Out of the Box

by Michelle Mulder

  And then I found this:

  Researchers believe that, in most cases, genetics and environmental factors, such as stress, play a role in mental illness. The sooner one recognizes the warning signs, the better. It’s never too early or too late to seek professional help.

  I slammed the book shut, shoved it under my bed, snapped off the light and smacked my head down on my pillow. No matter how hard I squeezed my eyes shut, though, sleep wouldn’t come.

  And my thoughts wouldn’t go away.

  Nothing I’ve done has been enough. Listening to my parents’ problems. Thinking up ways to make their lives easier. Getting good grades. Trying to be the perfect daughter. What difference has it made? They’re still miserable.

  Part of me knows Jeanette’s right about Mom’s mental health, and I’m starting to feel like an idiot for not seeing it before. All my talk of supporting my family, and I didn’t even know my own mother was sick. The next day we had another shift at the soup kitchen, and that freaked me out even more. If Mom can develop mental-health issues without me even noticing or being able to help, how far is she from turning into Diane, who hears God’s voice, or George, who is convinced that we spit in his sandwich before handing it to him? How will I know when she’s at the breaking point?

  “Do you want to search here?” Frank asks. “After the lesson, I mean. I’ve got a computer.”

  For a moment I don’t know what he’s talking about, and then I remember that we’d been talking about Facundo García, the guy who had no idea who his real parents were. I nod, and Frank smiles.

  “You’re a good person, Ellie,” he says. Then he fishes out some sheet music from a pile on the floor, and we begin the lesson.

  Later, we search the Internet but find only Facebook pages and personal websites of people who were born much earlier or much later than 1976.

  SIXTEEN

  Jeanette’s basement still has mounds and mounds of stuff that we haven’t sorted through yet. At least the “sell” and “throw away” piles are getting bigger though.

  “Looks like we’ve almost got enough for another load,” Jeanette says, surveying a heap of broken stuff by the stairs. She’s found an artist who turns old junk into sculptures, and once a week, we’ve been pedaling things across the city to his place. “I don’t suppose one of the broken lawn mowers would fit in our bike trailers, eh?”

  I laugh. “No way. I draw the line at lawn mowers.”

  “Okay, okay.” She sighs and pulls over a box of vinyl records. “I guess there are some things I’ll have to fire up the car for.”

  “Yup.” I scan the stack of boxes nearest me. One is labeled Costumes (Sound of Music) and another Doilies. I smirk, shake my head and open a plastic grocery bag full of something soft. “Whose toys?” I ask, pulling out a teddy bear.

  “So that’s where those are,” says Jeanette. “We got those for any kids who came to visit, but then we lost track of them somehow. Put them on the stairs. We’ll have a toy box in the corner of the living room for visitors.”

  I’m about to reply when I hear a knock on the tiny window over by the hockey net.

  “Are you guys down there?” Sarah calls.

  I pop open the window latch, and she sticks her eye close to peer in. “Do you want to go to the drive-in for ice cream later?” she asks. The drive-in is about three blocks away, and going there is a summer tradition in Victoria. I look at Jeanette, and she nods.

  “Michael and Steve are going to meet us there,” Sarah adds, and I change my mind. I never know what to say around them, and since Sarah asked them first, she’d probably rather go with them.

  “I think I should probably pass,” I tell her. “We’ve got quite a bit to do here still.”

  Jeanette gives me a quizzical look and opens her mouth to say something, but I cut her off. “Maybe another time?”

  “Sure,” Sarah says, “of course, and, uh, let me know if you need any help down there. I don’t mind pitching in.”

  I feel suddenly guilty, as though I’m the one that’s snubbed her, and I ask if she wants to join us now. She’s around the house and down the steps in record time.

  In the next hour, we discover an entire box full of wine corks, a basket of cat toys (in case Jeanette and Alison ever decided to get a cat), and a rock collection. We tease Jeanette mercilessly and laugh so much that by the time Sarah gets up to go, I wish I was going with her, boys or no boys. I can’t go back on my decision now though. That would just seem weird.

