Dad’s slightly more olive-toned skin shows his age a bit more, and his thick black hair is shot through with silver on the sides. He wears one of his many starched, button-down shirts and shiny leather loafers. On his wrist is one of the tastefully expensive watches he gets for Christmas from his wife. But unlike my mother’s blasé sweetness, my father is always stern. Sergio Barros never, ever smiles. That, more than the fact that he has over ten years on her, is why he has more wrinkles than his wife. His forehead is always puckered when he frowns.
Today they both look a little more their ages than usual. Dad really does look fifty-eight, and Mom really does look forty-two, mostly because their faces are shot through with something different. Sadness, maybe? Dread?
I grip the edge of the counter, already bracing myself for something. “What’s up?”
Mom takes a long drink of wine. Her tennis bracelet clinks against the glass.
“We waited as long as we could,” Dad says. “Your mother and I, we wanted to give you one last summer here before...well, it’s time.”
My gaze ping-pongs between them. “Time for what?”
“Your mother and I have decided we will no longer live together.”
Silence drops on the table like an anvil while his words echo around the big house. In here, everything has its place. Nothing feels shattered...yet. I’m not even sure if I heard him correctly.
My parents have never been happy together—that much was always clear. They’re an odd couple—a Pasadena princess with a magnanimous foreigner many years her senior. My dad is loud and authoritative while my mom is diminutive and quiet. They’ve never been affectionate, never even socialized together beyond work events. Once, when my mother had too many glasses of wine and my dad was working late, I asked her if she loved him. She laid her head in my lap and cried. I was twelve.
They’ve always treated each other with indifference, the way one might treat a piece of outdated furniture. It’s fine until it starts to get beat up. It’s fine until it gets in your way. When things get in my mother’s way, she turns around and ignores them. When things get in my father’s way, he attacks.
Living.
Apart.
“Wha-what?” I finally stutter. “You’re getting a...divorce?” The word is not even in my parents’ vocabulary. “But...you’re the most Catholic people on the planet.” I’m shooting back and forth between them. “You wouldn’t even let me go to a Protestant youth group in high school, for Christ’s sake! You don’t believe in divorce!”
“Layla!” chastises my father. “There’s no need for that kind of language. And we’re not getting a divorce. We are separating. There is a difference.”
Beside him, my mother snorts. It’s the first noise she’s made, and if I hadn’t been looking at her when she did it, I might have missed it. She hides her face in her glass like she didn’t say anything, but Dad shoots her a dirty look nonetheless. I wait for the sharp retort that should knock her down a peg—the kind I just received. But none comes.
“Is the difference that you’re planning to get back together?” I ask, trying and failing to keep the sharpness out of my voice, which is already starting to quiver.
My dad tightens his jaw. “It’s not so simple.”
“Yes, it is, Serge,” my mother interrupts.
Dad and I both stare at her, dumbfounded. My mother never, ever interrupts my father. But she isn’t looking at him when she says his name. She’s looking at me.
“We’re not getting divorced because the church doesn’t allow it, even if the state does,” Mom tells me. “And...well, that’s just the way it’s going to be.”
She casts another long look at my father, who doesn’t have the decency to meet her gaze. It’s clear which one of them refuses to do this. And fighting my father is usually not worth the battle.
“But effectively,” she continues, “we will be divorced.”
This causes my glance to flicker back to Dad. We’re Catholic, yes, but it’s mainly a choice fueled by my father’s occasional guilt. Mom converted to marry him, so this isn’t her hang-up. But my dad...yeah. I could see him refusing to sign divorce papers on account of the church. He doesn’t wear that St. Christopher medallion around his neck because he’s confident about getting into heaven. There’s a reason why he calls me on Sundays to see if I go, why he made me send pictures last year after I received my blessing on Ash Wednesday. He’s the guiltiest person I know.
“So, what, you’re going to move to an apartment downtown or something for a while?” I venture back at my dad. “Leave Mom in this giant house by herself? What kind of life is that?”
