Free Finn by Matthew Olshan

knew about my grandparents, it made sense that they wouldn’t want the maid to be able to lock her door.
    Even before I opened the door and turned on the light, I knew who was inside. I could smell her.
    It was Silvia. She wore a distinctive ultra sweet kiddie perfume, some berry or other—but she also used my grandfather’s brand of deodorant. She said it reminded her of her father. So she gave off a confused smell, half man and half woman, which generally annoyed me. But for once, that mixed signal of hers was making me incredibly happy.
    Silvia’s sobbing was so scary and intense, for a moment I thought she might be having her baby. I turned on the light. There she was, sitting on the floor with her skinny little legs splayed out in front of her, her round belly resting like a basketball on her lap. She aimed a hammered tin cross at me and started screaming in Spanish. She seemed to think I was some kind of demon.
    It took a minute or two to calm her down enough to talk. I kept saying, “It’s just Chlo, it’s Chlo.” She waved her finger at me each time I said it, as if saying my own name was a no-no. “If you’re who you say you are,” she said, “then stand over there.” Meaning, in front of the mirror, to prove I had a reflection. She was being absurd, but I understood a little better when I saw myself in the mirror. My chin was smudged black from the windowsill. That plus the missing eyebrows and eyelashes did make me look pretty ghoulish, not to mention the fact that the left side of my hair was all curled up from the heat, which made it look like I had gotten a lunatic perm, or at least half of one.
    Silvia made me take a test to prove that I was really me. She asked a bunch of questions, things that only I would have known, such as, What was her favorite kind of pizza? I answered, “Ham and pineapple.” What was her favorite movie? “Gone with the Wind.”
    “See?” I said. Silvia grimaced.
    “That doesn’t prove anything!” she said.
    I told her it wasn’t my fault if she asked bad questions.
    “You confused me,” she said. “It wasn’t fair.”
    “How?” I said. “How?”
    “You’ve got ways.”
    “All right,” I said. “One more question.”
    Silvia had already thought up the ultimate puzzler. “What was the name of the first teddy bear Roberto gave me?”
    “That’s a trick question!” I said. “He gave you about ten, all at the same time.”
    “Then the first big one.”
    “Fuzzy or hairy?”
    “Fuzzy.”
    “Tito P.,” I said. “After some dumb musician.”
    Silvia started sobbing again. “Oh, Chica,” she said. “It is you. Thank God.” She reached up and pinched my cheeks, which stung like they were sunburnt. Then she pulled me down next to her and kissed my lips and said, “Sweetie, we thought you were dead!”
    From what I could gather between blubbery hugs—which were still punctuated now and then by sudden piercing looks, just in case I really was a demon—Silvia was overdue to have her baby. “The baby won’t come and the doctors tell me nothing, but then I figured it out—God is unhappy with me. I’m so unfortunate! I left my saints.” She opened a paper bag and showed me what was inside: two picture frames made out of flattened coffee cans, with tacky religious scenes in them; some fat candles with printed hocus pocus that’s supposed to come true as the candle burns; some bits of metal in the shapes of human body parts, that she said were for praying. And of course the tin cross, which she still wouldn’t let me touch and which she kept more or less pointed in my direction. For insurance, I suppose.
    Silvia had somehow gotten it into her head that God was punishing her for leaving all that stuff behind. That’s the kind of thing I hate most about religion, that it takes perfectly good people with real problems and gives them the worst kind of nonsense to worry about.
    I personally didn’t agree with her convictions, but I didn’t argue with