Return to Sender (5 page)

“How did the visit go?” his mom asks Tyler at dinner. Sara is still down in Boston until the weekend, when Uncle Tony and Aunt Roxie will bring her back. Ben's supposed to start classes at the University of Vermont on Monday, so he has a few days left at home. After Dad's accident on the heels of Gramps's death, Tyler's older brother considered delaying
college for a year, but his mom insisted he continue with his plans. The Mexican workers are helping them stave off having to sell the farm while they decide if Dad is going to recover enough to be able to manage, even if he doesn't do the actual work. Meanwhile, Mom has already started her service days at the high school, where she is a math teacher.

“They're such sweet girls, don't you think?” His mom obviously is not satisfied with Tyler's shrug as enough of a description of how the visit went.

“They're okay,” Tyler says. If he makes them sound too okay, his mom will be sending him over there often. But if he complains, she will consider it a good character- building challenge for Tyler to befriend them. Maybe, hopefully very soon, now that Tyler's entering sixth grade, his mom will realize that he is not a little baby whom she has to keep improving or hiding things from.

“In a few years, Tyler bro, you'll be glad if Mom's throwing you at three pretty girls.” Ben reaches over to ruffle Tyler's hair. Tyler bats away his brother's hand. He'd feel even more annoyed at Ben's disgusting comment if it weren't that his older brother will be moving into a dorm in a few days. Ben's still planning to come home on weekends to help out at the farm, but it won't be the same. Leave- taking is in the air. The swallows in the barn haven't yet left, but Tyler knows any morning now, he'll go into the barn and feel an eerie silence that will make his heart ache.

“I was thinking …,” Mom sighs. Tyler braces himself. He can tell when his mother is about to have a good idea, just like he can tell when a hen is about to lay an egg.

“Maybe, what do you think”—the question is addressed to the room in general, but Tyler knows he's going to be stuck with the consequences of his mom's brainstorm—”I was thinking of maybe inviting the girls over on Saturdays to help me around the house, pay them a little spending money?”

“You know what would really be great?” Ben adds. “If they could go over and visit Grandma. She's so lonely.” Most every night when she isn't at Uncle Larry's or Aunt Jeanne's in town, Grandma comes over for dinner or at the very least dessert and a visit. Any little memory sets her crying.

Tyler looks down at his plate, not offering an opinion. He is thinking that with Ben away at college, and his dad often half asleep on the couch on pain medication, that means it'll be just him, Tyler, the sole boy, and three little girls, plus Mom and Sara and often Grandma as well. He's going to feel totally outnumbered.

“They had a fight,” Tyler offers. He wasn't going to bring it up until now, when his mom might balance her good idea for company against commotion in the house.

“A fight fight or a disagreement?” His mom would make that distinction.

“The older one ran off crying and locked herself in the bedroom.”

That piques Mom's interest. “What about?”

And now Tyler's curiosity takes over. Why did Mari get so upset? He explains that the two little sisters were telling how they were born in North Carolina and then when they
told him the oldest was born in Mexico, she started to cry. “They're also all named María.” He doesn't know why he threw that in. For the first time in his life, he has met people who are really different. It doesn't exactly upset him so much as make him realize he's just one of a zillion people. Like finding out in Sunday school that God loves everyone the same, whereas Tyler was hoping that maybe God had reserved a special place in his heart just for Tyler. “He has,” Mrs. Hollister, the minister's wife, told Amanda Davis in Sunday school when she asked the very thing Tyler was thinking. “God's heart is vast enough for everyone to have a special place in it.”

“I think I understand,” his mom is saying. She exchanges a look with Dad and Ben.

“What?” Tyler wants to know. He hates this feeling that the grown- ups are keeping some secret from him. In a couple of weeks, he's starting sixth grade, for crying out loud. “What's wrong with her being born in Mexico?” But Mom is suddenly busy removing the serving dishes from the table.

Ben takes pity on him. “Nothing's wrong with her being born in Mexico, little bro. She just probably didn't want you to know that she's not an American citizen.”

“Ben, I think maybe we'll discuss this later,” Mom says in her company voice, which is a waste of manners with no company in the house. “Tyler and María are going to be in the same class, you know.” In other words, there are some private matters that Tyler should not know about his classmate because he might blab to the others.

Ben lifts his eyebrows at Tyler as if to say, She's the boss.

Tyler looks over at Dad, hoping he'll stick up for the un-derdog, like he often does. But Dad's still working on his half- full plate. Now that his right hand is out of commission, he has to feed himself with his left, which means eating din-ner takes him twice as long.

Mom sets down the brownie platter and nods at Dad's plate. “Are you done with that?” she asks, all brisk business.

Dad puts his fork down. “I'm done,” he says in a resigned voice, as if he's giving up on more than his chicken stir- fry

That night, Tyler lugs his telescope out to the barn. When-ever he's feeling upset, it helps to look up at what Gramps used to call the bigger picture. In the hayloft, away from the lights of the house, Tyler can see the sky more clearly. And away from his parents and the sounds of their conversations and phone calls and TV programs, he can think more clearly, too.

He feels stumped as to why his mom is suddenly so cau-tious. Could it be the same reason she sent him down to Boston to visit Aunt Roxie and Uncle Tony? Does she seriously think Tyler's not right in the head and can't be told the truth about anything?

He climbs up to the loft, his flashlight throwing skewy beams this way and that as he tries to hold on to it and to the telescope while also keeping a footing on the ladder.

