Tell Me Something True Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Leila Cobo

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55827-3

  Contents

  Copyright

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

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  Helena

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  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Helena

  Gabriella

  Nini

  Gabriella

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  Guía para grupos de lectores

  About the Author

  To my mother, Olga, who inspired this story,

  and to the Hanlon circle: Arthur, Allegra,

  and Arthur III.

  There is a picture of my mother. She’s kneeling in front of a bed of roses in the garden of our Los Angeles home, one hand holding down a huge straw hat against an obvious gust of wind, the other clutching weeds and roots she’s just dug up from the moist soil. Her long, curly hair is blowing around her face, and she’s smiling and she looks beautiful and impossibly happy.

  I had that picture in my bedroom, and it was my favorite for many years, before I learned that my mother hated gardening. That every plant she ever touched died. That the beautiful day in that beautiful garden was a fluke. That at the time that picture was taken, she was probably already thinking of another life, another place, far from me, far from us.

  Gabriella

  The air feels sweet and moist and just the slightest bit warm when you get off the 9 p.m. flight to Cali. It clings to your skin, but in the faintest, most tenuous way, like the sheerest of gauze blouses touching but not touching your arms as you breathe. When Gabriella tries to explain the sensation to her friends, they just don’t get it.

  “How can you feel or smell any air,” they always ask, “if you arrive into an airport terminal?’

  “It’s not a real terminal,” she is forever responding. And it isn’t, to her at least. It’s a building with open windows and no air-conditioning, and if it’s raining, drops of water sweep in, like a mist, and it makes her feel as though she’s arrived somewhere real and tangible and alive, so far from a carpeted airport terminal you feel like you’re in another world.

  Her friends from up there never come down here. They’re afraid of getting killed, or worse.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with these people,” she complained to her father as he watched her pack the night before. “It’s extraordinary, really. They go to Singapore, to Turkey, to Peru! But Colombia is too dangerous.”

  Her father didn’t say anything, because he’s as guilty as they are, absent from her trips for over a decade.

  “They’ll go down,” he finally contributed. “They’ll fall in love with a Colombian, and then they’ll have to,” he added with a laugh, a laugh that tried to tell her it’s okay that once again she’s going without him.

  She could sense his unease, could see it in his worried blue eyes, in his tall lanky frame that tonight was coiled tight, his legs crossed, his arms crossed, sitting on her bed, trying to look nonchalant but swinging his foot incessantly, making her nervous as hell.

  “Try and use your time there wisely, Gabby,” he said. “Think about where you want to be a year from now. You have to make a plan.”

  Gabriella wanted to say that maybe it could be wise not to have a plan for a change, that plans interfered with creativity, but he interrupted her thoughts before she could put them into words.

  “And remember, I don’t want you driving alone, okay?” he said for the third time that evening. “And I don’t want you walking around without Edgar,” he added, referring to her grandmother’s bodyguard. “And I want you to call me as soon as you land and as soon as you get into Nini’s house. And I want you to keep that cell phone on at all times.”

  “Daddy!” she finally exclaimed, exasperated. “Daddy,” she repeated softer, picturing him alone in their big house for a whole month while she’s gone. “It’ll be okay. Nothing bad’s gonna happen,” she said placatingly, even though they both know bad things can happen, bad things have happened.

  But they happen to other people, not to her.

  “I’ll be fine,” she added, sitting next to him on the bed, her dark, curly head close to his straight, blond mane. She ran her fingers through his soft hair, twirling it at the nape of his neck, like she used to do when she was a little girl. “I’ll be fine.”

  Thinking of him now reminds her she has to call. A quick call.

  “Two dollars and fifty cents a minute,” he’s reminded her a dozen times, because she is a fiend with her cell phone and her text messages, and roaming fees to Colombia are outrageous, even for someone like him. When he answers, she speaks rapidly, almost furtively, and he laughs just to hear her voice, because she always makes him laugh. And she laughs, too, happy that he’s finally happy, that she’s arrived, that she’s fine, and that now she can embrace her days here without guilt.

  Tonight it smells like rain, and the wind carries a whiff of sugarcane from the refineries in the valley. She breathes deeply, taking in the burned, bittersweet smell, a smell most people can’t stand but whose familiarity she embraces. For a moment, she feels physically lighter, feels the weight of her worries loosening their grip on her: what she wants, what she’s supposed to do, who she’s supposed to be in six months when she graduates.

  “Extraordinary.” That’s what they say about her. Her father, her grandparents, her teachers. They say it to her face, and they talk about it when they don’t think she’s listening, ticking off the long list of potentials she could be. And if she could get off the treadmill of endless expectations, maybe she could focus for a moment, but she never seems to have the time.

