Half Life

by Lillian Clark

  Marco climbs into his sleeping bag beside me and takes his pants off inside, then folds them neatly on top of his bag. He’s changed into a clean shirt. It’s plain, white, and looks bright in the dark.

  We watch each other. His deep brown eyes look black in the night. My gut heats. I can feel it in my spine. “I’ve never…”

  “Me either,” he says.

  “Really?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  I snuggle down into my sleeping bag, and Marco does the same in his. We don’t break eye contact.

  “Of course I believe you. I’m just…” I shrug.

  “Surprised?”

  “Maybe.” He waits, and I continue, “Not that you seem like, I don’t know, seem like you should have. You’re just…”

  He fights a smile. “What?”

  “Um, hot?”

  He laughs. Breathily, still quiet. “Well, likewise.”

  I grin. Embarrassment tingles in my cheeks, but I don’t try to hide it. I want to be me with Marco. Not Lucille Harper, Overachiever, or any other iteration. Just me. “Sometimes it feels like I’m the last one. Like everyone is off doing things I’m not.”

  Smiling, he frees an arm from his sleeping bag, reaches over, and runs his fingers through my hair. “Um, have you met my friends? Those two oversharing weirdos a couple yards over?”

  “Yeah, they’re a little intense.”

  He grins. “They’re…something.”

  “Have you ever gotten close?”

  “Once,” he says. “But it didn’t feel right. Not like the situation was wrong or we were drunk or something. I just…didn’t want to.”

  I swallow. His fingers keep moving, methodically combing through my hair. “Do you want to with me?”

  “Yes. Do you? With me?”

  “Yes,” I say. “But maybe…”

  “Maybe not tonight.”

  I nod. Even though I’m half on fire. Even though I mean it. I want to. I so want to. Someday.

  His hand pauses. “Can I kiss you?”

  I nod again, leaning forward, closing the narrow space that separates us. And we kiss. Slow and sweet. Then, deeper. His hand in my hair, mine on his chest, the sleeping bags unzipped so we can get closer.

  LUCY

  Isobel knows the instant I meet her eyes.

  Friday, eight days since I went “home,” and I still haven’t looked at it.

  I follow her down the hall toward the conference room. “I’m trying to help you,” she says, voice low. “To help you help yourself.”

  “How can anyone help me?” I whisper back.

  She glances at me over her shoulder for the span of a footstep, then looks forward again. We’re quiet the rest of the way.

  Drs. Thompson and Kim wait at the table in their usual seats. The pseudo-formality of it, of Isobel escorting me, of following this protocol every single time, is ridiculous. Like they didn’t grow and assemble me three doors down.

  “Hello, Lucy,” Thompson says, smiling. “No Lucille today?”

  I take the chair across from Thompson and say, “Nope. She’s been backpacking with her new boyfriend all week.”

  Thompson’s smile shifts, brows lifting, eyes genuinely curious. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s going well?”

  “No pitchforks yet.”

  Kim snorts a laugh, and I turn to him, shifting my head with the unnatural precision of a robot in the way he hates. He catches me staring and clears his throat. How he’s still creeped out by me, I have no clue. Lucille could be sitting here, pretending to be me, and he’d never know.

  “That’s…” Beaming, Thompson shakes her head. “Impressive, Lucy. Well done. Why didn’t you share this in your daily check-ins?”

  “You didn’t ask what Lucille was doing.”

  “Right,” she says, “well, it’s wonderful news. Lucille’s absence proves you’re doing even better than expected, that your integration is…”

  I stop listening. As the sun dips lower in the sky, shadows cast the courtyard in a variety of grays and diluted blue.

  I painted my portrait in blues today. From a watery, early-morning sky to the deepest midnight, near-black and spectral. I felt a flow, an obsession I know Lucille has never felt. Like being in a bubble at the bottom of the ocean. Dark and quiet and insulated. But not empty. Because everything that makes me me was in that bubble. A life that felt like mine. Every convoluted thought. Every duplicated memory. Every laminated feeling, layer after layer of emotions and reactions and questions. All those questions. About what I am. Who I am. If I’m more than Lucille, different or identical. If, even though I’m her, from my cells to my thoughts, I’m also my own….

