“I didn’t talk you into it.”
“And I really can’t believe we have to write a seven-page paper now. We just finished midterms! Is there no mercy?”
“You can do what I do, and just write one page a day until it’s done. Writing one page at a time is way more manageable than sitting down and writing seven pages all at once.”
“You actually do that?”
“Why? It works.”
“That’s insane, Mira.”
“No, it’s not. It’s totally reasonable.”
“I honestly don’t know, sometimes, who’s a bigger nerd, you or Beth.”
“Definitely Beth.”
“I’ll tell her you said so. You’ll be around this afternoon?”
“I’ll be around.”
As soon as I descend into our basement, I smell the mothballs. Typically the basement smells like a combination of damp earth and the box of dryer sheets that sits atop the washing machine. The uneven concrete floor is ruffled where the smoothing tools came up off a drag. The walls and ceilings are striped with exposed wooden beams that have rusty nailheads popping out at various angles. But that scent. How can I describe it? Instantly it puts me in Panama again. Not as if I traveled back there again in my mind, but as if I stood still while the world around me transformed, blossoming into the place I was in months earlier. It’s as if I’m standing in the middle of it again.
I yank my suitcase off the bumpy crawl-space ledge and let it land beside me with a thud. Lucy is upstairs with my mother, who is attempting yet another crossword puzzle. She still does them every day. “There’s a house for each letter,” she told me yesterday. “It must get expensive for whoever is building all of those houses,” I said. “Oh, Mira, don’t be stupid. They’re not nice houses. Look, they’re just little boxes. Two walls, a floor, and a roof, that’s all.”
I unzip the bag and dig hastily through my layered clothes for the book. I packed it at the bottom to cushion it, I remember. Under the mound of shirts and jeans, I feel it and pull it out. I’m about to close the bag and store it away again, when I glimpse a long, white envelope suspended in the mesh pocket lining the inside of the suitcase cover. On the front of the envelope is the letter M. The letter M, wide and artful. I stare at it for a minute as though it’s a bomb I need to figure out how to disarm before handling it, and then quickly pluck it from the suitcase pocket. I know who it’s from. It has to be. I don’t want to read it.
But of course later that night, after Asha has come and gone and taken the book with her, after my mother is asleep, mumbling through her dreams, after Lucy is snoring on the couch with her feet popping out past the bottom of an afghan, after I’m alone in my room, sitting at my desk with my legs folded under me, I do.
I know you’re going to leave. That’s okay. My life can go back to normal now. It was taking up a lot of my time showing you around every day. Nardo is always asking me, “Man, when are you going to drop that girl and come back to us?” So he’ll be happy at least.
I don’t know what you want me to say to Hernán. I’ll let him know that I took you to the woman and that you know the truth about your father. He’ll be pissed at me, but whatever. He’ll get over it.
I guess you’ll be in Chicago when you read this. I don’t usually write letters to anyone so I don’t really know what else to say. I knew you would leave. Even before you got your phone call. I knew that as you soon as you found out, you would want to leave. When you walked out of the apartment this morning, I knew it was probably the last time I would see you. I knew you wouldn’t give me a chance to say good-bye. So I just started writing this. Whatever. It’s kind of a shitty effort. Sorry about that. I think you deserve better.
I hope you had a good trip back.
Danilo
It’s written on Hotel Centro stationery. I slide the letter back into its envelope and put it in my desk drawer, next to a box of extra staples. For days, it stays there. For days, it’s all I can do not to think about it. When Danilo wrote “at least,” does that mean that Nardo will be happy, but that Danilo won’t? And he said he doesn’t usually write letters to anyone. Does it mean something that he wrote one to me? And the line I can’t shake, the one I read over and over: he said I deserve better.
Three weeks after opening that letter, I get another.
Actually, I did write to my parents once. Hernán made me do it. He bought this fancy lined paper and gave me a pen and sat me down at the kitchen table and told me to write. I complained that I didn’t have anything to say to them, so he dictated. I don’t remember what I wrote exactly, but it was short. Just like, Hi, Mom and Pops. How’s everything in Brazil? Maybe I could come visit you sometime. Or do you have any plans to come back to Panamá? You should give me a call. And then Hernán made me write down our phone number in case they didn’t already have it. Can you believe that? I was smart enough to get it, you know. No one likes to believe that maybe I’m actually smart. But I understood that basically it was Hernán being like, Fucking come get your kid already! I’m tired of taking care of him. I mean, seriously, what’s up? We folded that thing into some crazy shape to get it to fit into the only envelope Hernán had, and then we mailed it. I never heard back from them.
Anyway, you should call me sometime. Or you could write me back. You know the address. I know you’re supposed to include the return address on the outside of the envelope, but I thought about it and I don’t like the idea of that too much. It seems like bad luck or something. Like if I include it, then the letter could be returned. It’s like tempting fate. And, you know, I do want it to get to you. So.
This might also be a good time to confess that I got your address from the hotel records. They still had a copy of your information in their file. I didn’t know how else to get it. Don’t rat me out, though.
Ciao.
Danilo
And then again a month after that.
