Finding Miracles (10 page)

Black Monday. I couldn’t remember what Mr. Barstow had said about it—some Monday in history when someone had gotten beheaded or an important battle had been lost. All I knew was that it was my Black Monday: voting day at Ralston High.

“You each get five minutes,” Mr. Arnold, our principal, coached us. He held up five fingers like we were kindergarteners.

The ninth graders began filing into the auditorium. Our class seemed smaller today. I’d heard Mr. Arnold say something about an unprecedented number of absences. Maybe some kids had gotten caught bashing in mailboxes or tipping over cows this weekend.

When everyone was seated, Mr. Arnold gave a brief welcome, which lasted more than five minutes, then the candidates marched on stage to wait for our turn to talk.

I wish I could repeat what everyone said, but I was truly in a state of terror. I do remember Taylor and his pals looking a little hungover. Probably they’d gotten wasted at his party this past weekend. Maybe that’s why there were so many empty seats out there. I remember Jake sounding like if you voted for him, he was going to save the planet, not just Ralston. A little while later, I remember Em going on and on and on, Mr. Arnold stage-whispering that her time was up, Em finally hearing him, getting all flustered, then spending another minute apologizing to our class before sitting back down.

Then it was my turn. I was in such a sweat that the backs of my legs were stuck to the seat of my chair. Great, I thought. Now I’ll make a fart sound when I get up.

But there was no sound. In fact, I made it to the podium without fainting or tripping. I even managed to unfold my short speech, which was not much longer than two sentences if I took out all the thank-yous. But when I looked down, the words began swimming around that piece of paper. In a panic, I glanced up and my eyes found Pablo. He was beaming me his intense look as if he was drawing out some native courage I didn’t quite believe I had. The NPR bulletin flashed in my head. His country was free! I had not had a chance yet to congratulate him.

“This is a special day for a member of our class,” I began, my voice all trembly but audible. I told about the victory of democracy that very weekend in Pablo’s country. The assembly broke out in cheers.

“It’s also a very special day for my family,” I continued when the clapping had died down. “You see, we have a close connection to Pablo’s country. My parents met there in the Peace Corps. My sister Kate, who some of you know, was born there. And I . . . I was . . . adopted there.”

Em later told me that looking out at the audience was like seeing a choir singing on TV with the sound on mute. A sea of mouths dropped opened in an
oh!
of surprise. I wouldn’t know. All I could see was Pablo looking back at me. I plowed on, my burning hands clutching the podium.

“I’m not telling you guys this to get your sympathy vote. I’m saying it because I feel lucky. Real lucky. It’s no joke. A lot of people in the world don’t ever get the chance to vote. I know, it’s just a high school election. I’ve told myself that, too. But really we’re practicing being free. So vote—even if it’s not for me. We all win when we have a democracy.”

Finally, my courage gave out. I felt like one of those cartoon characters running out past the cliff, looking down, and yikes, there’s no ground beneath her! I turned, wondering how I’d ever navigate my way back to my seat. I remember finding my chair, Em putting her arm around me, Jake giving me his solidarity hand clasp. I remember the audience clapping. A while later, we came off stage and filed down the aisles as kids called out the names of their favorite candidates. Maybe my name was among them, I couldn’t say. I was feeling numb, like I was tumbling down some rapids, carried by the current of whatever was going to happen next. It was an effort to keep my head above water.

Until I heard Pablo’s voice. He was standing up in his row, waving and calling, “Milly, Milly.” All around him my friends were taking up the chant. And suddenly, my Black Monday turned—like that song Alfie always sang to us— “a brighter shade of pale.”

A kind of nervous excitement carried me through the rest of that day. But the following morning, I hid my head under my pillow. Oh my God! What had I done? Today I’d have to face the consequences of my big mouth.

One good thing about having blabbed my secret was that I was no longer worried about the elections. I’d been dreading the announcement of the winners over the public address system this morning. But now I had something else to worry about. Was I really ready to have everyone know I was adopted?

I was wondering which excuse might work for not going to school today—PMS or instant flu?—when I heard the phone ringing downstairs. Moments later, Mom brought up the cordless. “It’s for you.”

“Hola, Milly.”
It was Pablo. Could I meet him at the entrance before school today?

I sat up in bed. “Something wrong?”

“Wrong? No, no, Milly,” Pablo reassured me. “For me, it is very good. I hope for you, too.”

“Give me a hint, please, Pablo,” I pleaded. Take pity on me today, I thought.

“My parents are here with me, Milly. They say hello.”

