The Summer of Broken Things

  Dad kind of grunts, “Uh-huh,” as he shifts gears. Kayla’s in the backseat looking out the window at the pine trees around us, and she doesn’t seem to hear.

  And suddenly I miss Mom. Mom’s the one who would get outraged along with me at things being misnamed. I can hear her in my head ranting, Words deceive. And they shouldn’t. Language should be precise and clear.

  “Claro,” I mutter to myself. In Spain, people say “claro” all the time—I think Señora Gomez is addicted to the term. But I’ve figured out people use it more like Sure, sure, uh-huh, okay, go on, than Clearly.

  Dad should have grunted, Claro, at me. I would have understood.

  And Mom should have called me by now. And Mom and Dad shouldn’t be getting a divorce. And they shouldn’t have hired Kayla’s mom to have me. . . .

  I guess I can’t really argue that last point. If they hadn’t hired some other woman to give birth to me—either Kayla’s mom, or somebody else—I wouldn’t even exist.

  I gasp. How is it that that never really occurred to me before now?

  Neither Dad nor Kayla look over at me to ask why I gasped. Dad’s still fighting with the gearshift. Kayla’s still staring out the window like she’s just a passenger on a bus with strangers.

  But words do deceive, Mom. I’ve got no idea which direction is west, because it’s almost noon and the sun is directly overhead. But I’m directing my thoughts across the Atlantic Ocean like they’re arrows I’m shooting at Mom. Take the word “mother.” Even if you forget how I was born, can someone still be considered an actual mother when you haven’t even bothered to try to contact your daughter in weeks? When your daughter is dealing with devastating news? News that’s pretty much all your fault?

  I’m kind of not even sure if I mean the whole surrogate-mother mess or the divorce.

  Mom asked for the divorce. But Dad argued with her just as much as she argued with him.

  And the surrogate-mother mess . . .

  Am I actually blaming Mom because she couldn’t have a baby without help?

  Dad grunts again, but it’s just because the gearshift won’t slide into place right. The car bucks a little.

  “Sorry,” he mutters. “It’s been a while since I’ve driven a stick. Especially in the mountains.”

  Before we left Madrid, Dad took a shower and combed his hair and put on a nice polo shirt and khakis. He switched back into his usual Mr. Workaholic mode so much that he put his laptop in the trunk, just in case something came up that needed his attention. I was even glad to see that, to see him acting normal.

  But his face still looks a little gray; his eyes still look puffy. Everything about him still looks . . .

  “Unloved” is the word that jumps into my mind.

  Words deceive. I love him. Mom must still love him too. She has to. Claro que si.

  That means “of course.”

  But if Dad looks this bad, I wonder what Mom looks like right now. What’s she been doing, all this time she hasn’t called or texted me?

  Dad pulls into a parking lot near the top of the mountain. He inches our car around one that’s abandoned between two rows of parked cars.

  “That’s not a parking space, is it, Dad?” I ask.

  He squints.

  “I’d say they forgot to put their parking brake on,” he says. “And so it’s been sliding downhill inch by inch. . . .”

  It sounds like he’s really talking about something else.

  “Shouldn’t we tell someone?” I ask. I remember how Kayla said sometimes I look like I did when I was five. Now I sound like a little kid.

  Back when I was five, I really did believe my parents could fix anything, between the two of them.

  “Uh, sure,” Dad says.

  After we park—and Dad presses down hard on our parking brake—he goes off to talk to a guy in a security uniform. The guy only shrugs.

  “There’s a funicular up to the cross at the top of the mountain,” Dad says when he comes back. “We should do that first, and then—”

  “Didn’t you see the signs on the way up?” Kayla asks. “The funicular’s cerrado. For repairs.”

  It’s like she doesn’t even realize she’s mixed Spanish with her English. I don’t care that much about funiculars. I’ve been on ones in Quebec and California and—maybe Pittsburgh? They go sooo slow.

