She must have been ashamed, since she never told me. Not even when I was coming to Spain with the Armisteds. She left me . . .
Defenseless.
I was starting to catch my breath, but this thought makes me gasp for air again. My breathing is so ragged that people give me strange looks—maybe that’s part of the reason their faces seem so distorted.
What if I look like such a crazy person now that someone calls the police?
What do Spanish police do with crazy people?
I try to move back, away from the throngs of people on the sidewalks. I’m looking for a shadow to hide in, but the sunlight is too bright—there’s no shadow big enough. Nothing can be hidden here. I can’t be hidden.
The crowd presses against me—oh, a traffic light has changed, and people are trying to cross the street. I let the crowd carry me along because it’s easier than resisting.
No matter what side of the street I’m on, I can’t unsee Avery’s birth certificate. I can’t unhear Mr. Armisted explaining that my mother gave birth to Avery. I can’t unsee Avery’s face or unhear her voice as she gasped in horror, Is Kayla Butts my sister?
I trip over the curb on the other side and keep blindly walking forward. I bump into something big and hard and gray: a building. No, a sculpture.
It’s a sculpture of a baby’s head that’s almost twice as tall as I am.
I turn, and there’s a second huge baby head across the plaza, on the other side of a row of motor scooters. The one I’m standing next to has its blank eyes open; the other has its eyes closed.
Babies. Two babies.
Is Kayla Butts my sister?
My face twists, and a moan escapes me. I am not a crier, but I am about to lose all control. In a moment, I’m going to be wailing and weeping in a way that I’ve only heard about in the Bible readings at church, when the prophets wore sackcloth and ashes and tore at their clothes and gnashed their teeth and beat their fists on the ground and were thrown into the outer darkness.
I don’t know anyone around me—they’re all strangers. I’m in a city of strangers, in a country of strangers, on a continent of strangers. But surely even strangers would react if I threw myself to the ground and started weeping and wailing in front of this baby head sculpture.
I have to find a place to hide.
I rush into the nearest building, and it’s some kind of train station.
Train stations have bathrooms. Bathrooms have stalls. Stalls have privacy.
I am on a mission.
I try to follow the signs pointing to the nearest baño, the nearest WC, but my eyes are already swimming with tears, and I can’t see very well; I can’t think very well. I get turned around and have to retrace my steps. Finally, I find a line of people by a bathroom door.
The woman in front of me reaches into her pocket and pulls out two coins.
I see the sign on the bathroom door, in English and Spanish: Going to the bathroom costs fifty cents, fifty Euro cents, and I don’t have so much as a Euro penny. I left the Armisteds’ apartment with nothing.
I’m too poor to go to the bathroom.
A wail starts deep in my chest. I hold it back so nothing comes out but a whimper, but even that is too loud, and the woman in front of me starts to turn around.
I run away again.
I careen blindly, retracing my steps—or maybe not. I can’t tell where I am in this maze of people and luggage carts and stairs and escalators and signs I don’t know how to read. There’s a door off to the side and I jerk it open, because I’m making a scene; I have to get out of sight. I have to hide.
Nobody stops me.
Another door looms ahead of me, and I jerk it open too. I scramble through.
And then I’m alone.
The door settles closed behind me, and it feels like I’m being sealed off from the rest of the world, like no new air or sorrow or hope or fear can escape or penetrate this space, from any direction. I step forward into a dim, empty room and reach a long, low black bench. The bench stretches in front of a window that looks out on the ordinary bustle of the train station. But this can’t be just an ordinary train station waiting room: It’s too empty, too eerie, too . . . grim. The window before me is made of some thick, distorting glass that keeps me from hearing any sounds from the other side; even though I can see out, it feels like nobody out in the train station can see in.
Is this what it feels like to be dead? I wonder. To be a ghost? Or . . . to be my dad?
Over the years, the doctors have told us he can see and hear; he just can’t communicate. He can’t control much of anything about his body. They’re not really sure how much he can think or understand.
Did he know Mom was pregnant with Avery before his accident?
Did that maybe even . . . somehow . . . contribute to his accident?
I don’t have a phone with me to call and ask Mom, even if she were available to answer.
I don’t really want to ask Mom, anyway. I couldn’t say a single word to her right now.
Everything in me recoils from that.
But I don’t start weeping and wailing like I longed to back when I was surrounded by other people in the train station or out in the plaza with the giant baby heads. Something about the deep blue peacefulness of this strange room has calmed me down.
I step back from the window, back to the only other source of light in the room, coming from a break in the ceiling. Only when I’m standing directly under that break do I see that it’s not just a skylight. It’s actually a funnel of words flowing up toward the sky: words written on some sort of translucent material that lets the sunlight through. The words are in lots of different languages, I think, not just Spanish and English. I see “Memoriam” and “people that suffer their lost” and “Peace and freedom in the world” and “todos las familias . . .” That means “all the families.”
This is some kind of memorial.
