Half Life

by Lillian Clark

  I tap the answer button on the touch screen. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hey, Luce.” Her voice is weird. Not just car-speaker weird, but taut. And I think, Maybe it’s in the water. A parasite. Alien microbes using my parents as hosts. “You almost home?”

  I glance at Dad, and he looks the same as before. Like, should I slap him? Not hard. Just a snap-out-of-it tap. “Yeah,” I say, “almost there.”

  “Great,” she says, and hangs up.

  We ease to a stop at the last light before home, and I ask, “Did someone die?”

  Nothing. Like he’s not even in the car with me. I’d been joking—halfway—but now my stomach shrinks and my pulse rises. “Dad.”

  He gives his head a slight shake. “What?”

  “Mom. You. This conference in the middle of the afternoon on a workday. Did someone die?”

  He shakes his head again. “No.”

  We turn onto our block and pass a series of densely landscaped, oversized houses. The Gilberts’ Maltipoo sprints across their front yard to bark at our car through their wrought iron fence, a frenzied sentient cotton ball. “Then, what?”

  “Your mom and I will tell you inside.”

  “Awesome. Not at all ominous.”

  He doesn’t say anything. Not as we pull into the garage stall next to my mom’s car—leaving the door open, I note—or as he climbs out, forgetting his work bag in the backseat. Nothing as I follow him into the house. Nothing as Boris, our five-year-old Great Pyrenees does his groaning delighted dance in the kitchen, shoving his massive body first against Dad’s legs, then mine. Nothing as Mom comes into the kitchen, as they pass each other without a glance.

  No, worse than “without a glance.” They pass each other like two negatively charged magnets, with a repulsed barrier between.

  “Hey, Lucy Moosie,” she says, leaning over Boris to give me a hug.

  “Mom. Please.”

  “Right.” She straightens and picks dog hair off her navy skirt. “Sorry. Lucille.”

  Navy skirt and crisp-not-crumpled blouse means she probably wasn’t on call, but I ask, “Usher forth any new life today?”

  “Not today.” She crosses the kitchen in her nylons, taking a mug from one cabinet and our basket of assorted teas from another. She sets those on the island and grabs the kettle off the stove. “Ava offered to take most of my patient load today so I could make it home in time.”

  Does that mean Ava, Cass’s mom, knows what this is about? Does Cass? I watch my mom fill the kettle in the sink, set it on a burner, turn said burner on, then shake her head and turn it off again.

  But, not death. So, are we moving? Is Mom pregnant with some midlife-crisis baby? Is someone sick? Does one of them have cancer?

  “Come on,” she says, walking toward the living room. “Your dad and I need to talk to you about something.”

  The knot in my chest is pulled so taut, it’s vibrating.

  Dad’s in one of the accent chairs arranged to face the couch, elbows propped on his knees, tie dangling in the space between. Mom moves to sit in the second accent chair beside him. They wait. I stand behind the couch, arms crossed, holding myself together. Boris plods into the room and lies on the rug with a full-chested sigh. Likewise, Bubbo. Likewise.

  “Luce,” Dad says, not looking at me. “Please.”

  I sit.

  “So,” Mom starts, then swallows whatever she planned to say next. Her eyes are wet.

  She and Dad share a look, and he says, “We’ve decided—”

  “Together.”

  “Right. We’ve decided, together, that it’d be best for us to separate.”

  I blink. “What?”

  “Well, not best,” says Mom. “That’s not—”

  “Okay. Poor word choice, but—”

  “Wait. Separate or divorce?” I ask.

  “Divorce,” they say at the same time.

  Dad shakes his head.

  Mom rolls her eyes.

  And I feel the bottom of my world fall out.

  “Lucy.” My mom’s watching me. “Say something? Please?”

  “I—” They were perfect. College sweethearts, married after graduation, each other’s cheering squads through MBAs and MDs and working at the same hospital, perfect. Jobs, house, kid, perfect. “I thought you were happy.”

  Mom flashes a look at Dad, but he’s staring at his hands, linked in his lap. “We were. For a long time. Then it…faded. Until we were just going through the motions. And once you realize you’ve been pretending at something like that, like happiness, well. It’s pretty impossible to go back.”

