And that doesn’t stop the nagging voice in my head, Maybe I should read Mom’s e-mail. All I have to do is pick up the iPad, and . . .
I have to get out of this apartment.
I hang up my wet clothes and go stand in the living room. I should walk out onto the balcony again and let Mr. Armisted know where I’m going, so he doesn’t worry. But I can see through the glass that he’s got his face buried in his hands again; his shoulders shake with sobs.
Not my problem, I tell myself, steeling my heart. My mother gave him and his wife a baby, and they still couldn’t be happy. They raised Avery to be a spoiled brat, and they wouldn’t even tell her what my mom did for them. I’m not helping Mr. Armisted. I’m not a little kid anymore, taking Kleenex around the nursing home to crying men. I don’t have to do anything.
Thinking this way makes me feel guilty. But I don’t slide open the glass door and step out onto the balcony. I leave a note on the kitchen table: I decided to go on to Spanish class late. I think Avery is still sleeping, so I didn’t bother her. I’ll be back this afternoon the usual time.
Will Avery or Mr. Armisted even miss me? Will they notice my note? Or read it?
Like I’m not reading Mom’s e-mail . . .
I make myself hurry down the stairs, so I can’t focus on anything but trying not to fall.
I don’t realize until I’m at the very bottom, but I’ve managed to speed down the entire staircase without taking a single break.
And I’m not even panting.
Because you went down, I remind myself. Down is always easier than up.
Out on the street, I hesitate. I can’t really see going to Spanish class this late. Everyone would stare.
I test myself: What? Do you think they could take one look at you and know you found out last night that your mother was . . . what she was? Or that the Armisteds, the people you once thought of as the perfect family, are getting divorced?
Of course no one in the Spanish class could figure that out just by looking at me.
But Andrei would be able to tell that something was wrong, I think. He’d notice. He’d ask. Maybe Dragomir would too. And then what would I want to tell them?
I don’t want to tell anyone anything. It doesn’t even matter that I don’t know enough Spanish to describe my problems, anyway—probably having people ask would be enough to make me cry. I’d make a fool of myself in front of everyone.
I walk to Puerta del Sol and go down into the Metro, but I take the subway to the Atocha train station, not to Spanish class.
I’m going back to the blue room.
Even knowing it’s there, I still have to wander for a while through the train station to find it. I’m starting to wonder if it was just a mirage last night—or like that old musical Grandma and Grandpa like, “Brigadoon,” where a whole town shows up only one day every hundred years.
Maybe it only shows up for people who need it.
Maybe I don’t actually need it today.
Just when I’m about to give up, I see the window of thick, wavery glass. I see the door and the solemn attendant beside it.
“Can I go in?” I ask her.
“Oh, yes,” she says, in English. I have to strain to understand even those basic words. “Here, take a brochure.”
She escorts me through the double sets of doors, making sure the one closes behind us before she opens the next. Is she afraid birds will fly out or in? Or bugs?
We finally get to the blue room, and she leaves me alone with the emptiness and the silence. And the brochure in my hand.
It’s in Spanish.
“Monumento en recuerdo de las victimas del 11-M,” it says on the front.
I don’t know what “recuerdo” means. I’ve never heard of the victims of 11-M.
I open the brochure and it seems to be more about the building of the monument than the victimas del 11-M. It’s like whoever wrote the brochures thought everyone would already know about 11-M. Finally I see a paragraph that includes the words sufridos en Madrid el 11 de marzo de 2004.
Something happened on March 11, 2004.
Does “sufridos” mean “suffered”?
I can’t figure out much else on that page. Knowing that “entre” means “between,” doesn’t help when that’s practically the only word I understand in an entire sentence. My eyes glide over the beginning of the next paragraph, but I can actually puzzle out the words at the end.
. . . al mismo tiempo, con todos los que han sufrido la violencia terrorista.
What happened on March 11, 2004, must have been a terrorist attack. And the con todos part means that this memorial connects to everyone who suffered from terrorism.
I feel even more like I belong here.
I wasn’t even born yet when September 11, 2001, happened, but it changed my life.
Before that, my father was taking community college classes, planning to become a firefighter. Maybe a paramedic, too.
But after September 11, he thought it was his duty as an American to join the military, to go off and fight the people who wanted to attack us.
That’s how Mom and Grandma and Grandpa always explained it. That’s what my other grandparents say too, though they moved to Florida after Dad’s accident and we don’t see them very often.
If Dad hadn’t joined the marines, he wouldn’t have been in his buddy’s car the night of the accident. He wouldn’t have even known the man.
He wouldn’t have been stuck in a VA nursing home for fourteen years, unable even to say my name. He’d be a paramedic or firefighter in Crawfordsville, saving other people’s lives.
If Dad hadn’t joined the marines, Mom wouldn’t have been in California at the same time as the Armisteds. She wouldn’t have been there to give birth to Avery. Would Mom have become a surrogate mother if she’d stayed in Ohio?
Would Avery even exist?
Everything feels balanced in this room, where the air isn’t allowed to go in or out, and consoling and sorrowful words swirl together above my head.