  “That’s incredible,” Bode said when he saw my portrait.

  He stood behind my bench, staring at my blue-covered canvas. I got up to stand beside him, shoulder to shoulder. He looked at me. “Go out with me. Tonight?”

  “Lucy,” Thompson says.

  I blink and shift my focus back to her. “Yes?”

  “A memory?”

  She thinks I’ve glitched. “Nope,” I say. “Just bored.”

  She and Dr. Kim share a look, then tell me I can go.

  LUCILLE

  I learn that his middle name is Yasiel after his dad’s grandpa, who was apparently an “epic badass who fought with the army in World War II.”

  And that his favorite flavor is vanilla. “Really?” I asked, sitting with him on a rock in the sun, hair crisp from the drying lake water. “Vanilla?”

  “Oh, and what’s yours? Chocolate? People always say chocolate. Like that’s somehow less boring than vanilla.”

  “Except my favorite flavor isn’t chocolate,” I said. “It’s pistachio.”

  “No.”

  I laughed. “No?”

  He shook his head. “Yes. I mean, right, no. Just no. Pistachio cannot be your favorite flavor. It’s unacceptable.”

  “Ah, well,” I said. “Then, coconut.”

  And he pretended to die, dramatically, like with blood spurting and convulsions, until I grabbed his face between my hands, kissed his lips, and he told me I was forgiven for my “ghastly taste.”

  I learn that his dad left when the twins were two and he was nine. “But it’s not awful or tragic or anything. Though we don’t see him enough.” And his mom got remarried when he was twelve, but they divorced after a year.

  I learn that he wants to study to be a nurse. “Not a doctor?” I asked in the dark as we talked late into the night Thursday.

  “Nope,” he said. “People need nurses. I mean, they need doctors too, of course. But there’s something I like more about nursing. I don’t want to be the captain. I’d rather be part of a team.”

  I stayed quiet for a while, thinking. “I guess I always figured everyone wants to be captain.”

  I learn that he snores. That’s it, just that he snores. Until I shove him hard enough that he rolls onto his side.

  I learn that he hums while he brushes his teeth and hates sleeping in sweatpants, even when it’s cold. That he knows how to braid hair way better than I do. That he can recite on demand every coffee order for the regulars at the shop where he works and that he’s allergic to cats.

  And all I can do is lie.

  At least, that’s what it starts to feel like. In the beginning, it was easy. Then he started asking questions about school, meeting Boris, meeting my mom and dad, what they think of me going backpacking with a guy they’ve never met. And every time I can’t answer, it’s a whisper. A little bite of doubt, saying, If she’s you, and you’re here, then who’s the secret? And, Three more weeks, but then what? Will I go right back to where I was before? And if I do, then is
this feeling even real? Or is it as manufactured and temporary as she is?

  I shake my head—forget it, forget her—and settle into Marco’s and my sleeping bags. It’s Friday, our last night, and I don’t want to waste it worrying. A breeze slips along the thin walls of the tent. Our nylon cocoon, self-contained and cast in gray scale from the light of the stars and moon. Marco climbs into the tent after helping Taylor stow the bear canisters and zips the door closed behind him. I watch him and think, I could stay here forever.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” he says back, and takes off his shoes, tucking his socks into them, stowing them in the corner beside mine. Then he pulls his shirt over his head and reaches for his bag to grab the white one he’s been sleeping in.

  I touch his arm, grip his wrist, pull him toward me.

  He turns, kneeling on the sleeping bag next to me. I sit up and slide my hand up his arm to his bare shoulder. He reaches with his other hand and weaves his fingers into my hair, leaning down as I stretch up. We kiss. Once. Twice.

