Gabriellita, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Nini says over breakfast. “We’re tearing the old house down.”
“But why?” Gabriella says, stunned.
“I can’t rent it. It’s too big and in too bad a shape. I can’t afford to just have it lying there. Mi amor, I’m not going back to live there again. Neither is your uncle. We’re going to tear it down next month. Your uncle is going to make a building, and one of the apartments will be yours,” she adds comfortingly.
Gabriella looks at her cereal bowl, the milk stuck at her throat. She feels like crying, even though she’s never spent any time in the house. By the time she started coming here, Nini had already moved to the apartment and the house had become home to her uncle’s architecture firm. He would let Gabriella visit, and she’d play with the turtles and the fish in the garden pond and go up and down the curved marble staircase that swept into the foyer.
“I’m going to live here when I grow up,” she would always tell Nini, because she always yearned for a house with a sweeping staircase like this one. She had a picture of her mother descending the staircase on her wedding day, one hand on the balustrade, the other holding the long train of her ivory wedding gown.
The dress was Nini’s, and Nini had promised Gabriella the dress would one day be hers, too. In Gabriella’s mind, the dress went with the house, with the staircase, with the huge garden, with the fountain and the orchids that grew on the acacia branches.
“I’ll buy it from you,” she’d been saying about the house, even as a little girl. “And I’ll fix it up and I can sleep in my mother’s room and you can sleep in your old room again.”
But the upkeep of the house had proven too much even for her uncle. He’d thrown in the towel when rain leaked in, for the hundredth time, after a particularly big storm. That time it got into the electrical system, causing a short circuit and making all the computers in the firm crash.
The house has been empty for five years. But now, for the first time, Gabriella realizes the difference between simply being empty and not being there at all.
“Nini, can you give me the keys?” she asks. “I want to go and look around for one last time.”
“Of course, nena,” says Nini. She reaches across the table and brushes a stray hair from Gabriella’s face. “I know what you mean. I cry every time I go in there and think of what it was.”
In the afternoon she walks slowly up the hill, the keys tucked in her jeans pocket. The house is only a few blocks away, but farther up, on a street where stately homes have succumbed to luxury condominiums. The house is not the last one standing, but it looks ready to go. The stone walls, now covered with moss, give it a haunted mansion air it never had in its haughtier days of parties on the terrace staffed by white-clad waiters bearing silver trays. Even the grass on the curb is overrun with weeds. But the house, windowless on its entrance side, seems impervious to the humiliation the years have brought. Gabriella slowly turns the key to the top lock of the huge metal door—her grandfather had insisted on a metal door as a safeguard against savvy thieves with God knows what kind of tools—then to the bottom dead bolt, and eases the door open.
She’s momentarily startled, as she is every time, by the sunlight that drenches the main room. It’s inescapable, pouring in from the wraparound terrace on the other side of the house and the now blindless, curtainless windows that look out at the park below. Every room has a view—that was such an object of pride and joy for the architect who built the house—but now the tall-paned windows, so avant-garde in their day, look sadly dated; the paint is peeling from the wooden balustrades and the wooden, barren bookcases, struck daily by the relentless, tropical sun. Even the staircase marble has faded under decades of foot traffic and no polish.
Gabriella unlocks the top and bottom hinges of the glass double doors that lead to the terrace and pushes. The door is stuck. How long has it been since anyone has swept the house? She pushes again and again, until the debris stuck underneath gives way and the doors swing back.
She gasps out loud. The garden has practically eaten up the house; the vines have climbed from the garden below to the terrace on the second floor, and the branches from the acacia tree hang over the balustrade, the leaves aggressively poking at the bedroom windows. Down below, the grass looks like it hasn’t been cut in more than a year; if she were to go down, it would reach her waist. Mango season has come and gone, and the rotting fruit is barely visible in the green tangle of weeds and unruly plants. Even from upstairs she can smell its sweet, pervasive decay.
In a month, she thinks in wonderment, this will all be gone. Just getting rid of the acacia, which is monstrous and straining against the boundaries of the stone wall, will alone probably cause the house to crumble; its roots have taken over the entire garden, and Gabriella sees them, like knotted arms, extending into the fountain on the other side, lifting the tiles from their foundation.
Even in its current condition, Gabriella loves this house. She’s convinced there are ghosts here, although she’s never seen one. They are good ghosts, she always tells Nini, because only good people lived here.
One summer, when she was fifteen, Juan Carlos got a Ouija board, and they spent afternoons on end going from room to room, trying to summon her mother. When it didn’t work with just the two of them, Juan Carlos brought in his friends; they needed additional energy, he said, and they spent hours locked up in his grandfather’s library—her mother’s favorite room—asking, “Are there spirits here? If there are any spirits here, please give us a sign!”
But the lights never flickered, a gust of wind never materialized, and their fingers on the Ouija board pointer stayed immobile, even when they went up to Helena’s walk-in closet and huddled with the lights off.
“It means she’s at peace, Gabby,” Juan Carlos told her comfortingly. “It means she’s already left the world of the living. Only spirits who have unresolved issues hang out.”
Now Gabriella walks around, taking in the view from her grandparents’ room—the biggest in the house. Looking for… what? Nothing.
Everything.
“Is there anything left there, Nini?” she’d asked before coming, because she loves to explore, sift through her grandmother’s things, take home scarves and purses and old cocktail dresses from the ’70s that are way too short for her, but show off her legs like a dream.
She’s never seen any clothes in the closets of this house, just boxes of stuff—papers and books and scores of business folders dealing with transactions made decades before she was born.
“Oh, baby. I think I’ve taken everything out. Everything that was worth anything, you’ve probably looked through before,” Nini said. “Some books and records, I think that’s all there is now.”
That’s all there is now.
Her mother’s room is right in front of her grandparents’.
How did she manage to sneak in nights when she came in after curfew? Gabriella wonders.
She swings the bedroom door back and forth. It creaks. How did she close it without making any noise?
Her grandmother never gets into this kind of detail about her mother.
She was beautiful. Artistic. Sensitive. She had so many boyfriends. Sometimes two at a time! This part she always accompanies with laughter.
But Gabriella has never heard about where she went, what she wore, what books she read. When she comes inside her mother’s space, she always wonders. Were those boyfriends good-looking? Nerdy? Did they look like her beautiful father? In her mother’s arsenal of photographs, she has rarely found pictures of her mother with anyone else.
Helena saw the world through her camera, but she rarely photographed people. Her subjects were places, things. She made a living of giving life to what was lifeless.
And what about her? thought Gabriella. Who was her confidante?
Elisa was her mother’s good friend; Gabriella has always regarded her as an aunt, always imagined she and her mother were like sisters.
Imagines because as an only child she cannot fathom what it’s like to grow up with someone close to your age in the same house.
Did her mother talk—really talk—with her uncle? He’s told her they did. He talks of pranks they played together when they were kids. But then again, he’s not a man of many words, much less confidences. Gabriella can’t picture him in this room, sitting at the foot of her mother’s bed, exchanging secrets.
Gabriella has her father, who is more than a father, who read her to sleep every night of her childhood, who would pack her up and take her on location, paint their trailer pink just for her, allow her to watch any movie she wished until he finished the day’s shooting deep into the night. Just as she has no notion of a sibling, she has less so of what a mother’s function would have been. She only has Nini.
“My kindred spirit,” her grandmother calls her. “God took your mother away, but he made sure she had you first. For that, I will always be grateful.”
Gabriella looks around her mother’s bedroom and only sees a room that’s harshly bare under the midday sun, with peeling yellow paint on the walls and missing linoleum tiles on the floor. Anyone could have once slept here. Everything that belonged to her mother has been neatly transplanted into Gabriella’s room in Nini’s apartment. Her mother’s bed is her bed; her mother’s vanity is her vanity. Even the bookshelves have her mother’s old Nancy Drew collection.
Gabriella looks inside the bathroom, which is pink and prissy, two things she’s never imagined her mother to be. Was she?
She turns toward the closet and tries several keys in its lock before the right one fits and turns. It’s a huge walk-in closet, every girl’s dream: a dress rack all along the back, and shelves along both sides. It’s big enough to comfortably fit furniture, and that’s exactly what her mother did, turning it into a darkroom.
It was the only room in the house that sunlight couldn’t reach, Nini had told her. So Helena set up shop there when she was only sixteen. This much Nini tells her. That her mother would spend hours—hours—every day, developing film, experimenting with different exposures. The smell of the fluids impregnated her clothes and they had to be taken out and placed in the guest room.
