“One broccoli with fly specks!” shouts the pimply teenager behind the counter. He rings up the sale while his coworker scoops the gelato.
“Broccoli with fly specks!” the scooper calls back, and I laugh. Alison would have loved that one. She was never much of a gelato fan, but she loved coming here just to hear the crazy names the staff made up.
Sarah orders caramel apple, and the cashier yells, “One mashed potatoes and mud!”
Customers laugh, and someone wonders aloud if they come up with new names for the flavors every day. I’m about to answer that yes, they do—I always order chocolate-chip mint and have never heard it called the same thing twice—when I spot the older boy we saw at Victoria Middle School. This time he’s with a kid our age, sitting on the sidewalk, eating a hot dog. They look up and smile.
Guys don’t usually pay attention to me, and if they do, I get all tongue-tied and say dumb things. Sarah doesn’t seem to worry about stuff like that though. As soon as we’ve got our cones in hand, she marches up to them. “Hi. Are you going to Vic Middle in the fall?”
“Yeah,” says the guy I recognize. “You too?”
“Yup,” Sarah says, sticking out her hand to introduce herself. Even I know that normal kids don’t shake hands, but for some reason, the guys don’t even blink. The one I recognize introduces himself as Michael; the other is Steve.
“Ellie here is visiting from Vancouver,” Sarah adds, and I smile, like I’m an interesting kid from the big city, not someone who lives in a boring suburb and hardly ever goes downtown.
Sarah sits on the sidewalk, legs folded up beneath her in Lotus position. I plunk down on her other side.
“So what’s Vic Middle like?” she asks.
They shrug. “It’s okay.”
“Good basketball team,” adds Steve, adjusting his ballcap.
Michael leans out from behind Steve and looks straight at me. “You look familiar.”
I feel my face go hot. Any minute I’ll get tongue-tied, and he’ll either think I’m mute or a babbling idiot. “A few days ago,” I say carefully, “Sarah and I went up to the school to look around. You were there with a little boy.”
“Oh, right. My nephew, Jake.”
Sarah is still deep in conversation with Steve. Michael’s obviously trying to be friendly, and it would look dumb for me to just sit here silently, licking my gelato. “What were you looking for that day?” I ask. “In the dirt, I mean.”
“Bugs,” Michael says.
“Bugs?”
“Yup,” he says. “For my collection. Not that the schoolyard’s the best spot for capture, but my sister would only let me take Jake across the street. She’s a bit overprotective.”
“Oh.” I want to ask him how he got interested in collecting bugs, and how he can do it without everyone thinking he’s weird, but I’m afraid he’ll think I’m nosy. He looks at me for a second, but when I say nothing, he leans back against the wall to finish his hot dog.
Sarah has no trouble keeping her own conversation going. She asks a million questions about Vic Middle and life in Victoria, and within minutes she’s writing down Steve’s phone number. I raise my eyebrows at her, and she turns a bit pink. “He wants a tour of the petting zoo at the park,” she says. “He’s thinking of volunteering there.”
“Uh-huh,” Michael says. “I’ll bet he is.” He winks at me.
I smile back, for real this time, and hope he doesn’t notice my cheeks burning.
THIRTEEN
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: I love you
Dear Ellie Belly,
I’ve started this email five times, and I keep erasing it because it comes out all wrong. Mostly, I want to tell you that I miss you and I love you, even if you’re mad at me right now. Whatever I’ve done to offend you, I wish we could just talk it out. I hear your voice, and I know there’s something wrong. I’m disappointed in Jeanette for not encouraging you to tell me what’s on your mind, but ultimately, you’re old enough to make your own decisions about that kind of thing.
I can understand that teenagers get mad at their parents—that’s part of being a teen after all—but I’ve always taught you to talk things out. Punishing me with your silence is not going to solve anything between us.
Please do what you know is right and tell me what’s going on.
