The World in Half (23 page)

He won’t meet my gaze. And suddenly, I understand that he knows. He knows something, and has known whatever that something is since before we stepped foot in this house.

Then, to my back, the woman says, “Yes.”

I whip my head around. “Yes, you know him?”

She sighs. “I’m his sister.”

 

 

 

Ilsa Gallardo.
At one time Ilsa Gallardo de Toro, but when she was widowed she dropped the de Toro. She instructs Danilo and me to sit on the couch, a small tight-backed piece of furniture upholstered in the kind of black velvet that makes it seem as though it belongs in a room called a parlor. She sits in a wooden chair she pulls from the dining table and places in front of us. Stiffly, she offers us both sodas, but she does it only as a matter of civility. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she doesn’t even have any soda in the house. Danilo waves off the offer. He’s uncharacteristically quiet, though I can tell by the way he keeps angling his head that he wants me to look at him. I refuse. I can’t deal with him right now. There will be time later to think about him and why he brought me here and what he knew and how complicit he was in this setup and to what extent he orchestrated it. Right now, though, I need to concentrate on Ilsa.

“We weren’t always close,” Ilsa explains. “I’m his half sister, to tell the truth. Our father had an affair, and from the affair had me. It was very painful for Gatún to be around me for a long time. I was a reminder of something he didn’t want to know about. Even after his mother learned of the affair, she stayed with our father. When I look at the whole situation now, she should have left him. If a person cheats you that way, they’re telling you they don’t want you. But Gatún’s mother was the sort of old-fashioned Catholic who believed that marriage meant staying no matter what. She lived unhappily with our father for the rest of her life. Gatún and I only became close after our father died.” She speaks gently and with a measured cadence. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m going on.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her.

“I always wondered what you looked like,” she says.

“You knew about me?”

“Of course. Gatún told me. He wondered, too.”

“What I looked like? He never saw a picture of me?”

“When you were a baby, your mother sent one. But after that, no.” She draws her lips tight, the pleats deepening. “It would have been nice.”

“I never saw a picture of him, either.”

“No?”

“I came here to find him,” I say. “I have an old address and I went there, but I guess he doesn’t live there anymore. Does he still live in Panama City? Or did he move? Do you have his phone number?”

“No.”

“Do you still talk to him?”

“No.”

“Do you know how I can find him? Please, I’m running out of time. I’m not going to ask him for anything. I just want to see him, have him see me. If he never wants to meet again after that, it’s okay. Please, you have to help me.”

Danilo pushes his hand through the top of his hair and grips it, hard.

“I’m sorry,” Ilsa says. “He’s dead. He died ten years ago.”

The back of my neck tenses like someone is squeezing it. My lungs drain. I shift my eyes to various points in the room before, through a doorway, they lock on a gas knob on the stove.

Ilsa says, “I didn’t know that it was you on the phone that day. The boy told me when I talked to him that you had tried to call. I thought perhaps it was your mother. She called once before. But as soon as she gave her name, I hung up the phone. I was”—her voice quiets—“very angry with her.”

Everything and everyone in the room is perfectly still. It’s a symphony of the most immaculate silence. Around the black gas knob, rust spreads like a disease along the stove’s porcelain veneer. The surface of the knob is dull, though not worn. It’s oblong with a slim fingerhold running vertically down the middle. Like a cat’s eye.

“Miraflores,” Danilo says. He prods my leg with the tops of his fingers.

I blink and close my mouth purposefully. My lips are dry.

“I’m sorry,” Ilsa says.

“Is he really dead?” I whisper.

“I got what’s in the box when I went to his house to clean out his things. I didn’t keep much. But when the boy said it was you, I told him what I had. I put it in a box and taped it shut for you. I hoped perhaps you would simply come here and take it. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you.”

 

 

 

The word “ eclipse”
comes from the ancient Greek verb
ekleipein,
which is generally taken to mean “to omit,” or “to fail.” The earth falls into the shadow of a total solar eclipse only once every few years. I know that. The next one isn’t due for months. And yet, as I sit there taking everything in, it’s as though the moon has made an unscheduled move into the path of the sun. For a moment, the world feels lost in darkness.

 

 

 

First,
there are the photographs. Polaroids mostly, ten in all, some of them caked and cracked like plaster, whole chunks of the images missing or dissolved into dust that has settled into the bottom of the frame. They are pictures of my mother, and of my mother with him, and one wallet-sized portrait with rounded corners of me as a baby, lying on my back on our green shag carpet, wearing a lemon-yellow bunting, my mouth in the shape of an O. On the back of that one, in my mother’s handwriting, is written: “Miraflores Catherine Reid, 5 months, 1 week.” And underneath that, in my father’s, only my name—“Miraflores.”

I sift slowly through the rest of the photographs. Even though I am seeing my father as he was more than twenty years earlier, it’s the first time I’ve laid eyes on him, the first time I have anything more tangible than my own invention to fill out what he looks like. I want to see myself in him, the resemblance of our features or expressions, but it’s hard to tell whether those connective threads are there. In the two photos where he appears, he is slender to the point of looking lanky, the flared bottoms of his dark brown pants emphasizing the narrowness of his knees and thighs. In both photographs he is wearing a printed button-down shirt tucked into his pants, which are held up by a wide leather belt. He is smiling wide, an irrepressible joy bursting through the seams of his features. His teeth are white and straight. He has a neatly trimmed mustache. His hair is wavy, pure black, parted deeply on one side, and giving way to sideburns. In one photograph he has aviator sunglasses; in the other I can see his eyes, shining with the same sort of ebullience that defines the rest of him. He looks, I think to myself, like a man in love. With my mother, I assume, but also with the world, with the whole crazy tangle of life. In one photograph he is standing next to my mother with his arm slung over her shoulder, and in the other he is demurely holding her hand. Both were clearly posed. I imagine them asking a passerby on the street to take a photo of them, and then the two of them huddling together eagerly over the glossy Polaroid paper, waiting for the result to crystallize into being.

The images of my mother, in photograph after photograph—my mother’s back as she walks down a street in Panama City; my mother sitting on a step outside a small shop, her legs crossed; my mother posing sidesaddle in a hammock with her arms thrown up in the air and a triumphant grin on her face; a blurry close-up of my mother’s smile and imperfect teeth; my mother in a navy blue bathing suit, displaying in her cupped hands an assortment of seashells she must have collected from the beach; my mother waving at the camera; my mother curled up and sleeping in her dress on a couch as the sunlight drapes in through the windows—are in a way more astonishing to witness. She looks familiar enough; I have seen other photographs of her from the early eighties, the mid-eighties. Her hair was darker then, parted in the middle, falling straight down past her shoulders. She wore polyester dresses with exaggerated collars and platform sandals that crossed in an X over her toes and buckled at her ankles. But in another way, looking at her in these new pictures throws me off kilter even more than seeing my father for the first time. Because in all the photographs I’ve seen—not only from that time, but ever—she has never looked so carefree, so utterly and unabashedly happy, so perfectly radiant as she does in these. In all my life, I have never seen her look like this.

 

 

 

Then the letters.
The ones from my mother are on top, the airmail envelopes stapled to the upper left corner of each.

The rest are stacked loosely, unencumbered by envelopes or paper clips or staples. Page after page on onionskin paper, written in the same handwriting that graced the letters I found in my mother’s room more than a month earlier. All of them undated, all of them unsigned, and all of them for some reason unsent.