Tell Me Something True (18 page)

They drive in the uneasy silence of uncertainty.

They went to the club today. Her club, because in her search for normalcy, she insisted on going there instead of holing up
at one of his hangouts. They played tennis, something they both do competently. And it should have been fun. It should have
been inconsequential.

Except she took him not to the main clubhouse but to the back courts, rationalizing he’d like the privacy, but now admitting
to herself that she chickened out at the last minute, uncertain of what her cousin’s friends would say if they saw her with
him.

And all that for what? she wonders now bitterly. No sooner had they started to play, all the way on court 18, than a group
of Nini’s friends descended en masse for their weekly ladies round-robin. It was inevitable that between games, they would
eventually coincide at the benches between the courts.

“You’re Cristina’s granddaughter, aren’t you?” one of the women asks, her smile bright and friendly.

“Yes,” says Gabriella weakly. In the best of circumstances, these encounters were uncomfortable. Today, her IQ seemed reduced
by half, because she couldn’t string together a coherent response.

“You are so tall and so beautiful!” the woman continues, looking at Gabriella with open admiration. “Tell your grandmother
Monica Garces said hello. And who’s your friend?” she asked curiously.

“Oh, this is Angel,” says Gabriella, looking at him with a sense of trepidation.

“Angel Silva,” says Angel, adding his last name deliberately, getting up to shake the woman’s hand, looking everything like
a handsome, suave young man, and nothing like a drug dealer’s son.

He is beautiful, thinks Gabriella looking up with regret at his wiry frame, because in that instant, she can unerringly anticipate
what the next question will be.

“It’s so nice to meet you, Angel,” says the woman, oblivious to Gabriella’s unease. “And who are your parents?” she asks,
just as Gabriella knew she would.

Gabriella can see Angel pause, clearly weighing the answer. She can hear Edgar’s voice in her mind—“Luis Silva’s son? That’s
pretty big leagues”—and before Angel gets his bearings she interrupts smoothly.

“Angel just moved back from Europe,” she says. “His family has been living there for a while.” And then, before anyone can
intercede anymore, she gestures Angel toward the tennis court.

“Shall we finish the game?” she asks brightly.

“You just can’t wait to lose, can you?” Angel says with a little laugh, but Gabriella can sense his irritation, if not his
outright anger, even as he politely shakes everybody’s hand and walks nonchalantly to his side of the court.

They finished their game in silence and left immediately, not even stopping for lunch or to relax by the pool.

Angel said he needed to work, but Gabriella knows better. She senses his acute discomfort at being out of his element and
out of control, at a place where he knows he’s not welcome, at a club where his dubious family ties will forever bar him from
becoming a member. And somehow, instead of making it easier for him, she’s managed to compound everything that was wrong.

On the way home they’ve stopped at a light and a band of children are doing their merry tricks for petty cash. To the right,
a group is juggling oranges. Good juggling, with oranges going under legs, over arms, under the legs again. To the left, they’re
doing pirouettes, one skinny black kid balancing himself on the shoulders of two equally scrawny kids who flip him over, so
he lands in front of their car.

Before he can stop her, Gabriella opens the window and hands over five thousand pesos to the jugglers on the right, then reaches
over and hands five thousand to the acrobats on the left.

They can’t believe their luck.

“Gracias! Gracias, señorita,” they cry, their white smiles lighting up their dark faces, hands touching hers for an instant
before they dash to the divider to share news of the unexpectedly large bounty with their buddies.

Gabriella loves this. Five thousand pesos is two dollars, but here, for kids like this, it’s a small fortune.

“You know, I’m trying to talk my dad into shooting something here,” she says, feeling warmly benevolent and desperate to break
the tension.

Angel doesn’t say anything, and for a second, she thinks he hasn’t heard her.

“I’m telling you,” she adds, getting animated at the prospect, “I’m going to convince my dad to shoot a movie here. I’ve been
working on a script. If he gets the right partner, I think we can do it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Angel. “Just what we need. Another gringa telling us what we’re all about.”

At first, she thinks he’s joking.

“I’m not a gringa, Angel,” she says, not even looking at him.

“Oh, yes, you are,” he says, and this time she hears the hardness in his voice and now she does look at him. “Coming here
once a year doesn’t mean you’re from here.”

“Oh, and what about you, Mr. Swiss Private School?” she asks. “You were even farther away than me!”

“No, no,” he says, shaking his head. “You see, the difference is you think like a gringa. It doesn’t matter that you speak
like a Colombian. You think like a gringa. You’re like one of these…” He pauses, searching for a word he’s read but never
used. “What do you call them, Oreos? Isn’t that what blacks say? People who are black on the outside, white on the inside.
That’s you.”

“How can you say something like that?” she asks, anger rising from the pit that has formed in her stomach. “Weren’t you the
one telling me I had an ‘open mind’? Now, something doesn’t go your way, and I’m suddenly an execrable character?”

“Something doesn’t go my way? Are you joking? You just showed your true colors, and how!” he says with a snort. “Come on,
tell the truth. You think my dad’s a shitty drug dealer, and you think I’m one, too. You think I go around offing people in
my free time! You believe every cliché you’ve ever seen in those little Hollywood movies your daddy makes.”

Gabriella feels her face get red. Last year, after a dismal fall recital at St. Stephen’s, her teacher had approached and
whispered furiously in her ear. “That’s not the way we play the piano at USC,” he said angrily, and she felt the same embarrassed
futility now, of having tried to do the right thing, of having failed, and at a loss as to how to correct it.

“I’ve never thought anything like that about you,” she says quietly, wishing she could somehow hit a rewind button and take
back the morning, do it all over again. “I don’t know enough about your father. But I do know about you.”

