The Summer of Broken Things

  But I’m lost. I can’t stop crying. I don’t have anything to hold on to at all.

  Except Kayla.

  Kayla, Trying to Hold It Together

  I have Mr. Armisted’s phone in my hand. I’m gripping it so tightly it cuts ridges into my skin.

  All I want to do is call my mother.

  My mommy.

  But it’s not really fair to do that in front of Avery, and anyhow, I already know what my mom would tell me to do right now: Take care of Avery, while the poor girl doesn’t even know if her father is alive or dead.

  That’s like what my mother has done for the past sixteen years: taken care of me, while my father hangs in his weird limbo between life and death. I can see it; I can feel it, everything my mother did that was for me, not for herself: moving back to Crawfordsville, where Grandma and Grandpa could take care of me while she worked. Taking a job at the nursing home, where a lot of the time they’d let her bring me to work with her.

  Not divorcing my dad, not leaving him behind the same way his own parents did.

  The same way Avery’s mother wants to leave Avery’s dad. She wanted to leave him even before he was a body on a stretcher.

  “Avery,” I say gently. “I think I have to give them your mom’s name and phone number. Because they are still married.”

  Avery’s holding on to my arm even tighter than I’m holding on to the phone. She buries her wet face against my shoulder.

  “You should probably call your mom first,” I say. “To warn her. Let her know you’re all right.”

  A sob wracks Avery’s body so hard that I shake too.

  “You,” she wails. “You call. I can’t.”

  I gulp. I pull up the right number and put the phone to my ear. I want Avery’s mom to answer and say, Okay, then. Thank you for calling, Kayla. I’ll take care of everything from here. I wouldn’t even care if she said it rudely. Like, You’re dismissed now, servant.

  But I get her voice mail, a brisk, professional explanation of how the renowned interior decorator Celeste Armisted is unavailable at this time, but she will respond to messages in a timely fashion.

  It’s almost a jolt to hear English from someone besides Avery. I don’t think anybody at this hospital knows anything but Spanish. But of course Avery’s mom is in a different country from us, on a different continent, even in a different time. It’s still Saturday morning for her, and we’re caught in the longest afternoon of my life.

  The beep startles me, and I begin my message badly. “Um . . . .” But then I recover. “Mrs. Armisted, this is Kayla Butts. I’m at the hospital with Avery. Avery’s fine, but I think your husband had a heart attack. Avery and I did CPR, but . . . now we’re waiting. The hospital might call you. But call Avery back. Please. On this phone. And, oh, it’s the hospital in El Es—”

  A second beep cuts me off, and I hang up. She can call back if she wants to know more.

  “Told you,” Avery whimpers. “Told you she wouldn’t care.”

  “She was probably just away from her phone,” I say, and now I sound as brisk and heartless as Mrs. Armisted’s answering machine. “She’ll call back.”

  The phone doesn’t ring.

  Should I call Mr. Armisted’s office, even though Avery told me not to? Should I text or call Dragomir or Andrei? Susan? Hugh? Señora Gomez?

  Before I can decide, Avery straightens up and peers at the paperwork lady. She keeps her death grip on my arm, but there’s a fierceness in her face that wasn’t there before.

  “Nobody else is going to come,” she hisses at the paperwork lady in Spanish. She even gets the verb tenses right. “My dad doesn’t have anyone but me. And Kayla. So you have to tell us what’s happening. How my dad is. We have to know.”

  Oh, Avery, no, I think. Didn’t you see how long we did CPR on him, and he didn’t come back? Don’t you know you’re asking for bad news here? Don’t you see how they’re waiting for someone official to show up—some adult who can take responsibility?

  But Avery’s right. There isn’t anyone coming. There isn’t anybody to summon. Señora Gomez is not the comforting type. She’s never given any sign that she’s anything but a Spanish-speaking robot. And I like the other kids from our class—Susan could be particularly helpful, with her obsession with speaking perfect Spanish. But the kids I like annoy Avery.

  And she really hates Susan.

  Doubt crosses the paperwork lady’s face. And . . . maybe sympathy.

