I ran True at his fastest canter for as long as he wanted to run. He slowed down as we neared the white fence at the west end of our property, out on the dry dusty plains. True would never jump a fence while I was riding him, and he paused to sniff the wind and take in the sights. I wondered if there was any point at all to running True around a bit closer to the house in the hopes that Colby McKay might be hanging around. But it was doubtful he’d be at the ranch on a weekday. I was sure had his own friends from school and didn’t make a habit of lingering around our property unless his whole family was there for services on Sundays.
Around us, the hot air stood still. I could sense True’s happiness to be with me and I let go of all of my thoughts of Treadwell and the impending trip to South America to enjoy the moment. I could see my house in the distance at the horizon, and I was so relieved to be home that I smiled to myself.
At dinner that night, I had hoped to have some private time with Daddy, but we had guests. My parents loved to entertain, and Mama typically pulled out all the stops for a high-profile dinner party. A politician from Southern California, who was running for the House of Representatives, and his wife were staying on the ranch for the week, apparently looking to my father for guidance on their campaign. Rick Davies, the politician, was handsome and in his early forties. He wore a cowboy hat, which I thought was kind of dumb, seeing as how he didn’t raise cattle or even own a horse. His wife had bleached-blond hair and wore a huge cocktail ring with a sparkly yellow gem in it that I assumed was as fake as her giggly laugh.
Anna, our private chef, and the kitchen staff went overboard preparing an elaborate meal intended to impress. They brought out grilled cactus with an herbed yogurt sauce and a buffet of toasted tortillas and salsas to showcase their expertise in local Southwestern cuisine. Next, the waiters brought out mixed green salads with strawberries, almonds and goat cheese, followed by a main course of carne asada and skewered shrimp that made my mouth water, and yellow rice flecked with cilantro and red onions. Mrs. Davies served herself extra helpings of fresh guacamole three times. I thought with contempt about how Treadwell billed the food in its dining hall as contemporary fare; there was nothing I had ever been served at Treadwell that even came close to the food Anna cooked for me in Phoenix.
Daddy talked throughout dinner of the importance of keeping oneself open as a vessel of God’s will, and being conscious of the mind’s tendency to try to convince itself that its own will is what God wants.
“God has plans for each of us,” Daddy insisted. “Even me. And if some day God tells me it’s time to leave this house behind and preach in war-torn Africa, I hope I am ready to heed the call and be of service to His glory.”
Everyone around the table listened intently, not wanting to miss a single word of my father’s casual sermon. Daddy could command a small room with the same intensity as he could hold an entire congregation in rapture for an afternoon.
It’s hard to put into words the love and admiration that I felt for my father in moments such as this. When my father was ten years old, he had already dropped out of school in Arkansas and worked with his father and brothers on their farm, where they grew corn and potatoes. A thunderstorm began rolling in one afternoon, and when my grandfather and uncles ran for the house to take cover, my father sprinted out into the field, determined to wrangle his favorite milk cow safely back to the barn. He was struck by lightning while his father and brothers watched helplessly, electrocuted through and through. He tumbled to the ground and his hair fell out; he bled from the mouth, and the bottoms of his feet turned black.
My grandparents thought my father was a goner for sure. They laid him out on their bed and waited two hours, praying over his body, before driving him in their pickup truck to the nearest hospital in Little Rock. They were convinced he was going to die, and wanted his spirit to pass in their family home.
However, in the hospital, he was resuscitated and two days later he was walking and talking normally again. Only as he recovered, his parents noticed that there was something remarkably different about him. He spoke constantly of doing the Lord’s work. He claimed he had been touched by God when the lightning struck him, and had been put on a mission by God, Himself, to preach the good word.
A lot of girls at Treadwell – and their parents – had plenty to say about my father’s preaching. But I was convinced that my father was a modern-day prophet just as he said he was, a man who had truly been put on this earth to bring the faith into the lives of everyone he met.
