The World in Half (23 page)

Read The World in Half Online

Authors: Cristina Henriquez

BOOK: The World in Half
2.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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.
Gatún,
I’m so sorry—really I am—that I didn’t say good-bye to you before I left and that I didn’t tell you where I was going or anything of the sort—I was just so confused—and so much has happened—and I didn’t know how to tell you about it. I needed to figure some things out on my own first. I hope you’ll forgive me. But here is the news—I hate having to give it to you in a letter like this, but I don’t think I could bear to call you and hear your voice and hear your reaction—I’m so afraid for what it might be—and you’ll have questions I don’t know how to answer yet. But here it is: I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a baby—and it’s yours—I’m sure—it’s not Brant’s—there’s no way it could be—it has been too long between he and I—but you don’t need to know that, I suppose. I’m having your baby. Maybe you can understand now how my head got all turned around. I’ve come back to my parents. I haven’t told them about you yet—but I will—I swear it—and together we’ll figure everything out—but for now I just wanted you to know. Part of you is inside me. Part of you will always be with me.
Your little bird,
Catherine
Gatún,
So much has happened—and I’ve been thinking it over—and perhaps it would be best for me to stay here and have the baby here and live here with the baby on my own. I know you
said
you were excited—but I also know that a child right now was not exactly in your plans—and I don’t want it to become a burden for you—you shouldn’t feel any responsibility. Besides that, it’s just not a good time here—you don’t understand how people here can be—their attitudes, their judgment, that sort of thing. I’m going to stay here for now—and you should stay there for now. Maybe in the future something can change.
Catherine
Gatún,
We have a baby girl—you have a new little bird. She’s a week old now—with the most perfect feet and elbows and nose—the most perfect everything. We are staying with my parents—they’ve insisted—no visitors. I’ll write again soon.
Catherine
Gatún,
It’s the hardest thing—you can’t imagine—I can’t believe—but you have to stay where you are—it will just be better for everyone—and you should try to forget about me—about the baby—it’s no use—it wouldn’t be good here for you—I can’t think straight but I know that—and it would make her life more difficult—and yours—and mine—so you should just go on—and we’ll go on—and you shouldn’t worry—there are lots of single mothers—and I’ll just be one more—but whatever you do you should pretend that I never happened—and I’ll do the same about you—and life can continue without all the complications—we’ll just release each other—just like that—we’ll let each other slip away—and it will all just be like a dream that we’ve woken up from now—that we walk out of without looking back. It’s best that way.
Catherine
Gatún,
I’m sorry.
Catherine
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.
Dear Catarina,
I wonder sometimes whether you really know how I feel about you. I have trouble putting it into words, so I probably didn’t tell you as often as I should have or as well as I wanted to. I’m not a poet. I’m only me. But I do want you to know, if you didn’t know it before, that you changed my life. When I met you, you were a spirited, funny young girl who couldn’t stop talking. You ordered
seco
in the bar and smoked cigarettes on the street. You drank Coca-Cola straight from the bottle and I remember you always wanted to keep the bottle when you were finished. You would slip it into your pocketbook to take home with you. Why? What did you ever do with all those bottles? I always wondered. And do you remember our first kiss? In my kitchen? I was cooking
plátano
and you were humming at the table and then you walked up behind me and laid your hands, like two soft paws, on my back. Catarina? I said. Gatún? you said. And I laid the fork down and turned to face you, the palms of your hands skimming around my body until they stopped on my chest. You started humming again, and then you smiled and rose up on your toes and kissed me. I never knew the name of that song.
I remember how you kept your shoes on the first time we went to the bed together. You giggled when I unbuttoned your blouse. You breathed against my neck in the dark. And that one night, you fell asleep afterward with your hand resting so gently on my thigh.
I was in love with you. I’m still so in love with you. It seems like it should be fading by now, but it only gets stronger. I can’t stop thinking about you and remembering you. On the street, I don’t see anyone else. No one else registers. I could live a hundred more lives and a hundred years in all of them and never again find another person besides you.
I don’t know what to do now without you. I feel like I’m on a carnival ride, spinning around and around, dizzy, unable to see anything clearly. My life now depends on being with you. My life! You’ll think I’m exaggerating, or that I sound too desperate to be taken seriously, or you’ll be frightened because I never told you all of this, even though I should have.
Please write to me. I don’t have a phone number for you in the United States, even though I tried to find one though the administration offices on your base. They produced one that rang in a small town in New York, but the woman who answered told me it was the wrong number. I only have these letters. I’ll wait for your handwriting. I’ll wait for you,
mi pajarita,
however long it will take. I’ll be loving you exactly like this every day for the rest of my life.
Yours

Other books

Something in My Eye: Stories by Michael Jeffrey Lee
The Hard Way (Box Set) by Stephanie Burke
Claimed by Elizabeth Hendricks
Forget Me Not by Sarah Daltry
B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton
Dare to Love by Carly Phillips
Project StrikeForce by Swaim, Kevin Lee
The War with Grandpa by Robert Kimmel Smith