The World in Half

by Cristina Henriquez

  If, at some earlier point in my life, someone had described this situation to me, everything that had happened, and asked me to guess how I would have felt at this moment, I think I would have imagined myself pacing around in a state of disbelief, not knowing how to take it all in. But as I walk that afternoon, that isn’t what I feel at all. I believe that my father is dead. I think perhaps some part of me believed that, or at least suspected it, long before Ilsa told me. It’s been so difficult to find him, after all, and at some point I sensed the futility of the search. So that’s it. He’s dead, and I never knew him. I thought I knew him once, what sort of man he was, only to learn that he was a different person entirely, one I think I would have liked if I’d gotten the chance to spend even one minute of my life with him. But I won’t find out now. It’s over.

  As I walk, thoughts drift toward me from every direction, their edges overlapping like playing cards. Ilsa’s house. How dark it was inside. The birdcage on the floor. The revelation that Brant, my mother’s husband, was actually gay. And how overt had he been about it? How had my mother known? The letters. My mother. How complicated she seems to me. How much she has endured and made herself endure even when she needn’t have. How furious I am with her. Furious anew. About what she did to him. My father! And at what she had done to me, denying me him for the few years we shared on this earth. He was here in Panama, lovelorn, broken by the thought of her, hopeful and bitter, obedient and scared. It’s amazing how much he loved her. It’s amazing that she didn’t let him. And at the same time, that idea, that I came here for her, too. Isn’t there a tacit forgiveness in that? Or at least a willingness to try and understand my mother, what she must have been going through? Has this whole trip been about understanding her?

  Compulsively, I start tracing everything—the letters, the years. My mother was twenty-five when she had me. Which meant that he was forty. Which meant that he was forty-five when he wrote that last letter to my mother. If he died ten years ago, he died when he was fifty. Which meant he gave up writing to my mother for only the last five years of his life. Maybe he tried to forget her. I doubt he succeeded.

  But I start tearing up not because of my father. Not because of my mother or Panama or myself. Because of Danilo. And Hernán. They lied to me. They betrayed me. They strung me along, and like a fool, I fell for all of it. All that time I spent following Danilo around the city, when we were supposedly looking for my father, and all that time he knew it would result in nothing. He knew it was a goose chase. How long had he known? Since the beginning? He didn’t know right away, before the library, before he even knew my father’s name, right? But then, when he heard it, did he know? Or did he find out later? Did he and Hernán sit around together at the end of the day and talk about me and conspire? This whole time I was the butt of an elaborate joke. How stupid I must have seemed to them. How ridiculous Danilo must have thought I was, insisting that he call Ilsa and getting excited at the possibility that it might lead to something. They must have thought I was so fragile, so goddamn fragile, if they felt they needed to protect me like that. How stupid and gullible and—

  My cell phone rings. I stop and fumble for it in the bottom of my bag.

  “Mira, is that you?”

  “Lucy? What’s wrong?”

  “She had an accident. I don’t know how it happened. I was outside shoveling the walk, and by the time I had come back inside, it had happened.”

  “What happened?” I am standing on the side of Avenida de La Paz, facing the traffic as it zooms by, my phone tight against my ear.

  “There was a fire. It was only a small one, a kitchen fire, but she burned her arms. We’re at the hospital right now. I haven’t seen her since I brought her in. I don’t know what they’re doing to her, either. They won’t tell me.”

  The tears that were welling in my eyes, wobbling hesitantly along my bottom lids, spill over now, one after another, streaming down my cheeks. I breathe through my open mouth as Lucy goes on about how the doctor wants to give specifics only to family and how she tried to convince him that she was family, even though to look at the two of them, of course, she might as well have been saying she were related to a giraffe. After a while her voice fades away, but like a statue, I keep holding the phone to my ear. I shouldn’t have come here, I keep thinking. I shouldn’t have come.

  “Lucy,” I finally say, stopping her in mid-sentence. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  When I turn around, Danilo is standing in the middle of the sidewalk, his hands in his slouchy pants pockets, as people make their way around him like a stream around rocks.

  “I have to go home,” I say.

  We stand next to each other at the bus stop. A thin elderly man dressed head to toe in chocolate brown sits on the bench. He’s eating potato chips from a bag that crackles each time he digs his hand in for more.

  After a time, Danilo says softly, “She told me not to tell you.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “I need to tell you this.”

  I bite my lip and run my fingers along the underside of the box. “You had a lot of time before. I’ve been here for more than two weeks, Danilo. You could have told me anytime.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Great.”

  “She wanted you to read it for yourself. She said one of the letters would make it clear. She said that it would be like he told you himself.”

  I can’t speak. Cars and trucks rush by in front of us, making a sound like they’re being sucked into a vacuum—whoooooosh, whoooooosh—again and again.

  “I guess that sounds stupid now, but I don’t know, when she suggested it, I thought it sounded okay, you know?”

  “How long have you known?” I finally ask.

  Danilo sighs and scratches his head.

  “You knew all along?”