  For the last year or so, since I got my learner’s permit, I’ve been having this recurring stress dream. I’m driving my mom’s SUV, with her in the passenger seat, and the brakes give out. It’s not dramatic. Or even exciting. Instead, it’s so basic it’s almost boring. I’ll be preparing to turn or slow down on a hill, press the brake pedal, and…nothing. I can feel the weight of the vehicle around me, impossibly heavy, pushed forward by its momentum. And I have to stop it with the sheer force of my will.

  I slam my foot down on the useless brake and urge the SUV to stop. All two and a half tons of it.

  Sometimes I manage to make it slow.

  Most of the time, I don’t.

  This is like that. If I try hard enough—stop trying so fucking hard, Lucille—it’ll stop.

  “Is someone moving?” I ask. “You? Dad? All of us?”

  Dad blinks some focus back into his eyes and clears his throat. “I am. I—” His voice breaks. He coughs, falsely, to cover it and pats his chest with an open palm. “I took a job over in Aurora.”

  “We thought it’d be…easier,” Mom says.

  Easier?

  Dad rubs his eyes. “I signed the lease on an apartment yesterday.”

  I try to take a deep breath. Try, try, try. But the knot’s so tight, the room’s gone airless. Standing, I say, “I have stuff to do,” and walk away.

  Behind me, Mom calls, “Luce,” while Dad says, “Let her go.”

  I cross the entryway and climb the stairs to my bedroom. Close my door, squeeze my eyes shut, ball my hands up so tight it hurts. And silent scream.

  But it does nothing. When I open my eyes, the knot’s still cinched tight, and my room’s a brittle void, a vacuum tailored to me alone.

  A favorite mug. A set of end tables. A vase. A smattering of picture frames from the walls and shelves. Then the bedroom set from the guest room, the entire contents of Dad’s home office. Gone. In his car and a U-Haul towed by Mom’s SUV, leaving our house three-quarters full.

  It feels fake. I mean, I’ve been over this—what’s real, anyway? What’s true?—but this is the ground tilting. Or finding out the ground has always been tilted and all the while you’ve been happily, obliviously walking up the incline. Then poof!, awareness. And now you’re struggling. Legs aching and unsteady on your feet. While you ask yourself, Has it always been this hard?

  But of course it hasn’t. Because maybe the foundation of your life shifted, but it did so gradually. Quietly. Behind closed doors and when you weren’t home. Sunday, eavesdropping from the top of the stairs, I wonder, Would screaming have helped? A few blowouts, accusations and vitriol, muffled by my bedroom walls while I did my homework. Brittle silences and sidelong glares at dinner. Would that have made this…better?

  “What about this magnet, Ryan?” my mom asks, painfully polite. Like, yes, this is torture, but make sure it’s nice. “The one from the Grand Canyon.”

  “Sure, I’ll take that one,” he answers, followed by the sound of said magnet being tossed in a box.

  Or, later, my dad: “What should we do with the wedding china?”

  “Save it for Lucille?”

  A pause. “You think she’ll want it?”


  Nope.

  “Leave it,” my mom says. “I’ll ask her later.” Then I hear her sigh. There’s the sound of a dish being set on the counter. Soft footsteps. Dad murmuring. It’s gentle. Sweet.

  This can’t be real. Divorce is for hatred and infidelity and not being able to stand sharing the other person’s air. Not this amicable shredding. This painstaking courtesy. Like my seemingly happily married parents are playacting at divorce.

  Then, more footsteps. Closer, crossing the dining room toward the stairs, so I sneak back to my room thinking, Lucille Harper, Overachiever; Nancy and Ryan Harper, Perfect Couple; Nancy and Ryan Harper, Bitter Farce.

  If perfect’s not perfect, then…what’s the point?

  * * *

  Friday again, the last day of the school year, and Cass claps her hands in front of my face. “Earth to Lucille,” she singsongs.

  “Sorry.”

  “What planet were you on?”

  Planet My Dad Spent the Last Five Nights in His New Apartment. Which I’d tell her except I’m honestly not sure how. At some point in the last nine months, I stopped knowing how to talk to Cass. And every time I picked up my phone to call her last weekend, every time I thought to bring it up this week, I’d hesitate, imagining opening my mouth only to have nothing come out. Knowing that if—when—I managed to tell her, it’d go from “real” to real. Official.