  She looks out at the airstrip from the open window and gets the strongest urge to go out there and run into the darkness, caution be damned, beyond the point where the airport lights
end and the planted fields abruptly begin. She suddenly remembers one summer afternoon, several years ago, when they parked the car on a dirt road and climbed up to a grassy knoll, where her cousin Juan Carlos and she watched the sun set and the planes take off. The sky was stunning, with sweeps of orange and purple and pink, and for a few minutes, they felt like the only people alive, the only ones who knew that such beauty existed and was available free for them.

  They stayed there until it was dark, and by the time they got home, it was nine and Nini was so mad.

  She’ll be here for four weeks. Same as it’s been every Christmas, for as long as she can remember.

  “Gabriella,” says the immigration agent, looking at her American passport, then speaking to her in Spanish. “Razón por la cual viaja?”

  “Vacaciones,” she replies.

  He grunts. Thumbs through the passport. Stamps. Then finally looks up at her. Unsmiling but polite, and yes, gratified that she’s there, a foreigner in a city that discourages foreigners.

  “Bienvenida a Cali, Gabriella,” he says and hands her the passport.

  Outside, Cristina Gómez waits. She waits and she frets, her perfectly glossed lips pursed, both arms clutching her handbag, even though Edgar is standing right by her side. Cristina hates airports in general and this airport in particular. Because it’s hot and chaotic. Because the cement outside of customs is always slick with rain and aguardiente and trampled fruit. Because hordes of people, wound tightly together like spools of yarn, strain against each other to get a glimpse of the arrivals through the tinted glass, their shouts of recognition blending with shouts of drunkenness as bottles are passed back and forth, back and forth over her head.

  Because she’s petite and claustrophobic and always thinks she’ll suffocate while she waits, and because it invariably reminds her of the accident. For years, she couldn’t bring herself to come here. Regardless of who was arriving, she would dispatch Edgar and go out someplace else—never staying home—so as to dispense with any semblance of waiting. But when Gabriella turned ten and started to fly alone, she took it as her cue to take responsibility again.

  Before that, Marcus would bring Gabriella for a week or two, in a gesture of solidarity with Cristina, even though they lived in Los Angeles and the trip was long and involved two flights. If Cristina had a soft spot for her son-in-law before the accident, she became his fiercest advocate afterward, supporting him through what she would teasingly refer to as his “dissolute lifestyle”—one girlfriend after the other. He never remarried, he didn’t have any more children. She had never demanded that he give her time with Gabriella, but he had understood it was the correct thing to do, and she was grateful. As the years passed, he stopped coming altogether. But he never denied her Christmas, even the few times Gabriella herself had begged not to come because she was dating one boy or another.

  Eleven years she’s come to pick this child up. Always at this time, from this gate, from this flight; the same flight her mother used to take. The wait takes place outside, and it involves throngs of people, all anxiously leaning against the railing that leads to the exit door. They hold signs, toddlers with flowers and gifts, cameras. Moisture sticks to her skin, and she feels something wet on her face. Panicking, she swats her hand against her cheek, then stops, feeling foolish as she realizes it’s her own perspiration damaging her matte makeup.

  Someone in the crowd recognizes a passenger exiting the glass doors, and the bodies heave against her. Edgar firmly takes her arm and steadies her, his huge presence shielding her from the others, his right hand gently resting on the gun at his waist.

  She sees Gabriella before her granddaughter sees her, and she doesn’t say anything for a few moments, not until she can quell her tears. She is so tall, so striking, this girl, with her straight black eyebrows, pale skin, and slate gray eyes. How had her tiny daughter managed to produce such a specimen?

  “Not to brag, but you haven’t seen a more beautiful girl” is her mantra, repeated through the years at countless luncheons, dinners, and tea parties. She knows her love for this girl borders on the pathological, but she simply doesn’t care. Eleven months of the year she devotes to Juan Carlos—her twin soul, so old and proper inside that boyish exterior—the son of her only son.

  But Gabriella.

  With Gabriella she only has four weeks to make up in every way for the other forty-eight without her, and she caters to her every whim. The only daughter of her only daughter. She is entitled.

  “There she is, Edgar,” she finally tells him, and he immediately clears a path for her to walk through the crowd.

  “Gabriella!” she shouts, waving frantically.

  “Nini!” Gabriela pushes through the crowd, the porter behind her lugging three bags and her laptop. “Nini,” she repeats, crushing her small grandmother and rumpling her linen suit with her hug.

