Champlain Academy was only half an hour away. I could maybe carpool with Meredith. I’d visited the school a bunch of times with Em to see Meredith, and the girls weren’t at all snotty like I’d expected. The school itself was real progressive and emphasized fun, extracurricular stuff. Just this Valentine’s Day, Em and I attended a performance of The Vagina Monologues there, which was awesome. The play, I mean. Meredith was so-so. She just was not convincing as an old lady talking about her tired uterus.
So why not transfer to Champlain? I’d still get to see Em and my Ralston High friends on weekends. The problem was the tuition, which I knew there was no way my parents could afford. Then I got another winning idea: ask Happy! She had talked about sending Nate to private school. Why not her granddaughter as well as her grandson?
A heavy weight was falling off my shoulders. “There will be an answer, let it shine, let it shine,” as Alfie, our bus driver, liked to sing. Of course, another little tune of his was piping up in my head. Something about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose. Sure, I’d be free of Ralston and my fears and embarrassment, but I’d also lose daily contact with my friends and my teachers.
Rather than lie there and let this little voice get any louder, I decided to head down to the kitchen for a glass of water. (Em would be proud.)
I found my way in the dark around the air mattresses and sleeping bags. On the second-floor landing, the hall lights were still on. Kate’s door was closed—as was Nate’s.
Downstairs, lights had been left on . . . in the hallway . . . the living room. . . . Someone was still up. Just outside the kitchen, I heard raised voices.
“I can’t believe her!” Mom’s voice was shrill. “How can she think we’d accept a will that doesn’t treat all our kids the same? A stipend for Milly instead of a share!”
My heart stopped beating. My hands were tingling. I stood there paralyzed, not wanting to hear what I was hearing.
“You know why she’s doing this, don’t you?” Mom went on. “Didn’t I tell you she’d try to get back at you for refusing to go back to Kaufman again?”
“Well, she can hurt me all she wants, but I won’t let her hurt Milly.” Dad sounded the angriest I’d ever heard.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Mom fumed. “I’m not accepting another penny from her. No more handouts!”
I don’t know why I didn’t just run upstairs and exit out of this moment in my life like I had out of so many others. My eyes were burning. My hands were burning. But somehow I knew there was no place to run away to anymore.
I pushed open the door of the kitchen. Mom and Dad jerked around toward me, their faces pale and shocked. “Sweetie,” Dad began. “We were just—”
“I heard,” I stopped him.
They came forward and folded their arms around me.
“It’s not about you,” Dad kept saying.
“We love you, honey,” Mom reassured me. “We’re still a family. Nothing has changed.”
But everything had changed. For weeks now my life had been trying to tell me something. I was different. I was adopted. I was not blood family. Oh, I was still their daughter, Milly. But there was another me. The one who had caught Pablo’s eye. The one Happy had left out of her will. The one I had kept a secret, even from myself.
3
small towns
MOM ALWAYS SAYS THAT living in a small town is good for your character. You’re bitchy to the lady at the bank, and there she is at Greg’s Market, rolling her cart toward you. Or her kid’s on your kid’s soccer team. In the city, my cousins can mouth off to some salesperson at Bloomingdale’s and head uptown to their East Side apartment and no one will know. Except, I suppose, their therapists.
In a small town, you have to face the consequences.
Ditto for high school in a small town.
Hello, Pablo. How’s it going, I practiced. Or should I really go all out and say it in Spanish? Hola, Pablo. ¿Qué hay?
I was standing outside the lunch room, waiting to get brave enough to go in.
“Hey, long-lost friend!” Em came from behind me. I winced at the surprise in her voice. Had I stayed away so long it was now a shock to see me? When I turned, there was Pablo beside her!
“You coming to lunch?” Em asked, looking from me to Pablo and back. She was picking up some tension between us.
“Sure.” I flashed her a smile, then tried holding it steady for Pablo.
He scowled back. Why shouldn’t he hate my guts? After visiting our advanced class, he knew I could speak pretty good Spanish. I had understood him back in January. Now, two months later, I was deciding to be a nice person? Muchas gracias, but no thank you.
