Finding Miracles

by Julia Alvarez

  For a long time, I actually thought I was stupid. All through grade school and middle school, I had to have special lessons. I just couldn’t seem to put letters together into written words and sentences. And I used to get such headaches! I was totally convinced that I had a brain tumor. Once, I overheard Mom talking to one of my tutors. He was saying how he’d read some article about children adopted from the Third World having learning disabilities. “When you think about the traumas many of these kids have been through, it’s a miracle they even survived.”

  Was he referring to me? Was I a survivor?

  How could I claim credit for something I couldn’t even remember?

  The bus had stopped.

  “Earth to Mil, Earth to Mil,” Alfie, the driver, called out. Alfie’s an ex-hippie, a favorite of Em and Jake and me. His conversation is sprinkled with misquotes from old sixties songs. Em’s theory is that back in his Woodstock days, Alfie fried his brain with drugs, and his memory cells got all jumbled up. “You gotta get out of this bus if it’s the last thing you ever do,” Alfie sang.

  Very funny, I thought as I filed by, not giving Alfie my usual smile on my way out. He knew something was wrong and started improvising on “Hey Jude” in that soft, throaty voice of his: “Hey, Mil, don’t be a grouch, take a bad day and make it happy . . .” On and on as I went down the stairs. You couldn’t give Alfie a dirty look. He was just too nice a guy with his bandanna and ponytail and pretend-gruff face. So I did the only thing I could think of. I turned around and gave him the peace sign.

  He flashed me one back. His came with a smile.

  Mom was home, talking to Kate on the phone, coordinating picking her up later from chorus. I searched the house. No Nate.

  I rushed into the kitchen just as Mom was hanging up. “Where’s Nate?”

  I must have looked panicked, because Mom’s hand was at her heart. “What do you mean, ‘Where’s Nate?’ ”

  “Nothing.” I tried to calm my voice. “I was just looking for him, that’s all.”

  “Honestly, Milly. You scared me to death.” Mom was annoyed.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I was just looking for him to help him with his project.” Lie twice told. How deep was I going to dig this hole? “Where is he?”

  “It’s Thursday, honey.” Mom was now watching me closely. We all know schoolwork is not a strength of mine—it wasn’t likely that I’d be helping my brother with any project. “Nate has hockey practice.”

  Hockey practice! There wasn’t a more public place in winter in our town than the Ralston Rink. By tomorrow, everyone would know I was a big liar. I slumped down in a chair just wanting to cry but telling myself I couldn’t because then I’d have to explain why.

  Mom sat down at the table across from me. She had on what Kate and I call her therapist look. I understand, it says, before you’ve even told her what’s wrong. “Everything okay, honey?”

  “I just wanted Nate to be home, that’s all.”

  Mom sighed. “I know how you feel.” Mom had taken afternoons off from her busy practice as a family therapist to spend quality time with her family. (“Walking the talk,” she called it.) But suddenly we were all so busy that what she did was spend time sitting in her car, waiting for Kate to come out of choir or for Nate to finish his sports practice, and until recently, for me to come out of some special tutoring lesson.

  “I was about to make some cookies. Want to help?”

  I shook my head. I was feeling too low to do anything useful. The only thing I would have agreed to was if Mom had suggested, “What do you say we bury you under the snowdrifts in the backyard and dig you up once everyone you know has graduated from Ralston High?”

  “Roads were terrible today.” Mom talked, her back to me, as she mixed ingredients at the counter. “I stopped at Sterlings on the way home, hoping I’d find something for Happy’s birthday. Nothing.” Mom was trying to draw me out. First she’d offer a little of her life, then slip in a question about mine. “How was school today?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I mean it was interesting.” And then, I don’t know what got into me, since I was trying to avoid the subject. But suddenly I heard myself saying, “There’s a new guy in our class, Pablo.” I mentioned how his family were refugees, how he probably didn’t know much English, and then I slipped in where he was from.

  Mom reacted with the same tensing up as Em had in class when Mr. Barstow mentioned Pablo’s native land.

  Mom turned around, her hands all greasy from buttering the cookie sheets. Her eyes were like two wide-open doors. “Milly, honey,” she began, coming toward me. “Is that what’s going on?”