  “I don’t know. Hernán knew kind of early, I guess. He said he thought he knew the first time you mentioned your father to him, but he wasn’t one hundred percent sure so he asked around to find out, and it was true. He didn’t want to tell you, but it was because, well, Hernán is many things. You know he and I don’t always get along. But he’s not malicious.”

  “What?”

  “Mean. He’s not mean. He was trying to protect you. He thought—well, his feeling was that you were just so hopeful that he didn’t want to extinguish that hope. Those were his words. You know how he talks. He said that would be crueler than lying to you. Even though he was convinced it wasn’t lying, you know. He said it was just that he was letting you go on believing, and that people need to believe in things that are impossible.” Danilo takes a deep breath. He pulls a cigarette from his pocket and lights it quickly.

  “So you knew.”

  He shakes his head. “I knew Hernán’s theory about it. But look, I didn’t want to believe it. It’s not like he had papers to prove it or anything. I thought maybe we really could find him. I wanted to find him for you. I swear.”

  “You knew.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Dusk is settling. Several streets over, in what looks like an apartment building, perfect little boxes of yellow light form a grid against the sky. The old man on the bench balls up his potato chip bag and tosses it on the ground.

  “I didn’t know for sure until I talked to Ilsa. And that was just last night.” He clears his throat as if even dredging up the explanation is painful. “Before that, I really thought it might have been possible.”

  After a few minutes, I turn to him. He gazes at me achingly, ruefully. I don’t have anything to say.

  Ten

  Erosion

  The view from the window is beautiful. I don’t want to think that. It doesn’t seem fair that anything should be beautiful anymore, or that I should think of it that way, but there’s no denying it. As the plane nears Chicago, the snow is spread over the ground like frosting. The sun shines down on it like a blessing.

  We fly over Hyde Park,
over the Midway and the campus buildings and 55th Street bowing around an apartment building at the eastern end. The Metra tracks run like a scar along the edge of Lake Michigan. Once, in a life that feels far away, my mother and I walked underneath those tracks on our way out to a sidewalk where she confirmed a diagnosis I had suspected for some time.

  The plane soars gracefully around the Sears Tower and the Hancock building, over the lake with giant S-shaped scales of ice, its arms straightening as we close in on the airport. I pull the waxy bag from the seat back, holding it on my lap, fingering the tabs along the opening as I force myself to breathe through a surging bout of nausea. As the plane drops further, my stomach rises like a buoy. I hold the bag over my mouth. We’re close. Only another hundred feet or so. If I can just hold on. Saliva gathers in my mouth. I spit into the bag. Then comes the jolt. The wheels hit the tarmac. The plane screeches as it decelerates and the world on the ground—gray, listless, full of concrete—speeds by.

  I go to the house first, even though I know very well that she’s in the hospital. From the airport in Panama, I spoke to Lucy on the phone again and she gave me the details: they’re at Cook County; they’re on the fifth floor, in the burn center; my mother is sharing a room with another woman; there’s an ice machine in the hallway that makes too much noise; fresh flowers are forbidden; the bed pillows are too thin and the sheets are too rough.

  “You’re on your way?” Lucy asked.

  I told her I was. I called the airline on the bus back to Danilo and Hernán’s apartment. They charged me a hundred dollars to change my reservation.

  “I feel awful that you had to leave your trip,” she said. “Did your teacher understand?”

  My teacher understood, I assured her.

  I talked to Beth from the airport, too, to tell her I was coming home.

  “I thought you weren’t scheduled to come back until Sunday. I have it on my calendar.”

  “I know. But Lucy called me. My mother’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh God, Mira! What happened?”

  I told her everything I knew and to pass the word along to Asha and Juliette because I didn’t have time to call them. She promised she would.

  The first thing I notice when I get off the plane is what a relief it is to hear English again, to understand immediately everything someone says, to eavesdrop without concentrating, to decipher signs at a glance. I’m struck, too, by how contained everything is: lanes of traffic are perfectly orderly, grass grows in even plots, trees thrive in mounds of mulch, building faces are austere. The air smells cleaner.

  I take the el from the airport and walk the seven blocks from the train station to our house, my suitcase bumping along behind me over patches of ice and snow. I’m dressed in the same outfit I left in nearly three weeks ago—jeans, Converse, a navy zip-up hoodie, and a hip-length brown jacket with a pocket on the sleeve. Because I didn’t want to crush it in my suitcase, I’m wearing my straw hat. The wind stings my cheeks. My scarf, which has been balled in the corner of my suitcase, is wound around my neck and over my mouth. The wool smells like Hernán and Danilo’s apartment, like mothballs. It makes me want to cry.

  As I walk up our street, our house in the distance looks the same as always, the flagpole in the middle of the front yard surrounded by a doughnut of snow. Inside, though, things have changed. Along the wall, my mother has apparently piled more collections. When I left, there were only magazines. But now there are magazines; restaurant menus; a stack of LPs, their covers feathered at the edges; cassette tapes in cracked cases; matchbooks; a mountain of different-sized envelopes arranged from largest to smallest; a milk crate filled with empty glass soda bottles; and a tower of shoe boxes alphabetized by brand. As if providing some counterbalance, the rest of the living room has been stripped to the essentials—our couch and television set, a pair of lamps.