I caught on. Pablo couldn’t talk freely. But what on earth did he have to say to me that was so urgent and couldn’t be mentioned in front of the Bolívars? He had assured me it was good. And it was his promise and my curiosity that finally propelled me out of bed and into my Banana Republic top and best faded jeans. I put on a little lipstick, a little mascara, all the time pep-talking myself,
Go, Milly, go! Win or lose, you
do it with style, girl!

Pablo was waiting at the front door of the school, pacing back and forth, just like his father had the night of their national election. His face brightened when he saw me. He nodded toward the picnic table directly in sight of the front office. It was almost always unoccupied.

“I never congratulate you properly,” Pablo began. It was true. Yesterday, I’d been swamped with well-wishers. Em kept saying, “You should have run for VP, Mil. You would have won.”

“Your speech was beautiful, Milly,” Pablo went on. “I told Mamá and Papá. They are so proud that you are from our country.” He said loads of people had come up to him afterward. Mr. Arnold had even mentioned organizing a group from Ralston to go down next year on a service trip. “This is all because of you, Milly,” Pablo added.

It wasn’t that I minded hearing praise, but the national anthem was going to play soon. “Did you have something urgent to talk to me about, Pablo?”

Pablo nodded. “Your mother, she called my mother last night about the invitation.”

“Invitation?”

“To accompany us this summer for our trip home.”

I had totally forgotten that I’d invited myself on their trip! I hid my face in my hands, too mortified to worry about the ugly rash spreading on my skin.

“No, no, Milly, don’t be that way,” Pablo protested, pulling my hands away. “I told you it is good. My mother, she asked me if I asked you. I told my mother, yes, of course, I invited you.”

I looked up at Pablo’s face in shock. He was grinning, but when I kept standing there with my mouth open, his smile faded. “I hope you accept my invitation? You will come, no? Mamá and Papá say you are very welcome.”

“Hey, Pablo, Milly, get in here, you two!” It was Mr. Arnold hollering out the window. “The anthem played five minutes ago. You don’t want a late pass your first day as class senator, do you?”

I felt like those newborns on TV when they get slapped on the butt. Right before they burst out bawling, they always look so shocked, kind of surprised at the air rushing into their lungs. Well, I was shocked by all this unexpected news. I was truly surprised my legs could carry me across the lawn to the front doors. And sure, I wanted to bawl. But I didn’t have a tissue, and I was wearing mascara, and I didn’t want to end up with raccoon eyes and a snotty nose in front of my class. I kept remembering what Grandma had said about the Kaufmans, “Whatever comes our way, we meet it with style.” Especially winning, I thought.

part two

6

el paisito

“THERE IT IS!” Pablo was pointing down.

I leaned over to look out his window. The clouds had parted. Below lay mountains upon mountains of green jungle—just like Mom and Dad had described. But I kept searching for something
more
. I don’t know what I was expecting—a tiny mom and dad outside a little casita waving up at me?

You’d think the Bolívars had just sighted Treasure Island.
“¡El paisito, el paisito!”
they started crying.

Mr. Bolívar motioned toward the ground.
“¿Qué piensas, Milly?”
What did I think? “Beautiful country, no?”

I nodded and smiled.

I was already feeling homesick.

Not that the home I had left behind that morning was a warm, inviting nest to think about. Everyone had been so upset with me—except Mom. She had wanted to come to the airport, but the car was going to be too crowded with Dad, me, the Bolívars, and all the luggage. Mom offered to drive on her own if I wanted her along, but I knew it’d just make it harder when the time came to say goodbye in front of everybody.

After her initial shock, Mom had been super supportive. “I think you should go,” she kept encouraging me. “It’s obviously the right time. I just thought it would happen when you were a little older. And that maybe I could hold your hand through it.”

“Oh, Mom!” I wailed. “It’s not like I’m going to get tortured!” It did cross my mind that not too long ago, people were getting tortured there.

“I know, I know,” Mom said, hugging me. It seemed like every chance she got these days, Mom was throwing her arms around me. “However you have to do it, honey. I trust your judgment.” The one thing she insisted on was that we tell the Bolívars about my adoption. It was too big a secret to keep from them.

“Mom, they already know.” I explained about my speech at school, how Pablo had reported it to his parents. How just this last Saturday when I’d gone to the mall with Mrs. Bolívar to help her buy gifts to take to her family back home, she had said how proud she was that I was from her country. What I didn’t tell Mom was what Mrs. Bolívar had said about my eyes. How they were like the eyes of her sister-in-law, whose name I’d heard before, Dulce, the widow of Mr. Bolívar’s murdered brother, Daniel. Dulce came from Los Luceros, the place Pablo had also mentioned. Hearing all this, Mom might think that I was trying to track down my birth family. And really and truly, I thought of this trip as a chance to get acquainted with the country where I accidentally happened to be born. That was all. Anything more than that would have been scary to think about.

