I told him that being able to give Mr. Armisted CPR and drive him to the hospital had made me sad all over again, because there’s nothing like that I could do to help my own father.
“But for a moment, it almost felt like I was helping you, Dad,” I whispered. “Does that make any sense? Like, I wanted to save Mr. Armisted even more, because I knew exactly what Avery would lose if he died or . . . stopped being himself. Like that made me try harder, because of you.”
Was I trying to say that helping anyone would be like helping Dad? Was that why Mom was always trying to help people at the nursing home, as a replacement for helping Dad?
“It’s like what Mom said in her one e-mail about watching the Armisteds carry Avery away as a newborn,” I told Dad. “It does feel like being happy and sad can get twisted together so tight that you feel both at once. And . . . that’s how I feel about leaving Spain and coming home, too.”
I finished by telling Dad I loved him, in English and then Spanish, too. Just because. And then he winked at me.
I’m not sure if he understood anything I said, but it sure felt like he did.
When I was done talking with Dad, I really wanted to go back to the blue room at the train station one last time. But it was too late in the day.
This morning is my last chance.
But as soon as I turn the doorknob to leave the apartment, Avery comes sprinting out of the kitchen after me.
“Can I come too?” she asks, and before I can answer, she shouts over her shoulder, “Mom, Kayla and I are taking a walk—don’t worry, we’ll be back in time to go to that lunch place you want to try. . . .” And then, under her breath, she mutters to me, “We will, won’t we? Where are you going?”
I could say, Oh, over to the Gran Via one last time to try that fro-yo place the kids from our class were talking about, or Back to the Prado, or To check out the tourist shops to get more souvenirs for my family. I could totally change my plans because of her.
But she has such a frantic look in her eye, I tell the truth.
“I’m going someplace that helped me when . . . well, you know. The day we both found out my mother gave birth to you. When I was upset.”
I could add, and the day you said, “Is Kayla Butts my sister?” like that would be the worst thing in the world. But it’s almost like I want to see if Avery remembers that, if she’ll apologize without me having to beg for it.
She doesn’t apologize.
“Honestly, I’d go anywhere, to get away from my mother right now,” she said. “You’d think I was the one who had the heart attack! She acts like I can’t cross the street without holding her hand!”
“She’s going through a tough time,” I said mildly. “And she feels bad that she wasn’t there for you before. And . . . she’s here now. She loves you.”
“Yeah, well, she’s going to make me hate her. Again,” Avery groans. Then she stops in the middle of the stairs. “It’s okay if I say that to you, right?”
“Avery, what haven’t you said to me this summer?” I ask.
But Avery’s phone buzzes, and she’s distracted. After everything that happened, her mom threw away Avery’s burner phone and insisted on unlocking Avery’s iPhone for international use, no matter what it costs, so Avery is fully connected all the time now.
Actually, Avery’s mom wanted to get me an iPhone too, for while I was with Avery, but I said that was silly for just a couple weeks.
Avery looks at her text and mutters as she texts back, “Yes, Mom, I do have my phone with me. Yes, you can reach me if our lunch plans change. Or if something else happens.”
Her voice dips on the if something else happens, and I can tell she’s done bad-talking her mother. For now.
She tucks her phone back in her pocket and glances my way as we continue down the stairs.
“Where we’re going—is it that church by the churro place?” she asks. “That’s a place you went when you were mad about things, isn’t it?”
Sometimes, Avery amazes me.
“How did you know?” I gasp. “Did you follow me, or—”
“No!” Avery insists. “I just saw how you looked at that church when we were eating churros. . . .”
“I went to that church the day you made fun of me for using white bread for the grilled cheese sandwiches,” I say.
“I didn’t—” Avery begins. She stumbles on a step and has to grab the railing. “Ohhh . . . . I guess you probably did feel like I was making fun of you. But I didn’t mean to. I was upset over everything that night.”
“Yeah, me too,” I admit.
We reach the bottom of the stairs.
“But I’m not going back to that church today,” I say. “It was kind of too frilly and fancy for me. I’m going to the train station.”
“You’re taking a train?” Avery asks, giving me an Are you crazy? look.
“No,” I say. “Just visiting the station.”
“Oh-kay,” Avery says.
I expect her to ask a lot more questions, but she doesn’t. We’re both quiet as we pass the eighties music nightclub and head out of our neighborhood. Everything is so familiar now that it’s weird to think that I’ll never see any of it again after tomorrow: not the wrought-iron railings of all the balconies; not the bright yellow and red flowers in the window boxes; not the one neighbor’s door with the crack in the wood. I even feel nostalgic for the little cubbyhole at the end of the street where we take the trash and recycling.
We turn onto Calle de Atocha, and everything’s familiar here, too. There’s the grocery store. There’s the Museo del Jamon, which I really did think was a museum for ham until I saw the stores in other parts of Madrid too. There’s the memorial that looks like a circle of men in trench coats with their arms around each other—the monument honors a group of lawyers killed during the transition to democracy back in the 1970s. I finally looked it up just last week.
