Finding Miracles (2 page)

“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” sounding for sixth period drowned out my “sure.”

All afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. I felt like an awful human being. I also felt mad. Why was this Pablo guy singling me out? Everyone else just assumed I was from here. Or did they? Had Jake asked me about knowing Spanish because he knew I took Spanish or because he
knew
?

I dragged myself through my afternoon classes. I was so glad that I’d already had Spanish in the morning. I don’t think I could have tolerated even hearing the language. Just thinking about all this stuff was making me itch like crazy.

When the last song played (some march with trumpets), I rushed out with just a wave to Em. I couldn’t wait to get home and hide under my covers. Actually, I’d have to figure out a way to convince Nate that he didn’t want to go out with his friends today. We live in too small a town, and Nate couldn’t be seen in public
and
be working on a project on the Milky Way at the same time. I had an afternoon of stupid video games with an eight-year-old ahead of me.

On the bus, I stared out the window at the wintry Vermont countryside: gray sky above and gray snow below, blah on blah. My breath was misting up the window. Had Em been with me, she would have drawn a smiley face to make me smile.

But I was glad to be alone. My sister, Kate, hardly rode the after-school bus anymore. She always had some extracurricular activity, chorus, yearbook, debate club. Kate’s my same age, but a grade ahead of me. (Her birthday’s the 9th of April, mine’s the 15th of August, or so it was decided. We’re both turning sixteen this year.)

Sometimes a new acquaintance will do the math and start asking questions. How could Kate and I be sisters and be the same age but not be twins? One time, I questioned Mom and Dad about how much everyone we knew knew. They exchanged a glance.

“We’ve just told a few friends,” Mom said, then hesitated. “Honey, I hope you know there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Children come to families in different ways.”

That inspirational stuff always sounds great, but it doesn’t take the feelings away. I wanted to be just another Kaufman. Was that so hard to understand?

“It’s private, that’s all,” I tried explaining.

The funny thing is that Kate looks more Latin than I do. She’s got our grandmother Happy’s chocolate brown eyes and brown-black hair (Grandma’s is from a bottle now) and olive skin that was common, Grandma says, on her mother’s side, before they all got wiped out in the Holocaust. Grandma Happy actually has a lot to be sad about. But that’s a whole other story.

Kate is also smart. I should know. We shared a room for years, before I begged for my own attic cubbyhole, where I didn’t have to watch Kate put together a report the night before and come home a week later with an A. Meanwhile, I was lucky if I could hang on to a B minus with some assignment I’d struggled over for weeks.

For a long time, I actually thought I was stupid. All through grade school and middle school, I had to have special lessons. I just couldn’t seem to put letters together into written words and sentences. And I used to get such headaches! I was totally convinced that I had a brain tumor. Once, I overheard Mom talking to one of my tutors. He was saying how he’d read some article about children adopted from the Third World having learning disabilities. “When you think about the traumas many of these kids have been through, it’s a miracle they even survived.”

Was he referring to me? Was I a
survivor
?

How could I claim credit for something I couldn’t even remember?

The bus had stopped.

“Earth to Mil, Earth to Mil,” Alfie, the driver, called out. Alfie’s an ex-hippie, a favorite of Em and Jake and me. His conversation is sprinkled with misquotes from old sixties songs. Em’s theory is that back in his Woodstock days, Alfie fried his brain with drugs, and his memory cells got all jumbled up. “You gotta get out of this bus if it’s the last thing you ever do,” Alfie sang.

Very funny, I thought as I filed by, not giving Alfie my usual smile on my way out. He knew something was wrong and started improvising on “Hey Jude” in that soft, throaty voice of his: “Hey, Mil, don’t be a grouch, take a bad day and make it happy . . .” On and on as I went down the stairs. You couldn’t give Alfie a dirty look. He was just too nice a guy with his bandanna and ponytail and pretend-gruff face. So I did the only thing I could think of. I turned around and gave him the peace sign.

He flashed me one back. His came with a smile.

