Read Online Finding Miracles by Julia Álvarez - Free Book Online

for sure. Last week in Algebra, he’d asked Jake for a sheet of paper. But instead of saying
sheet,
he had asked for a shit. The whole class had tried not to, but we couldn’t help cracking up. Last period on a Friday afternoon, what can I say. We totally regress.
    I opened to the first chapter: “Meeting New Friends.” A man with a cap and a long robe was pictured meeting a girl. The ponytail was meant to make her look American, I suppose. Might as well start here.
    “Hello, my name is Pablo Antonio Bolívar Sánchez. What is your name?” Pablo read his lines, filling in the blank with his name. Then I read out my part, asking him how he was. “I am happy to be here,” Pablo replied.
    “Happy,
not
’appy,”
I corrected. “In English, you pronounce
h
’s.”
    “Happy?” Pablo tried.
    I nodded, thinking of Grandma. She had sent us a Passover card. Inside there were three checks, made out in each kid’s name. On the memo line, she’d drawn a heart, even on mine. “What does she think? That she can buy love?” Mom had said, arms folded, eyes narrowed.
    But Dad’s face had softened. “She’s trying. Happy doesn’t know how to apologize. How to admit she’s wrong.”
    “It’s very simple,” Mom had countered. “I. Am. Sorry.” Mom said each word like it was a whole sentence.
    “Where are you from?” Pablo was reading from his workbook. When I didn’t respond, he looked up.
    “You asked me that same question the first day I met you,” I reminded him. It was high time I admitted I had understood him.
    He nodded, then repeated what he had said.
“¿De dónde
eres?”
    “I’m sorry that I pretended . . . I . . . I didn’t know why you were asking me where I was from.” Even now, two months later, it was still hard to talk about.
    Pablo was staring at me again with that intense look of his. “I explain why I ask. Your eyes . . . they are eyes from Los Luceros.”
    It was a good thing I was sitting down. I felt light-headed. My hands were tingling. “What do you mean, eyes from Los Luceros?” I managed to get out.
    Moving back and forth, English to Spanish, Pablo told me about a small town high in the mountains of his country. “It is called Los Luceros,
muy remoto,
very remote. That is why the revolutionaries hide there. These people from Los Luceros, they all have eyes like yours.”
    As he spoke, my eyes filled with tears.

4
    the box
    MY HEAD WAS SPINNING. Was I really from this small town in the mountains? Were my birth parents revolutionaries? Were they still alive? And if not, what had happened to them?
    I felt like this girl, Pandora, in the Greek myths we’d studied in Ms. Morris’s class. She opened up a box she’d been told not to open. Out came all the sorrows and problems in the world.
    In my case, not just sorrows, but all kinds of feelings and questions and thoughts were whirling around.
    Pablo touched my hand. I felt a tingling that was different from my allergies.
“¿Qué pasa, Milly?”
What was wrong?
    I guess that’s when I should have told him about my adoption. But I was still reeling with all this new information.
    “I’m fine, fine,” I said, turning back to the workbook on the table before us. The next section was called “Meeting the Family”: mother, father, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother. I thought of Happy again. But for some reason, what came to mind was not her meanness but the people
she
had lost—her mother and her mother’s family in the Holocaust. It had made her bitter. I didn’t want to end up like that.
    “My grandmother, Abuelita, still lives near the town I mention, Los Luceros,” Pablo was explaining. Every summer when he was a boy, Pablo and his brothers would be sent to the mountains to stay with their grandparents.
“Extraño mi
país,”
Pablo added softly. He missed his country.
    “I’d like to visit it some day,” I told him. I wasn’t just saying it. “I’d like to see the country where my parents got married,