Out of the Box (6 page)

We walk along in silence for a few minutes. The farther we get from home, the bigger the houses become. Now we're in a neighborhood of streets lined with enormous oak trees and old mansions, and I'm enjoying the shade. I ask Sarah what she thinks of the sock-to-bowtie book, and she says it's given her a lot of ideas. She looks serious, so I try not to laugh.

For one thing, I'm not sure why she thinks she needs a more interesting wardrobe. Yesterday she showed me photos of herself at various schools. In one shot, she's on an old wooden dock, striking a diver's pose in a sleek one-piece swimsuit. In the next, she's got her hair twisted back and is wearing thick glasses and a long-sleeved dress that makes her look like part of some religious group. In a third, her hair is short and spiky, her clothing black and her face covered in white makeup. In all of them, she's surrounded by what appear to be friends. I know it's silly, but for a moment I wonder if I should pay more attention to my own clothes.

I don't dwell on the thought for more than half a second, though, because we've reached the school. From across the street, it looks like it's all chain-link fence and parking lot, with a patch of yellowing grass at the far end. I squint against the sun.

“Hey, I was wrong about no one being here in the middle of July. I guess you're not the only keener in Victoria, Sarah.” Across the parking lot, in the shadow of the school, two boys—one our age and one much younger—are sitting on a curb, poking at the dirt. The older boy holds a jar, and the younger one is dropping bits of earth into it with a stick. They're talking and laughing, and it looks like they're having fun. I'd love to know what they're doing.

Sarah jerks her head in their direction, and we wander closer to the school. Both kids are dark, with thick black hair. The older one is wearing a red ball-cap backward, low-slung jeans and very white running shoes. He looks like he'd be part of the school's cool crowd, not someone who would sit in the dirt with a little boy, talking and laughing. If I were a different person, I would leave Sarah to her investigation of the school and go talk to them.

Sarah is peering in the school windows.

“What do you think?” I ask.

She shrugs. “This art room looks better than most. Come look at the mural.”

She stands back, and I press my face up against the glass. On one wall of the classroom, someone has painted life-size images of kids painting a wall of a classroom. I wonder if the kids did it themselves, and what kind of teacher might let them do that. All at once, I wish I were the one coming to this new school. I'd reinvent myself, be braver than I am at home. I picture myself wandering back to Jeanette's place by myself or with friends, spreading out my homework on her sunny kitchen table and listening to music while she chats with friends in the living room or works in her garden. Sunshine and music instead of silence or shouting.

And suddenly I feel like the most ungrateful kid on the planet. Here I am imagining all this when I have a perfectly good home with two parents who need me. I shake my head and try to think of something else.

“Let's go.” Sarah steps back from the window. “I've seen everything I need to see.”

E
IGHT

“C
are to come with me?” Jeanette asks. We've just hauled two big bags of postage stamps up from the basement, and she's putting on her sandals and bike helmet. “Louise lives close to Chinatown. Maybe we could stop for red-bean cakes afterward.”

“Deal.” I slip on my shoes and hoist one of the bags. “Who knew postage stamps could be so heavy?”

“I don't know where Louise plans to keep them,” Jeanette says. “Their condo is tiny, and both she and her husband collect all kinds of stuff. You'll see. They're quite the characters.”

Louise, from the soup kitchen, and her husband Frank live in a new condo near Chinatown. Louise beckons us in with a big smile and introduces us to Frank, who looks familiar, though I don't know where I'd have met him before. He's short, round, balding, and looks happy to see us.

Their place is incredible. The floors are polished concrete, and the high ceilings are covered in big pipes painted bright orange, red and yellow. A canoe sits in the middle of their living room. “No other space for it,” Louise says when she notices me staring.

The usual living-room furniture is squeezed tight around the canoe, and a potter's wheel stands off to one side, leaving very little room to walk. The far wall is full of books—and I mean
full
: floor to ceiling, with a ladder that's two stories tall to reach the top ones. What strikes me most, though, is an enormous poster of a couple dancing, the man in a tuxedo, and the woman in a bright red dress with heels high enough to make walking impossible for most people. I wonder if Frank and Louise were once mad dancing fiends, or if the poster's here because the colors match the decor.

“Tango,” Frank says, coming up beside me.

“I know.” I ask if he dances and immediately feel my face flush. I can't imagine him and Louise ever looking as glamorous as the dancers in the poster. Maybe he'll think I'm mocking him.

“Used to dance,” Frank says. “The music itself has always been more my thing though.”

He smiles, and suddenly I know who he is: the bandoneón player at the tango festival Alison took me to last year. I turn to Jeanette, and she's grinning at me. So are Louise and Frank.

“I suspect you two will have a lot to talk about,” my aunt says. “This is the fellow who was going to teach Alison to play the bandoneón.”

In three days, Jeanette has given me not only the instrument of my dreams but someone to teach me to play it as well. I stand there in stunned silence for a second or two before Louise claps her hands together.

“First we eat,” she says. “I've just made a strawberry pie that we can't possibly finish ourselves.”

We sit down around the canoe and eat pie and ice cream while Frank tells me about growing up playing accordion in Germany and later studying music in Paris.

