Tell Me Something True (20 page)

“I hate to say it was love at first sight, because it sounds so corny and because it wasn’t love at first sight. I’d practically
grown up with her. But that night, I saw her, and I knew, like I’d never known about anyone before. Can you understand that?”

Gabriella pictures her mother, the photographs that practically speak to her. Although she doesn’t say so to Juan José, she
can understand. Oblivious to her thoughts, he continues.

“I once read, long after Helena died, that you’re extremely fortunate if you find true love once in your lifetime. Twice is
practically impossible. I didn’t know that when I saw her that day. All I knew is, there was… something. I’ve never really
figured it out. Her perfume? Her dress?

“I had to talk to her. I had to dance with her. I couldn’t let her go and risk not seeing her again.” Juan José pauses to
take a small sip from his water bottle. When he speaks again, Gabriella hears the strain in his voice.

“Of course, she told me she was married. And of course, she spoke about you. Constantly. About how you learned how to walk
when you were only nine months old. She told me she only spoke to you in Spanish, because she wanted you to be fluent, never
forget where you were from. She said you played the piano. That you were picking out melodies at four years old.

“Do you still play?” he asks, his voice wistful.

“Yes,” she says softly. “That’s what I do. I’m a pianist.”

Juan José smiles, a wan, sad smile. “I’m glad,” he says. “She would have liked that.”

There’s a small, restless silence, punctuated by the hum of the air-conditioning.

“So, yes,” he finally continues. “I knew about you. I knew all about you. But I still fell in love with your mother.”

Juan José takes a long swig of water from his bottle.

Talking about personal issues is alien to him. After Helena died, he dropped the subject, and his best friends did, too. Those
close to him were unsure how to react. Give their condolences for someone else’s wife? His future with Helena had been formalized
only between the two of them. Taking it beyond that—insisting to the world that they had planned on getting married—was not
only absurd, but futile.

In the beginning, he resented the silence, even though he himself was unable to break it. He felt cheated out of mourning
her, a stranger at her funeral, standing to one side as Marcus shook hand after hand, finally coming to his. When he looked
him in the eye, there was no recognition of who he was. Just one more of Helena’s friends, now forever relegated to anonymity,
not even a snapshot in some lost photo album.

Only one night, many months later, did he acknowledge the finality of the situation.

His father was away on business, and his mother invited him out to the movies in an effort to lure him out of his funk.

It was a weeknight, and they sat in the half-empty theater, watching
Amadeus
. Later, they walked to the ice cream parlor, where he sipped a Coke as his mother daintily ate a scoop of tangerine sorbet
and made small talk.

Only when they got into the car, alone again in half darkness, did his mother stretch her hand over his on the steering wheel
and finally ask, “Are you okay, m’ijo?”

Juan José, who had long ago ceased to be a boy, let himself be one for the last time in his life.

“Helena always had tangerine sorbet after the movies,” he said simply, looking at her with lost bafflement. “She used to say
that they didn’t make it in the States. Isn’t it funny that she had the same tastes you did?”

“Ay, m’ijo,” his mother said softly, reaching over across the car seat to smooth his hair from his forehead, like she did
when he was a little boy.

He tried not to cry, but he couldn’t hold it, and his mother brought his head to her shoulder, gently rocking him as he sobbed
helplessly, a month of tears for what he’d lost and what could have been and what he now would never know.

It’s all coming back to him. So many years. Such a long time. Until you begin to think about things, and then they come back
in a rush.

“I took her to a lot of the haciendas she photographed in the book,” he tells Gabriella now. “I even took her to places she
hadn’t planned on including. That was the wonderful thing about her. I know this valley so well. I know every place worth
knowing in it. But with your mother, I rediscovered everything.

“She made me see things I didn’t know existed,” he says, and there’s wonderment in his voice, a wonderment Gabriella has never
heard in anyone’s voice when they speak to her.

She looks at him carefully and sees that, even now, his eyes sparkle with the thought of her mother, his face grows animated
as he recounts things never said before.