I love you anyway,
Mom XOXO
I stare at the library computer’s screen. How can she accuse me of giving her the silent treatment when I’ve talked to her every night, except when she didn’t call? She must know it’s not my fault that Jeanette ends our conversations almost as soon as they’ve begun. (My aunt still insists she’s trying to give me breathing space, but how does she imagine causing problems between my mom and me is helping?)
The woman next to me glances in my direction, and I realize I’m glaring at the computer, jaw clenched and hands balled into fists, my short nails digging into my palms. I close my eyes, breathe deep and try to relax. Above all, I have to remain calm.
I can’t do anything right away anyway. Firing back an email is out of the question. When Mom’s this upset, all interactions have to be in real time. I need to be able to gauge her mood and adjust my every comment accordingly.
I glance at the clock on the computer screen. I’m supposed to meet Jeanette at the check-out counter of the library in twenty minutes. I sigh, open a new Internet window, and try to immerse myself in what I came here to do. At first I’m too mad to concentrate properly, but I force myself to focus. I don’t want to think about my family anymore.
Andrés Moreno desaparecido, I type. This time, I find a few sites that are more than lists of dead people. One site in particular is a whole newspaper article from 1998 with the name included in one of the paragraphs. I click Translate this page, and after a few minutes of deciphering badly translated English, I figure this is what it says:
After a lifetime of believing he’d been born to a marine officer and his wife, Facundo García now knows he was born on July 7, 1976, in an illegal prison in Banfield in the province of Buenos Aires, where his mother, Caterina Rizzi, was being held. His father, Andrés Moreno, was seized on a crowded city bus on June 17, 1976. Rizzi, who was eight months pregnant at the time, was taken from their house two days later in the middle of the night. The young woman gave birth to her child with the assistance of doctor Jorge Bergés. The baby was delivered, still bloody and wrapped in newspaper, to marine officer Aníbal García and his wife Esmerelda Perez. The doctor then signed a false birth certificate claiming that the child was born in his private clinic in Quilmes and that Perez was the biological mother.
My heart is pounding, and I feel sick to my stomach. I scan the rest of the article and find the word Canada, followed by a few quotes:
Today, the young man’s biological parents remain “missing.” However, more than two decades after their disappearance, Facundo García has discovered other relatives and has been welcomed into a large extended family with members as far away as Canada.
“I can’t express what it was like to meet my biological grandparents, aunts and uncles for the first time,” says the young man. “They’ve been actively looking for me for years, and when I see my smile on their faces, or my habitual gestures made by their hands, I realize I’ve been hoping to find them too. I just never knew it would be possible.”
As for the couple who raised him, he says, “I don’t hate them. It’s the deception that hurts. I’ve always been honest with them, and all my life they’ve been lying to me.”
I slump back in my chair and blink at the screen. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be Facundo García. No matter how bad my life gets, it could never compare to his.
And no matter how much I want to honor Alison’s memory by donating money to the soup kitchen, I can’t use the money in the bandoneón case for that, knowing how much Facundo has lost and that I’m holding back one of the few gifts his
parents can give him now.
A tap on my shoulder makes me jump.
“I wondered if I’d find you here,” Jeanette tugs on the straps of her loaded backpack. “I finished sooner than expected. How are you doing?”
“Uh, fine,” I say, closing the window and logging out before she can see what I’ve been reading. I grab my own backpack and stand up.
“I can wait a bit, if you like,” she says, appraising my empty bag. I haven’t even looked for books yet, but I don’t feel like it now anyway. How can I think about reading when my own aunt is trying to pull my family apart?
I clasp my hands together to stop them from shaking. “It’s okay. I’ve still got a few books at home to read. Mostly I wanted to check my email.” I meet her eyes. “I got a message from Mom.”
“Oh?”
We walk to the main exit in silence. Outside, she asks what the email said.
