Gabriella walks around in a slightly tipsy daze. She’s heard of houses like this, but she’s never actually been to one. There’s so much marble that it overwhelms her. Vast marble hallways, marble foyers, and spiraling marble staircases, like the one she walked down to find the bathroom. She opens a massive door and finds yet another staircase, this one going farther down. Maybe, she thinks stupidly, it leads nowhere. Maybe they built it just for fun, and if you go down, you’ll just come up again in some other part of the house.
Maybe, maybe, she thinks, as she walks down, holding tightly to the balustrade because this marble staircase curves round and round, like a snail, and she feels like she could simply fly off at any second. Instead, she reaches the last curve and stops in surprise.
“Ooooooh,” she says out loud, looking around her at rows and rows and rows of books. A library.
A library with old-world cherrywood floors and Persian throw rugs that jar with the glinting marble stairs.
She almost giggles. These people actually read?
But someone does, she sees, because there’s a wooden ladder with little wheels, the kind bookstores keep to reach the top shelves. She walks around slowly and realizes there are books on one side, movies on the other. The giant screen, she guesses, is behind the closed doors of a massive wall unit. Automatically, she goes toward it, and stops at the coffee table. It’s piled with books.
She takes in in one glance that there are too many to have been put there for effect. And they’re of all sorts—paperbacks and hardcovers and magazines and coffee-table books.
She sees just one corner, sticking out from under the bottom of the pile, and recognizes it.
Gabriella kneels down, carefully picks up books and moves them to the floor, until she reaches her mother’s book.
She lifts it slowly, reverently, feeling the sleekness of the cover, the ridges and grooves of the emblazoned letters. She knows this book well. But she hasn’t seen it in someone else’s home in years.
Las Haciendas del Valle del Cauca. Pictures of the state’s historical farms and estates. “A labor of love,” Nini would always say, shaking her head, dismissing it. “If it wasn’t for that book, everything would have been different.”
But Nini still keeps it in her bedroom, inside her nightstand. Sometimes after her nightly prayer, she takes it out and leafs carefully through the pages her mother never got to feel. The photographs she never got to see in print.
Gabriella knows her mother left her for nearly two months for this book. She knows rationally that she can’t possibly remember a day that happened when she was barely three. But the story has been told to her so many times, she even knows the words by heart.
“Mi amor, I’m going to go away, just for six weeks. Six weeks is nothing, Gabriella. Even if I’m not here, I’m still with you. In your heart. In your mind. Like an angel.”
She had left her with her father in Los Angeles, and before her departure, she gave Gabriella the golden chain with the locket she still wears today. Sometimes, at night in bed, Gabriella closes her eyes and closes her hand over the little heart and is convinced she can feel the cool gold as it touches her neck for the very first time.
Her father told her it was a great six weeks. They went to the beach and to the Santa Monica Pier and to Malibu to watch the whales and the dolphins. Her father put her on a surfboard and filmed her as she splattered around in her mini–wet suit.
Her mother, he said, was doing important things in her country far away. She was taking photographs for a book, a wonderful book, a magical book, a book so special, the governor had commissioned it.
Gabriella now knows that there had been no money to be made from this book. That it was, as Nini said, a labor of love, important only for the prestige it generated in this one city, in this one state, in this one country.
When she was little, Gabriella would look at the book and try to divine these places her mother had captured with such care. It wasn’t only the facades, but also the bedrooms, a corner footstool, the hammocks hanging from support beams on long, long porches, the verdant green that clung to everything in this valley. Everything was so very removed from her Los Angeles reality. So, so—Colombian.
She wonders if this is what Thomas Wolfe meant when he said you could never go home again. Or maybe it was the other way around. You could never leave home. You would forever be in a midground limbo, neither here nor there.
She turns the pages quickly now and stops at a double spread marked by a small, yellow Post-it note. The house is vast and sits at the foot of a hill surrounded by mountains. A winding road leads to a red wooden portal. Her mother shot it from the mountains above, early in the morning, Gabriella guesses, because dewdrops and mist still cling to the rooftop.
“Wow, you must be really bored.”
The voice butts in through her drinks and her reverie, and she looks up guiltily.
It’s him again, the guy with the eyes. Involuntarily she feels her pulse quicken slightly, and she brings her hand to her temple, certain he can see a vein throbbing or something. She now notices that he’s wearing loose-fitting jeans and a black short-sleeved polo that looks worn and expensive. The look of someone who doesn’t care how he looks because he knows he always looks good.
“No, no. Not bored,” she says quickly. “Just… resting.”
He walks closer, leans down to glance over her shoulder, and pulls up a stool next to her.
“We bought that house,” he says matter-of-factly, pointing to the book with a glass that she smells has scotch on ice.
“Really?” she says, happily impressed.
“Yeah,” he says nonchalantly. “My dad told my mom to pick whichever one she liked from that book, and she picked that one. I liked…” He leans over and flips the pages for her. “This one,” he says, pointing to a smaller farm flanked by a decidedly modern pool.
“Well, tell your daddy to buy it for you,” she says, slightly put off. As a matter of principle, she never talks about wealth. It’s one of the few things her families on both continents see eye to eye on.
He laughs appreciatively, but not in the least bit mortified, she notes.
“Maybe I will,” he says, taking a long sip of his whiskey. “Or maybe I’ll buy it myself.”
“Why that one?” asks Gabriella, curious despite herself. It isn’t the biggest or grandest or the most anything, for that matter, house in the book.
“I went there once,” he said. “It’s really, really out of the way. Lost, almost. Not like these other places, which are just an excuse to be social with the neighbors. It’s a place where you go to get away. And the view is amazing. I’m just waiting for the owner to lower the price. He’s trying to gouge me just because he thinks I have cash.”