We’re closing in on the train station, and I almost chicken out when we pass the sculptures of the giant baby heads, and Avery starts talking about how creepy they are. I could tell Avery that I just want to see the area on the lower level of the train station that’s like an indoor tropical rain forest. It’s actually more impressive than the blue room.
Instead, I turn to Avery and say firmly, “There are rules for where I’m taking you.”
“Rules?”
“You can’t make fun of anything while we’re there,” I say. “I don’t care what you think, but don’t ruin it for me. If you don’t like the room, save your opinion for later, when you talk to your friends back home. Just don’t ever make fun of this place to me.”
“Okay,” Avery says meekly.
The people streaming into the station around us have backpacks and rolling suitcases; they call out to each other about when the train is leaving for Barcelona or Bilbao, and do they have time to buy a sandwich first?
I get a little jolt when I realize that all the conversations I’m eavesdropping on are in Spanish, and I still understand.
But the travelers head down toward the train tracks, and Avery and I turn toward the blue room.
There’s an attendant standing there, like before, and Avery gets a mocking smirk on her face when the woman goes through the long explanation about not opening one set of doors until the other closes behind us.
This was a mistake, I think.
Then we’re in the blue room, all by ourselves. Avery looks around, and . . . she doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t even look like she wants to laugh.
“This,” she says softly. “This is what I needed at the hospital, when we were waiting to hear if Daddy was going to live or die. Or if he was already dead.”
“Then you don’t think it’s creepy that you can look out, and everyone else is living their ordinary lives—going places—but they don’t even see you?” I ask.
I wait for her to remind me that I didn’t want to hear her opinion. But she’s still peering around, breathing in the stillness of the place.
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“It think it’s a good creepy,” she says. “Eerie, but . . . it feels right.”
“Exactly,” I say, relief flowing over me. “Sometimes, you need to get away from people who are just living their ordinary lives. Because you don’t belong with them. Because your life is too strange. Or you need to figure out some things.”
Avery goes and stands under the cone of words, under the one shaft of bright light in the room. She turns slowly, as if reading the spiral of lamentations and hopeful prayers, spun together.
“Who is this a memorial for?” she asks.
“The victims of the worst terrorist attack in Spain,” I tell her, because I’ve looked it all up now. “It happened in March of 2004. It was kind of their September eleventh. There were bombs on trains, and a hundred and ninety-two people died. Just ordinary people, going about their ordinary lives . . .”
Avery gazes up again.
“There are a lot more bad things that happened in the world than I ever knew about,” she says. “I thought it was mostly just, I don’t know, the Holocaust, September eleventh, a war here and there. Homelessness. Drug addiction. I thought, otherwise, everyone’s life was pretty good. Like mine.”
I don’t say anything. I look away, just for an instant, and suddenly Avery’s got her head down.
“Daddy could still die,” she whispers, and it feels like she’s been carrying those words around for weeks, afraid to say them. Until now.
“You mean, because he had one heart attack, he could have another?” I ask. “Don’t you remember what the doctor said, how—”
“I know, I know—they fixed all the blocked arteries,” Avery says. “But even if he goes to all his doctor’s appointments, and does everything he should—and lays off the Spanish ham and the stress . . . Regardless. Someday, he’ll die.”
“So will you,” I say. “So will I. So will your mother and my mother and my dad and my grandparents and all my friends and all your friends. . . .”
And in spite of myself, in spite of everything I know about death that Avery doesn’t, I get a lump in my throat thinking about the people I love who are probably going to die much, much sooner than Avery’s dad.
Grandma.
Grandpa.
My dad.
“So that’s it?” Avery asks, slashing her hands through the air. “We’re all going to die someday, so why bother? Why not just . . . What’s that awful country song? ‘Live Like You Were Dying’?”
“No,” I say. “I hate that song too.” I just never quite knew why. But suddenly I do. “It’s not about skydiving or riding bulls or taking stupid risks, because you’re going to die anyway. You can’t just give up. Or constantly pray just to accept things as they are. That doesn’t leave room for taking the time to learn Spanish. Or making new friends. Or learning CPR. Or learning to drive a stick shift. Or standing up for yourself. Or . . .”
Was I lecturing her or me?
“Or because you’re afraid your husband is going to die in a war, you agree to have a baby for total strangers,” Avery says softly. “Like what your mother did.”
Oh, Mom.
I get a lump in my throat thinking about her, too.
Avery keeps her gaze on me. It’s a little too intense.
“Would you ever do what your mother did?” she asks.
“You mean, get pregnant and have a baby just to give it to someone else? Would you?” I counter quickly.
Why should I have to answer that question, and not her? I have angry words rushing to my tongue: Do you think I’m the only one who would ever have to consider that, just because you’re rich and I’m poor? But I hold back and wait for her to answer.
Avery’s eyes dart to the side.
“I think I would always be too selfish,” she admits. “And . . . right now I can’t imagine having a baby, period. For anyone.” She grins. “Or with anyone.”
“Yeah,” I mutter. Because we’re in the blue room, it feels okay to go on. “And I keep thinking about my mom lying in the hospital watching your parents take you away. When she knew you were the last baby she’d ever have . . .”