“So, are you coming?” Em prodded, as I seemed rooted to the spot.
“I’ve got to go to my locker first,” I finally managed. “You guys go on.”
I don’t know what’s worse: when you act stupid, or the moment after, when you’re stupidly kicking yourself for acting stupid.
My stage fright with Pablo might have lasted forever. But like Mom says about small towns: everything does come around again.
One night, Dad came home with the news that he had hired a carpenter to help him with his extra jobs. “This guy can do anything with wood, I mean anything.” He didn’t speak much English, but that was no barrier for Dad. I suppose because of me, my parents kept up their Peace Corps Spanish over the years. Ever since I was a little kid, Señora Robles, whose husband taught Spanish at the nearby university, would come over for family lessons. We’d watch videos, play games, listen to tapes. Afterward, we’d all sit down to a meal where we spoke Spanish and ate tacos, enchiladas, stuff like that.
“And you’d never guess who this guy is.” Dad had turned to me. Small town that we live in, I should have guessed. “Señor Bolívar, your classmate Pablo’s father.”
I nodded, like yeah yeah, I knew that.
“Poor family has been through hell.” Dad went on to tell how Señor Bolívar’s brother, a journalist, had been murdered. His oldest son had been taken away by the secret police. “They still don’t know where he is. The middle son has had to go into hiding. Both sons are with this new party that’s trying to get rid of that jerk we once put in control.” We was the United States of America. We had helped some general to take over or start a civil war or something. I never can keep all the countries in the world connected with their stories. But I knew there were a lot of dictators in many Latin American countries that had been supported by our government. “Bolívar managed to get out with his wife and Pablo, don’t ask me how.”
I felt even worse about rejecting Pablo now that I knew what he and his family had been going through. Mom, meanwhile, was shaking her head. She sometimes talked about how hopeful she had been about the future of her host country. That’s why she had gone there in the first place—to help spread the tools of freedom. The dictatorship was supposed to be temporary. But even while Mom and Dad were there, the roundups had started.
“Bolívar says they’ve tried to get news of their sons. They’re worried sick,” Dad continued. “They don’t know where to turn.”
That’s all you have to say to Mom, Caretaker of the World, because the next words out of her mouth were “Let’s have them over.”
My heart did two things at the same time—it kind of soared up with relief that the stalemate with Pablo would finally end, and it plunged down with fear that I’d have to face him. I felt like I was having an emotional heart attack. Meanwhile, my hands began to itch.
Mom noticed me scratching them. She looked suddenly unsure. “Would that be all right with you, Mil?”
Ever since the Happy incident, Mom had been hovering all over me. I knew she was just concerned, but it made me feel like she was babysitting my feelings.
“Sure.” I shrugged. A Spanish meal might actually be fun. Last summer, the Robleses had moved back to Mexico. I was surprised how much I missed our get-togethers.
Kate, meanwhile, was jump
ing all over Mom’s idea. “¡Por favor, invítalos!” she said, showing off. She had already taken Advanced Spanish last fall and was now doing a private tutorial with Mrs. Gillespie. “I want to keep up with mi español.”
Her Spanish! Mostly, I was glad that Kate and I shared another language and country. But sometimes I felt proprietary about the one thing I had that was my very own. Kate had only been born there by accident. I was an accident.
“So’s it okay if I invite the Bolívars for dinner Saturday?” Mom asked the table, but she was looking at me.
“Sí,” Kate and I said together. We glanced at each other and burst out laughing. Señora Robles had told us that it was a superstition in her part of Mexico: when two people said something together, they were joined for life.
Kate held out her hand, and I slapped her five.
“Uno-dos-tres-cuatro-cinco,” Nate counted, not wanting to be left out.
The minute the doorbell rang, I called out, “I’ll get it!” and rushed into the mudroom. I had decided that if I waited, rehearsing what I was going to say, I’d get my usual stage fright, and the night would go by without my saying a word to Pablo.