Gabriella can’t tell if he’s bragging about his money or simply stating the obvious. Either way, it bothers her.
“I don’t know. How many farms really does anyone need to ‘get away,’ ” she says thoughtfully, her customary reserve gone with her drinks. “Can’t you just lock yourself up in your room or something?”
She can read the surprise on his face, the vacillation between taking her comment as an insult or a joke.
“Anyway, look at your mom’s farm,” she says, flipping the pages back to the original photograph, slowly tracing on the glossy paper the path that leads from the portal to the actual house. “It’s so beautiful. God, look at those colors! It makes you want to lie down on that grass.”
Gabriella looks up and finds his eyes steady on her, and on his mouth is just the beginning of a smile; the kind of smile that comes with seeing something you like for the very first time.
She laughs suddenly. “I guess if you get up really close, it won’t be nearly as beautiful, right?” she asks ruefully. “Nothing is.”
“Actually, it’s magical up there,” he says slowly. “In the afternoons, the clouds come down, and they touch the house. It feels like you’re walking in the sky.” He shrugs. “Too bad no one uses that house,” he adds, looking down at the photograph again, at her hands on the page.
“You bite your nails,” he says suddenly, looking at her hands, but not touching them. “What’s eating you up to make you do that?”
Self-conscious, Gabriella snatches her hand away, mortified. Her thumb looks raw where she tugged skin earlier, even to her.
“This is my mother’s book,” she says abruptly, changing the subject.
He looks at her blankly.
“I mean,” she adds quickly, “my mother took the photographs. These are her pictures.”
“Really?” he says, and she sees his eyes glimmer with a genuine spark of interest for her, one that goes beyond her face or her body. “Wow,” he adds, lifting his eyebrows, but he says it like he means it.
He takes the book from her hands and flips the pages to the jacket’s back cover where her mother’s picture looks intently, seriously at them.
She isn’t beautiful, or pretty, even, in a traditional sense. But she is riveting in her contrasts—a delicate face made up of a dozen tiny sharp angles: pointed nose, pointed chin, angular cheekbones, slanted eyes that look brilliant, even in black and white—all overpowered by the hair.
“You don’t look like her,” he says, studying Gabriella closely and putting the book back on the table by his side. He calmly cups a hand beneath her chin as he compares her with the black-and-white picture, turning her face this way and that. She is too taken by surprise to protest and lets him bring her face close to his, so close she can smell the musky mix of cigarettes and whiskey on his breath. He has smooth skin and very long eyelashes, almost like a girl’s, and they’re black and sooty and make his eyes look even greener.
“You’re much prettier,” he adds slowly, giving her that one-sided smile she now sees is his very own, making her pulse speed up again and making her grow warm, so warm she’s sure he can feel it in his fingers.
“My hair is like hers,” she blurts out automatically, wondering almost immediately why she’s felt compelled to say this.
“So what?” he parries quietly, leaning even closer. “Eyes and mouth are what really matter. What does hair say about people anyway, except that they like to go to the beauty parlor, or they don’t.” He pauses for the briefest of moments then smiles wide. “You don’t,” he laughs.
“I… I really should get going,” she says, flustered, pulling back from his touch, but not getting up, either.
“Go where, this time?” he asks. “You can’t seem to find your way into the party.”
“Well, you can’t, either,” says Gabriella, peeved. Is he following her, or what? “And it is your party and your guests, you know.”
“I don’t need to be in the middle of my party to enjoy it,” he says, leaning toward her again, his elbows balanced loosely on his knees. “And you don’t look like a wild partyer to me, either.”
Gabriella looks at him inquisitively and against all logic feels a small pang of rejection.
“What, do I look like a dweeb who can’t hold her own at a party?” she asks.
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “Not a dweeb at all. I’d say, shy. Shy and aloof.”
“Shy and aloof,” she repeats, feeling herself being drawn in again. “Like you?”
He considers this for a moment, taking a sip of his drink. He finally replies, “Aloof, yes, shy—no. It’s just that some people don’t interest me and some people do.” He looks straight in her eyes.
She knows, somewhere in the back of her mind, that if she were to repeat this conversation to anyone, they would laugh at the pickup line. But she is all alone here—Juan Carlos so far removed from her, he might as well be in Los Angeles with the rest of her life—and his eyes are so clear, almost like a piece of glass. She can actually see her reflection looking back at her.
She believes him.
“Let’s go back together,” he proposes good-naturedly, still smiling. “Oscar D’León is going to start playing any minute. You do dance, don’t you?”
He gets up and holds out his hand to her, and she sees that he has a tiny tattoo of a cherubic angel inscribed on the inside of his wrist.
Gabriella wants to run her thumb across that angel. She wants to take that hand, and feel it again, cool and dry against her skin.
“Well, why?” she says, defiantly coy. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Well, this is my house, and as you pointed out, my party, so I should be asking you who you are, don’t you think?”
This time, she really blushes. Laughs to cover up her embarrassment, the flurry of adrenaline that’s cutting her breath short and making her heart race, almost as if she were about to step onstage before a concert. “I’m Gabriella. Gabriella Richard.”
“I’m Angel. Angel Silva.”
He turns up the palm of his still extended hand.
“Now, do you want to go up? I’ll make sure you don’t get lost again.”
“Sure,” she says with a shrug, attempting to look as casual as he sounds. She thinks she probably doesn’t sound casual at all as she puts her hand in his, letting him take her away from the book and the table and up the stairs and to the roof and into the party she had watched but hadn’t wanted to join until now.