  “Uno momento,” she says, holding up one finger.

  She slips out from behind her desk and walks out the door.

  We wait, clutching each other’s arms.

  I try to think how I’m going to console Avery when the bad news comes. I know all the things you murmur when old people die: He’s in a better place. He had a good life. Everyone could see how much he loved you. I’m sorry for your loss. May God comfort you. May your memories comfort you.

  A lot of the dead people I knew also had do-not-resuscitate orders. They didn’t want to be brought back if their hearts stopped. They were ready to be done with life.

  Mr. Armisted wasn’t that old.

  He isn’t.

  A man in scrubs appears in the doorway. His face is grim, and Avery begins to sob just at the sight of him.

  “He’s dead, right?” she wails, and manages to switch to Spanish: “¿Muerto? ¿Muerto?”

  The man—a doctor?—rushes over to pat her shoulder.

  “No, no, no!” he cries. He lets out a burst of Spanish that includes the same word again and again: cirugía. But neither of us knows what that means. Finally, I hold out Mr. Armisted’s phone.

  “Type it,” I say, and I don’t know if I’ve said that in Spanish or if the doctor understands my English, or if he just figures out what I mean because I’m shoving the phone into his hands. But he types in the word, and I hit the translate key, and the English word appears.

  “Surgery!” I scream. “He’s in surgery!”

  “He’s still alive!” Avery cries. But then her face falls. “What kind of surgery? How serious is it?”

  “Cirugía de bypass,” the doctor says, and I don’t need help understanding that.

  Avery’s face quivers, as if she’s struggling to hold back more sobs, struggling to keep from falling apart again.

  “Can we . . . ,” she begins, and gulps. “Is there anything we . . .”

  “Rezad,” the paperwork lady says. It’s another word I don’t know, but I don’t need to look it up.

  She’s telling us to pray.

  Or maybe she’s saying she’ll pray for us herself—it all kind of feels like the same thing.

  The doctor leaves and the paperwork lady leads us out into an open waiting room, and then Avery surprises me by saying, “You should call your mom.”

  “What? Why—?”

  Has Avery read my mind?

  Does she think she can boss me around? Even now?

  But this is entirely different from when she told me to read my mother’s e-mail.

  “We’ve got one functioning parent between the two of us right now,” Avery says. “Call.”

  And it’s funny—it’s like she’s allowed to say things like that to me now. It’s okay that she’s kind of putting her mother and my father in the same category.

  Because we don’t know what category her father’s going into next.

  In a daze, I click on my mother’s contact information and lift the phone. I hear my mother’s phone ringing. All the way across the ocean, all the way back in Crawfordsville, Ohio, I know her her phone is sending out a Taylor Swift song. I downloaded it for her myself. That was one of my birthday gifts to her.

  She might be working, I think. She might have picked up somebody else’s Saturday shift. . . .

  But she answers: “Hello?”

  I hear the hesitation in her voice, because this is Mr. Armisted’s phone. This isn’t how she would answer if she knew it was me.

  “Mom?” I say. “Mommy? I love you.
I miss you so much. . . .”

  And that’s when the phone goes dead.

  Avery, Who Can Actually Be a Nice Person

  “Does anybody have a phone charger?” I shriek as Kayla sits there staring at the blank screen on Dad’s phone. I remember Dad saying he forgot to charge it overnight; he forgot to bring a charger. That seemed a lifetime ago.

  A lifetime . . .

  Around the waiting room, Spanish faces stare blankly at me.

  “¿Un telefono?” I try again. “Uh . . .” I don’t know the Spanish word for “charger.” I mime shoving a plug into the wall behind me.

  A haggard-faced woman hesitantly brings over a cord, but it’s not the right type. There are only seven or eight other people in the waiting room, and they all either offer up choices that don’t work or apologetically shake their heads.

  “It’s okay,” Kayla whispers. “I said what I wanted to. She’ll know . . .”

  I dig into Kayla’s purse and pull out her burner phone. I press it into her hands.

  “Call her back!”

