Tell Me Something True (7 page)

Gabriella feels her stomach dip. It’s him, but now she doesn’t want him. Now, the thought of him makes her cringe.

“It’s your grandmother,” adds Lucía, and Gabriella feels relief pouring over her like a salve.

He won’t call. He won’t call. And if he calls, she’ll just say she’s not home, and he’ll stop calling, and it will be over,
like it never happened. Like when she was sixteen and she and her friends would get fake IDs to get into the clubs on the
Sunset Strip, picking up guys for drinks, then giving them wrong names and phone numbers.

Because she never does anything rash, not really. She is so careful, living on tiptoes because if she were to break, like
her mother, then what would be left?

Come to think about it, he hadn’t even asked for her phone number.

Aquí no pasó nada, nothing happened, she tells herself, picking up the phone on her nightstand.

“Nini?”

“Mi amor, what time did you get in?” replies Nini in greeting.

“Nini, you know what time. You were up,” says Gabriella, knowing that she was. Nini can’t sleep properly until Gabriella’s
home. But she still gets up at seven thirty the next day, like a little clock, and goes to her office downtown.

“Did you have a nice time?” asks her grandmother, unfazed.

“Yes. Yes. Great time. Interesting,” she says noncommittally.

“Good, mi amor. Listen, get dressed, I’m picking you up in twenty minutes and we’re going to see your mother. It’s our last
chance before the weekend crush.”

“Okay,” Gabriella says. “I’ll get ready.”

But she lingers in bed, uncertain. Can Nini tell that something isn’t quite right? When she was younger, one of her friends
swore her father could tell if she had smoked pot, even three days later. Impulsively, she picks up the phone again and dials
her father, even though it’s only six thirty in Los Angeles, but who knows when she’ll get another moment alone.

“Gabby,” he answers her after the first ring, his voice thick with sleep. “Can I call you back?”

“Mmm, sure,” she says quickly, immediately sorry she’s woken him with nothing specific to say.

“No. Wait!” he says, more alert. “What’s up?”

He’s always been uncannily perceptive, her downfall and her trump card. Who else has a father you can talk to about boys,
about birth control, about fashion?

But now, as she looks out the window from her bed, at the tile and tin roofs that stretch out below her amid the trees and
the still cloudy mountains pasted to the back of the horizon, she is assaulted with uncertainty.

He is in Los Angeles, where appointments are kept, curfews are respected, where no one smokes, where most people don’t drink
and drive. Last night now seems impossibly foreign, a mesh of unforeseens and unplanneds that her father wouldn’t—could not—possibly
understand, even if he were disposed to do so.

What
did
she want to ask him?

Have you ever met someone and felt that the world literally comes to a stop? And what happens if that someone is off-limits.
No. Not off-limits; an abomination. Maybe a monster. What had Juan Carlos said? “A fucking drug dealer with a personal army.”

Back home, they made movies about this. Or maybe someone gets shot in a ghetto somewhere, in a drive-by that becomes a little
item in the Metro section of the newspaper. Here, they… She’s not even sure. They shoot people, she knows that much. Do they
burn them with cigarettes? Pull their nails out? She’s heard so many stories through the years, it’s hard to sort out urban
legends from fact.

“Gabby, what’s up?” he says again, insistent.

Gabriella closes her eyes, touches her face, her neck. All her dad’s admonitions of caution, and she’d tossed them out the
window on her second night here. If she were to say a word, he’d do an Internet search and come pick her up himself by the
end of the day.

“Nothing, Daddy,” she says softly. “Really, Daddy. Nothing that can’t wait.”

He fell in love with my hair, Gabriella. Even before he saw my eyes. He’d walked into the classroom and had seen the hair,
laid out over the desk in a huge, curly mess. I was passed out. Okay, I was tired. I fell asleep.

He was not pleased. He was a new teaching assistant, and he didn’t want his stupid students walking all over him before he
even started talking. But he loved the hair. He thought it would be nice to film that hair with the right light.

The rest of the class was apparently laughing when he walked up to me and leaned over the hair.

“Boo!” he shouted.

I literally jumped, toppling my chair.

“Class has started,” he said calmly but looked into my eyes, and really, right there and then, we both knew.

You love this story. You can’t possibly understand it, but your father sits next to you in bed and recites it verbatim, night
after night.

“It was love at first sight,” he always says. “We got married, and we lived happily ever after. And then.” He always pauses
here, looks at you, raises his eyebrows, and you fall for it every time.

