Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  That long day, the longest of Mom’s life, she roasted beef and baked gingerbread. She hung lights and cut out paper snowflakes.

  Dad and Pete drove hours into the country and hours back. The tree they brought back barely fit through the door, but Pete heaved it in.

  Then Mom called us one last time. Called us the way she did every holiday. Begged us to come, but we were too busy. Always busy with something, weren’t we? she said to Paula and me. Changing our addresses or our clothes or our minds. No, she corrected herself. We never changed our minds.

  Our poor mom. Hadn’t we said that all our lives? Her tone now implied that we were the problem. But in the army, standing by your convictions is called being strong.

  That morning she had promised Dad she would bring us home. Only one way left to make that happen. Mom signaled to Wild Pete. “It’s time.”

  But Pete didn’t move. That self-described grizzly man, the Alaskan Paul Bunyan, scaler of Mount McKinley, wrestler of rams, tamer of mountain lions—he chickened out. Though he knew Mom would cover for him, he didn’t have the guts to make the gun go off “by accident.” Happened more and more, guns shrinking so small they were often mistaken for phones. Pete ducked out the door with nothing more than a bear hug good-bye—a slap on Dad’s back, a squeeze to Mom’s thigh. He held it all in while Dad was looking. His face tightened with the effort. Mom knew as soon as he drove out of sight he would pull over on the shoulder. And let it all out.

  Mom and Dad ate beef and potatoes and gingerbread that night. Then went to bed.

  His chest rose and fell, the air from his mouth audible and visible, its wheezing and misting a movie she never tired of. She watched him for hours, remembering every night they had spent together. Sleeping. And not.

  She smelled and tasted him. Wet moss. Hot embers. Sweet sweat and smoky breath.

  She lived through their entire marriage like a waking dream. And then she did it.

  “What’s the first thing he taught you?” she asked us. “Once you were old enough to understand?”

  We still didn’t speak. I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear this was a dream and I would wake up and never hear the end of the story. I lowered my eyes to my knees.

  “It’s the first thing he taught me, too.”

  How to control life and death, no weapons required. The most important thing he had learned in the army. Not a technique from Ranger training. More like something from one of the myths Ya-Ya used to read to us from ancient Greece.

  Mom put on her gloves, then pressed on his throat. A gentle thumb, not enough pressure to wake him, directly on the spot he had showed us on our tenth birthday, during our hike in the forest. The artery that connects our hearts to our brains. The spot that, if blocked, takes your breath away. Doesn’t require much strength. You can do it in the middle of the night, and no one will ever know it was anything other than sleep apnea.

  A thumb on his throat—soft, quiet, peaceful. Quick and painless. A pause in the middle of a dream. He had just stopped breathing.

  The perfect crime. The only problem was that I hadn’t thought of it myself.

  43

  But—” I said. Maybe Artis did, too. Maybe the dolls and the snowmen and the penguins in the Christmas displays behind glass joined in. Maybe the whole room had learned to speak again.

  Mom made a stop sign with her hand and said she couldn’t have said this on the phone. These days every line was hacked. Then she tried to explain.

  She had promised Dad she would do it. He wanted her to. She didn’t think she could, so she had asked Wild Pete to do it instead, to persuade Dad to settle for an accident with a firearm.

  When they went to bed that night, Dad told her: It’s the only way to end this endless winter.

  She called it mercy killing. Assisted suicide. That’s how she thought of her deed. He had told her back when he was well that if he ever lost his mind, he didn’t want his body to stick around. She thought he had told us when the doctors had diagnosed him a year ago. Maybe he had. We hadn’t read his emails or texts in what felt like millennia. And when Mom had mentioned his name, Artis and I both pretended we couldn’t hear. Though I did write those songs for him, didn’t I?

  Dad might have been sick even when we were kids, the doctors told Mom. It’s hard to diagnose at first. It gets worse and worse over time. Makes you lose your memory little by little until you can’t take care of yourself. Even makes you mean. That’s the worst of it.

