The World in Half

by Cristina Henriquez

  Six

  Concretion

  I wake early that first morning, before either Danilo or Hernán is up. The day feels swollen with possibility, and I’m restless, eager to get going, see them, get dressed, go out, do something. But I don’t want to go into the kitchen and make too much noise and disturb them, so I stay put in Danilo’s room for the time being. I turn the fan down to low and find my cell phone in my bag to call my mother.

  “Mira?” she answers. “How are you?”

  “I’m good. What are you doing?” I’m sitting cross-legged on Danilo’s bed, clutching the toes of one foot with my hand.

  “Nothing. I just had breakfast. It’s snowing here, so I don’t think I’m leaving the house today. Are you having a good time in . . . shit.”

  “Washington.”

  “I’ve never been to Washington. But I hear it’s nice.”

  “It seems nice so far.”

  “The only school trip I can remember taking was to Niagara Falls one year. We stood up on the edge of a cliff and white water crashed down around us. I remember we were working on similes in language arts and my teacher, Mrs. Coe, would say things like, ‘The water sounds like . . .’ and ‘The water looks like . . .’ and she would wait for someone to raise their hand to fill in the blank. I said, ‘The water sounds like a roaring lion.’” She laughs softly to herself. “I can’t believe I remember that.”

  “Nice simile.”

  “I also remember that I sat with Sally Perris on the bus ride home. In the gift shop, she bought a box of these really fat pencils with the words “Niagara Falls” down the sides in blue. I asked her if she would give me one, but she wanted to keep them all for herself. She was always sort of vicious like that. You know, she came over to the house once.”

  “Our house?”

  “Before I left New York. She sat in the kitchen with me and had tea. I was drinking peppermint tea then. I started with it in the beginning of my pregnancy because people said that it helped curb the nausea. I don’t know about that.” She lapses into silence, as if she’s forgotten her place in the story.

  “Sally Perris and you were drinking tea,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Sally Perris and you were drinking tea.”

  “Yes, and she told me that she couldn’t associate with me any longer. She said that my father had gone to her and all the rest of my friends and told them that I had shamed him and my mother, and that unless they stopped associating with me, he would have their husbands dismissed from the military. He could have done it, too. He was very big in our town. He taught at the academy. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, I knew that,” I say delicately. I did know that her father taught at West Point. I’m not certain whether she understands what else she’s telling me, but I want her to go on.

  “He threatened them. And they caved. Every last one of them.” Then, “That’s enough about that. I’m going to have my breakfast now.”

  By the time we hang up, there are noises coming from the kitchen. I walk out to the sight of Danilo making eggs. He’s standing in front of the oven in the same T-shirt he had on yesterday and mesh shorts that hang to his knees, his hair sticking out at the sides and flattened in the back.

  “They’ll be ready soon,” he says when he sees me, and a minute later he delivers to the table a plate of eggs scrambled with cubes of ham and shredded cheese. I sit at the table and eat silently while he continues cooking, the sounds of sizzling cheese and popping grease filling the kitchen. I’m about to ask where Hernán is, when all of a sudden the sound of his singing floats down the hall. At first I think it’s coming from outside, but the longer I listen, I realize that the warbling voice is coming from the bathroom. I laugh.

  “What?” Danilo asks.

  “Is that Hernán?”

  “Singing? Yeah. Dude loves to the sing in the shower.”

  “Is he singing Shakira?”

  “He fucking loves Shakira. He has videotapes of her concerts that he watches when he’s feeling depressed.” I laugh again, and after giving the eggs a quick turn in the pan, he says, “You think that’s funny?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Oh, it is. It’s funny as shit. A man his age sitting around watching Shakira. His eyes get all big and he leans forward on the couch. I hope you get to see it while you’re here.” He pushes the eggs around again and turns down the flame on the burner. “Although you probably won’t. He’s so happy you’re here that I don’t think he even needs Shakira.”

  “I’m better than Shakira?”

  “That little thing? Flicking her hips around? Any day, Miraflores. You’re better than her any day.”

  His back is toward me, so I can’t read the expression on his face, but I have the sense that he means it.

  Hernán goes on singing, and I go on listening, amused. Danilo opens the shuttered window in the kitchen and pours us both glasses of orange juice that tastes vaguely like Tang, before joining me at the table.

  “These are good,” I tell him after several bites of the eggs.

  He doesn’t respond.

  “So what are you doing today?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

  “I’m meeting up with Nardo later. He wants to get some new sneakers, so we’ll probably go to La Onda or somewhere to look for something cheap. This afternoon, I’ll be out with my flowers. And tonight we have a hot card game set up.” He picks at something in his teeth. “What are your plans?”

  I don’t want to tell him that I was counting on him to provide me with plans. “I guess I’m going to try to find an Internet café so I can get on the computer and maybe find out something more about my father.”

  “Those places are a rip-off.”

  “What?”

  “They’re too expensive.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Why? You’re rich? You probably are, right? All Americans are rich.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Everyone. You’re all driving your Mercedes-Benzes and living in your big houses.”