“Not one I want,” Dad puts in. “The house was sold in the spring, before you came home. We’ve been renting it since then.”
That explained why both my parents had been even more anal-retentive than normal about keeping the place clean. The house wasn’t even ours anymore.
“So...where are the two of you going?”
My mother takes another long slug of wine, but she lets my father talk.
“I’ve sold my practice,” Dad replies as he swirls the ice around in his drink. “And bought a share in another. In Vitória.”
Vitória. Brazil? I shove a hand through my hair. This makes no sense. Absolutely no sense at all.
“B-but...you hate Brazil,” I sputter. “You’ve spent most of your life trying to act like you’re not even from there!”
“Layla, Brazil is my country. Of course I do not hate it,” Dad replies wearily after taking a long drink of his scotch. “I’ve made a good life here, it’s true, but it was hard. Very hard. Now your mother and I have little in common anymore. I’ve made my fortune. My daughter is grown. I am tired of fighting so hard for what I have. It is time for me to go home.”
“I-I still don’t understand.” I’m reeling. What is happening right now? “You won’t even let me tell people I’m Brazilian.”
“That’s because you’re not!” my father returns sharply. “You’re American. Look at you. You have blue eyes, your skin is white like snow, and you speak only English. You were born here, and thank God for that.” He leans in, the angles of his face softening slightly. “It will never be as hard here for you as it was for me, Layla. Besides, is this not what you want? To leave this place? How much did we have to fight for you to come home this summer at all?”
This close, I can see the way the dark circles, the ones I get too when I’m stressed, make his eyes look like they’ve been etched with black. My father is tired. He never wants to tell me about the problems he’s had, only gestures to them obliquely like this. Sometimes I try to imagine. Racial slurs thrown at him when he first arrived here in the seventies, maybe? Assumptions that he was the groundskeeper at Stanford, not a medical student? He and my mother must have caught some kind of wrath when they started dating. Harassment? Attacks?
I’ll never know. But obviously it was bad enough that he feels he needs to shield me from it. Bad enough that he learned to hate himself and now wants to run away.
I look up. “Where’s Mom going?”
“Pasadena.”
My mom has a quiet voice, one that comes from years of learning how to play second fiddle to Sergio Barros, preeminent surgeon and life of the party. She fiddles with the stem of her wine glass before she meets my gaze.
“I’ll be staying with your grandparents,” she tells me, “while I look for a new house down there.”
I blink. “You’re moving in with your parents?”
My mother is forty-two. She’s a grown woman, and not just that, a rich grown woman. Even if she wants to house hunt for a while, there’s no reason she has to stay with her parents while she does it. She could rent an apartment or even a house somewhere in the LA area.
I glance between the two of them as my chest starts to feel like it’s icing over, a thin crust of frozen water, delicate enough that it might shatter. This is where I grew up. While it’s never been the warmest place in the world, it�
��s always been familiar. They have been familiar.
Slowly, I push back from the counter as tears cloud my vision. The chair leg drags on the marble floor, and the screech echoes through the high-ceilinged rooms.
“Where are you going?” my dad barks as I walk away.
I turn up the stairs that lead to the six empty bedrooms. The house echoes with every one of my steps—it’s never had enough to fill it, but it’s the only home I’ve known.
“I need a few moments,” I say, barely hearing my own voice.
“Not too long,” Dad calls, always controlling, always assuming he’s in the right, even when he’s the one delivering the bomb that blows everything up. Until he drops the other one: “We have a lot to do. I leave in three days, and you’ll be going to Pasadena with your mother.”
Chapter Two
Nico
The Jeep rumbles to a stop, and I pull the parking break and sit for a minute. The soft top is off, and early evening California sun beats down on me and the pavement. Across the street, the disc-shaped Capitol Records building practically shimmers in the heat. It’s almost six o’clock, but it’s still hot as fuck. Not humid like August usually is in New York, but nastier. In New York, the grime is gray and sticky, but every so often a rain shower or a snowstorm washes everything away. The heat in LA feels dirtier somehow. It flickers with a layer of smog that bakes in the sun all year round. It doesn’t matter that the sky is always blue and the palm trees sway in the breeze that sometimes comes up from the ocean. LA heat is tinted yellow, and it cuts you through like a rusty blade.
