Candela was still skipping out on her job in Stockholm. When I asked her about it, she gave me even vaguer explanations than before. This led me to the hypothesis that she had called to take more days off, using up all her vacation days, trying not to leave so many dumpster fires behind her when she finally went home. She had a lot more fires to put out than my imminent descent into hell. Patricia was losing her mind, and not because she missed her phone, which I sent over with a messenger from the business on Sunday morning.
On Monday, at the crack of dawn, she showed up at my apartment, perfectly dressed and glam, holding a box from the bakery, which she wasn’t even going to smell (because she didn’t eat sugar, which is the new cocaine), to tell us with a smile that she had gone on a fishing expedition in her husband’s wallet, calendar, laptop, and car, and she had proof of his infidelity.
She laid it out on the living room table, setting aside the vase of fresh flowers someone refilled every Monday.
We were still in bed when she arrived, but she ordered the “staff” to wake us up. I feel the need to clarify that my house was not a hive of butlers, housekeepers, interns, and cleaners, but every day Isabel, a very affable middle-aged lady, took care of chores and some cooking. It was 7:20 in the morning when Isabel came into my room.
“Your sister is here,” she whispered, as she flipped the switch that opened the curtains. “She insists you get up. She says you have to make a plan.”
I looked at the ceiling and fantasized, happily, about the chandelier falling on me. I didn’t want a dramatic death, just a few weeks in the hospital.
“I’ll be right there.”
She let me take a shower first at least. And while I was putting on pants and a shirt from the corner of the wardrobe labeled “around the house” (first and second drawer right next to the en suite bathroom), a sentence got stuck in my head like an earworm. It was like when you wake up humming a few verses of a song that you don’t remember listening to recently, but it plays on a loop in your head all day: You have to get out of here.
“Okay, what’s going on?”
Patricia was sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen with her legs crossed and a cup of coffee in hand. Isabel was making breakfast, but I went over and kindly asked her to leave it for now.
“I’ll make myself a coffee.”
“Nothing else? A bowl of fruit?”
“A ten-diazepam omelet, please,” I grumbled. She smiled. She knew Patricia and the face she put on when she wanted everyone to think everything was fine. “Please call Sonia and ask her to come over after lunch, whatever time works best for her.”
I needed my right hand here. I needed to keep myself busy, and she might be able to bring me some reports so I could stay up-to-date on how things were going at work.
Patricia pointed at the table, at the statue of Christopher Columbus, with an almost blank look in her eyes. There was the proof of the “crime”…a handful of receipts.
“What is all this? And why didn’t you wake Candela up?”
“Because she told me to go to hell in seven languages and one wasn’t even verbal, that’s why. What you have in front of you is—”
“An art exhibition that exposes how our lives are controlled by consumerism?”
“No. They’re receipts.”
“For what? Diamonds and motels?”
“Restaurants and parking lots.”
“Oh my god.”
I turned on the coffee maker and stood there, glued to it, like it was my best friend. Every drop of coffee dripping into the cup gave me the will to live.
Patricia had also brought a paper copy of her husband’s calendar. She had copied appointments and reminders from his Google Calendar while Alberto was taking a shower, and now, on top of cross-referencing the receipts with the calendar, we also had to learn how to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“For the love of Manolito,” I said, with one of the small but filling croissants in hand, “do you even know how to write?”
“You try copying a month of appointments while your husband is in the shower. He’s bald! He doesn’t need to wash his hair or put on mascara, Margot. Do you have any idea how fast he can be?”
Candela deigned to show up when the will to live the coffee had gifted me was already draining away, and as proof of the whims of genes and how different sisters can be from each other, she seemed pretty hyped about all of this.
“OMG! This is like playing Clue!”
“Yeah, except with my husband. If he’s cheating on me, I swear I’m getting new tits.”
Logic and my family have had a complicated relationship for years; this was nothing new.
“Do you think I ran away from my wedding because of some recessive gene that’s active in you guys?” I suddenly blurted out.
“No. It was because of your lack of emotional awareness, but nothing that wouldn’t go away with a few vacations in one of your hotels.”
“Our hotels,” I corrected.
“Your hotels. I’ll remind you that I sold my stock and donated the money. The only thing that belongs to me from the business is the last name,” Candela said proudly, seconds before immersing herself in the facts we had gleaned from the chaotic stack of papers.
I looked at Patricia who, wearing the coolest and most flattering plastic glasses, smiled at me before she said, “But they are a little bit mine.”
