I HEARD ANA COME IN the front door.
“You have some explaining to do,” I told her when she appeared in the workroom.
“It was just for a little while,” Ana said nervously.
“That’s what they’ve all said.”
“Well, you disappeared so quickly yesterday and I thought of the poor kid sitting in the kitchen playing cards all night… And I wanted very much to show her my houses and—”
“But why is she still here? Why didn’t you contact her mothers?”
“She asked me not to.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
Ana grew defensive. “She did. She said she didn’t want to go back to everybody fighting over her. So I took her around Barcelona today, we went up to Poble Espanyol and took the funicular and then rowed a boat on the little lake in Ciutadella. You know, they hadn’t really taken her anywhere, those mothers, they’d been too busy with their own affairs. And it was nice for me too, so nice being with a child.”
I saw the white sneaker moving slightly.
“Are you awake, Delilah?”
“Uh-hmm,” the mollusk answered.
I went over and looked at her. She wasn’t a pretty child, but she had a sense of herself that I liked.
“Well, I don’t need to tell you that everybody has been looking like crazy for you.”
“Except April.”
“I don’t think April is going to be in the picture much anymore,” I said. “If that makes you feel better. She’s going back to America tonight by herself.”
“That’s good,” Delilah said, and for the first time she looked happy. “So it will just be me and Ben and Frankie?”
“Yes, if they can work something out.”
“I hope so,” Delilah said, and began to crawl out of her shell. She stopped and looked at me. “You know the real reason that April didn’t like me?”
“Well…”
“’Cause I figured out she was a boy.”
“What!” both Ana and I said.
Delilah nodded sagely. “She was. Just like Frankie. A boy that turned into a girl.”
“That’s impossible, Delilah, you’re confused. I mean, it’s understandable that you would be confused, the way you’ve grown up. But I can assure you that April is not and never was a boy.”
“Was too.” Delilah made as if to curl back up in the shell.
“Okay, if you say so.” Jeez, this kid needed counseling. And fast.
Delilah reluctantly climbed out.
“You ready to go back to Ben and Frankie?”
“Yeah. I guess.” She turned to Ana. “Will you come with us?”
Ana was touched. You could tell she was having a struggle not to kidnap Delilah forever.
“I’ll take you on the moto,” she said.
“What about me?”
“It’s just two blocks, Cassandra.”
So I followed them on foot. Soon, soon, soon this would be all be over and I’d be on my way to London and then Bucharest. Tomorrow perhaps, after one last passionate night with Carmen. Anymore and she’d be demanding that I move here. She was already demanding that I let my hair grow again.
The white waves of La Pedrera gushed around the corner and I saw Hamilton coming towards me from the Provença door.
“I met Ana and Delilah at the elevator,” he said. “I’m so glad she’s safe. It was a stupid thing for me to do, to take her from Frankie’s hotel. It just made things more complicated.”
There was no need to respond to that. I gestured to one of the white mosaic benches that seemed to emerge whole from the sidewalk of the Passeig de Gràcia. We sat.
“Hamilton,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me that April was your stepsister?”
He started. “You’ve seen April?”
“At the Parc Güell. She told me the whole story of your childhood. She’s on her way back to San Francisco tonight. She said she realized it would never work with Ben.”
He was silent for an instant. “She told you the whole story?”
“Well, I think so. About her parents and your mother and the drinking and everything.”
“Not the whole story then.”
“What’s the mystery here? Lots of people come from broken homes, lots of people come out, what’s the big deal?”
Hamilton stared across the street at the rippling bulk of La Pedrera.
“April wasn’t my stepsister.”
“Oh god. Don’t tell me she made that all up.”
“Not exactly.”
“What then?”
“She was my stepbrother.”
“Stepbrother as in boy-brother?”
“Albert.”
I leaped up and then sat back down again. “So Delilah was right.”
Hamilton just nodded.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” I swore. “Does Ben know? No, of course Ben doesn’t have a clue. Frankie must not either. Je-sus Christ.”
“I’m not sure, but my guess is that when April got involved with Ben she didn’t know about Frankie. Ben wasn’t so eager for anyone to find out that she’d been married to a male-female transsexual. April may have thought that Delilah had a father she visited every weekend. But at some point she realized that Ben had huge problems with Frankie’s transsexuality. Would April tell her if she thought that? Would you?”
“Probably not,” I admitted.
“And the longer their relationship went on the more impossible it probably felt to discuss it. And then there was Delilah. Maybe Delilah said something to her. Maybe that’s why she didn’t like Delilah. I’m almost certain that’s why she left San Francisco for Barcelona.”
The hot spring afternoon was turning now to evening as Hamilton and I sat on the white bench looking at La Pedrera. A tinge of pink and peach from the sunset colored its porous surface, and it pulsed with undulant vitality, an expanding space rather than a static geometric configuration. It was wonderful—even so, if I’d only seen the outside I wouldn’t have known that the real beauty of the building lay in the finely finished interior details, in its swirls of plaster and curves of dark woods, in the shapes of its rooms and the coils of its stairways.
“You know what Gaudí wrote about La Pedrera?” Hamilton said. “I’ve always liked this. He said ‘… the corners will disappear and the material will abundantly manifest itself in its astral rotundities; the sun will penetrate on all four sides and it will be the image of paradise… and my palace will be more luminous than light!’”
“That man was ahead of his time,” I said. “Far far ahead… shall we go in?”
“No point saying anything about April to Ben now, is there?” Hamilton asked.
I shook my head, and then, companionably, we sighed and got up.
Frankie and Ben were sitting on the sofa with Delilah between them like a little prisoner of war. Ana was in tears, trying to explain her rationale for the kidnapping. Her usually competent English had deteriorated.
“I want. I only want make your girl happy. She so unhappy.”
“Cassandra!” Frankie said as Hamilton and I entered. “This is the final straw.”
“Oh, give it a rest, Frankie,” I said cheerfully. “You got her back, didn’t you? You got what you came for, didn’t you?”
“But I’ve been employing you, Cassandra.”
“Not recently.”
“That’s just like you, Frankie,” Ben said. “You lie all the time.”
“Oh you think you’ve been Miss Honest, Bernadette. You think you’ve been behaving with great honorability.”
“Stop it!” shouted Delilah, jumping up from the sofa and running over to Ana. “I hate you both! I hate you talking like that! I’m sick of it!”
Ben and Frankie stared at her.
“But Delilah,” said Ben after a moment, in a tone of adult reasonableness. “It’s only that we love you.”
“You should love each other!” the little girl screamed. “That would be better!”
Ben’s face fell. “But we do love each other, honey.”
Frankie sighed. “We do, Delilah. We just have a funny way of showing it.”
She took Ben’s hand. “Ben and I go back a long ways, Delilah. A lot of things have happened since we met, including you, a lot of changes. Some changes aren’t easy to accept.”
Delilah clung obstinately to Ana.
“We don’t want you to be unhappy,” Ben said, tears in her eyes.
“We want to be good parents to you,” Frankie said.
Ana bent down and whispered something to Delilah, and slowly a smile appeared on the little girl’s face.
“Okay,” she announced. “But I want to go back home. And I want both of you to be nice to each other. Please.”
Hamilton was coming undone beside me and suddenly left the room.
Frankie nodded. Ben nodded.
“Do you promise?” Delilah asked.
“Well, I’ve really been needing to get back to the gym,” said Ben. “I’m completely out of shape.”
“I promise,” said Frankie, nudging her.
“I promise,” said Ben.
Later I asked Ana what she’d whispered to Delilah.
“I told her I would give her one of my new houses to take with her. So she would always have a home.”