  Yes, no, yes, no, my head and heart were having a shouting match. Yes, I wanted Mom to hug me. No, because if she did, I knew I’d break down sobbing.

  I guess I opted for no, or maybe the shouting inside was just too loud and confusing. I bolted out of the kitchen and upstairs and ended up under the quilt Mom made me last year with fabric pieces I’d picked out. Which made me feel even lousier about rejecting her.

  The thing about feeling sorry for yourself is that after you do the whole funeral scene in your head—everyone saying how great you were, how sad that you had to die so young— you want to be alive again. Mom called up that she was going out for a sec to pick up Kate and Nate. I knew she was “giving me my space,” but I kind of wished she had come up and given me a second chance to be a nicer human being instead.

  When I heard the car pulling back in the driveway, I felt a flood of relief and happiness. But I didn’t go running down the stairs to greet everyone. Instead, I waited, too proud to show how desperately I needed my family around me.

  “MILL-L-L-E-E-E!” Nate called up.

  I pretended not to hear. But when he didn’t call up again, I opened my door and called down, “What?”

  “Hey, Milly-the-pooh, come on down.” It was Kate. I wondered if Mom had had a talk with them.

  Down I came, trying to figure out what look to put on my face when I entered the kitchen. I felt I owed Mom an apology, but then, if I said anything, Mom being Mom, we would have to have a talk about it.

  “Milly, you should have seen this goal I made!” The minute I came in the room, Nate launched into the story of his triumphs at practice. He raced around the kitchen, bat-ting an imaginary puck. Kate rolled her eyes at me.

  Nate swung and almost knocked Mom over as she was taking a cookie sheet out of the oven. Mom almost swore, but in the end all she said was “foul!” Kate and I laughed. There was no way Mom would ever say the f-word. She was raised Mormon, and even though she’d been quite the rebel, leaving Provo to go to college in the East, joining the Peace Corps when she graduated, marrying a Jewish boy, there was still a prim part of Mom who thought Chap Stick was enough “makeup” and said excuse me every time she sneezed.

  Mom brought the cookies to the table, sailing the plate in the air with a flourish, like a fancy waiter. Nate lunged but missed. “Come on, Mom!” he wailed impatiently.

  Mom set the plate down in front of me. “Milly gets first pick.”

  “Why?” Nate asked, instantly adding “no fair!” before Mom could even reply.

  “Because . . . I risked Milly’s life making these cookies!”

  Even I looked startled.

  “I left the oven on,” Mom explained, pulling up a chair beside me. “What if I’d burned the house down? What if something had happened to my baby?” She squeezed my hand, which actually made the itching feel better.

  Nate was grinning. He loved it when someone else got to be the baby in the family.

  “I saw Em after school,” Kate said between nibbles of her cookie. She was turning the lazy Susan at the center of the table round and round. Any minute Mom was going to tell her to quit, that this was the third lazy Susan in the last year. It was Kate’s nervous tic, an inconvenient one, I often thought, as you couldn’t exactly carry a lazy Susan around with you. Mine was much more portable: skin rashes. “She was headed o
ver to Jake’s.”

  “Yeah?” I asked nonchalantly.

  “There was some hot-looking guy with her. She said he was someone new in your class.”

  Hot-looking? What about his hair? What about his clothes? I could feel Mom extra quiet beside me.

  “Em said he’s older but was put back until he catches up.”

  “Where’s he from?” Nate asked.

  Kate shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

  I didn’t volunteer. Neither did Mom.

  After dinner, I took the cordless up to my attic room. Em and I usually talked at least once every night, sometimes more if the line was free. We are all heavy users at our house. Except Dad, though sometimes he has a bunch of phone calls to make about private jobs he takes on when the local contractor goes into his seasonal slump.

  Em reported that she had had a great time at Jake’s. Dylan and Will had come over. And Meredith! I felt a pang of jealousy. Meredith had been Em’s best friend before Em and I became best friends. It wasn’t that Em dumped Meredith to be close to me, but just that they saw very little of each other now that Meredith was at Champlain Academy, the private school one town over. “I wished you’d been there,” Em was saying, as if she could sense that I felt left out. “Everyone missed you so-o-o much.”

