“Such rosy, chubby cheeks!” Francesca DeLuca sat on the edge of the bed and pinched her granddaughter’s face.
Although she was twenty-two, Luisa Michaela DeLuca scrunched up her nose like a little girl and raised her hand as if to ward off the devil. “Gran, you promised to stop that when I graduated.”
Francesca laughed. “So I did. I apologize, preciosa. I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not.”
“You’re right.” Her grandmother smiled in that hapless way people did when they admitted to guile. It didn’t matter whether they were Italian, French, Jewish, or Latino, Luisa thought. Every culture shared the same “je ne sais quoi.”
She stretched and threw the covers off the bed. She’d been staying with her grandmother in Barrington while her mother attended a medical conference in Cleveland. Technically Luisa was an adult, but her mother still insisted she stay with her grandmother when she was out of town. Overprotective was not the word for Carla Garcia. Strangulation was more like it.
Still, Luisa didn’t mind. Gran treated her like a princess. For five years when she was little and her mother was in medical school, they’d lived here, and her grandmother had turned one of the guest rooms into a pink and white castle for Luisa. It was a wonder Luisa wasn’t spoiled rotten, her mother would sniff.
“So, what are your plans today, Luisa Michaela?”
Gran was the only one who called her by both her names. Luisa smiled. Her grandmother was somewhere in her seventies—she’d never confess her exact age—but she barely looked fifty. Trim and athletic, thanks to the personal trainer who came every morning, Gran was impeccably dressed, thanks to the personal assistant who came every afternoon. Her hair was also perfectly coiffed—with nary a strand of gray—thanks to the hairdresser who came three times a week. In that respect, Gran was the opposite of her mother, who couldn’t be bothered with make-up or expensive clothes and belittled the thought of someone coming to the house to help move her body through space.
Now Luisa threw her arm over her head. “I’m meeting with friends to go over a flyer for the demonstration next month.”
“You’re still—involved—in those activities?” Gran pursed her lips.
Luisa propped herself up in bed. “Of course I am. You should be too. We’re all on the same side.”
“What side is that?”
“The side that wants to stop poisoning the planet and purge the toxins we’ve spread in, around, and on top of it. We’ve got to stop reckless corporations from destroying what’s left of our air and water and land. They know they’re doing it, too. And then they try to whitewash it with the golden fleece of jobs and American self-sufficiency,” Luisa said. “Everybody knows all they’re after are profits.”
“Ahh, the idealism of youth,” Gran said.
“You were young once.”
“Thankfully, I grew out of it.”
Luisa expected Gran to smile when she said it, but she didn’t. Luisa let it go. “And then I have a meeting with my advisor to go over my summer plans.” She was studying for a Master’s Degree at Northwestern’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
“I told you I could help.”
Luisa pretended she hadn’t heard. “And Mom’s coming home later, so I’ll go home afterwards.”
Gran cleared her throat. “That means you have nothing planned for this morning, correct?”
Luisa cocked her head. “Why?”
“Oh, nothing.” Gran’s tone was offhand, and she hunched her shoulders in another shrug.
Luisa tried to gauge her grandmother’s mood. Bland. Casual. But there was a catch in her eyes. Gran always had an agenda. “Gran…”
“All right,” Gran said. “You know I can’t lie. At least to you.” She paused. “Do you remember our discussion last night?”
Luisa’s pulse sped up. “About my father?”
Gran nodded. “I have work to do this morning, but then I want to show you something.” She hesitated. “The only problem is… it’s a secret. Between you and me. Okay?”
Luisa thought about it. Her mother and grandmother didn’t get along well. Her mother said it was because grandparents and grandchildren were natural allies against the parent. But Carla, Luisa’s mother, was blunt, honest, and prickly; she would admit to it occasionally. And her grandmother, despite her claims otherwise, was just this side of cunning. Luisa tried to keep her balance between the two, but it wasn’t easy. The one thing both women had in common was their stinginess with information about her father. But now, apparently, Gran was ready to open up. Luisa’s curiosity won out. Like Gran knew it would, Luisa thought.
“So what’s the secret? Does it have to do with my father?”
Gran nodded. “Something that belonged to him.”
Her father, Michael, had died before she was born, but she’d been told the stories. How Gran met her grandfather Luis in Havana, but had been snatched away from him by her father. How she’d been forced to marry Carmine because she was pregnant. How, thirty years later, their child, her father, was sent to Cuba. How he met her mother. How he’d been shot when they tried to escape.
“What is it?”
Gran’s expression turned conspiratorial. “It’s in my safe deposit box. Down at the bank.”
Luisa wondered what it could be. Jewelry? Stock certificates? A souvenir from his time in Iraq?
