Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (26 page)

“There you are, Hannah!” Jaime continues.

I see my mother step from out of the darkness toward my grandmother, who motions to a waiter to refill her champagne glass. He fills up her glass and I see my grandmother staring at me. She’s not smiling and neither is my mother. They both stand there, side by side, just looking at me.

Jaime continues his drunken speech: “I’m so happy to let all of you know that Hannah and I are engaged!”

The crowd erupts into happy cheers and I’m enveloped into hugs from a million different strangers. I steal a look over in my grandmother and mother’s direction and they are frozen, still looking at me with furrowed brows. The crowd takes me farther and farther away from Nate. Each time I get a glimpse of him, through the crowd, he’s just standing there, not moving, staring at me.

“To celebrate this happy occasion,” Jaime yells into the mike, “we’d like to sing a song for you.”

Jaime switches places with the lead singer, who takes the mike. Jaime leans down to pick up his bass, stands back up, and throws up all over the stage.

Forty-two

It’s not that I object to people getting drunk and stoned at my grandmother’s parties and then throwing up all over the bandstand. It’s more that I’m beginning to see that Jaime is merely going through the motions of doing the right thing. Maybe he feels some sort of Cuban-Catholic guilt. Or sense of responsibility. Either way, we need to talk.

At the end of the night, Jaime passed out in the guest house with his bandmates, and I think it says a lot about our relationship that I wasn’t angry about the fact that he never came to bed last night. I was just happy that I wouldn’t have to clean up after him.

I brush my hair back into a ponytail, ready to make my way out to the guest house when I hear yelling down in the kitchen. Screaming. Blood-curdling cries. I abandon my brush and run down the stairs.

“You weren’t going to tell me this?” my mother screams. “You’re only telling me this because I’m dying?”

“I was going to tell you,” my grandmother says, in a voice I’ve never heard from her before. “I just thought if we had more time, it might be easier for all of you.”

“Well, there’s no more time,” my mother yells just as I walk into the room. “There’s no more time!”

“What’s going on here?” I ask.

My mother is standing right against the back door. It looks as if she’s about to run at any second. My grandmother is curled up, hunched over, sitting at the kitchen table. She’s quietly crying. Adan is next to her, rubbing her back. He looks as if he’s about to cry, too.

“Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on here?” I ask. I can hear my voice begin to shake, but I take a deep breath and I’m okay.

“You think she’s so fabulous,” my mother says to me, “go ask her.”

She walks out the back door into the backyard. Adan excuses himself and I’m left alone in the kitchen with my grandmother.

“What’s going on?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper.

“Sit down,” my grandmother says. Her voice is so tiny, so weak, that I barely recognize her.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I say, grabbing my grandmother’s hand. “Is it my mother’s health?”

“No, it’s not,” she says, giving my hand a squeeze. “It’s about me.”

“Are you sick?”

“No,” my grandmother says. “This isn’t about health. It’s about a lie I told. A lie I told many, many years ago, that’s now come to light.”

“What is it?” I ask. “You can tell me anything.” As the words come out of my mouth, I think to myself: Do I really mean it? Can my grandmother truly tell me anything?

“Adan is your grandfather,” she says. She says it quietly, emotionlessly, as if she is trying to be strong for me. Or perhaps it’s that all of her emotions are drained from admitting this to my mother.

“I don’t understand,” I say, even though I understand perfectly. My grandmother explains herself to me. The story Adan told about coming to find my grandmother after the war, how she fainted when she first saw him at the beginning of the summer, how desperately she wanted my mother and me to connect with Adan.

“What about my grandfather?” I ask. Even though I never really knew him, I feel as if someone needs to be looking out for him about now.

“He knew,” she said. “He always knew.”

“You told him?”

“Your grandfather knew,” my grandmother says, taking my hand once again. I’m not sure when I dropped my hand from hers, but she grabs it now, and looks me in the eye. “He knew, and he forgave me.”

“How could he forgive you?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper. I hate that I’m judging my grandmother. I know that if the roles were reversed, she would grab me and hold me and tell me that everything is okay, that everything works out the way it’s supposed to, and that what I’d done wasn’t so horrible. But I can’t help but think that what she’s done is horrible.

