The Summer of Broken Things

  “Gracias,” Kayla and I say, over and over again. “Gracias.”

  We are all in this together. Everyone in this room is either sick or hurt, or waiting and worrying about someone who is sick or hurt.

  I do feel a little better after eating real food.

  We wait some more. The room starts to empty out, one cluster after another called back. New people arrive. But nobody comes for Kayla and me. Hours pass. Lifetimes. Eternities.

  And then a man in scrubs steps out from behind a screen and says, “¿Familia de David Armisted?”

  He motions us toward the screen, but I’ve lost the ability to move. I think if I tried to stand up, I’d only fall over.

  “¡Digame!” I beg. “¡Por favor digame ahora! ¡Aquí!”

  He has to tell me here and now.

  “La operación fue un éxito,” he says.

  I look to Kayla to see if she understands, but her face is blank too.

  The man pulls a Spanish-English dictionary from under his arm. The paperback is so battered, it looks like it’s been hanging around this hospital since before the Internet was invented. The man starts leafing through it slowly, searching for the right word.

  But it doesn’t matter, because the people around us start cheering: “¡Que bien!” “¡Buenas noticias!”

  And then the man in scrubs is pointing to two words paired together:

  Éxito—success.

  The operation was a success.

  Kayla, Drained

  We wait and wait and wait some more, and finally we’re allowed to go see Mr. Armisted. I hang back, walking into his room, but Avery tugs me forward, whispering, “We both saved his life. He’s going to want to thank us both.”

  I bet Avery will never, ever, ever let her father forget she saved his life.

  I bet he won’t mind.

  Mr. Armisted’s face is almost as white as his pillow, and the hugs we give him have to be very, very gentle. But his smile is broad.

  “I think it was a really good idea, bringing you both to Spain with me,” he murmurs groggily.

  “Me too,” Avery whispers back.

  Avery and I fall asleep in chairs on either side of Mr. Armisted’s bed. At three a.m., I wake up when a nurse comes in to check on him, but she pats my arm and puts a finger to her lips, like everything’s okay and it’s fine to go back to sleep.

  Then she leaves, and I’m still awake. And I remember that the rental car that’s sitting out in the hospital parking lot was supposed to be turned back in six hours ago.

  None of us thought about that before, when we didn’t know if Mr. Armisted was going to live or die.

  I pick up my purse and creep out into the hallway, so I can go someplace where I won’t disturb anyone if I call the rental car company and explain for Mr. Armisted. But when I pull out my burner phone, it’s dead too. And of course I don’t have the charger, because when we left Madrid, I thought we were only taking an afternoon trip.

  Like the three-hour tour from Gilligan’s Island, I think, and giggle.

  It feels okay to giggle again.

  In the darkened hallway, I can’t read any names on the patients’ doors, and the hallway curves enough that I can see only the barest glow of an exit sign—I can’t make out the red letters that spell out “salida.” It feels like I could be in any hospital, anywhere in the world.

  I think about my mom staying with my dad at the hospital after his accident fourteen years ago. There must have been nights like these when she wandered the halls, wondering what was going to happen next.

  My dad had some operations that were successes. But he never got the news we heard the doctor tell Mr. Armisted, right before we all fell asleep: “Once you heal, you’ll be able to resume all your normal activities.”

  My dad never got to be normal again.

  I don’t have any memories of him before his accident, and yet it’s him I ache with missing right now, as I stand here in this dark hospital corridor in the middle of the night.

  There’s a special wink he has, whenever I walk into the room, that lets me know he’s glad I’m there.

  My mom said in one of her e-mails that every time she goes to see him this summer, he looks around and looks around, and she has to explain that I’m still not back from Spain. And then he looks sad but not too sad—as Mom put it, “He’s also happy you’re getting opportunities he and I never had.”

  I think Mom wants to think that’s how Dad feels.

  But, for all that my father hasn’t been able to speak to me in fourteen years, I still feel like I know him. And I love him.

  A lot of kids do worse in the parents lottery.