Sitting around our dinner table with the Davies,’ I was as in awe of my father as I had been as a small child. It seemed he always knew exactly what to say to bring peace to a room. The sun was setting over the desert outside the picture windows of our dining room, and Anna and her staff began serving coffee. I couldn’t help but yawn despite the nap I had taken earlier in the day; it was my bedtime already on the East Coast.
“I don’t know what I’d do if that Santangello mess was happening in California instead of New York,” Rick Davies said when talk at the dinner table turned to finance. “Every campaign supporter with two dollars to rub together has been affected in some way. It’s just a shame all around.”
My mother interjected thoughtfully to spare my feelings. “Grace attends boarding school with James Santangello’s daughter, Juliette. In fact, Juliette spent some time out here on the ranch last spring. She’s a lovely girl. Very bright.”
Rick Davies’ jaw firmed up as he realized his disparaging comments were not going to be welcome in our home.
Daddy, always the peacemaker, spoke up. “Sometimes men find themselves committing unspeakable acts for reasons beyond their control or even their own comprehension. We have to remember that it’s not our place on this earth to judge them, and in the Lord’s eyes, it’s never too late to ask for forgiveness. My prayers are with Mr. Santangello as well as the victims of his crime.”
Mama gave me a long, lingering hug goodnight before I went to bed, and promised to wake me up early enough to take True out for another run in the morning before our flight to Colombia. My suitcases had already been packed by the staff and were loaded into the SUV in the garage, waiting for our ride to the airport. I slept restlessly that night, wishing with all my might that we weren’t flying to Colombia in the morning despite my earlier promise to myself that I would be open-minded about the trip. All I wanted to do that week was sleep in, splash around in the pool and run True to the boundaries of our property under the hot Arizona sun until it was time to go back to Treadwell.
Chapter 3
“Have you heard from Aaron recently?” Mama asked me on board the flight to Bogota.
We were sitting in First Class, and she was pouring a sugar packet into her iced tea.
“No,” I said, realizing for the first time all week that he had never replied to the e-mail I had sent him. “Marguerite said he was working at an animal shelter this week.”
My mother said, “Hmm,” as if this answer was not satisfactory, and then did not mention my brother for the rest of our six days in South America. When we landed, the cable crew de-boarded first, led by the loud-mouthed, bossy director of the holiday special, who wore sunglasses even though we were indoors on the aircraft. We lingered on the plane with Abe and Karl, my mother’s body guards, and two members of a private security detail that had been hired to accompany us on this trip. Abe had previously been a body guard in Hollywood and had often been in charge of making sure that diamonds and jewels borrowed by starlets for events like the Oscars were returned to the stores that loaned them. Karl had been a Green Beret and had worked Special Ops in Vietnam. He was fiercely protective of my mother, who I think sometimes drove Abe a little crazy with her nonstop chatter.
Despite his devotion, Karl creeped me out a little. He had a lot of tattoos and a thick moustache, and looked like a criminal on weekends, when he wasn’t wearing his suit. I wouldn’t be surprised if Karl had some kind of fantasy on a back-burner in which Daddy
were to die in a horrible accident and he were to marry Mama, like, the next day.
The airport in Colombia smelled like fresh baked goods, and I begged Mama to buy me some pane d’oro (little golden buns) while Marguerite and I used the bathroom. Using the bathroom when traveling with my parents was an annoying experience. We had to linger outside the entrance to the ladies’ room until all other women using the bathroom had left, and then Abe stood guard while I entered with Marguerite to relieve my bladder. The bathroom was nothing more than a cinder block of a room with three seatless toilets. The toilet paper was basically the equivalent of rough brown paper towels. I felt self-conscious because I could hear women outside the doorway complaining in Spanish that they had to go, and could hear babies crying. I took care of business as quickly as possible and rinsed off my hands, knowing all too well that even if I had told Abe it was fine for others to come in and use the bathroom while I was still in there, that he still would not have permitted it.