  I felt better knowing I’d been missed, even if Em was exaggerating. “So how was Pablo?” I ventured.

  “What do you mean how was he?”

  What I meant was, had he said anything about the awful classmate who pretended not to understand him. “I mean, did he talk any?”

  “Mil, he hardly speaks English, how could he talk to us? Well, actually, take that back. Meredith tried talking to him in Spanish.” Meredith’s family had lived in different Latin American countries when she was growing up. Her dad used to be some reporter specializing in Latin America, until he took a job teaching journalism at the university. “Meredith told me later that he actually knows a lot of English. I guess he’s just really shy.”

  Oh yeah? Pablo didn’t seem to have that problem with me.

  “How did Nate’s project go?”

  “What project?”

  “Mil, the project you had to go home to help him with!”

  That’s the problem with lying. You have to remember stuff that didn’t happen so you can report on it when asked. “Oh, you know, the usual. ‘The Earth is a planet revolving around the sun.’ Hey, my dad needs to use the phone.” Dad was standing at the door, waving a hand that he’d be back. But Em had already hung up. “It’s okay, Dad, I’m done. Really.”

  Actually, Dad didn’t need to use the phone, but could he come in? “Nice place you got here.” He was looking around, like my room was for rent or something. Dad had been the one who had redone the attic just the way I wanted, putting in the seat at the dormer window and a skylight, which had not been easy to do on our old roof.

  Dad tested my book stand. “Hmm,” he worried. “I should probably bolt this thing to the wall. It could fall on you if you leaned over to get a book from the bottom shelf.” Dad demonstrated. (The stand did not fall over.) I love Dad, but he has got to have the worst worst-case-scenario imagination going. Not that you can tell just looking at him. Dad’s got these cowboy looks, tall and lanky with a strong jaw, like no problem, he can handle any outlaw possibility in the world. But he worries! My New York cousins say he’s got a Woody Allen mind trapped in a Clint Eastwood body.

  Dad was now kneeling in front of the stand, rocking it back and forth. “What I could do is reinforce . . . Nah, wouldn’t work.”

  I sat down on my bed and waited. “It’s fine, really it is.”

  “Well, anytime you need it bolted down, okay?” Dad stood and looked around for anything else he could offer to do for me.

  Mom had obviously suggested Dad try talking to me. But Dad is not a big talker that way. Oh, he can discuss wall joints and two-by-fours and whether you want paneling or drywall. I think that’s why we gravitate toward each other. We have a certain understanding that words are not always the best way to communicate about the things that matter deeply to us.

  “I guess I better be heading back to my dungeon.” Dad’s workroom was in the basement. He had trudged all the way up three flights of stairs to “talk” to me. His current project was a cherry footstool for my grandmother, Happy, whose birthday was always a big deal. This would be her seventieth, so an even Bigger Fuss would be expected.

  “Dad.” I called him back as he was turning to go. “I did want to ask you . . . about when you . . . you got me.”

  “Sure, Mil.” Dad waited.

  “This new guy in my class.” Dad nodded. So Mom had said something to him. “He and his family are refugees. Mr. Barstow explained about Latin American dictatorships disappearing people and stuff.”

  Dad shook his head the way people do when they feel bad about the state of the world. He often said he couldn’t bear the thought of how many people were living subhuman lives under oppressive regimes.

  “Is that what might have happened like . . . to my birth family?”

  Dad sat down on my bed. Suddenly, he looked so tired. “You know, honey,” he said, his voice sad and gentle, “we don’t really know.”

  “How about my papers and stuff?” Maybe there was more information in The Box they kept in their bedroom? My hands had begun their tingling. Conversations like this always set my allergies off.

  Dad was shaking his head. “I wish there were more answers for you,” he said when my face fell. “Maybe, who knows, maybe your birth family opposed the government and maybe...”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I said. We both knew maybes didn’t add up to a story I could hold on to.

  “I hate for you to lose sleep over this, sweetie.” Dad was already worrying about me. “Maybe it’d be good to get to know this new guy?”

