Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  I moved into the fast lane. We were hydroplaning, but I didn’t care.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mom said. “Zeke was an accident like you girls were. And Moose took care of us.”

  I needed a mint to clear my palate, but all I could fish out of my pocket was trash. “How can you act so fucking calm? When you’ve been betrayed and lied to for so long?”

  Then my sister clasped her hand behind my neck. She squeezed it the way we used to squeeze each other’s knees. I knew what it meant, even though I could no longer read her mind. Mom wasn’t the one who was lied to, Paula said, with the pad of her middle finger circling the knot of my scapula. We were.

  And yet she still thought we should forgive him.

  I pulled onto the shoulder, stopped, and pressed my forehead against the wheel. Then I yanked the diamond out of my earlobe and dumped it into the cupholder. I would have dropped it into an ashtray full of ashes, had there been one.

  45

  Mom pressed the emergency lights. I opened my sister’s door and webbed my hands over hers, still on the wheel. They were as hot as her temper, but I soon cooled them down. Knuckle to knuckle, joint to joint. The fate lines of our palms stacked. Without me, I wondered if Artis would burn up in an hour.

  Whenever I needed to turn on my brain again, I walked or soaked in Epsom salts. There were no bathtubs on the interstate, so I took over the wheel, turned on cruise control, and let the car do the walking, farther and farther, till I finally found words for my sister. “You heard what Mom did to Dad. And all you want to talk about is Zeke?”

  “At least I said something,” Artis said. “You were zoned out on your phone.”

  “Googling Lewy Body Syndrome. It’s an often-misdiagnosed brain disease,” I explained. “The second most common dementia after Alzheimer’s. Starts young. Typically hits after fifty but sometimes much earlier. Can cause impaired thinking. Visual hallucinations. Mood and behavior changes. Delusions or paranoia. Who knows how long this thing had been hijacking his personality?”

  “The doctors said he had it. That doesn’t mean he had it,” Mom corrected.

  Artis kicked my seat, the way toddlers do on airplanes. “An accidental asshole is still an asshole,” she said.

  For a moment, I thought she was talking about herself.

  46

  I could Google, too. Better to look at my phone than remind myself that Paula couldn’t drive. A dusting of snow and you have to crawl below the speed limit? I could fly a copter through a sandstorm with a bullet wound better than this.

  LBD. That’s what the internet called it. The Little Black Dress of brain disorders. Lewy Body Dementia. Lacking Better Descriptions. Let’s Be Dumb. “It’s hereditary,” I read on my screen.

  “Can be,” Paula said, her eyes fixed on the taillights directly ahead.

  “There’s a gene. You have to pull up the research. See?” I leaned between my sister and mom to show them.

  “I can’t look. We’ll crash,” Paula said.

  “As slow as this, I think we can risk it,” I said.

  “What are our chances?”

  “As much as one in two.”

  “Either me or you.”

  Or Zeke, neither of us said.

  Let it be him. Did my sister think that, too? Could I make her? Could I think a thing and make it so? Had we ever been able to? I could close my eyes and try.

  My phone buzzed. Sebastian wanted to know when we were coming home. What in God’s name, he asked, were we doing out in this storm?

  “We” were doing nothing. Paula was driving. I was surfing. Mom was staring up at the agitating clouds, her own silent movie.

  Maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe we were all thinking the same word without saying it: Zeke.

  “He said he wouldn’t contact you,” Mom said. “But you could contact him.”

  Paula pounded a tune on the steering wheel and hummed in harmony. Then she said, “I already did.”

  47

  Hours later, I answered Mom’s door and saw a ghost. Big eyes, endless chest, the chin that could double as a weapon.

  Snow melted from his face, his thin, clumpy beard. When he took off his puffy coat, he shrank to human size.

  Zeke. Of course it was. Who had I thought it would be? I had invited him.

  “Come in!” Mom said, her voice a forced chirp.

  The husbands shook hands with this stranger, this family member, this half-this and half-that, then rushed outside to shovel snow. Mom hung up Zeke’s coat while he stomped his shoes clean.