The door to Venom, the nightclub across the street and my place of work, opens, and a few of the staff exit the building. One of them says hi, but they know my routine. I usually take a few minutes in my car, just to be alone, before I go in. The Wednesday-night DJ is already setting things up at the booth and doing his sound check. It’s drum and bass night, which means I’m going to need about ten Advil tomorrow morning to get rid of my headache. The sun will go down in another couple of hours, and the club will open to a mix of tourists, wannabe actors, and the people they want to impress. All of them have to pass by me. I’ll be dressed in my black monkey suit, my hair slicked back like a gangster while I check names and IDs, just like I do every other night.
It’s a job I didn’t mind so much in New York, but that was only because I did it for extra cash. It was never a career. It was never the defining part of my life. Now I’m working security six nights a week at Venom, where K.C., my best friend from back home, DJs every Saturday. It’s one of the biggest clubs in LA, but Venom is the cheesiest place on the planet. Go-go dancers and caged girls, strobe lights and disco balls.
And the people who come here...forget about it. I haven’t seen normal-colored teeth or real tits in three months. I feel bad for the bouncers. About half their job consists of kicking people out who are fucking or doing blow in the bathrooms. I can’t even imagine wanting to fuck the kinds of people who go to places like this. I’d be getting STD tests every week for the rest of my life.
I work from seven thirty to four. Go home and sleep until noon. Get up. Go to the gym. Get dressed in the black tie and collared shirt I have to wear every damn night. Repeat.
It’s getting harder not to admit that coming here was a mistake, even if it’s only been a few months. At least the money’s good. I make enough to pay my little brother, Gabe’s, tuition at CUNY and my mother’s rent, plus help out my sisters, Maggie and Selena, so they can focus on work and Maggie’s kid, Allie. My family is taken care of, and since I’m three thousand miles away, they can’t come running to me for every little thing. It’s nice to have a break from them. I think.
My phone rings in my pocket. I pull it out. “Hey, Jess.”
“Hey. Everything okay? You seemed kind of mad when you left.”
I sigh. Jessie’s my roommate, but obviously wants to be more. And yeah, there have been a few times in the past couple of months where I’ve been a little weak and given in. What would you do if you were living with an actual model who handed out blowjobs like candy? When I come home from the club, I’m so tired that I don’t usually stop to wonder why she’s there waiting for me instead of going home with her own dates. And yeah, so maybe sometimes I close my eyes and pretend she’s someone else. Someone with black hair and blue eyes. Someone I still see almost every night when I fall asleep anyway.
Layla.
I didn’t think it would be this hard to forget her. I got here, and all I wanted was to hear her voice. Make her laugh. It was so hard that I almost quit my job the first week to drive up to Seattle to see her. I had to “lose” my phone in the Pacific Ocean to stop myself from calling and texting her, and I changed my number to a fuckin’ 323 area code so she couldn’t call me either. Do you know how hard it was to give up my 212 number? That’s OG New York right there. I’ll never get that back.
We only knew each other for a couple of months. And yeah, we both fell pretty hard. But Layla is young—only nineteen, or maybe twenty by now. I think she had a birthday over the summer. She was going to move on from a futureless loser like me anyway at some point, so it might as well have been last May. I just didn’t think I wouldn’t be able to let her go.
“I’m fine, Jess,” I say, forcing myself back to the present. When I start daydreaming about Layla, it’s a rabbit hole I can’t always escape. “Just don’t want to go to work, that’s all.”
“Want me to come down and keep you company? You know Craig doesn’t mind when I hang out.”
