The Nannies (4 page)

7

“My girls seem to have fallen for you,” Diane commented as the kids went back to the swings. She sighed. “I need to learn Spanish. It’s so hard to make the time, you know? I mean, I work ten, twelve hours a day sometimes. I was overscheduled before I adopted them.”

Esme nodded, curious. “What do you do?”

Diane ran a hand through her hair. “Oh, Lord, there’s so much.” She began ticking things off her perfectly French-manicured fingers. “There’s my work with UNICEF—most people don’t know it still exists. I’m on the board of the Getty Center, and the Jewish Federation, of course. And I’m one of the chairs for Susan Pelcarovic’s EU-phoria Ball every year—we raise money to support international culture. Then there’s the gym, facials, manicures—just basic upkeep. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.”

Esme tried to keep a pleasant look on her face. So, Diane didn’t work at an actual job. What had her so overextended was volunteering and personal grooming.

“The girls will learn English quickly, you’ll see,” Esme told her. “Faster, if you don’t speak Spanish.”

“I don’t want their adjustment to be too difficult,” Diane said.

Adjustment. Esme found that notion hilarious. These children had just landed in an America where the streets really
were
paved with gold.

“You can always ask my mom to help. Her English is better than my dad’s.”

Diane nodded. “I hate to bother them.”

“Well, there are a zillion Spanish speakers in L.A. you can call. And I’m available for emergency translation. Anyway, I guarantee that in three months their English will be functional. In a year, they’ll speak it better than we do. And they’ll tell you so, too.”

Diane gave Esme an admiring look. “I just might take you up on your offer.” She stood. Esme stood, too. “Anyway, your parents are doing some painting in the guesthouse. It’s up that red-brick path past the tennis court. It was so nice meeting you, Esme.” She held out her hand again.

“You, too,” Esme replied, shaking it.

When Diane started up toward the main house with the girls, Esme followed the path. She passed the tennis court, where a college-age guy and girl were hitting together. With their perfect tans and tennis clothes, they looked like a magazine ad for rich, white perfection.

A few hundred feet past the tennis court was the guesthouse. It was actually more like a second home, with its own parking area, a basketball hoop, a veranda with white wicker rocking chairs, and two orange trees flanking the entrance.

“Mama? Papa?” Esme stepped inside. The odor of fresh paint was overwhelming.

“Yo estoy aquí!”
She followed her father’s voice to the guesthouse bathroom. At the moment, he was contemplating an old-fashioned toilet with a rubber plunger.

“Where is Junior?” her father asked in Spanish.

“A long story,” Esme replied, waving away his question. “Mr. Goldhagen is having someone drive us home.”

Her father put a hand to his lower back and winced. “Ay. Can you take this?” he asked, holding the plunger out to her. “I need to help your mama carry paint up from the basement. You know what to do here.”

Esme had dressed for Junior, not for manual labor. “But Papa—”

“Don’t ‘But Papa’ me, Esme. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can go.”

Esme took the plunger from her father. She’d fixed their toilet at home many times—it wasn’t as if they could afford a plumber. Crouching, she felt behind the toilet for the water valve to check if her father had turned it off. It twisted easily to the right, which meant he’d forgotten. After turning it as far as it would go, she stood and gave the bowl a few good pushes with the plunger. Then she pulled on the antique overhead chain, to make the toilet flush properly.

It flushed, all right. But
up
instead of down. Esme was forced to jump back to avoid the fountain of raw sewage that sprayed down onto her sandals.

“Shit!” she exclaimed.

“Exactly,” said a deep voice behind her.

She whirled around. A fantastic-looking guy with short brown hair, startling blue eyes, and the rangy build of a born athlete stood outside the bathroom door. It was the guy from the tennis court—he still held his racquet. The girl he’d been playing— blond hair in a ponytail, sapphire eyes, and a heart-shaped mouth—stood a few feet behind him. The guy had a bemused smile on his face.

God, he was hot. Why the hell did he have to be so hot?

“Whoever you are, go away,” Esme said, her face burning with embarrassment.

“I can’t, I live here. Need some help?”

Esme scowled. “No.” Stepping gingerly through the muck, she leaned over and lifted the top off the tank. It was filled to the brim.

“I think you forgot to turn off the water,” the boy said.

“No, I didn’t,” Esme snapped. “Your valve is messed up. Do you know where I can find some pliers?”

