CHAPTER ONE
August 2003
Layla
Fifty-eight...fifty-nine...
I turn from the register in the empty juniors’ department at Nordstrom. It’s exactly three thirty, and I’m officially off the clock for good.
“Sarah, I’m out of here,” I tell my twenty-something manager, who’s busy digging through boxes in the stockroom.
Sarah pushes her picture-perfect, light-brown hair out of her face. It always takes her a moment to remember the temporary employees like me. I’m not sure that in three months she’s even managed to learn my name.
“Oh...right,” she says. “When are you here tomorrow?”
I smile tightly. “Today’s my last day. I’m headed back to school.”
Realization dawns on her vapid face. Sarah’s nice, but her world doesn’t extend very far beyond the sales floor. “Oh! Well, thanks for the great work this summer. Let me know if you need a reference.”
“Layla.” I nod. “Will do. Good luck with...everything.”
There’s not much else to say. I’m practically skipping out of the door after I go through employee security for the last time, grab my purse, and sprint to my car. This giant brick building in the middle of downtown Bellevue has felt like a prison for the last three months, and now I’m free. Two weeks of vacation with my parents, and after that, I can go back to New York, back to the city that’s been calling my name since May.
It’s true what they say: you can never go home again. Fewer of my high school friends came home this year, so I feel like a stranger in the town where I grew up. On top of that, my dad seems to be working even more than normal, often spending his nights at his office while my mom disappears to the country club with her chardonnay-drinking friends.
The bright side is that their negligence has only given me more time to save money. Between working overtime at the mall and answering phones at my dad’s office, I’ve managed to save enough that I won’t have to work during the school year. The problem with boring jobs, though, is that they leave too much time for daydreaming, and I have an active imagination. I had two goals this summer: make money and forget about a certain handsome ex-New Yorker who broke my heart last spring.
Well...I succeeded at one.
The long afternoon shifts don’t keep me from imagining him striding around every corner. They don’t stave off dreams of how he spots me, picks me up, and swirls me around like the guys in cheesy romance movies. They don’t calm my heart every time I see a FedEx truck. Do you know how hard that is? Those things are everywhere.
Broad shoulders and strong hands, the kind that lifted me up like I weighed next to nothing. Tattoos that decorated an excruciatingly defined body, under which lay a heart of gold. A smile that made me lose my footing regularly, and which could probably power all of Manhattan during an outage.
But in the end, the fantasies hurt. I remember that I’m stuck here, and he’s in California after he left New York to seek a real future for himself elsewhere and wouldn’t let me come with him. And I remember that after exchanging a few phone calls once he got there, and then even fewer text messages, he changed his number and hasn’t called me back since.
That’s when the real pain starts. So I try to think about how I’m going back to New York in two weeks with a savings account full of money. Which means I won’t have to work at the entertainment law firm anymore––a relief, since the place would no doubt remind me of the man I met there. Instead, I can focus on my classes and getting the kinds of internships that will help me get into law school.
If, of course, that’s still what I’m going to do. The idea has been sounding worse and worse to me lately, although I haven’t mentioned it to my parents. Since they’ve shown absolutely no interest in me, I’ve chosen not to bring it up, and they haven’t either. Works for me.
Surprisingly, both of their cars are in the driveway when I pull up to our house in Redmond. Despite the fact that I grew up here, it’s never totally felt like home. For one thing, it’s huge, far too big for just three people. With six bedrooms sitting on three acres of lush forest, it’s more like a museum than a home. My mother has stocked it with priceless antiques, and the immaculate white carpet has never seen a shoe, much less a dropped backpack or spilled snacks. Everything has its place, but none of those places ever seemed to fit me. Let’s just put it this way: when I saw Beauty and the Beast...I felt for the Beast, not Belle. I understood why he was such a dick locked up in the big castle. The guy was lonely.
“Layla?”
My dad’s deep voice echoes through the long hallway when I enter the house. I remove my shoes and carefully place them in the hallway closet, then pad into the kitchen, where I find him and my mother sitting together at the marble-topped island, both of them holding their favorite drinks: scotch on the rocks for my dad, dry white wine for my mom.