By the time I had finished telling Mom about my speech, she was shaking her head. “The truth is, you’ve been doing a lot of growing up, Milly. I’m really proud of you.” She hugged me then, too.

Not everyone in the family was so understanding. At first, Dad wouldn’t even hear about my going on this trip. He was worried about my safety, he said. Every few weeks, he’d call the State Department to find out if it was okay to travel to a country that had only recently been liberated. They kept reassuring him that the U.S. embassy was open for business, that the new government had won in a clean sweep, that its human rights record in the last three months was impeccable. In fact, the new administration’s Truth Commission was holding trials to investigate and punish all past abuses.

Once he had to admit safety would not be a problem, Dad started in on the cost of the ticket. We couldn’t afford it, he argued. We had to be saving for college tuitions.

“What if I pay for the ticket myself?” I challenged, folding my arms in front of me.

“Where are you going to get seven hundred dollars?” Dad challenged back, folding his arms. Sometimes, at least with our gestures, we did all act like family.

“I have people I can ask,” I said vaguely. “So will you let me go if I pay for it?”

Dad was in a bind. “I guess . . . well . . . your mother might not...” He glanced over at Mom, a desperate look in his eyes.

Mom stood by me, arms folded, waiting for Dad to complete his sentence.

Dad threw his hands in the air. He turned and headed down to his basement workroom, too upset to think up another pretext. I almost ran after him, ready to give up on my trip. It wasn’t worth this much grief. But Mom held me back. “Dad’ll be all right,” she reassured me. “Remember, he had to disappoint Happy in order to grow up, too. He’ll understand.”

Days went by and Dad did not seem any closer to understanding my choice. Finally, Mom had a talk with him— one of those talks where they shut the bedroom door—and first it’s like an overloaded washing machine in there, thundery, off-balance sounds. Then soft, persuasive sounds (rinse cycle), and finally, kissing sounds like a light breeze blowing on the laundry!

Not that Dad came right out and said yes, Milly, you can go on this trip with my blessing. He just suddenly shifted into talking about the best kind of backpacks for traveling. How I needed a money belt for walking around in the capital. What medicines I should take in case I got dysentery, malaria, typhoid fever . . . What about AIDS, Dad? I almost asked. But I knew that would totally freak him out.

Then there was Nate. For weeks, my little brother followed me around the house, pulling at me to please stay, not to go away. Kate, meanwhile, just would not talk about my trip. The morning of my departure, she refused to come out of her room to say goodbye. Okay, it was six in the morning, but still. Later, I did find a note tucked inside my bag: “YOU BETTER COME BACK OR I’LL KILL YOU!!!” Kate signed off with a smiley face—well, the smile was more like a straight line, and instead of her name, she’d written “YOUR BIG SISTER FOR LIFE.”

At the airport, Dad chatted with the Bolívars, but when it came time for us to say goodbye, he clammed up. Great, I thought, a parent with stage fright during a major scene in my life.

As I went through security beyond the point where Dad could go, I felt a pang. Maybe my family would never take me back again? I turned, ready to run and ask to return home, but when I looked to see where he was, Dad was gone.

We had about two and a half hours in the waiting area. Mrs. Bolívar had insisted on being at the airport way ahead of time. Like we were going on a safari to hunt an airplane, not just board it. “It is the custom in our country,” she explained.

“The custom of nervous people in our country,” Pablo teased.

We sat around, Mrs. Bolívar digging stuff out of her purse, worried that I had not eaten breakfast.
“¿Un chocolatico? ¿Una mentica?”
A little chocolate? A little mint?

“No gracias,”
I kept refusing. My stomach was having a nervous breakdown. I hadn’t skipped breakfast for nothing.

“Ya, ya,
Mamá.
”
Pablo came to my rescue. “Milly is going to change her mind about coming with us.” Pablo knew how exasperating his mother could be. But I had to admire how patient he always seemed to be with her.

“Remember we won’t be eating until we get to
el
paisito,
” his mother reminded him.

El paisito.
I had been reading up on it in the Lonely Planet travel book Dad had bought me for the trip. In the full-page map in front,
el paisito
had a sprawling amoeba shape, as if it were breaking out of the ruler-straight borders drawn by some king in Europe. And really, the “little country ” didn’t look all that little. But then, it wasn’t just
el
paisito
that Mrs. Bolívar called “little.” Lots of things were little: a little trip, a little meal. Señora Robles had once explained that people added this ending to words in Spanish to show affection.

“¡Tus manos!”
Mrs. Bolívar exclaimed. She had caught sight of my hands. For months, I had tried to hide them from Pablo. Now he, too, was staring down at them.
“¡Pobrecitas!”
Poor little things.