“She thinks I’m angry at her because we never actually finish a conversation these days.” I kick a stone in my path. Hard. “She probably assumes I’ve asked you to take the phone away every evening.”
Jeanette sighs. “Look, Ellie, I’ve told your mother exactly what I’ve told you: that I think she needs professional help, and that I think you need some space. I asked her to stop telling you all her problems and suggested she look for a psychologist.”
I feel like shoving her against the wall and demanding that she use her brain. “If you’re so worried about her, why make everything worse by making her think I’m mad at her?”
“Hold on there,” she says, stopping to face me. “I didn’t make her think anything. After you and I discussed the whole mental-health thing, I told her what we had talked about and requested that she not rely on you for emotional support. From there, she jumped to her own conclusions.”
“Of course she did,” I say. “She probably thinks I’m the one who decided she’s crazy and that I don’t want anything to do with her.” It sounds illogical when it comes out of my mouth, but I know my mother.
“If she thinks that, then it’s not because I haven’t explained.” Jeanette bites her lip and is silent for a second. “You know, you could have refused to give me the phone. I wouldn’t have forced you to give it to me.”
Fire surges into my cheeks, and I glare at her. How dare she make it sound like I’m the one who wants to abandon my parents?
She meets my eyes. “I’m worried about you, Ellie. I think you need a break, and I’m trying to provide that for you. You seem to have blossomed this summer—making friends with Sarah, learning to play the bandoneón, getting to know Victoria on your own. I don’t want you to backtrack when you go home.”
“What do you know about how things work in my family?”
She stares at me in shocked silence. Until this moment “my family” has always included her. I know my words cut deep, but she’s brought it on herself.
She’s asking me to pick favorites, and she should know that’s a dangerous game to play.
FOURTEEN
“Dad, it’s me.”
“Hi, honey.” Dad hates talking on the phone, so we haven’t spoken at all since I left home. But I still expected him to sound happier to hear from me. Maybe I’ve caught him in the middle of something. Maybe he and Mom are working out the details of their divorce. “How’s Victoria?”
I describe my adventures with Sarah and meeting Michael and Steve. I do not mention that Sarah has been talking about Michael and Steve almost nonstop since. She sees them as her “in” at Vic Middle. I tell myself it’s ridiculous to feel left out when of course they’ll be more useful to her than I ever could be.
“That’s great, Ellie,” my father says.
“How are you doing, Dad?” I ask. “Mom says she’s worried about you.”
“Oh, I’m okay,” he says. “Pretty busy with work.”
That’s always his first answer. It takes several minutes of talking to get to the deeper issues. “Your mother’s never home,” he says finally, “and when she does get home, she expects me to drop everything and pay attention to her, no matter what I’m doing. It gets old after a while.”
“She says she’s concerned about you pulling back into yourself.”
“Yeah,” he admits, “I can see that, but it’s a two-way street, you know? She’s got to meet me halfway, and not only on her terms.”
“Mm.” This is exactly what I suspected. Mom never tries to see anything from anyone else’s point of view. It’s her way or the highway. “Do you know when she’ll be back tonight?”
His choking laughter sounds totally unlike him. “Hard to say. She’s mostly been calling you from work these days.”
“Oh. Well, tell her I’ll be waiting for her call.”
“Ellie, it’s so good to hear your voice.”
You’d think we hadn’t spoken in a year. “You too, Mom. Sorry I worried you.” I hold my breath until I can tell if she wants an apology, or if it’ll make her angry.
“I’ve missed you,” she whispers, like she always does when she’s about to cry. “I just—”
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “I’m not mad. I never was.
It’s just that—” Damn. How do I explain without making Jeanette look so bad that Mom comes to drag me back? I’m pissed off at my aunt, but not so much that I want to go home. “Jeanette was telling me you were having a hard time and thought you might need some time to think. Without having to worry about me, I mean. That’s why she kept taking the phone,” I lie.