  “See you tomorrow,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Thanks for coming.”

  SEVENTEEN

  On my fourth Monday in Victoria, I go to the soup kitchen alone. Jeanette has an appointment with her financial advisor.

  Things at the soup kitchen are much the same as the first time I went there. The guys are hanging out on the church steps (except for Ned, whom I haven’t seen for a while). People are laughing and talking in the courtyard. Someone inside is shouting about poison in the coffee, and when I head upstairs, several people are asleep at their tables.

  The other volunteers smile at me when I arrive, and we spend the next hour making polite conversation. Louise tells me that Frank raves about what a great kid I am, and I grin as I slap bologna on slices of bread.

  I take my time getting home, looking at all the shop windows that I usually hurry past when I’m with Jeanette. I hesitate when I pass the library. She won’t be home from her appointment right away. I could keep researching.

  At a library computer, I log in for a half-hour session and google children of desaparecidos Argentina. I’m hoping to find more about Facundo García, but I find other people’s stories instead, some even more incredible than his. In one, the child didn’t want to meet his biological grandparents because he was raised to think they were evil. In another, the biological grandparents didn’t want to meet the child because “she had been raised by the enemy.” In a third, the child’s adoptive family abused him, and by the time he found out the truth about his birth, he hated his adoptive parents so much that he changed his last name and never spoke to them again. I think about that for a few seconds. Then I try something I hadn’t thought of before. Instead of googling Facundo García, I try the last name he would have had if he hadn’t been stolen from his parents: Facundo Moreno.

  I press Enter, and wait as the slow library computer chugs its way to the Google listings. I know it’s silly to imagine finding this guy. Facundo García and Facundo Moreno sound like unusual names to me, but for all I know, they could be the John Smiths of the Spanish-speaking world.

  Sure enough, up pops a whole page of hits, most of them personal web pages and Facebook stuff, but this time, there’s something else too, something so incredible that it makes me laugh out loud: a page from the University of Victoria’s Department of Hispanic Studies. It seems like an unbelievable coincidence, but I know Alison would say It Was Meant to Be.

  I click on the UVic site and hold my breath.

  The page takes forever to load, but when it does, all the details fit. Facundo Moreno studied in Buenos Aires and Victoria, and his publications are all in the past few years, which would make sense if he was born in 1976. It takes awhile to become a professor, I guess. And wouldn’t it make sense that both he and his parents’ bandoneón are in the same city, even if it doesn’t make sense that they got separated? Then again, Jeanette said Alison got the instrument at a yard sale from someone who didn’t even know what a bandoneón was. Maybe it was stolen.

  I go over the web page again. On the right is a list of links—Facundo’s favorite books, a few poetry journals and, weirdly, a tea shop whose name sounds familiar. I click on it and slowly, very slowly, the computer reveals the events page of a tea shop in downtown Victoria, one that I’ve passed lots of times on my walks with Jeanette.

  Tea Talk. Discover yerba maté, the ancient drink of health and friendship still popular in South America today. Join us for the fourth of our Tea Around the World lec
ture series, as Dr. Facundo Moreno, Professor of Hispanic Studies, takes us through this tea’s exciting history. Samples and refreshments will follow.

  The date is this Thursday. Three days from now. I imagine Alison looking over my shoulder at the computer screen and laughing. Don’t question it, Ellie. Just enjoy!

  I stare at the page and swallow hard. I could meet him. Without telling him I have his parents’ bandoneón. I could just see what he’s like and decide later whether I really need to tell him or not. He’ll want it back, of course. But I don’t know whether I want to give it back. I scribble down the details of the tea talk, shut the computer down, and walk out of the library in a daze.

  “You all right?”