  But I still burst out, “Is everything broken in Spain?”

  “Well, you know, the economy . . . ,” Dad begins. But even he seems to lose interest in explaining all the things Spain can’t afford to fix.

  We climb stairs to the enormous plaza that lies in front of a lineup of pillars. The plaza’s so broad you could play soccer here—it’s probably bigger than a regulation field.

  But if you kicked the ball too hard to the right, it’d go flying off the side of the mountain, into the pine trees below.

  It feels like we’re really high up. Even the air is different here—a lot cooler and clearer, somehow. Purer.

  “This view is amazing,” Kayla says grudgingly. As if she didn’t want to have to admire it.

  As if she wanted it to be a mediocre view, so she could tell herself, See? I really should have gone swimming.

  I feel a little guilty, and I don’t even know why.

  “You want to go over there to get pictures?” Dad asks, pointing toward the low wall at the edge of the plaza, with the blue sky and the evergreen trees and the whole valley spread out below. “Selfies, or whatever they’re called?”

  “Okay,” Kayla says.

  I try to remember the last time I posted anything to Instagram.

  When we get over to the wall, Kayla pulls out a prehistoric camera, the kind people used before there were smartphones.

  “I’m not very good at selfies,” she says. “Could you . . . ?”

  She holds out the camera to me.

  “Sure,” I say.

  I take a picture of her, but she’s not really smiling. Then she takes one of me and one of me and Dad together.

  “Have you had that camera all along?” I ask her.

  “Yes,” she says. “I just keep forgetting to use it. Too many other things to think about, I guess.”

  I realize I’ve totally forgotten to bring a phone. I tug on Dad’s arm.

  “Dad, can I use your phone, then send the pictures to myself when we get back to Madrid?” I ask.

  “You can do that?” he asks, raising his eyebrows and making his eyes widen in fake astonishment. “Kidding, kidding! I’m not that out of it.”

  I feel a little better. I take a few selfies, then we hand the phone around getting all the same combinations that Kayla already got.

  But I have better plans for my pictures . . . , I think.

  Just as Kayla’s taking the last picture, a man calls to us in an American accent, “Want me to take a picture for you of the whole family? You and both your girls?”

  I freeze. I can feel Dad’s arm go stiff against my shoulder. But he says, “That would be very nice.”

  Kayla crowds in, and Dad kind of fakes putting his arm around her the same way he has his other arm around me.

  “It is just the three of you, right?” the man says.

  Is there any way he could make this worse?

  “Yes,” Dad says, and even the most clueless person in the world should be able to tell that Dad’s gritting his teeth. But the too-friendly man hangs around to ask questions about where we’re from and why we’re in Spain. He tell us he was born in Chicago but lives in Atlanta now, and he sells computer software, and . . .

  “I’m sorry, but we really should go into the basilica now, if we’re going to make it to El Escorial this afternoon,” Kayla interrupts.

  “Oh, you haven’t even been over to that Escorial place yet?” the man says. “There are a lot of rooms in that palace. . . . Go! Go!”

  “Thank you,” Dad mutters to Kayla as we walk away.

  When did Dad become so helpless? He should have been able to get away from
that man all by himself.

  We pass through the pillars and step into the basilica, which looks like a hollowed-out cave. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust, but then I see a row of angels on columns. Except they look more like demons than angels, leering down from their pedestals. They’re terrifying.

  “I’ll warn you,” Dad says. “This is the creepiest church I’ve ever been in. We don’t have to stay long.”

  “It’s controversial, too, right?” Kayla asks, in a near whisper. “Because of how it was built?”

  “Huh?” I say.

  “Some of the workers were political prisoners, and critics say that was like using slave labor,” Dad whispers back. “They say it’s the same as Nazis using workers from concentration camps.”

  I feel sick to my stomach.

  And Dad’s right—this is a creepy church. It’s too dark, and I feel like the demon angels are watching me.

