The Summer of Broken Things

  I can’t help it. I giggle again, imagining that.

  It wouldn’t have much of an effect, anyway, with me huffing and puffing from climbing up the stairs. The five flights of stairs, even though we’re only on the fourth floor, because the Spanish lie when they’re counting floors.

  I turn off the main street and head up the alley toward our apartment building, with its wrought-iron railings at every balcony, its tidy rows of window boxes spilling over with flowers. On Saturday, I’ll see if the nursing home can move my Skyping time earlier in the day, and maybe Mr. Armisted will let me bring the iPad outside, so I can show everyone back in Crawfordsville what this street looks like. Or will the Wi-Fi not work this far away? Grandma and Grandpa don’t have Wi-Fi back home, so I always have to go to the library or the nursing home if I want to use a computer. So I’m just figuring these things out.

  I’m good at unlocking the front door of the apartment building now, even though I couldn’t figure it out at all that first day. I step into the lobby. There’s a strange man in a uniform I don’t recognize standing by the row of mailboxes.

  “Disculpe,” I murmur, reaching past him to open the box for our apartment. Picking up the mail is something else that Mr. Armisted wanted Avery and me to take turns being responsible for, but—yeah, you guessed it—Avery never does.

  Of course, Mr. Armisted also thinks Avery and I are going back and forth to school every day together. He probably thinks we skip and hold hands, too, like we did when we were little.

  Oh well, Avery’s loss, I think. She can ignore me all summer—I’ll make other friends. That’s already happening. And then we’ll go back home and we won’t have anything to do with each other, ever again.

  There’s nothing in the mailbox, and I flip it shut, pull my key out, and take a deep breath, ready to start on those crazy stairs.

  But the man in the uniform suddenly springs to life. He starts practically jumping up and down, and pointing at the mailbox I just opened. He reels off a long string of Spanish, and I’m lost before he even gets to the second syllable.

  “I don’t speak Spanish,” I say. “Sorry.”

  He points at the 4I label taped on my key. I was so confused at first about why our apartment is “4I,” when the only other door on our floor is “4D.” Why isn’t there a 4A, 4B, 4C, etc.? But Avery actually asked about it, and it’s not anything alphabetical; it’s fourth floor left side and fourth floor right side—izquierda and derecha.

  Maybe there are apartment buildings in big cities in the United States where it would be 4L and 4R.

  The longer I’m here, the more I realize I don’t know anything.

  “¿Es esta su piso?” the man asks—or something like that. I think “piso” means “floor,” not “apartment,” but he had to have seen the I part too.

  “Yes,” I say. “I mean, sí.”

  I don’t understand what he says after that, but he sounds really happy. He holds out a stiff, formal-looking envelope addressed to Mr. Armisted. The man also holds out a little machine, like a credit-card machine, and hands me a stylus. He wants me to sign.

  “I’m not David Armisted,” I say.

  The man grabs my hand and presses it toward the machine. The stylus makes a line and two dots on the screen.

  “But I’m not—”

  The man keeps jabbering away. He points to the stairs.

  “Gracias. Gracias,” he says.

  Oh. He’s thanking me for signing for the envelope so he didn’t have to climb five flights of stairs.

  I actually understand!

  “De nada,” I say, as though I’ve been speaking Spanish my whole life.

  I glance down at the envelope—I haven’t committed Mr. Armisted to paying thousands of dollars for some unwanted letter, have I? But the return address is the records division of the state of California. It’s got to be Avery’s birth certificate.

  I think Mr. Armisted actually would pay thousands of dollars for that.

  “Gracias,” I tell the delivery man.

  I am just speaking Spanish like crazy now.

  The man heads for the door out to the street, and I start climbing the stairs. It’s not so bad if I pause on every landing. I can do this if I’m alone or with both Avery and Mr. Armisted, because he likes to pause every now and then too. But any time I’m with Avery, it’s like she’s a mountain goat, and she gets annoyed that I slow her down.