  I blink and turn to see Ned, or a rough and exhausted version of Ned, anyway. In the two weeks since I gave him the sandwich in front of the gelato shop, it looks like he hasn’t slept at all. I dig in my bag for the granola bar I’ve taken to carrying instead of the sandwich and hand it to him. “I’m fine,” I say. “How are you? Haven’t seen you around lately.”

  “Went up island,” he says. “Visited a cousin. I’m back now though.”

  I want to ask if he’s still living above the soup kitchen, but I suspect from the haggard look on his face what the answer will be.

  “Welcome back” is all I can think of to say.

  He thanks me for the granola bar, tips his ballcap to me and wanders off down the street, leaving me torn between his story and questions of how a bandoneón and its owner’s long-lost son both wound up in a small Canadian city, thousands of miles from home.

  For lunch, Jeanette buys a bunch of salads and packs them into a picnic basket, along with wineglasses, a bottle of fizzy water and a blue tablecloth. She suggests I invite Sarah, but I say I think she’s probably busy. On the way to the park, I ask my aunt about her appointment with the financial advisor.

  “Good,” she says. “Nothing unexpected.” She asks me about the soup kitchen.

  I tell her about a woman who said God had told her I was a saint. “I wish she’d tell that to my mother,” I say.

  “Nah,” says Jeanette, “she’d be disappointed in you for going all religious.”

  “That’s true. Oh, and there was this guy who found half a pack of cigarettes on the street and was sharing them with everyone in the courtyard, all excited.” We cross the street into the park and take the path around the pond. “I wonder why some people can have terrible lives and still find things to be happy about, and other people can have everything and still be miserable.”

  She casts me a sidelong glance, and I wish I hadn’t spoken. We keep walking, and in the end all she says is “It’s all a question of perspective, I guess.”

  Maybe so, but for the first time, I wish my parents would make more of an effort to be happy, at least some of the time.

  EIGHTEEN

  Who knew half of Victoria wanted to know about Argentine tea?

  The small shop is packed when we arrive, and people are lined up out the door. I’ve never been in here before, but I like the floor-to-ceiling shelves, lined with black tins bearing names like Rose Burst and Midnight Mist. Alison would have loved it. I imagine her here right now, looking over my shoulder, chuckling at the names and crossing her fingers that this little bit of serendipity turns out to be all that I hope for—not that I know yet what I’m hoping for.

  The long counter on one side of the shop reminds me of the pharmacy in a heritage village museum I went to once on a school field trip. At the back of the store, a table is set up on a small platform, and on the table is a round thing the size of an apple with a metal straw coming out of it, a metal thermos and another black tin labeled Yerba Maté. One of the employees is brushing invisible flecks of dust off the table.

  Jeanette and I squeeze our way through the crowd toward the back. She was surprised at first when I asked if she’d come with me to a talk about tea, but I told her it was Argentine tea, and since the bandoneón comes from Argentina, I wanted to go.

  “You’re getting into this tango-culture thing in a big way, eh?” she said and left it at that.

  My mom, on the other hand, couldn’t figure out why I was interested, because she doesn’t know about my interest in tango. Her response to the tea talk was, “Your aunt’s rubbing off on you,” and I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, and I didn’t ask. I’ve been watching my step in my conversations with Mom lately, trying not to match her words to symptoms in the mental-health book. It’s becoming harder and harder to avoid though.

  As Jeanette and I step into the tea shop, I’m not sure this was such a good idea. If this Facundo Moreno turns out to be who I think he is, meeting him will make it much harder for me to keep the bandoneón, and selling it to donate money to the soup kitchen is probably out of the question. I wish I’d thought of that before inviting Jeanette to this talk.

  My aunt, of course, instantly agreed to come. She’s always interested in learning about stuff that has nothing to do with her life. Judging by the number of people she seems to recognize in this room, many of her friends are the same way.

