by Jason Starr
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why do you even care about work right now?” “What am I supposed to do? Not go on with my life?”
“You act like . . . I don’t know . . . like you don’t care. I mean, I’m telling you I’m worried. I’m afraid he’s going to come back tonight and—”
“He’s not coming back.” “How do you know?”
“Because why would he? That’s a surefire way to get caught, rob the place you already robbed.”
“Yeah, and what makes you think the guy’s a freaking Rhodes scholar? We’re talking about a criminal here, for God’s sake. He’s not necessarily thinking logically.”
Adam considered this, then said, “Even if he does come back, he’s not getting in. We’re changing the locks in an hour, the alarm guy’s coming down later to change the code. There’s no way anybody’s getting into this house again.”
“You don’t know th— And can you stop staring at that thing?” she nearly screamed. “It’s so goddamn rude.”
Now he looked at her and said, “What? What do you want me to do?” “I’m scared,” she said. “I don’t think it’s enough.”
“It’s a state-of-the-art alarm system.” “That didn’t help us last night.”
“Okay, I have an idea, let’s get a watchdog.”
He was saying this facetiously. She was allergic to dogs, and he knew she had no intention of taking immunotherapy shots for the rest of her life.
“Maybe we should move,” she said.
“What?” He couldn’t believe she was even suggesting this. She knew how much he loved the house, how much it meant to him.
“The house is worth a lot now,” she said. “Marissa’s out of school, will be on her own eventually, and I’ve been wanting to move anyway. We could move someplace small, a condo maybe in the city or—”
“You’re out of your mind,” Adam said.
“Why does wanting to move mean I’m out of my mind?”
“Because our house was robbed,” he said, “it’s not like it’s been contaminated with nuclear waste. How many other houses in the neighborhood have been robbed over the past couple of years? Did everybody else just pack up and move?”
“Everybody else didn’t kill one of the robbers.”
Adam glared at her hard and said, “Okay, here we go, finally, I knew this was coming. I’d appreciate it if you stopped it with your passive-aggressiveness and evasiveness. If you have something to say, please just come out and say it.”
“You know exactly what I want to say.”
“Then what’re you waiting for? Come on, let’s go, I want to hear it.”
Her lips moved and her mouth started to open a few times, as if she were about to speak, but she kept catching herself. Then she finally let out a deep breath and said, “This is ridiculous,” and marched out of the room melodramatically.
“Brilliant,” Adam said, and he picked up a pillow off the settee and flung it across the room. Then his BlackBerry started ringing and he saw lauren on the caller ID. Snapping into his upbeat work persona, he said, “Hey, Lauren, what a coincidence, I was just about to shoot you off an e-mail.”
FROM THE very beginning, the Blooms had been very good to Gabriela. Twelve years ago, when she came to New York from Ecuador, she was just nineteen and very shy, and she spoke only a few words of English, and she didn’t think she’d ever find a good job in America. But the Blooms hired her because Gabriela’s sister, Beatrice, who was working for another family in Forest Hills Gardens, told them that Gabriela was a good maid and asked them to please give her a chance. Gabriela was very grateful to the Blooms for giving her a good job when no one else would, and she always told them how she hoped to repay them someday.
Although Gabriela had worked as a maid for two years at home in Quito, she’d never had to clean a house the size of the Blooms’. The first day she felt like such a fool; she didn’t even know how to turn on the vacuum cleaner. Some families might’ve lost patience and fired her right away, but the Blooms were very kind and understanding. The first few days, Mrs. Bloom cleaned the whole house with her, explaining how everything was done and where everything went, and she didn’t lose patience at all even though Gabriela couldn’t understand most of what she was saying.
