The Second Time We Met

by Leila Cobo

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Adored and nurtured by his adoptive parents in California, Asher Stone has moved effortlessly through a nearly perfect life. He is on the verge of a professional soccer career-when a car accident throws his future into doubt. Suddenly, Asher begins to wonder about his past, and about the girl who gave him up for adoption in Colombia two decades ago. And so begins his search for a woman named Rita Ortiz. From the teeming streets of Bogata to a tiny orphanage tucked into a hillside, Asher untangles the mystery of Rita's identity, her abrupt disappearance from her home, and the winding journey that followed. But as Asher comes closer to finding Rita, his own parents are faced with fears and doubts. And Rita must soon make her own momentous choice: stay hidden in her hard-earned new life, or meet the secret son who will bring painful memories-or the promise of a new beginning . . .

Release date: February 29, 2012

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 374

Sample

“[A] poignant tale of truths hidden and laid bare.”

—Booklist

“[A] novel of forbidden love and its repercussions… Cobo smoothly imparts the importance of familial ties and family honor in Colombia, alongside American priorities of success and security… Tell Me Something True is a bittersweet journey about coming to understand and forgive the indiscretions of one’s parents through the simple act of living one’s life.”

—Miami Herald

“With a story that leaves the reader wanting more, journalist and pianist Leila Cobo enters the literary world on the right foot with her first novel, Tell Me Something True.” [Translated]

—Semana

“Raw, passionate, honest, and fearless.”

—Examiner.com

“The smooth prose and authentic Colombian settings provide a unique spin to familiar territory.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[Tell Me Something True] is a well-told story. The characters are alive and maintain a reader’s interest until the last word.”

—Midwest Book Review

“A good story, delicately told with pathos and compassion.”

—BookLoons.com

“This heart-wrenching story focuses on how memories permeate the everyday, the relationship between mothers and daughters, and the role family plays in our most intimate relationships.”

—RT Book Reviews

“This first novel, one of the best that I have read all year, throws question after question at the reader and tosses us all back to our first loves and the choices we may or may not have made… Relentless and absolutely honest, the surprise ending is unbeatable. Wonderful writing, content, themes, and characters… this novel is a must read. Bravo!”

—TheReviewBroads.com

“Tell Me Something True is an utterly wonderful and riveting book that had me in its clutches from the first page. It is lyrical and sensual with no word out of place. The character development is perfect, deep and meaningful, bringing the reader into the heart of the protagonists and their lives. In a sense, this novel sang to me in its poignant story of great loves.”

—www.MostlyFiction.com



Rita, 1989

It rained that night, and it made all the difference.

In her dream she was on a boat, and the wind and the ocean mist fanned her face, even though she had never even seen the sea. But when she opened her eyes, she realized it was just the rain, trickling slowly in heavy droplets that settled on the innermost corner of the open window before sliding lazily onto her pillow, which lay directly below.

It was very cold.

With a sigh, Rita peeled off the heavy blankets and knelt on the twin bed, the mattress thin and hard under her legs. She opened her arms wide, and with each hand grabbed the heavy wooden shutters that, when closed, sealed off her bedroom completely from the outside world.

They lived in the second-story apartment of a small, three-century-old structure of white stucco walls with its wooden windows and doors painted a dazzling blue. It was a home of long, dark, narrow hallways and cramped rooms with creaking floors. There’d come a time when these same homes would become trendy, when the wealthy people from nearby Bogotá would start scooping them up and remodeling them, tearing down walls and putting in new wooden floors and vast skylights that made up for the undersize windows. But right now her family’s threadbare, lower-middle-class existence was evident in the scratched floors, in the living room with the worn, plastic-covered couch, in the bathroom—shared with her little brother—that housed a sad, square shower with broken tiles and a white sink with a perpetual brown stain around its edges that refused to go away even with the most abrasive detergent.

Downstairs was her father’s modest sundry shop, right off the main square in this town of expansive landscapes and small imaginations. She knew the minutiae of every client and neighbor: the notary public across the street who paid for his daughter’s school supplies with public money; the pharmacist who still didn’t know that his wife dyed her hair because she ordered it straight from Rita’s father’s shop rather than getting it at her own store and risking her husband’s learning she was going gray; Rita’s older schoolmates, who stopped here after school to shop for condoms on the sly, paying her instead of her mom or dad; Georgie, who was thirty-five years old and still lived with his mother next door because he was retarded but was given permission to shop here every afternoon for little trifles as he looked in awe at her classmates’ legs, their blue uniform skirts hitched up high above their knees the minute they were off school grounds.

