Out of the Box

by Michelle Mulder

  I think I understand. They must have been fugitives, in such a hurry to escape the police that they misplaced the bandoneón case with their money and the plane tickets. But how did the bandoneón end up in Victoria, half a world away?

  I look up the address that was in the envelope: 78 Oak Crescent, Victoria, British Columbia. Google Maps tells me it’s up near the university, but I can’t find out who lives there now, never mind in 1976.

  I look around at the other computer users— travelers with huge backpacks propped up against their chairs and older people who peer at screens over their glasses. Beyond them, Sarah makes her way toward me, loaded down with books. I quickly flip to my email and log on. Three messages, all from Mom. Subjects: Miss you, Love you and Frustrated.

  I open the last one first. She sent it last night.

  To: ellie@channel.com

  From: gloria@channel.com

  Subject: Frustrated

  Dear Ellie Belly,

  Sorry we never get to finish our conversations lately. All three times, I’ve asked Jeanette to pass me over to you when we’re done, but she hasn’t, always making up excuses. I’m jealous that she gets to spend all that time with you, and I don’t even get a proper conversation these days!

  My stomach twists painfully. Mom probably thinks I don’t want to talk to her, and I had no idea. All my life, she’s been afraid I’d turn against her some day. I read on.

  Things here aren’t going very well. Like I was telling you, your father’s all but disappeared into his office since you left. He comes up for meals and to watch tv, but other than that, he might as well not be around. I get home and want to talk to him, and he just tunes me out. It’s like the television is all that matters these days. I have to say I’m getting pretty fed up. If he doesn’t pull his weight around here soon, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe you could call to talk to him. You’ve always been good at drawing him out. If anyone can get him to shape up, it’s you.

  Work has been pretty terrible too. So many clients who expect the earth no matter how many other projects I have. I imagine you’re having a wonderful time with Jeanette, being a tourist and going on day trips and whatnot. Thank goodness she finally got you a dentist appointment. Sometimes she gets too caught up in having a good time to remember the basics. I wanted to ask you, too, to please work on your math at least a little bit this summer. You know it will help you in September.

  I love you, and I miss you. Please call when you get this. I need to hear your voice, and I’d really appreciate your help with your father.

  XOXO Mom

  I let out a long breath.

  “Everything okay?” Sarah asks.

  I nod. Tears prick my eyes. I shake my head. “Things aren’t so good at home.”

  “What’s up?” She shifts her stack of books to one hip.

  “I’m afraid my parents are going to divorce before I get back,” I blurt out, stopping myself from saying the worst part: if they divorce, it’ll be my fault. They’re always telling me how much they need me, yet this summer all I’ve been thinking about is myself.

  Back at Jeanette’s, I call home. No one answers. I leave a message saying I got Mom’s email, I love them and I hope to talk to them soon.

  TEN

  “Before we begin,” Frank says, “tell me what got you interested in the bandoneón when most people don’t even know what one is.”

  We’re sitting in his living room. A stack of music books rests on the canoe, Frank has his accordion out, and my bandoneón case is unopened at my feet. Outside on the patio Jeanette and Louise are drinking lemonade, and occasionally their peals of laughter carry through the closed door. I tell him about Alison, her thing for tango and the Basement of Wonders. He listens without saying a word.

  When I’m finished talking, he says, “I never imagined sitting in my living room talking to a thirteen-year-old about Ástor Piazzolla.”

  I shrug. “Just because most kids have never heard of him doesn’t mean nobody has.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it,” Frank says with a half smile. “Glad to hear the world’s wrong about teenagers all being delinquents and technology junkies.”

  I smirk. “I couldn’t be even if I wanted to. Do you know Jeanette has an encyclopedia instead of a computer?”

  Frank clucks and shakes his head. “An encyclopedia in the living room and a bandoneón in the basement,” he says in a loud voice. “She does sound like something from another age.”