Mom was home, talking to Kate on the phone, coordinating picking her up later from chorus. I searched the house. No Nate.

I rushed into the kitchen just as Mom was hanging up. “Where’s Nate?”

I must have looked panicked, because Mom’s hand was at her heart. “What do you mean, ‘Where’s Nate?’ ”

“Nothing.” I tried to calm my voice. “I was just looking for him, that’s all.”

“Honestly, Milly. You scared me to death.” Mom was annoyed.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I was just looking for him to help him with his project.” Lie twice told. How deep was I going to dig this hole? “Where is he?”

“It’s Thursday, honey.” Mom was now watching me closely. We all know schoolwork is not a strength of mine—it wasn’t likely that I’d be helping my brother with any project. “Nate has hockey practice.”

Hockey practice! There wasn’t a more public place in winter in our town than the Ralston Rink. By tomorrow, everyone would know I was a big liar. I slumped down in a chair just wanting to cry but telling myself I couldn’t because then I’d have to explain why.

Mom sat down at the table across from me. She had on what Kate and I call her therapist look. I
understand,
it says, before you’ve even told her what’s wrong. “Everything okay, honey?”

“I just wanted Nate to be home, that’s all.”

Mom sighed. “I know how you feel.” Mom had taken afternoons off from her busy practice as a family therapist to spend quality time with her family. (“Walking the talk,” she called it.) But suddenly we were all so busy that what she did was spend time sitting in her car, waiting for Kate to come out of choir or for Nate to finish his sports practice, and until recently, for me to come out of some special tutoring lesson.

“I was about to make some cookies. Want to help?”

I shook my head. I was feeling too low to do anything useful. The only thing I would have agreed to was if Mom had suggested, “What do you say we bury you under the snowdrifts in the backyard and dig you up once everyone you know has graduated from Ralston High?”

“Roads were terrible today.” Mom talked, her back to me, as she mixed ingredients at the counter. “I stopped at Sterlings on the way home, hoping I’d find something for Happy’s birthday. Nothing.” Mom was trying to draw me out. First she’d offer a little of her life, then slip in a question about mine. “How was school today?”

“Fine,” I said. “I mean it was interesting.” And then, I don’t know what got into me, since I was trying to avoid the subject. But suddenly I heard myself saying, “There’s a new guy in our class, Pablo.” I mentioned how his family were refugees, how he probably didn’t know much English, and then I slipped in where he was from.

Mom reacted with the same tensing up as Em had in class when Mr. Barstow mentioned Pablo’s native land.

Mom turned around, her hands all greasy from buttering the cookie sheets. Her eyes were like two wide-open doors. “Milly, honey,” she began, coming toward me. “Is that what’s going on?”

Yes, no, yes, no,
my head and heart were having a shouting match. Yes, I wanted Mom to hug me. No, because if she did, I knew I’d break down sobbing.

I guess I opted for no, or maybe the shouting inside was just too loud and confusing. I bolted out of the kitchen and upstairs and ended up under the quilt Mom made me last year with fabric pieces I’d picked out. Which made me feel even lousier about rejecting her.

The thing about feeling sorry for yourself is that after you do the whole funeral scene in your head—everyone saying how great you were, how sad that you had to die so young— you want to be alive again. Mom called up that she was going out for a sec to pick up Kate and Nate. I knew she was “giving me my space,” but I kind of wished she had come up and given me a second chance to be a nicer human being instead.

When I heard the car pulling back in the driveway, I felt a flood of relief and happiness. But I didn’t go running down the stairs to greet everyone. Instead, I waited, too proud to show how desperately I needed my family around me.

“MILL-L-L-E-E-E!” Nate called up.

I pretended not to hear. But when he didn’t call up again, I opened my door and called down, “What?”

“Hey, Milly-the-pooh, come on down.” It was Kate. I wondered if Mom had had a talk with them.

Down I came, trying to figure out what look to put on my face when I entered the kitchen. I felt I owed Mom an apology, but then, if I said anything, Mom being Mom, we would have to have a talk about it.