“Can I help you?” a girl's voice calls from overhead. It's the oldest Mexican girl. She has preceded him to his secret
place in the hayloft, something Tyler is not happy about. “Here,” she offers, grabbing hold of the telescope just in time.

“You can lay it down,” he says, brushing off his jeans. He hates to admit he almost lost his grip on it. He doesn't want to even think what a drop from the hayloft to the barn floor would do to the lens of a telescope.

She lays it carefully between them. “What is it?” she asks, crouching down to inspect it more closely.

“It's a telescope,” he explains, shining his flashlight on it.

“What's it for?”

Tyler can't believe someone his age doesn't know what a telescope is for. Maybe it has to do with her being from Mexico, a subject he will not bring up. Last thing he needs is a girl crying in his secret spot. Bad enough she has intruded into it. “It's for seeing into the far reaches of the universe,” he says. Okay, it doesn't see that far, but Tyler loves to pre-tend that his is a powerful telescope, as powerful as the one at the Museum of Science. Maybe some night he'll discover some new star cluster or spot a spaceship zipping around the stars.

“My gramps gave it to me last Christmas,” he explains as he sets it up by the opened hayloft door. The half- moon casts only a faint light inside. Without Tyler even having to ask, Mari takes the flashlight and shines it wherever his hands are screwing together the parts.

“See that star there, that bright one?” He takes the flashlight from her and uses it as a pointer. “Now take a look.” He invites her to kneel down and peer through the telescope. A
way of thanking her, even though he didn't really ask her to help him.

“Amazing!” she gasps.

Tyler feels his heart soar proudly as if he has arranged this incredible night show himself. And his is a piddly tele-scope. Wait till she looks through the one at the Museum of Science! “That's the North Star. It always points north. That's how when there was slavery, people would escape and follow that star all the way to freedom in Canada.”

“Like the Three Kings,” she says in an awed voice. “And what about those ones that look like a scooper?”

“That's the Big Dipper. And those that are like a little upside- down house, that's Cepheus. And then, see the cross right overhead? That's the Northern Cross.”

Tyler teaches her the most prominent constellations, first pointing them out, then having her look through the telescope. She is surprisingly quick for a girl.

“Did your grandfather teach you?” she asks when they are through.

Tyler nods. He doesn't trust his voice to explain that yes, Gramps taught him the most important things. As a matter of fact, Gramps would have been the one looking at the stars with Tyler tonight if he were still alive. “My grandpa died this June,” he finds himself saying, although he hadn't planned to mention it even at school to his friends. Talk about private.

“I'm sorry,” she says simply, which strikes Tyler as just the right thing to say. No clumsy consolations, no asking for
the gory details. Then she tells him her own grandmother died last December.

“What about your mother?”

“My mother is alive!” she says, so quickly and sharply, it kind of surprises Tyler. “She is away on a trip. She is coming back soon.”

So much for Mom's sappy idea that the girls don't have a mother. Tyler suddenly remembers the letters he was sup-posed to get from her. Mari was probably writing to her mother. “My mom wanted me to pick up some letters from you?”

It's her turn to fall silent. “My father … he took care of them.”

Tyler follows her gaze out the loft door toward the small lit- up trailer. In the silence, he can hear the twittering of the swallows perched on the beams overhead. It strikes him that the loft of a barn is not a usual hanging- out place for a girl, even a girl who is good at learning the constellations. “So why did you come up here?”

“The birds,” she tells him. “I come to visit them. I watch them all day flying in and out and in and out.” She waves her hands in the air. “Like a dance.”

“Those are swallows,” he tells her.

“Swallows!” Mari seems delighted. “We have this song about swallows in Spanish. We call them
golondrinas.”
It's her turn to teach Tyler something.

“I took Spanish,” he tells her. But among the words Ms. Ramírez taught his fifth- grade class, Tyler doesn't remember
golondrinas.
“Any day now they'll leave and won't be back till next spring.”

“Where do they go?” she wants to know.

“Mexico,” he says before he even thinks that's the same place Mari is from, the place he's not supposed to mention or she might burst into tears.

But instead she seems delighted. “They fly all the way to Mexico?” When Tyler nods, she adds, “Just like the
mariposas.”

“Mariposas?”
Tyler vaguely remembers learning that word in his Spanish class.

“Butterflies,” she explains. “They're those little orange and black butterflies and they go to Mexico in the winter. I saw it on TV. They have another name.”

“You mean monarchs?” Tyler offers.

“Yes!” Mari's face lights up again.

Tyler loves how every word out of his mouth seems to surprise her. It's wonderful to be the teacher for a change. And he's also learning some Spanish words from her, which is sure to impress Ms. Ramírez this fall. “Butterflies, birds.” He counts them off. “I guess everybody wants to go to Mexico.”

Mari beams proudly. She gazes out the loft door as if she is looking for something. “Which way is it to Mexico?” she wants to know.

“Thataway,” Tyler says, pointing southwest. “But it's not like you can see it from here,” he teases, because she is leaning out the window like she might catch a glimpse of it.

She pulls back. “I know,” she says, sounding embar-rassed.

“Mari! Mari!” a man's worried voice suddenly calls out.

“My father,” Mari says, hurrying toward the ladder. “Please don't tell!” she calls out as she climbs down out of view. A minute later, Tyler spots her running across the backyard to the dark figure standing at the lit- up trailer door.