11. The First Strike
THE FIRST STRIKE
ESTRELLA
Iwas making lunches. Pedro was in his pajamas demanding that I find his red car, which I had just discovered under the couch cushion but was choosing to deploy strategically.
Luz was in the bathroom performing what she called her “morning beauty treatment,” which appeared to involve every hair clip we owned and a level of commitment that would have impressed my old makeup team in Mexico City.
Roberto called at seven-fifteen on a Wednesday morning, which was in itself an act of aggression. Roberto Salinas did not wake before nine if he could help it. That he had managed it today meant he had been thinking about this call for long enough to be irritated by it.
“Estrella, mi vida.” The old endearment, deployed with the ease of long practice. As if three years of near-silence were nothing.
“Roberto. I’m getting the children ready for school,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m in Los Angeles. Did I tell you? I’m shooting a series here — very exciting project, American network, prime time. I thought we should see each other.”
“You and I?” I handed Pedro the red car without ceremony. He examined it, declared it satisfactory, and disappeared.
“Me and Luz, of course.” A pause that I recognized as calculated. “And you. Informally. As co-parents.”
Co-parents. We had not co-parented. We had, at best, parallel-parented from different countries, with Roberto’s contribution consisting of occasional telephone calls and one birthday gift that arrived two months late and was clearly chosen by his assistant.
The card had not even been signed in his handwriting.
“What do you want, Roberto?”
“I told you. I want to see my daughter.” Another pause. “I also want to understand what I’m seeing in the papers.”
And there it was.
“You’re seeing a photograph of me at a public event,” I said, my voice very steady. “At a library.”
“Dancing with Leo Ramirez.”
“Yes.”
“Is it serious?”
Luz emerged from the bathroom at this precise moment.
She had arranged approximately six hair clips at points across her head that bore no obvious relationship to each other, or to any known convention of hairstyling.
She looked extraordinary. She looked like a small, extremely confident person who had invented her own aesthetic and was entirely at peace with it.
“Luz,” I said, “your lunch is on the counter. Your backpack is by the door.”
“Mami.” She stopped in the middle of the kitchen and turned to face me with great seriousness. “Do I look like a princess?”
“You look like a queen,” I told her.
She considered this. Accepted it. Beamed, and disappeared toward her backpack.
“Estrella,” Roberto said.
“My personal life is not your concern,” I said into the receiver. “If you want to arrange a visit with Luz, have your lawyer call mine. As you know, I have full custody and your visitation is at my discretion.”
“That could change,” he said.
The words were quiet. Not shouted. That was how Roberto operated — smooth surfaces over everything underneath, like a floor that looked solid until you stepped on it.
“It could change,” he repeated. “A high-profile relationship, photographers outside your building, your children being seen in the papers — a judge might have questions about stability.”
My jaw tightened. “A judge might also have questions,” I said, equally quietly, “about a father who has had eleven documented contact hours with his daughter in the past three years.”
Silence.
“We’ll talk,” he said finally. “When things are calmer.”
“They’re perfectly calm now,” I said. “Goodbye, Roberto.”
I hung up.
For a moment I stood very still at the kitchen counter, my hand flat against the cool tile, breathing. Outside the window, Los Angeles was doing its ordinary morning thing, entirely indifferent to the fact that my ex-husband had just attempted to threaten me before eight o’clock.
Then Luz came back for her lunch and Pedro reappeared needing help with his shoes — the left one specifically, which had developed opinions about being tied — and the morning resumed its necessary momentum, and I was grateful for that, because it did not allow me to fall apart.
Mrs. Feldman arrived at noon with her folder of exercises and her expression of patient professional encouragement, which I had come to recognize as the face she wore when she expected a difficult session.
She was not wrong.
“From the top,” she said, settling into the armchair across from me. “The ‘th’ passage. Nice and slow.”
I read the passage. My mind was in three places simultaneously: the ‘th’ sounds, Roberto’s voice that morning, and the very satisfying mental image of my lawyer receiving his call and demolishing it with the calm efficiency I paid her to bring to exactly these situations.
“The third line,” Mrs. Feldman said. “Again.”
“The thirty-three th—” I stopped. Tried again. “The thirty-three—”
“You’re rushing,” she said. “Something’s on your mind.”
“No,” I said.
She looked at me with the patience of a woman who had coached many actors through many difficult days and knew the difference between someone who had nothing on their mind and someone who was performing having nothing on their mind.
“From the top,” she said again, kindly.
I read the passage from the top. I was careful about the ‘th’ sounds. I was less careful about the rhythm, because part of my attention was occupied with composing, in elegant and legally unimpeachable language, everything I intended to say to Roberto’s lawyer when the time came.
“Better,” Mrs. Feldman said, in the tone that meant adequate. “Now the second exercise. The one with the vowels.”
The vowel exercise required me to produce a sequence of sounds that English speakers found natural and I found faintly absurd, as though someone had disassembled a perfectly functional language and asked me to rebuild it from diagrams.
