The World in Half (27 page)

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 asked.

“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.”

I wonder whether she remembers that.

 

 

 

She’s sleeping
when I see her. She’s on her back under a pink waffle blanket, her arms, wrapped in gauze up to her elbows, perfectly straight along either side of her. Her face is pale and sunken. Her eyelids are mauve. Silvery roots have grown in at her scalp. Even under the blanket, she looks thinner than when I left.

The room itself is dreary, with light gray walls and rubber baseboards. My mother shares it with an elderly woman, who lies in her bed, holding a plastic cup as big as a pitcher and sipping water through a straw, her blue eyes wide open. The two of them are separated by a gray cotton curtain that hangs from a track on the ceiling. My mother is on the side of the room with the window, the aluminum blinds closed, some of them bent and drooping at the ends. A piece of framed needlepoint—a kitten pawing a ball of yarn—hangs on the wall next to her bed. It’s terribly depressing.

Lucy stands when she sees me walk in. She has on a yellow gown, just like the one I and everyone else are required to wear as long as we’re in the burn center. When she hugs me, we crinkle against each other. “She’s okay,” Lucy says. She smiles sheepishly. “No, I’m lying. She’s not okay. She’ll recover from the burns. But she’s not okay.” Her look is stern. She wants to make sure I understand. Then she says, “Why do you smell like mothballs? They have a lot of mothballs where you were?”

I could tell her, and I probably should, too, but I want to tell my mother first.

“The person I was rooming with had mothballs in her suitcase. The smell got over everything.”

“Where’s your suitcase?” she asks.

“I dropped it off at home first.”

“I cleaned everything up the best I could. I went back there after she was settled. I think you’ll have to get an inspection, though. Have someone over to take a look at the oven. I don’t know if it’s still usable. You might need to buy a new one.”

“Okay.” I’m hardly listening. My eyes are locked on my mother. Looking at her, I feel a constriction, a tightening around my heart, as well as a drowning guilt—the strongest sense of it I’ve ever had—over leaving her like I did.

“It would have happened even if you’d been home,” Lucy murmurs. “I’m a trained professional and I wasn’t able to stop it. It’s like having a child. No matter how much and how closely you mind them, every mother I know has a story about how their child fell off the bed at least once. You can’t be there all the time.” Lucy puts her hand on my arm in a way that makes it feel like absolution. “You can talk to her. She probably won’t wake up for a while still because of the medication they’ve got her on, but I’ve been talking to her anyway.”

I stay still.

“Go on,” she says, nudging me a little. “I’m going to take a little walk in the halls. Been sitting down for too long now.”

I sit on the side of my mother’s bed, balancing awkwardly so as not to disturb her. I don’t know what to do next. A minute later the door to the room opens, and though I can’t see beyond the curtain, someone shuffles inside. I wait, thinking maybe it’s a nurse coming to check on my mother. But then there’s a murmuring from the other side of the curtain.

“Elizabeth,” a man says. “Elizabeth, how long have we been married?” His voice is thin. “Is it forty-eight years? Forty-eight years, is that right? I have to fill it out on this form. They’re asking how long we’ve been married. I think it’s forty-eight years, but I can’t remember.” The man makes a sound like scribbling. “Does anyone in your family have trouble clotting blood?” he asks. There’s no sound. “I’ll put down no. Is there any mental illness in your family? Did anyone have a stroke?” He goes on and on in his fragile way. Every so often, the woman in the bed, his wife, Elizabeth, makes a noise of consent, but mostly the room holds only the man’s voice, searching, trying with desperation to take care of his wife, groping for answers.

When he leaves, I look over my shoulder at my mother, still sleeping.

“I didn’t go to Washington,” I whisper. “I went to Panama.” Her face is still. “I found his letters to you. In your room. I knew you wouldn’t want me to go there, but—”

She stirs.

“Mom?”

“Mira?”

“I’m here.”

 

 

 

As soon as
my mother is back at home, I call Dr. Herschel’s office and tell him that I need more time. I explain that my mother had an accident. We make a plan that I’ll return to school the following fall quarter. Dr. Herschel assures me my scholarship will carry over.

The day we return from the hospital, there’s a potted bouquet of yellow flowers wrapped in cellophane on the front step.

“What is that?” my mother wants to know. “Did I already die and I don’t know it?”

“They’re flowers. Daffodils, I think.”

She sighs. “Well, bring them in the house. We’ll put them on the ledge next to George’s plant, I guess.”

The flowers are from my friends. A plastic spear stuck in the soil holds a note that says, “Let us know if you need anything.”

I call Beth as soon as I get my mother settled inside, watching television.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.

“We had to do something. I mean, we wanted to do something. We were going to come there sometime this weekend, too, if you want. We don’t want to be in your way, but if we can help, you know we’ll come.”

“I know.”