  I guess the only time I climbed up and down these stairs just with her was that first day, when we went to Pans & Company and then sat in Puerta del Sol. And she seemed to get mad at me for no reason, over nothing.

  Well, she’s got her birth certificate now, so she can get her passport right away, I think. Maybe she’ll beg and plead with Mr. Armisted, and she’ll get her way, and she can be mad at me in London or Paris or Lisbon, not just in Madrid.

  Being annoyed with Avery gets me up the stairs with only two breaks to catch my breath. I unlock the door to our apartment and call, “Hey, Avery, your birth certificate just arrived.”

  She dashes out from her room as if she’s actually eager to greet me—or to get her birth certificate, anyway.

  “Let me see,” she demands.

  I stifle the impulse to say, Hello to you, too. Or I could be really bratty and spout off, Buenas tardes, and a bunch of other Spanish words, and make it seem like I’ve learned tons in the Spanish class she’s been skipping.

  Nope. I couldn’t carry that off.

  Avery takes the envelope from my hand and pulls the little tab on the back to open it.

  “It’s addressed to your dad, not you,” I can’t resist saying.

  “Yeah, but it’s my birth certificate,” she says. “And Dad says government bureaucrats mess things up all the time. If there’s any problem, we’ll want to know right away, so Dad can call and make them fix their mistake.”

  It figures she thinks other people are going to make mistakes. When it was her mistake—losing her passport—that meant her dad had to order her birth certificate in the first place.

  Avery pulls a sheet of paper out of the envelope. I can’t help looking over her shoulder.

  “Certificate of live birth,” she reads, and giggles. “Okay, good to know I’m alive!”

  “Avery Nicole Armisted, female, single—who would expect a baby to be married?” I ask, lulled by her giggle into making a joke of my own. I brace for her to tell me it’s a stupid question; that word in that box just means she wasn’t a twin or a triplet.

  But Avery gasps and moves the certificate farther back, then closer to her eyes.

  “What?” she says in a strangled voice. “That’s not my mom’s name!”

  I bring my own head down, peering more closely.

  “Stacy Lynn Carter?” I read numbly.

  “There is a mistake!” Avery complains. “This is wrong! Those stupid bureaucrats just put down some random name, and—”

  I grab Avery’s arm.

  “But Avery,” I say. “That’s not random. That’s my mom’s name!”

  Avery, Stunned and Outraged

  “Your mom’s last name is Butts,” I tell Kayla, like she’s the stupidest person alive. “Stacy Butts.”

  “That’s her married name,” Kayla says. “Her maiden name was—”

  “Don’t say it!” I warn. It’s like I can stop any of this from being true if I don’t let her finish. I blink again at the birth certificate, as if that will make the right name appear. But that just makes me see that “Carter” is listed as a maiden name. There’s no space for a married name.

  “This is just a coincidence,” I snarl at Kayla. “Just a really dumb mistake.”

  “Your dad and my mom?” Kayla sputters out. “They didn’t . . . They wouldn’t have . . . .”

  “No, of course not,” I snap. This, at least, is something Kayla and I can agree on.

  I drop the birth certificate and go running for my phone.

  Kayla catches the certificate in midair.

/>   “Mom was already married,” she says. “I was already born. My dad . . . my dad had just had his accident. . . .”

  She’s almost whispering, but the words still cut like knives.

  “Dad will fix this,” I say.

  I dash into my room and retrieve my stupid burner phone from the tangle of sheets and blankets on my bed. I hit the call button like I’m swinging a knife.

  “Honey, this isn’t a good time,” Dad says, by way of a hello.

  “This is an emergency,” I tell him. My voice doesn’t even sound like my own. “You have to come home.”

  “Are you okay?” he asks, and I can tell he’s snapped into high alert. “Remember, the emergency number in Spain is one-one-two, not nine-one-one, and you should call immediately if . . . Is something wrong with Kayla?”

  Just the way he says Kayla’s name feels wrong.

  If this birth certificate says my parents are my dad and Kayla’s mom, then what does her birth certificate say? Could my dad be . . .

  I don’t let myself finish the thought.