“It’s just an allergy,” I managed, my face as red as my hands.

The truth is they looked pretty bad. With all the commotion of the last few weeks, my rash had gotten worse. Mom had taken me to a new dermatologist in town where I had to fill out a medical form. Was there any history of skin diseases or allergies in my family? I passed the clipboard over to Mom, who read it, sighed, and put her arm around me. She understood.

“I get the same malady in this country,” Mrs. Bolívar explained in Spanish, showing me her chapped hands. She dug around in her purse and pulled out a tin. I half expected it to be Burt’s Bees hand salve that Em had converted me to using. But no, this was a greenish ointment, the last of some potion she had brought with her from home. “This
yerbabuena
will take away the itch. Shall we put some on?” The lid was off and her fingers delving inside before I could say yes or no.

“Mamá,” Pablo reminded his mother.

“It’s okay,” I assured him.

As Mrs. Bolívar worked on my hands, I couldn’t help thinking of Dad and his calamine lotion.
Dad
. . .
Mom
. . .
Kate
. . .
Nate.
. . . I felt homesick all over again. One last call home in case the plane crashes, I promised myself.

A little later when I tried, our line kept being busy. I couldn’t call Em, as she was away at a special leadership camp sponsored by the governor for members of student governments. I’d actually been invited, too, but I had already planned this trip. I had promised Em that I’d send tons of postcards and bring her back some live contraband: a gorgeous Latin hunk in my suitcase, provided I could get him through security!

The only other person I could think of to call was Happy. (555-HI HAPPY, easy to remember, Nate’s trick.) Surprisingly, early as it was, Grandma answered. “Milly, darling! I’ve been thinking about you. Isn’t it today you leave?”

“I’m at the airport. I made it through security.”

“Good for you!” she congratulated me, like I had cause to worry.

“Grandma, thanks so much for paying for me to do this.” When Dad had tried using the price of the ticket as a reason for me not to go with the Bolívars, I had called Grandma with that favor she’d said I could ask her.

“Don’t you mention it. You feeling a little nervous, honey?”

“Nah,” I bluffed, then remembering how Grandma said nobody in our family ever told her the truth, I added, “Just that Kate wouldn’t even say goodbye. And Nate had a tantrum at the door.”

“Don’t you worry about them. They’ll be just fine. I’ve invited Kate to come down and go shopping with me in the city. Roger’s picking up Nate when Scout camp ends on Friday, and we’ll all go to a Yankees game.”

Suddenly, being with Happy on Long Island sounded like a lot more fun than being some place where people were still recovering from a dictatorship.

But this had all been my choice. Grandma had even offered to buy tickets for everyone in the family to go with me. But I hadn’t been sure I wanted them along. Mom had suggested that I play it by ear, see how I felt, and once I was there, if I decided, just call and the family would join me. Grandma’s offer was still open. “And I’ve cleared the decks. I’m free all August, and Dad was going to take two weeks off anyway.”

Standing there at that pay phone, I was so tempted to tell Happy to go ahead and buy their tickets now. But I knew if they came down, the whole thing would turn into a family trip. Mom would hover. Dad would be a safety freak. Nate would whine that he didn’t understand people’s fast Spanish. And Kate would be competing over
our
native country. No, I really didn’t want them along. I wanted this to be my journey, my country, my story—before they became ours.

After the excitement of sighting land had died down, Pablo noticed my silence.

“Are you preoccupied, Milly?” Pablo wanted to know.

I nodded. “Not because of what I’ll find there,” I went on to explain. Well, maybe some of it was that. “But what I left behind. Some members of my family, I guess they’re having a hard time with my going on this trip.” I hadn’t wanted Pablo or his parents to feel bad, so I hadn’t mentioned anything, until now. “It’s like they’re afraid the truth is going to break up our family.”

“The truth,
la verdad
.” Pablo repeated the word slowly, as if he were trying to understand its meaning in English, and then failing that, in Spanish. “In
el paisito,
we have now the Truth Commission to bring to justice the guilty ones who helped the dictatorship. Some say let us forget the past and build the future. Others say we cannot build the future if we do not know the past.” It was strange that now that we were on this trip where I was supposedly going to practice my Spanish full time, Pablo was always speaking in English.
“Para no olvidarlo,”
he had explained. So as not to forget it.

“I think the truth is the most important of all,” I said, jumping right in.

Pablo looked thoughtful. “I believe in the truth, too, Milly. But I had an uncle. I loved my uncle. He was a very good uncle. But he was also a general. Maybe he was not so good a person when he was a general. I would never want to punish the good uncle. But what to do about the cruel general?”