“Are you okay?” Beth asks.

I draw a deep breath in and hold it for a second, feeling the pulse against my ribs. “Tell me something else. What’s going on over there? All we do is talk about me these days.”

“Well, the big news is that Asha got a terrible haircut yesterday. It’s longer in the back than in the front.”

“It’s a mullet?”

“That’s the thing. It’s not exactly a mullet. But it’s definitely not good.”

“What was she doing?”

“She got into a huge fight with her parents the other day, and she decided that they were too obsessed with her being a perfect Indian girl and that she was tired of being a perfect Indian girl, so she went to Art and Science and told them to chop it all off. I don’t know. It’s bad, though. She skipped all her classes today because she doesn’t want anyone to see her. I’m supposed to take her my red knit hat this afternoon.”

“It’s going to take forever for her to grow it out again.”

“I know.”

It feels good to be talking about something meaningless.

“Oh, wait. This is even bigger news. I forgot because it happened a few days ago and the Asha hair debacle was just yesterday, but Ben Linwood called Juliette.”

“No, he didn’t!”

“Well, I wasn’t actually on the call, so I can’t say for sure, but she said he did. They’re meeting up after his shift tomorrow night.”

And then, as if I stepped in quicksand, I am sucked back into a lonely desolation.

“That’s great,” I say. “It’s great for her.”

Before we hang up, Beth says, “I don’t know if I should ask. I mean, I think I know the answer since you haven’t said anything about it, but did you find him?”

“I found his sister.”

“But not him?”

“He died. Ten years ago.”

“Oh, Mira. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I kept worrying that you would see him and he would reject you. Maybe this is better than that. No, that’s stupid. Forget I said that. It’s obviously not better. I’m so sorry, Mira.”

I ask Lucy to stay on with us for a while, and fortunately it’s not difficult to convince her. We establish a tag-team routine of sorts where at least one of us is no more than a few feet away from my mother at all times. We entertain her, start the shower water for her and sit in the bathroom while she washes herself, pour milk in her cereal, knot her freshly laundered socks, find the radio station she likes in the car, escort her on short walks through the neighborhood, blow-dry her hair, read her the mail, tell her again and again that her black beaded necklace is on the dresser. My mother seems fine at times, and at other times gets excessively frustrated, and at still others simply collapses—not physically, but within, as if the bulk of what’s inside of her is made out of delicately heaped leaves that, out of nowhere, get blown away by a bit of wind, becoming scattered and displaced.

One week in February, after a few days straight of staying indoors because the weather was so cold and wet that none of us wanted to even open the front door, Chicago heats to unseasonable temperatures, and Lucy thinks it would be a good idea to get my mother out of the house.

“Just drive around with her a little. Roll the windows down so she can get some fresh air.”

My mother dresses herself in black shorts, a black polo shirt, purple socks pulled up to her knees, and running sneakers. She still has bandages on both arms, which Lucy or I change every morning. A week earlier, the doctor assured us that she no longer needed them. Her skin, which was once raw and bubbled at the wrists, has healed enough that it should no longer be painful. It’s not particularly attractive, though, since there are areas of her forearms where the natural texture of her skin has been erased, a patchwork of swaths that are flatter and shinier and more pink than the areas of skin surrounding them. So my mother insists she be wrapped up, one long ribbon of gauze pulled around and around until she is satisfied. I tried to substitute gloves once—long black silk gloves—but she refused them on the grounds that they did not look “official” enough.

That day, I steer my mother’s eleven-year-old Toyota Corolla south along Sheridan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive. We pass buildings lined up along the side of the road like spectators at a parade. The icy blue body of Lake Michigan cracks under the sun. I put the windows down and my mother leans her elbow in the opening, resting her chin in her hand, as the crisp air whips in.

We make it all the way to Buckingham Fountain—we’re stopped at a light—before either of us speaks.

“Did you find him?” she asks, so softly at first that I’m not sure I heard her.

“What?”

“Did you find him?”

“No.”

She has her face turned from me, but I can see her reflection in the side mirror. She closes her eyes briefly.

“I haven’t seen him in so long,” she says when she opens them. “I wonder what he’s doing now.”

“Mom—” I say, then stop myself. I don’t think there’s any point in telling her he’s gone.

She doesn’t speak again until we’re moving. “I tried to call him once, but a woman answered.”

“And what happened?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No. A woman answered.”

“Did you say anything to her?”

“I think I hung up. I don’t know. We were disconnected.”

“You hung up or you were disconnected?”

She doesn’t respond.

We pass the museum campus—the glass-faced aquarium, the sparkling dome of the planetarium. As we hurtle around a curve, the coins in the tray in the console slide. “You could have called back,” I say.

“I don’t know why I called in the first place. It was probably better that he didn’t answer. I imagine he had gotten over everything by then. There was no need to open it all up again.”