning of a shockwave that would carry from here and create a ripple in the nearby Colorado river. And if it reached there, why couldn’t it grow into a wave once it entered the gulf? It could travel all the way out, into the Caribbean, past islands and reefs, until finally, spent and exhausted, it would crash home. In Todasana. In that same beach where, one day, Papi saved a boy’s life, and I thought him the most amazing man in the world.