“Because I didn’t tell them where I was. There are hundreds of hotels in Barcelona. How could they have known it was this one?”
A good question. If I hadn’t been able to find Frankie in the best hotels, how could Ben and April, who spoke little Spanish, have found Frankie in one of the worst hotels?
“I didn’t even call them,” said Frankie. “I sent a message with a taxi driver to their apartment. All it said was ‘Delilah is safe with me. I will be contacting you soon to work out new custody arrangements.’”
I didn’t know what to think. I preferred to think that April and Ben had somehow gotten the hotel’s name from the taxi driver rather than that Delilah had been nabbed off the street by professional childnappers, but it was still all very confusing. If April and Ben knew where Delilah was why hadn’t they contacted me? I’d searched out Hamilton last night, but he hadn’t said a word. Perhaps they hadn’t told him?
“Frankie,” I said. “If you think Ben and April have Delilah and you know where they’re staying, why don’t you just go there and talk about it with them? What do you need me for?”
Frankie’s thin lips quivered. “I need you to go with me.”
“But why?”
“Because. Because I’m afraid of them.” And Frankie burst into tears again.
This was not the way I had envisioned my stay in Barcelona, speeding around in taxis with bereft mothers. Before I’d always taken this city at a leisurely pace: long mornings reading newspapers and books in cafés, which drifted into serious lunches with Ana and other friends; afternoons spent napping and strolling along the streets, stopping in bookstores and again in cafés; resplendent evenings full of food and music and talk.
Now I had the feeling that even Gaudí’s architecture, which had always been a lovely backdrop for my wanderings, was never going to be the same for me.
We screeched up in front of the door to La Pedrera and went inside and up the elevator. Frankie was clutching my arm and smoking non-stop. My headache wasn’t getting any better.
We knocked and April came to the door. She looked from me to Frankie with wide-open dark eyes. I couldn’t read their expression. “Ben,” she called, a little unsteadily. “Ben, they’ve brought Delilah back.”
Then she noticed that Delilah wasn’t with us, but not in time to warn Ben, who came rushing out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around her midriff. What’s she got that I haven’t, I thought. Except fifteen years or so and a tattoo of a dancing woman on her back shoulder.
“Where is she, where’s Delilah?”
“I thought you had her,” shrieked Frankie.
“Oh my god,” said April. And fainted.
Neither Ben nor Frankie seemed to notice April’s unconscious state, so it was left to me to bring her around with water from a vase of flowers, while Ben and Frankie screamed at each other. Or perhaps it was the screaming that brought her around.
“What have you done with Delilah?”
“Why are you pretending you don’t have her?” Frankie grabbed Ben’s arm and Ben’s towel slipped off, revealing rock-hard thighs and an abdomen like a knotted slab of maple.
“April, April dear,” I was murmuring. “Wake up April, are you all right? Do you want me to rub your feet?”
“You stole her right from under my very eyes and you think I have her?”
“You’re the one who has her. You took her this morning when the poor little thing had to go to the bathroom.”
“What are you talking about? I had no idea where you were. How could I have taken her?”
“I sent you a message. That’s how you found me. Don’t pretend you didn’t get it.”
April groaned and her eyelashes fluttered. I had to fight down a terrible desire to kiss her. April, I wanted to say, what are we doing with these two crazy people? Let’s just you and me go away together, I know we’re meant for each other. Her black eyes opened and she stared at me. According to the film script she should have murmured, “Darling, I knew it was you all the time.” But instead she croaked, “Where am I?”
“You’ve always been like this,” Ben shouted. “One lie after another, one excuse after another. I could give a damn if you’d had surgery to become an elephant, if only you’d be honest for once.”
“You don’t know a thing about honesty. Or human kindness. If you’d been honest or kind you never would have left San Francisco without telling me. Do you think it’s been easy finding you? I had to give up my job, everything to follow you.”
I assisted April to an upright position, but she seemed not to want to take part in the debate.
Frankie continued, “The only reason I took Delilah in the first place was to get you to agree to new custody arrangements.”
“Kidnapping is no way to get me to agree to anything.”
“Well, we’re even now. I don’t have Delilah and neither do you,” Frankie said smugly. But then reality hit her. “Then she really has been kidnapped by white slave traders.”
The two of them burst into shocked tears and then resumed accusing each other.
April said, “I think I need some fresh air.”
I walked April as gently as an invalid through the tiny Pasage de la Concepción that led from Gràcia to the Rambla de Catalunya, and seated her at an outdoor café sheltered from the sun. On either side of us traffic flashed by; it wasn’t the quietest place for a conversation, but in Barcelona there aren’t many quiet places. I often sat at this café, for it was just across from Ana’s apartment building.
“Poor April,” I said several times, encouragingly, but she only nodded her frizzy black hair. She looked a little older this morning, wearing a gold caftan that could have been a bathrobe, her darkly-haired legs shoved into Birkenstocks. I still adored her though.
I ordered tea and ensaimadas, the Catalan version of sweet turnovers.