Mom says when bad things happen, you can always find good things in the results, if you look hard enough. She says it’s like a balance sheet, and the good things are what you have to focus on. But I’ve never seen a counterbalance before for Dad’s accident. If he’d been hurt in battle, it would have been He was injured defending his country. He sacrificed for us all. But his accident was just a mistake. It was bad, and it ruined his life. It kind of ruined Mom’s and mine too.
Mom was already pregnant with Avery when Dad had his accident, I tell myself. One thing didn’t cause the other.
Am I trying to say it would have been okay for Dad to be hurt so badly—so badly he almost died—if it happened in exchange for Avery getting to live? To exist at all?
Because of course Avery’s life would be worth more than my dad’s? Is that what I’m working toward?
I’m mad again. But it’s like this room with its blue walls and its funnel of words can absorb my anger.
I sit there until it starts to get too hot. It’s like being in a greenhouse—the light from overhead is too focused.
And I’m hungry. Grapes and an apple aren’t much of a breakfast.
It kind of feels good to be able to think of something that simple. I’m hungry; I should eat.
I stuff the “Victims of 11-M” brochure in my pocket and walk out of the blue room. I don’t want to go back to the apartment—and anyhow, there’s barely any food there. I decide to go to Pans, the place Avery and I ate our first day. I could order by pointing, if I have to. But as I’m walking in that direction, I pass a sign that says 100 MONTADITOS, and something clicks in my brain.
“100 montaditos” means something like “a hundred sandwiches.” This is the restaurant chain that Dragomir and Andrei talk about constantly, where you check off what you want on a piece of paper, and you don’t even have to ask out loud for what you want.
“Muy bien para mi,” Dragomir said, and pantomimed how he could gobble down all sorts o
f food at a 100 Montaditos, but he starves at a restaurant where the waiters have to understand him. His pantomime even showed the waiters in regular restaurants bringing him weird things—shoes, an umbrella, an old belt—rather than actual food. And then he’d pretend to try to eat it.
At least, I think I understood Dragomir’s pantomimes. He was probably mostly joking, because if he really wanted to, he could always use the translation app on his phone.
I go into the 100 Montaditos. I’m still not really sure what I’m ordering, but I end up with a lot of little sandwiches and a pile of French fries and a Coke.
See? I did this by myself. I don’t need you, Avery. I don’t need you, Mr. Armisted.
The food makes me happy.
After lunch, I walk around. And it’s crazy, because it’s really hot and I’m still avoiding reading my mother’s e-mail, and who knows what I’m going to face when I go back to the apartment. But I am still happy. As long as I keep walking, I don’t have to think about much of anything.
I see a Hard Rock Cafe on the Gran Via.
I see fancy stores, and women walking out of those fancy stores who look like they just bought everything straight off the mannequins.
I see the Plaza Mayor, this huge open square that doesn’t even look real. It looks like something out of a movie.
I see the royal palace.
I see an Egyptian temple that came straight from Egypt and was rebuilt here. I don’t know why there would be an Egyptian temple in Madrid, but there is.
When my feet get tired—beyond tired—I sit down in a park where there’s a statue of a man on a horse and another man beside him on a donkey or a mule. A tour bus pulls up behind me and a bunch of old people hobble off. I think they’re all Japanese, and they’re obviously not nursing home residents if they’re traveling the world. But watching them makes me think of everyone back at Autumn Years. They hold on to one another’s elbows; they give one another a hand down from the last step of the bus.
They’re not here alone, I think. And suddenly the huge pile of 100 Montaditos food doesn’t feel so good in my stomach.
“Listen up! Listen up!” a young, non-Japanese woman with a bullhorn calls to them in English. “This is the Plaza de España. The man depicted seated in the chair on that pillar over there is Miquel de Cervantes, commonly regarded as the best writer in Spanish literature. And in front of him are his most beloved creations, Don Quixote and his trusty sidekick, Sancho Panza. In his travels, Don Quixote thought he was on a noble quest, but most of his efforts were misguided. He is known for tilting at windmills . . .”
The Japanese tourists take picture after picture.
I think about my mother.
Mr. Armisted wants me to think that she did something great, being a surrogate mother. Like she was on some noble quest.
I decide I like the word “misguided.”
If she thought she was doing something noble, why else would she keep everything secret for the past fourteen years?
One of the Japanese men lowers his camera.
“What means, ‘tilting at windmills’?” he asked.
The guide seems rattled, as if she’s so used to saying the same words every time, she’s forgotten they have any meaning.
“He—¿como se dice?—he saw windmills, and he thought they were fearsome beasts he had to slay,” she says. “So he tried to fight the windmills. He thought he was heroic, but he was loco, a crazy man trying to fight a windmill.”
The Japanese man still looks confused—I mean, the guide’s accent makes her English hard for even me to understand. But the statue guy on the horse does look foolish.
It’d be embarrassing to be his sidekick.
It’s embarrassing to be my mother’s daughter. . . .
