Finding Miracles (6 page)

“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.”

“
Found
you?” Pablo questioned, eyebrows raised.

I nodded. “
Soy adoptada
. I am adopted.” I said it in English and Spanish, as if to confirm the fact in both languages.

A knowing smile spread across Pablo’s face.
“Somos
patriotas,”
he said proudly.

Fellow patriots? Well, that was maybe stretching it. But it was reassuring how Pablo treated the news like it was nothing to get upset about. It made me want to keep talking. So I told him the little I knew. The orphanage in the capital my parents had visited about four months after Kate was born. The sickly baby they found there. The decision to adopt. The paperwork. The final okay. The bringing me back. How I’d tried keeping it a secret so as not to feel any different from Kate, or Nate, born seven years later.

I talked on and on—the words just seemed to flow out. Pablo kept nodding, listening without interrupting, as if he knew how important it was for me to get my story out.

When I was done, it was suddenly very quiet . . . as if we were both looking down at that empty box that had once held my secret.

Pablo knowing my story definitely brought us closer. If I could tell him my deep dark secret, then I could talk to him about anything. Well, almost anything. There are some things you just can’t gab to guys about—like PMS or your big butt. I did talk to Pablo about Em and how we were drifting apart.

“I want to forget that she blabbed. I really do,” I explained. “I mean, I even told her that it was over and done with, but my heart just doesn’t seem to want to come along with the rest of me, you know?”

Pablo nodded. He didn’t immediately offer advice or respond. I liked the way he was thoughtful about what people said. Like he was really thinking about it.

“Things of the heart you cannot rush,” he said quietly, as if he were speaking from personal experience. I wondered if Pablo did have a girlfriend back home, or maybe a whole slew of them. All those Beatles lyrics, I supposed. “When I was a little boy, summers with my grandparents, Abuelito and I used to plant a garden. I was so impatient for the crops to grow. I used to pull the tiny plants to see if the roots had sprouted.”

I had to laugh at the thought of Pablo surrounded by mounds of plucked would-have-been onions, potatoes, carrots. “Your granddad must have loved you!”

Pablo smiled wistfully. “Abuelito would say, ‘Things of the garden and things of the heart, you have to give them time, Pablito.’ Poor Abuelito. He never lived to see his country free. He died when I was a boy. A natural death,” Pablo added with relief. I guess in his country that was a rare thing.

This actually was the hardest thing to get used to with Pablo. How he would suddenly switch from being just your normal teenage guy to someone brooding and absent, someone I didn’t know.

“Earth to Pablo,” I sometimes teased him. “Come in!”

He was perplexed the first time. I guess this spaceship routine wasn’t done in his country. Sometimes Pablo would respond, shaking off whatever bad memory had overtaken him. But sometimes he was too far gone, and he would look at me from such a far distance, like he himself didn’t know how to get back to me.

Those times, I really wanted to comfort him. But I couldn’t yet seem to reach out and hold his hand. Things of the body. I guess you can’t rush them, either.

A few days after I talked with Pablo about her, Em caught up with me on our way to Algebra. “I really feel like you’re still mad at me. I mean, if you’re not going to be my best friend, would you please let me know?” She looked like she was about to cry.

“Oh, Em!” I put my arm around her. It was a relief to feel the ice breaking between us.

“We never really talk anymore,” Em wailed, her eyes brimming with tears. She seemed oblivious to the fact that we were standing in the hall, surrounded by wall-to-wall people hurrying to their next class. And two of them, Jake and Dylan, were heading in our direction.

“I know you’re like still totally upset about me telling about your adoption.”

“EM!!!” Like my New York cousins, Em thought making a scene showed a person was really being sincere.

“Hey there!” Jake and Dylan had swerved to join us. I thought for sure they would notice the high-tension wires threaded between Em and me. But they seemed totally clueless. Did Jake even remember what Em had told him about my being adopted? “What are you ladies up to this weekend?”

Em and I both shrugged. We were too into our talk to think about the weekend. Actually, mine was wide open. My parents were taking Nate to a game in Boston. On the way, Kate was being dropped off for an overnight with her best friend, who had moved to southern Vermont last summer. At first, Mom had insisted I go along with “the family,” but finally she had agreed to let me stay home. The Bolívars would be around if I needed anything. In fact, I had already offered to accompany Mrs. Bolívar to the mall on Saturday to help her shop for some nice nightgowns for Miss Billings.

“We’re getting together Saturday night to plan my campaign strategy,” Jake was saying. This past Monday, Jake had registered to run for class president. Elections would be held in late May for officers for the following year. Jake was the world’s nicest guy and every downtrodden person’s Robin Hood. But I didn’t think he’d stand a chance against Taylor Ward, all-around jock and ninth-grade heartthrob. I know, it sounds like every high school sitcom—the handsome, blond hunk; the skinny, intellectual-type guy. But like Ms. Morris says, clichés get to be clichés because they ring true. The most I could hope for Jake was a happy ending to his story: skinny guy doesn’t get the presidency, but he gets, I don’t know, a date with Jennifer Lopez.

“Sure, I’ll be there,” Em was saying. I noticed, kind of sadly, that she didn’t accept the invitation for both of us like she used to.

Of all things, “Auld Lang Syne” came through the loudspeakers. “You guys coming?” Dylan said. We were all in Algebra this last period.

