Out of the Box by Michelle Mulder Page B

time I went there. The guys are hanging out on the church steps (except for Ned, whom I haven’t seen for a while). People are laughing and talking in the courtyard. Someone inside is shouting about poison in the coffee, and when I head upstairs, several people are asleep at their tables.
    The other volunteers smile at me when I arrive, and we spend the next hour making polite conversation. Louise tells me that Frank raves about what a great kid I am, and I grin as I slap bologna on slices of bread.
    I take my time getting home, looking at all the shop windows that I usually hurry past when I’m with Jeanette. I hesitate when I pass the library. She won’t be home from her appointment right away. I could keep researching.
    At a library computer, I log in for a half-hour session and google children of desaparecidos Argentina . I’m hoping to find more about Facundo García, but I find other people’s stories instead, some even more incredible than his. In one, the child didn’t want to meet his biological grandparents because he was raised to think they were evil. In another, the biological grandparents didn’t want to meet the child because “she had been raised by the enemy.” In a third, the child’s adoptive family abused him, and by the time he found out the truth about his birth, he hated his adoptive parents so much that he changed his last name and never spoke to them again. I think about that for a few seconds. Then I try something I hadn’t thought of before. Instead of googling Facundo García , I try the last name he would have had if he hadn’t been stolen from his parents: Facundo Moreno .
    I press Enter, and wait as the slow library computer chugs its way to the Google listings. I know it’s silly to imagine finding this guy. Facundo García and Facundo Moreno sound like unusual names to me, but for all I know, they could be the John Smiths of the Spanish-speaking world.
    Sure enough, up pops a whole page of hits, most of them personal web pages and Facebook stuff, but this time, there’s something else too, something so incredible that it makes me laugh out loud: a page from the University of Victoria’s Department of Hispanic Studies. It seems like an unbelievable coincidence, but I know Alison would say It Was Meant to Be.
    I click on the UVic site and hold my breath.
    The page takes forever to load, but when it does, all the details fit. Facundo Moreno studied in Buenos Aires and Victoria, and his publications are all in the past few years, which would make sense if he was born in 1976. It takes awhile to become a professor, I guess. And wouldn’t it make sense that both he and his parents’ bandoneón are in the same city, even if it doesn’t make sense that they got separated? Then again, Jeanette said Alison got the instrument at a yard sale from someone who didn’t even know what a bandoneón was. Maybe it was stolen.
    I go over the web page again. On the right is a list of links—Facundo’s favorite books, a few poetry journals and, weirdly, a tea shop whose name sounds familiar. I click on it and slowly, very slowly, the computer reveals the events page of a tea shop in downtown Victoria, one that I’ve passed lots of times on my walks with Jeanette.
    Tea Talk . Discover yerba maté , the ancient drink of health and friendship still popular in South America today. Join us for the fourth of our Tea Around the World lecture series, as Dr. Facundo Moreno, Professor of Hispanic Studies, takes us through this tea’s exciting history. Samples and refreshments will follow.
    The date is this Thursday. Three days from now. I imagine Alison looking over my shoulder at the computer screen and laughing. Don’t question it, Ellie. Just enjoy!
    I stare at the page and swallow hard. I could meet him. Without telling him I have his parents’ bandoneón. I could just see what he’s like and decide later