  I’m thinking about Avery’s mom, who hasn’t called her even once since Avery found out she had a surrogate mother.

  Then I think about my mother fourteen years ago, giving birth to Avery right after finding out my father was never going to be normal again. My mother was so sure that Avery’s life would be charmed and perfect—so much better than mine.

  But . . . maybe I was the luckier one, after all?

  I think about how Grandma and Grandpa and Mom were always there for me. I think about how just a few phone calls can get all of Crawfordsville to pray for me, just like that. Probably, my classmates at Crawfordsville High School will go back to making fun of me after they pray for me, but there are worse things.

  And the world is a lot bigger place than Crawfordsville High. My classmates don’t get to define who I am and what I can do.

  Neither does the fact that Mom was a surrogate mother. I can be impressed or dismayed or just in awe of the choices she made. But those choices were hers, not mine.

  I have a life of my own, choices of my own.

  I go back into Mr. Armisted’s room, and even though I’m still tired, I just can’t find a comfortable position, back in my stiff chair. I don’t think I’ll be able to go back to sleep. But the next thing I know, there’s bright sunshine in my face, and a woman runs into the room crying out, “Avery? David? Are you in there?”

  It’s Mrs. Armisted.

  Avery, Astonished

  “Shh, you’ll wake up my dad,” I snap, before it sinks in that this is Mom stumbling to a halt before me, staring and staring and staring into my face.

  Mom, who is still supposed to be in Ohio.

  Mom, who didn’t call back—but came all the way across the ocean to Spain instead.

  I brace for her to say, What have you done with your hair? When was the last time you combed it? Or You look like you slept in those clothes. I’m braced to snarl back at her, I had to sleep in my clothes. It’s not like you were here to bring me pajamas. You didn’t even answer your phone!

  But there’s none of the usual dissatisfaction and disappointment in her expression.

  Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be any makeup on her face either.

  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her without makeup.

  And her clothes look as thrown together and wrinkled as mine. Not only do her shoes not match her purse, they don’t match each other. They’re not even the same shade of brown.

  Mom reaches out and wraps me in a big hug, and I’m so startled, I let her. I even hug back, a little. And I don’t burst out with, You think showing up now is going to make up for ignoring me for two weeks?

  “You came,” I whimper. “You do love Dad.”

  “I came . . . ,” Mom whispers into my hair, “because I love you. I had to be here for you. You only have two parents, and if . . . if your father, well . . . . I thought you needed me.”

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to snap, You know what? I was doing fine. I had Kayla. And a waiting room full of Spanish people. Or, Only two parents? That depends on how you count it. The woman who gave birth to me was actually willing to talk to me last night, when I didn’t know if my father was alive or dead. That’s more than you did.

  But Mom pulls back a little, like she knows I’m about to explode. And I catch a glimpse of her face, and . . .

&nb
sp; Oh, crap. Now I see why Kayla keeps saying she can’t stay mad at me when she looks at me and sees how I looked as a five-year-old.

  It’s not like Mom has drunk from any fountain of youth. She still has the wrinkles of a fifty-three-year-old woman, no matter how much anti-aging skin cream she uses. And she’s just gotten off a red-eye flight, which would age anyone.

  It’s not even that she looks so much like me—I’ve got a lot of my father’s features. Only my hair is exactly the same color as hers, and that’s because she dyes hers that way on purpose.

  It’s more that her thoughts are written on her face, like a little kid’s. And she’s clearly thinking, What you’re about to say is going to hurt me. And I can’t protect myself. Please, please, please don’t hurt me.

  “Where were you the past two weeks?” I ask. But I keep my voice gentle.

  Mom lowers her head in a humble way I’ve never seen her use before.

  “I fell apart,” she says. “I had to get help. I’m still supposed to be getting help, but . . . as soon as I heard the voice mail, I had to come. I had to think about you, not me.”

  She does look fragile, like it wouldn’t take much to break her.

  Like maybe the news about Dad and the flight across the ocean did break her.