  “Why build a church on a mountain with a great view, if you’re just going to hide the whole thing underground, without windows?” I ask. “You know what Mom would say. ‘Natural light! Make use of the natural light! Fake it if you have to!’ ”

  And then I freeze, because Dad stops walking in front of me.

  I shouldn’t have said that around Dad.

  But Mom would want to fix this place, and suddenly I miss her so much I want to sob like a little baby. I miss her acting like better lighting and the right flower arrangement can work miracles, and a perfectly decorated room could change your life. I miss her always trying so, so hard to make everything look good. Even if it’s rotten underneath.

  I miss her acting like problems are things other people have.

  Not us, I think. Never us.

  “Franco’s tomb is up by the altar,” Kayla says, as if yammering on like a tour guide is going to make any difference. “It’s supposed to be really plain and understated. But he’s the only one buried within the monument grounds who didn’t die in the Spanish Civil War. There’s one other leader buried here in the church, and something like forty thousand people buried out in the valley.”

  I bet she just got that from Wikipedia. Unless those details were in one of the Spanish lessons I didn’t listen to last week.

  We start creeping forward again. Now there’s eerie music coming from speakers I can’t even see. We’re almost to the stone on the ground that says FRANCISCO FRANCO, when an old woman in front of us plants her feet before it and lifts her arm straight out from her body—exactly as if she’s saluting Hitler.

  “Dad—” I gasp.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says.

  We speed away from the altar as if we’re race-walkers. We burst out into the sunshine again, and now it feels too hot and too bright.

  “I thought Franco was a dictator,” I say. “I thought people were glad when he lost power. . . .”

  “I always heard that some of the older people were still loyal,” Dad murmurs, looking around as if he’s afraid of who might hear him. But the plaza is deserted now. “I’d just never met any of them.”

  “But if Franco had political prisoners and, and concentration camps . . . ,” I say. “Why did you bring us here?”

  “To Valle de los Caidos?” Dad asks.

  “To Spain.”

  “Franco and the concentration camps and even this monument—they’re Spain’s history,” Dad says gently. “Not Spain now.”

  “But that old woman—” Kayla interrupts.

  “She may not believe the stories about the concentration camps were ever true,” Dad says. “Or maybe she thought the prisoners deserved it. She may have felt like she had a pretty good life under Franco. To her, it was the good old days. When she was young. There are two sides to every story. Or . . . two hundred.”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore,” I say.

  “Right,” Dad says. But he just stands there, looking helpless and lost.

  “Lunch?” I remind him. Even on a Spanish meal schedule, it’s getting late for that.

  Dad kind of jerks back to attention, and we head back to the car.

  “Dad, can I have your phone again?” I ask.

  “Service is spotty out here,” Dad says. “I couldn’t even get e-mail when I looked a little while ago.”

  “I want to check my pictures,” I say.

  Dad hands over his phone.

  “Don’t run the battery down,” he says. “I forgot to charge it last night. And then I forgot to bring my charger.”

  As Dad backs out of our parking space, I click straight to the photos of Dad and me together at the edge of the mountain. My plan is to find the best one and edit it to perfection.

  Then tonight, when we’re back in Madrid, I’ll send it to Mom. It will be like a secret message: Look how happy we are without you! Look how beautiful everything is here! We don’t miss you at all! We don’t NEED you!

  But my hair’s blowing into my face in one of the photos, and Dad’s got his eyes shut in another. Our expressions aren’t right in the others.

  I switch to evaluating the pictures where Kayla’s with us, because wouldn’t that be even more of an annoyance to Mom, that someone like Kayla is taking her place as the third person in our family?

  But there’s something wrong with these pictures too. We all look really sad.

  That’s the problem with all the pictures: They tell the truth.

  Kayla, Descending

  Up in the front of the car, Avery and Mr. Armisted are talking about how far it is to the nearest town, and whether the restaurant where Mr. Armisted ate a delicious bull tail twenty years ago is still there.