It’s going to sound like I’m making this up, but seriously there was a dude from Chicago in the hotel today. I asked him if he knew you, but he gave me a funny look and then held his arms out wide and said, “Chicago. Big.” He didn’t speak much Spanish. I saw him again tonight after dinner (I hung around the hotel today because Hernán said he needed the company). He was having a drink at the bar and talking on his cell phone. I think he’s one of those real estate investors that are fucking everywhere in this city lately. Do you know that Donald Trump is building condominiums here? He’s famous in your country, right? He’s very famous here now.
I’m out of things to say and it’s late. Hernán should be getting off soon so we can go home.
Danilo
And then a package another month after that.
Hernán wants me to tell you that he’s sorry. He’s gone to, like, thirty confessions about it already. He said, “Tell her that. Not less than thirty!” He wants to make sure you know that he was only trying to protect you. He says that hope is a very, very fragile thing and that when you steal it from someone, it can be like stealing their soul. He’s convinced that taking away hope is much worse than giving someone the truth, and that those were the alternatives he was forced to choose between. You understand all that, right? He only did it because he cares about you. Fuck. I don’t know. Are you ever going to write me back? Probably not, huh?
I ate a whole cake yesterday. I don’t know why I just decided to tell you that, except that it seems a little funny. I rescued it from the trash. That bakery near our apartment was going to throw it out because the decorator fucked up and spelled the kid’s name wrong whose birthday it was. I was just walking by when I saw one of the employees carrying it back to the huge metal garbage container out there. I asked what she was doing and she told me they were tossing it. Man, I could smell the frosting from where I was standing. I told her I would take it off her hands for her, and she didn’t even hesitate. I was thinking I could stand there on the street and eat it, but then I got nervous that some of those street dudes would try to com
e over and talk themselves into a piece. Well, I don’t know if I was nervous, but I just didn’t want to deal with that. So I took the cake back to the apartment and put it on the table. I was just going to have one slice at first and save the rest for Hernán and me to share. But I don’t know. I sat down, and the next thing I knew, I had eaten the whole thing. Shit was good, too. You might have liked it, even though the cake part was yellow, which I know isn’t your favorite.
So, anyway. I guess that’s all from this side of the world. I know you know a lot about the canal, like probably more than most of my paisanos do, but did you know that the dudes who used to work on it in the beginning when they were digging it all out used to say that they were cutting the world in half?
Hey, I know how you like maps, though. I know I said you couldn’t find your life by looking at them, but I think I might have figured out a way. I just think there’s more for you here. There’s more of you here that you might want to find. Anyway, you should look at page 2.
Aren’t you ever going to write me back? I probably shouldn’t even send this one, even though I know I will.
Danilo
And oh yeah. More goodies! This girl I know makes these things and tries to sell them around the city but she’s usually shit out of luck. No one’s buying. I guess we aren’t a very introspective people. But I had a little extra cash so I offered to take one off her hands. I asked for one that had a geology theme but my only choices were either this or a flower. You don’t seem like a flower kind of girl. But I was thinking you could use it. You could write everything down. I know you’re worried about forgetting everything, but this way maybe you won’t. Even if it does happen to you one day, you would be able to read about your life like it was a book, you know. You wouldn’t forget. So, anyway, use it if you want.
Page 2 is a map he drew. He sketched a globe and, popping off the surface like thought bubbles, inflated outlines of the United States and Panama. He drew a trail from Chicago to Panama City with an X at both ends. Standing next to the X in Chicago is a deft sketch of me: my Converse, my long bangs, my hair held back by what I assume are bobby pins, although that’s more detail than he included. And standing next to the X in Panama City is a sketch of him: baggy pants, sneaker tongues up over the hems, messy hair. There are arrows along the trail, pointing from Chicago to Panama City. Across the top of the page, Danilo wrote in Spanish: THIS is THE WAY to FIND YOUR LIFE.
The “thing” he referred to is a blank journal. Hand-bound with burgundy twine. A cover made of sturdy green paper. A sticker of a frog on the front. Lined pages thin as newsprint. I fold the letter and the map and wedge them inside the cover. I squeeze my hands around it so hard that the edges of the cover dig shallow grooves into my palms.
I call him after that, before another letter has the chance to arrive and before I walk any further down the path that my mother already carved out.
The ring tones beat like a slow drum. Da. Da. Da. Da. Da. And then.
“Aló?”
“Danilo.”
“Who is this?”
I can’t speak.
“Miraflores? Is it you?”
“It’s me.”
Eleven
Vibration
I believe the earth has a memory. That everything that’s ever happened throughout time has left its trace in fine, featherweight particles that fell and sank back into the earth like dust. The Sumerians tilled the soil. Mount Vesuvius blanketed Pompeii with ash. The Black Death slashed through Europe. Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type printing. Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Copernicus conceived of a heliocentric solar system. Americans threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The French rose up against the nobility. Napoleon and his troops—fewer and fewer of them the longer they went on—retreated across Russia. Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species. Alfred Nobel mixed nitroglycerin with sand to make dynamite. The U.S. and British air forces firebombed Dresden at the end of World War II. Man walked on the moon. Two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City. Mothers had babies. Somebody baked a pie. I scribbled all that ever meant something to me into a journal whose pages would one day disintegrate and fall away, just like everything else.