  “But—your dad said not to use this one for international calls. He said it costs, like, a dollar a minute. . . .”

  “I’ll pay,” I say. “Talk as long as you like. Because you can. Because your mother wants to talk to you.”

  Kayla’s eyes flood with tears, and she hugs me. She keeps her arm around my shoulder even as she dials the phone. And I’m not trying to eavesdrop, but she is talking right in my ear. She sounds more and more like a hick from the country, the longer she talks to her mom. It’s as if she’s picking up an old accent, one I hadn’t even noticed her losing.

  But I like it. It’s what makes Kayla Kayla. And . . . it’s kind of how my dad sounds sometimes, when he starts talking about his life back when he was a kid.

  “Tell Mr. Wilkins when you see him at church that I wouldn’t have known how to do CPR if he hadn’t drilled us again and again in health class,” Kayla says. “All those signs he told us to look for . . . I remembered them all. I didn’t remember until afterward that I was supposed to use the rhythm of that song ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ but . . . I did my best. And tell Grandpa I shifted gears three—no, four!—times without killing the engine. I wouldn’t have known how to do that without him.”

  Is she going to end up thanking everybody in Crawfordsville?

  Maybe she wants to thank everybody in Crawfordsville.

  Kayla finishes the story of where we are now, what’s happening with my dad. And suddenly they’re talking about Kayla’s mom giving birth to me.

  “Mom, it’s okay,” Kayla says. “I understand. None of that matters now.”

  She sounds like she means it. Is it that easy to let go?

  “Can I talk to your mom?” I whisper to Kayla. “When you’re done, I mean.”

  “Um, sure,” Kayla says.

  She hands me the phone immediately.

  “Mrs. Butts?” I say. “I just . . . Whatever happens, I need to thank you. Thank you for helping my parents the way you did. And me. I wouldn’t be here without you.”

  It’s the most basic thing in the world, a statement of the obvious. But I hear her gasp as if I’ve given her some huge gift.

  Maybe it’s not such a basic thing. Doctors said my mother couldn’t give birth, which meant that someone with my combination of genes would probably never exist. But I do. I’m here. I’m alive. Thanks to Mrs. Butts. My hands throb—hands with DNA from both my parents, hands that just worked so hard trying to save my father’s life.

  I can’t take anything about life for granted right now. Mine or Dad’s or anybody’s.

  “Oh, Avery, honey—can I do anything for you now?” Mrs. Butts says. “Is there anyone I can call for you from here, anything I can—?”

  “No,” I say. “Kayla’s taking care of me.”

  And it strikes me how true this is. I’d probably still be sitting in the car by the roundabout, sobbing my eyes out, if it weren’t for Kayla. Even if it had occurred to me to do CPR, I couldn’t have driven the car to the hospital. Who knows how long it would have taken for someone to come along and help?

  Daddy would have died if I’d been alone.

  It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. I wasn’t alone.

  Then Kayla leans over and says into the phone, “You can pray.”

  “Oh, honey, I will,” Mrs. Butts says, and her voice is so soothing it’s like a balm flowing over me. “I’ll call up the church and get them to add Avery’s dad to the prayer chain as soon as I hang up. And I’ll call the prayer chain at the nursing home, and probably some of those ladies will call their churches. . . . You’ll have the whole town of Crawfordsville praying for the three of you!”

  After we hang up, Kayla says in an embarrassed voice, “You probably think that’s foolish, getting people you don’t even know to pray for you.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t.” I hesitate. “What you kept saying in the car—‘Please, God, please, God’—that was a prayer, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure felt like it,” Kayla says. She looks down at her hands. “It felt like those were the words giving me power. That wouldn’t let me give up. I—I’ve never felt like that before, praying.”

  “Dad always wanted me to go to Sunday school and church when I was little,” I say. “But Mom didn’t.”

  “Huh,” Kayla says. “I don’t think I ever had the right attitude either.”

  We’re silent for a minute, leaning against each other.

  “How long do you think we gave Dad CPR?” I ask. “When his heart wasn’t beating on its own?”

