Even so early, there was a backup in the shipping office. Standing in line and then waiting at the counter for her mother’s funeral urn to be properly packaged and labeled, Graciella recalled the life journey that had brought her from being a hungry waif begging on the streets to where she was now.
• • •
A little more than ten years earlier, and two days shy of the commencement service where Graciella was scheduled to be awarded her MBA from the Wharton School, she’d been contacted by Bill Varner, the trust officer currently handling her banking arrangements on her father’s behalf. Since no similar meetings had occurred in the past, Graciella was somewhat concerned.
“What’s this all about?” she had asked her caller. “Did I overshoot my allowance for the month or bounce a check?”
“Oh, no,” the banker said quickly. “It’s nothing like that. Someone is interested in making you a job offer. Since he’s currently unable to travel to the US, he’s asked me to set up a videoconferencing arrangement. We have a specially equipped room that we use for just those kinds of long-distance meetings. I can assure you that you and he will be the only people in attendance.”
“He was hoping you could do it now,” Mr. Varner said. “This happens to be a convenient time for him, and he’s standing by.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said.
As the school year had drawn to a close, Graciella had been sending out résumés and going for interviews, but so far nothing seemed promising. Because of her dual citizenship, she’d toyed with the idea of returning to Panama, but so far none of the job offers she’d seen from there had measured up. Yes, her mother still lived in Panama City, but that was hardly an advantage. With Christina’s mental and physical health both permanently impaired, mother and daughter had never been able to reconnect, and Graciella had only the faintest memories of the beautiful woman who had once been her mother. That person had ceased to exist for her that long ago night when Graciella was six years old, a night when Christina went off to work and didn’t come home.
• • •
At the time of Christina’s disappearance, the two of them had been eking out a meager existence while living in a shanty in one of Panama City’s soon-to-be-demolished barrios. By now Graciella understood—as her six-year-old self had not—that when her mother had gone off to work nights for a so-called modeling agency, she had, in actuality, been nothing more or less than a prostitute working the streets. In the evenings, Christina would put food on the table for her daughter to eat while she fixed her hair and put on makeup. Once Christina was dressed for work, she’d tuck her daughter into bed, kiss her good night, and tell her to sleep tight—that she’d see her in the morning.
Of course, left unsupervised, Graciella had hardly ever stayed in bed. When she got older, as soon as her mother left the house, she’d slip out, too, blending invisibly into the bustling nighttime streets of Panama City. Christina was proud of her American heritage and wanted her daughter to be bilingual. In public the two of them spoke Spanish; at home they spoke English—American English, rather than the British English that was taught in local schools.
The hovel where they lived started out deep in the slums, but as one neighborhood after another was torn down and gentrified into upscale high-rises, the distance between rich and poor decreased. Eventually only a matter of a few blocks separated their shoddy dwelling from the high-priced restaurants and nightclubs where well-to-do tourists came and went.
On Graciella’s nightly prowls, she’d often made her way to one or the other of those ritzy neighborhoods, where she would attach herself to some unsuspecting group of English-speaking tourists. Always armed with a sob story, Graciella would spin heart-wrenching tales about how she’d gotten separated from her mom and needed help getting back to her hotel. Not only was she bilingual, she was also a very capable liar who hardly ever walked away empty-handed. The money Graciella earned on these nightly excursions was hers alone. It was money Christina never knew her daughter had, and it was a good thing she had it, too, because eventually there came that awful morning when the sun came up and Christina hadn’t come home.
Graciella stayed in the house all day long that day, waiting anxiously for her mother’s return. She hadn’t dared go outside for fear one of the neighbors might let on to someone that she had been left alone. That first night when there was no food on the table and nothing to eat, she had crept out of the house and bought her own.
Had they owned a TV set at the time, Graciella might have seen the news reports about an unidentified woman who had been attacked on the street, raped, savagely beaten, and left to die. Her alleged attackers were believed to be a group of six drunken airmen stationed at Howard Air Force Base. The injured woman had been carted off to the hospital, where she hovered between life and death. The men were caught, arrested, charged, and later convicted, but Graciella knew nothing of that at the time. All she knew was that her mother had gone to work and hadn’t returned home.
The child survived on her own that way for three long days and nights. At the end of the third day there was a knock on the door. Hoping it would finally be her mother, Graciella had flung the door open, but the person standing outside wasn’t her mother at all. It was a policeman—a uniformed policeman.
“Is your father home?” he asked.
He wasn’t, of course. Graciella didn’t have a father, or at least not one she knew personally, so she tried lying.
“He’s not here,” she said.
“This is about your mother,” the policeman said kindly. “I need to speak to whoever’s taking care of you.”
And that was when Graciella had burst into tears and blurted out the truth—that no one was taking care of her. Christina was gone, and Graciella had been forced to look after herself. The policeman gave her the news that her mother had been badly hurt and was in the hospital, trying to get better. They had used fingerprints to identify her, and one of Christina’s friends had mentioned Graciella’s existence.
The policeman was kind but firm. He told Graciella that she couldn’t stay home alone. He took her first to a police station and then to some people who, he said, would look after her. Late that night, Graciella Miramar found herself in foster care, but not for long. When morning came she slipped away again and found her way back to the house. The next morning, someone came and retrieved her.
When the media learned about the abandoned child, they went nuts, making a story that had already been big news even bigger, not just in Panama, but all over Latin America. It was too good a story not to tell—the poor, hardworking woman; her luckless child; the evil American servicemen who had attacked her. Eventually, Christina Miramar’s name surfaced in one of the stories.