  “I heard that!” Jeanette calls. “Don’t you have a lesson to teach, Frank Schwartz?”

  “Okay, okay.” He winks at me and points to my case. “May I?”

  I nod, and he places the case on the couch beside him. He lifts the bandoneón out like a baby, caressing the bellows and touching the buttons tenderly. He opens and closes it, playing a few notes, his face full of the same awe that I feel every time I touch it. I smile at him, and he smiles back. “You’re a very lucky person, Ellie.”

  “I know,” I say.

  He plays a rendition of Ástor Piazzolla’s fiery “Otoño porteño,” and he totally throws himself into it. Every muscle in his face is tense, and his body moves to the music. Everything around us falls away, and I find myself sitting on the edge of my seat with my mouth hanging open. I want to play like that, and I want him to teach me. Above all, I want him to know I’m worth teaching.

  The piece comes to an explosive finish. I applaud until my palms hurt. He falls back on the couch, exhausted, and the bandoneón case crashes to the floor, the hidden envelope—and its contents—gliding out.

  I didn’t even plan to bring the envelope, not until the last minute when I was going out the door and it suddenly felt wrong to leave it behind. It had spent decades hiding there in the bandoneón case after all. Separating them now seemed somehow like messing with history.

  I’d never let the bandoneón case out of my sight, so it wasn’t like I’d lose it or anything. I don’t know why I didn’t think about what would happen if Frank saw what was in the envelope.

  If Alison were here, she would say this happened for a reason. She was a great believer in Everything Unfolding As It Should, and she always said that the key to happiness is celebrating opportunities instead of wasting time being frustrated or baffled by them.

  With everything spread out on the floor, though, celebrating opportunity is the last thing I’m thinking about. Frank stares at the envelope and then at me, like I might be a juvenile delinquent after all. I begin to babble, my voice low so Jeanette won’t hear, because it suddenly feels weird to have kept this a secret from her. “I found it the other day. Hidden in the lining. I’ve been trying to figure out where it came from. Like a mystery, you know?” Even I can hear the pleading note in my voice. I don’t want him to go all responsible-citizen on me, calling the police or something. “I haven’t even told Jeanette yet.”

  He picks the papers up off the floor, and his expression changes from confusion to shock. He closes his eyes and seems to be considering his words. “Ellie,” Frank says, “there’s a story here.”

  “I know.” I’m about to tell him what I found online when he asks how much I know about Argentine history.

  I wish I’d done more than skim those pages of the encyclopedia the other day. “It used to be a Spanish colony?”

  He nods, waiting.

  “It’s a republic,” I add, remembering the words I read on the money.

  “All true,” he says. “Do you know what was going on in Argentina in 1976 though?”

  I want to tell him yes, but I have to shake my head.

  “Military dictatorship,” he says. “From 1976 to 1983. The military ran the country by trying to control every aspect of people’s lives. They censored news, books and letters going in and out of the country. They also arrested people who didn’t agree with them, or who they suspected of not agreeing with them—political activists, artists, intellectuals, Jews, and even musicians, because musicians gathered large cro
wds that the military regime found threatening. The government seized them, tortured them and eventually killed them. Some say up to thirty thousand people were disappeared.”

  His words hit me like a tidal wave. Desaparecidos.

  “I found their names on a list,” I whisper, suddenly understanding why the plane tickets went unused. “I looked them up on the Internet, and I found out they’d disappeared, but I couldn’t find anything else.”

  Frank closes his eyes for a moment again. “I’m not surprised,” he says. “That’s what the military was trying to do—erase people without a trace.”

  What do I do now? I wonder, and I don’t realize I’ve asked out loud until Frank says, “That’s entirely up to you. It’s your bandoneón.”

  I think we both know that’s not true anymore.

  ELEVEN

  “It obviously went well,” Jeanette says on the way home from Frank’s. “Your fingers haven’t stopped moving since we left.”