  “We don’t need nine-one-one,” I tell Dad. “We need you home. Now.”

  “What happened?” Dad begs.

  “My birth certificate came,” I say. “And it’s got the wrong name on it. The wrong mother’s name.”

  Dad goes silent. And it’s a long silence. This is all wrong. He’s supposed to say, Avery, what are you talking about? That doesn’t make sense. Are you sure you aren’t reading the wrong line? Like maybe the doctor’s name or something? Look for Celeste Marin Armisted. Or Celeste Marin Sterling, if it’s the maiden name listed. You know your mother’s name!

  Finally, finally, finally, Dad says, “Oh.”

  “That’s all you can say?” I rage. “ ‘Oh’? When you and Mom have evidently been lying to me my whole life? When—”

  “It’s not what you think,” Dad begins. “We didn’t—”

  But I can’t bear to hear whatever he’s going to say next. I stab my finger at the phone to end the call. A split second later, the phone starts ringing, but I don’t answer it. I will never answer any of Dad’s calls again. I will never even speak to him again.

  I let myself fall back flat on the bed.

  “What did he say?” Kayla hovers just outside the doorway of my room, like she’s afraid to step inside.

  “Nothing,” I mumble.

  “Nothing?” Kayla repeats. “He didn’t have any—”

  “Shut up,” I tell her, and I don’t care how rude I sound. “I’m thinking.”

  But my thoughts don’t go anywhere except in circles: This isn’t possible. This doesn’t make sense. There’s no way. This isn’t possible. . . .

  “Would your mother . . . ,” Kayla begins, and it’s a lifeline.

  Mom, I think.

  I know my mother. My parents have been married for a million years. (I do the actual math: It’s twenty-three years. They were married for nine years before I was born.) If Dad had an affair and the other woman got pregnant, there is no way in the entire universe that Mom would adopt the other woman’s child and raise it (her? me?) as her own. There is no set of circumstances under which that would happen. My mom knows how to watch out for herself. She has rules. Boundaries. No one—and I mean, no one—crosses those boundaries.

  If Dad had an affair, she’d divorce him so fast his head would spin.

  Not that my dad would ever have an affair.

  And I look like my mom. I do.

  So there. I’ve proved it. The mother’s name on my birth certificate is just one huge mistake.

  But what about the way my dad said, “Oh”?

  I reach up, grab my pillow, and pull down it over my face.

  “Avery?” Kayla calls from the doorway. “Don’t hurt yourself. Whatever this means, that’s no reason to . . .”

  Seriously? She thinks I’m going to suffocate myself over this?

  She must, because she steps into and across the room—the floorboards creak beneath her lumbering feet—and she tugs the pillow back from my face.

  “I’m not doing anything!” I snarl at her. “Go away!”

  I grab the pillow back. I sit up and clutch the pillow against my stomach, as if I’m just daring her to take it away again.

  Kayla takes a step back.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  I hold the pillow tighter. I hunch over like I have to protect it, like it’s a . . .

  Baby.

  My mind’s eye jumps, and I can see how I’m sitting; I can see exactly what I look like. Back home, there’s a picture that’s been hanging in our upstairs hallway for as long as I can remember. It’s Mom holding me when I was a tiny baby—a newborn. Mom’s wearing a red sweater shot through with threads of gold that almost look like brocade. The gold glints a little, and it’s echoed in the gold highlights in Mom’s hair and even in the peach fuzz of my own hair, peeking out from my baby blankets. Mom took a lot of art history classes in college; back when Mom and Dad were getting along better, I can remember him joking once that she always wanted to reenact her own Madonna and Child portrait. But who could blame her? It’s a beautiful picture. She looks amazing.

  Can a woman really look that good right after giving birth? I wonder.

  I think about the childbirth video they showed us in eighth-grade health class. They cut away really fast from showing the actual birth, but they had interviews with mothers immediately afterward, and they all looked awful. Like, if you knew you were going to be on camera, wouldn’t you at least comb your hair?

