Lost Ones

by Nicole French

  I blink. “Sorry,” I say and follow my mother into the house.

  It’s empty except for a small woman with black hair and dark skin who pops into the hallway carrying a dust cloth.

  “Hello,” Mom greets her slowly, speaking in very loud, slow words. “You must be the new housekeeper. I’m Cheryl, Jerry and Cece’s daughter. This is my daughter, Layla.”

  “Martina,” the woman says cautiously, although she offers a kind smile.

  Martina leaves the cloth on the entry table and accepts my handshake, although Mom doesn’t offer one. The woman looks at me curiously and a little bit knowingly. I wonder if she’s heard about my dad.

  “Hello,” she says in thickly accented English.

  “Where are you from?” I ask. Mom looks at me sharply, but doesn’t say anything.

  This time Martina’s smile is more genuine. “Panama City,” she says. “Habla español?”

  “No, she does not,” Mom cuts in. “Her father is Brazilian, not Hispanic.”

  I frown at her, the way she says “Hispanic” like it’s a dirty word. Like it’s something bad.

  “Actually,” I tell Martina, “estoy..ap-apren…diendo. Es correcto?” When Martina nods at my bad phrasing, I smile. “I’m learning,” I say again in English. “Maybe you can help me practice.”

  Martina smiles brightly, but when she catches my mother’s sharp look, she picks up her cloth and murmurs, “sí, sí” before darting into another room.

  “What do you mean, you’re learning Spanish?”

  I turn around to my mother with a hand on my hip. “I have to take a foreign language before I graduate. Spanish is way more practical than French. I started at the community college this summer, remember?”

  My mother quirks an eyebrow and taps a long finger on her lips. “I don’t remember that.”

  “That’s because you were swimming in your wine glass,” I mutter, too low for her to hear.

  “What’s that?”

  I look up. “Nothing. It was just something I did on the side.”

  “Does your father know?”

  I shrug. “He knew I was getting ahead with my degree. But Dad’s not here anymore, is he?”

  It’s the first time either of us has talked about the fact that this morning, my father took one plane while we took another. Permanently. Mom hasn’t mentioned it once, and it’s gotten to the point where I wonder if she’s actually aware this is happening. Or, I consider, maybe she’s happy. She wasn’t any more affectionate toward my dad than he was to her. My father has a tendency to micromanage every aspect of my life, and it drives me absolutely crazy. I wonder the extent to which he did that to Mom too.

  “Well,” Mom says. “It’s your life. I suppose you’ll be able to help us communicate better with the help, at any rate.”

  I roll my eyes. “Only if you stop saying things like ‘the help.’”

  “Layla, please. You’re in Pasadena now. Everyone says ‘the help.’”

  I wander into the foyer of the big house. I’ve been here a few times in my life, but we were pretty isolated in Washington. My mom’s family didn’t get along very well with my dad. They barely came to visit, and he didn’t usually come the few times we visited them. I’m as much a stranger in this house as I would be in any other.

  “Where are Grandma and Grandpa?” I wonder.

  Behind me, Mom’s nails tap the glass entry table. She checks her watch. “Well, right now is Mother’s weekly hair appointment, and Daddy’s probably at the golf course. They’ll be home in time for cocktails, I’m sure. They never miss that.”

  “Well, I’ll probably miss them, then,” I say as I grab one of my bags and start toward the stairs. “Do you know which room I’m in?”

  My mother’s hand closes around my wrist. “What do you mean, you’ll miss them?”

  I look down at her hand, then back up at her face. Not for the first time today, tension crackles between us.

  “I’m going out with a friend,” I inform her. “I’ll probably be back kind of late. Do you know if there are any spare keys?”

  Mom just stares at me, then releases my wrist. “Layla, this is a strange city. We just got here. I really think it would be best if you stayed here tonight and we relaxed with Grandma and Grandpa. I’m sure they’re excited to see you––”

  “Thrilled, clearly,” I say sarcastically. “That’s why they’re here waiting for us, right? The grand welcoming committee? Oh, wait, except they’re not.”