  I whisper against his lips. “Do you want to?”

  “Yes,” he whispers back. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” I breathe, and kiss him again.

  He moves his hand from my hair to reach into his bag, digging around. He pulls out a condom. I swallow, purse my lips. Shift to the side to give him room to join me in the sleeping bags. He does, leaving the condom on the tent floor by his pillow, reaching to touch my face, my hair, to pull my lips toward his again. “You’ll tell me,” he says, mouth against mine, “if you want to stop?”

  I nod. “You too?”

  He nods back.

  We kiss. And kiss. He helps me pull my shirt over my head. His hands are warm on my bare skin. I taste salt, faint, on his neck, his shoulder, feel the heat of the mild sunburn on his back. Eventually he reaches for the condom. It’s everything and nothing I imagined it would be at the same time. It’s eagerness and hesitancy. Quiet and closeness and a little awkward.

  Afterward, lying together, looking at each other, silent and still, arms entwined, bodies tucked up tight, I feel completely different.

  Yet exactly the same.

  LUCY

  “Have I met him before?” Mom asks.

  Sitting beside her at the kitchen island while I wait for Bode to pick me up, I think through Lucille’s memories. “I don’t think so. He’s friends with Cass’s boyfriend.”

  She nods, slowly, appraising, and takes another sip of beer. “You’re bouncing.”

  I still.

  She laughs. “Nervous?”

  I shake out my shoulders and suck in a breath. “Sort of? Maybe not nervous. Bode doesn’t make me nervous, exactly.”

  “More…jumpy? Twisty? Excited?”

  I smile. “Twisty. Definitely twisty. But in a good way.”

  “Of course. Good twisty. Like your stomach might squirm its way down and out of your butt.”

  I laugh. “Mom!” Lying on the kitchen floor, Boris looks between us and wags the curled end of his tail.

  “What?” she says, smiling. “It’s an awful feeling. And one of the best.”

  Lucille’s never had a conversation like this with Mom before. And, I realize, I’m taking this from her. First official date, first known boy. She’s never going to get this moment back. But I don’t think I care. She has her whole life for conversations like this, moments like this.

  The feeling blooms like a tiny, rotting flower in my gut. Bitterness. Resentment. She’s so terrified of not meeting expectations, of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, of her own inadequacy and being judged as not enough. Yet here I am with nothing but scraps, and I’m supposed to be okay with that? Or, I’m supposed to be nothing. A nonentity.

  I run a finger along the condensation on my water glass. “Anyone making your stomach squirm out of your butt these days?”

  She gives me a reticent grin, laugh-sighs out her nose, “No,” then takes another drink of her beer. “Tell me more about Bode. Does your going out with him mean you’ve patched things up with Cass?”

  “Nice segue.”

  “I try.”

  “Yes. Sort of. We haven’t really talked yet. But I think we will.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me what happened there?”

  I hate that memory. It’s so abrasive. Lucille was awful. Cass was awful. Louise was awful. It was all just awful.

  I sigh. “We had a bad night. I was the odd one out. And Cass was mad because I didn’t tell her about the divorce before Ava did. And…” This memory, this scar…I have it. But it wasn’t me. The things Lucille felt, the things she said. I wouldn’t have felt them, wouldn’t have said them. Maybe it’s hindsight? A mix of clarity thanks to two weeks locked up in a white room with few distractions but my thoughts and a perspective honed by my ticking clock. But even while those dulled it, made the divorce and Cass and all the fallout feel less raw, the signs were there.

  Mom and Dad living like roommates. The date nights that ended years ago. The silences at dinner, not awkward or strained, just…empty. Long hours and mismatched schedules and those Venn diagram circles drifting farther apart while no one cared to force them back together. “We fell out of love,” Mom told Lucille one day, and I can feel how that memory sat in her head. Like a shard. Incongruent and irritating. But if she’d bothered to look past her obsession with “perfect,” she’d have seen how well it actually fit.