When Gabriela started to work for the Blooms, Marissa was just ten years old, in fourth grade. Marissa had a babysitter who still took care of her part of the time, but sometimes when the babysitter was sick Mrs. Bloom would ask Gabriela to go pick Marissa up from school or take her to play with her friends. Gabriela liked Marissa, she was such a sweet little girl, and she liked Mr. Bloom, too. Sometimes he sat down with her in the kitchen and helped her with her English, teaching her new words. He was a very good man who worked hard and who loved his family very much. She hoped that someday she could find a man for herself like Mr. Bloom and have a family as nice as his.
Her first few months in New York, Gabriela was living with Beatrice and her family in Jackson Heights, Queens, sharing a room with Beatrice’s daughter. But then at a party one night she met a Mexican man named Angel. He was very handsome and a very hard worker. He was a waiter at a diner in Manhattan, but he had big dreams. He wanted to open his own restaurant one day. He took her dancing in the Village a few times, and he knew how to do the mambo. They started doing everything together—going out all the time, going to Jones Beach, or just staying home at his apartment—and that summer he got her pregnant. He didn’t want to get married, which was okay with her. He was young, just twenty, and she knew how scared young guys got. She thought she’d have the baby and then in a couple of years they’d get married.
But when Gabriela was getting ready to have her baby, Angel disappeared. At first she thought something bad happened to him; maybe he got hurt or something. The people at the diner said they didn’t know where he was, he just stopped coming to work. She got Beatrice’s husband, Manny, to go looking for him, but he couldn’t find him anywhere, and then she called the police. They said that chances were he probably just ran away. She couldn’t believe that Angel would do something like that, but then, a few days before she had to go to the hospital, Manny found out from one of Angel’s friends that Angel was living in the Bronx with a new girlfriend.
Gabriela had her baby, a beautiful girl, Manuela, named after Gabriela’s grandmother. She was worried that it would be hard to work and take care of her baby at the same time, but the Blooms were so nice, letting her take Manuela to work with her every day. The Blooms got her more work with other families in the neighborhood, and pretty soon she was working five days a week, making enough money to move into her own apartment in Jackson Heights. For the next few years, Gabriela was working hard, making money, but it was hard not having a man in her life and a father for Manuela.
When Manuela was about five years old, Gabriela met Juan. He was forty-two, his wife had died of cancer, and he had two boys. He wasn’t very handsome—he was fat and had a big crooked nose—but he was a very good man and he loved Gabriela and always bought her flowers and told her how beautiful she was. When he asked her to marry him, she said yes.
Everything seemed so happy; she finally had a good man to take care of her and her daughter. Then, one morning, she was working at the Blooms’ when she got a phone call from her sister. Beatrice was screaming hysterically, “Dios mio, Dios mio, Dios mio!” and then she told Gabriela that a taxi had hit Juan while he was crossing a street in Manhattan. Mrs. Bloom took Gabriela to the hospital, but when they got there Juan was already dead.
Gabriela knew that Juan had been her true love and that she would never find such a good man ever again. She was sad for a long time, and even though the doctors gave her medicine to make her mind feel better, it was still hard to get out of bed. She used to laugh and smile all the time, and people had always told her how funny she was, but after what had happened to Juan it seemed like there was nothing to laugh about anymore. Some days she didn’t feel like going to her job, so she just didn’t go. Ma
ny families would’ve fired her, but the Blooms were very kind. They sent her flowers and called her every day to check on her and tried to get her to talk to the doctors and take her medicine.
About a month after Juan was killed, Gabriela was finally able to get out of bed and go to work every day again, but she didn’t feel the same and she didn’t take care of herself the way she used to. She didn’t care how she dressed or how her hair looked, and she stopped putting on makeup and she got very fat. If she wasn’t so sad and so lonely and feeling so bad about herself all the time, she probably would never have wanted to be with a man like Carlos.
She met Carlos on the subway. He was sitting next to her and he asked her if she wanted a piece of gum. She said no thank you, and then he said, “Then how ’bout we go to dinner instead?” She didn’t think he was very handsome, but at least he made her smile, so she gave him her phone number.