  “He gave me a whole song to practice,” I say, fingering the notes in the air. An hour of practicing and listening to Frank play has taken my mind off Andrés and Caterina, and I’m buzzing with everything I’ve learned. “It’s a simplified tango tune, and if I practice every day, I think I can do it. Did you know that when you press one of the buttons, you make a different sound depending on whether you compress the bandoneón or pull it apart?”

  “Interesting,” she says. “So do you think the goose you’ve been hiding in your room will sound less asthmatic now?”

  “Hey!” I poke her. “Watch it.”

  She pokes me back, and we almost get into a tickle fight on the sidewalk halfway through Chinatown. We stop when we come to the vegetable store that spills out onto the sidewalk. No room for tickling among the densely stacked crates of bananas and spiky, green durian.

  “It’s good to see you happy,” Jeanette says as we pass the giant luck dragon on the corner. “You’ve had a lot on your shoulders lately.”

  I frown. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” she says. “Your mother leans pretty heavily on you.”

  My happiness bubble bursts, and I arrive with a thud in my regular life again. “She’s having a tough time,” I say. “Dad’s not helping out much, and work is really stressful.”

  She puts an arm around my shoulder and tries to match her step with mine. We used to walk like this when I was younger. Every now and then, she’d jump or kick, and I would laugh and scramble to imitate her. Today I don’t change my pace at all.

  “You know,” she says, “I wish she wouldn’t talk to you so much about her problems.”

  I stiffen. “But that’s what families are for, to support each other.”

  Jeanette looks at me and presses her lips together. “In many ways, that’s true,” she says. “Especially when everyone in the family is an adult, but right now your parents should be supporting you, not the other way around.”

  I slow my steps to fall out of sync. She casts me a questioning look and pulls away.

  “They do support me,” I say, “and I don’t see what’s wrong with helping them when they need it. I’m not a child, you know.”

  “Well,” she says, “you’re certainly wise beyond your years, but that doesn’t mean you should have to deal with adult problems yet.”

  “Is that why you’ve been taking the phone away from me when I’m talking to Mom?” Anger prickles under my skin. “I have the right to talk to my own family, you know.” At least I treat them with respect, I want to add, thinking how Mom must have cried after Jeanette snapped at her about the dentist appointment.

  Jeanette looks hurt. “I know you do, Ellie,” she says, “I just don’t think they’re being fair to you.”

  “So you’re trying to save me from them?”

  Jeanette looks away. We walk in silence for about a block before she says, “I’m not saving you from them so much as from their situation. Ellie, I believe your mom’s struggling with some mental-health issues. And it sounds like your father doesn’t know how to help, and the whole situation affects their judgment as well as their emotions.”

  I roll my eyes. “I can’t believe you think that about Mom. She’s stressed out. That’s all,” I tell her. “I should know. I live with her.”

  “Don’t forget I know her really well too,” Jeanette says, her tone gentle. “I raised her, and I know what her life was like—all those years with our mom and dad…What makes you think this can’t be a mental-health issue?”

  “What makes you think it is?” I counter, my tone not so soft. “I can’t believe you’d call your own sister crazy!”

  “I didn’t,” Jeanette says. “That’s your word, not mine. I’m not insulting her, Ellie. I love her too, you know. I’m only saying she’s struggling, and it takes more than stress to make a person cry that much or to fly off the handle over things like burned toast.”

  I flinch. “How do you know about that?” I ask.

  A few weeks before I came here, Mom was running late for work, so I thought I’d make her breakfast. I got distracted, though, and burned the toast. When she came into the kitchen, she was furious. I apologized, and that made her madder still. “Good god!” she shouted. “Why are you apologizing? Did I raise you to be a doormat?”

  She slammed out of the house without her breakfast. I was stunned into silence for most of the morning, but that evening she acted like nothing had happened. I guess she’d forgiven me, but I was careful about apologizing after that. Mom’s got enough on her plate without worrying about having a doormat for a daughter.