My parents were manically paranoid about South America and the rate of terrorist kidnappings there. I had been told before this trip, as I had been told before all previous trips to Argentina, Chile and Ecuador, that at no time would I ever be allowed to venture out on my own. I never had any clue why they seemed to think there was such a high percentage of probability that one of us would be kidnapped even after we grew up, but then again, I never saw the security reports on our property.
They probably would have lost their minds if they had any idea that Juliette and I would sometimes take the bus into Boston alone on weekends and use public restrooms and eat in crowded food courts without any bodyguards or cares in the world.
A cavalcade of Oldsmobiles awaited us outside the airport. There really wasn’t any such thing as limousines in Colombia - well, surely they were, but they were only safe for Colombian popstars like Juanes to ride around in. Nothing says, “Kidnap me! I’m rich!” quite like a flashy limousine. We rode in the back of a gray Oldsmobile with Booth, the director, and Abe in the front seat next to the driver, who did not speak English. Karl and Marguerite followed in the car behind us in traffic.
“This country’s undergone tremendous change in the last ten years,” Booth was telling us. “The FARC has lost much of its power and a number of technology start-ups are booming. Guess what Colombia’s number one export is?”
Mama blushed and said, “Well I know what I think it is but I’m not sure it’s appropriate to mention in front of Grace, here.”
“Cocaine,” I guessed for her. I wasn’t dumb, I had seen Mr. and Mrs. Smith and was well aware of the bad reputation that many South American countries had acquired, and why.
“Grace!” my mother exclaimed, ashamed of my candor.
Booth smiled. “Flowers,” he corrected me. “The majority of flowers delivered in the U.S. were grown in Colombia.”
I was fascinated by the long, winding streets beyond the window of our car. Laundry hung outside apartment windows on wires in the poorer neighborhoods, and adults walked dogs while children kicked soccer balls in the many grassy parks we passed. We wove our way through small neighborhoods and then onto the highway for a stretch. I saw small mini-vans pulling over alongside the highway to allow passengers waiting in the hot sun to board, and Booth explained that this was Colombia’s official form of public transportation: private buses. Anyone with a minivan or SUV could charge a fare for a ride, and the system was surprisingly efficient at all hours of the day.
Our hotel was in the middle of what would be considered the ritzy part of town, the north side, just two blocks from where a powerful drug lord used to have his luxurious mansion. The mansion still stood, in shambles, and my mouth fell open as we drove past it. It was barely visible from the street because of a large whitewashed wall topped by razor wire that had been built to encircle it. Booth explained that when the government was finally strong enough to crack down on the excessive drug trade in the city in the early 1990’s, government helicopters had firebombed the mansion from above, killing the drug lord and much of his corporate cartel.
The entrance to our hotel was guarded by five paramilitary guards carrying machine guns, accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs. Despite the slightly terrifying display of security outside, the hotel was majestic inside. It was only when we stepped inside and began breathing the purified air that I realized how poor the quality of the air outside had been. Bogota was a smoggy city. It smelled toxic.
The next six days were a whirlwind of rides up and down twisting streets and dusty highways. We served up breakfast in downtown Bogota at a soup kitchen. Soup kitchen service was the only time my mother ever put on an apron and handled food; she was always far too busy at home to be involved in meal preparation, although she liked to think that her input on menus for large events counted toward something like cooking. Anna humored her and assured her that she was a culinary genius, but truthfully, a large part of my mother’s reputation as a stellar homemaker was due to Anna’s talents.
“Don’t, honey bun,” Mama hissed at me at the soup kitchen.
I tried to sneak a bite of eggs when the cameras weren’t rolling. I immediately assumed she meant that it was in bad taste for me to sample the food that we were serving to the hundreds of people who had stood in line for breakfast in the church basement that morning. How wrong I was.
“That food is probably not safe for you,” she continued. “They have all kinds of bad bacteria in the water here. The last thing you want is a visit from the old brown fairy while we’re so far from home.”