I produced the sequence. I thought about Luz and her six hair clips, and how she had asked if she looked like a princess, and how she had not flinched when Roberto was mentioned because she had learned very early, in the way that children of absent parents learn, not to hold too much hope in that direction.
She deserved better than that.
“Good,” Mrs. Feldman said, which was a step up from adequate. “One more time.”
By the end of the session, I had worked through every exercise on Mrs. Feldman’s list and arrived at a state that I recognized as useful anger — the kind that had edges you could do something with, rather than the shapeless kind that just wore you down.
“You were distracted today,” Mrs. Feldman observed, packing up her folder, “but your instincts were better. When you stopped monitoring yourself, the sounds came more naturally.”
I thought of the audition. The wrong room. The forgotten corrections. The director saying I want exactly what you have.
“Perhaps that’s the lesson,” I said.
She considered this with the air of someone who would need to think about it. “Perhaps,” she allowed, and took her leave.
I called my mother at half past one, after Mrs. Feldman had gone and before I needed to collect the children.
“He threatened me,” I said, without preamble.
My mother had never liked Roberto. She had been polite about it for years and then, after the divorce, she had been freely and sometimes poetically not polite about it.
She had opinions about Roberto that she had been storing up and was always delighted to air.
“Of course he did,” Mamá said, without particular surprise. “He’s in Los Angeles, he’s ambitious, and he’s seen you in a photograph looking beautiful and happy with a famous footballer. This is exactly the kind of thing Roberto cannot tolerate.”
“He has no case,” I said. “I have full custody. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” she agreed. “But you should call your lawyer today. Not tomorrow. Today.”
“I already did. This morning, the moment the children left.”
A satisfied pause. “Good girl.”
“Mamá, I’m twenty-eight.”
“You’re my daughter,” she said, which settled the matter. Then, more gently: “And Estrella. Don’t let him take this from you.”
“Take what?”
“Whatever it is you have with this Leo.” A pause I could hear her smiling through. “I have seen the dancing photograph. He looks at you the way your father looks at me.”
I sat down on the couch. “Mamá.”
“I know, I know. You’re careful. You’re practical.
You’ve been hurt.” She sighed. “My heart, I know all of this. But there is careful and then there is using caution as an excuse to keep standing outside a warm house in the cold. You can see the fire through the window, Estrella. At some point you have to open the door.”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum. Something ached there, the particular ache of wanting something and not quite letting yourself have it yet.
“He’s very honest,” I said. “It’s disarming.”
“Good men are.”
“It frightens me,” I admitted. “How much I want to believe him.”
“Of course it does,” Mamá said gently. “Wanting something real, after everything — that’s terrifying. But the alternative is worse. I’ve watched you be careful for two years, mi vida. I would like to see you be brave for a little while.”
After we said goodbye, I sat quietly on the couch for a moment. The apartment was still in the particular way it only was when the children were elsewhere — every small sound distinct, the city outside the window suddenly audible.
Then I picked up the telephone and called Leo.
He answered on the second ring. “Hola.”
I hadn’t planned what I was going to say exactly. I just knew that my mother’s voice and Roberto’s voice were both still in my head, and that Leo’s voice was the one I wanted there instead.
“Roberto called this morning,” I said. “He’s making noise. I’m not panicking — my lawyer’s already been notified — but I thought you should know. In case it affects things for you.”
A silence. Not a bad one. The kind where someone is actually thinking rather than preparing a performance.
Then, low and very controlled: “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Annoyed. But all right.”
“And the children?”
“They don’t know anything. Luz went to school with six hair clips in and Pedro got his red car back, and as far as they’re concerned it was a perfectly ordinary Wednesday.”
“Good.” Another pause. Then, careful and deliberate, as though choosing each word: “He doesn’t have a case, Estrella. You know that.”
“I know.”
“And whatever he’s trying to do — whatever this is about — it’s not about Luz. It’s about you. About the photograph. About the fact that you’re happy and he’s not responsible for it.”
The accuracy of this was so clean it almost made me laugh. “My mother said approximately the same thing.”
“Your mother sounds like a very sensible woman.”
“She is. She also said she’d seen the dancing photograph and that you look at me the way my father looks at her.”
A beat. When he spoke again there was something different in his voice — quieter, more careful. “What do you think?”
I looked at the refrigerator from where I sat. At the drawing with its four stick figures, the tall one in glasses, the careful letters underneath. Nuestro Leo.
“I think,” I said, “that the enchiladas are still happening on Thursday if you want to come.”
A warmth in his voice, unmistakable. “I’ll be there.”
“Good,” I said.
And I sat for a moment after we had said goodbye, the receiver still in my hand, thinking that my mother was right — not about Roberto, about whom she had always been right — but about the warm house and the cold and the fact that at some point you had to open the door.
I was beginning to think I had.