“One day, we were driving back from Palmira and we ran into a circus, of all things,” he says, shaking his head. “They were
setting up the tents. She made me stop, and we bought cotton candy and she convinced the circus manager, or the circus director—I
don’t know what the title is—to give us a private tour. We got to see the lions, the tigers, the elephants. They even let
her try out a trapeze. It was unbelievable.

“That was the kind of person she was. She could convince people to do anything for her. Before we left, she took pictures
of everyone. These great black-and-white pictures, Richard Avedon style, where you could see every crease on a person’s face.
She developed them, and we took them back a week later. Gave them out to everyone. I never understood why she didn’t do more
portraits. She was a master at bringing out people’s true expressions.”

He stops and rolls the water bottle between his two hands.

“I asked her to marry me after the first month,” he finally says and looks directly into Gabriella’s eyes. “I know that’s
not what you want to hear, but that’s what happened.”

An image of her father flashes through Gabriella’s mind. All the girlfriends. All those beautiful girlfriends. A different
one every year, every second year. Aspiring actresses, writers. None of them Latina. An entertainment attorney once, who bought
her a PlayStation for Christmas. Silvia, a grant writer, who’s been his companion for the last three years. A reserved, practical
woman who likes to work while Gabriella practices her piano. In her steady presence, she’s almost found a friend.

In all their eyes, Gabriella has recognized, even as a child, that longing look she now sees in Juan José’s. She always thought
her father hadn’t remarried because he had never found anyone else to love. Now, she wonders if it was because he was afraid
of losing someone all over again, or if he simply lost faith in women, because he knew he’d been betrayed and couldn’t stand
the thought of it happening again. Her father’s perceptiveness is a gift that makes him a great director of photography. He
must have sensed things were different when Helena returned from her two-month tryst. He must have seen it in her eyes as
well.

Perhaps he did know, after all, she thinks, and she’s filled with sudden pity, a feeling she has never associated with her
father.

“What did she say?” Gabriella finally asks.

“What did she say about what?” he asks.

“When you asked her to marry you. Did she say yes?” she presses.

“What good is this doing you?” he replies, frowning, shaking his head in impatience. He looks at Gabriella with something
close to disgust. “You love your mother, don’t you? Why do you want to dredge up what’s over and done with?”

“I didn’t dredge up anything,” Gabriella says. “She left the diary for me to find. You know, I’ve never believed in fate,
but now I’m starting to. If I found it, I was meant to find it. I was meant to know what happened.”

Gabriella’s voice quickens and rises with her heartbeat. “You know what? I
deserve
to know what happened. I’m her daughter. Her only daughter. It’s my right. So tell me. What did she say when you asked her
to marry you?”

Juan José sighs. A big, heavy, tired sigh.

“At first she said no,” he says, shaking his head. “She thought it was a big joke, or a fling; I don’t know what she was thinking.
So I let some time go by, and I made sure she knew how serious I was. And I asked her again. And the second time, she said
yes.”

I should be stunned, Gabriella thinks to herself. I should be crying. I should be protesting.

Gabriella opens her mouth to speak, but he silences her with a wave of his hand.

“She said yes,” he continues, “and we settled on a date. January. And then she left. And then, something changed. I’m sure
it had to do with you and your father and being together as a family again, and I expected that. She had to sort things out.
Figure out how to bring you here. I kept asking her to come, even for the weekend. And she finally called and said she would
be here before Christmas, but only for a couple of days. She said she needed to see me, and then she had to spend Christmas
in Los Angeles.

“It was a ridiculous time of the year to come, for only two days, but I was dying to see her. I should have talked her out
of it, because what was one more month? But I didn’t.”

Juan José leans back, closes his eyes briefly.

“And she took that flight. You don’t know how many years I spent thinking how I could have changed the outcome of things.
If I had insisted she come a day late or a day early. Or if I had insisted that she tell me whatever it was she was going
to tell me over the phone. If she had missed the connecting flight to Cali from Miami.”

