Tell Me Something True (12 page)

My father peered at me intently over his reading glasses. “Muñequita,” he said with slight emphasis, calling me by my childhood
nickname—little doll—and from that tiny edge I could tell how terribly upset he was, this man who never got upset.

“It’s late,” he finally said calmly, but half questioning, when it’s obvious I have nothing to say.

“I’m sorry, I lost track of time,” I finally offered, even though I thought that I was way too old to have to give explanations
for any behavior I engaged in. “Good night, Papi,” I said quickly, resolutely, from across the sitting room, starting to move
toward my room.

“Helenita,” my father said quietly, stopping my progress. “You shouldn’t be out this late. I was worried. And your husband
called.”

Gabriella. My first thought was Gabriella.

“Did something happen to Gabriella?”

“No,” my father answered in that same measured tone. “Marcus just wanted to speak with you. You really shouldn’t be out at
these hours,” he repeated.

I was about to talk back, give him a piece of my mind, but the look in his eyes stopped me. It wasn’t anger. It was disappointment,
I saw with a pang of regret.

I had disappointed my father.

Damn it, and why couldn’t I? A lifetime of doing what appeared to be right, of pleasing everyone, of being the accomplished,
brilliant daughter who married the accomplished, brilliant filmmaker.

I was five thousand miles away from Los Angeles. Who was I hurting? Who would know?

Because, if Marcus knew, I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t begin to imagine the look on his face. But now, looking at my father’s
face, I no longer knew if it was him or Marcus that I was worried about.

My friend Elisa and I spoke often about infidelity. The what-ifs.

“What if your husband finds out you’re cheating on him?” Elisa queried.

“You deny it,” I said flatly, unequivocally.

“What if he finds you in bed with someone else?” asked Elisa triumphantly.

“You deny it,” I said again, shrugging. “He’s wrong. He’s mistaken. It’s not what it seems. You always deny it, Elisa,” I
insisted earnestly. “If they love you, they’ll believe you.”

I now wanted to ask my father, ask him if he was ever in this place, of wanting but not wanting. But speaking was too daunting.
I forced my mind to go blank. I looked sullenly at the rug, a Middle Eastern black and burgundy pattern that curled from one
corner into the other and the other and the other, and then started again in an endless repetition. If I looked at it long
enough, I could pretend I wasn’t here.

“You’re an intelligent woman, Helena,” my father finally added, when he didn’t get a reaction beyond my silence. “Act intelligently.”

He paused one more time, looked at me intently, waiting for an answer, an explanation, then pushed his glasses back up on
his nose and deliberately resumed his reading.

“Good night, mi amor,” he said with finality, not looking up.

“Hasta mañana, Papi,” I answered, chastised. I could feel his unspoken censure, and for the first time since I could ever
remember, I didn’t kiss him good night.

In my room, I slowly took off my clothes, dropping them on the floor, like a child, then went into the bathroom and turned
on the shower. I got it to the right temperature, which is almost scalding hot, the way I’ve always liked it, and I stepped
in and let the water and the soap and the shampoo clean off the makeup from my face, the cigarette smell from my hair, his
scent that had impregnated every inch of my skin. I stood there for a long time, the water beating down my neck, and when
I finished, my back and buttocks were a bright, angry red.

I looked intently at the reflection in the floor-length mirror on the bathroom door as I dried myself, then hung up the towel
and removed my wedding band. For the first time since my marriage five years ago, I was completely naked.

I was twenty-nine years old, almost thirty. I had a husband. I had a daughter. Now, I had a lover.

Was I still beautiful? I looked anxiously at myself, closer into the mirror, ran my hands over my breasts, my stomach, my
thighs, which startled at my touch. I’ve long known I have something men crave. It’s in the delicacy of my bones, the misleading
fragility of my limbs. My breasts were still high and rounded. I knew they were beautiful. I’d been told that. I was told
that just tonight. My stomach was still flat, despite the baby. The muscles still defined. I wondered how long it could stay
that way. How many more children could it bear before it sagged into middle-aged oblivion. How many more children could I
bear before
I
sagged into middle-aged oblivion? Before this body stopped being desirable? Before men stopped asking me to dance?

I looked at my face, still unlined, the skin still taut.

I told myself that this wasn’t important. What was important was my husband. My family. My daughter. I had a daughter.

I tried to conjure the feeling of my daughter’s breath against my cheek, but all I could feel was his mouth against my breast.
Not hers. Not my baby’s. His.

Through the open window, I heard the dull beat of salsa music wafting up from one of the homes in the barrio below. This was
the soundtrack of my life, this relentless music that never stopped on the weekends.

For the past five years, I’ve lived in a tree-shaded home in Beverly Hills with a vast front yard and a row of trees that
shield me from the world outside. A strict noise ordinance banned any music or loud noise after 11 p.m., and I realized I’d
forgotten about the music and the sweat and the anxious imperfections of life here.

Now I could barely remember the quiet of that street anymore. The line between my two lives was stretched so taut, a flicker
of my finger could break it and send one end recoiling into itself.

On an impulse, I picked up the phone and dialed Los Angeles, even though it was already 1 a.m. there. But the machine picked
up, and I heard my own voice, delivering a friendly California message: “Hi, this is Marcus, Helena, and Gabriella.”

“Hi,” piped in Gabriella in a baby voice we’d found irresistibly cute when we originally recorded an announcement.

“We can’t pick up, but we want to hear from you. Leave a message!”

“Leave a message,” Gabriella echoed, then giggled.

“Marcus?” I said urgently. “Marcus, pick up!”