“Do you play Edith Piaf 's stuff?” I ask, my dessert forgotten, the ice cream melting in front of me.

“Of course. What decent accordion player doesn't play Piaf?” He gets up, goes to a kitchen cupboard, pulls out an accordion and starts to play.

I lean back into the couch and close my eyes, drifting with the strong, sad tones, hearing Piaf 's mournful voice in my head. This is way better than my iPod.

“You keep playing like that,” Jeanette says, “and this kid'll never finish her dessert.”

My pie is now a soupy mess on the plate, but I don't care. I have a hundred questions bubbling up inside me. I don't know where to start, so I begin with the most important. “Can you teach me to play the bandoneón?”

I ask before I think about having no money of my own to pay him, before I remember that my parents won't want a noisy accordion-like instrument in the house and that I won't have time to practice come September. Right now, none of that seems important.

“I was hoping you'd ask,” Frank says. “Jeanette tells me you're now the proud owner of a fine instrument. So we'll make a trade. A few lessons this summer for all those stamps you brought over, which will give me many happy hours. Deal?”

I sneak a glance at Jeanette. She nods. I wonder whether she's already made arrangements to pay him. She does things like that: discovering something I'd like and helping me get it. She doesn't care if it's a practical skill. She does it just to see me smile.

I should protest. I should do the responsible thing and ask for time to earn money and pay him. I consider offering him some of the cash I found in the bandoneón case, but he'd probably wonder where I got American money. I could get a newspaper route, or water someone's plants or babysit. If there's one thing I've learned from my parents, it's not to be in debt to anyone, not even my Aunt Jeanette. But I don't care about any of that right now. “Can we meet twice a week?” I ask.

Louise laughs. “Frank, I think you've met your match.”

N
INE

“Y
ou busy? Want to come to the library with me?” Sarah's standing on Jeanette's front steps with hay in her hair and goat poop on her knees. She picks what I hope is a wood chip off her T-shirt and flicks it to the side.

I laugh and pick the hay out of her hair. “You might want to get rid of some of the straw first, or the herons will take you for a new nesting site as we walk past the park.”

“Ha, ha.” She flings her hair around, and bits of barnyard fly out. Behind me, I hear Jeanette raise her voice. She's on the phone, sounding unimpressed with the conversation. I assume she's talking to Mom again. Mom's called the past two nights, and we've talked briefly before Jeanette remembers something urgent that she has to talk to my mother about. No one's ever explained that missed phone call. Yesterday I asked Jeanette what was going on, but she told me I worry too much. She had a nervous look on her face when she said it though, and I can't help feeling she's still hiding something from me.

I'm glad Sarah's invited me to the library. I need to get out and think about something other than my family.

“I'll grab my backpack,” I tell her. “Back in a second.”

“Your aunt let you out on your own today, eh?”

One of the men from the soup kitchen—Ned, the one the volunteers keep talking about—is sitting on the sidewalk on the way to the library. His ballcap lies upside down in front of him, and a few coins glimmer at the bottom.

Sarah raises her eyebrows at me, and I'm not sure what to say. “We're going to the library,” I mumble.

“Keep reading, kid,” he says. “It'll take you far.”

I smile and look him in the eye. He smiles back.

Later, Sarah wants to know who that was. “He stinks.”

“You would too if you'd been through what he has.” I tell her about the soup kitchen and what I know of his story.

She nods but says nothing more until we walk through the library doors. “I'm headed to the history section.”

“I'll be at the computers,” I say. I can tell she's dying to ask what I'm up to, but for some reason she holds back, which is good. I'm not ready to share my secret yet.

“Suit yourself,” she says and turns down the corridor.

I don't waste any time. As soon as I'm logged in, I go online and google
Andrés Moreno
. At first I get a bunch of personal pages and Facebook listings, but they're all for people in Spain and Colombia. I add
Argentina
to my search and come up with a bunch of websites in Spanish. The first one says
Listado de desaparecidos
on top, and below is a list of names. Screen after screen of names. Thousands of people. I look at another website. The word
desaparecidos
appears again near the top, and it's another list. I do the same search with the other name, Caterina Rizzi, and again I get lists. Then I look up the word
desaparecidos
in a Spanish-English dictionary and discover that it means “disappeared.”

I think I understand. They must have been fugitives, in such a hurry to escape the police that they misplaced the bandoneón case with their money and the plane tickets. But how did the bandoneón end up in Victoria, half a world away?

I look up the address that was in the envelope: 78 Oak Crescent, Victoria, British Columbia. Google Maps tells me it's up near the university, but I can't find out who lives there now, never mind in 1976.

I look around at the other computer users— travelers with huge backpacks propped up against their chairs and older people who peer at screens over their glasses. Beyond them, Sarah makes her way toward me, loaded down with books. I quickly flip to my email and log on. Three messages, all from Mom. Subjects:
Miss you, Love you
and
Frustrated
.

I open the last one first. She sent it last night.

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Frustrated

Dear Ellie Belly,

Sorry we never get to finish our conversations
lately. All three times, I've asked Jeanette to pass me
over to you when we're done, but she hasn't, always
making up excuses. I'm jealous that she gets to spend
all that time with you, and I don't even get a proper
conversation these days!