Tell Me Something True (6 page)

Gabriella wants to run her thumb across that angel. She wants to take that hand, and feel it again, cool and dry against her
skin.

“Well, why?” she says, defiantly coy. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“Well, this is my house, and as you pointed out, my party, so I should be asking you who
you
are, don’t you think?”

This time, she really blushes. Laughs to cover up her embarrassment, the flurry of adrenaline that’s cutting her breath short
and making her heart race, almost as if she were about to step onstage before a concert. “I’m Gabriella. Gabriella Richard.”

“I’m Angel. Angel Silva.”

He turns up the palm of his still extended hand.

“Now, do you want to go up? I’ll make sure you don’t get lost again.”

“Sure,” she says with a shrug, attempting to look as casual as he sounds. She thinks she probably doesn’t sound casual at
all as she puts her hand in his, letting him take her away from the book and the table and up the stairs and to the roof and
into the party she had watched but hadn’t wanted to join until now.

Querida Gabriella:

I spoke with you today on the phone.

“Me traes un regalo?”

That was the mantra. Regalo, regalo, regalo. Your main concern is the gift. Missing me is not part of the equation (so, don’t
give me a guilt trip twenty years from now!).

You seem perfectly happy.

Papi is “bien.”

Connie, your nanny, is “bien.”

School is “bien.”

When I asked you if you missed me, you said, “No!”

Of course you don’t. You have fifty people doting on you!

But I miss you, sweetness.

Things are different here without you. Because of you. I am in another hemisphere. In another world. Ah! I’m drunk. Can you
tell? I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.

The thing is, your grandmother insisted I go to this party. It was being held at one of the haciendas I’m photographing. But
do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been to a party here in Colombia? Five years. Five years! The time I’ve been married
to your father.

Ay, Gabriella. I haven’t been home in five years.

Why did I let that happen?

It feels strange now. Not everything. My house is the same. My room is the same. I even wear the same pajamas I did when I
was fifteen!

But going to parties just makes me a little nervous. It was supposed to be a fiesta bailable, a dancing party, with a big
band and all that. That implies sitting at a table and, well, not dancing because I don’t have a date and your dad isn’t here
to ask me out (which wouldn’t make a difference since he can’t dance salsa anyway).

But I digress.

It was a beautiful house. And they had lit it up with torches, lining the entrance and all around the garden. I could have
kicked myself for not taking the camera.

But Mami said it clashed with the dress—“It will look bulky, you can’t take a backpack, why, oh why, must you always make
an effort to look as bad and dowdy as you possibly can,” blah, blah—and I suppose she had a point.

It was a beautiful dress. Lilac silk, very clingy. I bought it at a vintage boutique in Melrose. Mami thought it was awful,
of course.

“It’s—exotic,” she said doubtfully. Yeah. I call it that, too. It came with a long, long scarf. Kind of Isadora Duncanish.
I love that scarf. I felt very Hollywood in it.

And there I was at this beautiful party, sitting at this beautiful table with orchid centerpieces that matched my dress, looking
at this utterly romantic courtyard, with the dance floor illuminated by torches that cast just the right golden glow on the
dancers.

Alone.

Papi took me out for a couple of mercy dances. He likes how I dance. He taught me.

“Keep your back straight,” he would tell me, “your chin high. You never, ever look down.” And I never do. I follow his hand.
The lightest pulse on the small of my back can make my waist turn, my hips swivel, my legs crisscross or glide. My American
friends never got this, the concept of following a man on the dance floor.

“It’s so submissive, Helena,” my friend Angie always says, and she even has the temerity to insist that you can actually dance
salsa and lead the guy.

But I love to follow and my papi taught me well. If there’s something even Mami can’t dispute, it’s that no one follows like
me. “Like a feather, ni se siente,” my boyfriend Jorge used to say.

But Papi likes dancing with Mami better, and they make such a beautiful couple. He’s so tall, so stately. And she’s so tiny.
Very Coco Chanel. Not exotic. With that perfectly coifed hair. Sometimes she slips her right hand from his, like now, and
just holds it up shoulder height as she dances, like a doll in a jewel box, and she smiles with her eyes closed.

And you know how it is, people start dancing, and in the beginning, they try not to leave you alone at the table, but then
it’s just too tempting. They want to dance. Even Elisa, my best friend, left me eventually to dance with her boyfriend du
jour, leaving me at the table, feeling like a bona fide wallflower. There’s a phrase for that here: “Comer pavo,” which literally
means eating turkey, and please don’t ask me to explain what eating turkey could possibly have to do with not being able to
dance.

Jeez. I hadn’t comer pavo since the sixth grade. I played with the orchid. With the matches. With the candle. I was mortified.

Do you remember how it was in high school? When you prayed for the night to end and someone to take you home? When you felt
so soundly out of place. Was it your dress? Your hair? What happened between the time when you last checked in the mirror
and went out feeling confidently beautiful and now, when your increasing desperation leads you to eat the fruitcake in an
effort to look occupied? Well, of course, you don’t remember—you’re just a baby! But someday you’ll understand.