  “What for?” I snapped. I knew I sounded defensive. I didn’t want people pushing me to be friends with some stranger just because we’d been born in the same country.

  “He might help you figure out some things.” Dad shrugged, as if to say but what do I know?

  I was scratching madly now. Dad looked down. My hands were covered with an angry red rash.

  “Just my allergies again,” I explained. The doctor had said that my system was probably supersensitive to American allergens. Stress didn’t help any.

  “Calamine,” Dad pronounced, like that would solve all my problems. Moments later he was back with last summer’s bottle.

  That night, I went to bed, my hands soothed by that pink lotion. But I still couldn’t seem to fall asleep. I felt itchy inside, as if I was allergic to myself. Actually, Dad had offered a solution for that, too. But I wasn’t ready yet to try the friendship cure.

  2

  command performance

  WHETHER OR NOT I wanted to hang out with him, Pablo had been taken up by my friends. It seemed like I could not get away from him.

  He even turned up one day in Mrs. Gillespie’s Advanced Spanish class. The minute he stepped in the door, his eyes found my eyes.

  “¡Hola, clase!” Mrs. Gillespie began. Today we had a special guest! Mrs. Gillespie went on to explain that Pablo Bolívar had recently joined the ninth-grade class at Ralston. We were to go around the room, introduce ourselves, and tell our visitor a little something about ourselves.

  I felt my heart sink. Meanwhile, my hands were burning up. Actually, I wished they would burst into flames. That was the only way I was going to get out of this room fast enough.

  I sat paralyzed like one of those animals Dad sometimes surprises at night in his headlights. Up and down the rows we went, my turn getting closer and closer. I heard every name, every boring or cute detail . . . and then, I was next. I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  “Milly?” Mrs. Gillespie reminded me.

  “Ya yo conozco a Milly,” Pablo spoke up. He already knew me. He shifted his gaze to Andrea, sitting behind me. The introductions moved on.

  I felt a
flood of relief and confusion. Had Pablo tried to save me from embarrassment or was he saying that I wasn’t worth getting to know?

  What do I care what he thinks of me? I kept asking myself. I felt bad enough about myself.

  I started avoiding everyone. Soon as school was over, I’d rush to the bus before Em could hook her arm through mine and tell me “our” plans.

  I should have talked to Em. But every time I tried, I’d get the same stage fright I’d gotten in Spanish class. Nothing would come out.

  What was there to say anyway? That I felt helpless and adrift not knowing my story, who my birth parents had been, why they had given me up? That the longing hurt too much and I was afraid of falling into a big black hole of sadness?

  I remembered this myth we had learned in Spanish about a woman called la llorona, who cried and cried for her lost children. She had drowned in her own tears—at least in the version Mrs. Gillespie had told us.

  I didn’t want to end up a basket case that everyone wanted to give away again.

  “What’s going on?” Em finally asked me during one of our nightly calls. Something had changed, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Are you mad at me for something?”

  “Oh, Em,” I reassured her. “It’s just that my grandma’s birthday’s coming up, and she’s decided to have it here. Mom is a wreck, so I’m helping her out.”

  “Happy?”

  For a moment I thought Em was asking me how I was feeling. But no, she was just confirming that my rich and impossible grandmother, Happy, was going to be here at the end of the month.

  Maybe because I was home-based these days, I actually started looking forward to my grandmother’s birthday this year.

  Usually we drove down to Long Island, where Happy put us up at the local Sheraton. Some renovation was always going on in her mansion that made staying with her “inconvenient.” Dad’s sister, Aunt Joan, would come out from the city with her husband, Uncle Stanley, and our three wild and crazy cousins, Bee, Ruthie, and Nancy. Command performances, Mom called them. I mostly stayed out of the way. Happy was always polite to me, asking how my studies were going. (Mom and Dad swore they hadn’t breathed a word about my learning problems.) But I always got this feeling that Happy thought about me different from the others. Once when I told her I didn’t like math, Happy had given me this look. “Poor dear,” she remarked. “Mathematics has always been a Kaufman strong suit.”