Free Tell Me Something True by Leila Cobo Page B

how.
    From behind my lens, I wondered how it was that I’d lived here an entire childhood and never knew these things, never saw
     them, and I inhaled his cigarette smoke with him, tuning into the cadence of his breathing, the rhythm of his words.
    When I was a little girl, my mother would complain incessantly about cigarettes and the smoke, but now, I find it comforting.
     When I’m in Los Angeles, it reminds me of my father, and I can picture him, smoking and reading in the library. When I finally
     snapped a picture of Juan José, wisps of smoke clung to his hair as he talked and gestured with his glowing Marlboro.

Gabriella

    G abriellita, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Nini says over breakfast. “We’re tearing the old house down.”
    “But why?” Gabriella says, stunned.
    “I can’t rent it. It’s too big and in too bad a shape. I can’t afford to just have it lying there. Mi amor, I’m not going
     back to live there again. Neither is your uncle. We’re going to tear it down next month. Your uncle is going to make a building,
     and one of the apartments will be yours,” she adds comfortingly.
    Gabriella looks at her cereal bowl, the milk stuck at her throat. She feels like crying, even though she’s never spent any
     time in the house. By the time she started coming here, Nini had already moved to the apartment and the house had become home
     to her uncle’s architecture firm. He would let Gabriella visit, and she’d play with the turtles and the fish in the garden
     pond and go up and down the curved marble staircase that swept into the foyer.
    “I’m going to live here when I grow up,” she would always tell Nini, because she always yearned for a house with a sweeping
     staircase like this one. She had a picture of her mother descending the staircase on her wedding day, one hand on the balustrade,
     the other holding the long train of her ivory wedding gown.
    The dress was Nini’s, and Nini had promised Gabriella the dress would one day be hers, too. In Gabriella’s mind, the dress
     went with the house, with the staircase, with the huge garden, with the fountain and the orchids that grew on the acacia branches.
    “I’ll buy it from you,” she’d been saying about the house, even as a little girl. “And I’ll fix it up and I can sleep in my
     mother’s room and you can sleep in your old room again.”
    But the upkeep of the house had proven too much even for her uncle. He’d thrown in the towel when rain leaked in, for the
     hundredth time, after a particularly big storm. That time it got into the electrical system, causing a short circuit and making
     all the computers in the firm crash.
    The house has been empty for five years. But now, for the first time, Gabriella realizes the difference between simply being
     empty and not being there at all.
    “Nini, can you give me the keys?” she asks. “I want to go and look around for one last time.”
    “Of course, nena,” says Nini. She reaches across the table and brushes a stray hair from Gabriella’s face. “I know what you
     mean. I cry every time I go in there and think of what it was.”
    In the afternoon she walks slowly up the hill, the keys tucked in her jeans pocket. The house is only a few blocks away, but
     farther up, on a street where stately homes have succumbed to luxury condominiums. The house is not the last one standing,
     but it looks ready to go. The stone walls, now covered with moss, give it a haunted mansion air it never had in its haughtier
     days of parties on the terrace staffed by white-clad waiters bearing silver trays. Even the grass on the curb is overrun with
     weeds. But the house, windowless on its entrance side, seems impervious to the humiliation the years have brought. Gabriella
     slowly turns the key to the top lock of the huge metal door—her grandfather had insisted on a metal door as a safeguard against
     savvy thieves with God knows what kind of tools—then to the bottom dead bolt, and