“Milly, you should have seen this goal I made!” The minute I came in the room, Nate launched into the story of his triumphs at practice. He raced around the kitchen, bat-ting an imaginary puck. Kate rolled her eyes at me.

Nate swung and almost knocked Mom over as she was taking a cookie sheet out of the oven. Mom almost swore, but in the end all she said was “foul!” Kate and I laughed. There was no way Mom would ever say the f-word. She was raised Mormon, and even though she’d been quite the rebel, leaving Provo to go to college in the East, joining the Peace Corps when she graduated, marrying a Jewish boy, there was still a prim part of Mom who thought Chap Stick was enough “makeup” and said excuse me every time she sneezed.

Mom brought the cookies to the table, sailing the plate in the air with a flourish, like a fancy waiter. Nate lunged but missed. “Come on, Mom!” he wailed impatiently.

Mom set the plate down in front of me. “Milly gets first pick.”

“Why?” Nate asked, instantly adding “no fair!” before Mom could even reply.

“Because . . . I risked Milly’s life making these cookies!”

Even I looked startled.

“I left the oven on,” Mom explained, pulling up a chair beside me. “What if I’d burned the house down? What if something had happened to my baby?” She squeezed my hand, which actually made the itching feel better.

Nate was grinning. He loved it when someone else got to be the baby in the family.

“I saw Em after school,” Kate said between nibbles of her cookie. She was turning the lazy Susan at the center of the table round and round. Any minute Mom was going to tell her to quit, that this was the third lazy Susan in the last year. It was Kate’s nervous tic, an inconvenient one, I often thought, as you couldn’t exactly carry a lazy Susan around with you. Mine was much more portable: skin rashes. “She was headed over to Jake’s.”

“Yeah?” I asked nonchalantly.

“There was some hot-looking guy with her. She said he was someone new in your class.”

Hot-looking? What about his hair? What about his clothes? I could feel Mom extra quiet beside me.

“Em said he’s older but was put back until he catches up.”

“Where’s he from?” Nate asked.

Kate shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

I didn’t volunteer. Neither did Mom.

After dinner, I took the cordless up to my attic room. Em and I usually talked at least once every night, sometimes more if the line was free. We are all heavy users at our house. Except Dad, though sometimes he has a bunch of phone calls to make about private jobs he takes on when the local contractor goes into his seasonal slump.

Em reported that she had had a great time at Jake’s. Dylan and Will had come over.
And
Meredith! I felt a pang of jealousy. Meredith had been Em’s best friend before Em and I became best friends. It wasn’t that Em dumped Meredith to be close to me, but just that they saw very little of each other now that Meredith was at Champlain Academy, the private school one town over. “I wished you’d been there,” Em was saying, as if she could sense that I felt left out. “Everyone missed you so-o-o much.”

I felt better knowing I’d been missed, even if Em was exaggerating. “So how was Pablo?” I ventured.

“What do you mean how was he?”

What I meant was, had he said anything about the awful classmate who pretended not to understand him. “I mean, did he talk any?”

“Mil, he hardly speaks English, how could he talk to us? Well, actually, take that back. Meredith tried talking to him in Spanish.” Meredith’s family had lived in different Latin American countries when she was growing up. Her dad used to be some reporter specializing in Latin America, until he took a job teaching journalism at the university. “Meredith told me later that he actually knows a lot of English. I guess he’s just really shy.”

Oh yeah? Pablo didn’t seem to have that problem with me.

“How did Nate’s project go?”

“What project?”

“Mil, the project you had to go home to help him with!”

That’s the problem with lying. You have to remember stuff that didn’t happen so you can report on it when asked. “Oh, you know, the usual. ‘The Earth is a planet revolving around the sun.’ Hey, my dad needs to use the phone.” Dad was standing at the door, waving a hand that he’d be back. But Em had already hung up. “It’s okay, Dad, I’m done. Really.”