  Artis tilted her head, a hint of a nod, her fingers burrowed deep in her pockets. I felt my sister’s glare, daring me to withhold my hand, too. I had always obeyed that stare, and look where it had gotten me. So I reached out my arms to see how Zeke would respond. He folded me in his embrace, and I disappeared into his familiar smell, the musky oil Dad had used to groom his beard. I could hear the boys building a blanket fort in our old bedroom, clicking their tongues as triggers.

  Mom offered leftover funeral cake and her homemade gingerbread men, but Zeke seemed too fidgety to sit. He wore a ski cap the same color as his dark hair, skateboard shoes despite the snow, and a baggy T-shirt under an unbuttoned faded flannel. Without his skinny purple tie, he fit right in with the decor.

  Our silence echoed off the taxidermy decorations and made our sons’ chatter all the more audible. Now they were pretending their bodies were made of smartphones. Whenever they wanted to call someone, they just flicked their fingers. They were so high-tech, they could even call the dead.

  “How’s heaven?” they asked in their child voice.

  Then they pretended to speak for Dad. “Heaven is good,” they made him say in a boom like God.

  “You’re not lonely?” they asked in their high-pitched squeak.

  “Han Solo is here,” said the booming voice. “And Luke Skywalker.”

  “Is there lots of candy?”

  “Every day is Halloween. But I never get sick to my stomach.”

  “Do you have a stomach?”

  “No, I’m made of snow.”

  Then, finally, both boys in stereo: “Do you miss us?”

  No answer. I squeezed my shoulders into a hunch up to my chin then peeked around the room. Everyone else was staring at their phones. I seemed to be the only one who could hear a thing.

  No answer still from the bedroom.

  Then finally a shout so loud even Mom heard. “No!”

  She scuffled away to close their door.

  None of us knew what to say, so Mom gave us something to do. We helped her carry boxes from the basement. Photos, clothes, and treasures. Dad’s knives and trophies and gear. Each box weighed me down to the ground. Artis lugged two at a time, as if they were empty.

  Zeke marched through the house, silently marveling. At the animal parts on the walls, the coffee table Dad had built in high school shop class. I tried to ignore the frayed edges of furniture, the cracked paint and stained carpet. I could have bought my parents a new couch with the money from my latest record, at least.

  “I always wanted to come inside.” Someone finally spoke. It was Zeke. He sat at the kitchen table and accepted a cup of coffee from Mom.

  I joined him, dropping boxes at his feet. Mom pushed a plate of cookies toward me, and I nibbled on one just to be polite. “You could have asked.”

  “Dad said no.” It took me a minute to realize who he meant. Moose. Shouldn’t Zeke have called him by another name? Something that meant half dad? Though he wasn’t, was he? Zeke had seen Dad more than we had as adults, for sure.

  “He thought you’d stopped talking to him because . . .” Zeke stared up at the moose antlers above the TV, the ones I secretly believed were deer. He paused so long I thought he must be waiting for the animal to tell him what to say. “Because you found out about me.”

  “We didn’t know you existed,” I said.

  “But you saw me at that chicken place.”

&n
bsp; I had told him that on the phone. “We didn’t know who you were then.” Did we?

  “Then why?”

  I excavated a wolf tooth necklace from one of the boxes we had carried up and added it to Zeke’s pile. Why had I stopped talking to Dad? How many times had I been asked that question? By my friends and my husband, therapists and strangers, even in music magazine interviews. “It’s complicated,” I always said. But now I knew it was simply this: because my sister told me to.

  I couldn’t say that, so I turned up my palms.

  48

  We had reasons,” I said. I didn’t want to talk to Zeke. I didn’t even want him here. Couldn’t he tell by the evil eye I shot in his direction? But Paula’s mouth had run out of battery again. Someone had to respond.

  “What did he do to you?” Zeke asked.

  “What didn’t he?” I moved the gingerbread men around on my plate. I finally understood why Mom played with her food instead of eating it.

  “I want to know everything,” Zeke said.

  “Why?” I plucked the raisin eyes.