If you’ve done awful things in your life, does that make you a less judgmental person? Maybe once you’ve done the unthinkable, you lose the right to look down your nose at someone. Maybe I’ve lost that right myself. Thinking of one man while pregnant with another’s child … maybe I really am my grandmother’s granddaughter after all.

“Love is complicated,” my grandmother says, getting up from the table and putting a kettle up for tea.

I have to hold my tongue—the only time I’ve truly been in love was with Adam, and it wasn’t complicated at all. It was just entirely too short. But her statement gets me thinking. If Adam were still alive today, if our relationship hadn’t been cut short, would I, too, think that love is complicated?

“It’s the nature of love,” my grandmother continues, not even noticing that I’m lost in my own thoughts. “Forgiveness. Love’s not the sum of what you do. Well, it is, of course it is. I shouldn’t say that. I should say that love isn’t only the sum of what you do. It’s more than that. Love is two people trying to make a life together. It’s not easy. It’s messy. What’s important, at the end of the day, is the sum of who you are.” She takes two teacups out of the cabinet, and when she turns back to face me I can see that she’s crying. I put my arms around her and hug her.

I don’t really want to hug her—the anger over what she’s just told me is building in my chest—but I know that’s what she would do for me if the roles were reversed. I think that’s what she would do, anyway. Perhaps I don’t know anymore. My grandmother isn’t the woman I thought she was.

“I should go and talk to Gray,” I say, and my grandmother nods her head yes.

I walk out into the backyard to find my mother. She shouldn’t be alone right now, and the truth is, I don’t want to be alone either. For the first time in my life, I don’t want to be with my grandmother.

I walk around the backyard, past the pool, onto the beach, looking for Gray. The boys are all still asleep in the guest house, so they wouldn’t know where she could have gone. I check the garage, and then the main house. But my mother’s nowhere to be found.

Forty-three

Growing up, my mother and I lived in hotels and didn’t even have a phone. If you wanted to find us, you’d have to figure out what city we were in, guess what hotel we’d be staying at, and then call the front desk. They’d take a message and give it to us when we waltzed in. Then we’d have to find an empty phone booth and call you back.

It’s not so difficult to find someone these days. Now, we’ve all got cell phones that we carry around with us. Emails, Facebook, and Twitter. Instant access whenever you want it. But not if the person you’re looking for doesn’t want to be found.

I’ve called my mother fifteen times so far on her cell phone, and she hasn’t picked up once. I also sent her thirteen text messages, and seven emails, all of which have been ignored. I know she’s upset about my grandmother’s announcement, but surely even she can understand that we need each other now more than ever?

I drive over to Hunter’s house. I know it’s a long shot, but she’s been enjoying teaching him so much, and if I were having a really bad day, one of the first people I’d turn to would be Hunter, so I give it a shot.

“You’ve lost your mother?” Hunter asks me.

“I didn’t lose her,” I say. “She’s just really upset and ran off somewhere.”

“I did that once when I was seven,” Hunter says. “I got so upset that I grabbed a blanket and left our apartment. I only got as far as Fifth Avenue, but my plan was to move to Central Park.”

“I don’t think she actually ran away from home,” I say. “She just needed to get away to clear her head.”

“I know the feeling,” Hunter says, nodding. “No offense, but you’re not a very good assistant if you don’t even know where your boss is.”

I’m about to explain to Hunter that I don’t actually work for my mother on a day-to-day basis when it hits me: there’s someone who does. I get back on my cell and call Gray’s assistant.

At first, she doesn’t want to tell me where my mother is. She says something about assistant-boss confidentiality, but then I pull the I’m-pregnant-and-she’s-got-cancer card (an amazingly effective one-two punch, I’ve discovered), and I’ve got the information I need to find my mother.

This whole process has taken me two hours, so by the time I hit the road, I’m sure that my mom’s already back in the city, hunkering down in the one place I don’t want to be right now. The one place that will make me remember all of the things that I think are wrong with my mother and the way she raised me.