  “Preoccupied,” I say.

  “Obviously.” She half smiles. Half-indulgent, half-annoyed. “But with what? School’s over.” Sitting hip to hip on the bench, she nudges me, teasing. “Nothing left to be uptight about for three whole months.”

  “Funny,” I tease back. At least, I hope it sounds like teasing because it feels like bullshit.

  “Come on,” she says. “I’m trying here. Are you okay?”

  She got her hair done last weekend. Fresh cornrows on the sides with strands of purple woven in and her natural hair styled in a Mohawk up the middle. It looks incredible. Which I told her, of course, Monday when I saw her in English. But now I wonder if, while I went through SAT vocab lists and listened to my parents haul boxes outside, Aran went with her. Or even Louise or Finn. And I feel jealousy slurp the marrow from my bones, then fill the hollow left behind.

  “I’m fine,” I say, and force a smile. She smiles back, lips stained a bright purple that looks amazing against her brown skin. I can’t wear colors like that. I’m too—self-conscious—pale. Purple lipstick would turn me corpselike. But maybe that’s what I need. Purple lips, neon hair. A new look, a new everything.

  Aran and Bode stroll up, and Cass stands to wrap her arms around Aran’s neck, kissing him in a grand display of school’s-over-can’t-get-in-trouble PDA. I lean back against the wall. Bode catches my eye, nods toward the pair, and rolls his eyes extravagantly.

  He sits next to me, and I stare at his red Vans, matched to his red-framed glasses and the blood dripping from the horn of the unicorn on his T-shirt. It’s rearing, preparing to stomp a half-mashed Starbucks logo beneath its hooves. A Bode original.

  Don’t blush, don’t blush, don’t blush. “Subtle,” I say.

  He glances at Aran and Cass. “ ‘Subtle’ is not the word I’d use for that.”

  “I meant your shirt.”

  “Oh.” He looks down at it. “Yeah. And a little passé.”

  I breathe a laugh.

  “Seriously,” he says. “I made this screen in eighth grade.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  I smile. “It’s really good!” Gross, Lucille, no. Way too enthusiastic.

  His brow creases as he grins. A closed-mouth grin, the paradoxical kind where the corners turn down like he’s not sure if what I said was a compliment or an insult. “Thanks.”

  My cheeks heat. I consider becoming incorporeal and sinking back through the wall.

  “You coming tonight?” he asks.

  “Where?”

  “Lava!” Aran cheers.

  Cass unhooks her arms from around his neck. “A bunch of us are going to play it in the park. You should come.”

  My knee-jerk is to say no. Because when she says a bunch of us, she means her theater friends. Such as Louise, who isn’t my biggest fan. Like, rolls her eyes at half the things I say, and I don’t talk much around her. But even with everything—I’m caught up with prep and nothing starts till the week after next—I have none of my typical excuses. And my house feels like living inside that ache in your throat when you refuse to cry. So I say, “Okay.”

  I walk home. My mom’s still at work. I let Boris out, empty my messenger bag, unload the dishwasher, vacuum Boris’s daily layer of shed fur, then sit in front of my laptop in my room. I reply to my SAT tutor, update my calendar with the new info from my Intro to Business syllabus, send a “hello” message to my group through the classroom portal, and try not to panic as the knot creaks with tension in my chest. Writing it all out helps. Four hours of class each day, chapters to read, weekly assignments, quizzes, tests, the course-long group project.

  Dad was supposed to take me. Drop me off, pick me up. But now he’s in Aurora. I pick up my phone to call him, make a new plan.

  There’s a thin layer of dust on the moose figurines arranged along the back of my desk. I watch a single mote—rainbow, flickering in the late-afternoon sunlight spilling through my window—float down and settle atop the one from my sixth birthday, a bobblehead with the moose sitting like a person on a rock and holding a banner that reads COLORADO. There are seventeen total. One for each birthday, including the day I was born.