“¡Bienvenidos!” I welcomed the surprised couple at the door. The Bolívars were dressed like every other Vermonter in winter, in bulky parkas and clunky boots. In fact, except for their soft brown faces and the fact that they were slightly shorter than most of Mom and Dad’s friends, they looked like everyone else I knew. I mean, not poor and cowering in sarapes and sombreros. I don’t know what I was expecting. Movie refugees, I suppose.
Both Bolívars stepped in, full of gracias, muchas gracias . But Pablo was hanging back. Would he stand in the cold on the other side of the door all night until I apologized?
“Hey, Pablo.” The well-rehearsed lines tumbled out of my mouth. “Funny, your dad and my dad knowing each other. Small town, all right. Everyone knows everyone else.” From stage fright, I had passed on to manic motor-mouth. Did he even understand what I was saying? Actually, Em had told me that Meredith had told her that Pablo knew a lot more English than he let on. He had been studying it since he was a boy. But living in a dictatorship, he had learned to keep his mouth shut.
Pablo stepped inside. He was taller than his parents, but he slouched as if trying to make himself smaller and hide behind them. “Thank you for the invitation,” he said, as if it had been my doing.
Mrs. Bolívar kept staring at my eyes. “¡Qué ojos tan lindos! ¡Qué linda!” My eyes were beautiful. I was beautiful. No one had ever said that to me just like that. Thank you again, Banana Republic top, I thought.
“Come on in. Everyone’s waiting to meet you.” I gestured with my hand in case this was more English than the older Bolívars could handle. I felt kind of shy speaking in Spanish in front of native speakers. And Mrs. Bolívar’s compliments were making me feel even shyer.
Dad had appeared at the mudroom door. “Mi casa, su casa...” He went through the whole my-house-is-your-house routine. Honestly, Dad. Then he gave both Bolívars big, embarrassing American hugs.
Next was Pablo. Dad kind of threw an arm toward him just as Pablo was reaching out for a handshake. There was an awkward moment when neither one knew what to do. Finally, they did this half-and-half maneuver—hugging with one arm and shaking hands with the other, both of them laughing.
Dinner turned out to be like Mr. Barstow’s World History class. Mom and Dad and the Bolívars got started talking about politics. But first, it was like Señora Robles’s Spanish dinner lessons, lots of talking about the food. Mom had made rice and beans, the way she had learned to cook them back in the Peace Corps.
“They are as good as Abuelita’s,” Mr. Bolívar claimed.
“Mejor,” Mrs. Bolívar protested. Even better.
Latin people, I was learning, really overdid it in the compliment department.
Talking about the food led to talking about el paisito. “The little country,” as Mrs. Bolívar called her homeland. Every time she said it, her eyes filled with tears.
Actually, they had some good news to report. Their oldest son’s name had appeared on the list of prisoners the Human Rights Commission had recently interviewed. Their middle son had come out of hiding and called to say there was a cautious but hopeful mood in the country. The United States had decided to support free elections. Former president Carter was going down in late May to be an observer. “Tenemos esperanza,” Mr. Bolívar confessed. They were feeling hopeful.
Mrs. Bolívar’s eyes had filled with tears again. She made a sign of the cross. “Gracias a Dios,” she whispered.
Mom gave her a hopeful smile. “Things will improve, Mrs. Bolívar.”
“Angelita, por favor,” Mrs. Bolívar insisted.
During the discussion of the political situation, Pablo had joined in. But he grew quiet whenever his brothers’ names came up.
“By summer, things might be settled enough to go for a visita,” Mr. Bolívar was saying in Spanish. I could tell he was trying to brighten the mood around the table.
“I sure hope it is just a visita,” Dad said, looking a little worried. “I don’t know what I’d do without my master carpintero.”
Mr. Bolívar bowed his head at the compliment. “Muy agradecido.” He was most grateful to his excelente patrón. In truth, his plan was to stay in the States until Pablo finished his schooling. To give their son una oportunidad.
Pablo frowned, like he didn’t want the opportunity. Was he that unhappy in this country? At school? Maybe if people like me were nicer, he’d want to stay. Suddenly, I had to catch myself. Two months ago, I was hoping this guy would disappear! My emotions were like what they say about driving through small towns in Vermont, don’t blink, you’ll miss them.