“Gee, I don’t think he has any pliers in his toolbox,” the blond girl said, oozing attitude. She snaked an arm around the boy’s waist from behind.

Bitch.

“Is there a main shutoff outside, at least?” Esme asked the guy.

He shrugged. “No idea.”

“Excuse me.” Esme squished past the couple and went outside to locate the water line that fed into the house. She quickly spotted the old-fashioned crank and twisted it, but it didn’t budge. Another hard spin made it give way. Several revolutions later, the water to the house was off.

Next she went back inside to search for supplies to clean up the disaster she’d created. When she got back to the bathroom with her arms full of ancient copies of the
Los Angeles Times,
the handsome guy and his golden girlfriend were gone, thank God. But almost as bad: Mr. Goldhagen and his wife stood there. Esme’s heart dipped to her crap-covered sandals. What if she got her parents fired because of this screwup?

“I’m really sorry about the mess,” Esme began. “I made sure the water valve was closed, but . . .” She glanced down at the sewage. “I’ll take care of everything. I promise.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mr. Goldhagen said. “We’ve already called a pro. One of the neighbors told us this toilet hadn’t been used since Cary Grant owned the place.”

Cary Grant. An old movie star, though Esme was fairly certain she’d never seen any of his movies.

“Anyway, Esme,” Mr. Goldhagen went on. “The reason we wanted to talk to you is . . . my wife noticed how good you are with our kids.”

“Selina’s giving them a bath,” Diane added. “When I peeked in, she told me that the girls keep chattering on and on about their new friend, Esme.”

Esme smiled. “That’s sweet.”

“And obviously you’re bilingual,” Mr. Goldhagen said. “Which is key. So, we were thinking you might like to spend more time with the girls. We’d pay you, of course. Sound good?”

Not really. Yes, the twins were cute. But they reminded her too much of her cousin Jacqueline. And she already had a job doing tattoos in the Echo. Why would she want to change?

“I don’t think so,” Esme said. “Thank you for asking.”

“Are you sure?” Diane asked. “Because I was thinking of putting a job listing up at UCLA and USC: Bilingual nanny, five hundred a week, plus guesthouse and use of a car.”

Esme was lucky if she cleared two hundred dollars doing tattoos. “Did you say five hundred dollars a week? To look after the girls and clean your house?”

“Oh no, no cleaning,” Diane assured her.

“You’re interested,” Mr. Goldhagen surmised.

“Maybe.”

“Then let’s take it one step at a time,” Diane suggested. “What if we do a two-week trial? That way, we can all see if it works.”

Esme hesitated. It was so overwhelming—one minute the police were barring her and Junior from the estate, and the next she was offered a job. “What happens with school, in the fall?”

“Well, if things work out, we’ll arrange your hours around classes,” Diane said. She turned to her husband. “I guess she’d go to Bel Air High School.”

Mr. Goldhagen nodded. “You probably wouldn’t want to leave all your friends. You could always drive back to . . .”

“Echo Park,” Esme finished for him, realizing that her parents’ employers weren’t exactly sure where their employees lived. “We live in Echo Park.”

The prospect of choosing Echo Park High School over Bel Air High School almost made her laugh. The only school friend she’d miss would be Jorge. There would be no hardship in leaving behind detectors and gang wars and drive-bys on school property.

Diane tented her fingers. “You’d live right here. With a functioning toilet, I promise. We’ll give you a cell, and one of the cars so that you can get the girls where they need to go. The Audi, Steven?”

Mr. Goldhagen nodded. “The Audi.”

A cell phone
and
a house
and
an Audi
and
five hundred dollars a week? She had to be dreaming. There had to be a catch.

Suddenly, Esme thought of Junior. What would he think if she said yes? That she was turning her back on her homies? That she had sold out? A flood of guilt raged through her. And shame. She had almost done it: turned her back on who she was, what she was, and where she came from, just because some rich white people were dangling prizes like she was a contestant on some game show.

“I’m honored you’d think of me,” Esme said stiffly. “But I can’t do it.”

“Of course she can,” said a strong female voice from behind the Goldhagen clan. It was Esme’s mother, Estella Castaneda. She stood in the doorway holding two five-gallon cans of paint. “Not only that, she starts tomorrow.”

8

“Oh. Oh, God. Oh, baby!”

Kiley’s eyes snapped open. She had no clue where she was. But as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, lit only by a night-light in the bathroom, she saw her opulent suite. Right. Sunday night. Los Angeles. Hotel Bel-Air.