  Helena

  Querida Gabriella:

  You were born today, July 7, at 7:32 a.m. Weight: 8 pounds, 6 ounces.

  A big girl! A perfect baby girl, the doctor said.

  Wow, you came into the world with a bang!

  I think you wanted to make a statement. We were at a gallery opening and my water broke. Oops. In the middle of the show. I was wearing a black dress, so it wasn’t that obvious, but obvious enough. I mean, I literally dropped a bucket of water to the floor. I thought your daddy was going to have a heart attack as he drove to the hospital. He thought he’d have to deliver you himself!

  But you waited, my sweet. Very patient of you. I even had a chance to get an epidural (I’ll tell you what that is some-day). And here you are. Your hair is black, your eyes are blue, but they tell me that can change. Will they be like mine? You have your father’s mouth—a big, fat Cupid’s mouth. You look utterly beautiful to me.

  You are, dare I say it? Not what I expected. I didn’t know what to expect. An alien, perhaps. A creature bent on tearing my body apart, on changing my life beyond repair. I always wondered how these calm mamas did it: Push a living child out of your own body. How it must hurt!

  But here you are, looking up at me with those bizarrely huge eyes. I already forgot the pain!

  Your name is from the Hebrew Gabriel, which means “Strong Man of God.”

  And you’re a woman! Strong woman.

  Like Gabriela Mistral. Like Gabriel García Márquez.

  Like you, my Gabriella Richards.

  Do you notice how easily you can say Gabriella in English and in Spanish? Because you’re going to have to speak both.

  You notice I’m writing to you in Spanish?

  Spanish only in this book! This is your book. From me to you, so you don’t forget who you are and where you came from.

  So, my love, good night on this first night.

  Bienvenida, querida Gabriella.

  Te adoro.

  Mamá

  I had never been a writer. My means of expression had always been visual, out there for everyone to see. Then I got pregnant, a totally unplanned occurrence. At first I was truly furious with your dad, even though I knew it wasn’t his fault. It was the last thing I wanted, a baby. I mean, yes, I knew one of these days I’d be a mom. I just didn’t figure it had to be quite now, when things were just starting to happen, when I had finally lined up shows and assignments.

  And then, you started to grow inside me. It’s quite extraordinary, really. One thing is to get pregnant and intellectually know that you’ll have a baby in nine months. Quite another is feeling that baby evolve within you.

  “There is a maternal instinct,” I told your dad one night as I rubbed lotion onto my ever-growing belly, “and it’s been awakened!”

  I began writing this diary the day I felt you move inside me for the first time. Quite a jolt. Your dad was away and I was lying in bed, watching TV. And then, the barest of flutters, like butterfly wings. I thought it was my pregnant mind’s imaginings. And then it came again, so soft but so persistent. My belly was almost flat still. But now, the truth
was undeniable. Something alive was inside me. I’ll have you know that I quit smoking cold turkey. I quit drinking, too.

  I’ll admit. All my life I’ve gotten exactly what I want. But you. You made me responsible.

  I bought a red diary because it’s my favorite color and because I figured it would contribute to generating a strong personality for my Gabriella.

  Marcus thought this writing kick was funny at first. Then he thought I would drop it in a few weeks. He humored me, because he always does, but I knew he thought it was a short-term project.

  Ha!

  I’ll show him, you’ll see. I’ll write you. Forever. So you and I can remember everything that happened today, and ten, twenty years from now, we can laugh together.

  Or cry.

  Just joking!

  Gabriella

  Can we go see Mom?” she asks, snuggling against Nini in the backseat, letting her stroke her hair.

  “Of course, princess. Whenever you want.”

  “Did you fix the squeaky pedal on the piano?”

  She hates the squeaky pedal that whimpers every time her foot rhythmically pumps it, bringing back memories of sagging beds in college dorms.

  “Yes. I told you I did last week,” Nini says patiently. “You can play until your fingers fall off, you won’t hear a thing from the pedals.”

  Gabriella doesn’t say anything for a moment. She wants the pedal fixed, even though the last thing she wants to do right now is lay her hands on the keys and practice endlessly for something she can’t pinpoint.

  “Is Juan Carlos home?” she asks instead.

  “No, he went out tonight. But he’s taking you to some party tomorrow,” answers Nini.

  “Ooh. Nice,” she says, contented. Juan Carlos knows the right people. Always. And he always knows the right parties. “Is there soup for me tonight?”

  “Of course. Vegetable soup. And shredded beef.”

  “And my Diet Coke?”

  “Yes. I got you a whole case.”