As soon as they’re gone, Beth says, “Did I tell you before that you look really nice tonight?”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?”
“We usually only see you in your sneakers and jeans.”
“Excuse me, but I wear tops, too.”
Beth smiles. “I’m just saying, it’s nice to see you dressed up.” She presses the back of her fork against some leftover piecrust still on her plate and watches it crumble through the tines. Then she looks up. “I can’t believe you’re not going to be here next quarter. Who’s going to meet me for coffee at the C-Shop?” She sighs and lays her fork down. “Did I tell you I saw Dr. Herschel on the last day of finals? He asked me how you were. I didn’t even know he knew we were friends. I mean, he has a lot of students to keep track of. Although maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since all your professors love you.” Dr. Herschel is the chair of the Geophysical Sciences Department.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said you were fine.” She looks at me and blinks. “Just tell me one more time that you’re fine.”
“I’m fine.”
At midnight, as anyone might have predicted, Juliette jumps up from our booth, streaks across the room to where Ben is standing with an empty round tray tucked under one arm, takes his face in her hands, and kisses him. He drops the tray, but boy if he doesn’t kiss her back with gusto. Asha walks over to the group of guys at the booth behind us and asks, with exceeding politeness, if any of them would consider spending his New Year’s kiss on her even though she is not dressed as prettily—the word she uses—as her friends. All four guys raise their hands.
When she rejoins Beth and me at our table, I say, in a lightly mocking tone, “Would any of you consider—”
“Stop,” Asha says, blushing.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to date American guys,” Beth says.
Asha writes on a napkin: “Date.” And under that: “Kiss.” “Do those look like the same thing?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “What’s the Hindi translation?”
“Hilarious,” says Asha.
When we leave, it’s gotten so cold outside that we run the whole way back to Asha’s dorm, our lungs stinging by the time we arrive. Juliette and Beth are both staying overnight, sleeping on the floor, but because I didn’t clear it with Lucy first, I tell them I’m going back. We hug good-bye and I promise to call them the minute I get back from Panama. They want pictures, they say, and if anything, anything at all happens while I’m there, they want to know about that, too. They’ll be keeping their cell phones on.
Outside, on the sidewalk, I walk past my car, across the street, down a narrow path that leads to the heart of campus. In the distance the sounds of horns and the unnerving snap-pop of amateur fireworks punctuate the air, but from where I stand I can’t see another soul. There is nothing around me but the towering Gothic buildings, the stark trees, the snow-dappled grounds, and the deep black sky, opaque as velvet, domed overhead. I fist my hands into the pockets of my coat and take a long breath, the cold air tingling in my chest. Pieces of my hair sweep lightly against my cheeks, caught in the icy breeze. Not even a month earlier I walked by this same spot, one of hundreds of students streaming silently past, on my way to class or to my dorm. Now, though, I have other places to go.
Two weeks ago, I was in my mother’s bedroom, looking for a medical bill that she wanted me to find. Her doctor’s office kept sending us a bill that she swore we had already paid, and though she called and tried to straighten it out with them, they insisted that they had no record of the payment. The person on the other end of the line apparently told my mother that if she could produce the record in question and send it in, they would be able to sort everything out and cancel the charge.
When I walked into my mother’s room that day, the bed was unmade. The pillows, flattened where her head had lain, were propped against the wall. The flimsy wooden dresser with its trifold mirror was piled with every trinket or piece of jewelry she had ever owned: chipped seashells she proudly told me once were from the Atlantic; barrettes I hadn’t seen her wear in years; chopsticks; plain rings; beaded necklaces; tarnished brooches; nail polish bottles; sample tubes of perfume, the liquid inside browned like whiskey. And next to the dresser, a metal filing cabinet, four drawers tall.
I started with the second drawer from the top, the tabs of the file folders ruffling against the underside of the drawer above as I slid it out. The folders weren’t labeled, so I flipped several past my fingertips and peered inside. Receipts, credit card statements, instruction manuals—the usual. When my fingers pried open a folder near the back, I stopped. It looked like it was full of letters. Some of them were typed on onionskin paper, some handwritten in blue ink. All of them were in Spanish—I could see that easily—and addressed to my mother. Querida Catarina, they said, one after the other. I pulled the folder back enough to see the name signed at the end of each: Gatún Gallardo. I caught my breath. My father.
The topic of my father has always been off-limits in our house. For a long time, the sum of my information about him consisted of knowing that he was a man my mother had an affair with while she was stationed with her husband in Panama. I always thought of him as a man who, upon learning she was pregnant, decided he didn’t have much interest in raising a child, so he let her, and me, go. It isn’t a story my mother ever verified. It isn’t even a story that I tested out loud. It’s simply what I pieced together from what little I knew about him, about their situation, about the past. And it seemed easy enough to believe. My father, after all, had never contacted me, and on the few occasions I brought him up, my mother usually told me not to worry about him or else just gazed at me with the kind of excruciating sorrow that would shut anyone down.