It didn’t take long to figure out there was nothing noteworthy. Receipts for lunches with clients that corresponded to the millisecond with what Alberto had scheduled in his calendar. When they started declaring that he could be using code names to hide his affairs, I decided to leave. And I climbed back into bed. Face down. With any luck, I’d suffocate.
Sonia, as always, warned of her arrival far enough in advance that I could get dressed and spruce myself up.
I led her into my home office (not nearly as warm as my office at work) with a Diet Coke (she hates Coke Zero) and a burning desire to ask her to kill me.
“Hey, boss.” She smiled tenderly. “You look good.”
“I better. I’m wearing seven layers of Double Wear by Estée Lauder.”
“Then you’re going to have to take it off with gasoline.”
“Yeah, like the Kardashians.”
We gave each other a hug just with a look. Some people you only need to look at to feel their arms around you.
“I thought you wouldn’t want to see me.” She sat down across from me and whipped out her ever-present iPad, where she had the entire universe organized. Damn she’s good, the bitch. “I thought you were going to rest and all that.”
“My sisters won’t let me. They’re playing IRL Clue.”
Sonia raised an eyebrow. “Did they kill someone?”
“Let’s drop it. The less you know, the better,” I joked. “Give me an update?”
She wrinkled her nose.
“What?” I asked, alarmed.
“I don’t want you to think I haven’t been doing my job.”
“I never think you haven’t done your job because you do yours, your colleagues’, and sometimes even mine. What’s going on?”
“I don’t want to get into something that’s not my place,” she said, avoiding eye contact.
“I called you.”
“Let’s see…” She sighed and ruffled her hair a little, kind of scratching her scalp in the slightly annoying way she always did when she was stressed. “I brought a bunch of updated material, but I don’t think I should give it to you.”
“And why not?”
She raised her right hand. “I solemnly swear that what I’m about to say is not a judgment or even a criticism.”
“Spit it out, you troublemaker.”
She bit her lip. “The board is right: you need a vacation.”
“Like everyone in Spain right now.”
“I don’t know if everyone else in Spain has an eye twitch, drinks seven Coke Zeros a day, and ends up cursing and trembling like a crumpled leaf.”
“Are you telling me I need a psychiatrist?”
“No. You need to rest. And to talk to someone.”
I put my forehead on the desk. “You’re telling me to get an urgent appointment with my psychiatrist, right?”
“No. Margarita—”
“Call me Margot, please.”
“Margot…I cleared your calendar until the end of August; the business owes you seventy-seven vacation days.” Her faltering hand crept closer to mine until it finally landed on top of it. “You’ve been under too much pressure, and you’re going to end up getting sick or—”
“Going crazy.”
“I don’t know, but…I really think you need to get out of here. Stop seeing all of us and…find yourself.”
“Well, when I find myself, let’s see what I tell myself.”
Sonia smiled.
“I’m sorry to ask, but…have you spoken to Filippo?”
My breath caught. “We texted, but…it’s not looking good.”
Her fingers squeezed mine.
“I’m going to be really honest, okay? You pay me to be, and you pay me well, so I’m going there: rumor has it that the rest of the board is pressuring your godfather. They say the fact that you fled the day of your wedding indicates that your mental state is not suited for a position with so much responsibility and that you’re buckling under the pressure. Someone mentioned that your mother has made comments about your delicate state.”
“She’s a cat who drinks too much; nobody will listen to her.”
“But it bodes very well for them to believe her. They want it to be true. You know better than anyone that they don’t—”
“They don’t want me there, got it. Any other information about how disastrous my future is looking?”
“It’s not disastrous. You just have to do what they want you to do. It’s simple: make the most of the opportunity and leave for you, not for them. Leave for all the things you don’t even know you want because you never have time to do them. Leave for the part of you that’s sad and for the part that’s going to be happy. Leave for me too because I can’t. Leave, Margot. Leave and lounge around on some beach, for the love of God. You’re the heiress of a hotel empire, and you’re using a shade of foundation from Siberia. You don’t need to constantly prove you deserve it, okay?”
Sonia tugged on my fingers and raised her eyebrows.
“You’re fucking Ana Margarita Ortega Ortiz de Zarate. Get out of here. And don’t come back until you’ve forgotten your computer password.”
We stared at each other, and a tiny smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.
“Nobody…listen to me carefully because I’ll never talk to you this way again…nobody runs out on their wedding when they’re happy. And you deserve to be happy. Like me. Like your sisters. Like the boy who brings us our lunch orders. Leave and figure out what’s missing.”