My hands were itching like crazy. I felt tempted to high-tail it back to my room. But something held me there, a growing curiosity about my own story. I took it down as if it were some sacred object in a ceremony. Then I did something that totally surprised me. I brought it up to my face and touched it to my cheek.
From downstairs came Nate’s excited shouts. “I won! I won!” I smiled, thinking about my own quiet victory over my fears.
“Milly?” Kate had come into the room. “What’re you doing?”
I couldn’t exactly say nothing. I’d literally been caught red-handed. “Just looking at my stuff,” I said, putting The Box back. I actually wasn’t sure if Kate knew what was in it. It was weird how we never talked about my adoption. And with Kate, I felt that it was her more than me who felt uncomfortable with it.
Kate let herself drop down on our parents’ bed. “Come sit,” she said. “You okay, Milly-pooh?” she asked, once I’d joined her.
“It’s just been a weird time,” I began. Kate grabbed for my hands so I’d stop scratching them. “Pablo, the Bolívars—it’s all started me thinking about my . . . adoption.” I tried the word. “It’s like I’ve never really let myself feel the feelings.” I could feel them welling up now, but I sensed Kate tensing beside me. “That’s all,” I added, as if putting a lid on both our discomfort.
In the silence that followed, I thought of a bunch of things to tell Kate. How I wished I could talk to her about stuff. How I always felt she was quick to tell me that we were no different. How I felt she just wanted me to forget the past, even more than I did. But maybe this was part of having a therapist for a mom. We let her dig stuff out of us and hadn’t learned to do it for ourselves.
Finally, Kate spoke up. “Sometimes I wish I’d been the one adopted.” I must have looked totally surprised, because she added, “I mean it. Then I wouldn’t always feel guilty, like I got something you didn’t.”
So that was it! “But I got some other stuff instead,” I heard myself saying. Sometimes you say something you know is true, but you don’t feel it yet, like a déjà vu in your head before your heart feels it, too.
Kate looked up, hopeful. But then a cloud of doubt entered her face. “Mom told me about what happened with Grandma. I’m really sorry. Grandma can be such a bitch.” Unlike our mother, my sister had no problem with her f and b words. “Anyhow, I just want you to know that you’re my sister and nobody but nobody can take that away.” The hug she gave me was a serious bone cruncher.
“Hey,” I said smiling when we broke away. “Remember? Joined for life?”
“You said it,” Kate said, giving me a firm nod. But her gaze faltered when it fell on The Box.
Every time Pablo came over, Nate appropriated him. For years, Nate had been asking Mom and Dad for a brother, and finally he had gotten what he asked for—or even better, an older brother who played video games much better than his sisters.
“Poor Pablo,” Em commiserated one afternoon. She and Meredith and I were sitting at the kitchen table. From the family room came sounds of some video explosion.
“Poor us, you mean,” Meredith added. Em had told me—though I was not to let on that I knew—that Meredith had a crush on Pablo. Big secret. Why else was Meredith always hanging out with us these days?
“Ay, ay, ay,” Pablo cried out as if mortally wounded. He was letting Nate clobber him, we could tell. He had to be sick of spending hours playing video games with an eight-year-old. I mean, Pablo was almost seventeen. His birthday was in April. He was a Taurus. Meredith and Em had been quizzing him on his life story.
“I won, I won!” Nate shouted.
Meredith sighed for the umpteenth time. Her next comment caught me by surprise. “So is everyone from your country good-looking?”
“This is my country,” I said, flashing Em a look. I had asked her to keep my adoption story private. Why had she told her friend?
Meredith stiffened. “I mean . . . you know what I mean.”
Em was capping and uncapping her water bottle nervously. The cap fell and rolled across the room—we followed it with our gaze to where Pablo was standing at the doorway. We all kind of jumped. Had he heard us talking about his native country?
“Hey, Pablo!” Em waved him over. She sounded relieved.
“So, did Donkey Kong getcha?” Meredith flirted as he sat down.