Graciella was back in foster care by then—spending her time in a room that was locked to prevent her from running away again. Late one afternoon, the housemother who was in charge unlocked the door. “Someone wants to see you,” she said. “These are important people. Mind your manners.”
She led Graciella into the living room, where two men sat waiting on a sofa. One, wearing a white coat, looked like a doctor. The other was an incredibly ugly man. At first Graciella thought he was wearing some kind of scary mask, but it turned out he wasn’t. Close up she realized that vivid, lumpy scars crisscrossed his face. She tried to shrink away from him, but the housemother grabbed her by the arm and propelled her forward.
“This is Graciella,” she said.
The scary man stared at her so hard that she wanted to shrink into the floor. Then, reaching into a small plastic bag, he drew out a cotton swab. Graciella recognized it because Christina sometimes used them to remove her makeup.
“Rub the end of this on the inside of your cheek,” he ordered.
Graciella tried to refuse, but the housemother squeezed her shoulder and gave her a severe warning look that said, Do it or else.
So she did as she was told. She rubbed the swab on the inside of her cheek and then gave it back to him. He returned the swab to the bag and then handed the bag over to the doctor.
“How long?” he demanded.
The man in the white coat shrugged. “We’ll put a rush on it.”
He turned back to the woman. Speaking over Graciella’s head, he said, “We’ll be in touch.”
With that, the two men took their leave. A week later, Graciella, still accompanied by the housemother, boarded a small plane—a private jet—that flew north to Houston. During a refueling stop and prior to continuing on to California, the child cleared customs in Houston using her US passport. That piece of identification along with her first and last names were the only things Graciella Miramar took with her into exile—one that lasted for almost eighteen years.
• • •
Once ushered into the bank’s conference room, Graciella settled into one of the comfy leather chairs and waited for Mr. Varner to make the connection. When the screen lit up and a man’s horribly disfigured face appeared in front of her, Graciella understood exactly who he was and why she was there. She had known for quite a while that El Pescado was most likely her real father and that he had been paying her way all these years. Now the bill was about to come due.
Felix’s face was beyond repulsive, but Graciella steeled herself to look the man straight in the eye. “Good afternoon, Mr. Duarte,” she said calmly. “I believe you must be my father.”
A look of visible shock flashed across the damaged face. “Who told you?” El Pescado demanded. “Varner here?”
“No one told me,” Graciella answered. “I found out on my own. While I was still going to school at the University of Arizona, the ten o’clock news did a segment about Mexican drug cartels. They showed photos of some of the guys in charge, and I remembered your face from when you and that doctor came to see me in foster care.”
“I guess that means I’m pretty unforgettable, right?” he asked as a lopsided grin distorted his damaged features even further.
Graciella didn’t smile back. “This was supposed to be a job interview not a family reunion,” she said stiffly. “Since I’m not especially interested in working in the drug trade, perhaps I should just leave now.”
“No, wait,” he said. “Please don’t go. This is a job interview, and it’s about your mother.”
“What about her?” Graciella demanded. “Every year or so I get a letter from her saying how much she loves me and misses me and that I should come home. After that she goes dark again, and I don’t hear another word from her for months on end.”
“Your mother is troubled,” El Pescado admitted. “She’s been in and out of various institutions for years. Right now Christina is a patient in a residential treatment center. Her current therapist thinks she’d be better off in something with more of a homelike setting, and so do I.”
“What does any of that have to do with me?” Graciella asked.
“I’d like you to come home and look after her.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Graciella said. “I’m about to be awarded my MBA, and you expect me to come back to Panama to provide nanny care for my mother?”
“I’d make it well worth your while,” he said.
“You’d pay me? How much?”
“A hundred and twenty-thousand dollars a year, put away tax-free in a numbered offshore account. In addition, I’ll continue providing housing for both of you, and I’ll cover all related expenses as well, including hiring whatever household help you require.”
Graciella had spent her childhood begging on the streets and had yet to have a full-time job. For someone from her background, the amount on offer should have been considered breathtaking. El Pescado seemed dismayed when Graciella turned it down out of hand.
“That’s a joke,” she told him. “It doesn’t matter how much you offer to pay me. If I’m stuck being a glorified babysitter, I’ll end up bored to tears in less than a week.”
“What if I could help you find a job over and above what you’re doing for your mother?”
“What kind of a job?”
“One that would be in keeping with your education,” he said. “My family does a good deal of business with a financial consulting firm based in Panama City. If I say the word, I’m quite certain someone there will give you a job, no questions asked.”
“Doing what?”
“Arturo Salazar, the guy in charge, calls the women who work for him his ‘account managers.’ They facilitate whatever transactions are required. My understanding is that the job pays salary plus commission.”
“So how would this work?” Graciella asked. “You show up, tell this Arturo guy that I’m your daughter, and he hires me on the spot?”
“I believe,” El Pescado said thoughtfully, “under the circumstances, it would be best for all concerned if no one there had any idea that you’re my daughter.”
“That’s probably true,” Graciella agreed.
“So you’ll do it, then?” Felix asked eagerly.
Ever since the moment, years earlier, when Graciella had unmasked her father’s identity, she had followed his day-to-day exploits and had a fairly good idea about how much he was worth.
“Not for one hundred twenty a year,” she countered. “A hundred and fifty at least, and I choose where we live. Do we have a deal?”
“How soon can you start?”
“First you deliver on the job and the house,” she told him. “Then we’ll set a starting date.”
• • •
That is how Graciella Miramar became her mother’s keeper. She didn’t do it out of affection or a sense of duty, either. It was a job, plain and simple, and a means to an end. She would care for Christina willingly enough and capably enough—for as long as it suited her. And once that was no longer the case? She would end it, once and for all.