I bowed my head and squeezed my eyes shut. There was no way for me to relax. I crossed my legs and uncrossed them four times in the next twenty-six seconds. My swollen fingers fiddled with the chain around my neck, my paling face reflected in the mirrored walls around the restaurant from a dozen different directions. My hair looked grayer than I remembered, there was a deflated sag in my shoulders, and bags of swollen dark skin protruded from under my eyes.
When did I get this old? I thought. Maybe I should just go home.
A warm hand brushed my upper back and sprung me out of my melancholy stupor. A soft whisper floated near my ear, and a wet kiss landed on my stubbly cheek.
“Finally made it through all the traffic,” chimed Gabby. She had all of her mother’s sweet innocence and charm, and now Gabby hastily threw her purse over the back of her chair and plopped down hard in her seat.
I glanced at my watch again, 11:11 a.m. What were the chances of these repeating numbers? Gabby threw her head back and clapped her hands together. She looked as restless and empty as I felt. She squinted her sad golden eyes and gaped at me. Our eyes locked.
Gabby sized me up quickly and sighed. “Are you eating enough, Dad? You don’t look so good!” Gabby faked a smile, a smirk that made her look like she was holding back a burp. Her voice was sensible and serious, yet I knew she was holding in the same pain and grief that I was feeling. No child should have to feel the loss of a parent. “You should have stayed over last night, Dad. Did you finally get some sleep at home?” Gabby scrunched the space between her plucked eyebrows.
She knew me too well, and just like Claire, she constantly worried about me. Neither one of us was getting much sleep these days.
“My chest is hurting more than usual, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. I’ll be fine,” I lied, not totally convinced myself if this time I would really be okay.
Stop with the whining, I berated myself inside my crowded head. Shouldn’t I be the one comforting my daughter?
I picked up the sugar packets strewn all over the table and carefully began arranging them back into their crusty bowl again. An old Celia Cruz song screeched out over the din in the room. “Azucaaaa!” shrieked from the overhead sound speakers.
I couldn’t control the burst of laughter that escaped my pouting lips. Oy vey, the irony!
“I hate to bring it up again, Dad, but I need to be sure. Are you totally sure you’re okay with Jason and me going on our trip? I mean, we could always go next year.”
“No, we should never put off a happy occasion,” I snapped. Then, softening my voice, I added, “I know the timing stinks, but this is your honeymoon we’re talking about.”
“It hasn’t even been a month, Dad, and I don’t want to leave you alone. Not now,” Gabby muttered. She pressed her lips together in a slight frown and dabbed at the corner of her eye. “God, I miss her so much!”
Gabby’s words stung my heart. “I miss her too, angel.” The words caught like a clump of sand in my throat, and my trembling hands went up to my heaving chest. I gasped for air, every breath rattling in my weak lungs. “Enough talk about postponing your honeymoon, Gabby. It’s all set and you two are going,” I croaked.
Try to pull it together, Max. My wet eyes darted around the noisy restaurant.
“Where’s that water I asked for?” I yelled out for our waitress and then glanced back at Gabby. “Today, let’s just try to enjoy our breakfast together.”
Havana, Cuba
1941-1958
2
I should start my story at the beginning. Or, at least, my beginning. The real beginning that actually remained shrouded in silence almost until the very end. But the truth was always there, always taunting at me from the stars up above. And it was in the numbers. There might have been some miscalculations along the way, I may have spent decades in the dark, but in the end, it all added up. History, family, beginnings—everything always adds up in the end.
I was born Maxwell Simon Stein on April 14, 1941. That’s the fourteenth day of the fourth month of the century’s forty-first year. Repeating numbers. Between the superstitious beliefs in the numerology system of my Jewish ancestors and the influence of the unique Chinese Charada system in our culture, numbers always meant something. Many people seemed to believe that I was born with the antsy and mischievous spirit that was so like my father. But my father, whose death remained a mystery to me for decades, died a month after my mother gave birth, and by the time Mamá had gotten around to officially recording my existence at the city hall in Havana, we had lost all links to my father—or so I was led to believe. Mamá had registered my birth with only her maiden name, Chekovski. Margot Chekovski (everyone simply called her Mimi) had ended that chapter of her life and sealed it with her own final act of closure.
Mamá had been in labor with me for only forty minutes. It was, evidently, an excruciating forty minutes for her, though—a legend my grandfather never let me forget. It might have been a quick delivery, but there was no doubt from the very beginning that I would forever be a challenge.
People in our community who knew my real father, Gabriel Stein—and everybody knew him—claimed that I had inherited his gregarious and natural charm. They also claimed we both had “the same sense of virtue, a restless curiosity, and boundless energy,” whatever that meant. Some people suggested that I was born under a lucky star. They would say things like, “Gaby, may his memory be a blessing, must be looking down from heaven above and taking care of Mimi and Max!” I wanted so much to believe this chisme from our gossipy neighbors and friends. I remember those nights as a young child when Mamá would tuck me into bed and I would look up into the inky-black Caribbean sky searching for the brightest star. I willed my father to be up there in the heavens, looking down at me, watching over me. I never got to know him on earth, but I had developed a lasting relationship with him from a celestial distance. I might have been young and naïve, but in those bursts of electricity, I was convinced that every twinkle in the black night sky was my dear departed father winking down at me. And my boyish insecurities kept me praying that he would stay with me as I grew older.
Gaby Stein, the young man that was my father, had been adored and respected in our small Jewish community, La Colonia Hebrea, in Havana. He was the only kosher baker in the neighborhood, a trade handed down from his father and his grandfather in the old country, and he would deliver the Sabbath bread himself every Friday afternoon through the small and tightly linked Jewish Havana neighborhood, peddling around on his ratty tricycle with a wooden wagon rigged behind its back tires. Gaby, a humble and gregarious man, would sing songs and ring his rusty bell through the streets, greeting everyone by name with a bright smile and a quick wink. Charming and generous Gaby would often leave fresh bread and pastries at the houses of families who couldn’t afford to pay him. Most of the “Jewbans” who had settled in Havana had more than enough money and food, but there were weeks that were a bit rough for some, and the mantra of our wanderings had always lingered and sustained us all the same: If we don’t take care of our own, who will take care of us?
On the night of my thirteenth birthday, after I was called to the altar in the synagogue to read my bar mitzvah portion in the Torah in front of our entire community, my mother gave me a gift—my father’s gold necklace with a small Jewish star hanging from it.
“It’s a very special gift, Max. Your father wore it every day since he was a little boy, and I know he wanted you to have it when you turned thirteen.” I remember Mamá’s words whistling through puffs of exasperated grunts. She didn’t speak much, especially about my father, so I hung on every word she ever spoke about him. I wondered if she was proud of my performance that night in the synagogue. And if