“And you went along with that?” she asks. “How do you think I’ve felt this week, sitting here, wondering what I’ve done to offend you?”
“Mom,” I say, “I didn’t mean to worry you. I know you’re really busy, and—”
“You think I’m too busy to care about you?” Her voice is shrill. “When have I ever not been there for you? And as for too busy to care, well, I could say the same thing about you, young lady.”
I hate it when she does that. I take a deep breath and put on my calmest voice. “I’m not blaming you, Mom. I know things are very stressful for you at work and at home and everything. I don’t want to make things worse.”
“So you hide your feelings from me?” She’s shouting now. “You think that solves the problem? How would you feel if I treated you that way?”
Now is not the time to point out that I wish she would keep her feelings from me a bit more. All at once, I realize Jeanette was right about one thing at least: I could have hung on to the phone all those times, but I didn’t.
“What? You’re not even going to answer me now?”
“Yes,” I blurt, “I’m still here. I’m trying to figure out how to help.”
“You don’t always have to fix everything, you know,” she says. “Sometimes it would help if you just listened.”
I don’t tell her that I’ve been trying to do that. What’s the point when it’s obviously not enough?
FIFTEEN
Frank, dressed in an orange Hawaiian shirt and jeans, is sitting on his patio reading a book when I arrive. “Welcome, welcome!” he calls.
I grin and wave. The first time I came here, I never would have imagined feeling so at home in this strange, crowded space, but right now this is the only place I feel relaxed and happy. Frank is always thrilled with my progress, and he talks to me like I’m an equal, the way Jeanette talks to me when she’s not trying to save me from my parents.
I have to say, though, that Jeanette didn’t stay condescending for long. She’s stopped asking for the phone when I’m talking to my mom, and we don’t discuss my home life anymore. As for Mom, I’ve tried to smooth things out between us, but I think she still wonders if I secretly hate her.
“I think I’ve almost got the song nailed,” I tell Frank. “I mean, I know it’s probably not very tough, but when you first showed it to me, I thought I could never do it.”
“Of course you can!” he says, getting up from his wooden lawn chair. “Come on. Let’s get this show on t
he road.”
We settle around the canoe, and I’m about to open my case when he says, “Hey, before I forget, I went to the address you found in the envelope.”
“You did?”
“No news, I’m afraid,” he says. “The people there just moved in a few years ago, and the family before that was only there for a few years too. No one in the neighborhood seems to have been there for more than a few years.”
“You asked other people in the neighborhood too?”
“Of course,” Frank says. “That’s what a good sleuth has got to do, right?”
I nod. “I’ve done a bit of sleuthing too.” I tell him what I’ve learned about Andrés and Caterina’s son, Facundo García.
Frank goes very still. “So now what?”
I shrug. “I wanted to look up the son on the Internet, but I ran out of time at the library on Saturday, and I haven’t been back since.” I don’t add that Jeanette seems to be keeping me away from the library—and email—whenever she can. She stops short of forbidding me to go on my own or with Sarah, at least. After our conversation about Mom’s message, Jeanette and I were silent for a long time, but it’s impossible to stay mad at Jeanette for long. By suppertime, we were teasing each other and laughing again, and before going to bed, she came to my room to apologize for meddling. We’ve been spending all our time together ever since, hiking, cherry-picking or going to the lake for a swim. This morning I had thoughts of going to the library, but she invented some desperate need to find a set of electric massaging slippers that she knew were in the basement somewhere, and she made lunch so late that I had to rush to my lesson.
What she doesn’t know is that I’m not interested in emailing Mom anyway. Our last few conversations have left me completely exhausted, and afterward I go to bed only to stare at the ceiling. At about midnight the night after my fight with Jeanette, I pulled out the book on mental health and started reading. The common warning signs of mental illness looked uncomfortably familiar: sleeplessness, changes in appetite, extreme highs and lows, irritability, negative thoughts, excessive worries and anxieties.
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