  Mom bites her perfectly painted lip and frowns. “That’s really uncalled for. But aside from that, you’re my daughter, and I’m saying you need to stay. You can’t just go out whenever you want.”

  I cross my arms, prepared to stare my mother down. I’ve been looking forward to this all week––the one bright spot in the tornado that just hit my family.

  “And I’m saying I’m twenty years old and can make those decisions for myself.” I tip my head, daring her to contradict me.

  Mom starts, and as I catch a glance at myself in the giant mirror over the doorway, I’m struck by what she must see. My dad does the same thing when he gives an order. Stands the same. Looks the same.

  Immediately, I drop my arms. “I’m going out,” I repeat. “You don’t like it, I can leave too.”

  The “too” echoes around this cavernous house like I shouted it into a quarry. Mom’s blue eyes squint, and for a second, I feel bad. It’s not fair for me to make those kinds of threats when her husband left her. But she doesn’t get to tell me what to do any more than he does. Not anymore.

  “All right, then,” she says at last. “I’ll get you a key before you leave.”

  ~

  A few hours later, I’m sitting on the front stoop while my mom is inside taking a bubble bath. Nico is supposed to be here in ten minutes, but I didn’t feel like being in that mausoleum anymore. Despite the fact that they are well into their seventies and could potentially break a hip or something, my grandparents lived in a house that’s full of sharp corners and glass fixtures. After I changed into a pair of shorts and a tank top that befit the hot weather, I was tiptoeing everywhere, terrified I’d accidentally knock over a vase or maybe a tasteful figurine. My grandmother has a thing for Chinese statues.

  Outside, the sunshine feels nice, but a little heavy. It’s not like the sun in Seattle, which always seems to be tempered by the trees. The sun in LA has nothing to mitigate it––no clouds, nothing. But right now the warmth of the sidewalk is a nice balance with the cold house behind me.

  It makes me wonder what New York is like right now. I thought about taking some of my earnings and going back this summer for a visit, but no one would have been there. My friends were all home or working full-time internships. I’d have stayed in a hotel, felt like a stranger in a city that’s closer to home than anywhere right now.

  Instead, I put my energy into getting ready for the school year, working and starting a major that I only regret when it makes me think of Nico. The combination of a few Latin American studies electives I took my freshman year start a nice foundation for a Latin American studies major, something I decided to pursue in May. It’s not something I’ve told anyone. But after I had said goodbye to this man, felt that gaping hole in my life without him, I realized Nico had still left me with something else: a desire to know more about the side of myself that my father had never been willing to show me. It’s not my fault that my dad hated his foreignness so much he refused to teach his only daughter about her cultural roots. I realized I could learn about them, at least some of them, on my own.

  I never told my dad that I had decided on this major instead of a more typical prelaw major like economics or English. I never told him I was taking Spanish at the community college instead of French with the check he gave me. I never told him that I’d switched my fall schedule, and I marveled at my luck that for once, he wasn’t micromanaging my classes.

  And now that he’s gone, I know why he didn’t pry. He was already o
ut the door.

  I kick at a rock on the front drive. Right now, the idea of taking intermediate Portuguese and Afro-Brazilian musicology sounds terrible. My dad and his “country” can fuck off. Maybe I can find some classes on Caribbean culture instead. I try not to think about why I might want to do that. Why another man’s ethnic background might sound better than my own. A man who also left me.

  A man who’s pulling up right now.

  Nico’s black Jeep rumbles up the hill with a roar. Every muscle in my body tenses, and just when the Jeep backfires, it’s like a spring is released inside me. I’m scrambling off the step, suddenly freed from this smoky haze I’ve been living in for the past few days, hell, for the past three months. Like it always did when he was around, my body moves without thinking.