  “Dad, the words ‘delicious’ and ‘bull tail’ do not belong in the same sentence!” Avery protests, and she sounds so much like her usual self that I’m relieved. It’s safe to tune her out.

  What I can’t get out of my head is that old woman saluting Franco, back at the basilica.

  She could have been Grandma. She could have been Mrs. Lang or Mrs. Harrison or any of the other old women back at Autumn Years. She had the same rounded belly that a lot of older women get, and she wore the same kind of sensible shoes, and she had the same wispy, old-lady white hair.

  And she had a soft, kindly old face like theirs. Except that her face stiffened with pride when her arm went up.

  So what? I tell myself. She wasn’t Grandma or any of your Autumn Years friends. She probably lived her whole life in Spain. Only the first part of it was under Franco. Grandma and your friends lived their whole lives in the United States. With democracy, and winning World War II, and winning the Cold War . . .

  And, okay, even Americans didn’t do very well with the Korean War or the Vietnam War. Or 9/11 or the Afghanistan War or Iraq. Or the Great Depression or the situation with farmers like Grandpa losing their farms in the eighties . . .

  Either way, it’s all history, and it’s over. And who cares?

  And Mom giving birth to Avery . . . Isn’t that just history too?

  I’m not sure what I’m getting at. I think about Mr. Armisted saying, To her, it was probably the good old days. When she was young. I think about how Mom makes excuses for Grandpa referring to her friend Sonia Lopez as “Mexican” instead of “Mexican American” because he grew up in a different time period. I think about how Avery told me way back at the Holocaust Museum that you’re not supposed to say the word “Gypsy.” She said it was like how you’re supposed to use the term “Native Americans,” not “Indians.”

  I didn’t know that.

  Before I came to Spain, I didn’t know that any other country besides the United States had had a civil war. I didn’t know that the term “civil war” meant a country fighting itself. I didn’t know much of anything.

  Except that I did.

  I knew that Mrs. Lang lost a baby the very day it was born, and for the past fifty-nine years she’s wondered if that child’s blue eyes would have stayed so blue and innocent if he’d lived, or if they would have turned an ordinary, muddy brown like everyon
e else’s in her family by the time of his first birthday.

  I knew that Grandpa still thinks about what he could have done differently to hold on to his farm back in the 1980s—if only he’d known that the spring and summer of 1982 was going to be so rainy all the way through, he wouldn’t have bothered going further into debt to buy more seed and replant the fields that flooded. Or maybe he shouldn’t have ever tried to buy more land; maybe he should have planted more soybeans and less corn that year the corn blight was so bad… If only, if only, if only.

  I knew that Grandma had a pair of red patent leather shoes when she was six, and that made her feel like the most special child in her entire Sunday school class. Even though she knew it was prideful and wrong to be looking around at the other girls’ shoes when she should have been learning about Jesus.

  I knew that one of the things that made my mother fall in love with my father was the way he could run down the football field, shaking off opponents like they were nothing but thistledown. The way he made it seem like nobody and nothing could stop him.

  Mom never told me that story—Grandma did. Grandma Butts, that is—the one who moved to Florida because she couldn’t take seeing her beautiful running son trapped in a bed the rest of his life, barely able to move.

  There are two sides to every story, Mr. Armisted said. Or . . . two hundred.

  And I see now how much all the old people’s stories I know are just that—stories. It’s like they’re reshaping how they see their lives every time they retell their pasts: those innocent blue eyes . . . more soybeans, less corn . . . red patent leather shoes . . . he ran like the wind . . .

  Probably, the woman who saluted Franco more than forty years after his death does that too.

  I understand old people so well.

  Can I really understand anyone else? Even my mother?

  Even myself?

  I think about how the old people are always telling me to pray. But their prayers are always about acceptance: Oh Lord, let me accept my arthritis/broken hip/lost children/husband’s death.

  I think, back in Crawfordsville, I accepted way too much.