He had spoken to her the night before, one of so many evenings when he took advantage of the three-hour time difference with
the West Coast, calling her right before Marcus came home for the night.

“The nights here,” Helena had told him, “they’re so still. Like a painting. I miss the cacophony of home. Here, I have to
turn the lights on, play the music really loud, so I can pretend that I’m not alone.”

“What about Gabriella?” he had asked her stupidly.

“What about Gabriella?” she’d said testily. “She’s four. I can’t exactly have enlightened conversations with her just yet.”

He tried to reach out to her across the continent and the ocean, tried to feel her hair, soft against the palm of his hand.

“You’ll sleep in a really loud place tomorrow night,” he said gently.

“That’s right,” she said. “I sure will.”

Only later, when he replayed the conversation in his head, did he hear the gentle sadness in her voice.

He rubs his temples, the memory making his head hurt.

For years afterward, he had pictured that last scene of her life. Helena running with her bag and her red purse flying behind
her—running because she was chronically late and in the short time he’d spent with her, she had been late for every single
meeting they ever had—cursing, because she would most certainly be cursing (
carajo
,
carajo
,
carajo
,
damn
,
damn
,
damn
), yet somehow managing to make it to the gate, to dash into the plane, hot and bothered and disheveled and alive.

She would have taken a book.

“
Madame Bovary,
” she had told him wryly over the phone. “To get in the mood.”

He’s pictured her with the book in her hand, because she would have read it until the last possible minute, and he’s wondered
what she thought about at the end, when she must have realized that they were going to crash, because he knows, he’s convinced,
that Helena, in her brilliance, would have figured it out.

“You know what the chances are of dying in a plane crash?” he asks Gabriella, and there’s wonder and regret in the question.
“I looked it up. One in eleven million. One in eleven million,” he repeats. “And she was the one.”

Gabriella doesn’t say anything to this, because she, too, has looked up statistics. And because she’s thinking of what he
said before.

“You don’t know why she needed to see you?” she asks.

He smiles a little.

“Yes, I thought that, too,” he answers. “That she was coming to tell me no to my face. It sounds like something she would
do. I never met a more up-front person in my life.”

He shakes his head ruefully. “Yes, I thought that. And I also thought she may have wanted to see me before the holidays.”

He hears himself speak as if from a great distance, hears how callous he sounds. Cruel. But he can’t help himself now.

Helena’s daughter, he thinks, looking at Gabriella critically. A girl who looks like a woman, with the classic, symmetrical
features of a beauty who will age well.

Her face looks crumpled now, dissolved into childish helplessness.

Should he have lied? At least a little?

“Have you ever been in love? Really been in love?” he asks suddenly, earnestly. Because in the end that’s what it was about
between him and Helena. It wasn’t about family or obligations or money or provenance, and certainly, it wasn’t about children.
It was two people who fell in love, and for one of them, perhaps, the timing wasn’t right, but the love was strong enough
to win in the end.

She thinks momentarily of Angel. Of his hands, his breath, his mouth, of everything that happened to her when she was with
him.

She looks at Juan José, lumpy and middle-aged, and cannot imagine him with Helena, forever youthful in her mind.

Gabriella shrugs, feeling uncomfortable. She wants to leave.

“When it happens to you, you’ll know and you’ll understand,” he says urgently, as much for Gabriella as for himself and for
Helena, because he can clearly see how they both must look in this young woman’s eyes.

Eyes that Gabriella closes briefly. Opens them again.

She has seen what he thinks she would see: A selfish man, who fell in love with a selfish woman. A woman who was up-front
with everyone except those that mattered. She didn’t even have the guts to write the marriage proposal into the journal. The
sex stayed in, the marriage proposal went out.

For most of my life, thinks Gabriella, I’ve been living on lies.

“Thank you for your time,” she says formally, getting up and walking toward the door. Her finality catches him by surprise.
He can’t let it end on this note.