I press myself back against the blue, blue wall, like someone’s going to catch me—like someone’s going to quiz me about who this memorial is for, and then they’re going to throw me out when they find out I don’t even know.
I don’t belong here. This isn’t my city, isn’t my country, isn’t my continent. Whatever dead people I’m supposed to be honoring here had nothing to do with me.
But whoever set up this memorial wanted people to have peace and freedom. I think they wanted people to find peace and freedom in this room.
Maybe I do belong here.
Avery, Weeping
I lie facedown on my bed. I don’t remember climbing the stairs, coming back up to our apartment. Maybe Daddy carried me.
“Shh, shh,” he says, hovering above me. He’s patting my back, rubbing my shoulders. “I’m sorry. Oh honey, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want it to be like this. . . .”
I turn my face to the side. I still can’t put together what I saw, what I heard: Dad’s phone against his ear, then sliding down; that word, “divorce.”
Mom did call him back.
“Is it because I saw that messed-up birth certificate?” I moan. “Because now I know . . . Would Mom really divorce you over that?”
I can’t say what I truly mean: Is she divorcing you—or disowning me? Because I’m not her real kid?
“This isn’t your fault,” Dad says, and there’s steel in his voice, something solid to hold on to. “Never think that. Your mother . . . she . . . It bothered her so much that she couldn’t give birth to you herself. That’s her problem, not yours. But the divorce . . .” Just like that, the steel’s gone. Dad’s as lost as I am. He whispers, “We were already on this path.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me before?” I wail. “When I was still home, when my friends . . .”
When my friends could have helped me, I want to say. Lauren’s parents have been divorced since she was two; if we were together right now, she’d be saying to me, Oh, who cares? It’s not like parents even matter.
Except Lauren’s the one who
sometimes used to whisper to me at sleepovers after everyone else was asleep, My parents got into a fight again today about who gets my sister and me for Christmas. They’ve been divorced for almost my whole life, and they’re still fighting. I wish my family were like yours or Shannon’s.
I can’t tell Lauren this news while I’m still in Spain and she’s back home.
Maybe I won’t ever be able to tell her.
I can’t tell Shannon, either. Her parents are still married.
And they don’t even fight.
And Shannon and Lauren weren’t born from surrogate mothers. I can’t ever tell them about that.
Dad keeps patting my back.
“We weren’t sure,” he says. “I . . .” He gulps, an ugly, rude, desperate sound that no one should ever hear from another person. Especially no kid should ever hear from a parent. “We agreed to wait to see how the summer went, to see . . . to see how much we missed each other. . . .”
He goes silent. I close my eyes because I can’t look at him right now.
But I don’t have to look at him—or hear him—to know that his face is contorted, and he’s shaking with sobs.
Because Mom probably doesn’t miss him. She probably doesn’t miss me, either. The day I left, she couldn’t even lie and pretend that she would.
The way she cried—was that even about me? Or was she just thinking about getting divorced?
Isn’t it a good sign, that that made her cry?
“We planned to sit down with you together and explain all of this,” Dad chokes out. “Once we were home from Spain. After this trial separation. She— Your mother planned that. I thought there was still hope, still a chance. . . .”
It’s unbearable to hear the remnants of hope still in his voice.
Dead hope, I think. Ashes of hope.
“She wouldn’t even talk to me, when she called just now?” I ask forlornly. “Wouldn’t you let her?”
It’s like I want to be mad at my father, to blame him for being the one who told me everything.
For being the one who’s been with me all week, and who didn’t tell me until now.
For being with me my entire life and never telling me I had a surrogate mother.
Why am I madder at him right now than I am at my mom? She didn’t even give birth to me!
I open my eyes a crack. My father has his face buried in his hands. Then he lifts his head. I can practically see how hard he’s trying to regain control.
“Your mother is . . . struggling,” he says. “This is very hard for her. You wouldn’t understand. She was already having problems, and . . .”
He’s making excuses for her? Seriously?
He starts patting my back again, and it’s too much pressure. It hurts to be touched. I jerk away.
“Go away, Dad,” I snarl. I turn my face away from him again. The pillowcase fills my mouth like a gag. I already felt like I was choking and couldn’t breathe. Now I have a reason to feel like I’m choking and can’t breathe.
“But—will you be okay?” Dad asks.
No. Of course I won’t be okay. I won’t be okay again ever in my entire life.
I don’t say anything to Dad.
Because he should know this already. He should know everything. He should have protected me from all of this.
Isn’t that what parents are for?
Kayla in the Blue Room
I sit down on the floor.
For a while, that is enough, just to be here, just to be. It’s like sitting at my father’s bedside: There’s quiet and there’s peace, and it doesn’t matter what I tell him. But when I’m visiting my father at the VA nursing home, the moment always comes when my mother says, “It’s time to go,” and she leads me out, her arm around my shoulder.
I always thought it was talking to my father that made me feel better, but what if it was really my mother leading me away afterward, and the feel of her arm around me?
There is no one to lead me away from here. There is no one to hug me.