The next night he took her to a very nice Chinese restaurant, and during the meal he held her hand and told her how pretty and sexy she looked. They went out a few more times, and then she went back to his apartment. In bed he asked her to do coke with him. She’d never done any drugs before, but she was a little drunk so she decided to try it. It made her feel good and—for a little while at least—like she didn’t have any problems at all.
She started going out with Carlos a few nights a week. He didn’t have a job, and she knew he was probably some kind of criminal, but she didn’t want to ask where all his money was coming from. She was just happy to not be alone anymore and she liked how Carlos bought her presents all the time—jewelry, clothes—and she liked having a man in her life again. They did coke sometimes, and then one night he asked her if she wanted to try heroin. She’d seen the marks on his arms and legs, so she knew he liked to shoot up, but she was afraid of the needle. But he kept asking her, saying, “You got no idea how good this shit feels, it’s gonna blow you away.” So she tried it one time, just to see what it felt like, and after a couple of weeks she got hooked.
Everything was good for a while. She was seeing Carlos all the time and getting high a lot and forgetting about all of the tragedy in her life. But then she started seeing Carlos’s bad side. It was like she was sleeping the whole time she knew him and then woke up and saw who he really was. It started that night they were fighting about something when they were getting high and he suddenly hit her hard in the face. No man had ever hit her before, and she couldn’t believe that this was happening to her. She couldn’t tell anybody about it, feeling too much shame, and she was also afraid it would only make Carlos hit her even harder next time. Instead she made up a story that Manuela had swung the bathroom door into her face. She just couldn’t leave Carlos, even though she wanted to, because she needed the drugs so bad. He started yelling at her and beating her and one night broke her arm. She had to make up another story to tell the Blooms and the other people she worked for, saying she fell on the street, but she knew she couldn’t keep making up lies forever. She also knew she had to get away from Carlos, but she couldn’t leave him no matter how hard she tried.
Then she got sick with a high fever and a bad rash all over her back and chest. She knew what was wrong with her, but she didn’t want to believe it. She went to church and begged God not to let this happen to her. She screamed, “I don’t deserve this, God! I don’t deserve it!” Then she went to a clinic, and they told her she had HIV. She was crying for days and couldn’t get out of bed. She was afraid of getting sick and dying, but she was also angry at herself for being so stupid, for believing that Carlos was clean. When she told Carlos she was sick, he still wouldn’t tell her the truth, saying he wasn’t sick and she must’ve caught the HIV from some other man. Then he beat her again, and she screamed at him to go away and stay out of her life forever.
Gabriella knew she had done such a bad thing to her daughter, ruining her life, too, and she felt like she wanted to kill herself. She almost did it one night. She had the bottle of pills, and she wrote a letter telling Manuela how sorry she was and asking Beatrice and Manny to please raise her daughter good. She put the pills in her mouth and was about to swallow them when she decided that she couldn’t do this to her daughter, that killing herself now would be even worse. She was still young and healthy, and maybe if she took her medicine she’d live for a very long time.
The next day she went to the police and told them how Carlos was beating her, and the judge gave her a restraining order so Carlos couldn’t come close to her or her daughter ever again. Then she sent Manuela to stay with Beatrice and she went away to a center on Long Island to get clean. It was very hard at first, but she listened to what they said and she got off the drugs for good. She went back to her life of working hard every day and helping Manuela with her homework and decided this was how she was going to live the rest of her life—being the best mother she could be.
She kept her HIV a secret from everybody, even her daughter. She didn’t want her daughter to think her mother wasn’t strong, that she wouldn’t be there for her someday, and she was worried that if people she worked for found out she was sick they would be afraid and want to fire her. She was good at hiding it from people, even her own family, but it got hard sometimes, like when Beatrice would say to her, “What’s wrong with you, Gabriela? Why do you stay home alone every night? Don’t you want to find a man?” Gabriela would say that she didn’t want a man in her life right now, that she just wanted to be alone with her daughter and be happy.