  Lewy Body Syndrome. A kind of early-onset dementia. People end up in nursing homes before they’re old enough to retire.

  Would we have believed her if she had told us earlier? She thought she had. She had always said we should give Dad some slack, but she had been saying that since we were teenagers.

  She didn’t believe the doctors anyway. The explanation she preferred was this: climate change. “That’s what did him in.” In the old days, he really had controlled the weather, she explained. He was more than human.

  I could remember when he had made it rain, when he had brought down thunder and lightning and snow. He had made spring come when he wanted it to. He did have that power.

  Then he didn’t anymore. The world stopped working the way it had for so many thousands of years. Weather no longer predictable. Sea levels rose. Ice caps melted. Tornadoes on the Oregon coast? New Orleans sinking into the sea? “These things were not your Dad’s doing,” Mom said. His power was slipping. And it drove him crazy. Literally.

  “Doctors always have an explanation,” she continued. “Melancholia? Call it depression and take a chill pill. Visions? Those are hallucinations, the wrong chemicals in your brain. All those prophets in the Bible who saw God in the bushes would be packed away in the psychiatric ward today.”

  So she chose to believe what Dad told her himself: That he couldn’t die. That all he could do was leave the Earth and go back up to the sky. There, he would be himself again. He was done here. A body was just a costume he slipped on for a little while and took off again when it was time.

  “Remember what I said at the funeral?” Mom’s voice hushed so low I could hear her tears. “The snow out the window, that was your dad. I can feel him. He’s happy again. He’s so glad you girls finally came home for Christmas.”

  I opened my mouth, and only air emerged. Artis couldn’t even move. Her bones must have turned to rock. The clocks stopped.

  What was my sister thinking? Why wouldn’t she even look at me? I could tell her face was stuck in a smirk behind the hands that covered half her face.

  The animated dolls had nothing to say after all. What were we doing here? The coffee that was all I could swallow for breakfast burned through my guts. I tried to visualize the acid neutralizing, a stormy sea calming, the way my meditation teacher had taught me. I couldn’t throw up now. Artis needed me, even if she was too proud to admit it. I zipped my long coat up above my mouth and panted into the fluffy down to let the carbon dioxide settle me. Then I covered my face with my hands and disappeared. I tasted my saliva, the raw rust in the back of my throat.

  Whatever we called what Mom had done, Dad was gone. I would never, ever see him again. He would never see my husband. Never meet my son. The past was gone, but so was the future, thanks to Mom’s thumb. My head hung so heavy in my hands. Snot slipped through the cracks between my fingers.

  In the end he was felled by a hundred-pound woman. That didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did. In a way, this was still just Mom being Mom. She had never been able to say no to him. From the time she was sixteen going on twelve, she had said yes.

  I tapped a rhythm on my knees, starting a phrase for my sister to finish on hers. But she didn’t seem to hear it.

  “What I’m trying to say,” Mom said, “is that your dad had special powers, so he lived by special rules.”

  Artis started to laugh, a dismissive sound like the caw of a dozen birds. A murder of crows.

  “You didn’t see the lightning he made at our fourteenth birthday pa
rty?” I asked her. “What about how he zapped all the cyberstalkers who went after the Slutty Twins, with bolts that shook the internet? And every year, remember, he—not The Groundhog—made spring? Did you go through childhood with your eyes closed?”

  “One of us did,” she said, “but it wasn’t me. You’re as deluded as he was.”

  “Maybe delusion is another word for love.”

  We argued this way, back and forth, voices muffled by our coats, while Mom left to clean the salty red blotches from her face in the bathroom. Even though (or especially because) she was the cause of Dad’s death, she was still a grieving widow.

  When Mom emerged, her hair unraveled and her jewelry tangled in it, she said, “I never meant to tell you what I did that night. It would have been safer for you not to know.”

  “I thought that’s why you brought us here,” I said.

  “No, you brought me. And I know why. You wanted to ask about Zeke.”

  “Who?”

  “I saw you talking to him at the funeral,” she said. “He gave you his card.”