  I can’t tell whether he honestly believes that or whether he’s just baiting me. “I don’t think so,” I say. “I told you last night my mother and I don’t have a big house. And we definitely don’t drive a Mercedes. We have an old car that doesn’t want to start when it’s too cold outside.”

  He looks like he doesn’t believe me. “Danilo, come on. You’re not that . . .” I don’t know the word for “naïve.” “You know better than that. It’s just like anywhere. There are people who don’t have much, people who have some, and people who have a lot.”

  “But in the United States, there are way more people who have a lot than anywhere else.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But I’m not one of them. I have enough. Definitely. More than enough. But I’m still not one of those people you’re thinking of.”

  Hernán walks into the kitchen a few minutes later, dressed and freshly scrubbed and smelling of talcum powder. He plants himself opposite me at the table.

  “Eggs, please!” he says, winking at me. Grudgingly, Danilo heaps some onto a plate. From a lower cabinet within reach, Hernán produces a book, then drops it with a thud onto the table. “Don’t mind me,” he says in a way that makes it obvious he wants nothing more than for us to pay attention to him.

  Danilo snickers. “I’ve never seen you read.”

  “Just because you have not seen it, doesn’t mean that it does not happen.”

  “Okay, then,” Danilo says, playing along. “What are you reading?”

  “If you must know, I’m reading Don Quixote. The Man of La Mancha. Besides the Bible, it is the only book worth reading.”

  “You know, in order to say that, you would have had to read every book ever written.”

  Hernán narrows his eyes. Danilo is ruining his performance. “You know, in order to say that, you would have to be a real smart-ass.”

  “Oooh, such language!” Danilo teases.

  Hernán makes a harrum
phing sound and opens the book, the spine cracking as he turns to page one.

  I stand and smile at him. “I’ve always wanted to read Don Quixote,” I say. “I’m studying Spanish in school, but I won’t take that class until my . . .” I hesitate. I don’t know how to say “junior.” “My third year. You’ll have to tell me how you like it.”

  “I thought you were studying geology,” Danilo says.

  “I am. But my minor is Spanish.”

  “I told you she was smart,” Hernán says. “Just like me.”

  I expect Danilo to say something sarcastic, but he settles for rolling his eyes.

  I didn’t know why I stood up, but now that I’m standing, there seems like nothing to do but excuse myself from the table and go to my room. Who knows what I’ll do there, but I’ll figure out something until both Danilo and Hernán leave for the day and the coast is clear for me to emerge again and figure out my next move. Which is exactly what happens. I sit on Danilo’s bed, my heels digging into the mattress, my chin balanced on my knees, and watch a gecko, its skin so thin it’s nearly translucent, dart out from behind the dresser and scamper across the wall. I attempt to braid my own hair and then let it all unravel. I listen for the sounds of them leaving. But after a while what I hear instead is a knock on my door. When I open it, Danilo is standing in front of me with his arms crossed.

  “Nardo can find his own shoes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Let’s find somewhere.”

  The next few days are a blur, a pinwheel spinning in the wind. Danilo and I spend our waking hours together, devising plans over breakfast each morning for places where we can search for my father, teasing out any lead that seems even halfway viable, poring over maps and Internet printouts and my father’s old letters over and over again. Every day, we start out serious in our mission, though we’re rarely able to sustain our determination for more than a few hours. We abandon our plans in favor of going to places or doing things that Danilo suddenly decides I need to experience instead. Always, Danilo totes along his flower bucket, though he seldom makes a sale. He hardly even tries half the time beyond calling out to someone we happen to be passing on the street, asking the person, usually a woman, if she wants something beautiful in her day.

  In the evenings, Danilo leaves me on my own. I hole up in his room and read, or else I talk to my mother or my friends. Girls call the house for him sometimes, and Danilo ventures out in the middle of the night to meet up with them. I always hear him. Even if I’m sleeping, I somehow wake up at the precise moment that he shuffles past my room and closes the front door with a soft click behind him. He joins his friends for card games or at clubs sometimes, too, I know, but he never invites me along. I don’t know whether he’s embarrassed by me, or whether he assumes I won’t want to go, or whether he just needs a break from me, but I don’t bring it up either way. He still has his own life to attend to, a life that was going on before I got here and that will go on after I leave.

  Even so, when we’re together I talk to him in a way I’ve never talked to anyone. Not even my friends at home. He doesn’t ask anything of me, and yet I find myself telling him everything. Part of it, I’m convinced, is the fact that I have to speak in another language. It’s more Spanish than I’ve ever spoken with anyone. But with limitations comes freedom. I don’t have the luxury of relying on the automatic expressions I have at my disposal when I’m speaking in English. There’s no default mode of communication, few standby phrases and ready-made sayings. I have to think about how to express myself. I have to be creative and take roundabout routes to get across what I want to convey. Which means that I say things I never would in English. Ideas occur to me in ways they never have before. Which makes the world seem just that much different, and makes me think of myself a little bit differently—a little more imaginative, a little more spirited, a little less ordinary. Because while for most people the experience of having to measure out what they’re going to say might draw them inward, make them more pensive and cautious, it seems to be drawing me out instead, giving me access to some part of myself I didn’t even know was there.

