The Go-Between Read online

  My mother was not soothed by my father’s words. She continued to tear through the house—the dining room, the great room, the kitchen—and I could tell by the sounds what she had thrown. In the dining room, she had kicked off her stilettos, then thrown one and then the other at the wooden cabinet that held our fanciest dishes. The big wooden piece had shaken, but from what I could tell, nothing had broken. In the great room, she had grabbed a handful of coasters and now began tossing them, like Frisbees, at the artwork. One was tossed at the Gabriel Orozco; another one was flown at a mural by Minerva Cuevas. The only piece that was never used for target practice was a photograph of Frida Kahlo with a love letter scribbled to one of her many lovers. On the photograph, she wrote, “My Bartoli…I don’t know how to write love letters. But I wanted to tell you that my whole being opened for you. Since I fell in love with you, everything is transformed and is full of beauty…love is like an aroma, like a current, like rain.”

  In the kitchen my mother paused, then moved on, bypassing the easy pleasure of breaking water glasses and hand-painted ceramic plates. When I heard the door to the garden open, I rushed to the back window so I could see as well as hear the action. It was like a silent movie, the way my mother stomped around barefoot, her duchesse satin ball gown dragging in the grass, her arms thrown skyward like a Greek goddess summoning the elements. My father had tossed his jacket and his bow tie. His hands were clasped, and I did not need to read lips to know that he was begging her, imploring her to cálmate, querida, just please calm down.

  My father once told me that although my mother was thin, at heart she was an opera singer. “Her gift is delicate, and she protects it the only way she knows how—with layers and layers of drama,” he explained.

  I watched, still and unmoving, as my mother went straight for my father’s orchids, dropping pot after pot onto the floor. My father screamed when the first one broke, and for a minute, the look of rage was such that I thought, “That’s it. This is the time when he loses his cool and he hits her.” But he didn’t raise his hand to her; he never has and he promises he never will. Instead, he took her in his arms and she collapsed, crying on his shoulder. And that is where I left them, sitting on a mountain of dirt, orchid petals strewn around them like an exploded Hawaiian lei. My mother was crying and my father was holding her, and I knew that this was the end. The evening’s performance was over.

  My mother’s mood swings were just crazy, especially after Sergio went away to school. When she was happy, it was like the warmth of a thousand suns. When she was angry, it was all hellfire, like her fury could burn the whole house down. But the sadness was the worst. When she was depressed, it was like a slow plague that floated through our house. We couldn’t see it or touch it or smell it, but we could all eventually feel what she was feeling—the sadness, the weakness, the bewilderment, the helplessness. It was on those days, when we were all piled on the living room sofa watching Princess Diana or whatever heartbreaking video my mother had locked into, that I feared that it would all fall apart—my mother, my parents’ marriage, the oh-so-fragile sticks that made up the walls and roof and door of our family home.

  My mom often worked late, so a lot of nights it was just me and Papá for dinner. I didn’t mind. Dinners with my father were easy. He never bugged me about eating fattening foods, never urged me to wear more makeup or haga algo con su cabello, do something with “that hair.” When it was just us, a lot of times we ate in the study in front of the TV. We both loved soccer, and our favorite team was FC Barcelona. When we first started watching, my dad explained to me how Madrid’s team had deep roots in Spain’s fascist past. But the Barcelona team was more than just a bunch of guys who got together to play soccer. They were freedom fighters and idealists; the team symbolized a belief in equality and good sportsmanship. “Son hombres,” my father said of the Barça players, “who understand both the art of living and the art of the game.” He turned to me then and said, “Like us.”

  In real life, I was hardly sporty—a little tennis here and there, a lot of swimming in the summer. But I liked watching soccer with my father, I liked the way he equated our family with the Barcelona team. He didn’t have to say it in order for me to get that his lessons about the sport were actually lessons about life. So much of how we lived seemed outsized and unreal. I loved the practicality and easy-to-follow nature of sports.

