Page 36 of The Lost Heiress
Ransom put his arms around her, held her close, but he could feel her slipping away all the same. He could see their future, which was no future at all. How she would start to spend more and more nights at her apartment than his; how she would claim a headache and turn over on her side and switch the light off—no more passages read aloud of Proustor Austen, nothing beautiful or profound. How studying took more time than it used to and nights out with friends became more common. Breaking one by one the threads that had bound them together. The slow, drifting dance they’d pretend to do, to make it more bearable, when really, it had happened in a moment, the chasm that had opened between them that could never be crossed.
After his parents’ plane crash the spring semester of his senior year, Ransom answered a knock at his apartment door to find Gabi standing there. They’d been broken up for eight months at that point and hadn’t seen each other or spoken for almost as long. He held the door open, and she came in, holding her arms to her chest like she was carrying something heavy.
They drank scotch on his couch and listened to the new Elvis Costello album on his record player, trying to fill the large swathes of silence that pressed up against them. And then they were kissing, because that was easier than trying to find the right words. He held her in the dark, warm body to warm body, and felt all the things they could not say pass between them.
They didn’t talk again after that. He had seen her at graduation, standing with her friends across the quad, her auburn hair set off against her white cap and gown. She’d leaned into another girl for a photo, laughed at a joke he couldn’t hear.
She was married now. He’d found out through a friend of a friend. She was settled in Oakland with a doctor; they had a little boy. She taught English at a private all-girls’ school. Ransom could imagine their life easily—a blue-shuttered two-story on a quiet cul-de-sac, azaleas growing unchecked in the front yard. Stacks of Shakespeare essays to grade on the kitchen table, takeout eaten from the carton in the living room, bath time andGoodnight Moonand night-lights. And Gabi, dressed in a large T-shirt, her hair still wet from the shower, lying on her stomach as she read aloud to her husband her favorite passages of Hardy. Beautiful and profound.
“Mind if I join you?”
Ransom looked up to see Ana standing next to him, gesturing at the chair that Mrs. Talbot had vacated.
Ransom only nodded. He glanced behind her at the now-empty terrace.
“Where has Salvador gone off to?” he asked as Ana settled herself into the chair.
“To help Mrs. Talbot in the kitchen,” Ana said. “There was some mix-up with the new kitchen hand, and she needed someone who speaks Spanish.”
“Ah,” Ransom said. “Do you not speak Spanish, Miss Rojas?”
“No,” Ana said. “My older sisters do, but my parents were adamant we not speak it in the house, because they wanted us to learn English. I can pick out bits and pieces when they talk to each other, but I never learned it properly. My younger brothers, they don’t understand it at all.”
“That’s too bad,” Ransom said. “Bilingualism is an amazing asset.”
Ana pursed her lips. “Yes, well, I think my parents were more concerned with us fitting in, you know? My father, he picked oranges for a living. He was a field-worker. He was forty-two before he could carry on a very rudimentary conversation in English, and he never learned to read in it. To him, English always felt like a foreign language, something he was on the outside of, trying to find his way in. He never wanted English to be a second language to us.”
Ransom wished he could rewind the past few seconds, unsay what he had said. Languages had always been to him a matter of cultural capital, denoting intelligence, class. A shiny bead on your achievement bracelet. He had never experienced language as a barrier before—something keeping others out—but of course it was. What a privileged asshole Ana must think he was.
“I didn’t mean—” he started.
“No, of course not,” Ana said quickly and forced a smile. “So tell me the truth,” she said, changing the subject. “So far, I’ve survived three weeks with Mrs. Talbot and your sister. Are you surprised to see me still standing?”
Her green eyes flashed at him, and it struck him, for the first time, how pretty she was. The first time he had seen her, he had registered only how unexpectedly young she looked, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, and no makeup, and that khaki skirt. But sitting next to her now in the dark, with the candles on the table illuminating her face, he saw how pleasing her green eyes were, and with some color in her cheeks from being in the sun all day and her dark hair loose around her shoulders, she looked older.
He cleared his throat. “This was one time I was glad to be proven wrong,” he said.
Ana laughed. She crinkled her nose, and something about the gesture struck a chord in him, like a sense of déjà vu. He couldn’t help but feel that strange sense of familiarity he had felt that first time he’d met her. Like it wasn’t the first time, like they’d crossed paths before.
“Miss Rojas—”
“Ana, please.”
“Ana,” Ransom said. “You’re absolutely sure we haven’t met before?”
Her eyes flashed again at him, and there was something new there—fear? Uneasiness? He couldn’t quite get a read on it.
She looked away. “I get that a lot, actually,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear and making her voice light. “I guess I just have a familiar face.”
He opened his mouth to press the issue further—to ask about her travels, if she had ever spent time in Los Angeles, if she had family in other parts that she visited—for surely their paths had crossed before, but just then, there was a loud, piercing shriek across the sky, followed by a thundering boom. Ransom turned to see the sky ablaze and glittering.
“Ah, it’s starting,” Ana said. “I’m going to go grab Salvador; he’ll be bummed if he misses this,” she said, already halfway out of her chair.
Ransom only nodded at her, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was grateful for the sudden interruption, that she couldn’t get away from him and his question fast enough.
Chapter Twelve
Present