  “You had the life I wanted,” he said.

  “You have no idea.” I tore off the arms, the legs, and the head.

  He leaned toward me, elbows on the table. “Then tell me.”

  I exhaled a loud puff of air and made my hands into pointy triangles. “We used to listen in the hall on the other side of our parents’ door.” And with those words I began to share my first memories. “Dad kicked us,” I concluded. “So hard we had to wear long pants to cover up our bruises the next day.”

  I told him more. We were ten again, abandoned in the woods, bait for bears.

  Fourteen, excavating shards from our skin, the glass from the picture frames Dad had knocked from our dressers shattered across the floor.

  We were seventeen, and he said, “I’ll get your tubes tied.”

  “Look what he did for you.” Mom had been hovering at the sink, but now she sat down. “Look what he made you into. Fine young women.”

  Zeke said, “Dad taught you how to play guitar and sing. He told me that. He would have taught me, too, if we’d had time. Not just a weekend here or there, when he could pretend to be hunting.”

  I should have known those trips were fake. He never brought home meat.

  “I always wanted . . .” Zeke slipped off his cap and pulled his cascade of hair back and secured it with a rubber band.

  “You can have all his stuff,” I said.

  “I always wanted . . .” He stabbed his own thumb with a wolf tooth. “I followed you, you know. Walking home from school. I hid in a bush and watched you rehearse in your garage. I saw you at the spelling bee. At talent shows. I saw every clip of the Slutty Twins.”

  The pervy Peeping Tom. “I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Maybe there’s a lot you didn’t know,” he said.

  Mom brought a second plate of cookies, to replace the men we had reduced to crumbs. Only Zeke refilled his plate. I mashed my crumbs to sand, then piled them into a hill.

  “What about when he nursed you from pneumonia?” Mom asked. “When he read to you for hours on end? When he cooked you grilled cheese with olive oil and freshly picked dandelion greens?”

  What did a dandelion green even look like?

  “It’s more convenient for you to remember only the things that fit your story,” Mom said. “The story that justifies what you did.”

  What we did? What about her? But I couldn’t say that. Not in front of Zeke. She could give a million selfless reasons, but even if they were true, what she did wasn’t legal. She could prove nothing. Since Dad had no living will, if Zeke turned her in, she could even go to jail.

  49

  The story that justified what we did. When had Mom ever been so eloquent? Never. Or maybe I just hadn’t listened.

  In college I had waited for Dad to arrive at our dorm and beg us to take him back, to forgive him. Now I knew that forgiveness was a quiet thing. I didn’t need to say the words aloud. Wherever else he was, Dad was also in my head.

  He could finally read my mind. Like a twin.

  He could hear me say with my eyes, “You can talk to me now. I’m sorry I didn’t let you before.” My words rose up to the clouds, and the sky responded in kind. Who knew lightning and thunder could occur in the middle of a snowstorm? We all looked out the window. The dog in the yard yipped and yapped the way he had whenever Dad came home.

  Finally, Mom rose and herded us all to the basement. We watched her unlock each safe and hand us Dad’s rifles one by one. “Take whichever you want,” she said. “They’re not loaded.”

  We all let out nervous laughs.

  50

  I knew which one, of course. I was the only person in the house who knew a thing about guns. I saw it right away, the twin of the one Dad had given us for our birthday way back when. Why had he only given us one?

  I grabbed it and sequestered myself from their awkward chatter, letting the gun tell me where to go, landing on the spot where Dad had taught us to play guitar. A lot of good that did me in the army. Then I stripped down to bare feet on the cold concrete. I could hear the buzz against my soles and nothing else. We sank into Dad’s chair—the gun and I. Cold metal woke my warm skin. All I could see were the insides of my eyelids.

  I was thirteen again, rummaging in Dad’s underwear drawer for the ammo, convincing Paula not to stop me, then aiming out the window. My skin prickly and hot, the blood coursing between my legs where new fur grew, my head filled with the power of the budding curves of my hips, the curved shaft in my hand.