But he didn’t, and I remembered that Marcus and Gabriella were spending the weekend with friends up the coast.

I slowly hung up and turned off the lights, leaving the curtains open so I could continue to hear the dull thud of the music
and look at a sky heavy with clouds.

In the darkness, I ran my hands over my breasts and brought back his touch, fresh from an hour ago. In the darkness, the only
scent I smelled was his as it closed over me.

T
he diary looks innocuous in the morning light.

She lets it sit on the dresser while she has her coffee and breakfast, while she showers, while she dresses, sneaking furtive
looks at it, but forcing herself not to touch it.

When she’s ready, she tucks it under her arm, then goes to the kitchen and pours herself another cup of coffee.

She goes to the terrace, where the light is brightest and the hills and the city spread out before her, and the traffic and
the shouts from the vendors below remind her that all is well, that things have not come to an end.

Gabriella looks at her mother’s handwriting on the first page curiously. She tries to feel a connection with the strokes of
the pen, tries to recognize the curve of the words, the cadence of the language.

Helena’s entire life has been an anecdote for her, up until this point. Now, she can physically touch her. The last thoughts
she placed on paper are now hers.

Helena was nearly thirty-one years old. Not so much older than she is now. She couldn’t have imagined that she was writing
her last words. Couldn’t have imagined things were going to be all over. What would she have done—what would she have written—the
next day or the next or the next had she lived?

Gabriella has never believed in fate. Her mother’s violent death made her a skeptic. Destinies are carved out by individuals,
she always says, and in the middle of everything, accidents simply happen, like thunderstorms.

Now, the pages between her fingers seem to mock everything she’s lived by. How many single, independent acts were necessary
for this book to end up with her? wonders Gabriella.

She literally holds her mother’s life—what’s left of it—in her hands. The enormity of the thought stops her for a second.

But just as quickly, she surrenders to the joy of the moment, to the thrill of the possibilities that lie in these words her
mother wrote. For her.

Then she slowly, methodically, begins to turn the pages, carefully separating each sheet of paper, smoothing it gently before
she reads.

The diary is all written in Spanish. The chronicle of her life. Her baby adventures. Her first steps. Her first haircut. The
outfits she wore for Halloween the first four years of her life.

Gabriella turns the pages faster and faster, anxious to read the next word and the next, anxious to go back and make sure
she has grasped the significance. How important are these entries? How momentous these daily anecdotes?

The time she had a frighteningly high fever and her parents had to rush her to the emergency room. How her mother slept on
a chair at her bedside and looked at her frail self in the bed, attached to tubes and monitors, and how she realized that
she was part of her now, as vital as the air she breathed.

The writing vacillates from neat to sloppy, from leisurely to rushed. Where was she when she wrote this? What was she wearing?

Gabriella reads, intent, almost tasting the words, so absorbed, the intrusion inside the narrative initially escapes her.

But then, she goes back, and finds it, again and again, as quickly as cigarette burns forever branding the pages.

Only when she finishes reading the entire diary for the third time does she realize that somewhere along the line the entries
have stopped being addressed to her. That her story has become her mother’s story, and Gabriella is no longer part of it.

She closes the book firmly on her lap and looks from the terrace at the view before her. It’s noon, and the cries of the cicadas
in the park across the street are fierce and insistent.

The sun is suddenly piercing bright and she’s momentarily blinded. But it doesn’t matter. For the first time in months, she
has a mental clarity she didn’t know she possessed.

When Lucía tells her to pick up the phone, her mind turns as deliberately blank as her eyes that can’t see.

“Gabriella,” he says, and when she hears her name again, she can almost smell the sound of his voice over the telephone. She
no longer considers her father, her grandmother, her cousin, the words that others will inevitably whisper, when she says,
“Yes, yes, I want to see you. Yes, I will see you. Yes.”

*  *  *

He drives a black Ford Explorer, and he’s flanked by a battalion of bodyguards, four in an SUV behind him, four in an SUV
in front.

Alone in his car with him, she concentrates on the minutiae of the moment: the way he smells of clean soap, the way the muscles
in his arms stretch and contract as he navigates the curves up the mountains, how his hair falls against his eyes.

“So tell me something about you that I don’t know, something true,” he says, looking straight ahead as he winds up the mountain.

“Like what?” she asks.

“Mmm. Your favorite movie?”

“Oh, God. That’s too hard. I’ve seen every movie ever made, I swear. I can tell you my favorite movies.”

“No. One.”

Gabriella squeezes her eyes shut. Her world is unraveling and she’s talking about movies. She laughs ruefully.

“
The Wizard of Oz,
” she finally offers.

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not,” she says smiling. “I’m really not. I love
The Wizard of Oz
. Do you know it was the first movie that mixed black-and-white with color? Can you imagine what people must have thought
when they walked into those huge theaters from back then and then the screen just exploded in color? I used to watch it every
month when I was little. I’d see something new every single time. I still do. And Dorothy was all alone in the world, with
Toto. And she had to figure everything out on her own. She had to be so grown-up and so responsible.”

Gabriella pictures Dorothy, leaning on the fence, singing “Over the Rainbow.”

“She was so pretty,” she says musingly.

She feels the tears begin to well behind her sunglasses and she stops, horrified, biting down her tongue.

“So it’s your turn,” she says, changing the subject. “Tell me something about yourself that I don’t know. Something true.”

“My favorite movie?” he asks.

“No,” she says slowly. “I bet it’s
The Godfather: Part II.
”

“How could you possibly know that?” he asks, looking at her incredulously.