Read Surviving Santiago Online
Authors: Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Surviving Santiago (2 page)
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Kirkus Reviews
“This action-packed story is a wonderful work of historical fiction that is a must-have for any library or personal collection.”
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Children's Literature
Copyright © 2015 by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954486
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-5635-2
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Edited by Lisa Cheng
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For Aunt Ruth
Contents
I
'm not going to cry.
My crew surrounds me, all of us in our stuffy clothes, fanning ourselves with our invitationsâmy best friend, Petra, and a bunch of my other friends who've come to see Mamá and Evan get married. They shield me from sniffling adults, and if I do cry they'll rag on me and tell me that turning sixteen has made me old and no longer cool.
Adults cry when they're happy. I know that because Mamá's eyes are shiny as she stands in front of the judge. And she blinks a lot.
I'm happy for her . . . I think.
She has Evanâan awesome guy who loves her.
But Evan is not my father. Not the guy Mamá means when she says,
half of you is him
. My father lives at the ends of the earth, and I'm getting shipped there tomorrowâa pawn in a kicked-over chess set.
Mamá may not be skinny anymore, but her lacy wedding dress makes her look like she's still twenty-one, the bride from the album she brought with her when
we moved to Madison from Santiago in 1981, eight years ago. Nearly nine years after soldiers arrested my father. Papá had wire-rim glasses and a beard like Evan, but he also had shaggy hair. Evan is going bald.
Peludo como un oso
, Mamá used to say. Whenever I paged through the album, she would look over my shoulder, her teardrops splashing onto the plastic that kept the photos dry. I would imagine Papá flying out of that prison and laughing at her. A big, laughing bear with a beard that covered half his face and wild chestnut hair that blazed in the sunlight.
When I was your age, I didn't cry for the whole year
, he said on my seventh birthday after Daniel, my older brother, ripped the arm off my brand-new doll.
You can be brave, too. Not like your mother who cries over every little thing.
Papá twisted the doll's arm back into its socket and stitched the torn shoulder as if he were a surgeon instead of a taxi driver.
I didn't cry for a whole month after that. Not even when I tripped on broken pavement and scraped my knee. Papá loved me, and his love made me brave.
I had no idea it would be my last birthday with him, the way he used to be.
Beside me, Petra uses her set of colored pencils to decorate the black-and-white Victorian house on the invitation. Evan bought the house from the city of Madison for back taxes two years ago. His sketch for the
invitation doesn't show the real storyâthe boarded-up windows, collapsed porch, and sagging roof. He calls fixing up houses his
mitzvah
, which is a Jewish way of saying “good deed.” I was supposed to help him finish this
mitzvah
house over the summer so our new family could move there in September.
Now I'm going to Chile.
“Dropped your purple,” I whisper to Petra. Trying to fetch her pencil from underneath my wooden folding chair, I rock on the inn's bumpy lawn, which slopes down to the lake and nearly pitches me into her. I slide my left foot from my sandal and kick the pencil forward so I can grab it. The damp grass tickles my toes.
“Thanks,” Petra says as she taps the invitation with the eraser end. Two rows in front of us, Evan's mother's chair sinks into the ground. My real grandparents, Mamá's parents, aren't here. They refused to come from Chile for the wedding because they consider divorce a sinâeven though they also consider my father a subversive and a criminal who destroyed his family and deserved everything that happened to him.
The last time I saw Papá was three years ago, after they let him out of prison. He stayed with us in Madison for six months I wish I could forget. He no longer had a beard. His hair hung limp and stringy, and an eyelid and the corner of his mouth sagged. He sat in our apartment drinking wine like it was water. When
he left for Chile to work underground against the dictatorship, I thought I would never see him alive again.
As the judge officially turns my mother into Mrs. Evan Feldman, I focus on Petra's invitation. Mint-green siding. Light and dark purple trim. Gray roof. Bright blue front door.
The first bars of “Mellow Yellow” float in the air while Mamá and Evan are still kissingânot a restrained peck but a madly in love newlyweds' smooch in front of a hundred people that goes from cute to embarrassing by the end of the first verse. Petra holds up her invitation and raises her voice above the psychedelic music and the buzz from sappy comments around us. “I'm giving this to Evan.”
Mamá and Evan walk arm in arm down the aisle, Donovan crooning from the speakers behind them. The top of Evan's head shines in the sunlight. His skin is starting to go pink, so I make a mental note to tell him:
sunscreen
. I reach for the rose petals in my purse and toss them over Petra's head toward my mother. A couple land in Petra's blonde hair, and their scent mixes with her Herbal Essences berry shampoo. After the song fades and everyone stands, my friends and I hug each other.
Max asks, “Do you really have to leave tomorrow?”
“Yeah. They wanted me out so I wouldn't have a party with fifty people in our itty-bitty apartment while they're gone.”
“So does the water really go down the drain the opposite way there?” Petra says.
“Don't remember.” I wriggle my foot back into my sandal. “How about if I do an experiment? I'll flush my summer down the drain and see which way it goes.” A few of my friends laugh. In my mind summer dissolves into yellow and green paint circling clockwise instead of counterclockwise.
“Will it be snowing?”
“Do you have to go to school?”
“Are you gone the whole vacation?”
“They can't make you, can they?”
I sigh. “Guys, we wouldn't be having this wedding if I didn't agree to go. They don't allow divorce in Chile, so my father let it happen here in exchange for visitation rights.”
“That sounds like he's taking you prisoner,” says Max.
Prisoner.
That's the exact wrong word. “It was my decision. . . .” My voice comes out funny. I clear my throat.
Mamá wouldn't have gotten to marry Evan unless she divorced Papá. And if Papá demanded visitation rights, it means that he wants to see me, that maybe he still loves me. Me, his little Tina. Not just Daniel.
Petra clutches my wrist and drags me away from the others, toward the food table. Silently, I thank her. “You can come back sooner, right? When your mother gets home from her honeymoon?”
I lower my voice. “It depends.” On whether he's my old
papá
again.
My old
papá
drove us to the beach in his beat-up green taxi. We ran into the ocean and let the waves
chase us back to shore. But I was too small, so he lifted me onto his shoulders. My hands squeezed his hair like a horse's mane.
“Would he, like, get really mad if you left early?”
I shrug. Petra never met Papá. Never knew what he was like before. Or after.
“You said every time he and your mother talked on the phone during the divorce, he acted like a jerk and she ended up crying. Maybe she can use that as evidence.”
I run the back of my hand across my eyes. One teardrop. Doesn't count.
“Or remember that short story we read freshman year?” Her voice rises. “âRansom of Red Chief' or something.”
“Yeah, I could totally act up so he sends her money to get rid of me.” Or he could yell at me and slap me. And so could my aunt, TÃa Ileana, who lives with him. She doesn't have kids of her own, and even though she never spanked Daniel and me when we were little, she often yelled at us for making noise and running around too much.
Petra pivots toward our friends, but her spiked heel slides into a mole hole. She trips and crashes into Evan.
“Oh, sorry, Evâ, uh, Mr. Feldman.” She lifts her foot from the hole, brushes her hair back, and hands him her invitation. “Look, I picked out some colors for the house.”