Gabriella’s room is a replica of her mother’s room. Gabriella’s bed is her mother’s bed.
The bookshelves are her mother’s, and so are many of the books, although Gabriella has added her own over the years.
Even the closet harks back to her mother. Gabriella’s clothes fill the hangers and the shelves, but way on top, Nini has stored Helena’s stuff: dresses that stretch tightly across her back and T-shirts and scarves and old, tiny bikinis.
There is a picture of her mother on the nightstand. It was taken at her college graduation in Los Angeles. Her hair is very, very short, and she looks like a little pixie with that ridiculous cap on. It occurs to Gabriella that it was taken when she was her same age, twenty-one years old, all grown-up but still intrinsically linked to her parents.
Her father phoned today and yesterday and the day before, but she hasn’t had the energy to return his call and say… what? I know you were made a fool of? I know we both were? She has never been unavailable to her father before. Never. But the mere thought of speaking with him fills her with the most profound shame, for him, for herself.
Gabriella looks at Helena’s picture closely now, trying, as she often does, to see herself in her mother’s face.
But this time, she sees nothing. She sees nothing at all.
She picks up the picture and turns it over, facedown on the nightstand, and when her cell phone starts ringing, she answers it automatically and braces herself to speak with Marcus.
But it’s Angel, and she feels a pang of guilt at her relief.
“I’m sending someone to pick you up in an hour,” he says shortly.
“To do what?” she asks, uncomfortable with simply taking orders from a person she’s just started to date.
“It’s a surprise,” he says, his voice softening. “It’ll be worth it.”
“But,” she protests, confused. “How long will it be? What should I wear?”
“Wear whatever, it’s not formal,” he says. “It won’t take long. I’ll see you,” he says and hangs up before she can argue further.
Gabriella looks at the phone, now silent in her hand, and considers. She’s just agreed to go somewhere, with someone, for God knows how long. If Nini knew about this, she’d have a fit.
But Nini isn’t home.
Gabriella slowly picks up her mother’s picture again and stands in front of the mirror, holding the frame next to her own face. She leans forward, until both their faces are almost touching the glass, trying to read her mother’s eyes next to hers. Her mother, who always did what she pleased, and yet, those last years, was so sporadically happy.
Gabriella, instead, has been a good girl.
“And so, what?” she says out loud to her reflection. “What do you have to show for it?”
Gabriella sighs and tosses her mother’s picture on the bed, not looking at it this time. She runs her fingers through her hair and looks at herself dispassionately in the mirror, at the features she knows are arresting, at the eyes everybody says are her best trait, at the white skin that burns so easily, at her hands, her hands that she loves, which remind her of sculptures by Rodin. She remembers her mother’s words. She won’t look like this forever.
She looks at herself and sprays perfume on the insides of her wrists, on the crooks of her arms, behind her cheeks, and on her temples and grabs her bag and her cell phone and walks out of her room.
“Lucía, I’ll be back in a bit,” she calls from the front door, and before poor, anxious Lucía can ask, “But where will you go, niña Gabriella? What will I tell your grandmother?” she is gone.
She waits outside, by the entrance of the building, so no one has to call her and no one has to see or wonder who she’s going with when the black SUV slides to a stop beside her and the armed guard opens the door for her to get in. She sits alone in the back, the driver and a bodyguard in front. No one speaks. Chitchat, Gabriella has quickly learned, is just not the thing with Angel’s staff.
They drive north toward the opposite end of the city, where the structures begin to intersperse with empty lots, until they reach a hangar surrounded by a makeshift metal fence that opens slowly to let them through.
As she gets out of the car, Gabriella hears the strains of the music, the thump of the bass making the floor vibrate, even where she stands.
“Don Angel wants you to go inside,” says the bodyguard, motioning her toward a flimsy-looking side door that looks prefabricated, like this entire structure, which she now recognizes as one of the ballrooms that is built only for the holiday season dances. One of Angel’s shows, she suddenly realizes.
Gabriella pushes the door open and is greeted by a wall of sound and the ripples of accordions echoing throughout the vast room, where the space seems even more immense, with the chairs and tables that will later accommodate six or seven thousand people still stacked against the walls. There is no one here, except a handful of people milling at the front and the band on the stage, Jorge Celedón and Jimmy Zambrano.
“Oh my,” says Gabriella, bringing both her hands up to her face, and laughs out loud in sheer pleasure, her first, genuine, spontaneous peal of laughter in days.
She lets the music wash over her, such pretty, happy music, all for her. She’s so absorbed she doesn’t notice him until he’s already standing beside her.
“Do you like it?” he shouts eagerly in her ear. “They’re playing tonight, but I thought you’d enjoy them better during the sound check with no one around!”
“Oh, Angel, I love it,” she says in wonderment, and impulsively, turns around and holds his face between her hands and, with infinite tenderness, kisses him gently, lovingly, on the lips. For a moment he’s shocked into immobility, taken aback by the purity of the gesture, and then he brings his hands to cover hers as they cup his face and he smiles back. An open, unguarded smile of unadulterated joy. And for a moment, he is just a boy, and she is just a girl, and they are happy.