Her grandmother leaned over, stretched out her hand, and smoothed out the lines on Luisa’s forehead. “You go ahead and get dressed, Princess. There’s coffee in the kitchen. Armando will drive, but we’ll take three cars to the bank. Then you can go to your appointments.”
Luisa showered in her bathroom, which, like the bedroom, was pink and white. Over the years she’d come to agree with her mother. It was too much: the opulence, the luxury, the pink—it was suffocating. After toweling off, she threw on jeans, a thick sweater and work boots. It was early April in Chicago, but the temperature was only a few degrees warmer than winter. Spring in Chicago was brutal. And then it was summer.
She attempted to wrestle her hair into place. A rich brown, it was thick, long and curly, and rarely did what she wanted. Her bad hair genes came from both sides of the family: her mother’s hair was wavy in all the wrong places, and her grandmother’s tended to kink into tight curls. Although people told her she was attractive, Luisa considered herself average. Petite. Sturdy. Widely spaced hazel eyes. A patrician nose. OK features, except for the chubby cheeks her grandmother never let her forget.
An hour later, accompanied by their bodyguards, Gran and Luisa were greeted by Gran’s bank manager in Barrington, who insisted on personally ushering them down to the safe deposit vault. Gran went through the rituals of signing the cards and producing a key, which the manager matched with another. He opened a small metal door cut into a wall of similar doors, lifted out a box, and took it to an area curtained off from the rest of the room. Gran nodded at the bodyguards and the bank manager, and told them all to wait outside.
Once they were out of sight, Gran slid the box open. Inside were three small white boxes, several business envelopes, and several large manila envelopes. Gran lifted one of the manila envelopes out of the box, opened the clasp, and withdrew a sheet of paper. She handed it to Luisa.
The paper was eight by eleven inches. Thick. Off-white originally, it was yellowed now. On it was a sketch of three squiggly vertical lines about an inch apart. In the middle was a straight line that angled right. A jagged horizontal line bisected all the lines near the top of the page. Near two of the squiggly lines were three dots. One was below the horizontal line. A second was below and to the left of the first. The third dot was about three inches farther down the page. At the bottom of the page the letter “C” was written twice. The “C’s” were followed by the letter “L” which was circled. On the lower left was another sketch: a circle of dots with something in the center.
Luisa couldn’t make any sense of it. “What is this?”
Gran didn’t answer for a moment. Then she looked up, her eyes bright. If Luisa didn’t know Gran was one of the toughest women alive, she could have sworn those eyes were wet. Then Gran blinked, and her expression reverted to normal.
“Your grandfather could have been an artist,” she said softly. “But he had—other interests.”
“Granpa Luis drew this?”
“He gave it to your father when they were in Cuba.” Frankie didn’t add that Luisa’s mother was sure it was the reason her father died. Frankie kept that to herself.
“It’s a map,” Gran continued.
Luisa held it up. The squiggly lines, the dots, the letters were unreadable. “Of what? Where?”
“We don’t know.”
Luisa gazed at Gran. “Really? Ma doesn’t know?”
Gran shook her head.
“You don’t, either?”
Gran arched her eyebrows. “By the way, if your mother finds out I showed this to you, she’ll be furious.”
Although Gran had a propensity for the dramatic, Luisa’s stomach knotted. Her entire life she’d been aware of secrets held, stories untold. Gran and her mother told her only what they wanted her to know. Memories that had been approved and sanitized. Why couldn’t they be like other families, sharing their histories, warts and all?
“So why did you? Show this to me, that is?”
Gran shot her a sidelong glance. There was something she wasn’t telling Luisa. “Because I think you have an adventurous spirit. Like me.”
Luisa was about to say she knew Gran wasn’t telling her everything when Gran smiled.
“You’re always asking about your father. This sketch was important to him. Your grandfather, too. Over the years I have kept wondering why. I’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”
Her smile was too broad, Luisa thought. “You want me to find out what this is all about and report back, don’t you? That’s why you showed it to me.”
“Aren’t you curious? It could be a quest.” Gran paused. “Of course, if you don’t want to…” She let her voice trail off.
Luisa knew her grandmother. “Of course, I’m curious, but why now?”
“I was thinking with your engineering background, you probably have access to better resources than me.”
“Are you sure you want me to look into this? What if we find out something we don’t want to know?”
“Querida, whatever this represents is over twenty years old. Who would care after all this time?” She paused. “Still, you probably shouldn’t say anything to your mother.” She paused again. “So, what do you say?”
Luisa studied the map again. Then she looked up at Gran. “Why don’t you ask the bank to make a couple of copies?”
“Good idea.” Her grandmother beamed. “I knew you were the right person for this.”