Tell Me Something True (11 page)

Did her mother talk—really talk—with her uncle? He’s told her they did. He talks of pranks they played together when they
were kids. But then again, he’s not a man of many words, much less confidences. Gabriella can’t picture him in this room,
sitting at the foot of her mother’s bed, exchanging secrets.

Gabriella has her father, who is more than a father, who read her to sleep every night of her childhood, who would pack her
up and take her on location, paint their trailer pink just for her, allow her to watch any movie she wished until he finished
the day’s shooting deep into the night. Just as she has no notion of a sibling, she has less so of what a mother’s function
would have been. She only has Nini.

“My kindred spirit,” her grandmother calls her. “God took your mother away, but he made sure she had you first. For that,
I will always be grateful.”

Gabriella looks around her mother’s bedroom and only sees a room that’s harshly bare under the midday sun, with peeling yellow
paint on the walls and missing linoleum tiles on the floor. Anyone could have once slept here. Everything that belonged to
her mother has been neatly transplanted into Gabriella’s room in Nini’s apartment. Her mother’s bed is her bed; her mother’s
vanity is her vanity. Even the bookshelves have her mother’s old Nancy Drew collection.

Gabriella looks inside the bathroom, which is pink and prissy, two things she’s never imagined her mother to be. Was she?

She turns toward the closet and tries several keys in its lock before the right one fits and turns. It’s a huge walk-in closet,
every girl’s dream: a dress rack all along the back, and shelves along both sides. It’s big enough to comfortably fit furniture,
and that’s exactly what her mother did, turning it into a darkroom.

It was the only room in the house that sunlight couldn’t reach, Nini had told her. So Helena set up shop there when she was
only sixteen. This much Nini tells her. That her mother would spend hours—hours—every day, developing film, experimenting
with different exposures. The smell of the fluids impregnated her clothes and they had to be taken out and placed in the guest
room.

Gabriella never saw this closet as a darkroom, simply as a closet. By the time she came around, all the photography equipment
was long gone. She flicks on the light switch and is gratified to see that one lonely lightbulb manages to sputter alive.

There is nothing on the floor, nothing on the shelves. She opens the drawers and finds them empty as well. When she pushes
them shut, the sound of wood connecting on wood echoes against the bare walls.

Almost as an afterthought, she looks up and sees the edge of a box, on the very top shelf, almost touching the ceiling. She
wonders why she hasn’t noticed it before. Maybe it wasn’t there, or maybe, like most people, she never looked up above her
head. She gets on her tiptoes, but can’t reach the edge of the box. It’s too high, even for her. Gabriella takes a jump, but
only succeeds in pushing the box farther out of reach. This is silly, she thinks. I’m going to have roaches and spiders raining
down on me any second now.

But her curiosity is piqued. She puts her foot on the ledge underneath the drawers and steps up, reaching for the cardboard
box, dragging it toward her, and finding it, to her surprise, light. It falls, landing on the floor behind her.

“Damn it,” she curses quietly under her breath, and steps down, her hands black with dust. This silly closet is depressing
me, she thinks, and kicks the box out of the black hole and into the bedroom.

It’s sealed. Gabriella runs her fingers over the tape, surprised. Nini never seals a thing, she thinks. She hesitates for
a few seconds. The whole thing seems… private. But then again, nothing too private would be kept in an empty house for five
years, would it?

Gabriella sits on the floor and peels the tape off and opens the cardboard flaps, slowly taking out the blue tissue paper
lying on top.

Underneath, there are clothes, neatly folded and pressed. She takes out the shirt—a gauzy red shirt, clean, but ripped in
shreds. Gabriella looks at it uncomprehendingly. Is it a costume?

She takes out the next item: jeans. They’re worn and also ripped, but wearable. Tiny jeans, she observes, for a tiny person.

She digs further. No shoes. But there’s a purse. An oversized red leather purse, with a long thick strap and a big brass buckle.
The kind you hang across your body and can carry all your worldly possessions inside.

Gabriella frowns. So bizarre, she thinks, but gingerly undoes the buckle and opens the purse, reaches inside, and finds what
she didn’t know she was looking for.

At first, she only sees the wallet. It’s red, too, soft, beautifully worn red leather that matches the bag and the shirt and,
now she’s certain, the shoes that aren’t there. She opens it and searches slowly, methodically, for proof that this is hers,
and finds it in, of all things, a California driver’s license.

Helena Gómez Richard

DOB: 01-10-1960

253 Costa Drive, Santa Monica, CA 90404

Height: 5-01

Sex: F

Eyes: Yellow

Hair: Brown

She reads all this deliberately, one time, two, three times, until the words become a blur, because she needs to catch her
breath and still her heart, which she can hear in the stillness of the house, and stop the tears that are pushing against
the eyelids she has now shut very, very tightly. When that doesn’t work, she digs her fingernails into her arms, hard, and
lets that pain obliterate the tears.

She opens her eyes and looks at the picture. Her mother is smiling at the camera. Her smile is happy and sincere, and her
hair is pulled back in a shocking pink bandanna.

She must have left it during one of her trips. Her wallet. Her things. She looks inside again. An American Express card, a
Mastercard, a library card, an access card for the country club, a health insurance card, a baby picture. Gabriella’s baby
picture.

Gabriella takes it out very, very slowly, because her fingers are trembling and she’s afraid she might drop everything. She
holds the little picture carefully between her thumb and her index finger, looking at it curiously, unbelievingly.