Doors were always locked here, but that still couldn’t stop the secrets from leaking outside, like a thousand little minnows set loose in the water.

This secret, though, was so quiet it could have kept for the night, at least if Rita hadn’t been up at two in the morning trying to close the window that she opened in the evenings, just to see the stars through the ornate black grille.

She didn’t hear the voices at first. She was still half asleep, still taking in the cold wetness of the dark outside. But she realized they were there the minute they stopped, and she—recognizing that something had changed—looked down.

They were wearing fatigues, but of course here in the countryside that could mean anything: army, leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, or, worse, thugs who’d decided to scare people off with uniforms.

Rita froze, her arms spread wide, fear making her grip the windows’ edges for balance. They were standing in the middle of the damp, empty street, their faces shadowed but still clearly visible under the yellow glow of the streetlights. There were five of them, but her gaze zeroed in on only one. It was less about the levity in his gaze—she couldn’t even discern the color of his eyes from the window—and more about the narrow, aquiline nose visible underneath his cap, the confident arrogance of his stance.

He smiled when he met her eyes behind the bars that shielded her from him, a bold smile of utter self-assurance—the assurance that comes from being armed and in a group and… simply from being assured.

Rita hurriedly shut the windows, fumbling with the old latch but finally managing to secure the lock, then sat back on the bed, stunned and scared. Armed men in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, casing the town. Whoever they were, it couldn’t be good. And they had seen her. And she had seen them. She closed her eyes for a second, her pulse quickening with increasing panic. Her first instinct was to be quiet and pretend it hadn’t happened. But even at sixteen Rita knew she couldn’t do that. Doors here were locked for a reason. It was 1989, and the country was in the midst of civil strife, its rural areas dotted with pockets of violence, as unpredictable and surprising as landmines. Theirs was a false sense of security, brought by the picture-perfect landscape, the cobbled streets, the familiarity of those around them.

But always, always, there was the possibility of danger, lurking anywhere, ready to prey on a small, out-of-the-way town that boasted three overweight policemen (cousins) and no military outpost. They all knew each other here, and they had all been indoctrinated for as long as Rita could remember: “You see anything out of the ordinary, you report it.”

Rita took a deep breath and stood up, shivering slightly when her bare feet touched the cold wooden floor. She opened her bedroom door slowly, careful not to make it creak, and tiptoed down the hall to her parents’ room with growing trepidation.

She stood outside their closed door, her hand up, hearing her mother’s rhythmic breathing and her father’s loud snore. They slept in separate beds, virginal twin beds with dark blue spreads, and over each of them a simple wooden cross.

How many nights she had stood quietly in this spot, hearing the sounds of their sleep, hoping to hear some inkling of life beyond their breathing, wondering how in the world she and her brother could have been conceived in this sterile room.

“Do they really do that?” she’d asked her best friend, Jazmin, in horror when Jazmin showed her the sex-education pamphlet they distributed at the health center in the next town over. The black-and-white sketches depicted the man and the woman in a warm embrace, their mouths curved up in gentle contentment, while below, his penis clearly entered the opening in her vagina and little arrows marked the path of the sperm to the womb with cartoonish emphasis.

Rita had looked surreptitiously at her father’s crotch for days, trying to divine any sign of lust that could override the utter indifference, sometimes laced with quiet contempt, with which he treated her mother.

Even so, her presence inside their room was strictly verboten, as was her waking them up at night, for any reason at all, from having killed a rat to dealing with a fever.

This time she gathered her courage and knocked, very softly.

“Father,” she whispered, her voice breaking. Rita cleared her throat, then called him again, louder this time.

“Father!” she repeated urgently. His snoring stopped, then resumed a second later.

“Father, wake up!” she called again, rapping the door sharply.

This time he heard her.

“What!” he answered loudly from behind the door. “What is it?”

“There are men outside!” Rita whispered loudly. “Armed men.”

“Wait there,” he answered tersely after the briefest pause.

Rita heard him shuffling inside, opening and closing a drawer, mumbling something to her mother.

He opened the door abruptly, his heavy black hair—which he always kept impeccably swept back in place with a touch of gel—standing out in all directions. She would have giggled—if he hadn’t been carrying the heavy shotgun she had seen only twice in her life.

“What happened?” he asked gruffly.

“I… I got up to shut the windows because it was raining, and I saw them down in the street. There were five of them,” said Rita.

“Did they see you?” asked her father immediately.

Rita cringed. “Yes,” she said softly, averting her gaze.

