Finding Miracles (5 page)

“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.

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 faded (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
e
s, 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!”