“Donkey Kong, Spider-Man, Zelda—I was defeated in every game,” Pablo announced loudly. Then casting a glance over his shoulder, he lowered his voice. “I have finally won my freedom. Nate says that I play as bad as a girl!”
“Hey!” Em, Meredith, and I shouted together. It was the tension breaker we all needed. Everyone laughed.
Later that night, Em called. “I’m sorry, Mil. But Meredith’s my friend and I didn’t think it would matter.”
“I wish you’d at least have asked first,” I said, like protocol was the problem, not Em’s big mouth.
“It’s not like it’s some awful, shameful secret. And this is a small town, you know?” Em argued.
“So does everyone know?” I asked. Is that what she was trying to tell me by saying Ralston was small?
“I swear I only told Meredith, and I guess I told Jake—”
“Em!” What a fool I’d been to think my secret was safe with Em! She had always been a blabbermouth, but still, I couldn’t help feeling betrayed.
“I said I was sorry, okay?” Em pleaded. “Mil?”
“It’s okay,” I finally told her, wishing I meant it. “I’ve gotta go.” I hung up before she could apologize again.
Even though I was seeing Pablo more now, we weren’t ever together, just the two of us. People were always around, friends at school, my family. But then one afternoon, I found myself riding home alone on the bus with him. It was a Thursday, Mrs. Bolívar was working late; Kate had chorus; Nate, his hockey practice; and Em, well, I admit, things hadn’t been the same since the afternoon with Meredith. We were still friendly with each other, but it was that hyped friendliness when what you are really feeling is uncomfortable with a person.
Up at the front of the bus, Alfie kept glancing in the rearview mirror at us.
I told myself not to get paranoid. Alfie often did his mirror check to make sure, as he said, that the natives were not acting restless. Sometimes he’d see something going on and he’d sing a few lines altered from some old song to make us behave. “What goes up, must come down, sit your little butts while the wheels spin on,” when someone was standing up in the aisle before the bus had stopped. Or, “On every bus, turn, turn, turn, there are some rules, turn, turn, turn, the rule to be quiet, the rule to calm down,” when we were being too rowdy. Sometimes, just for fun, he’d break into song and the whole bus would join in, “We all live in a yellow school bus, a yellow school bus, a yellow school bus,” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine.”
Today, I distinctly heard him humming, “Do you believe in passion in a young girl’s heart...”
Oh please, I thought. It’s true that sometimes I’d look at Pablo, drinking in everything about him. But it wasn’t because I had some mega crush on him like Meredith. I’d stare, wondering, Did my birth mother have that color hair? Is that how my birth father would express himself?
At least Alfie didn’t say anything obviously embarrassing as I went down the stairs. Just his usual. “Watch your step there, Milly.”
Pablo was shaking his head as we walked down the road to our drive. “He says all the words wrong!”
I explained Jake and Em’s theory about Alfie frying his memory cells in the sixties with drugs. “By the way, how do you know so much about the Beatles?”
“That’s how I learned my English back home.” Pablo strummed an imaginary guitar and sang a few bars of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” tossing his hair every which way in that Beatlemania way.
It was the first time I’d seen Pablo really let loose. I watched, laughing. Pablo had changed in the last couple of months. His jeans were fashionably f
aded (which could be that he’d been wearing them on and off for two and a half months!) and wrinkled (which could be Mrs. Bolívar had no time for extra ironing these days); his hair was longer, not tamped down with some hair cream. And now that he was smiling more, his dimples showed. He was looking good, but it wasn’t just that. He seemed easier to talk to, a guy I wanted for a friend. Maybe it was me who had changed?
“I guess I should scream and throw myself at you,” I teased. “That’s what girls used to do to the Beatles, you know?”
Pablo smiled, his dimples deepening. “Why do you think I learned their songs?”
Hmm, I thought. We’d had this long discussion in Mrs. Gillespie’s class about “machismo.” The stereotype of the Latin guy thinking he’s God’s gift to women. “I thought women just automatically did that with Latin men?” I kept a straight face.
“¿Bueno?” Pablo looked at me, as if saying, Well? So? Get on with it!