  “Then you and Dad aren’t getting divorced,” I say. “You’ll patch things up, because he almost died, and that made you realize how much you’d miss him.”

  I could go on talking this way forever. But Mom glances toward the bed, where Dad is still sleeping. Then she puts her hand on my arm.

  “Avery . . . ,” Mom begins. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But I don’t want to give you false hope.”

  “But . . . but . . . you love him!” I burst out. “Or you used to! You can.”

  Mom winces.

  “I do,” she admits. “But is it for the right reasons? I don’t love some of the things he loves about himself. That’s a problem. And . . . I have enough other problems of my own. We haven’t been good for each other lately, and a lot of it was because I was too miserable to care about anyone but myself. . . . I haven’t been fair to you, either, Avery.”

  Mom is admitting this? Mom?

  Mom is accepting blame?

  I’m crying again—I am so sick of crying. There should be a way to switch off the tears when you don’t feel like sobbing anymore, but you keep getting more reasons to cry harder and harder and harder.

  And then Kayla’s crouched beside me, with her arm around me, murmuring, “Shh, shh, it’s all right.”

  Mom looks down at her.

  “You’re Kayla, aren’t you?” Mom asks, as if she really isn’t sure.

  If Mom says anything about how Kayla’s too fat or has a bad haircut or shouldn’t wear the color tan with her pasty complexion, I’m going to punch her.

  But there’s no judgment in Mom’s expression.

  “I’m so sorry, Kayla,” Mom says. “I’m sorry I was never a good host when you and your mom came to visit Avery, all those years ago. I’m sorry I wouldn’t even meet you. I’m sorry I didn’t come to say good-bye at the airport. I just . . . I just couldn’t bear to see your mother. I was too jealous.”

  “Jealous?” Kayla repeats numbly. “Of my mom?”

  “Because she could have a baby, and I couldn’t,” Mom says.

  “Dad said . . . ,” I begin, but Mom shakes her head.

  “I probably deserve anything bad your father said about me,” she says. “But I can’t hear it right now.”

  “It wasn’t bad,” I mutter.

  Mom stares at me, wide-eyed and sad.

  “Oh,” she says. “I just . . . That’s where I always go now. Thinking the worst. It’s perfectly normal for a fourteen-year-old girl to push away from her mother. It’s perfectly normal for a couple who’ve been married for twenty-three years to have an argument every now and then. But I couldn’t let go of any of it. I started thinking that you sensed somehow that I wasn’t your real mother, and that’s why you liked your father better. I even . . . secretly hoped that you’d hate this summer, so you’d be angrier with your dad than you were with me.”

  She looks so shamefaced, I have to tell her, “Mom, that’s crazy. Of course you’re my real mother.”

  Do I believe that?

  I do. I really do. The way I was born doesn’t matter.

  Mom blinks back tears.

  “But I didn’t think I deserved to be your mother,” she says. “Not unless I was perfect. And . . . I couldn’t be perfect.”

  Mom, you are seriously messed up, I want to say. But I think about what she’s told me about her childhood: how she had to practice the piano over and over and over again, for hours, until she could play every song without a single mistake. How she had to sit at the dinner table with the grown-ups, and never spill anything, and never interrupt the conversation. How her parents cared more about her looking pretty and not mussing her clothes, than listening to her ideas.

  Maybe Mom has good reasons for being seriously messed up.

  “You’re meeting Kayla now,” I tell Mom, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the fierceness in my voice. “You can be nice to her from now on.”

  Mom lowers her head, almost as if she’s agreeing. And she hasn’t agreed with anything I said in the past two years.

  “Thank you for calling me yesterday,” Mom tells Kayla. “The hospital never called—when I checked with them just now, it turned out that they were one digit off on the number they wrote down, and they kept leaving messages for a total stranger.”

  It figures.

  “Wait a minute—then how’d you find us?” Kayla asks. “My phone was dead, and Mr. Armisted’s phone was dead—”

  “And I left mine back at the apartment in Madrid,” I chime in.