  So before Nico’s even pulled to a stop, I’m sprinting down the lawn, reaching him just as he steps out of the car. I barely register the open, eager look on his face before I tackle him against the door, barely hear the boisterous “Hey!” from his deep voice as I grab him. But he reacts quickly. I’m swept off the ground as his big arms encircle my waist, and my arms wrap a death grip around his neck.

  Suddenly I’m crying. My chest shakes with the tears that have been trapped since Wednesday. I am surrounded by Nico. This body, this touch––everything from last spring is here. The wanting, the magnetic attraction, the rightness I always felt with him. How could I have forgotten his clean, masculine scent? The way his skin seems to radiate at least a degree or two above my body temperature? The way his shoulders fit exactly against the hollow of my cheek, underneath my arms?

  The answer is that I haven’t. Not really. These facts have been living like shadows in the back of my thoughts all summer, jumping out in my daydreams. But now he’s here, in the flesh, and it’s awakening all sorts of things that had gone dormant out of self-preservation.

  I sob. Hard, painful sobs that make my chest rattle. Even though he left me too, I know I’m safe here with him now. I know he’d never hurt me that way. He’d never make me feel as cold, as lonely, as my father did this morning when he boarded his plane with a wave, not a hug.

  One of Nico’s hands cradles my head against his shoulder, but he doesn’t let me touch the ground for one, ten, thirty seconds? It could have been ten minutes. A low hum vibrates through his chest while he sways me back and forth, and we squeeze the life out of each other while my tears flow.

  “It’s okay,” he murmurs into my hair. “It’s going to be okay. I got you, baby.”

  I let out my frustrations, my hurts, both from Nico’s absence and the loss of my family. I let out everything onto his big warm shoulder until finally my tears abate. Then he sets me down in the still-open driver’s seat.

  “Hey,” he says softly, pushing my hands from my face so he can run his thumbs under my eyes and brush away the last of my tears.

  “Shit,” I mutter, making him laugh.

  And for the first time, I finally see him. The familiar square jaw. The wide, friendly smile that seems brighter than the sun. The chocolate-brown eyes that twinkle under thick lashes.

  “I haven’t seen you in three months, and your first word is ‘shit’?” Nico asks with a grin.

  I laugh and roll my eyes. “No. I’m just mad because I probably have mascara all over my face. And you look…well, you look like you.”

  Meaning he looks perfect. Because he really does. I didn’t think Nico could look better than he did in New York, but I have to admit: California looks good on him. His skin has gotten a little darker from the sun and has a new glow that sets off his bright smile and dark eyes against the white of his t-shirt and backward Yankees cap. His plain t-shirt strains against the curves of his biceps and pectorals. He worked out in New York, but he looks like he’s really been going at it this summer. His muscles practically cut through the cotton.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says simply as he wipes away the remnants of my smeared makeup.

  He pulls down the visor over the dashboard so I can look in the mirror. It looks like he got whatever was there. I look sad and blotchy, but at least the reddened skin makes my blue eyes pop.

  I turn back to him, suddenly nervous. “What, um, I––” It’s so strange. I have no idea what to say.

  Nico looks at me, and his gaze drops to my mouth. Unconsciously, his tongue slips out and licks at his full bottom lip.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says again, this time more softly. “I forget––I mean, I didn’t forget––but I…shit. I always thought I knew what you looked like until I saw you again. You knock me out every time.”

  He steps in between my legs and takes my hands in his. Tentatively, he fingers my knuckles, then looks at my lips again. He bends down.

  But just as he’s about to kiss me, I catch movement in the window behind him. My mother, standing in the frame with a glass of wine, watching the whole thing. And the look on her porcelain face is not good. She looks scared. And more than that, she looks impossibly sad.

  It’s then I realize what I’m doing. Throwing myself at a man who left me and cut me off all summer. In front of my grandparents’ neighbors. In front of my mother, who’s got to be dealing with her own pain, even if she doesn’t show it.

  What the hell am I doing?

  Nico, sensing my change in mood, stands up straight and drops my hands. He steps away, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “Ah…yeah,” he says, suddenly looking around the neighborhood uneasily. “You want to scoot over? Then we can get out of here.”