Humans forget everything eventually. Memories march out. They march away. But the universe keeps it all—in a rock, in the ocean floor, in the inner reaches of a mountain, in the fault lines in the crust—millions of years packed into the dirt. The universe holds on.
Over the next few months, my mother seems to plateau. She’s taking various medications and vitamins, none of which improve anything, but they don’t make anything worse, either, so we choose to see that in itself as an improvement.
Not long after the first time I talked to him, I called Dr. Herschel yet again and pulled myself out of school indefinitely. Even though it’s the last thing my mother would want, there was really no option. I lost my scholarship funds, but Dr. Herschel very graciously told me that whenever I was ready to re-enroll, I should let him know and he would make sure it happened. I didn’t tell him that it would likely be a while. By the time he and I spoke, my mother and I were quickly running out of money and I had already picked up an application from the Northwestern student center bookstore and from the Unicorn Cafe on Sherman Avenue. Juliette had given me the name of a manager she knew at Giordano’s if I was interested in being a waitress. I haven’t pursued any of those avenues yet. But soon. Very soon I’ll have to.
Juliette and Beth and Asha check up on me often, sending me e-mails to keep me abreast of the news on campus, and calling me as they walk between classes to see how I am, to see how my mother is, to beg me to come back because being at school, they claim, isn’t the same without me there. Which feels good in its way, and awful, too, because I know, and I’ve told them this, that I’m not going back for a while.
Beth drives to Evanston one day to have lunch with my mother and Lucy and me. When she arrives, my mother becomes agitated because she says that no one told her we were having company. I told her twice that Beth was coming, but I know by now that repetition has no bearing on anything. Information either sticks with her or doesn’t, and these days mostly it doesn’t. Lucy tells Beth and me to go on, sit in a restaurant together and enjoy the afternoon. She says she’ll deal with my mother. She takes the car keys out of a bowl at the back of the hall closet, behind a bag of cotton balls, where she’s been hiding them lately so my mother won’t find them and take off to who knows where. “Thank you,” I tell her.
At lunch, over a Caesar salad for her and a grilled cheese for me, Beth and I talk about nothing until she says that she was in Juliette’s dorm room the other day, looking at the postcard I sent Juliette from Panama. “She had it taped on the wall by her bed,” Beth says. “It had a picture of a church.”
“Yeah, I sent her the Iglesia del Carmen.”
“She said she was going to do an etching of it for her intaglio class. Whatever that means. But I was reading the back of it—she said I could—and you were saying how you didn’t understand much about your mother’s life before you were born.”
“She never really talked about what it was like.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but I did a little bit of digging. I mean, I just went to Regenstein to see what I could find out about her hometown. I made some photocopies of a few things. I brought them with me.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“I wanted to do something.”
That night, I sort through the sheaves of Xeroxed papers Beth had stuffed into the manila envelope she handed me. They don’t illuminate much. They’re all statistics, facts, figures—things I could find in almost any almanac. But she did include a profile of Highlands that appeared in The New York Times as part of a series about different communities around the state. The article is from 1960, a year after my mother was born. The third paragraph starts: “It would be impossible to visit this quiet town and
fail to notice the military academy that is, in many ways, at its heart. The majority of the population here is in some way associated with it, even though there are those critical of what they see as its undue influence on the community at large. To be sure, Highlands’ residents are on the whole conservative in their ideological leanings, and they strive to honor the best of the traditions that the Army has to offer. They look with suspicion upon those who are out of step with the unspoken ‘marching orders’ of the town.” The piece goes on to talk about residents’ “un-apologetic conformity,” before switching direction to write about the economy and the schools and the municipal parks.
All I have ever known about my mother’s parents was that her father taught at West Point, the academy mentioned in the piece, and that her mother, no matter how she might have judged him privately, supported his every move without question. After reading the article, though, I understand the essence of who her parents must have been—people with very particular values, with very particular friends, with very particular expectations. I imagine my mother returning to them from Panama, her belly round as a globe, and I understand also how scared she must have felt. How much a disappointment. And I realize the strength it must have taken for her to leave. To leave everything. To only move forward from that moment on.
My mother quickly becomes the center of my existence. After a period of relative stability, she experiences a noticeable decline. It’s agony watching her become unwhole, piece after piece flaking off and floating away.
I cook for her, even though she complains when I try to feed her anything but a BLT. I help her dress in the morning and undress at night, taking over with things like buttons and zippers, which have begun to confound her. She pleads to wear her pajamas sometimes day after day, and I give in because it’s easier than fighting with her over it. Although much of the time she’s still lucid, there are times when I sit at the kitchen table with her and have the same circuitous conversations we had yesterday, or the day before. I escort her to the bathroom and, unbeknownst to her, stand outside the door in case she needs me to remind her what to do inside, because I’ve read that one day that will happen. I mop the floor when, twice, she lets the sink overflow. I stand in the doorway of her room and watch her sleeping slack-mouthed in the middle of the day, to make sure that she hasn’t yet forgotten how to do a thing like breathe.
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