  We were watching Barcelona demolish Manchester United and eating a Hawaiian pizza when my mother walked in.

  “You’re home early, querida,” he said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

  I got up to hug her. “Hola, Mami. Qué tal?” What’s up?

  She looked over at our pizza that had been smothered with crushed tomatoes, cheese, ham, pineapple, and bacon. “That looks good,” she said. “Can I have a slice?”

  This was unusual. My mother never ate pizza. I don’t mean she ate it once in a while or when we were on vacation. I mean she ate it never.

  My father and I glanced at each other as she quickly gobbled down one slice, then another. “Qué sabroso,” she said. “Where have you been all my life?”

  She was wearing a long tank top, yoga pants, and flip-flops. It was a look she would never wear beyond the four walls of our home. “Illusions must be maintained,” she always said by way of explanation when she took two hours to get ready just for brunch or Plaza La Rosa, her favorite mall.

  My father was drinking a Dos Equis, and my mother said, “Oooh, I’d like one of those.”

  Another head scratcher. My mother never drank beer. Tequila with a squeeze of lime, yes. A glass of champagne, occasionally. She said it so often, it was almost a mantra—beer makes you fat. Tonight, as she popped open a bottle of brew, there was no such talk. “I only wish your brother, Sergio, was here,” she said, smiling wistfully. “But he’s not, so we will fill him in later. There’s something I want to tell you.”

  Then it occurred to me—she was sick. Cancer. It was the only explanation. She was home from work early, with a freshly scrubbed face and a hankering for pizza and beer. I started to cry before she could even get the words out. “Please, no,” I whispered.

  My mother leapt up and wrapped her arms around me. “What is it? Are you pregnant?”

  My father sprung up then, and with tears in his eyes, he said, “Camilla, no. We’ll support you, but God knows, this isn’t what we wanted for you.”

  Mami was crying then too, holding me in her arms and rocking me back and forth. “We’ll manage,” she kept saying. “We’ll manage.”

  It all happened so fast—the crying, the hugging, the despair. What can I say? We’re kind of a high-strung family.

  In my head, we were still talking about my mother’s illness. “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “About what? The pregnancy?” she looked confused. “You just told me.”

  It was my turn to be confused. “I’m not pregnant. I’m talking about the cancer.”

  “Ay Dios, no!” my father moaned. “Who has cancer?”

  I nodded toward my mother. “Mami has cancer.”

  She looked horrified. “I don’t have cancer!”

  We all took a deep breath then.

  “Let’s start over,” my mother said, taking a seat on the couch. “Sit with me.”

  I sat next to my father and leaned my head on his shoulder. Whatever it was, it had to be bad. Carolina del Valle was eating pizza, drinking beer, and wearing sweats. That was Armageddon behavior in my house.

  “This is going to sound funny,” my mother began, “but I’ve decided to seek treatment for my…anxiety. I used to think it was an occupational hazard—to be an actress meant that your heart had no skin, no covering. But I’ve been talking to Albita and my agent Samantha and Andy…”

  “Your hair guy?” my father asked, clearly hurt that he hadn’t been included in the conversation.

  “What other Andrew could I mean?” my mother asked. “He gives very good advice. He never breaks a confidence. He’s
like a bartender, I swear.”

  She continued, “For a long time, I’ve been wanting to go see a therapist. But I’ve been afraid that because of my…notoriety, anyone I saw in Mexico City would sell my secrets for a quick buck. But Samantha found me someone in LA—a Latina woman who has a lot of celebrity clients. I spoke to the therapist on the phone today. And what I’d like to do is go out to LA for a week after this novela wraps. She’ll clear her schedule, and I’ll meet with her every day. At the end of the week, we’ll make a plan for the next steps.”

  My father looked sad but relieved at the same time. “I’ll come with you, mi amor,” he said.

  “I’ll come too,” I chimed in.

  My mother smiled. “You have school.”

  I shrugged. “I can miss school. No big deal. I want to be with you…and I kind of would love a trip to LA.”

