“They got him out through the embassy. Dr. Penda was already here so it was easier to get a VISA.”
“What’s a VISA?”
“When will his parents come?” Trelawney asked.
None of the adults answered.
Val put her fork down. “Will he ever see them again?”
“Nobody’s sure, honey,” Meredith said, running a hand down Val’s hair.
“His father owned a bookstore,” Celeste said. “Just like mine, apparently. They burned it down.” She patted Val’s hand. “I can understand why he became upset.”
“Wait, who burned it down?” Roger said.
“The new government.”
“They burned books?” Trelawney said. “Why?”
Silence but for the clink of silverware on china.
“He’ll start school next week,” Celeste said. “Fourth grade, so he might be in your class, Roger.”
“He doesn’t speak English,” Val said. “He only knows little words. Little houses.” Her throat burned and ached. She wanted to run to her room and weep. Then she wanted to gather up every book she could find and bring them to Alex. Where was their copy of Alexander and the Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? She could read it to him. He’d love it.
“I’m sure he’ll have an aide,” Meredith said. “And you have Spanish-speaking kids in your class.”
“The Lopez twins,” Trelawney said.
“And Maria Santoro,” Roger said.
The thought of Maria Santoro made Val even more miserable. All the boys liked Maria. She had long shiny hair and beautiful dark eyes. She could speak Spanish. Alex would like her. Alex would want to follow her everywhere.
“You guys be nice to him,” Roland said. “Even if you can’t communicate, you can include him. Think how you’d feel if you were alone in another country where nobody spoke English.”
“And you didn’t know where your family was,” Celeste said.
“I wonder if he skis,” Roger said, drumming his fingers.
“Coming from Chile, it’s a good chance he does,” Roland said.
“Can we invite him to Stowe?”
Roland ruffled his son’s hair. “That’s not a half-bad, idea, Rog. I bet he’d love it. Remind me to ask his uncle.”
“Can I be excused?” Val said. “Actually, can I go somewhere?”
All eyes turned toward her.
“Where?” Roland said.
She took a deep breath. “Back to Dr. Penda’s. See if Alex wants to get ice cream or something.”
“I’ll go too,” Roger said. “We’ll all three of us go.”
Meredith smiled. “Clear the table first.”
“Take the dictionary,” Celeste said to Val.
It took some coaxing from Dr. Penda and Beatriz, but Alex came out of the house and walked into town with them. He glanced once at Val, and slowly blinked his eyes with a shrug of one shoulder. She shook her head with a “don’t worry about it” smile.
At their little table at Murphy’s, Roger paged through the Spanish-English dictionary. “Ess…skewee…ar,” he said, frowning. “Am I saying that right?” He pointed to the word for Alex, whose eyes and smile widened.
“Esquiar,” he said. “Si. Usted tambien?” His finger went around the table.
“Si, yes,” Roger said. “All of us ski. We have a house in Stowe. You can come with us.”
Alex let loose a stream of excited Spanish, accompanied by high gestures of one hand—obviously mountain peaks—followed by downhill slices—talking about the steep trails.
So the evening passed, and between the dictionary and sign language and a dozen little pictures sketched on napkins, Alex and the Larks hammered out a foundation of bilingual, beginner phrases and a rudimentary lean-to of friendship.
Val learned a valuable lesson that night:
Ice cream needed no translation.
Alejo became Alex and Guelisten became his home.
Certain things unnerved him all his life. Helicopters. The pitch dark. Enclosed spaces. Uniforms. Interrupted sleep in the middle of the night.
Certain things comforted him all his life. Skiing. Dogs. The group terms for animals. His two cardigans, lovingly folded in a drawer. And a handkerchief under his pillow. He curled his hand around it on the nights when his imagination drummed up horrific ways for his family to die and filled him with the immeasurable weight of a survivor’s guilt.
Where are you? What became of you?
I’m waiting for you.
For a few precious months, Milagros Martinez was in touch. Via sporadic letters and telephone calls on faulty lines, she conveyed news. A woman released from the Villa Grimaldi said she saw Clementina Penda there. Someone else thought they saw Eduardo on the street. Another eyewitness placed him back at the Estadio.
