The driver keeps his window open a crack to ash his cigarette. Synthetic stuffing spills out of a tear in the seat next to me. Buildings and signs—Panagas, Super 99, Empanadas Don Carlos, Félix B. Maduro, Farmacias Arrocha—pass by in a blur. After a while the driver reaches back and raps his knuckles against my window. “Two minutes,” he announces.
We pull up along a street tightly lined with tumbledown shanty houses, their zinc roofs almost flat, their multiple layers of peeling paint stained by water damage. Many of the front doors are open, and people sit in the doorways impassively, their elbows on their knees, thin sandals or worn slippers on their feet.
The driver tosses out his cigarette and rolls up his window as we near. He locks his door. When we stop I pay him, and he looks back at me with bored eyes. “You want that I wait?” he asks, testing his English.
“Please.”
He turns off the engine, then props his elbow against the door and ruffles his hand through the back of his hair. He keeps the windows closed.
We’re across the street from my father’s house. I’m staring at it right now. Maybe he isn’t home, or maybe he doesn’t even live there anymore, but it almost doesn’t matter. At one time at least this was his house, the place where my father cooked his meals and slept and got dressed in the morning and dreamed of me at night. The structure is covered in a faded salmon-colored paint. There is a heap of rusted auto parts in the front yard. A disused woven hammock lies like a dried corn husk on the ground between two trees.
Come on, Mira, I tell myself. This is why you came here. Get out of the car. Go to him. Come on. In one fluid motion, I open the car door and hurry across the street, practically skipping over the pavement as if it’s hot and volatile lava. The neighbors are watching me from their stoops. From behind the front door, a clanging noise erupts and then settles, as though someone dropped a pot on the floor. My father. My father is in there. I knock.
Before I got out of the taxi, I remembered being in school the day I learned that the seven continents we take for granted used to be one huge landmass. All the world lumped together in one place. If humans had been around back then, the entire population of the earth would have lived on one gigantic island. I obsessed over it for weeks. Actually, I think I’m still obsessing over it. That single fact is what got me hooked on geology and geography in the first place. Because the idea of it is so compelling. The earth used to be one continent. And over time, that continent, carried on the backs of dozens of different tectonic plates, broke apart. Even now, the plates are moving under our feet. The continents are on a collision course every second of every day. The earth was born and every time a volcano erupts or a plate shifts, the earth is born again. It keeps reordering itself, it keeps trying new patterns, it keeps meshing one piece with another piece, and then another piece, and then another piece. I like to imagine that the reason behind all of that relentless effort is that the continents are yearning to come together again, as they were in the beginning.
Humans try to be like the continents. We stumble and crisscross and stagger all over the world in an effort to find our way back to one another. It seems to be the main business of life sometimes: our disordered attempt to bump into other people. Straining, straining, just to touch.
An older woman holding a dustpan greets me. Her face is long, and her mouth, fixed into a frown, is framed by deep wrinkles like a series of outwardly expanding parentheses. I feel light-headed as a breeze scrabbles at my back.
“What do you want?” she asks.
“I’m looking—”
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for Gatún Gallardo.”
“Gallardo?” She repeats the word as if it’s a seed she’s spitting on the ground, then shakes her head.
“Do you know him?”
“No.”
I sneak a look over her shoulder into the dark house. Is this really it? I can make out the edges of a chair and a lamp.
I don’t think she appreciates me peering into her house because she takes a step back and puts her hand on the door, making a move to close it.
“Do you know Catherine Reid?” I ask.
“No.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just—I’m looking for my father.”
“Gallardo?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
The woman shakes her head. “Amelia Varón,” she says, pointing to her chest. “Gallardo no.”
I nod.
She tightens her lips and continues pushing the door, the metal hinges squeaking until it shuts.
I’m a levelheaded person. I think things through. I rarely let my emotions get the better of me. I try to keep it all inside. I knew, of course, that there was a very good chance my father wouldn’t be there. I wasn’t operating under the assumption that finding him could be so easy. But even so, I am unprepared for the sensation, as I climb back into the taxi, that my chest is slowly caving in, that I’ve been punched square between the breastbones and everything underneath is giving way.
The driver starts off. I can’t even pay attention at first to where he’s going. Then, vaguely, I assume he’s taking me back to the hotel. I don’t want to go there yet, though. I don’t want to lie in my room by myself with all of that air and space around me and think about what just happened. I ask him to take me downtown instead.
“The hotel is downtown,” he says.
“No. Somewhere else, please. Anywhere where I can just walk around is fine.”
“You want to go to Avenida Central?”
“What is it?”
“Lots of stores.”
“Sure.”
He drops me at the mouth of a brick-paved street with stores along both sides, their entire fronts wide open. The street is swarming with a healthy mix of tourists and native Panamanians, many of whom are simply sitting on ledges drinking soda out of bottles or playing dominoes on card tables under the shade of a tree or hanging out in the shop fronts, chatting with the employees. It’s the closest thing I have seen to a gathering place here.
