Tell Me Something True (19 page)

She was the one who needed comfort now. She was the one who needed someone who could listen, just listen, not say a word.
Or maybe, say just a word or two. Perhaps, all those years ago, her father wasn’t as attentive with her mother as he is now
with Gabriella. Maybe he missed all the cues that could have allowed him to discern a change and force his hand. Or maybe
he didn’t want to see, blinded by the unwitting arrogance of someone who is so certain of himself he cannot fathom that those
he holds dear could simply let go.

“You chart your own waters, Gabriella,” her father has often told her. “There is no destiny. Only volition.”

“Gabriella?” he repeated, cutting through her thoughts, but she interrupted him.

“Daddy. Please. Daddy, listen to me,” she said. Demanded. “I am fine. I am safe. Nothing is happening to me. Nothing will
happen to me. It’s just that… You have to give me a little space right now, okay? Because I’m sorting through things, and
I need you to let me breathe, and do what I need to do, okay? Isn’t that what you always taught me to do? To take control
over my life? Well, I’m doing just that.”

The silence this time was even longer than before.

“Perhaps it would help if you spoke to me,” he told her, resigned.

Gabriella looked around her room. Saw her mother’s portrait, facedown on the nightstand, picked it up, and once again, looked
at it curiously, divining her intentions. Perhaps it would help. But she couldn’t.

“When I have something to say, Daddy, I will,” she finally said.

Gabriella laid back on her bed, exhausted, and turned on her iPod, clicking until she found it, Arthur Hanlon, then turned
up the volume and let the spiraling lines of the piano wash over her and inside her. No words, just music. The soundtrack
to her roller coaster. She closed her eyes and pictured Angel’s face the last time she saw him, blank, rigid, showing his
true self, perhaps. How easy to read people wrong, to make mistakes, she thought, and impulsively looked at her mother again.
What did he look like? she wondered.

Juan José.

Juan José who should have never been reduced to a banal JJ.

He still lived here, Nini told her. It was likely they had crossed paths, at some point, in a city as small as this. She tried
desperately to remember the name of his company, fleetingly mentioned the day she fought with Nini.

Juan José Solano.

It comes to her in a flash, and she yanks the headphones from her ears, runs to the kitchen, and thumbs through the phone
book.

Before she can lose her nerve, she places the call.

“El señor Solano,” she asks softly.

“He arrives at nine,” the voice on the other side answers. “Would you care to leave a message?”

“No, no,” Gabriella says quickly. “I’ll call back.”

In her room, she sorts through her clothes, sweeping everything out of the closet and dumping it on the bed.

She wants to look anything but ordinary to him. She wants to look dignified, refined, hard to get. She wants his respect.

She settles on khaki pants, red halter top, and low, strappy sandals. She ties her hair back loosely and carefully applies
makeup, even though it’s not even noon.

Living in Los Angeles, Gabriella long ago stopped wasting her time on false modesty. Now, she looks at herself in the mirror
dispassionately and sees in her reflection a strikingly beautiful girl, the kind of girl people will turn to look at, will
wonder what her story is. This is the kind of girl she wants to be today.

Her hand shakes as she brings her lipstick up to her mouth, and she stops, takes a big breath.

“Relax, relax,” she tells herself. Because for the first time all week, she knows exactly what she needs to do.

Gabriella brings her lipstick up to her mouth again and carefully paints her lips a delicate pink.

From time to time, Juan José’s secretary looks up at her, but she doesn’t smile. Her eyes hold the deliberate, offended blankness
of forced servitude. She would like to send Gabriella packing, but she can’t because she looks rich, because she acts rich,
because she is rich.

“Please let him know I’m here,” Gabriella had quietly but firmly demanded when it was reasonably pointed out to her that she
had no appointment.

“He’s busy,” the secretary countered rudely.

“Please tell him I’m here,” she repeated with the somber dignity learned from her grandmother. “I’ll wait.”