I now felt grotesque in my purple dress with its outlandish scarf, and when Papi took me out for a second mercy dance, I felt
it trail down my back with the gracefulness of a clumsy, thick woolen scarf. Not Isadora Duncan–like at all.

He cut in before we got to the dance floor.

“Doctor Gómez. I’ll trade your daughter for my mother.”

We laughed.

And, of course, who could resist such an overture? We traded.

I knew him. From way back when. But he’d never given me the time of day. Never looked at me twice, as far as I could remember.
I had looked but never expected anything back. Girls like me—then—never got looks from guys like him. Guys like my brother,
who played polo and wore khaki pants and dated girls with long, straight hair, who used makeup in the mornings.

Tonight, he was looking at me like I was one of those girls. I no longer craved guys like him. Guys who have become men with
small aristocratic guts, too proper, too well kept, too boring.

But tonight, he was different.

Different from himself. And different from Marcus, who is tall and athletic and so beautiful and easygoing.

He wasn’t much taller than me, and I felt his breath rising and falling against my cheek, warm with just a trace of the last
smoked cigarette, his cheeks lending just a whiff of expensive cologne. He smelled authoritative, like Cali, like farmland.
He smelled like a man who knows what he wants and gets it.

Maybe it was the way he held me when we danced. His hand so tight, so rightfully firm on the small of my back, making my feet
go forward and backward, so effortlessly I really did feel like a feather, and my Isadora Duncan scarf once again felt like
it was made out of silk as it whirled around and around us as we turned in the courtyard under the torches and the sky.

T
he phone wakes her up—it’s past 11 a.m., but she feels surprisingly lucid given the evening she’s had and the fact that she
went to bed scarcely six hours ago.

Angel, Angel, Angel.

She’s never met someone whose name is Angel. Why was he named that? she wonders. Was he supposed to be a redemption, a saving
grace? Or was it to protect him? A talisman name that would shield him.

What is she going to tell Nini?

That she has the hots for a mobster’s son?

Maybe she won’t have to say anything. Maybe he won’t call her.

She wouldn’t care if he didn’t call. Well, she’d care for a couple of days. She liked him, she liked him.

But what to do if he did call? But he won’t call. Guys like that don’t call.

Juan Carlos was furious with her. Never mind he’d been the one to take her there.

“You were fucking necking with a mafioso, in his house!” he shouted at her in the car.

“I wasn’t,” she began to protest, but he cut her off midsentence.

“You want to get us killed? Shit. We’re not in stupid gringoland here. This is Cali. People get shot over stuff like this.”

“As if I did stuff
like this
all the time. You, you are so out of line, Juanca,” she finally said; she was so outraged at the injustice of it all. “You
made me go there.
You. And
you!” she screamed accusatorily at Camilo, who was trying to disappear in the front seat. “You make out with your bimbas
and you freak out because I’m
dancing
?”

“No joda, Gabriella. Don’t make me say it,” said Juan Carlos, banging on the steering wheel, turning violently around. “He
was all over you. Everyone was looking. Everyone was talking about it.”

“Everyone? Who’s everyone? You didn’t know anyone there except your two wenches who you just met. I never do
any
thing with
any
one here
any
way. God, you’re so overbearing, you’d think we were in the Dark Ages the way you go on about every little thing. Like my
reputation is going to be soiled because I slow danced at a party where everyone was snorting coke?”

“Gabriella.” Juan Carlos now sounded tired. “He’s Luis Silva’s son. If you were my sister, I wouldn’t let you go out with
him. But you’re not my sister. And he’s a fucking drug dealer with a personal army, so whatever I say doesn’t mean shit!”

Juan Carlos’s voice rose as he screamed the last word, banging against the steering wheel once again.

In the backseat, Gabriella squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could and covered her ears with her hands. She wanted
to undo the night now, but she couldn’t.

“You know what,” she said quietly, holding her hand up, shielding herself from this anger that she’s never seen in him before.
“He’s not even going to call. I’m not going to see him again. You’re freaking out over nothing.”

“I hope you’re right,” Juan Carlos said, shaking his head, sounding subdued. “I hope you’re right, Gabriella.”

They hadn’t necked. They hadn’t even kissed. They’d only danced. But in the end, she felt as if she’d been made love to. He
was holding her so close, breathing into her hair, his hand on the back of her neck, pressing her cheek against his, his other
hand planted firmly on the small of her back, leading her hips and her waist through the dances; then quieting down and only
locking her tight against him, barely moving, oblivious to the people around them and to the relentless beat of the songs
as they melted one into the next.

In the daylight, she winces at the thought, at the shocking intimacy that’s transpired between their fully clothed bodies.
In the daylight, she wonders if he was really all she saw and all he felt like, if other people feel things like this? In
the daylight, she tries to conjure the steady touch of his cool hands and wonders if they would pass muster under her grandmother’s
perusal. She tries to picture him eating in the dining room next door, with Juan Carlos and her uncle, but the image fails
to materialize, like a painting she can’t finish.

In the daylight, she tries to imagine the daylight with him, and she can’t. The thought is embarrassing, uncomfortable. It
only works cloaked by evening, hazed by drinks.

“Niña Gabriella?”

It’s Lucía, the cook, at her door. “Phone for you,” she says.