Her father looked at her, at the white cotton nightgown, at her long, loose hair and her bare feet.

“You stupid, stupid girl,” he said, shaking his head, raising his left hand, then thinking twice about it. “Get in there with your mother, and don’t come out until I say so,” he added, pushing her inside his room and shutting the door behind him. Rita stood there numbly, her ear against the door, straining to hear him as he walked down the hall to her brother Sebastián’s room, also admonishing him to stay inside.

She felt her mother’s presence behind her, close but not touching her, a woolen blanket wrapped around her like a shawl.

“Rita, what did you do?” she asked anxiously, her face creased in worry, as it often was.

“We can’t leave Sebastián alone,” said Rita, not bothering to answer. Her brother was only ten. “He’ll be scared!”

“No he won’t,” said her mother quietly, resigned. “He’s a man. He’ll know how to take care of himself. What did you do, Rita?” she asked again, and this time her tone left no room for evasion.

“Nothing, Mother!” Rita replied in a ragged whisper. “I looked out the window. That’s all I did.”

Her mother looked at her blankly. “Well, you shouldn’t have,” she said at last, shaking her head.

Rita opened her mouth, wanting to defend herself, then thought better of it and instead crouched next to the door, clutching her arms around her waist in a vain attempt to keep warm as she tried to discern movement in the floor below.

After a few minutes of silence, her mother handed her a blanket.

“Come on, cover yourself. The last thing I need is for you to get sick,” she said gruffly.

“Thank you, Mother,” said Rita, bringing her knees close to her chest so her bare feet were covered by the warm wool. She leaned her head against the door and remained perfectly still for what seemed an eternity, wondering what little Sebas must be thinking across the hall, hearing the quiet rumble of her father’s voice on the phone downstairs and then nothing at all, until her initial fear gave way to exhaustion and she slumped asleep on the floor behind the door.

Her mother sat stiffly on the edge of her bed, one hand holding her blanket around her, the other hiding the handgun inside the folds of her nightgown. Only her eyes moved as she looked from the door to Rita and back to the door again.

*   *   *

The man on the street lingered outside her window, hoping against all logic that the girl would open her shutters again. Long minutes passed as he stood, immobile, then motioned his squad to get a move on.

They called him El Gato, The Cat, but his name was Lucas and he wasn’t a man. He was just a boy, but he had the chiseled features and exposed cheekbones of someone who had long shed the vulnerabilities of youth. None of them really knew how old he was; he’d told them he was twenty-four, but he was barely eighteen, a birthday he had taken note of, but not celebrated, just a week before.

They walked more quietly now, familiarizing themselves with the silent streets, enjoying the feel of firm ground underneath their feet after months of mud and marsh. He didn’t mind the rain. It had been far wetter up in the mountains, and colder, too. There the early-morning mist penetrated your slicker and your sweater and felt as if it were forever impaled inside the marrow of your bones. At night it didn’t matter how close you sat by the fire; the cold seeped in, insidious, its icy fingers creeping under your skin.

Part of their crew had already taken a hot shower—the first in nearly a year—and were already settled in at the lonely police station, the first place they’d gone to enlist cooperation. Others were at the church. It was always harder to make the priests see things their way, but after all, what was the use of resisting? Once the connection was established, they’d be under protection and unbothered, save for the monthly collection.

Lucas liked to walk the town as soon as he could. Get a feel for the land, at night, when the lights were still low, before the sunshine stung his eyes after months spent in the jungle’s shadow. He believed fiercely in auras and insisted that the wrong energy could make the best-planned mission fail. This town was steeped in resignation. He’d come here two weeks before, alone, and quietly paced the cobbled streets, letting his hands run over the wooden doors and the low stone walls, covered with moss. He’d walked the perimeter of the town square, his lithe figure barely visible underneath the starry mantle of the sky, but he soon realized there was nothing to worry about. This was a place that collapsed into itself after a certain hour. There were two bars here, and a handful of cafeterias and restaurants, more extensions of homes than business establishments. There must be holidays celebrated here, birthdays, graduations. But that night, from his vantage point at the top of the steps leading to the locked church doors, he couldn’t see a single light glimmering behind the shuttered windows.

He pictured her again in his mind: the long dark hair accentuating the white nightgown, the slender arms as she reached for the shutters. Her face was a pale oval, with huge, liquid brown eyes, almost a blur, but he would remember.

He made a mental note of the house, the window, the number. He was in no rush. No rush at all.



Rita and her brother didn’t go to school that day. Or the next. Or the next. In fact, they weren’t allowed out of the house at all, not even to go downstairs and help out at the store.

