Chapter Seventeen
“Would you like me to read you a story before bed tonight?”
It hurt Enrique how carefully Marcello seemed to be considering this decision.
“Gabriela gave me some new books,” he added persuasively.
That clinched it! And so Gabriela, without even being there, gave him yet another gift. Soon, he sat beside Marcello on his son’s bed, both of their backs against the headboard, their legs stretched out in front of them.
He noticed Marcello had on blue pajamas with little ducks on them. Who bought his son’s pajamas? And didn’t they know he liked Ryder themes?
It was the same with the bedding. And the entire nursery.
Enrique noticed the room in ways he had not before.
The walls were wainscoted halfway up the wall.
Above that, they were dark blue, tasteful, with fluffy sheep cavorting across them.
Everything in it, from the mobile to the framed pictures, was lovely but distinctly babyish.
It occurred to him the room was photo-shoot ready as the perfect nursery, and yet did not reflect his son, at all.
Amelia had planned this room and furnished it She had chosen each stuffed animal and mobile and wall print.
Enrique had been pleased she had found something to be excited about and accepted her rebuff of his interest. Did Marcello feel his mother’s love in these choices?
Or would he be ready to move on to a room that better reflected Marcello’s growing-boy passions?
Since he hadn’t known, until recently, what his son’s interests were, it felt as if he had no one to blame for these lapses but himself. He hadn’t even known if Marcello had a birthday party.
Of course, there was always a small family event, but had children his own age ever been invited?
Enrique doubted that.
His son was only five. For most of his life, his mother had been enough for him. Friendships outside the palace walls were a recent development.
This was another way Gabriela was inserting herself in his life, without even having to be here. He was thinking of things in a different way from how he had before.
He opened the stiff cover of the brand-new book, Snuggle-Uffle-Gus.
In moments, both he and Marcello were completely entranced by the beautifully illustrated story of a renegade monster, Gus, who was supposed to like scaring people, but instead liked hugs best of all.
Without even realizing what he was doing, Marcello cuddled in closer to his father, traced the pictures with his fingers, made delighted oohs and aahs at all the unexpected turns the story took.
But it had been a long, exciting day, and Marcello’s comments grew fewer and his finger slipped from the page. His warm weight settled more heavily against his father and his breathing deepened.
Enrique stopped reading.
His son, in what seemed to be an act of complete trust, had fallen asleep against his chest.
Enrique’s fingertips found his son’s curls and combed through them. He was reluctant to get up, not just because he didn’t want to wake Marcello.
But because he never wanted this moment to end.
He dropped a kiss on the top of Marcello’s head, and the words he’d had trouble saying just a few days ago felt like the most natural thing in the world.
“I love you,” he whispered.
And still he stayed with his sleeping son.
How did a man let go of the best day of his life?
The last thing he wanted to do was go and see his mother—that would be a sure way to take some of the shine off the day.
But after what he had discovered, how could he not confront her? And one thing he had learned about dealing with unpleasant matters was the longer he put it off, the more difficult it became to address.
He went and knocked softly on the door of his mother’s suite. It was answered by the Queen’s longtime assistant, Mabel, who looked surprised to see him. Of course she was surprised; nothing in the Queen’s world unfolded with spontaneity.
“I’ll see if she’s receiving,” she said uncertainly, standing back to let him in the door.
This, he thought, was his world, a place where there was no spontaneity, where you didn’t even pop by unannounced to see your own mother. It had made the unexpected freedom and pure spontaneity of the day all the more intoxicating.
While he waited, he took in the grandness of the suite. It was extraordinarily formal, furniture, paintings, carpets, all of them hundreds of years old and all of it priceless. The effect of it was cold and museum-like.
Mabel ushered him through to his mother’s inner sanctum, a den and TV room. It looked faintly shabby and entirely lived in.
His mother sat in a recliner, a blanket over her legs, and tray on her lap, the large wall-mounted TV across from her muted.
He noted, amused, she was watching a show about housewives in America, not the news.
They had not had pets, ever, while he was growing up but now she had a dog, Beau.
He was at her feet, apparently too weary to raise his head. His tail flopped twice in greeting.
That dog, he realized, a little sadly, was really her only friend.
Despite the blanket over her legs, he could see his mother was still dressed, a businesswoman just home from a busy day. Her makeup was still on. Her hair, gray now, but as unruly as his and Marcello’s, was still pulled back in a stern bun, not a hair out of place.
“Enrique,” she said. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
Her emphasis was on unexpected rather than pleasure.
She looked beautiful and regal. He realized he had never seen her dressed casually, never once seen her drop the role.
“Come have a seat,” she said. Her expression was neither welcoming nor unwelcoming, but completely neutral. She cocked her head at him. They were not, after all, a family that did spontaneity.
He saw no point in beating around the bush. “I found out that you sent Gabriela away. Today, I found out that communication between us was thwarted after she left.”
“And what are you looking for from me, Enrique?”
What was he looking for? An apology, he supposed.
She took the tea from the tray on her lap and took a sip. “I did what I could to prevent an absolute disaster,” she said, not the least apologetic.
“It was despicable,” he said.
She lifted a shoulder. “Despicable, but necessary.”
“It was necessary to send an eighteen-year-old girl away from her home, to a place where she knew nothing and no one? It was necessary to keep her there, away from her family, and every single thing she knew and loved?”
“Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? She loved you.”
He wanted to say he had loved her, too, but it was not the kind of information you gave to someone who would be prepared to use it as a weapon.
His mother sighed. “Enrique! You were both teenagers. You have to think about where it was heading, and where it would have gone. What good could have come from it, if you would have followed all that youthful lust to its natural conclusion?”
He winced at her reducing what had happened between him and Gabriela to that. Lust.
“No good could have come from it,” she answered, softly, when he did not respond.
“Would either of you, in the throes of young passion, considered protection? Would you have even known what that was? You weren’t in a normal position, Enrique.
You couldn’t go down to the chemist and get some condoms.”
He was a little shocked that his mother knew what a condom was!
“What if she’d gotten pregnant?” his mother pressed softly. “It didn’t just involve you and her. It was Guido and Maria, and everyone on staff.”
What did he hear as Guido’s name came off her lips? He wasn’t sure.
“It was centuries of working relationships,” she continued, “that could have been lost in bitterness and divided teams. Sacrifices had to be made.”
“You sent her away, and made sure she never came back,” he said.
“Again, Enrique, what good could have come from her coming back? After she’d finished university, you were a married man.”
“To your choice,” he pointed out with bitterness.
“Yes! To a partner who had been carefully selected for you, without the complication of emotion. Of love. An arrangement beneficial to Princess Amelia’s island and ours and both our people.
That’s what comes first, Enrique, the people.
A relationship like the one you enjoyed with Amelia is safe.
There are no fireworks and no potential for the dreadful kind of accidents that happen when fireworks are involved. ”
“Is that the kind of relationship you had with my father?”
“Exactly,” she said, and yet something flickered behind her eyes, and he wondered, just for a second, if he was the only one who had had sacrifices imposed on him.
He also realized that though his mother said everything was for the people, she didn’t mean for individual people. She meant for people as a whole. She concerned herself with her subjects’ standard of living, and access to medical care, to good jobs and prosperity.
Everything else—the needs of one person, or two—were not of consequence to her. She was single-mindedly devoted to the big picture, and she had been willing to forfeit everything for that, including her own happiness.
“Have you ever loved anyone, Mother?”
A look crossed her face that was heartbreaking and intense, but then it was gone as if it had never been.
“Of course I love you and Marcello,” she snapped.
She waved her hand at the television set.
“But I don’t subscribe to romantic notions of love.
Here on Hermosa Mariposa, we’re not like Americans, constantly bleating about love, constantly letting our lives be disrupted by a force that can be so destructive if it’s not kept in check. ”
His mother saw love as the archenemy of order and control. And in that she was not wrong. Look at how his unexpected day with Gabriela had spiraled completely out of his control.
“You would have found your way back to each other if she’d come back here,” his mother said. “Is that what you would have wanted for her? The tawdry life of the other woman?”
She suddenly looked small to him, sitting with her dog, her only true friend in the entire world. She looked small and lonely.
The woman who had forgone everything for duty.
He thought of the absolute delight of his day, and knew he was not prepared to make those same sacrifices.
Nor would he ask them of his son. His son was not going to be sitting, alone, in a recliner, sixty years from now, with a cat, still, as his best friend.
“Do not,” Enrique warned his mother, “interfere in my personal life, again. Ever.”
His mother looked shocked, as unaccustomed as he himself was to being challenged.
But then her expression was quickly masked.
And he was confused to see something flash through her eyes before she dismissed him by turning the sound back on to the television show, her only window into the havoc love wreaked on lives.
But for a moment he was fairly certain what he had seen in her face was that she had been pleased.
By him standing up to her.
But was that because she was pleased for him, or because she was pleased at the prospect of a clash of wills, a good fight, brightening up the dull landscape of her life?
He went to leave.
“Wait,” she said. She put aside the blanket and got up from the recliner. She moved to her desk, not looking the least small or lonely anymore, but looking regal, powerful and untouchable.
She went to her desk over by the window, and opened the bottom drawer. There was no rummaging. She knew exactly where everything was.
She handed him a packet of letters, tied with a ribbon. It wasn’t quite an apology, but there was something ever so faintly contrite in it.
Later, he opened those letters one by one. Read each of them, and then read them again more slowly.
He ran his fingers over Gabriela’s girlish cursive.
And then he held the letters to his lips and kissed them, thanking them for making plain to him what he had really known all along.
What his mother had known all along. Gabriela had loved him then.
And he loved Gabriela.
It felt as if he loved her still and that he was always going to love her.
But he was not the boy he had once been, impulsive and callow, unable to see the consequences of loving her.
He needed to make sure that he was not mistaking friendship for love.
He needed to make sure he was not mistaking gratitude over the changes she had brought about in his relationship with Marcello for love.
He needed to make sure that what he was feeling was real and rooted in today, and was not the residue of an eight-year-old kiss.
He needed to make sure that it was more than passion between them.
He needed to do all those things before he got either of their hopes up that there could be a future, before he took on the formidable task of challenging age-old rules and protocols.
But if it was true—if their time had come—he was aware he would fight to the ends of the earth to give them the future they both deserved.
He was aware that his hope was mixed with fear.
Because he had never allowed himself to think he might one day have his own happily-ever-after.