  “I get it,” Mom says. “Or, I get that things are complicated and friends fight.” She finishes her beer, gets up, and rinses the bottle in the sink. “So, Bode.”

  I can’t help my grin. “Bode.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  I breathe a laugh. “He’s okay.”

  “The kid with the weird T-shirts.”

  I showed her his Instagram the other day, and she’d looked at his pictures and nodded. Which she does again now. “What’s that mean?” I ask.

  “Just…I’m surprised? That you’re all floppy-stomached about a kid who wears shirts with killer unicorns on them.”

  “Remember, he doesn’t just wear them,” I say. “He designs and screen-prints them too.”

  “Even better.”

  I hear a buzz in my bag and pull out my phone to check it. Bode’s text reads: Almost there. “That’s why we’re going out so late,” I tell her. “He was working at the print shop tonight.”

  She nods again.

  I raise my brow and widen my eyes at her. “What?”

  She purses her lips. “I’m not sure. The boy, the dress, the notebook.” Bode, the pink T-shirt dress with a massive black kraken printed on one side that I bought this afternoon, the rapidly filling sketchbook in my bag. “You’re different….Not in a bad way,” she rushes. “Just different.”

  Pins and needles, in my cheeks, across my scalp, and up my spine. As though my skin’s gone transparent, and when she looks at me, she can see my infant bones, my neonate organs, my jigsaw parts pieced together to build my made-to-order body.

  As though she can see that I’m not her daughter.

  “Must be my newly floppy stomach.”

  She nods again, unconvinced, then the doorbell rings.

  Boris scrambles to his feet and charges into the foyer, barking his huge, barrel-chested, I-will-eat-you bark. Mom follows a pace behind, with me (heart rate shooting to a hundred and thirty, Life2 phone buzzing in response in my bag) bringing up the rear.

  Mom waits back a step. I wave at Bode through the window, shove Boris out of the way with my hip, and open the door.

  “Hey,” he says, smiling.

  He’s dressed in his normal clothes with his hair damp like he just took a shower. Around six, not long after I got home from Life2, he texted: Don’t get too fancy. Which is
my nervous way of saying wear something you can get dirty. Ok not DIRTY dirty but paint. I mean ink. WEAR SOMETHING YOU CAN GET INK ON. Followed by a gif of a cartoon person blushing so fiercely he bursts into flame.

  I grab Boris’s collar and pull him back so Bode has enough room to squeeze inside. “Hi.”

  He eyes Boris, who’s stopped barking but is now doing his eager whining, anxious thing while trying to inhale Bode and/or force him back out the door. “Is he going to eat me?”

  “Maybe,” Mom says behind me.

  I laugh. Bode does not, which makes me laugh harder. “He’s not going to eat you,” I say. “Right, Bobo?” And I squeeze Boris’s fat head. He’s already calming down. Bode holds his hand out for Boris to sniff, then pats his head cautiously.

  I turn to Mom, Bode follows suit, and Boris, sated, stands between us like a fourth person. “Bode,” I say, “meet Nancy. Nancy, meet Bode.”

  He sticks out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Harper.”

  Mom grins and takes it. “Nice to meet you too, Bode.” They shake hands, then she turns to me. “Home by one.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Yes, really. Just answer if I call. Drive safely. And don’t do anything that might end in you needing my services. Got it?”

  I nod once. “Got it.”

  “Great. Have fun.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Harper.” Bode opens the door for me.

  “Bye, Mom,” I say, and follow him through.

  After he closes the door, he asks, “What are your mom’s services?”

  “She’s an OB.”

  He opens the passenger door of his old Subaru Forester. “As in obstetrician?”

  Climbing in, I nod.

  He swallows. “Ah. Okay.”

  I smile as he rounds the front of the car and gets in the driver’s side. He pulls out of the driveway onto the road, and I say, “So. Ink?”

  “Yeah. I started something at work today I’m hoping you’ll help me finish.”