It’s a large room with leather couches and a massive Obregón painting hanging on the main wall. A model of his latest project
stands ensconced under glass in the center. It’s the shopping center Juan Carlos has been saying will revitalize the southern
portion of the city. When she gets up to look at it more closely, she sees fountains and wide-open spaces. Her uncle Julián
likes the project because it will lie within a one-mile radius of the two housing subdivisions he’s now building. She wonders
if he, too, knew about her mother and Juan José. If he tacitly encouraged the relationship, thinking of future business deals.

But the thought is too poisonous to bear, and she returns quietly to her seat and waits.

Gabriella adjusts her sandals, reties her hair. This morning’s overpowering urge to throw up has given way to sheer hunger.
It is past two o’clock, and she hasn’t eaten a thing all day and her thoughts and emotions are starting to simmer.

She’s about to ask for a coffee, a glass of water, anything, but the phone rings and Juan José’s secretary listens for a second,
then looks at her again.

“You can go ahead,” she says dryly, motioning.

Gabriella sits quietly for a moment, taking deep breaths, like she does before a concert, but her legs still shake slightly
when she walks into his office.

He stands up from behind his desk, and for a long time, they simply look at each other from across the room.

She’s not sure what she had expected. A handsome man certainly. A man more handsome than her father, or at least comparable.
She had imagined his darker skin, his black, black hair, the firmness of his hands.

But his body is now bulky, softer, his face slightly puffy, its angles folded by time. His widow’s peak has receded high above
his brow, and the graying hair lightens up his skin.

He is like a faded painting.

Unremarkable.

Only in the eyes, the assured, slightly sardonic eyes of a man who knows what he wants, does Gabriella find a flicker of justification
for her mother’s actions.

He looks at her steadily. Then he reaches for the pack of cigarettes on his desk, offers her one, and when she declines, lights
his own, without bothering to ask whether she minds his smoking or not. His hands, she sees, are manicured.

He motions her to take a seat and she finally comes forward, aware of his eyes following her movement across the room.

“You look nothing like your mother,” he finally says, leaning back against his desk.

“You don’t look the way I expected, either,” she replies.

He snorts.

“Time,” he says, turning his head to flick the ashes into a silver ashtray, “doesn’t pass in vain.”

They consider each other warily, the air heavy with mistrust. She can’t even begin to pretend she’s here on a cordial mission,
and he’s utterly unprepared for her visit. Had she been the daughter of a friend, maybe there could be easy rapport. But she’s
Helena’s daughter, and everything is complicated.

On the shelf behind his desk, she catches a glimpse of a family picture: He’s sitting on a couch next to a woman and two children,
faces bright with laughter. She looks young—much younger than him, much younger than her mother would be today—and has long
blonde hair. The girl she hugs to her right side has hair like hers, tied back in a red bow. The boy is younger, and he, too,
has sandy-colored hair, slicked back to expose a widow’s peak.

He’s married. Her father never married again, but he did.

“My mother was married when you had your affair,” she says suddenly, taking him by surprise. “Didn’t you care?”

He looks away from her. Pueblo pequeño, infierno grande, he thinks, wondering who told her about them. He is fifty-two years
old and has never been questioned about his relationships in his entire life, much less this relationship. The girl has balls.
There is something about her mother in her after all, he thinks dryly.

He considers asking her to leave but instead looks at her intently again. Her eyes are slate gray. They’re nothing like Helena’s
yellow, slanted eyes. But in their depths he recognizes something he’s been looking to see for the past seventeen years.

“Why are you here?” he counters.

“I found her diary,” says Gabriella quietly.

“What?” he asks, puzzled.

“I found her diary,” Gabriella repeats, louder now. Juan José shakes his head. He’s had a diary inside his head for all these
years, a diary whose pages have been fading. Only flickers remain, as the details he so carefully guarded have been slipping
with time, with his marriage, with his two children. Helena’s face has been replaced by another face. Only rarely does he
think of her anymore.

“A diary of what?” he asks again, uncomprehending.

He didn’t know, Gabriella realizes. He didn’t know, either.

“Of everything,” she says evenly. She stops and looks away uncomfortably. Like a flash, she imagines his mouth on her mother’s
breast and covers her eyes with her hands, then uncovers them and looks up at him again. “She wrote everything down. She wrote
about you.”

