Hidden in Paris Read Online Free PDF Page B

true about Bel Air, with all those trees? They must be talking about the Port area, or the San Fernando Valley. She unrolled her mat and sat on it for a few minutes of meditation. She bit her lower lip, felt it still hard and sore two days after the injection. Coming from the kitchen downstairs were the sounds of a coffee grinder and pans being moved around. Serena, the maid, was preparing breakfast. Lola straightened her spine and closed her eyes.
I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out.
    The way Mark moved inside the walk-in closet, Lola knew he was getting himself worked up. “Why can’t I find a goddamn thing in this house?” he said.
    She relaxed her arms and laid her hands, palms up, on her knees.
I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out
. Whatever was needed was always elsewhere, far away and rarely in the expected place because the nanny and the maid were always in competition when it came to running the house, organizing closets and cabinets according to their conflicting senses of logic. Lola didn’t have what it took to demand that things be put in any specific place or done any specific way. Instead, she forever adapted, forever navigated her “staff.” She wasn’t a very good hostess, or housewife, or “CEO of the household,” or even “wife on duty,” titles Mark called her for fun.
    “Lola!” Mark called. She got up and escaped to her bathroom. In front of the mirror, she tapped her lips with the tip of a finger. They felt like wood. Did she look better or ridiculous? On the walls, her face graced the covers of
Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Marie Claire
. Twenty years of her life relegated to the walls of her bathroom.
    This last year, all the headaches with Simon had probably cost her triple in the looks department, but she was lucky to have good bone structure. Her ink-black hair was cut short in a trendy style. She was tall and thin with imposing boobs—paid cash, as Mark liked to say. She was almost forty and still turned heads.
    Leaving Mark to his struggle, she tiptoed out of her bathroom and descended the stairs dressed for yoga. The sound of pans in the kitchen resonated inside the stairwell. Maybe it was the height of the ceiling, but no amount of rugs could muffle the odd echoes. Mark liked the mansion pristine, all 7,640 square feet of it. He had said she’d never lack anything. He was speaking of material things, of course.
    In the kitchen, Tamara, the twenty-five-year-old nanny from South Africa, was feeding Simon in his high chair. Lia was only half dressed for school, and her hair wasn’t combed. Lola had helped her nine-year-old select two outfits for the day, to circumvent early morning meltdown, but Lia was wearing yet another combination, and at the moment was stabbing her spoon into her cereal bowl and not making eye contact. Is anger genetic or learned? Lola kissed Simon, took a mini lick of a speck of pudding on his cheek. “You taste delicious today,” she said.
    “Mom, that’s disgusting,” Lia said.
    Lola kissed the top of her daughter’s head. Mark’s call came from upstairs and tore through the silence of the house like skid marks on white linoleum floor. “Where is my fucking Donna Karan shirt?” Everyone in the kitchen—Lola, the kids, Serena, and Tamara—froze for a heartbeat.
    “It’s right in the closet,” Lola called out.
    “Not that one, dammit! The white one! Where the hell is it?” Mark yelled from the stairwell. She smiled at Serena, who could barely look at her. Simon flailed his arm at his mother. “Up me.”
    “I’m not carrying you, love. You need to finish breakfast.”
    In an instant, Simon had wriggled his way out of the chair, threatening to make it topple over. “Up me! Up me!” Tamara picked him out of his chair and set him down.
    The pediatrician didn’t know if what Simon suffered from were nightmares or night terrors. What difference did it make? Last time Lola had taken Simon to the doctor, not knowing where to start with the list