The brown fairy was my mother’s ridiculous Southern euphemism for diarrhea. Mama didn’t think it was ladylike to refer to bodily functions by their actual terms. Seriously. I didn’t ever say that I had to pee until I went off to Treadwell at the age of thirteen. Until that point I always said I had to tinky-dink, which is how Mama referred to urination. Mama dropped out of high school when she was seventeen and never went back, so I tended to cut her some slack when it came to things like correct names for anatomical parts and proper grammar.
Presumably the food cooked for us back at our ritzy hotel was prepared with the same water as the food we were serving at the soup kitchen, but she hadn’t said a word three hours earlier when we were eating our own breakfast off china plates at the Sofitel Victoria Regia. Unfortunately for me, I was not a fan of the fancy crepes and pastries that had been served in haste at the hotel because the crew had gotten up late and we were all late for the shoot. The food at the soup kitchen was much more to my liking, buttery scrambled eggs and crispy bacon, just like what we had daily in the Colgate dining hall at Treadwell.
The next day at an orphanage two hours away in rural Chia, a team of good-looking American volunteers, most in their early twenties, greeted us. They were the long-term volunteers at the Instituto Santa Maria, mostly recent college graduates who wanted to do a year of charitable service before starting their careers. The institute was run by tiny Catholic nuns in dusty black habits, some of whom were playing softball with a group of middle-grade children when our cavalcade of cars and production vehicles pulled up. Booth and his team of about thirty crew members set up cameras and lights in the nurseries. A few minutes into the set-up they realized that the electricity in the orphanage’s main building wasn’t enough for their lighting system, and they had to run cords out to the large truck parked in front that carried a generator.
Little boys and girls with dirty faces, many of whom were missing a front tooth or two, watched in delighted awe as the big American cable crew ran thick black electrical cords through the front doors of the orphanage. My mother and I sat inside the living room of the orphanage with two volunteers, Chris and Tim, while Booth finished his pre-production.
Chris, who looked about twenty-two and was insanely tan and handsome, offered us both coffee.
“Sure,” I accepted.
My mother shot me a death look, but I assumed by Chris and Tim’s appearances that they had successfully managed to avoid any bad ba
cteria in Colombian water. They both looked like Hunter Lodge models with abdominal muscles that were visible through their royal blue staff t-shirts.
“What grade are you in, Grace?” Tim asked me. He had curly brown hair and bright blue eyes that matched his t-shirt, and I was extremely self-conscious that such a hot man was paying me any attention at all. Treadwell is a boy-free zone, so it was pretty rare that I held a conversation with any person of the male variety other than my own brother. And Tim wasn’t just a boy, he was a man. He had a sharp Adam’s apple, which bobbed up and down in his tan throat when he spoke. He had a dimple in his chin and was so cute, he was downright heart-stopping.
“I’m a sophomore,” I said. I guessed that since he asked me what grade I was in, he was probably expecting me to say seventh. What can I say? I was short and didn’t dress very provocatively.
Chris returned with a cup of coffee for me. Tim explained that he had graduated from Yale and had spent a year in Colombia. He would be starting law school for the spring semester in January in New York. Chris had just graduated from UCLA four months earlier, and was volunteering for a year before applying to business schools. After Booth came into the living room, breathless and sweaty, and told us that it was time to start shooting, Mama whispered to me and told me that I should take note. Chris and Tim were exactly the kind of boys I should be interested in marrying.
Marriage advice from Mama was mortifying. I hadn’t even been on a single date yet, or kissed a boy. Prospective husbands, especially those as muscular and handsome as Chris and Tim, were not exactly on my mind.
Booth and his crew captured hours of footage of me, my mother, and Marguerite holding babies, giving them bottles and changing diapers. Well, actually there was only footage of me and Marguerite changing diapers; my mother was a little afraid to risk getting her silky blouse dirty. My mother sat and patiently listened as the nuns explained their financial challenges at the orphanage, nodding solemnly. I watched from the doorway of the orphanage’s main office during this segment, knowing at the end of the taping that my mother would dramatically hand the nuns a check for a hundred thousand dollars to make improvements. Booth had already storyboarded the entire conversation.
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