The two of them spent hours sitting on the floor next to the door that connected their apartment with the stairs that led to the store, straining to hear the muted voices of the men who walked in and out. Rita had neatly piled her notebooks and textbooks by her side and passed the time writing chapter summaries in her tidy little print. She figured that with midterm exams only two weeks off, she might as well get a head start in her studying, and she enjoyed it anyway. She reveled in the orderliness of the printed word, the nuggets of information encased in color-trimmed boxes, the pictures of presidents and leaders and places like China and India and Pakistan, countries whose names she would repeat under her breath as she looked at the photographs in her history book. She copied the highlighted information into her notebooks, writing page after page, the lined paper filling up with the words and exclamation marks and stars and suns and smiley faces—or frowns—that she added on the margins.

She had always been a good student: attentive, organized, quiet. The kind of student who teachers forgot existed until they graded her papers and her tests, shining receptacles of excellence. It usually took a while for teachers to adjust to her, to reconcile the invisibility of her classroom presence with the forcefulness of her assignments. In the beginning of the term, they would call out names as they distributed graded tests in class and invariably pause when they reached hers, taking in the perfect score, then, looking around the classroom with a touch of bewilderment, trying to match the grade to the girl.

“Rita?” they would say, and her name was always accompanied by a question mark, a tinge of incredulity, until, weeks later, they’d finally get that the languid girl with the Madonna features and downcast eyes was the same person who aced chemistry exams and essay assignments.

Rita didn’t care. She’d long ago perfected the art of invisibility, of drawing the least possible attention to herself through her actions. She was a girl of few words, even with her friends, who gravitated to her in spite of, or perhaps because of, her stillness, her ability to listen and finally say just the right thing.

Today she wrote in silence as the afternoon wore on, and Sebastián fidgeted, despite the marbles and the top and the messy stack of magazines with easy crossword puzzles that his father had brought upstairs the night before.

“Rita, I’m bored,” he whined, throwing the pencil against the wall in an ineffectual act of small rebellion.

“Go watch some television,” she replied, not bothering to look up.

“There’s nothing on,” he said, his voice rising and falling with ten-year-old indignation.

Rita sighed. He was right. They received only three channels here, and the early-afternoon programming had the bureaucratic dullness of a brick wall.

“And today,” he continued, “my friends all went to play soccer. They went with Carlos’s dad. Nothing’s going to happen, Rita. I’m the only one who’s stuck here!”

“And what do you want me to do about it?” she asked calmly. “You know I can’t change Father’s mind about anything.”

“You could come with me and keep me company, and then maybe they’d let me go. But you like being inside and just reading!” he accused. “This is fun for you! You’re weird,” he added huffily, laying his head on his folded arms and turning his face against the wall.

Rita tilted her head and looked at his skinny back, the small shoulder blades sticking out like stunted angel wings. She loved him. Loved his wet-puppy smell when he came home after playing in the fields with the boys, loved his cold little hand snuggling into hers when she walked him to school in the mornings, loved that he could still speak his mind and make their father smile, as Rita had once done, long ago. He was the opposite of her: spoiled, loudmouthed, a terrible student, and a brat, really, quick with his affections and mercurial in his moods. It made others go to great lengths to please him, and even at ten years old Sebastián took note, manipulating situations with the natural cunning of smooth talkers who always manage to get their way.

He was their miracle baby. After they’d had Rita, her parents had tried unsuccessfully for years to have a boy, but her mother’s body violently rejected the notion of a second child, miscarrying three times, the last after a painful thirty-week pregnancy that yielded a fully formed baby, strangled by his own umbilical cord.

Rita didn’t remember much of that time, save for vague recollections of tiptoeing around the house and occasionally being allowed inside her mother’s darkened bedroom, the wooden shutters closed against the afternoon sun. Her mother would lie there for hours, grasping a crucifix as she stared at nothing, her eyes briefly lighting up when she saw six-year-old Rita, her hand wanly reaching up to touch her daughter’s long hair.

“Your mother isn’t feeling well,” her aunt—who came and spent a month with them—would say, gently pulling her away from her mother’s touch, leading her downstairs to the store, where Rita sat painting on the floor underneath her father’s desk, listening to old boleros on the radio.

What Rita remembers most is that her father loved her then. He would let her pick special candy and Chocolatina Jet from the counter, and he would carefully post her drawings alongside the boxes of cigarettes so no clients could miss seeing them when they paid.