  I was nineteen again, spied on as I bathed in the lake, swimming to the bank to grab the gun and roust the Peeping Tom from the bushes like a startled deer. What had Zeke said? That he had followed us all our lives. He was no better than that creep.

  I closed my eyes and disappeared. I hadn’t forgotten the way Dad had taught us how, in the woods, so long ago. I stilled my breath, calmed my bladder, moved as little as I could. Quiet as a dead man.

  I let the gun speak to me. This is what it said:

  Maybe it was Zeke’s fault Dad never got to meet our husbands and sons. Maybe we did know about our “brother” all along. In the back of our minds, he could have been there, even if we hadn’t wanted to acknowledge him.

  “Maybe is a weak word,” Dad would have said. Did say, just now. I could hear him in the cold metal, which sounded the same as the rattle of my brain. It felt good not to have to rely on only my own words, like a pathetic singleton. His voice echoed in my head: “Maybe is a half-assed idea. Maybe is a coward. Maybe is what you say when you refuse to take a stand. Maybe won’t get you anywhere anytime soon.”

  Maybe was that limbo space I didn’t want to keep falling into.

  The gun had no patience for maybes. It made me say what I couldn’t have said all those years but must have always known. That we didn’t cut Dad off because he killed his dad. Or because he grounded us. The real reason was standing in the basement here with me, wearing an open flannel and a baggy T-shirt with the logo of his company, Phantom Limbs.

  And there was the diamond stud in his ear, identical to the one my sister wore. Had she dug it out of the cupholder in the car and given it to him? Or had he stolen it? I said I didn’t want it, but she had to know that wasn’t what I meant. She had always known before. Before Zeke.

  That diamond stud was everything.

  The little thief.

  I wanted to point the muzzle at him. The guns weren’t loaded, so what did it matter?

  The guns weren’t loaded, Mom had said. She had also said “cardiac arrest” on the phone.

  Anyway, I knew where Dad kept his cartridges. I could find my way to the underwear drawer and back before anyone knew I was gone. I could pretend to go to the bathroom. To check on the boys.

  We had no special powers, did we, Paula and I? But the object I held in my hands did, its barrel gleaming, its oiled metal hard and stubborn. Ready? Aim.

  Op
en your eyes.

  And lay the gun down.

  I couldn’t kill anyone. Not as a civilian, anyway. Dad couldn’t, either. I should have known that long ago. Paula and I were so like him. Nothing but cowards. Mom was the only one with any guts.

  Imagine that.

  How long had I sequestered myself down here? I had never been this alone before. Where was my sister? I didn’t know how to not know where my sister was. And that voice I had just heard? Was it stuck in the gun? Or outside, in the sky, like Mom said?

  Dad? Can you hear me?

  Where do we go when we die? Where would I go? Who would offer me mercy if I inherited your demented gene? If I lost my mind early? Maybe I was losing it already.

  Maybe? That voice again.

  I fell to my knees on the concrete.

  Then I heard laughter outside. That’s where they all must have gone. I scraped myself from the floor and went to find my twin. Out the basement window, I saw them. She was with Zeke, and I didn’t want to have to talk to him. Ever again. So I stood on my tiptoes and squinted at them through the murky glass.

  51

  A snowman needs a hat, so I gave him mine, the kind I wear on the subway when I want to go incognito. But the boys said no, Grandpa wouldn’t wear a beanie like a hipster. That’s what they called him. Grandpa.

  “Where’s my mom?” Pablo asked.

  “She’ll be back soon.” I couldn’t tell him she had disappeared. Let him think she was doing some last-minute shopping.

  My brother went inside and ferreted a fur-lined earflap hat from one of the boxes from the basement. One of Dad’s souvenirs from his hunting trips in Alaska. “Perfect,” the boys said, though snowmen don’t have ears.

  A snowman needs mittens, too, at least in Michigan. I slipped mine over the prongs at the ends of the branch arms. My favorites. Puffy black like boxing gloves. But on the palms shone rainbow peace signs.

  Pablo said his mom had a matching pair. “I love how you and my mom buy the same stuff even when you don’t go shopping together. I love how you . . .”