  While she stops to talk to someone, I head for the table to look at the round thing with the straw. I read a bit about maté before coming today. I know the round thing is traditionally made out of a gourd (a kind of squash with a hard shell), and the straw is called a bombilla.

  “Got dragged along, did you?” a man says. I assume he works at the tea shop. His long brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and he has a short beard and round glasses.

  I look around and decide that, yes, he’s definitely talking to me. Adults often do that with the youngest person in the room. “I’m the one who dragged my aunt along, actually.” I wave a hand in Jeanette’s direction. She’s deep in conversation and doesn’t notice.

  “Really?” He sounds surprised. “Do you have some sort of Argentine connection? Or a tea addiction?”

  I laugh. “No, no tea addiction. I’m interested in Argentina though.”

  “Oh?”

  “I like tango music,” I say. “I’m learning to play it.”

  “Wow. Now that’s something I don’t hear every day, especially from someone so young.” He has a slight accent, but I’m not sure where from. Quebec, maybe?

  “My father played tango,” he continues, smiling. “One of my favorite photographs is of him playing something called a bandoneón—it’s like an accordion— with my mother clapping in the background.”

  Understanding hits me like a wave, and even before he introduces himself, I know who he is. He doesn’t look like the stuffy, serious professor I imagined, and he seems happier than I thought possible, considering all he’s been through.

  “I’m Facundo Moreno,” he says, holding out his hand.

  I shake his hand and introduce myself, my voice catching in my throat. I know so much about him that he doesn’t know I know, and I have no idea what to say that won’t sound weird. “I guess tango’s pretty popular in Argentina.”

  “It is now,” he says. “Not so popular in my father’s day though. The government made it illegal for big groups of people to get together, so no one gathered to dance it. A lot of people forgot how.” His eyebrows pull together slightly, like he’s reliving a painful memory, and I look away to stop from confessing everything.

  I glance at my aunt, hoping she’ll rescue me, but she’s still talking, waving her hands around and laughing.

  Someone behind the long pharmacy counter rings a bell for attention. Facundo smiles at me, says he hopes I enjoy the talk and hands me a card. “If you have any more questions about Argentina,” he says.

  I feel my face go hot, and I mumble, “Thank you.” I wish I hadn’t come, or at the very least, I wish Facundo were a terrible person who didn’t deserve the family heirloom I know I should be giving him.

  NINETEEN

  “Inotice you haven’t been spending much time with Sarah this past week,” Jeanette says one morning a few days after the tea talk. She’s
spreading a piece of toast with orange marmalade from one of the ancient dust-covered jars of preserves that she found in the basement yesterday. No way am I going to eat anything that old. “Did something happen between you two?”

  I stare into my cereal for a few seconds and finally shake my head. “Not really. I’ve been busy with the bandoneón. Besides, we don’t really have much in common anyway.”

  “Oh?” Jeanette asks. “You guys got on like a house on fire when you first met.”

  “Maybe we ran out of things to say.” I’d rather feel guilty for a white lie than admit to my aunt that I have no idea what to say to the guys Sarah wants to hang out with. I don’t want my aunt to pity me or, worse, try to fix me.

  “I can’t imagine either of you ever suffering from a lack of conversation topics.” She takes a bite of her toast, closes her eyes and smiles. “I remember the summer we made this marmalade. It was so sweltering in here that we got a hot plate and did most of the canning outside.”

  “You helped with canning?” I ask.

  “Hey, don’t sound so shocked. I do know how to do a few things in the kitchen.”

  I do a bad job at stifling a laugh, and she throws a tea towel at me. I catch it and throw it back.

  “Anyway,” she says, “don’t change the subject. We were talking about you and Sarah. What’s up?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “She’s trying to meet lots of new people.”

  “And you don’t want to.”

  “Not really,” I say. “Besides, I think she’s figured out I’m not exactly Miss Popularity.”

  “She’s ditched you?”

  I shrug. “She’s always inviting me to stuff, but she invites these guys we met too.”