“I feel so guilty,” she said finally, in a low monotone. “Women are supposed to love kids, women are supposed to want kids, women are supposed to be crazy about babies and children. Well, I don’t love kids, I mean, as a rule, as a species. And I can’t stand how central children can be to someone’s life, how parents can fight the way they do over a child.”
“One thing I’ll say for big Catholic families is that no one gets any special attention. The fighting was all between us when I was growing up.” I paused. “Are you saying you don’t like Delilah?”
“I wanted to like Delilah….”
“But right from the beginning she was a bone of contention.”
April shook her head. “I didn’t even know that Ben had a daughter at first. I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved with her if I’d known. But does she look like a mother?”
I had to shake my head. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door to Ana’s apartment building open and a large, brightly painted papier-mâché arm protrude. Today Ana was taking her maternal construction to the home of the prospective mother.
“Of course she doesn’t,” said April, chewing on her sticky pastry. “She looks like a bodybuilder, she looks like a bulldyke, she looks like…”
“A boy.”
“How was I supposed to know she had a daughter? She never mentioned her. It was all ‘Oh, April you’re the only one for me. April I’ll love you till I die.’ It was flowers and cards and phone calls until I gave in.”
“And then you found out about Delilah. And Frankie.”
“She wasn’t only a mother, but a mother in a custody dispute. Not only a custody dispute, but a dispute about gender. About who was a real woman, who had the right to be the mother.”
Ana, with her long braid tucked up under a workmanlike beret, was loading arms and legs into the back seat of the car she’d borrowed. She couldn’t quite get the thighs to fit and had opened one of the back windows. The pair of red and yellow legs protruded wildly and disjointedly.
“Maybe I could have helped them,” April said, as if to herself. “Maybe I could have gotten them to reconcile.
But that would have meant committing myself to the relationship.”
“And you couldn’t,” I said, “because there was Delilah.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“But then why did the three of you come to Barcelona to get away from Frankie?”
April had finished her ensaimada and was dabbing delicately at the plate with a finger. “That’s what everyone thinks,” she said. “But I came here by myself. Ben followed me. And let me tell you, it’s been very difficult. I haven’t had a moment’s peace for a week.”
Ana was struggling to fit the body’s head into the passenger seat, where it sat, smiling benignly, like a totemic goddess. Something snapped into place. I stared at April in her rather tired caftan/bathrobe and for the first time her musky scents and freckled cleavage didn’t overwhelm me.
“You drugged Delilah with some kind of herbal knock-out drops, didn’t you? Then let Frankie in so she could kidnap her, didn’t you? And then when I turned up at seven-thirty, you kept me occupied so you’d have an alibi, didn’t you?”
April stared at me sadly. Her black hair looked grayer in the sunlight and her vibrant voice quavered. “I’m not a bad person. I’d never want you to think I’m a bad person.”
“Didn’t you think about how frightened Ben would be?”
“It was only going to be overnight, Frankie said. She wasn’t going to take Delilah out of the city. It was a negotiating tool. I thought, I guess I thought that Ben needed to be scared. I guess I thought they’d all go back to San Francisco.”
“How did Frankie persuade you? I thought you didn’t like Frankie.”
“I don’t know if I do like Frankie,” April said unhappily. “But it’s not because of who she is or what she’s become.” She started to cry. “It’s all so complicated. You’d never understand. And now Delilah’s really gone.”
“Then there’s no possibility that Ben really did steal Delilah out of the hotel this morning?”
“Ben and I slept until nine-thirty. We were exhausted, we’d been up half the night.”
“But Frankie sent a message that Delilah was safe.”
“That’s a message we never got.”
“Why is Hamilton so suspicious of you?”
That shook April up. “What makes you think he’s suspicious of me?”
“He didn’t want to let you out of his sight all last night.”
“He’s not suspicious of me. We’re old friends.”
“Since when?”
“Since high school. We… played in the orchestra together.”
“Where was that?”
“Just what is your point, Cassandra?” A harshness I’d never heard before came into April’s voice. She set her cup of tea down with a clatter.
“My point is that there’s something funny going on between you and Hamilton.”
“You’re the one who’s suspicious,” she turned it on me. “Working for Frankie, hounding us to Barcelona. You’d be the likeliest to have taken Delilah this morning. It’s something Frankie cooked up, I’m sure of it. Pretending that Delilah was kidnapped when Frankie has just got her stashed somewhere.”
For a second her guess rang true. God, it was just the kind of thing that Frankie might do. But then I remembered Frankie’s anguish in the hotel. She couldn’t fake that, could she?
“Are you ready to go back to La Pedrera and talk about this sensibly?” I asked instead.
“You go,” she said, struggling for serenity. “I need a little time alone. This fighting between Frankie and Ben may not be old to you, but it is to me. I can’t face it.”
“You can’t pretend all this isn’t happening, April,” I said. “Delilah is gone, and naturally Frankie and Ben are upset. They’re her parents.”
“I know,” she said. After a minute she added, “There’s something I’d like to tell you, but not right now. Could you give me a couple hours to work up to it? We could meet for lunch at the market off the Ramblas, the Mercat Sant Josep. There’s a restaurant there, Hamilton took me once.”