“In a sec.” I knew we were going to be late for class, but Em and I needed to plan getting together for a talk. Hopefully, we’d make it to Algebra before Mr. Oliver reached what he called his “negative numbers.”

“So, when can you come over?” I asked. The hall had cleared. Even a normal voice now sounded loud.

I don’t think Em heard me. She was crying again. “It’s been awful lately. I’ve been feeling like life is just not worth it.” Her parents, who were always threatening to divorce each other, were really getting a divorce this time. She had gained five pounds. Her thighs were huge. Didn’t I think her thighs were huge? Meanwhile, her brother had been kicked out of his prep school, which was kind of unfair since the school was for problem kids. She was flunking Phys. Ed. Nobody flunked Yoga.

“Oh, Em,” I kept saying, sometimes in comfort, sometimes in exasperation at how Em got the truly major all mixed up with the definitely minor. Why, oh why, is it so easy to spot this in someone else? But as Em talked on, I realized that a lot had been happening in her life that I didn’t know about. I’d been holding on to my grudge, not seeing how much Em truly regretted what she’d done.

“I don’t blame you for hating my guts,” Em went on. I shook my head in protest, but Em wouldn’t be convinced. “I deserve it, I know. I have the biggest mouth. But I’m really, really, really sorry!” Em squeezed her eyes shut as if to stop the tears that spurted out of the corner of her eyes.

“Em, listen, it’s okay, really.” This time it was my heart talking. “Truly, you are MY ONE AND ONLY best friend!” I raised my voice several decibels. Maybe if I made a scene, she would believe me.

Em blinked, as if surprised at my outburst. “Really? You mean it?”

I brought my face right up to hers, till our foreheads touched. “I mean it, girlfriend,” I said emphatically, looking into her eyes.

“You sure you still love me?” Em was like a little kid sometimes. It was something else I both loved and sometimes found exasperating about my best friend.

“I never stopped,” I assured her. Not that I wasn’t also hurt. But that was the thing about loving somebody, you hung in there with them during the hard parts. That’s what the love was for, the rest was easy.

“If I could only get mouth-reduction surgery like they do for big boobs.” Em sighed as we pulled apart. I loved it when Em’s sense of humor kicked in.

“So how about coming over this Saturday? My parents are going to be gone.”

Em nodded. “Maybe after we talk, we can go over to Jake’s—you want to?”

But I had been hatching another plan. “Actually, Em, I need your help with something.”

Curiosity lit up my friend’s eyes. “What?”

“I want to open The Box and I want you there, okay?”

Em’s mouth dropped—she looked totally shocked. “The Box? Really? But I mean, are you . . . do you really think you’re ready, Mil?”

I nodded, like I knew. But to be honest, I was in shock, too.

The box had been around for years before it became The Box.

It was made of this beautiful, dark wood—mahogany, Dad had said. A latch pulled down over an iron ring. One time, when we were little, curious Kate pointed to the dresser and asked Mom what was in the box. I remember Mom saying something like she kept some private papers and documents in there. That did the job. The contents sounded boring. Nothing for us to try to get into when she wasn’t looking.

One summer afternoon between third and fourth grade, when we were still living on Long Island, my parents came out to the driveway. I’d been riding my new bike up and down the street—the allowable block that was visible from our house. I don’t remember Kate being around, and Nate was napping. Now that I look back, my parents probably waited until the three of us could be alone together.

“Mil, honey.” It was Dad. “We’d like to talk to you, Mom and I, okay?”

From their faces, I could tell I was in for something important. Several things went through my mind. I had done something wrong. But what? I always tried to be good to make up for all the trouble I was having at school.

I followed them into the house, feeling like I was going to faint. I think I actually held my breath all the way to the kitchen. Everything seemed normal, in its place. But then my eye fell on the box sitting beside the lazy Susan on the table. It was a harmless enough thing, but it was so unusual to see it there that it could have been a gun or a bloody knife the way my knees began shaking.

I sat down at my usual place, Mom and Dad on the other side facing me. They each took one of my hands, smiling this emergency-room smile like bad news was coming. I must have looked ready to cry because Mom said, “Honey, it’s nothing to worry about. Remember how Dad and I have talked to you about getting you in an orphanage?”

I nodded warily. They had told me that I was adopted, but I didn’t really know what that meant. I had asked if Kate and Nate were also adopted, and Mom had explained that, no, children came to families in different ways. My brother and sister had come from her belly—which sounded much more disturbing.

“Anyhow,” Mom went on. “We just want to go over the whole story in case you have any questions. Okay?”

And then they told me a story I’d heard in bits and pieces before. I listened. I didn’t ask any questions. Even when they asked me if I had any questions. Really and truly, the only part I worried about was when they said they weren’t sure about my birth date. August 15 was just the date the orphanage had registered me. I thought they were trying to take away my birthday.

Dad was squeezing my hand. “Any more questions, honey?”

“You understand what we’ve told you?” Mom squeezed my other hand.

What wasn’t there to understand? Once upon a time, some parents who had been in the Peace Corps decided to stay an extra year in their host country. They worked at a school teaching English. Their first daughter was born. They called her Kate. One day, the mom visited an orphanage close to where they lived. There she met a beautiful baby who had been left at the doorstep. The mom couldn’t resist; she brought the dad over; they fell in love with this baby; they knew that baby was meant for them, and so they adopted this baby. Wonderful story. But it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me.