  “Lucy Moosie.” What a ridiculous nickname. Who wants to be called a moose? But, for some reason, from that first one—bought by my dad in the hospital gift shop—it stuck. It was that or geese, I guess.

  I set my phone down and pick up the moose from the year I turned twelve. It’s the most fragile. Glass. With brittle antlers and spindly legs. I weigh it on my palm, consider throwing it at my wall. Then put it back and schedule in enough time each day on my calendar to take the bus.

  The Reach the Sky email from Friday is still in my inbox. I should’ve moved it, trashed it. Instead I scan it one more time, like picking a scab. Like I might read between the lines why—with a perfect GPA and a list of accolades and extracurriculars as long as my arm—I’m only an alternate.

  Not like I didn’t already ask. I did. And the answer I got back read like a form rejection from a college: “With limited positions and a record-sized applicant pool, we were forced to be exceedingly selective” and “we invite you to reapply next year” and “should a position open up, we’ll be in touch.” Thankfully, someone has a scheduling conflict in the second session, so yeah. I’m happy. And I was able to swap an evening class for the daytime one with more credits. But it won’t fix the pockmark on my applications made by missing the first session. It doesn’t explain what about me doesn’t hold up. A privileged, straight white girl with a four-point-oh from a Mountain State? Boring. One in a hundred. Less. I need perfection. And then some.

  My phone and computer ding with a message from Cass: Pick you up at 8! I make myself wait a full five-count before answering that that sounds great—behold how calm and collected and not frantically convincing myself not to bail I am—then close my phone in a desk drawer to focus on the practice SAT test my tutor sent over to assess my existing skills.

  I’m only six questions in when my computer dings with a new email. From Life2. Again.

  I hover my cursor over the notification, ready to click delete for the tenth time in as many days. Instead, I open it.

  The message is topped by a banner ad. Silver, sleek, enigmatic, and animated so that when I move my cursor over it, the Life2 logo switches to a slogan—Do more. Be more.—with a flash of light like a lens flare. The body of the message is congenial. And less generic than I expected. “Dear Lucille
,” it reads, “I realize this is unconventional. And I hope you’ll forgive my persistence despite your lack of response. Thanks to your history of dedication to excellence, we at Life2 are eager to extend to you this opportunity of a lifetime and…” blah blah blah delete.

  An “opportunity of a lifetime” to hand over my Social Security number and end up with a few dozen credit cards opened in my name. But I stare at it in my trash folder thinking, Only an alternate, exceedingly selective, dedication to excellence while the knot in my chest goes creak, creak, creak.

  I hear the door to the garage open and close downstairs. My mom calls, “Luce?” and I head down.

  “Hey,” she says, dropping a bag of fast food on the counter. Her hair’s falling out of its messy bun and her eye makeup’s smeared, like she’s been crying.

  “Hey,” I echo. I don’t know what else to say to her. The divorce, her sadness, it all makes me feel so unprepared and insufficient.

  She dumps her work bag on the floor, letting it fall off her shoulder, not even trying to catch it, then unpacks the food, pulling out two cartons of French fries, then a burger and a salad. She pushes both toward me. “Your choice, Lucy.”

  I must make a face, because she wilts. Sitting on a barstool, she drops her head into her hands. “Sorry, Lucille. Sorry, shitty dinner. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She laughs. “I am so fucking tired of saying sorry.” She turns her head, still propped on her hands, and smiles at me. The world’s saddest, smallest smile. “It’s been the week from hell. And today was the sixth circle, at least. Maybe seventh.”

  “Harpies and blood rivers?”

  She stuffs a couple of fries in her mouth and, chewing, answers, “Less Dante, more calling customer service and getting an endless series of robo-menu prompts where you’re screaming Talk to a person! over and over while the lady’s perky recording-voice intentionally misunderstands you every single time.”

  “Brutal.”

  She nods, focus drifting to the burger. “You have plans tonight?”

  It’s a funny—as in sad—question because I basically never have plans anymore. I wonder if I should stay home. Offer to watch a movie with her. Eat ice cream. Help populate the TV room downstairs with its walls left barren after my dad took all of his framed concert photos. But then I think about canceling on Cass and how that feels barren too. “I’m going out with Cass and some of her friends in a bit.”