  “She called me, crying, that night,” Jeanette says now. “She felt awful for how she treated you that day, but that’s not an excuse. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

  “Like I said, Mom has a lot on her plate,” I say, “and she’s right that sometimes I apologize if I think that’ll make her feel better. I don’t see how any of that means she has ‘mental-health issues.’ She gets up and goes to work every day. She…I mean, she doesn’t just lie around and cry or get mad all the time, not the way you make it sound.”

  “It’s not black and white, Ellie,” Jeanette says. “Yes, she gets up and goes to work, and she has good days and bad days, but that doesn’t mean she’s okay. I’m worried about her, Ellie, and I’m worried about you too.”

  I sigh. Jeanette is paranoid, and maybe a bit jealous of how close my parents and I are. When Mom was growing up, she and Jeanette were super close, but they must have grown apart when Mom married Dad, and Jeanette and Alison got together. Now Alison’s gone, and Jeanette’s alone. I take a deep breath and try to be understanding.

  “I’m not telling you this so you do anything,” Jeanette goes on. “Your job is to be thirteen years old and do what thirteen-year-olds do. I only wanted you to know how things look from an outside perspective. I’m encouraging both of your parents to get some help.”

  She’s not asking my opinion. She’s telling me what she thinks of my family. What am I supposed to say to that?

  I shrug, and we keep walking.

  TWELVE

  “Ta da!” Sarah runs out of her house as soon as Jeanette and I turn onto our street.

  My aunt and I haven’t said much to each other the rest of the way home. She’s probably giving me time to let what she said sink in. I’m keeping my mouth shut, because anything I say might be held against my parents and me. I’m grateful for Sarah’s sudden appearance.

  She pounds down the stairs and twirls before us in a skirt I haven’t seen before, a rainbow of neckties sewn together, and I know right away where she must have got the idea. My mother would be pleased.

  Sarah’s feet are bare, her blouse is long and flowing, and her hair is tied back in a bandanna. I tell her she looks great, and I mean it. She could wear a potato sack and still look good.

  “Thanks,” she says. “Wait until you see the sock bowties!”

  I laugh, and she asks if I want to go thrift-store shopping with her
right now.

  “Yes,” I say without thinking. Thrift stores have book sections for me to explore while she’s trolling the clothing racks, and I couldn’t stand another second with Jeanette anyway.

  “Here.” Jeanette digs in the pocket of her jeans and pulls out a ragged ten-dollar bill. “Go to the gelato place afterward and try out some wacky flavor.”

  I can’t tell if it’s an apology or a pledge of ongoing support, but whatever it is, the end result will be gelato, my very favorite dessert. I pocket the cash, leave my bandoneón in my room and take off with Sarah.

  Downtown is crawling with tourists. On the way back from the thrift store, we dodge between shoppers and buskers on the wide sidewalk.

  Ned is sitting with his hat out on the pavement. I stop to rummage around in my backpack and pull out a somewhat squashed peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich. I used to think Jeanette was crazy for always having one with her, but after our morning at the soup kitchen, I started doing it too, and now I see why she does it. The grin on Ned’s face is totally worth it. “Say hi to your aunt for me!” he says as I go back to where Sarah stands waiting for me.

  “You and your aunt are two peas in a pod,” she says when I stoop to pick up one of our bags. We’ve each got a large yellow bag full of colorful dresses, blouses, leggings and skirts, none of which I even noticed until Sarah pulled them off the racks. I did find some great books though. Nestled deep in one of the bags are three books: an old South American guidebook with a big map of Buenos Aires, a novel I’ve been meaning to read, and another book that I waffled about and finally grabbed at the last minute, Mental Health and You. I’m going to need backup to prove to Jeanette how ridiculous she’s being.

  The gelato shop is only a door that opens onto the sidewalk with a lineup half a block long snaking out in front of it. Behind the door, two teenagers stand between long rows of ice-cream freezers. I order chocolate-chip mint.