Out of the Box(17)

“Okay, okay.” He winks at me and points to my case. “May I?”

I nod, and he places the case on the couch beside him. He lifts the bandoneón out like a baby, caressing the bellows and touching the buttons tenderly. He opens and closes it, playing a few notes, his face full of the same awe that I feel every time I touch it. I smile at him, and he smiles back. “You’re a very lucky person, Ellie.”

“I know,” I say.

He plays a rendition of Ástor Piazzolla’s fiery “Otoño porteño,” and he totally throws himself into it. Every muscle in his face is tense, and his body moves to the music. Everything around us falls away, and I find myself sitting on the edge of my seat with my mouth hanging open. I want to play like that, and I want him to teach me. Above all, I want him to know I’m worth teaching.

The piece comes to an explosive finish. I applaud until my palms hurt. He falls back on the couch, exhausted, and the bandoneón case crashes to the floor, the hidden envelope—and its contents—gliding out.

I didn’t even plan to bring the envelope, not until the last minute when I was going out the door and it suddenly felt wrong to leave it behind. It had spent decades hiding there in the bandoneón case after all. Separating them now seemed somehow like messing with history.

I’d never let the bandoneón case out of my sight, so it wasn’t like I’d lose it or anything. I don’t know why I didn’t think about what would happen if Frank saw what was in the envelope.

If Alison were here, she would say this happened for a reason. She was a great believer in Everything Unfolding As It Should, and she always said that the key to happiness is celebrating opportunities instead of wasting time being frustrated or baffled by them.

With everything spread out on the floor, though, celebrating opportunity is the last thing I’m thinking about. Frank stares at the envelope and then at me, like I might be a juvenile delinquent after all. I begin to babble, my voice low so Jeanette won’t hear, because it suddenly feels weird to have kept this a secret from her. “I found it the other day. Hidden in the lining. I’ve been trying to figure out where it came from. Like a mystery, you know?” Even I can hear the pleading note in my voice. I don’t want him to go all responsible-citizen on me, calling the police or something. “I haven’t even told Jeanette yet.”

He picks the papers up off the floor, and his expression changes from confusion to shock. He closes his eyes and seems to be considering his words. “Ellie,” Frank says, “there’s a story here.”

“I know.” I’m about to tell him what I found online when he asks how much I know about Argentine history.

I wish I’d done more than skim those pages of the encyclopedia the other day. “It used to be a Spanish colony?”

He nods, waiting.

“It’s a republic,” I add, remembering the words I read on the money.

“All true,” he says. “Do you know what was going on in Argentina in 1976 though?”

I want to tell him yes, but I have to shake my head.

“Military dictatorship,” he says. “From 1976 to 1983. The military ran the country by trying to control every aspect of people’s lives. They censored news, books and letters going in and out of the country. They also arrested people who didn’t agree with them, or who they suspected of not agreeing with them—political activists, artists, intellectuals, Jews, and even musicians, because musicians gathered large crowds that the military regime found threatening. The government seized them, tortured them and eventually killed them. Some say up to thirty thousand people were disappeared.”

His words hit me like a tidal wave. Desaparecidos.

“I found their names on a list,” I whisper, suddenly understanding why the plane tickets went unused. “I looked them up on the Internet, and I found out they’d disappeared, but I couldn’t find anything else.”

Frank closes his eyes for a moment again. “I’m not surprised,” he says. “That’s what the military was trying to do—erase people without a trace.”

What do I do now? I wonder, and I don’t realize I’ve asked out loud until Frank says, “That’s entirely up to you. It’s your bandoneón.”

I think we both know that’s not true anymore.





ELEVEN


“It obviously went well,” Jeanette says on the way home from Frank’s. “Your fingers haven’t stopped moving since we left.”

“He gave me a whole song to practice,” I say, fingering the notes in the air. An hour of practicing and listening to Frank play has taken my mind off Andrés and Caterina, and I’m buzzing with everything I’ve learned. “It’s a simplified tango tune, and if I practice every day, I think I can do it. Did you know that when you press one of the buttons, you make a different sound depending on whether you compress the bandoneón or pull it apart?”