  If that was the whole story, though, I would speak to Hernán and anyone else I met with similar ease. But I don’t. I can’t. So I know that being forced to communicate in Spanish is only part of it. The other part of it is Danilo himself. There’s something about him. I love how he teases me, fishing me out of myself, casting and recasting his line, tugging gently, holding on tight, reeling until he dredges up something real. I love his inclination for rebellion and how flippantly he uses language, as if words are something to be tossed around like confetti rather than laid out like a stone path. I love catching glimpses of his vulnerability, too. When everything else has melted away, I can see it, uncovered and raw, filled with rare and piercing sorrow. But mostly I love how stubbornly he demands life from himself and from everyone around him. Life explodes off him the way snow lifts off a speeding car and showers everything in its wake. And the more I’m around him, the more I fall under his spell.

  We have solemn talks about my mother and Alzheimer’s, Danilo discussing it with a frankness that other people have trouble mustering about a topic so big and so heartbreaking.

  “Explain to me how it works,” he says.

  “It’s in a person’s brain. There are these plaques—”

  “What?”

  “Like sticky blobs. And wherever they show up, they start killing brain cells. They’re like little thieves. They just sneak in and take memories and knowledge from people. And they lock the door behind them, because after a while people can’t put any new information into their minds, either. The brain starts to shrink.”

  “Nothing new?”

  “So part of it is forgetting. That’s the part everyone knows about. Information that people had stored in their brains vanishes as their brain cells die off. But yeah, the other part of it is that people with Alzheimer’s can’t get any new information in. So if my mother puts her fork in the sink, that’s new information. When I ask her later where her fork is, it’s not that she took that information in and can’t remember it now, it’s that the information never formed an impression in her brain in the first place, so the information isn’t there at all when I ask her to rely on it.”

  “That happened?”

  “No. She’s not like that yet. I mean, once in a while. I don’t know. She told me once it was like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to her head. Like there were just empty spaces all through her mind.”

  I tell him one day, “I’m afraid it’s going to happen to me.”

  I’ve had that thought and tried not to think it a hundred times since my mother announced her diagnosis, but saying it out loud is like a lightning rod shooting straight through my bones.

  “I can’t tell you it won’t,” Danilo says.

  “I know.”

  “But you shouldn’t live like it will.”

  “People lose themselves.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like if you were a bridge and pieces of you just started crumbling off and dropping down into the water and sinking and you could never reach them again.”

  “And after enough pieces fall off, the whole thing collapses. You’re not anything anymore.”

  “Exactly. I just don’t want to forget everything.”

  “I don’t think anyone would want that,” he says.

  Although, I think, maybe my mother is an exception. She tried so hard to bury the past and erase her own history—moving from New York, keeping undone the ties she was forced to sever, relegating my father to one brief episode in her life. Now, in a strange way, she’s getting exactly what she wished for. All of it is leaving her piece by piece. Even though—and this is the cruelty of it—I’m pretty sure that while she acts like she wants to forget, she has all along silently and secretly been holding tight to th
ose memories.

  Any discussion about Danilo’s parents is off-limits, but he confides in me about the strained relationship between Hernán and him. Hernán is angry and hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of school, because he believes that Danilo is making a mockery of the life that Hernán worked so hard to give him after his parents left.

  “He used to make jabs about it all the time, which was annoying as hell. Hernán’s soft, though, so he still tries to be nice to me, but things with us were never the same after I told him I was quitting school.”

  We’re at a food stand called Donde Iván, sitting at a picnic table while I eat a shrimp empanada and Danilo drinks a beer—one called, simply, Panama. Every so often he picks at the edges of the paper beer label with his fingernail, tearing off the pieces. I have the thought that he’s doing the same thing with himself—peeling back a layer to show me what’s underneath, making himself as transparent as glass.

  “Hernán doesn’t know everything, though,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He doesn’t know that I have other shit going on. Haven’t you looked around in my room?”

  I smile. “Did you want me to?”

  “I just figured you might have.” He takes another swig of beer.

  “Maybe I’m not that interested in you,” I say.

  Danilo shrugs. “I keep my drawings in my bottom dresser drawer.”

  “What drawings?”

  “I’ve been doing them for a long time. Just pencil and paper. They’re like comics. But not kid-stuff comics. Nicer than that. More sophisticated.”

  I don’t know the word—tebeos—so I ask.

  “Like Spider-Man,” he says. “But more adult. Even though I guess I know plenty of adults who like Spider-Man.” He finishes the beer and puts the bottle down on the table. The glass bottom half covers a rusty nailhead in the wood. “I’m going to get that shit published, though. One day. And when I do, I bet Hernán won’t give a fuck that I dropped out of school.”