  She shook her head. “No can do, sweetheart. One, your brother would kill me if I took you out of school for no good reason. He still has dreams of you following in his footsteps to Oxford.”

  I didn’t not want to go to Oxford. I was a pretty good student. But I wasn’t Sergio smart. He was always laser focused with his education, like his genius was this giant butterfly, flapping around his brain, desperately trying to get out. I didn’t see far into the future the way my brother did. I had no big ideas, no dreams or schemes about my grown-up life. I just woke up each day and tried to be as happy as possible. You couldn’t exactly put that on a college application.

  Mami took my hand and said, “The other reason that you can’t come is because this trip is not a vacation. Araceli, the doctor in LA, has already told me that in looking to manage my emotions, we will probably dredge some tough stuff up. I may feel worse before I feel better.”

  Having seen Mami at her worst, I understood and didn’t press it any further.

  “Well, I, for one, feel better already,” Papa said, wrapping my mother in a tight embrace. “I’m very proud of you for taking this step, cariña.”

  “I’m proud of myself,” she said, kissing him on the lips.

  “Oh, come on! Get a room!” I called out, tossing a throw pillow at them.

  My mother laughed, her just-for-us, not-for-TV laugh, and said, “Okay, it’s Friday and the night is young. What should we do?”

  “Let’s watch a movie,” my father said.

  I jumped up and bolted for the drawers of DVDs in the armoire. “Entre Amantes!” I said, holding up the case with the bodice-ripper cover.

  My mother groaned. “That old thing!”

  “Okay,” I said, putting it back. “You’re home early. We love you. So you choose.”

  My mother walked to the cabinet and searched, for what seemed like forever.

  “This one,” she said, holding up a DVD.

  “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?” I asked. “That movie is a gazillion years old. Isn’t it black-and-white?”

  “It’s not that old,” my mother protested. “It’s in color.”

  My father smiled and asked me, “You’ve never seen it, right?”

  “Never.”

  “Trust me,” my mother said, and smiled. “It’s perfect.”

  And it was.

  One afternoon, after my mother’s trip to LA, Patrizia came over after school and said, “Your mom seems like she’s in a good mood.”

  I explained that my mother was doing great. “Her meetings went really well.”

  “Do you think your mother ever slept with someone to get a part?”

  “What?”

  “Happens all the time in that industry. Pay to Play, my Dad calls it. But, seriously, she’s good? No breaking glass? No diva tantrums?”

  I muttered, “Come on, Patti. Stop it.” I regretted telling her about my mother, anything personal about our family.

  When she came back from the bathroom, she held up a bottle of pills.

  “I’m sure these happy pills help, right? Want one?”

  “What?” I jumped up, trying to wrest the bottle away from her. “Give those back.”

  She popped open the bottle, took out two pills, and washed them down with a swig of Coke Zero.

  I knew that my mother’s therapist had prescribed some pills for her. I didn’t know what. It hadn’t even occurred to me to search her bathroom and look.

  I put the pills back and thought about what Sergio would say if he was around. But I didn’t have to imagine. I only had to remember what he’d told me at Christmas: “You’re better than that, Cammi. Mejor sola que mal acompañada. It’s better to be alone than in bad company. You have to know how to cut that kind of person out of your life.”

  —

  I had managed to forget about the whole situation with Patti and Mami’s pills, until I came home from school one day and it was like someone had died. Usually when I walked into the house, there were ten people: Albita and her team in the kitchen, Diana making kale soup for my mother, and the security guys watching soccer on TV in the study. The show’s wardrobe designers sometimes came by for fittings, so it wasn’t unusual to see them or Marta, my mother’s personal shopper, in my mother’s dressing room with shopping bags full of clothes for my mother to try on.