  I drop my suitcase inside the door and wipe my wet shoes on the dingy green carpet. There’s a message on the answering machine from George Grabowski. “Catherine, it’s George. I’m just calling to make sure you’re okay. I haven’t seen your light on in a few days. Maybe you went out of town? Call me when you get back. I’d like to take you out for a coffee if you would like to go.” He coughs. “Okay. I’ll talk to you soon, I hope.”

  I don’t delete it, even though I understand now that George never stood a chance. My mother made a decision, a choice hardened into stone long, long ago, that she would cut people off. She would shut them out. She did just that, after all, to a man who loved her for who she was, a man who loved her persistently and truly, a man who loved her without asking for anything in return except that she remain open to him. And she couldn’t do it. She closed. Not only to him, but to everyone.

  In the kitchen, the smell of scorched air lingers. The oven, a double-decker range built into a wall of cabinets with old, wrought-iron handles, is caked with soot along its glass fronts. The cabinets are charred, streaks of black running up them like stalagmites seared into the wood. I slide my fingers over the indentations left by the flames, imagining how the fire slithered its way up after bursting in an awful pop inside the range, how it must have fed out through the edges of the doors, and how my mother must have just stood here, watching it, dumbfounded. I imagine it all unfolding as Lucy shoveled the sidewalk, unable to hear or know what was happening until my mother started screaming. Or maybe she never made a noise. Maybe Lucy didn’t know that anything was wrong until she smelled the smoke.

  When I was in junior high, my mother attempted to make duck confit. Looking at the stove, I remember that. It took her two days and thirty-six cloves of garlic, among other ingredients, to do it. She’s never been a big reader, but apparently she read in a book somewhere that only forty-seven people in the world still partook in the glory of actually making confit, a number that struck her as dismally, abominably low. It was like an endangered species of the culinary world, something akin to a bald eagle or a Sumatran tiger, and she was single-handedly going to save it. We went to the meat market together and bought three ducks. When the man behind the counter, in a bloodstained white apron, asked her whether she knew what she was doing, she said, “I’m buying three ducks.”

  “But do you know what you’re going to do with them?” he asked, smiling. He must have thought she was flirting with him.

  “I do. I’m going to take them home with me,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  His smile dropped. He understood that she wasn’t teasing with her first answer. “Whatever you want, ma’am,” he said, and hauled three wrapped pale duck bodies up onto the gleaming metal counter.

  In the car, with the ducks lined up next to one another in the trunk as if they were sleeping, she complained. “Why would he have thought that I didn’t know what I was doing?”

  “I don’t think people usually buy three ducks,” I said.

  “I should have told him I roasted a pig once.”

  “You did?”

  “A long time ago.”

  At home, I positioned myself at the kitchen table to watch as my mother pulled out little glass jars of cumin, coriander, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, and thyme, as well as a bay leaf. She steadied herself with her hands on the counter and surveyed the spread. Our salt and pepper shakers were rooster-shaped porcelain figurines with holes drilled into the tops of their heads, and I remember thinking that they, too, were watching. She sifted everything together in a cereal bowl. She wrenched the legs off the ducks, sprinkled all six of them with a generous amount of salt, and lay them in a dish with the thirty-six cloves of garlic. She put the dish in the refrigerator.

  “Don’t touch it,” she told me. “It needs to stay in there for two days. It’s going to cure.”

  Two days later, I watched as she heated the oven, drained the dish, covered the legs with duck fat, baked the whole thing, strained the fat through a cloth, and stuck the legs in a jar, which she sealed and set on the counter.

  “Aren’t we going to eat it?” I as
ked.

  “It stays good for six months.”

  “We’re not going to eat it for six months?”

  “I want to see if it keeps. That’s the whole point of confit.”

  “But what about dinner?”

  “Casserole?”

  She always made casserole. I didn’t want casserole. I made a face.

  “You want the duck?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t wait six months?”

  “Mom!”

  “Six weeks? Can you wait six weeks?”

  She was funny sometimes without intending to be.

  “I want to try it.”

  She gazed with anguish at the freshly jarred duck legs. “No, I’m making a casserole.”

  I don’t know why I was so outraged about it, but I summoned a tide of defiance, more than I typically showed my mother, and said, “Casserole sucks!”

  My mother spun toward me. “Casserole sucks?”

  I nodded, the tide coursing out already.

  “Duck sucks,” she said.

  She must have known how it sounded.

  I cracked a smile. She snorted a laugh. I giggled. She laughed harder. And for the next ten minutes solid we were both losing it over nothing, a kind of wild joy that was rarely present in our house, pulsing beneath our skin and issuing from our hysterical open mouths. When she had regained herself, my mother said, “Oh, it’s too short, Mira. Life is too short. Let’s eat the duck.”