It wouldn’t be such a strange sight if it weren’t four in the afternoon. My parents like their cocktails, but they aren’t exactly lushes. They’ll usually wait until at least five to break out the alcohol.
“Sit down, Layla,” my dad orders, his thick Brazilian accent more pronounced than usual.
I slide onto a stool across from them at the island. At first glance, they don’t look any different than normal. I suspect that Mom has occasionally taken advantage of the fact that her husband owns a successful cosmetic surgery practice––her glossy exterior never seems to change, while the rest of my friends’ parents have all gotten older. She’s still the same bottle-blonde, white-toothed, blue-eyed ingénue she’s always been, despite having celebrated her forty-second birthday last month. Same tasteful blue sundress, same mid-height pumps, same pearl necklace and solitaire ring.
Dad’s slightly more olive-toned skin shows his age a bit more, and his thick black hair is shot through with silver on the sides. He wears one of his many starched, button-down shirts and shiny leather loafers. On his wrist is one of the tastefully expensive watches he gets for Christmas from his wife. But unlike my mother’s blasé sweetness, my father is always stern. Sergio Barros never, ever smiles. That, more than the fact that he has over fifteen years on her, is why he has more wrinkles than his wife. His forehead is always puckered when he frowns.
Today they both look a little more their ages than usual. Dad really does look fifty-eight, and Mom really does look forty-two, mostly because their faces are shot through with something different. Sadness, maybe? Dread?
I grip the edge of the counter, already bracing myself for something. “What’s up?”
Mom takes a long drink of wine. Her tennis bracelet clinks against the glass.
“We waited as long as we could,” Dad says. “Your mother and I, we wanted to give you one last summer here before...well, it’s time.”
My gaze ping-pongs between them. “Time for what?”
“Your mother and I have decided we will no longer live together.”
Silence drops on the table like an anvil while his words echo around the big house. In here, everything has its place. Nothing feels shattered...yet. I’m not even sure if I heard him correctly.
My parents have never been happy together––that much was always clear. They’re an odd couple––a Pasadena princess with a magnanimous foreigner many years her senior. My dad is loud and authoritative while my mom is diminutive and quiet. They’ve never been affectionate, never even socialized together beyond work events. Once, when my mother had too many glasses of wine and my dad was working late, I asked her if she loved him. She laid her head in my lap and cried. I was twelve.
They’ve always treated each other with indifference, the way one might treat a piece of outdated furniture. It’s fine until it starts to get beat up. It’s fine until it gets in your way. When things get in my mother’s way, she turns around and ignores them. When things get in my father’s way, he attacks.
Living.
Apart.
“Wha-what?” I finally stutter. “You’re getting a...divorce?” The word is not even in my parents’ vocabulary. “But...you’re the most Catholic people on the planet.” I’m shooting back and forth between them. “You wouldn’t even let me go to a Protestant youth group in high school, for Christ’s sake! You don’t believe in divorce!”
“Layla!” chastises my father. “There’s no need for that kind of language. And we’re not getting a divorce. We are separating. There is a difference.”
Beside him, my mother snorts. It’s the first noise she’s made, and if I hadn’t been looking at her when she did it, I might have missed it. She hides her face in her glass like she didn’t say anything, but Dad shoots her a dirty look nonetheless. I wait for the sharp retort that should knock her down a peg––the kind I just received. But none comes.
“Is the difference that you’re planning to get back together?” I ask, trying and failing to keep the sharpness out of my voice, which is already starting to quiver.
My dad tightens his jaw. “It’s not so simple.”
“Yes, it is, Serge,” my mother interrupts.
Dad and I both stare at her, dumbfounded. My mother never, ever interrupts my father. But she isn’t looking at him when she says his name. She’s looking at me.
“We’re not getting divorced because the church doesn’t allow it, even if the state does,” Mom tells me. “And...well, that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
She casts another long look at my father, who doesn’t have the decency to meet her gaze. It’s clear which one of them refuses to do this. And fighting my father is usually not worth the battle.
“But effectively,” she continues, “we will be divorced.”
