3. Nepotize Me, Cap’n #4
Was I losing my gamble just by having this conversation?
I wondered again what billing she had in William de Witt’s life; how his touch might have implied something equal parts attentive and routine.
From afar, pacing the silent auction items in the ballroom, Teddy looked restless.
I might lose him if I stayed here listening to the ramblings of a woman who wasn’t quite his boss.
But which was the more fruitful partnership when all roads led to William de Witt?
Perilous seconds ticked in my chest, a countdown to the precipice. Disaster or delight.
“—point is I’m dying for a little help, Anya dear. I’ve been thinking about it all night and I’m just positive you’d be perfect—”
“Help,” I echoed, listening again to Emmanuelle’s soliloquy. So this was a job offer, interesting. A job that was neither hand nor blow might be suitable indeed, depending where it got me.
My previous calculations rearranged, adjusting for the variables in my head. “You need … an assistant?” I guessed. It wouldn’t be any worse than what I was currently doing, with one glaring exception. “It’s just that—you know, I try to be available during the day, for auditions and things—”
“No, no.” She waved me away with palpable impatience. “Nothing like that. You’ll have plenty of time to sleep in, have the day to yourself, plus William and I will help you—in fact, I can call Ariana Finch for you right now—”
“Oh no, no—” Aside from that being horrific to imagine, it was nearly midnight. The last thing I wanted was to leave an acrid taste in a celebrated director’s mouth by waking her in the middle of the night over nothing. “That’s really not necessary—”
“I will give you … Let’s see. Ten thousand dollars a month? Does that sound reasonable?”
My ears rang. I felt my knees unlock. An alternate future blossomed before me. My new-old apartment with Roro. Designer shoes to fit the trends. I’ve got this one, blasé humility when the check came around.
I could kill a man in this room and get away with it, or whatever Emmanuelle had said.
She took my hands and leaned close to me, in full temptress mode now.
“All you’d have to do is keep an eye on Julian for me.
It’ll be nothing! And then you and I can talk all the time.
You can be my confidante, my protégée.” She had a sweet, girlish giggle.
“Please say you’ll do it. Please! I’ll just die. ”
There was that overripe sweetness again, the presence of fruit that blossomed from her mouth. There was a stirring in me, instinct maybe, the presence of a door opening. Who was Julian, a dog? Something more eccentric maybe, like a lizard?
From afar I felt cool ocean eyes on my neck, sweeping over me like a wave. It came and went, a pull like the tide.
No compelling reason to refuse. No reason not to jump. I already knew something had happened the moment I’d locked eyes with William de Witt. Something inside me had already said yes. Like I’d willed him into my life.
“Why not?” I said.
Emmanuelle shrieked with joy, smiled, kissed me lightly on the lips, and I felt dizzy, dazzled, enchanted. Drunk and born again, like stepping over a threshold to a place of blinding sun.
I crept in through the front gate late that night, quiet as a mouse. I assumed my mother would be asleep and better left undisturbed, given the way we’d parted. But even before I reached my apartment door, I could see the courtyard wasn’t empty.
“Your grandmother spoke to me today,” Tita Linda said without preamble.
She was on the bench my mother had installed beside the fountain, sitting alone. Looking at the sky.
I’d already taken off my shoes and carried them by the straps with one hand, my phone and evening clutch held expertly with three clawed fingers in the other.
“You’re still awake?” I said, ambling toward her on tiptoe.
Tita Linda looked at me. She was almost identical to my grandmother, with the same slightly shrunken barely five-foot frame.
She had once been religious about dying her hair but had gotten less enthusiastic over time, her efficacy waning.
Her formerly raven hair now played host to a strange, deteriorating colorlessness at the root, like the stucco of the apartment building.
She always wore it pulled back, in a tidy, no-nonsense chignon.
“Your grandmother spoke to me,” Tita Linda repeated, less patiently that time, as if I hadn’t been listening.
It wasn’t the first time Tita Linda had relayed a message to me from the dead. Two months ago, my grandfather had told me to keep away from Tita Linda’s herb garden. Coincidence, I was sure.
“She says not to come straight home anymore,” Tita Linda continued, blessedly getting to the point. “Go somewhere else first.”
I sighed, sitting beside her on the bench. “Like where?”
“Get groceries, dry cleaning, drive in a circle. Anything.” She shrugged. “Just take an unusual path. Different every time.”
“Is that Alistair?” I was only half listening. I’d realized Tita Linda had set something beside her feet on the ground, something that shuffled in the shadows. It was the makeshift pigeon carrier JR had brought earlier to the store.
“This rat of the sky has a name?” Tita Linda made a face at me then, a very Grandma face, with her lips pursed. She sucked her teeth, shaking her head at the contents of the carrier. “Your mother is out for blood.”
So, Tita Linda had put herself between something and my mother’s wrath again. She and my mom seemed destined to fight this war until one of them died or all life on earth expired, whichever came first. “I didn’t realize you were such an animal lover, Tita.”
“Your grandmother told me this bird will save your life.” She patted the carrier, but when Alistair got spooked and shuffled around, she made a face of barely contained disgust.
“I see.” Some things couldn’t be argued with, or shouldn’t be. Functionally the same, in this case. I doubted that Alistair had anything to do with my survival, but Tita Linda would find some way to mold the events in retrospect, to tell the story as if she’d been right all along.
So I followed the patterns I was given, no different from knocking agnostically on wood. What mattered more, my beliefs or the story I told with them? “This bird, my savior,” I remarked, a sardonic version of compliance.
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” said Tita Linda.
“Are you going to keep it, then?”
“I’d better not have to.” She scowled like this was my fault.
“Right.” I gathered what suddenly seemed to be all my worldly possessions and rose to my feet, adjusting my dress to avoid stepping on it. “Well, it’s late. Thank you for the message.”
“Don’t come straight home,” she repeated. “It’s important. Carmelita woke me to make sure I told you right away. And she knows I like my sleep.”
I sighed for what seemed like the thousandth time.
The heels of my shoes clinked in my hands.
It was usually cool in the summers at night, a release of sorts, but tonight the air was hot and muggy, the wind a bluster of dissent.
On a normal night there might be the tang of vinegar from an open window or the smell of laundry detergent drifting in from the coin laundry downstairs, but all I could smell on the wind was smoke.
“Doesn’t Grandma ever have anything nice to say to me?
You know, like, ‘hello,’ ‘how’s life,’ anything? ”
Tita Linda scoffed. “You think she has time for small talk in paradise?”
This was the problem with third-world Catholicism. Heaven coexisted with superstition, inexplicably. Which dead husband had Grandma chosen to hang out with for the hereafter? Riddle me that. “Fine, I won’t come straight home from now on, got it. Any reason why?”
I don’t know why I asked. I didn’t believe it anyway. Not at the time.
“You have a devil on your back,” Tita Linda told me.
Her eyes strayed from mine then, almost as if she could see it.
Like a pair of eyes glowing crimson in the dark.