  “And your voice mail clicked off before I even said the whole name of the hospital,” Kayla finishes.

  “Let’s just say it’s a good thing to know an identity theft expert,” Mom says, “who could help me track the GPS coordinates on your father’s phone.”

  “You mean Lauren’s mom?” I ask incredulously.

  Mom nods.

  My mother is not the type to track GPS coordinates. Half the time she can’t even figure out Netflix.

  She’s also not the type to fly across the ocean without months of planning, without spending days coordinating outfits and figuring out the best way to pack the prettiest shoes.

  I mean, she might chip a nail doing something like that.

  But here she is.

  “Really, it would have been okay just to call the hospital,” I say grudgingly. “And then they could have asked me to—”

  Mom’s shaking her head.

  “There were complications with the tracking,” she says. “Something about a cell tower being down? I couldn’t just wait and do nothing. I got on the plane, and then I talked to Lauren’s mom when I got to Madrid this morning, and she finally had the information. I did call the hospital then, but they were speaking Spanish, and I didn’t understand very well, and I couldn’t get them to understand me, and—”

  “It is Spain,” I say.

  “Also . . .” Now Mom is whispering. “I wasn’t sure you would talk to me. And I didn’t want the hospital to know that.”

  Still with the shame. And the secrecy.

  I open my mouth, and I’m not even sure if I want to criticize her or comfort her. But then Dad stirs in the bed behind us, and all three of us snap our attention in that direction.

  His eyelids flutter open. His groggy gaze takes in all of us, and then his eyes travel back to Mom’s face. And I wish I could say that my mother goes running to his side, and clasps his hands in hers, and tells him that seeing him just now in that hospital bed has changed everything, and she’s so glad that she came, because now she knows now how much she loves him, how much she wants to stay married to him forever.

  But that doesn’t happen.

  Instead, they stare warily at each other,
as if Mom is just waiting for Dad to start yelling, and Dad is just waiting for Mom to start yelling. But then Mom whispers, “I’m so sorry . . . about everything. I wanted to be here . . . for Avery. We both want what’s best for Avery.”

  And Dad nods.

  It’s a start.

  And—I know it’s true. Whatever they feel for each other, they both love me.

  And they’re both here. They’re both alive. All three of us are here in the same room, together.

  Last night, that was more than I thought I would ever have again.

  Kayla: How It Ends/How It Begins

  It’s our last day in Spain.

  We’ve waited four weeks for Mr. Armisted to get clearance to fly. I overheard a few whispered conversations—I think Mrs. Armisted suggested sending me back on my own, now that she was here, and Avery scolded, “You want to make Kayla fly across the ocean all by herself? Who’s the one with the heart problem in this family, Mom—you or Dad?”

  It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for Mrs. Armisted.

  The thing is, I think I could actually handle flying alone. And I do miss my family and the Autumn Years residents. But I’ve been Skyping with everyone again. I even had a private conversation with Grandma and Grandpa about how they’d known all along that Mom gave birth to Avery.

  “I know Mom was sworn to secrecy, but why didn’t one of you tell me?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t our secret to tell,” Grandma said. On the iPad screen, her face wavered, the Internet cutting in and out as if to remind me how far away she really was.

  “Bet you were surprised we could keep a secret,” Grandpa joked.

  “But did you approve of what Mom did?” I ask. “Or were you upset? Or—”

  “We love her,” Grandma says. “We love you.”

  And somehow I know that’s all the answer I’m going to get from them, on that topic.

  It’s the right answer.

  Another day, Mom borrowed an iPad from the Crawfordsville Public Library and took it to Dad’s nursing home so I could Skype with him.

  This may sound weird, but I told Mom to leave the room for just a few minutes so I could talk to Dad in private. And I told him I forgive his friend Lester for causing his accident, and I hoped Dad was able to too. I told him that being with the Armisteds this summer has made me realize that nobody has a perfect family or a perfect life, and I’m not jealous of anybody anymore. Not even Stephanie Purley.