“Ohh. That’s so good!”

Voices came through the wall behind her bed that separated her from the next suite. Evidently, someone—no, two someones—were making better—and noisier—use of their bedroom than she was.

“Oh, oh, oh . . . !”

God. How embarrassing. She was just glad that her mom couldn’t hear this. Kiley rolled over and tried to ignore the symphony of lust.

“Ohhhhhhh!”

Jeez, what the hell were they
doing
in there?

Kiley crammed the pillow over her head to block out the sound, but it seemed like the moans and groans got louder to compensate. They went on, and on, and on.

And on.

In the morning, bleary-eyed Kiley and her mother ordered a room service breakfast—the very first of their lives. It arrived on a white-draped silver cart: lobster omelets draped with orange marigolds, fresh squeezed juice, and a selection of just-baked breads and pastries. The handsome waiter—was there any other kind of hotel help in Los Angeles?—explained in a French-accented voice that the marigolds on the omelet were edible.

Bon appétit.

When the meal was finished, Kiley checked her watch. She was supposed to rendezvous in an hour in the lobby with the producers and other contestants, which gave her enough time to walk around the sumptuous hotel grounds and maybe buy some postcards for her friends back in La Crosse, in case today turned out to be her last day in paradise. Her mom wanted to stay in the room, so Kiley pocketed the security card and stepped outside.

At that exact moment, a guy came out of the suite next door.

That
suite. It had to be
that
guy.

He was drop-dead gorgeous. The limo driver, David in hotel reception, and James the bellboy were dirtbags compared to
that
guy. About six feet tall, he looked like Brad Pitt circa
Thelma
& Louise,
a movie Kiley and her mom had once watched together on the small TV in her parents’ bedroom, because Dad was passed out drunk in the living room. Holy shit. No one should be that good-looking. If there were only so many good-looking genes in the world, some poor guy was butt ugly so that this guy could look like . . . well, like
this.

“Hi, neighbor,” he said, grinning at Kiley. “I’m Tom.”

Yep. The voice matched.
“Ohh. That’s so good!”

Tom’s fun and games of the night before flew into Kiley’s head, accompanied by psychographics of him with some lucky bitch. The girl, who was probably as perfect-looking as Tom, was probably still asleep in his bed, wearing nothing but a belly ring and a satiated grin.

He held out his hand to Kiley—a large, strong hand with really large, long fingers. “And you are—?”

“Kiley,” she managed, in a strangled voice. She shook his hand as quickly as possible.

“What brings you to the Hotel Bel-Air?” Tom asked.

Great. He wanted to be friendly. But the pornographic thoughts Kiley was thinking made “friendly” pretty impossible.

“I . . . have to go,” Kiley blurted out, and strode off toward the hotel gift shop.

Of course, it turned out he was going to the gift shop too. “This hotel is beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked, as if she hadn’t just made a total ass out of herself.

Brilliant conversationalist that she was, she nodded.

“And the food. Killer.”

She nodded again.

“Do you work out?” Tom asked, as if he and Kiley had been carrying on a friendly little chat. “Because they’ll give you a free pass to the Century Club in Beverly Hills.”

“I don’t do gyms,” Kiley said. “I swim.”

“Hey, in my book, that’s working out.”

Right. Of course it was. She sounded like an imbecile.

“You know, I can show you the indoor pool, if you like,” Tom offered. “The outdoor one is kind of overrun with ‘check me out’ types. But if you want—”

“Oops. I . . . just remembered. I left something back in my suite.” Kiley turned and fled. She didn’t stop until she was safely back inside suite 401, where her mom was sprawled on the couch watching Good Day L.A. Kiley recognized one of the hosts from a syndicated TV dating show.

“That didn’t take long,” her mother commented.

“I changed my mind.”

“Okay, sweetie.”

“Right.”

Kiley went into her bedroom and closed the door. She was met by an antique mirror over her dresser; she couldn’t help but study her reflection. Reddish brown hair caught up in a ponytail. Average height, average weight, average, average, average. Maybe she looked cute when she wore Heather the slut’s clothes and piled on the makeup. But that wasn’t the real her.

Still, she couldn’t help it. She leaned toward her reflection and tried out some of the dialogue she’d heard through the wall the night before.

“Ohhhh. Oh, yes.”

God. She felt like an idiot and she looked like an idiot. But she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to have a boy carry her away to the place he’d taken that girl last night. A boy, say, like Tom.