  The guy in the purple tie. “Who is he?” I asked. But then I knew.

  The guy with the pointy chin just like ours, that couldn’t be hidden even under facial hair. The guy who looked so much like us. Of course. He had been trying to tell us, hadn’t he? He said, “Call me Zeke. My family calls me Zeke.”

  “My family.”

  Our brother.

  My sister knew, too. I could tell by the way her smirk tightened into clenched cheeks. She shot up from her seat and bolted out the door.

  Mom sprang up after her, but I blocked the way. “Let her run it out,” I said.

  Mom slunk back to her bench. “She’s always been such a hothead. Reminds me of someone else I know.” She wasn’t looking at me, Artis’s identical twin, but up at the sky, out the window.

  “Only way she can think is to move. Let her sweat through this. She’ll forgive Dad, with time.”

  “Forgive him for Zeke?” Mom asked.

  “And other things,” I said. “For busting our butts.”

  “You mean discipline,” Mom said.

  “For abandoning us in the woods.”

  “That’s how you learned to navigate.” Blink blink blink. She was at it again.

  “For reducing your grocery money if you weighed too much.”

  “He was helping me with my diet.”

  “For never letting us go on a sleepover.”

  “Because you didn’t try to win the spelling bee. He wanted to teach you to be ambitious. And it worked.”

  “For storming into our room and breaking everything in sight.”

  “He’d just lost his job.”

  “We might even forgive him for making you scream behind your bedroom door at night.”

  “You mean when we were making love?” Mom stood up. A tiny curlicue of a grin rose up to her beauty mark. “How is that any of your business?”

  “Dad walked into the hall and kicked us.”

  “He nudged you with his feet.” Mom kneaded her earlobe. “And you know. You were sometimes in the way.”

  “She may even forgive you for not protecting us.” I paused. This was the hardest thing for me to say. “Or she may not.”

  “If I had,” Mom said, “how would you ever have learned to protect yourselves?”

  44

  I grabbed the key from Paula’s purse, then dashed through the snow globe the world had become. Had. To. Get. Out. My throat clogged with rage and mucus. My toes frozen in slushy boots.

  But the rental lay immobile in a mountain of snow. This weather was a lion escaped from the zoo, fiercer and hungrier every season. I yanked a shovel from the trunk and began to dig. Dad could shovel shirtless. I could shovel with my bare hands if I had to.

  What could Zeke do? What kind of hide did he have? Thin as a coddled child’s. Now I knew who this man was.

  Heave, dump, heave, dump.

  He was the boy Dad gave our birthday presents to. Our Hamster Hotel. He was the one who got a pet when all we got was a gun. The gun I wished I had in my hands right now, so I could shoot something.

  Pitch. Chuck. Hurl. Was this a shovel or a spoon? An ice pick would help more.

  He was the son Dad meant when he said, “The two of you don’t add up to one boy.” I could beat him in a brawl. Outman the little geek with the ugly purple tie.

  He was the mysterious friend Dad had given his moose cap to, that day we had seen them at Downriver Chik-N. The boy we worried Dad loved. The boy he did love, but not the way we thought.

  Scrape. Crack. Fling.

  He wasn’t a boy anymore. He was taller than us, almost as old as we were. Shoulders that stretched for miles. When he was young, I hadn’t noticed his hair, dark as a dog’s nose. So black it glinted blue. Didn’t see that he had Dad’s chin.

  My chin. My eyes. My hair. Of course he did.

  The air polka-dotted with snow, but through the white, I spotted Paula and Mom, trudging toward me.

  “What the hell?” Paula said. “You just disappeared. I didn’t even realize you took the car key.”

  “You knew where I was.” As soon as I said it, though, I realized it was a lie. I might as well have been speaking Uzbekistani. How had it gotten so cold out here all of a sudden? As frozen as an empty stare.

  “Let’s go,” Mom said. “Before you have to dig us out again.”

  I opened the passenger door for her. Paula slid into the back, then did her signature silent squirm. She never said much, did she? All our lives I had to do the talking for both of us.