Then the calls stopped. One last letter arrived, to convey nothing new had been learned. Then Milagros went silent.
All over Chile, tens of thousands of people fell silent, victims to the country’s new intransitive verb: they were disappeared.
Every night Alex placed Albacete in the center of his desk blotter, sure if his father were truly dead, his spirit would come and move the knife a little to let Alex know. Every night he tucked a handkerchief under his pillow, sure his mischievous mother’s ghost would take it away as a joke.
They would give him a sign. They would let him know.
They couldn’t just disappear.
“They didn’t disappear,” Felipe said softly, turning Albacete over in his hands. “They were disappeared.”
He gave Alex all the photos Eduardo and Clementina had sent over the years. Alex put them around his bedroom, clustered in small shrines. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes in the morning. The last before he fell into troubled dreams at night.
Where are you? What did they do to you? What became of you?
Why am I alive and you are disappeared?
Felipe was a benevolent, but abstracted guardian. He gently shook Alex out of the bad dreams and soothed him back to sleep. He understood his nephew’s need to have nightlights in his room and in all the upstairs hallways. Alex was clothed, fed and sheltered, and Felipe never missed an opportunity to further Alex’s education or widen his cultural horizon. But when it came to practicalities, Felipe was more hopeless than Eduardo.
He didn’t seem to know boys outgrew their shoes in an hour. Boys needed vaccinations and dentist appointments. Boys wanted to sign up for soccer or join the junior ski team. Boys needed permission slips signed, homework checked, boundaries set and odd jobs to make pocket money. Boys needed to be driven here and there, or at least organized into a car pool.
Some of the details Beatriz handled, but Beatriz was seventy-five and used to keeping house for an independent bachelor. She didn’t have the energy to rear a child, let alone an almost-teenaged boy. Gradually, the raising of Alex Penda fell into the hands of Roland and Meredith Lark, who willingly and cheerfully took on the task. Their house was large and their hearts larger. One more fledgling in their nest wasn’t an imposition. Besides, Alex and Roger were becoming inseparable, and Alex was a calming, grounding influence on the Larks’ rambunctious middle child.
As images of Chile faded and curled at the edges, the photo album in Alex’s heart began to fill with new family snapshots, all with his sleek, dark physique set like a black iris in the Lark bouquet of daffodils.
The Larks loved to joke how the first complete English sentence Alex learned was “knock three times on the ceiling if you want me.”
Roland Lark had a weakness for Tony Orlando’s hit song, and a habit of interrupting quiet interludes by belting the refrain, “Whoa, my darling…” His family would groan, but join in with the rest of the chorus.
On his first trip to Vermont with the Larks, Alex—lounging in the back of the station wagon with Roger—listened, groaned and eventually sang as well.
Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me…
Roge
r’s two sisters sat in the middle seat. Trelawney was in third grade, winter pale with nearly-white hair cut short. Val was golden blonde, like Roger. All three siblings had grey eyes. Trelawney’s were pale slate. Roger’s had a hint of blue. Alex thought Val’s eyes tended toward green, like his, but he couldn’t look at them long enough to tell.
All through the five-hour trip, he was keenly aware of her presence in the car. Something about the proximity of her hair and skin and scent made his stomach feel weird. In fact, since the day he met her, Alex had a hard time looking at Valerie Lark with both eyes. Worse, whenever he felt her gaze turn in his direction, a plug pulled in his mind and all the English he mastered swirled away.
He liked her. He didn’t like that he liked her. He hated how it made him feel she didn’t like him.
It was confusing as shit.
Roger taught him to say that.
At school, Alex worked with an ESL aide and spent much of his time in remedial language classes. After dismissal, his education belonged to Roger. On the playground or the ball field, one faltering conversation at a time, Roger filled the gaps in Alex’s English. He made casual corrections if Alex forgot to use I, he or it, or mixed up his and hers. He laughed when Alex referred to Dr. Lark as a beterinarian, then laughed harder when Alex told him to shut the fuck up, asshole.