  But the point of those childbirth videos was to make us girls think we wouldn’t want to get pregnant. At least, not until we’re thirty, which is practically forever. So maybe they were making those women look terrible on purpose, I tell myself.

  If anyone was going to look beautiful and perfectly made-up after going through childbirth, it’d be my mom.

  So there, again.

  I’m still not convinced.

  “I said, go away!” I repeat to Kayla, and it’s almost like I’m just talking to my own brain, my own thoughts. I want to stop analyzing. I want to go back to five minutes ago, when I didn’t wonder anything about my parents.

  Or about Kayla’s mom.

  “Fine,” Kayla whispers.

  She keeps walking backward and rams her thigh into the corner of my desk. I see tears spring into the corners of her eyes, and I should say something kind and sympathetic. I should apologize.

  I just can’t.

  Then Kayla’s out the door. I don’t know where she goes. I don’t care. I stay huddled on my bed, because that’s all I can do.

  I don’t know how much time passes before I hear the door of the apartment banging open, and Dad crying breathlessly, “Avery? Avery, honey, where are you?”

  Then I find I can use my legs again. I spring up and go running toward him. I forget I was never going speak to him again. I reach him before he’s taken three steps past the front door. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and pulls me close.

  “Oh, Avery,” he breathes into my hair.

  I let him hug me. This is my dad—my daddy—who’s always been able to make things better.

  “I kept trying to call your mom from the cab getting here, but she never picked up,” he says. “You really should hear this . . . explanation . . . from both of us.”

  I shove back against Dad’s chest. I pull away from him.

  “I am not waiting until you fly Mom over here to talk to me,” I say. “Or until we go home.”

  “No, that wouldn’t be fair,” he mutters distractedly. He runs his fingers through his hair, and it sticks up in tufts. He doesn’t notice. “I was thinking we should bring her in remotely. She could Skype in and—”

  He’s reaching into his pocket like he wants to pull out his phone and try calling Mom again. I grab his wrist to stop him.

  “I just found out my mother isn’t my real mother, and you want to set up a conference call?” I ask incredulously.
r />   “Right, right,” he murmurs.

  “Wait—am I right that Mom isn’t my mom?” I wail.

  “No! I mean, she is your mom, but . . . Where’s Kayla? Did she see your birth certificate too?” Dad asks, glancing around. “If she did, then—”

  “Oh, Kayla,” I erupt, because how could he worry about her right now?

  Unless she really is his daughter too? Who knows who anyone’s parents are now?

  A floorboard in the hallway squeaks, and I see Kayla creeping out, her face tearstained, her hair tangled. But she doesn’t say anything. She is such a mouse. Such a timid, ugly, colorless little mouse.

  Dad actually goes to her and pats her shoulder.

  “I know this must seem very confusing to you,” he says. “We could have your mom talk to you by Skype. Or . . . you could just call her right now and let her explain her side of things . . . I’d let you use my phone. You could talk as long as you want.”

  “Mom’s at work right now, and she’s never allowed to get personal calls unless someone’s died,” Kayla says in the tiniest voice ever. “Besides. I don’t want to talk to my mom right now.”

  Dad grimaces.

  “Oh,” he says. “Then . . .”

  He squares his shoulders, and I can practically see him shifting into business executive mode. One time I overheard him on the phone with somebody he’d just had to fire. He’s got that same tone in his voice now, the tone that says, This is going to be a really unpleasant conversation, but I am the most patient man alive. No matter what you say, I will stay calm and reasonable. You will not even be able to tell that I have feelings.

  “Both of you, sit down,” Dad says, steering Kayla and me toward the couch. He sits down in the chair across from us.

  This apartment living room is tiny, but it feels like the narrow coffee table between the couch and the chair has grown. Dad might as well be on the other side of the Grand Canyon. Or like Mom: on the other side of the entire Atlantic Ocean.

  I want to ask, Why are you putting me with Kayla? Why isn’t it you and me on the couch and Kayla alone in the chair?

  But my throat seems to have grown shut. Or my vocal cords have stopped working. I can’t say anything.