But sometimes it was very hard to be alone and she called Carlos and told him to come over. They were both sick, and even though she hated him for getting her sick and hitting her so much, she felt like he was the only man she could ever have. But then he’d start treating her bad and hitting her, and even hitting Manuela a few times, and she’d tell him to get out of her life for good or she was going to call the police. She’d stay away from him for another year or two, until she’d start to feel lonely and scared again and forget how bad he’d made her feel and how much he’d hurt her, and she’d call him up and start the whole thing all over again.
Gabriela was thirty-one years old. She knew her life would never change, that she would never be happy all the time, but her doctors told her her HIV was doing okay and she would live for many, many years. Manuela was eleven years old, in sixth grade, and was turning into such a beautiful young lady. Gabriela taught her daughter to stay away from drugs and the bad boys and to wait to meet somebody someday who would treat her good, the way she deserved to be treated. Gabriela just wanted her daughter to have a good, happy life; it was the only thing she cared about.
Then one day Gabriela was riding the bus home from work when Beatrice called her and was screaming and crying. It reminded Gabriela of that terrible day Juan had died, and she was afraid something bad had happened to Manuela.
“No mi hija!” Gabriela screamed. “No mi hija! No mi hija!” Gabriela screamed so loud that everybody was looking over, and the driver even stopped the bus.
Thank God, Beatrice wasn’t calling about Manuela, but it was still very bad. It was their father in Quito. He was very sick and needed a new kidney or he was going to die, but the doctors said he was too sick to get a new kidney from the hospital, so the only way was if they bought one on the black market.
Crying, Gabriella asked, “How much do they need?”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” Beatrice said. “That’s crazy money. What’re we gonna do?”
Gabriela didn’t have money to send to him. The money she made from cleaning houses was just enough to pay for rent and bills and food. Sometimes she didn’t even have money to buy new clothes for Manuela.
“How much money you have?” Gabriela asked.
“We only have two thousand in the bank,” Beatrice said, “and we need it for rent and bills.”
Gabriela had no idea what to do. Twelve thousand dollars was more money than she’d ever seen.
When she got back to her apartment, she called home and it was sad to
hear her mother crying and her father sounding so sad, and she felt so bad, knowing there was nothing anybody could do to help him. They just had to let him die.
“How much time does papi have?” Gabriela asked her mother.
“If they don’t do nothing, maybe a month or two,” she said.“They don’t know.” Gabriela spent most of the next few days crying. She and Beatrice were planning to go to Ecuador, to be with their father for the last time. They wanted their
whole families to go, but they didn’t have the money for the plane tickets.
Everything seemed so bad, and she didn’t know what to do, and then she was cleaning the Blooms’ house one morning when she saw a little piece of paper in a drawer in the dining room. The paper had some numbers on it, and on top she saw the words code new alarm.
Mrs. Bloom was home, right upstairs, and Gabriela heard footsteps in the hallway. Gabriela didn’t even think about it and put the paper in the pocket of her apron.
Later, at home, she felt bad. She didn’t even know why she took the paper, because the Blooms had been so good to her and there was no way she could ever steal from them.
Then, in the middle of the night, she woke up and thought: What if she gave Carlos the code? She didn’t ask about where he got his money, but she knew he probably knew how to rob places. And if he stole from them it would be different than if she stole from them. She didn’t want to do something bad to the Blooms, but she didn’t want her papi to die, either, and she didn’t know what else to do.
She called Carlos and told him to come over.
After she told him about the code, he said, “You got the key to the house?”
Gabriela hadn’t even thought about this. She was so worried about her papi and getting money that she hadn’t thought about anything else. “No, but I can get it,” she said.
The next day, at the Blooms’, when she went out to get lunch, she took the keys from the drawer in the kitchen and went to a locksmith. She found out she couldn’t copy the keys to the front door because they were some kind of special locks they couldn’t copy without some kind of card.