This causes my glance to flicker back to Dad. We’re Catholic, yes, but it’s mainly a choice fueled by my father’s occasional guilt. Mom converted to marry him, so this isn’t her hang-up. But my dad...yeah. I could see him refusing to sign divorce papers on account of the church. He doesn’t wear that St. Christopher medallion around his neck because he’s confident about getting into heaven. There’s a reason why he calls me on Sundays to see if I go, why he made me send pictures last year after I received my blessing on Ash Wednesday. He’s the guiltiest person I know.
“So, what, you’re going to move to an apartment downtown or something for a while?” I venture back at my dad. “Leave Mom in this giant house by herself? What kind of life is that?”
“Not one I want,” Dad puts in. “The house was sold in the spring, before you came home. We’ve been renting it since then.”
That explained why both my parents had been even more anal-retentive than normal about keeping the place clean. The house wasn’t even ours anymore.
“So...where are the two of you going?”
My mother takes another long slug of wine, but she lets my father talk.
“I’ve sold my practice,” Dad replies as he swirls the ice around in his drink. “And bought a share in another. In Vitória.”
Vitória. Brazil? I shove a hand through my hair. This makes no sense. Absolutely no sense at all.
“B-but...you hate Brazil,” I sputter. “You’ve spent most of your life trying to act like you’re not even from there!”
“Layla, Brazil is my country. Of course I do not hate it,” Dad replies wearily after taking a long drink of his scotch. “I’ve made a good life here, it’s true, but it was hard. Very hard. Now your mother and I have little in common anymore. I’ve made my fortune. My daughter is grown. I am tired of fighting so hard for what I have. It is time for me to go home.”
“I-I still don’t understand.” I’m reeling. What is happening right now? “You won’t even let me tell people I’m Brazilian.”
“That’s because you’re not!” my father returns sharply. “You’re American. Look at you. You have blue eyes, your skin is white like snow, and you speak only English. You were born here, and thank God for that.” He leans in, the angles of his face softening slightly. “It will never be as hard here for you as it was for me, Layla. Besides, is this not what you want? To leave this place? How much did we have to fight for you to come home this summer at all?”
This close, I can see the way the dark circles, the ones I get too when I’m stressed, make his eyes look like they’ve been etched with black. My father is tired. He never wants to tell me about the problems he’s had, only gestures to them obliquely like this. Sometimes I try to imagine. Racial slurs thrown at him when he first arrived here in the seventies, maybe? Assumptions that he was the groundskeeper at Stanford, not a medical student? He and my mother must have caught some kind of wrath when they started dating. Harassment? Attacks?
I’ll never know. But obviously it was bad enough that he feels he needs to shield me from it. Bad enough that he learned to hate himself and now wants to run away.
I look up. “Where’s Mom going?”
“Pasadena.”
My mom has a quiet voice, one that comes from years of learning how to play second fiddle to Sergio Barros, preeminent surgeon and life of the party. She fiddles with the stem of her wine glass before she meets my gaze.
“I’ll be staying with your grandparents,” she tells me, “while I look for a new house down there.”
I blink. “You’re moving in with your parents?”
My mother is forty-two. She’s a grown woman, and not just that, a rich grown woman. Even if she wants to house hunt for a while, there’s no reason she has to stay with her parents while she does it. She could rent an apartment or even a house somewhere in the LA area.
I glance between the two of them as my chest starts to feel like it’s icing over, a thin crust of frozen water, delicate enough that it might shatter. This is where I grew up. While it’s never been the warmest place in the world, it’s always been familiar. They have been familiar.
Slowly, I push back from the counter as tears cloud my vision. The chair leg drags on the marble floor, and the screech echoes through the high-ceilinged rooms.
“Where are you going?” my dad barks as I walk away.
I turn up the stairs that lead to the six empty bedrooms. The house echoes with every one of my steps––it’s never had enough to fill it, but it’s the only home I’ve known.
“I need a few moments,” I say, barely hearing my own voice.
“Not too long,” Dad calls, always controlling, always assuming he’s in the right, even when he’s the one delivering the bomb that blows everything up. Until he drops the other one: “We have a lot to do. I leave in three days, and you’ll be going to Pasadena with your mother.”
~