“And what
do
you know about me?” he asks evenly.

Gabriella shrugs. She struggles with the words.

“You’re kind,” she says finally. “And that when I’m with you, I don’t want to be with anyone else,” she adds with a smile,
attempting to make light of the matter, putting her hand on his arm tentatively, wishing for this gentleness even though she
feels the muscles tensing and relaxing as he grips the steering wheel.

“And this is why you hid me out in the back courts, where you thought no one else was playing? So you wouldn’t have to be
with anyone else? Is that why you were freaking out with your grandmother’s friend? You actually think I go around and brag
about my father? You are such a lying little hypocritical bitch. Like all the other ones like you.”

Gabriella takes her hand from his arm. She feels like she’s been slapped, which has never happened to her in her life. She
stares straight ahead until he slams the brakes at the next traffic light, and then, without any preamble, she opens the car
door and gets out.

She walks in the direction they came from, toward the children, stepping onto the grassy median where the children and their
parents and the hawkers converge, looking at her curiously, as she tries to get as far away from him as she can.

She sees two of his bodyguards looking uncertainly in her direction. Angel’s SUV is parked in the middle of the street, obstructing
traffic, and other cars are honking furiously. The honking doesn’t faze the guards in the least, she knows, and for a second,
their eyes meet hers—or seem to—from where she stands, and she imagines that they start moving toward her. But they halt abruptly,
and instead, they both get into Angel’s car, one claiming the front seat, the door of which she’s left open.

Gabriella looks at the bus lane that separates her vulnerable median from the opposite sidewalk and makes a dash for it, weaving
her way in and out of traffic and vending carts, until she reaches the other side of the street.

When she looks back again, their cars are gone.

For a second Gabriella panics. She thinks they might go around the block and come back to pick her up. So she dashes into
one of the many cafeterias that line the road and takes the seat farthest away from the door, the chair’s metal hard and cold
against her bare legs.

She has enough money for a Coke, enough money for a hot pandebono. She doesn’t have enough money for a cab.

She sighs, defeated. How is she supposed to explain this? she wonders. Stranded in the cafeteria. It dawns on her that there
isn’t a single person who can empathize with her predicament. Juan Carlos and Nini will give her “I told you so” speeches.
Her father is oblivious to all this. She doesn’t have close enough friends here, and her friends at home couldn’t begin to
grasp the situation—him, her, the guards, the guns, this moment.

For the first time she feels a wave of sympathy for her mother. Who could she have possibly confided in? she thinks. Who would
have understood? Perhaps, if she had had someone, it wouldn’t have gone as far.

She fidgets with her cell phone, delaying the inevitable, then finally calls Nini’s house, gives a lame excuse about car breakdowns
and emergencies, and waits for Edgar to come pick her up.

When her phone begins to ring, she doesn’t answer it. When it rings again and again and again, insistently, she turns it off.

The metal chair in the cafeteria is cold against her bare legs, and overhead the speakers are playing “Te Mando Flores.” She
sings along, never missing a word: “Te mando flores, que recojo en el camino. Yo te las mando entre mis sueños, porque no
puedo hablar contigo.”

She knows the songs, she thinks. She belongs.

H
er father’s call on her cell phone woke her up this morning, at seven sharp her time, 4 a.m. L.A. time, his way of not taking
no for an answer, because after all, what excuse can she possibly give for not picking up at the crack of dawn?

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked irritably and with no preamble.

“Here,” she said nonchalantly, and immediately regretted the unintended insolence of her words. “What’s wrong?” she added
carefully, fully aware that he’s had to either wake up at four, or stay up to call her. Both options are dramatic.

“You’re unreachable, that’s what’s wrong,” he answered curtly.

“I’ve been really busy, Dad,” she answered, sounding uncharacteristically formal. “You know it’s hard to call with the time
difference. I’ve spent weeks in Europe without calling you.”

“But you’re not in Europe, are you?” he snapped back.

“No,” she agreed testily. “I’m in Colombia.”

“Precisely,” he said curtly.

“Precisely, what?” she countered, egging him on, although she knew full well what he was about to say.

“It’s dangerous,” he replied slowly. “Colombia is dangerous. You cannot, ever, be incommunicado, and you have to return my
calls in a timely manner.”

“It’s dangerous?” she asked with a laugh, thinking, If you only knew. If you only knew that I’ve been sleeping with someone
who has the ability to have anyone he wants killed.

Gabriella takes a deep breath and lashes out at her father. “It’s not Iraq, you know? And if you would ever take the trouble
to look into it, or to come here, you would realize that,” she adds.

She could hear the meanness in her voice, but the distance between them emboldened her.

“Gabriella, do I need to cut this trip short?” he asked tersely, but underneath the terseness, she heard the defensiveness—no,
the impotence in his voice.

He doesn’t know that if he were to call Nini right now, she’d ship Gabriella right back to him in a heartbeat. All he knows
is she’s an ocean’s distance away. She is an adult. If he were to close the purse strings, she could still do as she pleases.
Just like her mother could, all those years ago.

Left out once, left out twice. Her father’s grasp on her is unraveling, just as it did with her mother. Everything in his
world has changed since then, but here, all remained the same, time crouched still, waiting for her to resume her mother’s
footsteps.

Did he know? she wonders. Did he feel something had shifted against him in the same way he now does, the empty seconds ticking
away—one, two, three, four—at the rate of two dollars and fifty cents per minute?

“Gabriella, I know something is wrong. Tell me what’s going on,” she heard her father say, his tone changed from chastising
to entreating, and she felt the urge to reassure him that it was okay, that, despite everything, she was still his. But immediately,
she rebelled against her own thoughts.