I don’t want to think about my mother anymore. But when I stand up, my legs ache. I have a blister starting on each of my big toes where my flip-flops rub. I decide I can go back to the apartment. I can hole up in my room, just like Avery’s doing, and I can watch YouTube videos without opening Mom’s e-mail.
I can be that strong.
It seems to take forever to get back to the apartment building. When I step into the lobby, I see that the mailman is just leaving.
Checking the mail gives me an excuse to put off climbing the stairs. But as soon as I unlock and open the box, I realize I’ve made a mistake.
There’s a letter from Grandma.
Avery, Stuck
I sleep. I wake up. I cry. I go back to sleep.
I’m not even sure what day it is anymore. Friday? Saturday? Sunday?
Isn’t anybody ever going to come for me?
Kayla, Confounded
Grandma knew all along, I think. And now she’s writing me too, to persuade me that . . .
What? What would Grandma want me to think about Mom being a surrogate mother?
I can’t help myself. I slide my finger under the flap of the envelope and rip it open. I pull out a thick sheaf of pages.
As soon as I see the date at the top of the first page, I realize my mistake. It’s from last week, from the day after I arrived in Madrid. It’s a letter. It took days to get here. It’s not going to tell me what Grandma wants me to know now, only what she wanted to tell me last week.
I see Grandpa’s goofily tilted writing in the middle of the page too.
This isn’t going to say anything about surrogate mothers or Mom giving birth to Avery, I tell myself. It’s perfectly safe to read this.
Except for the fact that just seeing Grandma’s firm, precise script and Grandpa’s helter-skelter scrawling brings tears to my eyes.
I start reading the letter anyway.
Dear Kayla,
I hope getting this letter doesn’t make you homesick. I remember sometimes when I was about your age and I’d go spend the night with my cousins, I’d get a little homesick. And that was still in Ohio (you remember, my cousins lived in Cleveland. The big-city part of the family.), and I was with people I’d known all my life.
But your grandfather and I were talking, and we miss you, and we thought maybe we could help you with something you’re having a problem with. And then it would be like you weren’t so far away.
I know you said the washing machine where you’re living isn’t working right, and maybe by the time you get this, that Mr. Armisted will have figured out a way to fix it. But your mom says he’s some big businessman, and you know how your Grandpa’s always saying that the more money someone has, sometimes that means he has less sense. Your Grandpa has always been good at fixing anything with a motor—you know, he had to do that all the time on the farm. He basically kept the whole place running with baling wire and WD-40. So, anyhow, we thought he could tell you all the things to look for. And maybe if you can fix that washing machine yourself, you won’t have to worry if Mr. Armisted is a little absentminded. It’s always good to know how to take care of things yourself.
I sink down and sit on the bottom step of the stairs. Grandma writes exactly the same way she talks. And this is crazy. If Grandpa really wanted to tell me how to fix the washing machine—er, washer—he could have done it any one of the days we’d Skyped. But I flip through the pages, and he has diagrams and drawings of exact sizes of belts and bolts. . . .
Maybe he couldn’t have done this in a Skype, I think.
Unlike Grandma’s words, Grandpa’s are all technical. If my eyes weren’t so blurry with tears, I could study his drawings and know everything there is to know about washers.
At least, what they were like in about 1970.
The front door of the apartment building rattles, like someone’s put a key in the lock. I haven’t actually met any of our neighbors yet, and I don’t want to try having a conversation in Spanish when I can’t even see straight. I grip Grandma and Grandpa’s letter and start rushing up the stairs.
By the time I get up to our floor, I’m gasping for air. But I stand on the landing for a few minutes catching my breath before I unlock the apartment
door. I tiptoe in.
The coast is clear. Mr. Armisted must still be out on the balcony. Avery must still be in her room.
I’m hot and sweaty, but I just splash water on my face in the bathroom, rather than taking a full shower. The washer is actually in the bathroom. I don’t have any confidence that I could fix it, even with a million diagrams from Grandpa, but I feel like I ought to at least make an effort.
His first direction is Scoot the washer out from the wall so you can see, and I’m pretty sure I can do that much.
I grab the washer on each side and tug it forward. There’s a clunking sound in the back.
Seriously? I already made things worse?
I peek over the back edge of the washer. Oh. The cord just fell to the floor. It must not have been plugged in all the way.
Not plugged in all the way?
I realize what this means. I stuff the plug in the outlet, making sure to line up the holes and the weird round metal tips, which look so different from the prongs on American plugs. The plug goes in securely. I hit one of the buttons on the front panel, and it lights up.
The washer was never broken. It just wasn’t plugged in all the way. We could have been using it all along. I wouldn’t have had to wash anything in the sink.
I laugh giddily. I’ve been perfectly fine being alone all day, but I want to share this news with somebody.
If I told Avery, she’d just snarl, like she did the first day, Who cares? It’s just a washer.
She probably owns so many clothes, she doesn’t even need to wash anything.
If I told Mr. Armisted, he’d probably just look sadder, and say what he said out on the balcony: Believe it or not, I used to be good at things like that.
I leave the washer flashing numbers and possible commands, and I go out and grab the iPad from the kitchen table. I type a message to Mom: