Gabriella

At three in the morning, it’s quiet in the hallways of the Imbanaco Medical Center, and even her flat heels click and clack loudly against the bare, antiseptic floor.

She spent the rest of the evening and the next day being questioned by detectives, returning home to a quiet Nini who resignedly watches her pack, getting ready to leave before her vacation is over. All her best intentions have been for naught, she thinks, not saying a word.

Now she has two policemen at her side, as much for her as for him, and when she gets off the elevator, soldiers flank each of the doors. At the end of the hall, where the staircase is, she sees two more.

They are quiet in deference to the other patients on this floor. But they’re here for Angel. His face has been plastered all over the news, Luis Silva’s only son, miraculously surviving a murder attempt that left three of his bodyguards, two gunmen, and two innocent diners from adjacent tables dead. He took four shots that in one of those quirky twists of fate, good luck, and anatomy missed any vital organs, save for the shot that hit his left lung, making it collapse, making him almost choke on his own blood.

The cops walk her to his door and gesture for her to go inside.

She doesn’t know what she expected. She’s never seen anybody in intensive care before, and her vision is that of someone simply lying on a bed.

He’s not just doing that. He’s hooked up to a ventilator, a plastic mask covering his mouth and nose, and every breath he takes is exhaled with a helpless, high hissing sound. An IV drips slowly into his arm, and a feeding tube goes down his throat.

He doesn’t look strong or imperious or sexy like this, but thin, so thin under the stiff white sheets. Even his beautiful bronze face is ashen against the white pillow.

Damaged. He is so damaged.

Gabriella wraps her arms around herself, raking her nails hard, up and down her arms, to keep herself from crying.

“Buenas noches.”

The voice makes her jump. She hadn’t seen Chelita sitting in a corner in the dark room. Her proud Indian features look old now, the face tired, drawn down by the bags that weigh heavily under her bloodshot eyes.

She looks at Gabriella appraisingly, then slowly gets to her feet, and now, Gabriella sees the shotgun that’s been lying on her lap this whole time.

“You’re leaving,” she says, and it isn’t a question but a statement, like Angel’s statements used to be.

“I have to, Chelita,” she says, and despite herself, she hears the defensiveness in her voice. “My father and my grandmother say I have to go. For my safety.”

Chelita looks at a loss. And angry.

“He’s a good boy. A good boy,” she repeats fiercely. “Mi muchacho. He didn’t deserve this.” She gestures toward the bed, the tubes. “And he doesn’t deserve to have you walking out on him. You know that. Now when he needs you.”

She remembers Chelita’s story. How her husband was murdered. Her son. She imagines her angry impotence and her refusal to back down. But Gabriella isn’t Chelita, she thinks. She has other things in the world. She has a life, and she isn’t willing to put it at risk, not here, not now, not even for him.

Gabriella steps back before the harshness of Chelita’s voice. She’s helpless to make things right for him.

“Chelita.” She shakes her head. Now she understands what people mean when they talk about being heart-broken. She feels like her heart is truly going to break, it hurts so much. “I can’t. I can’t. I don’t know how to make things better for him. I love him. But this…” She gestures to the bed, but it’s not the bed. It’s everything; it will crush her. “I can’t,” she repeats quietly. “I thought I could, but I can’t.”

She comes close to him and tentatively reaches out and touches his hair, the face whose bones she’s memorized, the smooth cheeks that now have a tiny layer of stubbly beard. She lightly grazes it with her fingers, back and forth, trying to bring back his smell, but catching only the whiff of antiseptics.

One afternoon, one of those many afternoons that they spent in his bed, she woke up to find him lying on his side beside her, watching her intently.

“What are you doing?” she had asked sleepily.

“Memorizing your face,” he replied.

Then he leaned over and cupped her temples lightly between his palms, holding them there for a few seconds, then running his palms firmly down her neck, her shoulders, her arms, her hands, traversing her body one inch at a time until he reached her feet.

“And now, what are you doing?” she had asked, amused.

“Now, I’m memorizing the way you feel, so I can remember, even if you’re not beside me.”

She had laughed, but tonight, she remembers that day, and now, she understands what he meant. The bars are up on the sides of his bed, but she reaches out between them, gently touching his head, careful not to move the mask, and slowly goes down the length of him, his broad shoulders, his tattooed wrist, the flat stomach, his legs, strong and warm underneath the sheets. She lets her hand glide all the way down to his feet, trying to make her fingers memorize his long, elegant shapes and his smooth texture.

“And now,” she tells his expressionless face very quietly so Chelita can’t hear her, “I’m memorizing the way you feel, so I can remember, even when I’m gone.”

Angel breathes evenly, and in the silence, she imagines his eyelids flicker, but then the movement is gone as quickly as it came and she’s left with the shuttered face again.

She wants to shake him, to make him look up, but after minutes of looking intently at him, all she can muster are words that, even to her, sound pathetic.

“Chelita, please tell him I had to go, tell him I didn’t have a choice?”

“You always have a choice, miss,” Chelita replies, her voice as leaden as her footsteps as she takes her seat again. “You always have a choice,” she says again. “That’s the problem.”

Gabriella straightens uncertainly. If she doesn’t leave soon, she’ll miss her flight.

Sensing her impatience, Chelita looks up at her, and in her black eyes, Gabriella sees she’s already moved on.

“I’ll give him your message,” she says simply. “I wish you luck,” she adds after a pause.

Gabriella nods.

“Lo mismo, Chelita.”

Gabriella stands hesitantly, wishes she had something of more weight to say, because her paltry fifteen minutes with him seem anticlimactic and stale, so different from these past few weeks, the most wonderful weeks of her life, weeks that beg for a big finale, a big musical climax, and not this awkward silence.

But there is nothing more to say to someone that can’t say anything in return, and finally she backs up to the door, unable to let go of his face, willing him to open his eyes, to please open his eyes, to look at her, to say something that will make her stay, that will make up for the last forty-eight hours. But only his chest moves, slowly up, slowly down, and the last thing she hears is the shaky hiss of the breathing machine, following her down the hall, all the way to the elevator doors.

Querida Mami:

Ha pasado un año desde que no voy a Cali. One year since I don’t see the mountains or the valley or Juan Carlos or my room with your presence inside it.

I’ve hardly even spoken any Spanish since I’ve been back, either.

Los Angeles is so strange, a city full of Latinos, and yet no one speaks Spanish. When I open my mouth, they assume I’m a gringa trying to act Latin and they answer me in English. Now my tongue seems to have turned to dust. I stumble over the words.

I called Nini yesterday and told her this. I told her I needed to go back, because I was losing myself.

She told me I had to ask Daddy. She told me even if I had my own money, I still had to ask Daddy.

And she told me to ask you. She told me to ask you, because she won’t take me back until I forgive you and move on. She said she has had too much pain in her lifetime to carry the burden of someone consumed by anger. And then she started to cry. My poor Nini. She acted against everything she believed in, for me. For nothing. Just like she did with you. But I suppose that’s what mothers do, don’t they? When it comes to their children they will do anything… Some mothers, anyway.

Oh, Mami, I promise you, I’m not angry anymore. Okay, sometimes I am, a little bit. Do you blame me? On top of everything else, you died on me! And for what? If you could see him now. Oh, if you could see him now. You would laugh at yourself. You would know how silly, how finally insignificant it would all become.

Do you know not a single day has gone by that I don’t think about your diary? I have dissected and analyzed and constructed and deconstructed every word that you wrote, trying to find clues in every cadence, some unwritten page to fill the things you left unsaid.

I never told Daddy about what I found. How could I? We only have each other, after all, and what would I gain with that? Nini was right. Some things are just better left unsaid.

Anyway, Mami, the truth is overrated, as you well know.

I sometimes wonder, if you came home to us, and you saw us, and maybe, maybe, decided that everything we were outweighed what you had just found. Maybe you thought that you could make this episode a chapter in the book of your life instead of the rest of your life.

In my book, you find something in us that you didn’t find in him. In my book, you decide that doing what’s right is actually what you wanted all along.

But you still had to go back, didn’t you, to say good-bye.

You probably thought you would never see him again otherwise, and the thought was too terrible to bear; to have found him, and then spend a lifetime praying for a coincidental meeting.

In my book, you went back, for just one more day.

And I want to think that it wouldn’t have mattered. That you would have come back to us, like you promised, like you planned, regardless of what you found and what you saw and what you might have thought you needed.

I understand now, because that’s what I would have done, too.

I wouldn’t have left him behind, regardless of the consequences. I would have stayed, or at the very least, I would have returned to him, for one last good-bye.

But I didn’t. I let others decide for me.

And now, Mami. I can’t. I can’t even find him, and I know he could find me.

The first months, I called every day. Is that what you did, too?

You must have. And I’m certain you spoke, for hours and hours, about silly things, like the weather and the latest movie you saw and where you went out to dinner.

But I had nothing to talk about with him, because he never took my calls. Never. It was as if he had died, even though I knew he hadn’t.

He wasn’t meant to die that day. That’s what the papers wrote after the shooting. Four bullets, none of them fatal. Minute circumstances helped him live—the errant shots, Julio’s sudden appearance, and me.

I put him in harm’s way in the first place, by taking him there, but then, it turns out, I saved his life by stemming the loss of blood. He must know that, he must know because he knows everything. And yet he still feels betrayed. And I would, too.

I’ve tried to romanticize it, see? I’ve rationalized that he doesn’t want any contact from me because he wants to spare me. But I’m only fooling myself. I abandoned him, like his mother did. What greater betrayal is there? How ironic, after he taught me to be objective, dispassionate even, about you, about everything. He taught me how to be pragmatic. But for him, everything is black and white.

For the longest time, I left messages on the answering machine, and then I stopped. I felt like I was leaving behind a little piece of my soul, every time I spoke into that blank machine with no face. God knows who was listening to my voice, stealing my thoughts.

The last time Chelita answered, and she told me he had gone back to France for some time, because he was never able to get that U.S. visa to come here. He’ll never stop being his father’s son, after all. Chelita could have left the conversation at that, but she also told me he sold the piano. And that’s when I really knew that there was no going back. That he had erased me completely.

I’ve kept all the letters that have come back unopened.

Now, I have a whole box of mail that I wrote, but I can’t bring myself to read. I actually carry them with me, in a little leather pouch, so they don’t get wet or damaged. Like you did with your diary.

Except your pages were meant to be ripped out and burned, whereas my letters are still looking for their reader.

I cling to the notion that one day I’ll meet him again, and I’ll have them—everything I poured onto paper—ready to hand over to him, to try to make things right.

That’s why I now know that you had to go back. That you had to see him. Touch him. Talk to him. You had to look into his eyes and know that your choice was right and fair. Because you couldn’t bear the thought of simply waiting for a random meeting, looking around airport terminals and hotel lobbies and at traffic lights, like I do. Thinking you might, just for a second, for the very last time, catch even a passing glance. Wondering, always wondering, like I do, what if?

What if.

I’m going back, Mami. I’m going to seal this letter to you, and take it to the cemetery, to where you lie on top of my grandfather, and even if he hears everything, I’m going to read it to you. And I won’t care what they say, and neither will you.

And then, I’m going to burn it, Mami. I’m going to burn it with all those other pages you wrote, and I will start writing my own story. And in time, this will only be one more chapter in that book.

Hasta mañana, Mami.

Te quiero,

Gabriella