In the evenings he would put her to bed and say her prayers with her—Ángel de mi guarda, dulce compañía, no me desampares ni de noche ni de día—his deep voice lulling her to sleep like a gentle bass drum. Her mother lay semicatatonic in the bedroom across the hall, but her father’s love—enormous, omnipresent—did not allow for spaces to grow in the landscape of her affections.

Rita was cherished then. She was still cherished when Sebastián was born, less than a year later. She wondered about that ever since she read the sex-education booklet. How her mother couldn’t climb out of the bed to take care of her own daughter but still managed to have sex with her father and within two months of miscarrying one child—miraculously, it seemed—conceived another.

It must have been their last act of true passion, Rita thought, because how else to explain their unfettered love for Sebastián, even as their affections for her seemed to diminish the older she grew, until she lost the awkwardness of childhood and began to walk with a sway in her hips. That’s when her father had stopped looking at her.

But she had loved Sebastián, too. Fiercely and immediately, with the certainty of someone who knows that others can change. She would look after him, she thought when she first saw him, sleeping at her mother’s breast, and her then-chubby hands reached impulsively to touch his tiny head, covered with hair the color of soot, only to be slapped away by her mother’s hand—the first of so many rebukes—with an admonishment of “Don’t touch him, you’ll make him sick.”

Rita didn’t care. Grown-ups slept. They got careless. For them, children were like gnats, pests that were swatted away and eventually ignored and forgotten. In the lazy afternoons, when her parents minded the store and the baby slept upstairs, she would creep into his room and watch over him. Hers was the first face he saw every time he woke up.

The first word he spoke was “tata,” aimed at her as she walked toward him with his bottle.

“He’s so smart, Sergio,” her mother marveled to her father. “See? He’s asking for his bottle!” But Rita, at seven years old, knew better. He was saying “tata” because he couldn’t pronounce the Ri in “Rita.” He was talking to her. “Tata,” he repeated, and clapped his little hands spastically. He smiled at her, and Rita’s heart opened up with an overpowering sense of joy, unlike anything she’d ever felt, far more thrilling than any of the carnival rides that occasionally made it to their town.

She now looked at Sebastián, at his skinny arms folded in indignation, at the black hair that had only seemed to get darker with the years, at the sliver of vulnerable pink skin that lay exposed between his socks and his scrunched-up corduroys.

“I’ll fix it,” she said quietly, with a certainty she didn’t feel, but still she got up and called downstairs from the hallway phone.

“What’s the matter, Rita?” her mother asked without preamble, not bothering to say hello.

Rita took a deep breath, then simply put it out there. “Mother, Sebastián wants to know if he can go to the soccer game,” she said, cutting straight to the point. “I’ll go with him. I’ll make sure nothing happens. I promise.”

Her mother was silent on the other end of the line. Rita knew she was torn between being overly cautious and giving in—not to her, but to Sebastián. After all, how many days could they keep them inside as the world resumed its pace around them?

“Wait,” her mother said tersely, and even though she covered the mouthpiece with her hand, Rita could hear her whispering to her father, could hear their intense arguing, she cajoling, he adamant—because he feared what the guerrillas could do to his children.

“Rita?” It was her mother again, startling Rita, who had begun a quiet game of catch with Sebastián, rolling a little yellow rubber ball down the long hallway so their parents wouldn’t hear them below.

“Yes, Mother?”

“Come downstairs. Alone. Your father wants to talk to you,” her mother said brusquely, and hung up.

Rita placed her receiver carefully back on the hook. She knew that the guerrillas collected money—a tax, they called it, for protection. She knew they tried to recruit children, to make up for ranks thinned by heightened army activity.

She’d heard that some of them had already left, but a handful had remained behind indefinitely and set up their post at the police station, under the guise of keeping the peace in an area of relative calm but occasional disputes, stolen cattle, a gunfight or two over land boundaries.

Nothing too dire, but she knew they targeted people like her family, people who’d tried to remain neutral during the conflict. She knew they targeted towns like hers, compact but isolated, like random wrinkles on starched linen shirts.

Sometimes when she rode in the back of the pickup truck that went twice a week to the next town over—the town with the closest bus stop—she’d look out at the winding hills and wonder just how the path of the main road had been decided. There was no rhyme or reason she could discern. Her town was just as beautiful, the fields around it just as fertile, the layout of the land designed for growth yet stunted by lack of easy access. She wondered if the man who’d plotted the route—because she’d never considered that it could be a woman—had succumbed to political favors or if he’d just simply, capriciously, let his pencil slide in one direction of the drawing board and not the other.

Rita didn’t muse now. She looked . . .