  But today there was no one cooking in the kitchen. There was no music playing, no soccer game on the TV. My father and mother sat in the formal dining room, the one we used only for holidays and big dinner parties. Also seated at the long, hand-carved wood table were people I recognized but rarely saw. Samantha Gonzalez, my mother’s agent. Javi Cortes, my mom’s PR rep.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  My father handed me a stack of tabloid newspapers.

  My heart sank when I saw the first paper—a big picture of a medicine bottle with my mother’s name on it. Prescription: diazepam for anxiety.

  My mother looked weak. “Of course, all this press is making me a little anxious.”

  The headlines just got worse and worse:

  CAROLINA DEL VALLE, THE NOT-SO-HAPPY HOUSEWIFE

  THE SWEETHEART OF TEXCOCO IS MEX-CUKOO, CUCKOO!

  CAROLINA DISTRAUGHT AND ON DRUGS, SAYS, “IVAN SANCOCHO IS MY ONE TRUE LOVE.”

  My mother was crying, and my father looked like he wanted to hurt someone. Albita was making cups of coffee, which I noticed she was spiking with heavy cream and whiskey.

  Javi said, “Let me put this all into perspective. Is it hurtful? Yes. Do you feel vulnerable and exposed? Yes. Am I the least bit concerned? No.”

  “Me neither,” Samantha chimed in. Then she mimed to Albita that she’d like more whiskey in her coffee.

  Javi stood in front of my parents as if he were making a presentation at a sales conference. “People are talking about you more than they have in ages, Carolina. There is no such thing as bad press, darling.”

  “Exactly!” Samantha said. “We will get in front of this, and we will control the story.”

  Javi snapped his fingers. “Maybe we can use this to get you a spokesperson deal for a pharmaceutical company.”

  Samantha nodded enthusiastically. “That’s not a bad idea.”

  My mother and father looked up and said, almost in unison, “No.”

  Samantha jumped sides more quickly than you could say “flip-flop.” “It’s a terrible idea. No spokesperson deals at this time.”

  My mother held up all the supermarket rags with photos of her and Ivan Sancocho kissing. Old photos from telenovelas she had filmed before I was born.

  “What I hate is how this is bringing all of those old rumors back,” she said.

  “That’s all they are. Rumors,” my father murmured lovingly.

  I knew then that there was something I needed to do. Find Patrizia. Confront her for selling secrets about my mother. And possibly kill her.

  The next morning, I called Patrizia. Before I could say a word, she said, “Hey, I’m sorry about all the bad press about your mom,” her voice dripping with fake sincerity.

  “Really, Patti,” I said, trying not to sound
as angry as I felt.

  My father said that whenever he was doing a voice-over for a character who was very powerful, he sat very still. “Powerful people don’t fidget,” he said. “Fidgeting, nerves, a lack of confidence. You don’t need to see a person to know they’re losing it. You can hear it in their voice.”

  I took a deep breath and said, “I really need to talk to you. Can you meet me? Today?”

  “Sure thing, C,” she said. “I’ll be right over.”

  “No,” I told her. “I’ll come to you.”

  My mother was taking a few days off work. The network didn’t mind because the TexCoco studio was a zoo. Reporters and photographers swarmed the place. They came from, literally, all over the world—not just Mexico but Miami and all over Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. There were even stringers for the gossip rags in Moscow and eastern Europe, where telenovelas were huge and my mother was a big star.

  After I got off the phone with Patrizia, I found Mami sitting in the study, playing cards with my father.

  “Not on your iPad?” I asked. Normally my mother was glued to the thing, a dozen windows open with fashion and beauty sites and all her favorite online shopping.

  She smiled. “Too tempting to Google myself. I’m cutting myself off for a few days.”

  I kissed her forehead and said, “It’ll be okay, Mami.”

  “Of course it will,” she answered. “It’s just, right now things suck. But you know what they say: la vida es dura pero yo soy más dura.”

  Life is tough, but I am tougher.

  “Where are you off to?” my father asked. I could tell he had a good hand because of the little smirk on his face. My father could disguise his voice a hundred ways, but he had no game when it came to poker.