Shortly before falling into a depression, my father created a beautiful garden in our backyard. He built wire mesh cages for hens, iguanas, cockatiels, and roosters. He stacked wooden logs to create enclosures for strawberries. He arranged rows of cacti. His face brown with soil under his cowboy hat, Papi was making us a Mexican Garden of Eden.
I was two or three when he started sleeping all day and everything in the garden began to die. The roosters killed each other. Our hens toppled into our neighbor’s backyard, where a Rottweiler ate them. The fruit shriveled into wrinkled black sacs. Even the cacti turned a sickly brown. My mother was a busy physician and couldn’t save the garden. She had other priorities: me and my sister and her patients. She helped us bury our pets, wreathing the corpses with flowers. She brought me a blank book and some markers...