“¿No le gusta Ralston?” Kate must have noticed him frowning, too.
Pablo’s face broke into a disarming smile. “I like Ralston very much. Everyone is very nice.” I sunk down further in my seat. “But I am sick for home.”
“Homesick,” Kate offered, eyeing Nate, who often found other people’s mistakes very funny.
But Nate had his own question for Pablo. “Do you like video games?”
Pablo made the mistake of saying yes.
“Let’s go play.” Nate pulled at Pablo’s arm, but he stopped midtug. Mom was giving him that mind-your-manners look. “May we be excused?” he pleaded. “¿Por favor?” Nate added, flashing his winning grin.
“¡Ay, qué niño tan simpático!” Mrs. Bolívar exclaimed. What a darling boy! Nate didn’t know much Spanish, but he knew this lady was doting on him. “Muchas gracias,” he threw in, snowing her totally.
Before Nate could haul him away, Pablo turned to me. “Will you play?” He lifted his gaze to include Kate.
“They don’t really know how!” Nate protested. “Come on, Pablo.”
But Pablo was pulling back our chairs, as if our nods were all the knowledge we needed.
As we headed out, I heard Mrs. Bolívar complimenting Mom in Spanish. “What beautiful children you have!”
I felt a pang. Little did Mrs. Bolívar know that only two of the beautiful children were really Mom’s.
From that night on, we started to see a lot of the Bolívars. Mom got Mrs. Bolívar a job next door, taking care of our neighbor, Miss Billings, who was crippled with arthritis but didn’t want to move into a nursing home. Mrs. Bolívar turned out to be Miss Billings’s salvation, even though neither woman understood the other’s language. Days his mother worked late, Pablo was invited to come over after school. On his way driving Mr. Bolívar home, Dad would swing by and pick up Mrs. Bolívar and Pablo at our house.
I think it was especially good for Dad having the Bolívars join our family just as Happy seemed to have disowned us. Dad had told Happy that he wanted no part of her disinheriting one of his children. He could do nothing about her will, but he would no longer accept her checks. Grandma was in shock. No one had ever refused to take her money before. She responded as if we had disowned h
er! She had not been in touch.
Occasionally Dad would remind Nate to call his grandma. Dad would hang around, like he was half hoping that Happy would ask to talk to him. But she never did. Nate would hang up, and Dad would get real quiet and head down to his basement workshop, where he’d spend hours—doing what, I don’t know. For weeks, we heard lots of hammering, but no stool or cabinet or birdhouse came out of it.
One time, I followed him down there.
Dad looked surprised to see me. Usually he was the one climbing up to the attic to “talk” to me. “What’s up, honey?”
“I just . . . I mean . . . ,” I began, totally tongue-tied. “Dad, I’m sorry,” I finally blurted out.
“What on earth for?” Dad’s head was cocked to one side, as if looking at me sideways might help him figure out what I meant.
“Grandma,” I murmured. “I feel like you lost your mom on account of me—”
“No, no, no, Milly!” Dad broke in before I could finish. “Don’t even think that. Your grandma wanted to hurt me. You were just the excuse this time.”
“She has a point, though.” I was trying hard not to cry. “Technically, I’m not a Kaufman. I don’t even look like any of you guys.” I went through the whole list of little things I’d been noticing lately: how everyone in the family was tall, whereas I was more chiquita. How Kate had Grandma’s coloring. How Nate had curly hair like Great-Grandpa in the portrait above the fireplace in Happy’s mansion.
Dad kept shaking his head.
“You’re not listening!” I folded my arms and narrowed my eyes at him.
“You look just like your mother when you do that, you know?” Dad winked.
Great! I thought. I’d picked up all their bad traits and meanwhile missed out on the good stuff, like being tall, smart, Grandma’s real grandchild.
One afternoon, while Pablo and Nate played video games downstairs and Kate talked on the phone, I headed for Mom and Dad’s bedroom. There it sat on the tall bureau, where it had been for as long as I could remember. The Box. Dad had said there wasn’t much information in it, but even a little bit might fill in a blank or two—some hint of who my parents had been, where they might have come from, why they had given me away.