“Very funny!” I folded my arms and narrowed my eyes at him. “This might come as a big surprise, Pablo. But some women prefer their men as equals.”
“¡Ayyyy, una feminista!” Pablo ducked, shielding his face, as if I’d shown a crucifix to a vampire in one of those old movies. It was pretty obvious he was joking. But I didn’t feel like letting him off the hook, just in case.
“Is feminist like a dirty word in your country?”
“Some men don’t like strong women,” he admitted. “But that just shows how weak they are, no?”
I gave him thumbs up. Good for you, I thought.
“Me, I like my women strong,” Pablo went on. “That way they can take care of me.” With a grin like that, he had to be joking. Still, I gave him thumbs down.
We walked up our drive, Pablo remembering some of his favorite sixties songs.
“If you love the Beatles so much, I can dig up some of Dad’s old LPs,” I offered. “Maybe we could reprogram Alfie.”
“Reprogram?” Pablo asked, lifting a questioning hand.
I’d noticed this before with Señora Robles and in the videos we watched together. Latin people spoke with their faces and hands as well as with words. I wondered if my birth parents had been expressive. If my birth mother’s hands suffered from rashes, too.
“Reprogram is, well, you erase the old stuff, then you fill someone’s head with new information.”
Pablo winced as if in pain. Had I said something wrong? “Reprogram,” he murmured. “It is what the guardia do to the prisoners in my country.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, touching his arm before I could think to keep my hand to myself.
“I have a special favor to ask, Milly.” Pablo always pronounced my name as if it had two sets of double es, Meelee. We were sitting at the kitchen table, preparing to do our homework.
I nodded, unsure what he was going to ask me. The thought did cross my mind that maybe Pablo was going to hit on me. And in his corny, well-mannered, foreign-student way, he’d probably ask first! Maybe he’d gotten the wrong idea from my joking about throwing myself at him?
“I want to improve my English,” Pablo explained. “Ms. Morris is giving me extra lessons, but she speaks very fast.” It’s true, our English teacher was a speed talker. Her English sections were the only ones that always got through the yearly syllabus with time to spare. I mean, we did Romeo and Juliet in three days! It was like R & J are in love, then R & J are in bed, then R & J are dead—boom, boom, boom. “I wish for you to help me with my English.” Pablo had lowered his voice as if he were asking for something intimate.
I was shaking my head in total disbelief. This was like my “helping” Nate with his science report two months ago!
Pablo misunderstood my reaction as meaning no. His face darkened with embarrassment. “I ask too much, forgive me.”
“It’s not that,” I explained. “I’m just surprised because up to about a year ago, I was like Ms. Dodo in English. I had to take special lessons and go to a tutor every day. And here you are, asking me to be your teacher!”
“I do not understand. You were in need of special instruction in English?”
How much to tell him? “I had some learning problems. I’d get letters confused and write the wrong words and not make any sense. Same with reading.” Actually, I still struggled sometimes. But I liked putting my failures in the past tense.
Pablo was nodding in agreement. “I have these learning problems as well. English is very difficult, Milly.”
“But that’s because it’s not your native language. . . .” My voice kind of petered out toward the end. I mean, was English technically my native language? Mom and Dad hadn’t brought me to the States until I was almost a year old.
“You know what?” I said, beginning to lose my nerve. “I think you’d be better off asking someone else to help you.”
I was thinking of Meredith. She’d love to teach Pablo a thing or two! Though recently she’d backed off. According to Em, Pablo didn’t seem interested. “Meredith says he probably has a girlfriend back home.”
Now it was Pablo who was shaking his head at me. “I want your instruction, Milly. You speak in a clear way I understand. Your English is very good.”
Don’t ever let anyone tell you compliments don’t work. “Okay,” I agreed. “But you have to help me with my Spanish, too.”
“One day, Spanish. One day, English,” Pablo suggested. “Today, English.” He opened his backpack (one of our hand-me-downs) and pulled out the ESL workbook Ms. Morris had special-ordered for him. I paged through it. Stupid conversational skits. No wonder he wasn’t making much progress. “Pablo, this is so dumb!”