All afternoon I walk up and down the street in air so humid it makes my hair frizzy, ducking into shops every now and again to catch a burst of frigid air-conditioning. There are jewelry stores and electronics stores and shoe stores and fabric stores, all overflowing with things for sale, all promising a bargain. In a store that sells Panamanian souvenirs—tiny animals carved out of soap, clay ashtrays with pre-Columbian designs painted in the bottoms, postcards, Panama hats, wood boxes with inlaid Panamanian flags, posters—I buy a wide-brimmed straw hat and four postcards: one of the canal, one of a toucan, one of the Iglesia del Carmen, and one of Panamá La Vieja. I wander into a bookstore that, at first glance, appears to sell books by only three authors: Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, and Paulo Coelho. Besides a dictionary, those are the only books—stacks and stacks of them—on the table at the front. Toward the back, though, there’s some translated fiction, some coffee-table books about Panama, some slim volumes of poetry. It feels more like a news-stand than a bookstore, but I like being there. It’s quiet, bathed in the sort of muffled hush that all places having to do with books seem to possess. I graze my fingertips over the spines of the books for a while before I walk out again. When I get hungry, I stop in a busy restaurant and at the recommendation of the waiter order a soup called sancocho. It comes with a mound of white rice and boiled ñame, which is a stringy vegetable that tastes like something between a potato and cauliflower. The soup is fifty cents per bowl. I order three before I pay. And the whole time while I eat, watching the people on the street and listening to the people in the restaurant, I try to ignore that sinking feeling in my chest, the disappointment that my first best lead didn’t work out, and the panic of not knowing where to go next.
A few days before I left for this trip, my mother and I went to a bookstore. I was looking for a Panama guidebook, and she just wanted to get out of the house. She had been saying for months that she didn’t like driving anymore. When she
had to go to the grocery store, or to SuperCuts for a trim, she took the bus. Otherwise, she usually waited for me to come home from school to take her out. Occasionally, when she was feeling particularly restless, she let George Grabowski take her out. He called her at least once a week to invite her for coffee or for a walk around the Garden Center at Kmart or to a local theater production he had tickets for. She always called me afterward, complaining that George was a bore or that he was too religious or that he had forgotten his wallet again, leaving her to pay for the coffee, which was always—always—the most expensive coffee she had ever consumed in her life.
That day at the bookstore, my mother wanted to browse the cookbooks. She asked me for a pen and paper to copy down any recipes she found that sounded good, so that she wouldn’t actually have to buy the book, and after I gave them to her, she clomped off in her snow boots.
I headed toward the travel section to buy a Panama guidebook. There were three on the shelf, and I chose the one with a cover photograph of thatch-roofed huts on stilts over the water, a line of them receding into the horizon. As I looked at it in my hands, my stomach tightened. I remember thinking that it was like looking at a piece of myself laid bare. There was something painful about it, the way it was so unfamiliar to me.
I paid for the book, and went to find my mother, who was sitting on a bench in front of a tall window. She was hunched over a thin spiral-bound book on her lap, clacking the end of my pen absently between her teeth—rack-a-tak-a-tak—her hat and gloves and coat still on, her untied scarf draped around the back of her neck. She had her legs crossed, one foot swinging in the air.
“What are you doing over here?” I asked. “I thought you were looking at the cookbooks.”
She looked up, surprised. “You’re done already?”
I held up my plastic bag and swung it lightly. “All done.”
“There was nothing good in the cookbooks,” she said. “It’s all that thirty-minute crap. Listen, sit down here for a second. I need to ask you something.”
I sat and waited. I could feel the cold air pressing through the pane of glass at my back.
“Do you know ‘Isle of exile’? It’s four letters.”
The book on her lap was a crossword puzzle book. In the past few months, she had grown obsessed with crossword puzzles. She did at least one, sometimes more, every day. She thought they were good for her, for keeping her mind limber, as she said.
“ ‘Isle of exile’? Maybe Elba.”
“Elbow?”
“Elba.”
“I don’t think that fits with twenty-three across. Unless I have that wrong. Damn it.”
“Mom, did you buy that book?”
“Do you know ‘Susan of L.A. Law’?”
“L.A. Law like the television show? No idea.”
“You never know the ones about TV.”
“That’s because I don’t really watch TV.”
She scribbled a word quickly into a series of boxes.“Tango,” she muttered. “I should have gotten that one earlier.”
“Did you already buy it?”
“What about ‘Last letter in Leeds’? I thought it was s, but apparently the answer is three letters long. Then I thought maybe it was E-S-S, but that’s stupid, right? You can’t spell letters. Letters are what you use to spell other things.”
“You can spell letters. One of the final five words in the 1998 National Spelling Bee was the spelling for h. A-I-T-C-H.”
My mother stared at me in disbelief.
I laughed. “What?”
“How do you know things like that?”
“Come on,” I said, trying to get her attention back on the puzzle. “Maybe it’s ‘zed.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s how they say the letter z in England, where Leeds is. Leeds, England.”
My mother shook her head—“Complicated,” she said—but she wrote it in. “And no, I didn’t buy it yet, but I’m planning on buying it. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.”