Of course, other details leaked out over the years. At some point I learned his name and that he had lived in Panama City, Panama, his entire life. I knew that he was fifteen years older than my mother and that he smoked cigarettes. I knew that he worked at the Panama Canal, that he had a wide jaw and a huge smile, that he was skinny as a toothpick, that he kept a comb in his back pocket. And I thought I knew that he was a man who had broken my mother’s heart. Until I read the letters.
Dear Catarina,
You’ve gone home. You’ve gone back to the United States. The butcher you knew on the base was the one who told me. He said, “Oh, the North American girl? She went back home. She was never really happy here.” Don’t worry. I’m not angry. But I don’t believe that you were never happy here. I think you were happy with me, no? Or maybe all along I was mistaken. Did I do something to make you leave? I don’t know what’s happened. For days, I kept expecting you in the evenings only to find that you didn’t show. I sat at the kitchen table where I had a view of the street and looked for hours for the shape of you lit against the streetlights, walking on your toes as you always did toward my front door. Every day, I grew more confused about where you could be and why I hadn’t heard from you. I was going crazy. And I was worried that something had happened to you. You can’t imagine the thoughts that ran through my head! So on Friday I went to the base even though I know I wasn’t supposed to, even though a hundred times you told me not to, and discreetly I asked around about you. Then the butcher told me you had gone (he really is a foul-smelling man, as you had said). You can’t imagine how much I miss you. I hardly know the point of getting up anymore in the morning if I’m not going to see you at night. Are you coming back? Are you okay? Please write to me.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I was so happy to receive your letter. Thank you for explaining everything. I can’t believe it! A baby! We made a baby! I told my mother, who is very excited, too. I can’t believe it. We have good medical care here in Panamá, but of course I understand that you want to be near your own family. When may I come to visit? I want to put my hands on your belly. I want to see you with a baby in you. Of course I’ll als
o come when the baby is born. I could move to the United States permanently. I could apply for a visa now. Or maybe you want to move back to Panamá so we can raise the child here? I’ll wait to hear what you prefer. I’m so excited, mi pajarita, I could burst! I’ll wait for your next letter so we can make our plans.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I’ve been checking my box every day, but so far, no letters from you. I hope you haven’t sent one that got lost. I can imagine it drifting off the plane and twirling down into the ocean, being eaten by a fish. Or maybe you haven’t had time to write. I hope everything is fine. I think about you and the baby constantly. I was almost fired from my job the other day because I fell asleep on my lunch break dreaming of the two of you.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I received your latest letter three days ago. It left me confused. I don’t believe you would have written the things you did if you understood how I felt about you, how I still feel about you! I understand that you don’t want to come back to Panamá. I understand that you want to raise our child in the United States. There are more opportunities in your country than here. I know how important it is to you that she has a good education. But I don’t understand why you’re telling me not to come there. I can apply for a visa. I have a good record. We can get married. We can spend every day for the rest of our lives together. We can fall asleep with each other every night. We can raise our child together. I don’t know what you mean when you say, “It’s not a good time here.” Tell me when will be a good time. I will wait for the good time. I miss you and I want to see our baby, who, if my calculations are correct, will be here in the world soon. Please write.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
A baby girl? I’m sure she’s beautiful. I hope you are fine, too.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
It’s been a long time. I didn’t think, not in a hundred years, that I would feel this way about you. All of my original feelings are still here, under the surface. They will always be here if you want to find them. But now
I don’t know what to say. I can hardly believe it was you who wrote the letter. Why did you tell me not to come there? And why will it be better for everyone if I stay away? And how can I forget about you? I know, because of other things you wrote and because of things you told me when we were together, that it’s not you saying this! It’s your parents, forcing it upon you. They don’t believe I’m a suitable father because I’m Panamanian, because I don’t have enough money, because they don’t like my brown skin. I know you told me about what the United States used to be like, how the people with color in their skin had to use different bathrooms and different drinking fountains and different seats in the movie theaters and on the buses. But that was a long time ago, no? Everyone knows now that that was wrong, no? I don’t believe that people there haven’t changed. I don’t see how it would be a problem for me there. She’s our baby, after all. She’s partly made of me. I just want to see her. Please, Catarina. I don’t know what else to say but please. Show me that you’re still the courageous, impudent girl I knew. Don’t listen to your parents or anyone else but yourself. You don’t need to do anything but open the door. I ask nothing else of you. I only want to see her.
Still yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I know you’re sorry. Did you think I didn’t know that? And yet, to see my name, and only those two words, and your signature afterward. I cried like a child. I cried like a man who has lost everything.
But I’ll honor your wishes. I’ve only ever wanted to give you what you desire. I’ll stay here. I won’t try to come there. I won’t try to contact her. You can tell her whatever you want about me, I suppose.