My mother is on the other side of the ocean. And, anyhow, she is the last person I want to see right now.
What am I going to do?
I think about how Grandma and Grandpa and probably three-fourths of the Autumn Years nursing home residents would tell me to pray—half of them say prayer is the answer to everything.
Maybe I am already praying. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing ever since I stepped into this room.
The see-through funnel of words above me quivers—it’s a harbinger, a sign that the air pressure in this room is changing because someone is opening the door. I scrunch back tighter against the wall as if that can make me invisible. But the young woman who steps through the door and toward the light seems to be looking just for me.
“Es la hora de cierre,” she says. “Tienes que salir.”
“What?” I say. “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Spanish.”
“We are closing,” she says, in such accented English that it still sounds like she’s speaking Spanish. “You leave.”
“Oh,” I say. I scramble up. My left foot has gone to sleep, so I limp toward the door.
“Espera, por favor,” she says, putting her hand on my arm as I pass through the first doorway. She waits until that door closes behind us before she opens the second door, letting us both out.
I blink in the sudden bright light of the train station. The woman says something that could be “Thank you” or “good-bye” or some expression I’ve never heard before.
What am I going to do now?
Where else can I go to hide?
I don’t even have enough money with me to go to a train station bathroom. Where do I think I can go? How many choices do I have?
Avery, Still Facedown
From my bedroom, I hear the front door rattle, the lock click.
“Avery!” Dad calls from the living room. “Kayla’s back! She came home!”
I don’t even turn my head. I keep my face buried in my pillow.
“This isn’t home,” I mutter.
Kayla’s Return
I went to the only place I could: back to the Armisteds’ apartment. I thought maybe I would get lucky and the door would still be unlocked; maybe I could sneak in and grab my purse and my passport and all my money, and I could leave again. I’m thinking wild thoughts: There are things called youth hostels somewhere in Madrid. The train station might be open all night. Maybe the American Embassy would help. . . .
Mr. Armisted is standing on the landing waiting for me when I round the last corner of the spiral stairs.
“You came back,” he murmurs dazedly. “You came back.”
I have nothing to say to him.
In spite of myself, I am a little proud I found my way back. I was calmer after the blue room. I found an information booth at the train station and asked how to get to Puerta del Sol.
I know how to get from Puerta del Sol to the Armisteds’ apartment. But it was a lot of walking, and on the stairway up I was starting to think that maybe I would just crawl into bed at the Armisteds’; maybe I would just hide there.
I stumble my way up to the landing. Mr. Armisted throws his arms around me. I jerk back a little in surprise.
“I was giving myself until nine o’clock,” he says. “And then I was going to call your mom. And maybe the police, too. But I thought you were too sensible and practical to . . . to do anything wrong. I didn’t want to worry your family. I was sure you’d be back in time to Skype.”
To Skype? What?
I remember I’ve been talking with the nursing home residents—and Grandma and Grandpa and Mom—every night at nine p.m. Nine o’clock for me; three in the afternoon for them.
I hadn’t even thought about it until now.
The girl who babbled on to the entire nursing home about mangling Spanish verbs and taking the subway and eating Spanish olives was somebody else. Somebody who had nothing to hide.
“I’m not Skyping tonight,” I tell Mr. Armisted. “I�
�m never Skyping again.”
His face sags the same way it does when he looks at Avery, when she’s been rude. But he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone.
“Here,” he says. “Just call your mom. She deserves to know . . . I mean, you deserve . . . You should hear her side of the story.”
I step around him and his phone like it’s a trap.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
I step on in to the apartment and go to my room. I shut the door and sit down on the bed. I don’t pick up my purse because I remember that Mr. Armisted still has my passport—after Avery lost hers, he put mine and his somewhere safe, and I don’t know where that is.
Without my passport, I couldn’t go to the American Embassy. I’m not even sure I could go to a youth hostel—during Spanish class, we talked about checking into hotels, and I know Señora Gomez said something about handing the recepcionista our pasaportes.
Mr. Armisted might as well be holding my passport hostage.
He might as well be holding me hostage.
Without my passport, I am trapped in this room.
This makes me think about the Autumn Years nursing home, the way some people see their rooms as cages. Sometimes new people get depressed there. Was I seven or eight when Mom sent me in to say hello to Mrs. Kelly, thinking I could cheer her up? And the old lady snapped, Don’t you go smiling at me, you little brat. Surely even you know there isn’t anything here to smile about. My family sent me to this prison to die. They want me to die! They might as well have shot me in the heart and been done with it. More honest that way.
And then she did die, a week later. I remember hearing the nurses and aides whispering about how there was nothing really that wrong with her, except that she’d given up.
I am not Mrs. Kelly. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to give up. I don’t want . . .
Someone taps at my door.
“I have a question for you,” Mr. Armisted says from the hall. “Can you . . . can you come out to hear it?”
I walk over and open the door. I stand there with my arms crossed.
The Summer of Broken Things Page 13