“What? What? What?” you squeal in that little pip-squeak voice.

“And then,” he says, “we had you.”

W
hen she was a little girl, Gabriella took for granted these two worlds she came from, so similar yet so completely alien to
each other. She took for granted that her Colombian grandmother had a chauffeur, who would open the door of the car for her,
who would drive impassively as she sat princesslike in the backseat. Even in her Los Angeles, in her Beverly Hills, these
were luxuries. The only time Gabriella was ever chauffeured anywhere was for her dad’s movie premieres, and even then, it
was in a rented limo.

Here, she sits in the backseat with her grandmother as Edgar drives solo, in the front of the cream-colored Volvo, which,
truth be told, is five years old now, and compared to Gabriella’s little BMW and her father’s Jaguar is, well, totally middle
class.

But from the looks of Nini, she’s the one riding in a Bentley. Gabriella has to smile.

She is impeccable, as always. Dressed in light blue linen pants and a starched white linen shirt that defies the heat and
the malaise outside the tinted windows.

Gabriella has also always taken for granted the duality of life in Cali. There’s her family. The country club. The maids.
Nini with her beautiful fourteenth-floor apartment, overlooking that vast, impossibly green valley. From the window of Gabriella’s
Italian-tiled bathroom, she can see the mountain range—blue in the distance, with high peaks dipped in clouds—as she takes
a shower. In the evening, lights flicker on the hills south of the building, making one think of a little Bethlehem. But when
you drive along those foothills, as they do today, it’s not cute or picturesque, but dirty and poor. The houses are shanties,
their roofs made of corrugated tin or cardboard. She knows that when it rains, water pours down from these hills, taking the
unpaved rocks and dirt of endless trails, and wreaks a havoc of mud on the road below. She knows this, but she’s never experienced
it, no more than she would by reading the
Los Angeles Times
in her Beverly Hills home. She’s but a breath away from all this, she thinks, looking intently for once. All she needs to
do is lower her window and reach out and touch it, but all these years, she’s been detached. What had he said? Aloof.

Today it’s sunny, and the midday stupor that permeates Cali at this time, before the afternoon breeze sweeps in at three,
barely reaches them, impervious, inside their air-conditioned car.

Gabriella rarely talks during this trip to the middle of the city. Nini doesn’t, either. They stop at a light and a little
girl, one of hundreds that show their stuff at stoplights around the city, furiously juggles three balls. Nini automatically
reaches into her purse for a coin, opens the window a sliver, and hands it to her.

She quickly shuts the window and reaches for Gabriella’s hand in the backseat, covering it carefully, comfortingly, with her
own, small and manicured. In the sunlight, her wedding diamond glitters.

Querida Gabriella:

When you’re older, I will bring you here every year. Every year. It’s important to never fully sever the ties that bind you.
You’re probably wondering why I haven’t brought you here before. I don’t have a good answer, baby. I knew I could always bring
you, you know? I knew nothing would change here. Everything would always be ready for you, exactly the way I left it. Even
my house, my room, are the same. The same bed. The same bookshelves. My high school nightgown.

In the mornings, I stand on the terrace and look at the houses below. They’re the same, too, and I still know what tiles are
broken on their roofs.

Time stood still here and time just went by, and there was always something else. Like this summer. I’ve come home to work,
but you’ve stayed with Daddy and Grandpa and Grandma over there. They have a house in Lake Tahoe. You love it there because
you get to go out on the boat, and there are no boats here.

But we’re coming next Christmas. I have it all planned out. We’ll have big parties with your cousin and invite all the kids
we know, and you’ll decorate the manger with real moss.

T
here’s no one here at this time of the day, and Nini has a parking pass that allows Edgar to pull up inside the gates, right
in front of the chapel. It’s full of trees here, old trees, solid and generous with their shade.

When they built this cemetery, over two hundred years ago, these were the outskirts of town. But the city has grown and swallowed
the dead, who are now shielded from traffic and smog by walls of concrete. From the outside, only the trees peek out, and
a guard zealously mans the gates, following a strict schedule, to prevent any pillaging from these tombs that house the poor
and the not so poor and the patrons of the city.

No one gets buried here anymore. There aren’t any more plots to be had. And it’s not the thing to do, anyway. People prefer
those pastoral cemeteries that are miles away, where each grave has its plot, like an endless garden, where the lines are
clean and organized. Here, the caskets are piled one on top of the other, inside tall walls with simple nameplates, each indistinguishable
from the next.