  “Where are we going?” I ask as I follow his request.

  Nico gets into the driver’s seat. “I want to show you LA, baby,” he says and starts up the Jeep.

  ~

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nico

  I actually hadn’t considered where I would take Layla, despite the fact that I had days to figure it out. I had a few ideas in mind, but they all flew out of my head when I saw her sitting on that step, looking more beautiful than I’d ever imagined for the past few months. Her hair seemed darker, shinier. Her lips seemed fuller, her legs longer. And by the time I’d parked and she tackled me against the car door, I couldn’t think at all, couldn’t fuckin’ breathe because she felt so good.

  The trees looked brighter. The unnaturally green grass rich people water to death looked like it was in fuckin’ technicolor. With Layla in my arms, I felt like I’d been seeing black and white for the last three months only to have the whole world turn into one of those new 3-D movies.

  Then she started to cry, and it was over. All my ideas that this was going to be some kind of beautiful reunion, that we were going to pick right up where we left off, vanished. The only thing I could see or hear or feel or sense was her. The only thing I wanted to do was take away her pain.

  But how the fuck do I do that?

  Luckily, she solves my problem as I start driving: “Let’s go to the beach.”

  I nod. “You got it, baby.”

  She’s quiet for most of the thirty-minute drive. This is a Layla I don’t know very well. She was never a loudmouth, but she was always full of questions, things she wanted to know about me. Since the roar of the road doesn’t make for good conversation, she just tugs on her long hair and gazes at the palm trees, the concrete buildings, the traffic as we take the back roads through downtown LA.

  I peek at her when we idle at stoplights, trying to spot any differences. They’re small, but they’re there. Her hair is a little bit longer, dropping past her shoulder blades in a loose braid I want to wrap around my fist. She’s gained back the weight she lost last spring––yeah, I noticed that as soon as she stood up. With the tight shirt and tiny shorts that show off most of her legs, with her curvy body pressed up against me, I really noticed that.

  You horny asshole. Get it together. She is not here for that.

  But the biggest difference is in the way she holds herself. The smile that was all over her face when I arrived is gone. Whether it’s the shit that
’s going down in her family or something else, there’s a sadness that wasn’t there before. Her eyes look more tired than a twenty-year-old’s should. Every now and then they close, her long black lashes hovering over her cheeks like fans for one, two seconds before they lift again. I know that look. It’s a look that says, “I’m just trying to fuckin’ deal.”

  It’s not until I’ve exited he freeway onto Sepulveda and have just turned onto Ardmore that I realize I’ve been so absorbed by her, I’ve driven on autopilot straight to my neighborhood. Shit. Thirty minutes with Layla, and I’m already losing my head. This is the last place I should be taking her.

  I could drive north to Malibu, maybe, or south to Newport or Laguna Beach. Maybe we could hike Griffith Park and make out behind the Hollywood sign. Anywhere but here. But instead, I find myself parking around the block from my building knowing that even if I can’t take her there, I can at least show her the places that have become my places here in LA, even if they aren’t quite home. Just as much as I ever did, I want Layla to know me, to see me for what I am.

  I didn’t realize how much I missed that feeling until I pulled up to her grandparents’ fancy house.

  “Where are we?” she asks as she gets out of the car.

  I close the door and take her hand. She glances at our entwined fingers, but doesn’t pull away. It’s natural. I don’t think I could be next to her and not touch her.

  “Manhattan Beach,” I say as we start toward the main strip.

  She gives me a look. “Out of all the places to live in LA, you ended up in Manhattan Beach? Don’t you think that says something?”

  I give her a sly grin. “You can take the boy out of New York, right?”

  She chuckles, but she looks a little sad.

  “This place actually makes a decent sandwich,” I say as we pass Becker’s, one of the only basic delis for miles. “Over there they make açai bowls and smoothies, but they don’t really fill you up. That’s my new gym––it’s not my old spot back in Hell’s Kitchen, but they have a good trainer.”