“You never make mistakes when you curse,” Roger said.
Riding up the chair lift at Stowe Resort, in their bizarre mixed language, they talked and laughed about the world.
“So?” Roger said, gesturing to the mountainous landscape around them. “Different from Chile?”
Alex nodded, frustrated at expressing how. To his eye, the heights of Ojos de Agua and Mount Mansfield were approximately the same. But the mountains in Chile punched out of the ground like fists. They loomed up sharp and sinister, the continent’s armored spine. Here, the eye’s path to the summit was softened by pine trees and scrub. The earth yawned and stretched toward the sky, rather than assaulting it. The peaks were mighty, but gentle.
“Friendly,” Alex finally said. “Is much friendly here.”
During that first ski trip, Alex fell in love with the Larks. The soulful, forever love that comes when you find your tribe. Up and down the slopes, in and out of the house, he and the three Lark children piled on each other like puppies. Playing Trouble and Monopoly and Sorry. Laughing loud, sleeping deep and eating nonstop. Learning each other’s language as they read comics and Mad Magazine. Belting, “Whoa, my darling,” whenever silence descended.
They slept in one room with two sets of pine bunk beds pushed head-to-head. Roger and Trelawney took the bottom bunks. Alex lay in the bed above Roger’s, close to the ceiling with the crown of his head staring at the crown of Val’s. The unique fatigue that belonged solely to skiing held him in soft arms as the Larks quizzed him on animal groups, trying to stump him and failing.
Finches.
“Charm.”
Peacocks.
“Ostentation.”
Hyenas.
“Cackle.”
He was happy. Too happy to feel guilty about being happy.
Val sat up on her elbows and looked over the headboards between them. “Larks,” she said.
Alex glanced at her with one eye. Then with both eyes. His toes curled tight in his wool socks as he answered, “Exaltation.”
Alex at fourteen. Dressed in his first suit and standing with Beatriz in Guelisten Cemetery, as the coffin of Felipe Penda was lowered into the earth.
Four days ago, the professor cancelled his evening classes and came home complaining of a headache. Beatriz told him to sit down, put his feet up and she’d make him some tea. When she brought the cup out to the living room, Felipe was slumped in his chair.
An aneurysm, the hospital guessed. Or a cerebral hemorrhage.
It was only in death that Alex grasped Felipe’s influence in Dutchess County. His uncle had collected people the same way he collected books and art. The phone rang off the hook, flowers crowded every horizontal surface. The cards and letters collected into baskets and boxes until Alex and Beatriz gave up trying to open them all. The day of the wake, an endless line of callers came through the funeral home. Grown men weeping as they paid their respects. Countless women telling Alex what a treasure Felipe was.
Alex became the curator of all this grief, staggering under the inventory until it slipped through his arms and crashed to the floor in pieces.
What do I do now? Where do I go?
Felipe might not have been a second father to Alex, but Felipe was all the family Alex had in the world. Felipe had been a haven and harbor. He was kind and caring. He never claimed ownership of his nephew, rather he was always generous. Constantly encouraging Alex, “Go. Of course you can go. Go with your friends. Yes, bring them here, absolutely. Be with your friends. Bring a friend.”
Now he was dead. And the enormity of Alex’s situation towered above him like a tsunami wave about to break.
What’s going to happen to me?
After the funeral service, Felipe’s attorney requested a meeting with Alex, and asked the Larks be present. Seated around the massive walnut table in the dining room, the attorney read aloud Felipe’s will. Bequests were made to Marist College, Columbia University, Guelisten Historical Society and the Latin American Cultural Center of Queens. Beatriz received a cash legacy that made her drop into a chair. The rest went to Alex, to be placed in trust until he was twenty-five.
“Why twenty-five?” Alex asked.
The lawyer smiled. “Knowing your uncle, he probably wanted you to go to graduate school,” he said. “Dr. Lark tells me you have an interest in becoming a vet?”