  “Who is he, anyway?” I couldn’t even look Mom in the eye. Luckily, I didn’t have to, since if I did, we would crash. “Pixie’s kid?”

  “You remember her?” Mom said, her eyes sliding away from the diamond stud in my ear.

  “Were there others?” My hands hurt from squeezing the steering wheel so tight.

  Mom did her weird syncopated blinking thing, the tic that had embarrassed me most about her as a kid, and said, “Don’t look at me like I did something wrong.”

  I could hear Paula sucking in her lips, like she was going to swallow her whole face, like she was some kind of jellyfish. Like she had forgotten how to talk.

  “How could you?” I hit the gas too hard and slid all the way through a red light. I didn’t want to stop anyway. “How could you call him our brother?”

  “He’s a good man,” Mom said. “And your dad, he did the honorable thing. He acknowledged his son’s existence.”

  “Not to us.” The visibility was for shit. If I opened my eyes wider, though, I could cut through the snow. I could make out every crystal, each “unique” flake. I knifed through the lanes.

  “He didn’t want to hurt you,” Mom said.

  I tried not to laugh.

  “But you heard Ya-Ya’s awful words at Papu’s funeral: You and your bastard son, she said. That’s what killed him. Everyone heard it. She meant the shame had caused a stroke. She may have even believed it. If you didn’t close your ears, you had to hear her say it.”

  “Dad was the bastard. How could you stay with him?”

  “I tried to leave. You didn’t really think I went to the hospital for ‘nerves,’ did you?”

  “You always came back.”

  “No one else could satisfy me. Or train you girls.”

  “Train us for what?”

  “To get what you want. To want it so much you make it so. To be like him.”

  “Let’s hope we’re not, for our husbands’ sake. For our boys.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Thick-skinned?”

  “He knew that was the only way.”

  “Did he have other kids?”

  “No.”

  “That you know of. What an ass.”

  “Having a kid makes you an ass?” Mom said. “I guess you’d rather not exist.”

  “I guess.” Let her think I was that reckless. Me, the one steering the car.


  “Where are you going?” Mom asked.

  She’d like to know, wouldn’t she? She’d like to have all the answers. Now she knew what it felt like.

  Forty. Fifty. Sixty miles an hour. Didn’t matter which direction as long as I merged onto the highway. Finally up to seventy-five. I could lift my foot and glide for miles.

  “I was just a kid when I had you,” Mom said. “People said I shouldn’t have. But not your dad. He wouldn’t let me get rid of you. He wouldn’t let Pixie get rid of Zeke. Didn’t want to let you, either.”

  “Let me what? Have an abortion? I thought you were on our side. Dad punished you for taking us to the clinic. Remember?”

  “Sometimes he got angry. We all have flaws. But he loved us. He loved us all.” Every time she said the L word, my nose ran. “Love is not a pizza. You don’t slice it up and then it’s gone.”

  “You read that on a fortune cookie?”

  “Remember how he called me Goddess?” Her tapping foot and blinking eyes stilled; her forehead unclenched. She smiled for the first time since I had arrived from the airport. She smiled so wide I had to see even when I tried not to look. She wound her hair around and around into a crown. The lily tattoo on the back of her neck shone white. Her teeth gleamed.

  In my head, I was seventeen again, and Mom was walking to the grocery store, after Dad had sold the Bull to buy the tow truck. What did she think of that? Had grief just whitewashed her memory?

  I pushed away thoughts of Pixie and Dad in bed. I didn’t want to remember how, when I had met Pixie the first time, I had fantasized about having her as a big sister. Those alluring leopard-skin stilettos. Her soft cleavage and hard studs. The diamonds Paula and I now wore in our ears. “Why are we only finding out about this now?

  “Your dad didn’t want you to know.”

  “And you just did whatever he said? You just rolled over for him, didn’t you? Always. Like a dog.”

  My sister finally moved. She leaned up from the back seat, and her voice slid between Mom and me. She whispered, “Just stop.”