For the first time in a long time, Juan José is at a loss. His hands actually start to shake, and he stubs out the cigarette
in the ashtray. He doesn’t know what upsets him more: the notion that she had a diary and that he didn’t know about it, or
the fact that what he did with her is public knowledge. He tries to remember what he and Helena talked about. What they did.
How would she have described their time together? He can’t bring himself to ask for details from this young girl with the
morose, accusing eyes.

“Has your grandmother seen it?” he asks, trying to sound nonchalant.

“No! No,” she repeats emphatically, shaking her head quickly, nervously. “No one saw it. No one will see it. Not even my father.
Just me.”

“What do you want from me?” he asks after a brief silence. He wants her gone. He’s sorry he ever agreed to see her.

“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head, confused. She really doesn’t know what she wants. “I mean. I—I just wanted to see you.
I didn’t know you existed.”

The words were coming out in a torrent now.

“I didn’t know you existed until I read her diary. No one told me. I was—so little. I hardly remember her. I remember we were
happy. I thought we were happy. I mean, I don’t remember any sadness. But she wrote that she fell in love with you. I wanted
to know why she would do that, when she had us.”

It doesn’t come out the way she wants it to, and even to her ears, she sounds naïve, pathetic.

Juan José never considered that he was doing anything wrong with Helena. Her family, barely mentioned, was a continent away.
Gabriella was a tiny inconvenience. Too tiny to protest. Too tiny to realize what happened or didn’t.

He makes a genuine effort to remember their clandestine conversations. Helena had told him she’d discussed leaving Marcus
with her friend Elisa, whose father had left when she was twelve.

“She says it’s better when they’re young,” Helena had told him earnestly during one of so many nights of endless plans that
seemed to go nowhere. “Their lives aren’t disrupted. It becomes normal.”

And until now, he reflects, it was normal.

Normal
. He repeats the word in his mind, like a mantra, wondering how much she can take and how much he can give.

“She didn’t do anything wrong,” he finally says slowly, not because he believes that anymore, but because it’s much too late
to have regrets. “People fall in and out of love. People make mistakes, they have affairs, sometimes they get divorced and
they remarry and that’s normal.”

“No!” she says, shaking her head. “No.”

“Yes,” he counters firmly. “Many couples get divorced. It is normal,” he repeats, spacing out each word.

“It’s not normal to want to leave your child!” she spits out. “Did you think she was going to do that? Did you
ask
her to do that?”

He feels like telling her it’s none of her business, but when he looks at her, he sees how young she is. A child. A child
who looks at him expectantly, as if he holds all the answers to the secrets of the universe.

Juan José’s mother is still alive. He has lunch at her house every Wednesday. He tries to imagine growing up without her,
and can’t. He wonders what he’d think if he ever found out she’d been unfaithful to his father. He wonders if she ever felt
for his father what he once felt for Helena. What the years have muted now comes back to him in waves, and he’s unable to
lie to her daughter or send her away or trivialize it, as he’s forced himself to do for all these years.

He looks at his polished wooden floor, then stands.

“Would you like some water?” he asks quietly, walking toward the minibar at the end of his office.

Gabriella nods quickly.

He gets two bottles and motions her toward the leather couch in the corner, opens one bottle for her, one for him. Sitting
on the edge of the couch, his elbows propped on his knees, he looks suddenly younger. A stray lock of hair—the hair that he
still combs straight back—falls over his forehead, and for a second, Gabriella catches a glimmer of the man her mother fell
in love with.

“I had known your mother for years, but I had never
seen
her. I wouldn’t be able to tell you why. It just wasn’t meant to be at the time, I suppose. And then, I saw her at this party.”

He stops and she can almost see her, reflected in the memory in his eyes.

“She was… a vision. She was wearing a lilac dress. It looked a little bit like a flapper dress, but she was so wonderfully
small and slim she could wear it. She looked like a figurine. And she had this… this long”—his fingers go up to his neck as
he describes it—“this very long scarf that she’d tied so it fell down her back. I’d never seen anyone dress like that.