  “Did the sign back at the roundabout say how far it was to the hospital?” Kayla says.

  I shrug.

  “Wish Dad’s phone still worked, and we could look it up,” I mutter. Then—“Oh! His laptop! There’s Wi-Fi here, right?”

  Five minutes later—after I find the car and figure out how to unlatch the trunk—I have Dad’s laptop set up and I’m peering at Google Maps.

  “It says it’s only ninety-seven meters from the roundabout to the hospital,” I tell Kayla. On the computer, I convert the metric. “That’s not even a tenth of a mile.”

  “But look at the map—that’s only to the driveway to the hospital,” Kayla says. “It felt more like ninety-seven miles.”

  “I don’t think we were thinking clearly,” I say.

  I don’t feel like I’m thinking clearly now, either. I start a different search: “heart bypass surgery.”

  “The surgery could take three to six hours?” I moan to Kayla. I start typing in “survival rates of . . . ,” but Kayla stops me.

  “Don’t,” she says quietly.

  “What else am I supposed to do?” I ask. “That’s all I care about!”

  “Those won’t tell you if your dad is going to live or die,” Kayla says. “Just the possibilities. Probability. Chance.”

  She takes control of the keyboard.

  “How about . . . Do you want to read the rest of my mother’s e-mails with me?” Kayla asks, her fingers poised over the keys. “Mom said when I wouldn’t answer, she just kept writing more and more about why she did it, what it was like to be pregnant with you, how it felt seeing you and me playing together, all those years ago . . .”

  “But you got so mad when I read your e-mail before!” I protest.

  “Now I’m inviting you to,” Kayla says. “That’s different.”

  We bend our heads together and start reading, and it’s like seeing my entire life in another way.

  I learn that Kayla’s mom has prayed for me every single day I’ve been alive. The same way she’s prayed for Kayla every single day Kayla has been alive.

  I learn that when the doctor put me in my mother’s arms, my mother cried and cried and cried and everybody thought she was sad, but she said, “No, no! It’s joy! I didn’t know it was possible to feel this happy!”

  I learn that Kayla’s mom felt horrible and wonderful all at once, watching my parents walk out of the hospital
with me in Mom’s arms, Dad’s arm around her waist.

  Some emotions are just braided together too tight to know what exactly you feel, she wrote.

  And that makes so much sense, because it’s so nice to read about how much my parents wanted me back then. It’s so nice to lean against Kayla and have her arm around me, holding me together.

  But what about my parents now? What’s going to happen now?

  It starts getting dark outside, and I have to squint at the screen.

  “Do you realize we never ate lunch?” Kayla asks. “Do you want me to go look for a vending machine, or a cafeteria, or—”

  “Don’t be away long,” I beg, “in case someone comes back with news. . . .”

  Kayla goes and asks the woman at the desk something, and then she disappears down a hallway. She comes back with bags of chips and cookies, and cans of Coke Light.

  “I know you like healthy food,” she apologizes. “But this was the best I could find in the vending machine.” She holds up a red bag. “They even had Doritos. Like it was the most ordinary thing ever. Do you suppose there are Doritos all over the place in Spain, and I just never looked in the right places?”

  “We’ve only been in Spain for three weeks,” I tell her. “There are lots of things here we never saw.”

  I open a potato chip bag and feel eyes on me. It’s like everyone in the waiting room is watching us, even though their eyes dart away when I gaze in their direction.

  “¿Quereis esto?” I ask, holding out an unopened bag, offering it around.

  I see a lot of shaking heads. A little kid—three years old? Four?—starts to reach for it, but his mother pulls his hand back and whispers in his ear.

  Okay, that was probably a cultural no-no. I was too much of the eager-beaver Americana, acting like we’re all in this together, instead of a bunch of strangers in the same room pretending not to notice each other.

  The haggard-looking woman even stalks out through the glass doors. I see her drive away.

  But then she’s back, holding out Styrofoam containers of real food to us: papas bravas, and thick slabs of meat . . . Maybe it’s even beef tongue, one of those weird things Europeans eat but Americans mostly don’t. But I don’t care.