Gabriella never saw this closet as a darkroom, simply as a closet. By the time she came around, all the photography equipment was long gone. She flicks on the light switch and is gratified to see that one lonely lightbulb manages to sputter alive.
There is nothing on the floor, nothing on the shelves. She opens the drawers and finds them empty as well. When she pushes them shut, the sound of wood connecting on wood echoes against the bare walls.
Almost as an afterthought, she looks up and sees the edge of a box, on the very top shelf, almost touching the ceiling. She wonders why she hasn’t noticed it before. Maybe it wasn’t there, or maybe, like most people, she never looked up above her head. She gets on her tiptoes, but can’t reach the edge of the box. It’s too high, even for her. Gabriella takes a jump, but only succeeds in pushing the box farther out of reach. This is silly, she thinks. I’m going to have roaches and spiders raining down on me any second now.
But her curiosity is piqued. She puts her foot on the ledge underneath the drawers and steps up, reaching for the cardboard box, dragging it toward her, and finding it, to her surprise, light. It falls, landing on the floor behind her.
“Damn it,” she curses quietly under her breath, and steps down, her hands black with dust. This silly closet is depressing me, she thinks, and kicks the box out of the black hole and into the bedroom.
It’s sealed. Gabriella runs her fingers over the tape, surprised. Nini never seals a thing, she thinks. She hesitates for a few seconds. The whole thing seems… private. But then again, nothing too private would be kept in an empty house for five years, would it?
Gabriella sits on the floor and peels the tape off and opens the cardboard flaps, slowly taking out the blue tissue paper lying on top.
Underneath, there are clothes, neatly folded and pressed. She takes out the shirt—a gauzy red shirt, clean, but ripped in shreds. Gabriella looks at it uncomprehendingly. Is it a costume?
She takes out the next item: jeans. They’re worn and also ripped, but wearable. Tiny jeans, she observes, for a tiny person.
She digs further. No shoes. But there’s a purse. An oversized red leather purse, with a long thick strap and a big brass buckle. The kind you hang across your body and can carry all your worldly possessions inside.
Gabriella frowns. So bizarre, she thinks, but gingerly undoes the buckle and opens the purse, reaches inside, and finds what she didn’t know she was looking for.
At first, she only sees the wallet. It’s red, too, soft, beautifully worn red leather that matches the bag and the shirt and, now she’s certain, the shoes that aren’t there. She opens it and searches slowly, methodically, for proof that this is hers, and finds it in, of all things, a California driver’s license.
Helena Gómez Richard
DOB: 01-10-1960
253 Costa Drive, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Height: 5-01
Sex: F
Eyes: Yellow
Hair: Brown
She reads all this deliberately, one time, two, three times, until the words become a blur, because she needs to catch her breath and still her heart, which she can hear in the stillness of the house, and stop the tears that are pushing against the eyelids she has now shut very, very tightly. When that doesn’t work, she digs her fingernails into her arms, hard, and lets that pain obliterate the tears.
She opens her eyes and looks at the picture. Her mother is smiling at the camera. Her smile is happy and sincere, and her hair is pulled back in a shocking pink bandanna.
She must have left it during one of her trips. Her wallet. Her things. She looks inside again. An American Express card, a Mastercard, a library card, an access card for the country club, a health insurance card, a baby picture. Gabriella’s baby picture.
Gabriella takes it out very, very slowly, because her fingers are trembling and she’s afraid she might drop everything. She holds the little picture carefully between her thumb and her index finger, looking at it curiously, unbelievingly.
Her mother carried her baby picture in her purse. In it, Gabriella’s eyes are huge and blueish in a serious face with a determined mouth. She now touches the locket that sits at the hollow of her throat. She knows she also carries the same photo in her locket. She didn’t know her mother owned a red wallet and that her photo traveled with her. She fingers the folds of the leather and finds not money, but a thick, folded piece of paper. She takes it out slowly. Duty free. A receipt from duty free.
She still doesn’t get it. Not even when she sees what the receipt is for: whiskey and perfume. Not even when she sees the date: December 21. Not even when she sees the city: Miami.
Her mother went to Miami. Bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey for her grandfather and a bottle of Shalimar for her grandmother at the duty-free shop.