“That wasn’t my parents’ fault,” Avery says. She crosses her arms and shivers, even though the sunlight is beating down on her. “It wasn’t my fault either.”
“I know!” I say quickly. “I know it’s just how things turned out, but . . . I don’t think I could be a surrogate mother. Er, a gestational carrier, I mean. It’s too hard. Even Mom only did it once.”
Avery frowns, and the corners of her mouth tremble. But it’s our last day in Spain, and I’m not going to make this easier for her. I don’t care if her father almost died a few weeks ago and her parents might still get divorced. She needs to understand exactly what my mother did for her. She needs to understand that it wasn’t just an implantation and a legal contract and all those other sterile, empty terms. For my mother, bringing Avery into the world was heartache and pain.
And love and joy and something to hold on to and hope for during a dark time . . .
I sigh, but Avery speaks before I have a chance to soften my words.
“Your mother was really young when you were born, right?” she says.
“Yes. Twenty.”
“Then she’s only—what? Thirty-six now? That’s young enough to have another baby!”
“Avery, remember my dad—”
For a minute I think she’s going to suggest that my mom should divorce my dad and marry someone else. Or find a “baby daddy.” Ugh. Now I’m really going to have to yell at her.
But she waves a hand like none of that matters.
“Remember, the egg and sperm that made me came together in a test tube, so there are lots of possibilities,” she says. “Artificial insemination. Donor sperm. Or . . .”
“All that costs a lot of money, remember?” I practically snarl. I could go on: Raising a baby takes a lot of money too. Don’t you know how poor we are? Haven’t you noticed how most of my clothes come from the thrift store or Walmart? But I surprise myself by saying, “Anyhow, I don’t think my mother wants another baby anymore. That’s just what she wanted when she was twenty-one or twenty-two. When her life was different.”
“What does she want now?”
I’ve never thought about that before. Mom is my mother. My father’s wife. My grandparents’ daughter. It feels like her having the right to want anything for herself ended with Dad’s accident.
Because she’s been praying like an old person for the last fourteen years: Please help me gracefully accept this life I’ve been given. Please let me not want anything else.
I think about how excited she was, telling me about the chance to go to Spain, how I’d have opportunities she never did.
I think about the ordinary things she wanted for me before: a chance to get my driver’s license. A job at the Crawfordsville Dairy Queen. Those were the only kind of things either of us dared to hope for.
I think about something I only heard her say once, to another aide in the staff room at the nursing home.
“Honestly? I think what she wants is to go back to school and get her nursing degree,” I say. “So she knows more about how to help her patients. And . . . so she’ll get paid more.”
“Well, that’s easy,” Avery says. “It’d take—what? Just a couple more years of school?”
“And a lot of money, remember?” I say.
“Aren’t there student loans for stuff like that?”
Do you even understand what the word “poor” means? I want to ask her. How is Mom supposed to pay back those loans?
But then I remember that an aide Mom used to work with actually did go back to school and became a registered nurse. It took her six years of part-time classes, and she complained all the time about how tired she was.
But she did it.
And now she is making more money and helping people more.
I still make a face at Avery.
“Remember how my grandpa lost his farm just like, w
ell, like your grandfather did?” I ask. “That kind of made him allergic to debt. He’d have a heart attack if Mom told him she was taking out loans for school!”
Then I wince, because I should have picked some other catastrophe besides a heart attack.
But Avery shrugs.
“You’re pretty good at doing CPR,” she says.
And somehow, because we’re in the blue room, it’s okay for us to say these things to each other.
Avery is still looking around.
“Does anybody else ever come here besides you?” she asks, because we’ve had the room to ourselves the whole time.
“Not very often, I don’t think,” I say. “Maybe this was really important to everyone when it first opened, but then the survivors needed it less and less.”
“I wish I had a place like this to go at home, when my parents drive me crazy,” Avery says. “Or . . .” Her voice gets very soft. “When I’m worried about them.”
I think about how pale her dad still looks. I think about how her mother gets tears in her eyes over the smallest problem—when a restaurant doesn’t have the exact kind of salad she wants, or when a shop clerk doesn’t understand her asking for something in English. Or when Avery tells her to calm down in a tone that really seems to be saying, Mom, could you just shut up? You’re bugging me!
“Oh, my parents!” Avery says, jolting upright. “We’re going to be late for meeting Mom!”
And then we’re in such a rush leaving that I forget to give the room one last look around. One last thank-you.
It turns out that the special restaurant that Avery’s mom wants to take us to is actually a 100 Montaditos.
“My friend Linda said when her twin daughters were studying in Spain in college, they loved this place,” Mrs. Armisted says. “I thought you’d be really excited to go where college students go!”
Mrs. Armisted’s eyes glisten. She’s trying so hard. I have to grip Avery’s arm hard and whisper in her ear when Mrs. Armisted’s back is turned, “Don’t tell her we’ve been eating here all summer. Don’t tell her we’ve been hanging out with college students ourselves. Let her think this is a big deal! Let her be happy!”