Tamara picked up.
“I need you,” Sylvia said. “Please bring a camera.”
As she waited for her friend, Sylvia stared out of Becky’s window. She could see a shimmering strip of yellow sea, forty miles away, glowing with the impossibility of hope.
Chapter 1
Of all people, Mercy Amado (nació Fuerte) should know that happiness is a decision. You simply cast aside that which you are tired of looking at, weary of battling, unable to accept and focus on that which remains. She had to have learned something during the span of her lifetime, with its marital therapy, grief counseling, past life-regression, born-again Christianity, flirtation with Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism and atheism. When did you figure it all out? When did you understand the world? When did God take you by the hand and explain it all to you, elaborating that you were indeed His child—special, gifted, divine—and apologize for the mess along the way?
Mercy dabbed the concealer over her age spots. She streaked the crease of her eyelid with gray, rimmed the edges with black. She placed her iridescent violet contact lenses on before she stretched her lashes with mascara. She used a plum lip liner and a slightly lighter lipstick. She covered that with a shimmering lip gloss. She ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing the layers for fullness. She wasn’t sure she liked its recent coloring, it seemed too dark and strident for the frosted tips she had requested. Well, at least the gray was gone. A quick peek in the full-length mirror to ensure that the waist of her purple sheath cinched neatly, that the hem hit exactly where it should, five inches above the knee. Yes, very nice. She would slip on the silver heels when Nataly arrived to drive her to her birthday celebration. Sixty years seemed so long ago.
It didn’t matter: it was her birthday and an afternoon with her three daughters was ahead. She decided to be happy.
She always told her students—encouraged, implored, cajoled them—to do their best. Had she done her best? Had she given her daughters what they had needed? Mercy set her silver heels at the screen door of her modest apartment. Either she hadn’t or she had, and it still wasn’t good enough.
“You look fabulous,” Nataly said, entering the apartment, the screen door slapping shut behind her. “Are we ready to go?” Nataly did a mock rhumba as she danced her way to her mother and squeezed her tight. “Happy birthday, Mama.”
Mercy knew it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair—for years she had tamped it down as best as she could—but the sight of her baby always gave her unalloyed pleasure. Thirty-two years old, Nataly was still her puppy, young, playful, endearing and joyful. (Her favorite! There, she confessed! But no one else had to know, right?) Mercy noticed the embroidering on the hem and seam of the jeans and knew it to be Nataly’s own. The sheer black blouse she wore, with a black bustier underneath, were both gifts from Mercy. “Stay young forever,” she always wanted to tell her, to hold her tight. Don’t give it up, don’t give it away, don’t squander it. Hold on to it.
Which is what Mercy would have done, if only she’d known how.
Nataly leaned over the end table and said. “Why do you still keep this picture of me out? I hate it. I look so—stupid.”
Mercy said, “I like it.”
Nataly shook her head and sat down heavily. It had recently struck her as odd and unfair even that she lived in a better apartment than her mother. How had that happened? Well, of course she knew the answer to that. But still. She hated her mother’s exuberant lifestyle squeezed into a one-bedroom, one-bath in a still-acceptable corner of Santa Ana. Sixty years old! Would this be her own story? Nataly batted the thought swiftly away.
“Do you want your gift now or at the restaurant?”
Mercy made a face. “Why don’t you give it to me now, and I can open it again at the restaurant.”
Her mother’s own logic. Nataly dangled a gift bag in her mother’s direction. “No card?” her mother demanded.
“The appropriate response is ‘thank you’ and you know I’m terrible at cards. I’m good at other things though.” Nataly heard a slightly disapproving snort.
Mercy reached into the gift bag and pulled out a wad of pink tissue paper.
“Careful!” Nataly said.
Mercy unwrapped the tissue paper, revealing a photograph of her and her three daughters. The frame was Nataly’s artwork, found objects. Among the fabric, tatting and embroidery, Mercy recognized markers of her daughters’ and her own life there—coins for Celeste, braided thread for Nataly, chalk for her, plastic brown babies for Sylvia. Within the frame Mercy, (God, how beautiful I had been once, how old I’ve gotten, take me out and shoot me) smiling proudly into the camera, her infant Nataly in her lap, Sylvia and Celeste clutching her side, smiling wildly as if the new baby were their very own.
Those three little girls were now all gone.
Nataly wouldn’t have any understanding of that. By thirty-two, Mercy had been married for twelve years, and her daughters were already growing up. Especially Celeste. Mercy stood abruptly and went to the bathroom, to see what she could salvage of her eye makeup.
On the brief flight from San Jose to John Wayne Airport, Celeste Amado entertained herself with a Bloody Mary. Tomato juice to make her feel virtuous, lime and spices to prick her tongue, vodka to make the flight as smooth as possible. She limited herself to one drink per flight.
On the plastic tray bobbing slightly in front of her, Celeste sifted once more through the statements Sylvia had sent her. Columns and columns of figures: automatic deposits, transfers, withdrawals. The statements were all very clear to Celeste. Part of the reason she was so successful was that she had no emotional attachment to money. What she cared about was how people spread the muck around, as Francis Bacon said. Celeste knew she was right about what she had found. What she didn’t know was whether Sylvia would hold that information against her.
Sylvia checked the clock on her dash: she was running late to the airport. She was always running late. She had always thought of herself as a punctual person, punctuality being the courtesy of kings and all that, but found herself always late—to the parent teacher conferences, to school registration, mailing off payments. In general, late to the party. She groaned at the traffic on the 5 Freeway heading south (why had she followed Jack’s directions? She knew since childhood the 5 was dense with congestion and fumes. And thick with billboards—corporate graffiti, she liked to call them). Sylvia cheered herself with the thought that Celeste’s flight would run late—and realized as she drove past the Matterhorn in Anaheim that she’d been listening to Radio Disney all the way down from Pasadena.
Nataly admired the tilt of her mother’s heels and the shimmer in her tights before closing the passenger door of her car.
“The Ritz or bust, Ma,” she said. She headed towards Laguna Beach, skirting Santa Ana’s Main Place, rejecting Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza, heedless of the lure of Newport Beach’s Fashion Island. Nataly despised Orange County’s shrines of ostentation and their label fixation. That shit was all Celeste.
“Have you heard from your father?” her mother said.
Nataly glared in her mother’s direction and swerved to miss a small truck changing lanes. “No. Not recently. Should I have?”
Her