And then.
And then, she got on a plane bound for Cali. A plane that crashed. And her mother died. She died. She really died, Gabriella tells herself, panicky, because she’s visited her grave.
In the bright sunlight, she grows suddenly cold and looks around nervously. Is her mother’s ghost here, after all? Has she done something wrong? This rotting house is empty, except for her and this box full of things that’s been left behind for her to find.
She feels nauseated, like she’s never felt before. She hears a gasping sound and realizes it’s coming from her. Like an old woman. Her heart is beating so quickly her breathing can’t keep up. Gabriella claws at her throat anxiously, pulling at her T-shirt, even though it isn’t tight, even though it’s nowhere near her neck.
It takes her several minutes, holding on to the now-empty box, before she can look inside the purse again.
The notebook is lying at the bottom. A red leather-bound notebook. She runs her hands over it softly, divining what’s inside. Like the wallet, it has the worn look of something cherished and much touched. Comfortable.
The binding is stiff, and the sheets of paper, when she opens the notebook, stick together, thick with humidity. She gently separates them, careful not to shred the paper, until she gets to the very first page.
The words jump out at her, cursive letters, written in bold, black ink.
Querida Gabriella:
You were born today, July 7, at 7:32 a.m. Weight: 8 pounds, 6 ounces. A big girl! A perfect baby girl, the doctor said.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, looking at the first line.
Querida Gabriella.
Querida Gabriella.
Querida Gabriella.
Gabriella. Gabriella. Her name. It’s for her.
This time she feels the cold reach deep inside her, like an ice pick that has gotten inside her chest and is literally piercing her heart. Her mother is touching her. She feels it. She is touching the last thing her mother touched.
Gabriella drops the book, as if the jacket were burning her instead of turning her fingers to ice, and sends it clattering across the room. She rocks back and forth on her knees and looks at it, lying half open, the letters simply scratches on a paper, blurry because her eyes are now full of tears, but this time she makes no effort to stop crying. She needs to get up to get it back and read.
She needs to move. But she can’t. Is it all for her? Letters to her, lying there, dead, unopened, intact, for all these years? In the emptiness of the house with its cracking floors and escalating vegetation it feels—absurdly, she tells herself, but she can’t help it—like she’s somehow set a curse in motion. Why did no one find it before?
Her cell phone has been ringing, but all she hears is the rushing in her ears, and she covers them tightly with the palms of her hands. Outside, the light changes, and when Edgar and her grandmother finally come to the house looking for her, the afternoon sun hits the kneeling figure in the middle of the room. The illumination is perfect for a natural light photograph.
That night, she sleeps with the notebook clutched tightly in her arms and the light on.
She hasn’t told her father about the notebook, and she’s refused to give it to Nini. She doesn’t really know why. Maybe because Nini never told her about her mother’s possessions, either.
“It was one of those things that wasn’t supposed to happen,” Nini tells her that evening, stroking Gabriella’s hair gently, insistently, as she lies on her bed, her back to her grandmother, looking at the wall.
“When I learned that her things were actually in one piece, well, I just didn’t know what to do,” Nini continues. “What is the point in having possessions without the person? And so, I put them inside the box. And everything else that had to do with that day, I put away. I locked it out of my memory—as much as I could, that is—and I put it as far away from me physically as I could. I made a conscientious decision to forget.
“I hadn’t even remembered where I’d put it until today. I just know that at the time, I wanted it as far away from my mind and my soul as humanly possible. I wanted to remember her alive and triumphant as she always was. Not dead. That was my daughter. Not the person with the dead face whose clothes I put away.
“After your grandfather died, I moved out of the house and into the new apartment. I moved here, I moved your mother’s room here, and your father started to send you down. That’s when I realized that I, too, had died that night. Because when you started to come down to visit, I started to live again. I started to feel again. You made me laugh again with your earnest stories and your beautiful face.
“And this box, with these clothes and this purse and all these things that I can see mean so much to you, I forgot. I forgot because I couldn’t bear to remember.
“Please forgive me, Gabriella,” she says, her voice sounding so profoundly, so hopelessly sad that Gabriella finally turns around and brings her hand up to her grandmother’s.
“Forgive me, Gabriellita. I did the best I could.”