“Por supuesto,” he agreed. “But it is the practice in pronunciation I require.”
I nodded. Pablo could use help in that department, for sure. Last week in Algebra, he’d asked Jake for a sheet of paper. But instead of saying sheet, he had asked for a shit. The whole class had tried not to, but we couldn’t help cracking up. Last period on a Friday afternoon, what can I say. We totally regress.
I opened to the first chapter: “Meeting New Friends.” A man with a cap and a long robe was pictured meeting a girl. The ponytail was meant to make her look American, I suppose. Might as well start here.
“Hello, my name is Pablo Antonio Bolívar Sánchez. What is your name?” Pablo read his lines, filling in the blank with his name. Then I read out my part, asking him how he was. “I am happy to be here,” Pablo replied.
“Happy, not ’appy,” I corrected. “In English, you pronounce h’s.”
“Happy?” Pablo tried.
I nodded, thinking of Grandma. She had sent us a Passover card. Inside there were three checks, made out in each kid’s name. On the memo line, she’d drawn a heart, even on mine. “What does she think? That she can buy love?” Mom had said, arms folded, eyes narrowed.
But Dad’s face had softened. “She’s trying. Happy doesn’t know how to apologize. How to admit she’s wrong.”
“It’s very simple,” Mom had countered. “I. Am. Sorry.” Mom said each word like it was a whole sentence.
“Where are you from?” Pablo was reading from his workbook. When I didn’t respond, he looked up.
“You asked me that same question the first day I met you,” I reminded him. It was high time I admitted I had understood him.
He nodded, then repeated what he had said. “¿De dónde eres?”
“I’m sorry that I pretended . . . I . . . I didn’t know why you were asking me where I was from.” Even now, two months later, it was still hard to talk about.
Pablo was staring at me again with that intense look of his. “I explain why I ask. Your eyes . . . they are eyes from Los Luceros.”
It was a good thing I was sitting down. I felt light-headed. My hands were tingling. “What do you mean, eyes from Los Luceros?” I managed to get out.
Moving back and forth, English to Spanish, Pablo told me about a small town high in the mountains of his country. “It is called Los Luceros, muy remoto, very remote.
That is why the revolutionaries hide there. These people from Los Luceros, they all have eyes like yours.”
As he spoke, my eyes filled with tears.
4
the box
MY HEAD WAS SPINNING. Was I really from this small town in the mountains? Were my birth parents revolutionaries? Were they still alive? And if not, what had happened to them?
I felt like this girl, Pandora, in the Greek myths we’d studied in Ms. Morris’s class. She opened up a box she’d been told not to open. Out came all the sorrows and problems in the world.
In my case, not just sorrows, but all kinds of feelings and questions and thoughts were whirling around.
Pablo touched my hand. I felt a tingling that was different from my allergies. “¿Qué pasa, Milly?” What was wrong?
I guess that’s when I should have told him about my adoption. But I was still reeling with all this new information.
“I’m fine, fine,” I said, turning back to the workbook on the table before us. The next section was called “Meeting the Family”: mother, father, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother. I thought of Happy again. But for some reason, what came to mind was not her meanness but the people she had lost—her mother and her mother’s family in the Holocaust. It had made her bitter. I didn’t want to end up like that.
“My grandmother, Abuelita, still lives near the town I mention, Los Luceros,” Pablo was explaining. Every summer when he was a boy, Pablo and his brothers would be sent to the mountains to stay with their grandparents. “Extraño mi país,” Pablo added softly. He missed his country.
“I’d like to visit it some day,” I told him. I wasn’t just saying it. “I’d like to see the country where my parents got married, where . . . Kate was born.”
“Your sister, Kate?” Pablo was surprised. He had thought all us kids had been born in the States after my parents returned from the Peace Corps.
“No, only Nate,” I explained. “Mom had Kate there. Then, a few months after Kate was born...” I took a deep breath. Okay, Mil, GO! I had this image of myself running down the diving board at the pool at Happy’s country club, about to jump off into nothing but air. . . . “A few months later, they found me.”