The Hotel Chelsea.

*   *   *

The front desk gives me a key, assuming “I don’t want any visitors” doesn’t extend to one’s offspring. As I stand in the lobby, waiting for them to locate the second set of keys to the room, I stare at a huge photograph that my mother used as rent one month when she couldn’t pay our bill.

It’s a picture of me, taken when I was ten or eleven. I’m running through the Parque del Buen Retiro in Madrid, wearing a white dress. I vaguely remember when my mother took the photo—she was finishing up a day of shooting in the park, and I was enjoying the last shreds of sunlight—but I’ve never looked at it that closely before. In all the years I’d lived here, I’d always just walked right by, dismissing it as part of the scenery.

My mother’s done something with the light and the tilt of my head—it looks as if a halo of light is all around my bushel of big brown curls. My arms are in front of me and my hands are reaching up. Was I chasing a butterfly? A ladybug? Whatever it was, the photograph is ethereal and beautiful and gives me a feeling of happiness and utter calm. My mother’s so well known for her photos of war and destruction that I often forget that she has the ability to make something really beautiful, too.

“Here you go,” the desk clerk says, and it takes me a second to respond.

“Thanks.”

The elevators are all broken, so I have to trudge up four flights of stairs to get to the room.

“You know how much I hate it here,” I say as I walk in. My mother is sitting on a chair by the window, barely moving.

“They weren’t supposed to let you in,” she says, staring out the window. “And I can’t believe Peg caved and told you I was here. You just can’t get a good assistant nowadays.”

When I sit down on the bed I realize that she’s not moving because she’s in pain.

“What can I do?” I ask.

“If you want to do something for me … I mean, really do something for me,” she says, “you’ll leave so that I can smoke some pot.”

“You can smoke pot when I’m here,” I say. “I think we’re already established that I’m not going to arrest you for it.”

“The baby,” she says, and I feel like it’s a big step that she’s looking out for her grandchild.

I jump off the bed and open the door. There’s a tiny Juliet balcony, not even as big as a fire escape, but we both step onto it, and, at the same time, put our arms on the railings and look down at Twenty-Third Street.

My mother and I often did this when I was younger—step outside of our room at the Chelsea and just stare down, watching the city go by. She’d always marvel at how amazing it was to watch the world going on with their day-to-day lives, while we were up here, just taking it all in. I remember she would tell me that there are a million things happening to a million different people out there at this very moment. Someone down there is having the best day of their life. Someone is having the worst.

We stay like this for a moment, and then I remember the point of our being out here, and ask my mother where her marijuana is. She tries to light up the joint far away from me, and let the breeze take it away from my pregnant body, but the city is sweltering, and the air just hangs.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry you have to deal with all of this right now.”

“Just because you like her better than you do me,” my mother says, “doesn’t mean you have to feel sorry. It doesn’t mean you’re responsible for what she’s done.”

“I don’t feel responsible for what she’s done,” I say. “I’m sorry that with everything you’ve got going on, you now have this to deal with.”

“That’s how he figured it out, you know,” she says.

“Who? What?”

“Adan,” she says, and then takes a long drag of her joint. “Pancreatic cancer runs in his family. He started asking questions.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“Your grandmother is a real piece of work, you know.”

“That’s one way to put it,” I say. I look down and I see a young couple. They’re having a quarrel. The man grabs her arm. The woman wrangles herself free and rushes off away from him in a huff. “When we get back out there, we should just all sit down and talk.”

“I’m not going back out there,” my mother says, and I turn to face her.

“You have to.”

“No, I don’t,” she says. “I’m dying. I can do whatever the hell I want.”

“Please,” I say, and then turn to look back down at the street. I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, but I quickly find it: it’s the quarreling couple. The man’s caught up to the woman, and they’re kissing in the middle of the street.

“Give me one good reason why,” my mother says, bringing my attention back up to the balcony.

“I need you,” I say, and I really mean it. Before the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t quite know what I was going to say to her, but suddenly I realize it’s true. I need her.