“The hell you aren’t.”
She knew, even though I had never said so out loud, that for the past few months I had been worrying as if it were my full-time job and someone were paying me a multimillion- dollar salary to do it well. At least, that’s what it felt like. I worried whether she was getting enough to eat, whether she was getting enough sleep, whether it was good-quality sleep. I worried whether she would pay the bills on time and whether she would write the checks for the right amount, whether she locked all the doors before she went to bed, whether she turned off the oven when she was finished using it, whether she would trip on something on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, whether every next time I talked to her she would sound worse than the last.
I got her up, and we waited in a short checkout line while my mother clutched the crossword puzzle book to her chest.
“So what did you buy?” she asked, signaling toward my bag.
“A book.”
“What book?”
“Just a book.”
“Why don’t you want to tell me?”
Behind us, an older man with a beard and ice-blue eyes coughed and looked to the side, but I could tell he was listening to us.
“Maybe it’s a gift for you,” I said.
“Why would you get a gift for me? Christmas is over.”
I shook my head. “You’re right. I can’t think of a single other reason why I would get you a gift.”
“Well, that was mean.”
“I was being sarcastic! Come on, don’t worry about it.” I crumpled the top of the bag—it made an awful crinkling sound—and gripped it in my fist.
A minute later we were at the counter to pay. My mother slapped down her book and started unzipping her purse for her wallet. I watched as the cashier flipped through the book’s pages—a routine inspection—and stopped at the puzzle my mother had half filled. I swallowed. The cashier—she was young, maybe in high school—slid the open book to the lip of the counter. Her fingernails were short and bitten.
“Did you know this one’s damaged?” she asked.
Still dealing with her purse, my mother said, without looking up, “It’s not damaged. I did that.”
“You wrote in it?”
She cocked her head at the cashier. “I did. But now I’m buying it.”
“I don’t think it works like that. I think you’re supposed to buy it first.”
My mother said nothing.
“Seriously. Because what if you had decided not to buy it?”
“Well, then you would have a book with one half-filled puzzle in it on your shelf.”
The cashier narrowed her eyes.
“We were always planning on buying it,” I said.
The bearded man behind us craned his neck to see what the commotion was about. I turned my body to block his view.
“I think I should call a manager,” the girl said, and took a step back, casting her eyes down the long galley behind the counter.
“You’re not going to let me buy it?” my mother said. “I thought that’s what you wanted. And now here I am, ready to do just that.” She pinched her lips and stared squint-eyed and unblinking at the girl.
I bit the inside of my lip and waited to see how things would play out. Finally, the cashier sighed and rang us up, although she didn’t say another word to us for the remainder of the transaction.
Sure, it was a bit ridiculous, but this was my mother: audacious and gruff and stubborn as steel, doing what was needed to get by in life and dispensing with anything she deemed frivolous. But she was capricious, too, so it was never patently obvious what qualified as necessity and what qualified as frivolity. She was not what anyone would describe as a warm person. She was not only short with cashiers, but with telemarketers, hovering salespeople, bad drivers, and slow pedestrians. Basically, anyone who got in her way. Over the years she had worked as a delivery driver for a pizza restaurant (until she could find something better), a
waitress at The Cheesecake Factory (a second job for a brief stint), a receptionist for the Economics Department at Northwestern, a receptionist at a dental practice, and most recently a receptionist at a small law firm in Wilmette. She almost never made more money than she spent. She’d paid rent on the same house for almost two decades. She had $1,236.51 in the bank. She’d once said that if she could have done anything with her life, she would have been an actress. But as she saw it, she couldn’t do anything with her life but muddle through it, one day after another, attaching the end of one to the start of the next so that the chain kept extending, until from a distance it was one seamless and winding line that looked like a life. My mother had brown eyes with flecks of gold in them and fine brown hair that she tried her best to plump up with a hair dryer every morning. She wore tastefully brown-hued makeup, except for a phase in the early nineties when she experimented with amethyst. She had freckles that marched across her slender shoulders and over the bridge of her nose. She talked in her sleep. She sang in the shower. She watched public television and prime-time game shows. She liked dressing up and didn’t understand the philosophy behind dressing as though you didn’t care to impress, dressing with nonchalance—in other words, my philosophy. But she didn’t let that inclination interfere with the fact that she was extremely budget-conscious. She trolled for overlooked gems at consignment stores, and once a year she flipped through the whisper-thin pages of the giant JCPenney catalogue for something to splurge on. She cooked meals for us at home, convinced that, as a mother, cooking was one of the obligatory tasks within her purview. Seldom did it seem as though she enjoyed it. She relied on frozen waffles and casseroles and BLTs, which were her favorite. She was stern with rules and discipline. She didn’t believe in treating children like children, so she always spoke to me like an adult. She expected me to entertain myself. She had her soft moments, those times when she was tender and bruised—they’re inescapable in this life—but mostly she was a plank of wood, braced and erect, weathering anything and everything. She puffed her chest out to the world and walked through it without taking a breath.
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