I’m returning to this letter after a few days. I don’t know what else to say. I will be thinking of you always. I have photographs of you. The one of you in the hammock, after you fell out the first time, is my favorite. I look at it every day. Even after all of this, I can’t help but love you. I love her, too, of course. Maybe she’ll sense that even though I won’t be there to tell her. This will be my last letter.
Yours with a heavy heart,
Gatún Gallardo
I stared at that last one for a long time, my heart thrumming in my chest. The handwriting was all capital letters. In the earlier ones he had drawn little cartoonish sketches after the signature, which was always his full name and the only thing in cursive.
It took me nearly an hour to read them all, translating in my head as I went. A few times, I had to stop and look something up in my Spanish-English dictionary, the filmy plastic cover rolled back at the edges, soft as petals.
When I gently laid down the last letter, I could see translucent circles near the edges where the oil from my skin had seeped into the paper. I pinched the paper again between my fingertips in exactly the same spots and slid it with shaky hands, along with all the others, back into the folder.
Both Lucy and my mother are there to bid me good-bye the day I leave. It’s a Sunday, three days after Lucy arrived. I would have liked more time at home with them both, to make sure this arrangement was going to work out, that Lucy would be able to handle my mother and that my mother would at least tolerate Lucy, but everything about this trip was so last-minute that there wasn’t much I could do about the accelerated timing. I found the letters and I made a reservation. I was afraid that if I thought about it all for too long, I wouldn’t go through with it at all.
Lucy and my mother are sitting together at the kitchen table, my mother doing the crossword and trying to persuade Lucy to help with the clues she can’t unravel, and Lucy eating a bowl of cereal. Next to my mother’s elbow is a paper towel with a heap of eggshell and the white of a hard-boiled egg on top. She always digs out the yolk and eats it first.
“Good morning,” Lucy bellows as I walk in.
“Good morning!” I bellow back, smiling. I feel good, alive with the frisson of anticipation. I feel like anything is possible.
“What’s all this yelling?” My mother frowns.
I pour myself a bowl of dry cereal and sit at the table with them, and the three of us pass the time talking about my mother’s puzzle and then, for a while, about what Evanston used to look like before a movie theater and glass condominiums and an Urban Outfitters moved right into the middle of it. “They closed Sherman Restaurant!” my mother exclaims at one point, and Lucy gasps and throws a hand to her mouth at the indignity.
When the doorbell rings, my mother gets up to answer it.
“Hello, Catherine. Happy New Year.”
George Grabowski is standing on our front step wearing a Chicago Bears parka. In his hands he’s holding a potted plant, the base wrapped in metallic cellophane.
“I brought you this,” he says, proffering the plant. “New life. New year. I thought it would be appropriate.”
“George Grabowski. Our neighbor,” I whisper to Lucy. “He’s in love with my mother.”
Lucy raises her eyebrows.
He isn’t bad-looking, George Grabowski. He has ruddy cheeks, and flecks of gray in his eyebrows and sideburns, and he keeps himself clean-shaven. But he has never, in all the years I’ve known him, made any sort of progress in his quest to woo my mother. I was there when he told her once that she was beautiful. My mother replied, “Well, perhaps I should make you an appointment with an eye doctor, then?” George managed to look only amused, not crestfallen.
“Hello, Mira,” George says, waving at me past my mother.
“Happy New Year,” I say. I grin at Lucy.
She smiles and whispers, “She doesn’t like him?”
I shake my head.
George tries his best to keep up the conversation at the door several minutes longer while Lucy and I try our best to listen without appearing as though w
e’re listening. When my mother walks back to the table a few minutes later, the plant in hand, she says, “What am I supposed to do with this thing?”
“Take care of it,” I mumble with a half-eaten spoonful of cereal in my mouth.
She stares at me blankly. “How?”
“You took care of me. I think you can figure out how to take care of a plant.”
Lucy takes the pot out of my mother’s hands and examines it as if she’s appraising it. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
The taxi arrives not more than an hour later. The driver carries my suitcase to the curb and drops it in the trunk with a thud, letting it fall awkwardly against the spare tire, then waits in the car while I say my good-byes. Lucy looks on from inside the house while my mother and I stand in the front yard by the flagpole we never use. The ground is damp from melted snow and my feet sink a little into the soil.
“So you’re leaving,” my mother says. “For how long again?”
“Three weeks.” I’m shivering with nerves.
“Well, I wish you had told me about it earlier.”
“Come on. It’s not that long,” I say. There’s a certain pleading laced through my voice that she not make this more difficult than it already is. My determination is fragile. If she makes enough of a fuss, I might cave. I might stay. “It will be over before you know it.”
She pinches her lips together and stares at my shoulder. “I meant to ask you, have you seen my black beaded necklace?”
She’s asked me the same question three times in the last week. “It’s on your dresser.”
She nods, her nose blooming pink from the cold. “Three weeks is a long time,” she says.
I wince.
“Who knows what could happen in three weeks,” she says.
“Nothing will happen.”
Everything around us is quiet except for the clink of the rope beating against the flagpole in the breeze.
The World in Half Page 2