Alex’s nod was wary, not wanting to chisel any of his interests in stone.
Roland touched Alex’s shoulder. “I don’t want you to worry. We’ll be here to guide you.”
Dr. Lark and Felipe’s attorney were named executors of the trust. Dr. and Mrs. Lark were named as legal guardians.
“Would you like to come live with us?” Meredith asked, holding both Alex’s hands. She freed one and brushed his hair back from his forehead, then put her warm palm on his face.
He set his jaw, the emotion writhing between his throat and teeth. He wanted to go. He wanted the haven of Meredith’s house, the safety of her arms and the protection of Dr. Lark. But to go with them meant becoming part of a new family, when he was supposed to be making a home for the family he already had.
“I’m supposed to wait,” he said. “My father gave me a job to do.”
“I know,” she said. “You can still do it. We’ll help you.”
Dr. Lark and the attorney tactfully left the room as Alex wept in Meredith’s arms.
“You come stay with us,” she said, rocking him. “We won’t hide you, Alex. You’ll always be their boy, I promise. We’ll keep you safe for them.”
Alex crossed over the railroad tracks and walked to the Hudson that night. The evening air was soft and celebratory: it was Fourth of July weekend and pleasure boats were thick on the river. Alex sat on a bench, dry-eyed and scraped hollow inside, not feeling much of anything.
He thought about Felipe’s grand life, now reduced to a single flower-heaped mound in the cemetery. At least Alex knew where his uncle was resting in peace. He wasn’t disappeared. Erased from the record.
Where are you? What became of you?
He had to be careful with these thoughts. They lived like dragons in his heart, chained in a cave and hibernating, exhaling benign wisps of smoke. They were easily awoken, though. The chains could break and then they would be on Alex. Tearing him open as fire screamed from their throats: My mother, my mother, what did you do, where is she, my mother, what did you do to her, my mother…
He pulled within and shut an imaginary closet door.
You mustn’t think about this.
After a while, Roger came to sit by him, slinging an arm across Alex’s shoulders. Val settled on his other side, looping her arm throu
gh his. Trelawney sat at Alex’s feet, her elbows draped on his knees.
Nobody spoke. Alex, at the middle of the puppy pile, leaned into his friends. Roger and Val both smelled like summer: sunshine, cut grass, barbecue smoke and watermelon. Trelawney was scentless, clean and purposeful as a knife.
“You can have my room,” Val finally said. “Trelawney’s is big enough for two.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Roger said. “He’s coming in with me.”
“Let him pick what room he wants,” Trelawney said.
“You want to come over?” Rog asked.
“I just want to stay here,” Alex said.
Val and Roger pressed tighter to his sides. Trelawney wiggled back further between his feet.
“You’re with us,” Roger said. “Nosotros cuatro.”
Us four.
A small smile touched Alex’s mouth as fireworks began to explode in bright zinnias over the river.
As the legal details of fostering Alex and sorting out his inheritance were worked through, he and Val were like a German and French soldier meeting in No Man’s Land to have a smoke and sing Silent Night. Once Alex was moved in and established as one of the Lark family, he and Val shook hands and parted ways to separate trenches.
The war lasted three long years.
Their fights became the stuff of family legend. Every Thanksgiving, they’d tell the tale how Alex, fed up with Val playing her Linda Ronstadt album incessantly, swiped it off the turntable and locked himself in the bathroom to gloat. Val kicked the bathroom door down to get it back. When the slugfest was over, Alex had to pay for the broken record and Val had to pay for a new door. They didn’t speak to each other for the month they were grounded.
Gone was the idealistic infatuation Alex felt for Val when he first came to the States. He swore he’d never known a bigger pain in the ass in his life. He couldn’t wait for his foster sister to graduate high school and get the fuck out of his hair.
Practically the day after commencement she was gone. A summer internship with a bridal company in Philadelphia, then barely home for a week before she left for the Rhode Island School of Design. It was heaven. Alex felt the entire house collapse into a chair, close its eyes and sigh. Peace and quiet at last.
An Exaltation of Larks Page 3