“I’m not sure I should let you out of my sight,” I said. “Why can’t you tell me now?”
“Because…” Her voice changed. “What’s that? Somebody is running down the street with a… a head.”
I followed her pointing finger. Ana had left the car unlocked while she went back upstairs to get more body parts and someone, a young boy, was indeed dashing across the Rambla de Catalunya with the peacefully smiling red and yellow papier-mâché head of Ana’s birthing house.
I jumped up from my chair and tore after him, but he was too quick for me. I chased him down the center walkway, but lost him in the end down a side street.
Ana was standing by the car when I returned empty-handed. A small crowd of passersby and neighbors had gathered to tell her what had happened and to discuss, in very loud voices, how things were going to the dogs in Barcelona. Now they were stealing art, right out of cars!
“The head’s not the important bit,” I tried to reassure Ana. “Many women become mothers without using their heads.”
“I’m late,” Ana snapped, slamming the door of the car and driving off in a temper.
I turned back to the café and the foot masseuse of my dreams. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.
April was gone.
14
I WAS ON MY WAY through the Pasaje de la Concepción back to La Pedrera when I recognized Ben and Frankie coming towards me. Ben had pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt with the name of some gym in San Francisco, and she was marching ahead of Frankie through the little pedestrian street. They were still quarrelling.
“I don’t understand how you could accept me once with all my quirks and eccentricities and then go so judgmental on me,” Frankie was saying. In contrast to Ben who set each high-top sneaker down as if it were a dumbbell, Frankie bounced and slid along in her pointed shoes.
“We didn’t have anybody else in Iowa,” Ben said glumly. “We had to accept each other.”
“I’m no different than what I was ten years ago.”
Ben turned on her. “You’re completely different, Frankie. How can you say you’re not different?”
Frankie stopped too. “Aren’t you ever going to understand? I never was a man. Never felt like one, never looked like one, never was one inside. I was always a woman.”
“You didn’t feel to me like a woman.”
“What do you know and what does it matter anyway?” Frankie’s triangular face twisted sadly. “I thought you loved me for the person I was and am. My qualities have never changed even though my body did.”
“I do care about you, Frankie,” Ben said, after a minute. “But I don’t know how to deal with you anymore.”
“Sometimes I think that my caring about Delilah throws your whole self-concept of motherhood in doubt. If I can be a mother too, what does your motherhood mean?”
“There’s always one biological mother,” Ben said. “That’s the way it is. And the biological mother always feels different than the other parent.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Frankie. “Motherhood isn’t about biology, it’s about love.”
“Don’t talk to me about biology meaning nothing,” Ben snapped, starting to walk away again. “We are our bodies, our bodies make us who we are. You can’t just play fast and loose with biology.”
“Says the great bodybuilder,” Frankie said snidely.
They both saw me.
“Where’s April?” Ben demanded.
“I… well… I don’t know exactly.”
Frankie looked closely at me and then rolled her eyes nervously.
“What’s wrong, where’s April?” Ben repeated, advancing on me threateningly, “I know you’ve been seeing her. What’s going on between you?”
It’s hard to tell someone that their lover has betrayed them, no matter what that betrayal consists of.
But Frankie took the initiative. “Look, Ben, you had to know sometime. April helped me with Del
ilah last night.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“It’s true, Ben,” I said. “Frankie set it up with April to let her into the apartment while I was there, so that she’d have an alibi. But Hamilton came home and then you did, and… you know the rest.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ben said again, her solid face anguished. “Why would April do such a thing to me? She loves me, she loves Delilah, she was the one who set up this whole trip to Barcelona… Cassandra, you’re in on this with Frankie, you’re making this up.”
Frankie’s voice shook, “Can’t you get it through your head that April doesn’t like kids?”
“I’m afraid it’s true, Ben,” I said. “April told me as much out on the street. She doesn’t feel comfortable around kids. And she says you followed her to Barcelona.”
“April would never say that!”
“Is it or isn’t it true?” Frankie demanded. “Is that why you took Delilah out of school, quit your job and disrupted all our lives? Because of some half-baked infatuation with a foot therapist?”
“Oh, what does it matter,” Ben wailed, “when Delilah’s gone.” She turned on Frankie. “It’s all your fault. If you hadn’t come here and stirred up trouble, none of this would have happened. April and I were making progress on our relationship. Now she’s gone.”
“She’s gone and she’s taken Delilah with her,” said Frankie portentously. “She stole our daughter from the hotel this morning.”
“How do you know that, Frankie?”
“Who else could it be?”
I tried to get things back to a level of rationality. “What reason would April have for taking Delilah, Frankie?”
“You think she did too, admit it!”
“Well, she did say she had something to tell me. We agreed to meet in an hour at the restaurant inside the Mercat Sant Josep. Maybe she felt bad about having helped last night.”
“But she fainted today when you two showed up without Delilah,” Ben said. “Doesn’t that prove she’s innocent?”
“Maybe she’s just high-strung,” Frankie said. “Those spiritual types often are.”
“April told me you slept in until nine-thirty, Ben. Wouldn’t you have noticed if she’d gone out?”
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