Page 57 of Nothing Less than Magic
Aunt Gloria, on the other hand, owned her own hair salon. Lolly and I loved sitting in the swivel hair chairs and spinning around until we were dizzy. The shop had six stations and a waiting area with cheetah-print couches and every fashion magazine under the sun. Before she got famous, Charlize Theron used to go there.
Where Mom was traditional—always in jeans and a crisp white blouse—Aunt Gloria liked to push the limits. Red leather pants, cropped tops, high-heeled shoes, and big hoop earrings. Her hair color changed with the seasons. Platinum-blond in summer, auburn red in fall, inky black in winter, and chestnut brown in spring.
I once heard Big Al tell Mom that he wished Aunt Gloria wouldn’t dress that way. That it embarrassed him. I loved it, though. She was brash and bold and, in my eyes, glamorous.
Every Easter, she would do Lolly’s and my hair. First, she’d shampoo us in the sink bowls in the back of the salon, then take an inch or two off our long locks and add in a few layers. She spent at least forty-five minutes blowing each of us out with a large round brush that made our hair big and fluffy. No one did it like Aunt Gloria.
But even to a little girl, it was clear that Al and Gloria were on the rocks, their marriage on life support. The thing was, Big Al loved her. Even to a little girl, that was clear, too. He used to follow her with his eyes wherever she went and brag about her accomplishments to my parents.
That’s why it was doubly sad when we’d find him sleeping on our couch on a random morning or find him scrounging through our refrigerator when Lolly and I got home from school. Dad had been promoted to sergeant and was home less and less, whereas Big Al was there more and more.
As I remember everything, or at least everything a twelve-year-old has the capacity to understand or process, I think about Knox. I think about Knox and Brody and Sienna. I think about Austin and me. Mary. I think about Sadie. I think about the countless couples I’ve counseled. About all the love triangles I’ve seen in my practice, none of them ending as tragically as the way it did with my parents.
Mom had taken Lolly and me to visit Uncle Sylvester. He and the show’s developers had just finished a teen television series, and we were getting to meet the cast. Afterward, Uncle Sylvester was taking us out for a fancy dinner to celebrate, and we were staying the night with him in his Century City apartment. Dad couldn’t come because he had to work.
It was an exciting day, our first time on a Hollywood set—at least, Lolly’s and mine. Mom had been to others with Uncle Sylvester. Although the actors weren’t on our radar at the time, the idea of meeting famous people, movie stars, put us over the moon. I’d changed my outfit for the big occasion at least three times. Even the dinner was magical. Uncle Sylvester let us order anything we wanted, and Mom even let us have small sips of her champagne.
We were outside the restaurant, waiting for the valet to bring around Uncle Sylvester’s car, when Mom got the phone call. Big Al had been injured on duty, and no one could find Aunt Gloria. Could Mom come to the hospital?
We raced across the Westside, taking Laurel Canyon to the valley, where Mom dropped us home in Porter Ranch, asking a neighbor to watch us while she went to Sherman Oaks Hospital. She couldn’t find Dad, but that wasn’t unusual. He worked the night shift, often supervising arrest scenes where he was unreachable to anyone outside of the department.
Only through my own memories and police reports have I been able to piece together the sequence of events that led to what happened in our family home the next day. What led to the shootings of both my parents.
Big Al had ripped his calf open and hit his head on a cement bollard while trying to jump a chain-link fence during a foot chase in Canoga Park. Apparently, there’d been a string of break-ins there, and Al wanted to relive his glory days from when he and Dad had busted the liquor store robber. The hospital was keeping him overnight for observation.
He was expected to make a full recovery. And he eventually did, at least for the torn calf and concussion.
After a long visit with Al, my mother went to his house. Her mission was twofold. Find Gloria and pick up clothes for Al, so he’d have something to wear home from the hospital. No one was there when she got to Al and Gloria’s, but she had a key. We took care of the Rosarios’ cat, Tweety, when they went on vacations. They in turn watered our plants and picked up our mail when we went out of town.
We were two families that shared everything, and that was our undoing.
My mother made her way up the staircase to Al’s bedroom. And when she opened the door, she found my father in bed with Gloria.
Lolly and I were asleep when Mom got home, but in the middle of the night, we were awakened by yelling. I remember Lolly getting out of her bed and climbing in with me.
Mom was shouting at Dad that she was going to tell Al everything and that she wanted a divorce. I heard the front door slam. And when I ran to the window, Dad was driving away.
But when Lolly and I woke up Sunday morning, he was there, in the kitchen, ready to make his famous pancakes. Mom hadn’t gotten up yet, so we had breakfast without her. Dad said he’d clean up and told Lolly and me to go outside and play.
Then Dad shot Mom in their bed. Even from the sidewalk, we could hear the gunfire. Three loud pops . . . then a fourth one. When the police arrived, they found Dad lying next to Mom, with his service weapon still in his mouth.
Later, Gloria told investigators that she and Dad had been involved for more than a year. The night I saw him drive away, he’d gone to Gloria’s to end it. To end it for good.
Neither Al nor Gloria came to the funeral. I remember waiting for him. I remember hoping he would take Lolly and me, that we could live with him in our house instead of going to Uncle Sylvester’s. Not that we didn’t love our uncle; we just loved Al more.
But we never saw Big Al Rosario again.
Last I heard, he and Gloria were divorced, and Al retired from LAPD and was living near Reno, Nevada in a gated community.
I think back on that day with so manywhat ifs. And so many questions. Ultimately, I could never understand why he’d done it. Why Dad took Mom’s life.
Knowing my father the way I did, I can see his shame, his abject misery. I can see how he believed there was no coming back from his infidelity with Gloria. Maybe from my mother. Maybe with time, she would forgive him for the affair.
But Al never would. And he couldn’t live with that.
I like to think that he couldn’t live without my mother, either, and he knew that she couldn’t live without him. So in those final minutes, with his finger on the trigger, he committed the ultimate act of love. The ultimate act of sacrifice.
But I keep coming back to the same brutal truth. It may have been love, it may have been sacrifice, but ultimately, it was an extreme act of selfishness. And no matter how much I try to romanticize it or even exonerate my father for what he did, every fiber of me knows it was warped and unforgivable.