It’s true. Craig, the club manager, loves it when Jessie stands outside with me. She’s gorgeous and blonde, and in California, that draws people in like flies. The only problem is, Jessie starts taking things like that to mean we’re more than we are. She starts putting her hands all over me, calling me baby, her big brown bear. It makes me cringe. I’m not a fuckin’ stuffed animal, and I’m certainly not hers. Any other guy would give his left nut to get with a girl like Jessie, but anything more than scratching the occasional itch just feels wrong. I can’t tell you the reason.
Yes, you can, you cowardly fuck. One big reason. One achingly beautiful, blue-eyed reason with a heart-shaped mouth and an ass that won’t quit. A heart that speaks to mine in a secret language that has no words.
I guess I’m a fuckin’ poet tonight. Just call me Mother fuckin’ Goose.
“No, it’s fine,” I say. “It’s going to be busy tonight. I’ll probably be in and out anyway.”
It’s a lie. Wednesdays are the slowest nights of the week. But I’m just not in the mood to deal with Jessie’s clinginess right now. If I hadn’t signed a lease on the apartment, I would have already moved out.
“Okay,” she says. “I guess I’ll just have to cheer you up when you get home.”
She doesn’t say anything wrong. But the way she talks, she makes it sound like it’s our place. Like we share everything about it together, instead of the living room and kitchen. Like we don’t have separate bedrooms, separate lives.
Who am I kidding? Maybe we don’t.
“I’ll probably just stay at K.C.’s tonight, hang out with him,” I tell her.
K.C. is in Vegas this week doing a party. But I have the key to his very nice West Hollywood apartment, and our arrangement here is the same as it was in New York: when he’s out of town, I get to use his place to get a little quiet.
And yeah, more often than not, I end up using it just to mope around and think about the girl I wish was there with me.
“Okay,” Jessie’s saying, a little sadly.
I sigh, trying not to be bothered by it. I came out here not to take on other people’s clingy shit.
“See you,” I say and hang up the phone before she can reply.
I lean back in my seat and pull the bill of my Yankees cap down low over my face, taking a few more minutes before I have to go into the club. Just like always, those two blue eyes pop up. Shadowed by a fringe of long black lashes. Wide and open. Bluer than the sk
y above me, bluer than the ocean just fifteen minutes down the road. I let them wash over me and pretend Layla’s right there, seeing into my soul the way she always could, penetrating but not painful.
My chest hurts. I rub my face. Usually when I give myself a few seconds to do this, I can push her memory away and get back to my real life. Like a true addict, I just need a quick hit. But today, it’s just making me want more, and it hurts like hell that I can’t have it.
My thumb slides over the buttons on my phone, automatically tapping out her number. Who was I kidding? I’d never forget it. It might as well be tattooed onto my chest, right over the compass that’s already there.
Before I know it, the phone is ringing. Three times, four times. I start to panic. What the fuck am I doing? She doesn’t want to hear from me. I haven’t called her in two months, like some fuckin’ asshole who sleeps with a girl and pretends she’s a stranger after she puts out. What the fuck am I going to say?
I’m just about to hang up when she answers.
“Hello?”
Her voice is shaking a little, and my heart shakes right along with it. Fuck. Does she know it’s me? What am I going to do? I’m paralyzed. But I can’t hang up now that I hear the voice that’s been haunting my dreams for the last three months. Like a true addict, I can’t let go.
“Hello?” she asks again. “Who is this?”
She’s been crying. Her voice is thick, like it’s speaking through molasses. I can imagine her, red-rimmed eyes, rose-petal mouth that’s pink and swollen. Sad, but beautiful. Always so damn beautiful.
“Hello?” she asks again, now a little bit irritated too.
“Hey, beautiful,” I say softly. “It’s me.”
Layla is silent. I can hear her shuffling around a little bit. I try to imagine where she is right now. Home, I think. She was going home for the summer––home to finish recuperating from a nasty bout of mono in the spring. Is she in her bedroom? A living room? I don’t even know exactly where her family lives, just that it’s somewhere near Seattle. Is it a big house? Her dad’s a big-time plastic surgeon, so I doubt it’s small. Do they live in a city, or a small town? Does she have pets?
Bad Idea: The Complete Collection Page 37