Her mother carried her baby picture in her purse. In it, Gabriella’s eyes are huge and blueish in a serious face with a determined
mouth. She now touches the locket that sits at the hollow of her throat. She knows she also carries the same photo in her
locket. She didn’t know her mother owned a red wallet and that her photo traveled with her. She fingers the folds of the leather
and finds not money, but a thick, folded piece of paper. She takes it out slowly. Duty free. A receipt from duty free.

She still doesn’t get it. Not even when she sees what the receipt is for: whiskey and perfume. Not even when she sees the
date: December 21. Not even when she sees the city: Miami.

Her mother went to Miami. Bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey for her grandfather and a bottle of Shalimar
for her grandmother at the duty-free shop.

And then.

And then, she got on a plane bound for Cali. A plane that crashed. And her mother died. She died. She really died, Gabriella
tells herself, panicky, because she’s visited her grave.

In the bright sunlight, she grows suddenly cold and looks around nervously. Is her mother’s ghost here, after all? Has she
done something wrong? This rotting house is empty, except for her and this box full of things that’s been left behind for
her to find.

She feels nauseated, like she’s never felt before. She hears a gasping sound and realizes it’s coming from her. Like an old
woman. Her heart is beating so quickly her breathing can’t keep up. Gabriella claws at her throat anxiously, pulling at her
T-shirt, even though it isn’t tight, even though it’s nowhere near her neck.

It takes her several minutes, holding on to the now-empty box, before she can look inside the purse again.

The notebook is lying at the bottom. A red leather-bound notebook. She runs her hands over it softly, divining what’s inside.
Like the wallet, it has the worn look of something cherished and much touched. Comfortable.

The binding is stiff, and the sheets of paper, when she opens the notebook, stick together, thick with humidity. She gently
separates them, careful not to shred the paper, until she gets to the very first page.

The words jump out at her, cursive letters, written in bold, black ink.

Querida Gabriella:

You were born today, July 7, at 7:32 a.m. Weight: 8 pounds, 6 ounces. A big girl! A perfect baby girl, the doctor said.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there, looking at the first line.

Querida Gabriella.

Querida Gabriella.

Querida Gabriella.

Gabriella. Gabriella. Her name. It’s for her.

This time she feels the cold reach deep inside her, like an ice pick that has gotten inside her chest and is literally piercing
her heart. Her mother is touching her. She feels it. She is touching the last thing her mother touched.

Gabriella drops the book, as if the jacket were burning her instead of turning her fingers to ice, and sends it clattering
across the room. She rocks back and forth on her knees and looks at it, lying half open, the letters simply scratches on a
paper, blurry because her eyes are now full of tears, but this time she makes no effort to stop crying. She needs to get up
to get it back and read.

She needs to move. But she can’t. Is it all for her? Letters to her, lying there, dead, unopened, intact, for all these years?
In the emptiness of the house with its cracking floors and escalating vegetation it feels—absurdly, she tells herself, but
she can’t help it—like she’s somehow set a curse in motion. Why did no one find it before?

Her cell phone has been ringing, but all she hears is the rushing in her ears, and she covers them tightly with the palms
of her hands. Outside, the light changes, and when Edgar and her grandmother finally come to the house looking for her, the
afternoon sun hits the kneeling figure in the middle of the room. The illumination is perfect for a natural light photograph.

That night, she sleeps with the notebook clutched tightly in her arms and the light on.

She hasn’t told her father about the notebook, and she’s refused to give it to Nini. She doesn’t really know why. Maybe because
Nini never told her about her mother’s possessions, either.

“It was one of those things that wasn’t supposed to happen,” Nini tells her that evening, stroking Gabriella’s hair gently,
insistently, as she lies on her bed, her back to her grandmother, looking at the wall.

“When I learned that her things were actually in one piece, well, I just didn’t know what to do,” Nini continues. “What is
the point in having possessions without the person? And so, I put them inside the box. And everything else that had to do
with that day, I put away. I locked it out of my memory—as much as I could, that is—and I put it as far away from me physically
as I could. I made a conscientious decision to forget.

“I hadn’t even remembered where I’d put it until today. I just know that at the time, I wanted it as far away from my mind
and my soul as humanly possible. I wanted to remember her alive and triumphant as she always was. Not dead. That was my daughter.
Not the person with the dead face whose clothes I put away.

“After your grandfather died, I moved out of the house and into the new apartment. I moved here, I moved your mother’s room
here, and your father started to send you down. That’s when I realized that I, too, had died that night. Because when you
started to come down to visit, I started to live again. I started to feel again. You made me laugh again with your earnest
stories and your beautiful face.

“And this box, with these clothes and this purse and all these things that I can see mean so much to you, I forgot. I forgot
because I couldn’t bear to remember.

“Please forgive me, Gabriella,” she says, her voice sounding so profoundly, so hopelessly sad that Gabriella finally turns
around and brings her hand up to her grandmother’s.

“Forgive me, Gabriellita. I did the best I could.”

I
shut the garage door behind me, took my shoes off at the foot of the stairs, and slowly, quietly walked up, a practice I’d
perfected in my teen years, when Julián and I would routinely violate our curfew. Our frequent inquisitor was my father, an
insomniac with a voracious appetite for chocolate ice cream and books, who would raid the refrigerator past midnight. Years
of lack of sleep at the hospital had made him comfortable with being awake at night.

I should have known my father would be there tonight as well, but my long absence from Cali made me complacent.

He was on the sofa, reading a book under the light of a single lamp, a lit cigarette poised on the ashtray, the TV on but
muted in front of him.

“Why, Papi, what are you doing up?” I automatically asked, feeling as guilty as I had when I was fifteen, caught going barefoot
up the stairs at an unconscionable five in the morning.