The World in Half (29 page)

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.

“Danilo.”

“Who is this?”

I can’t speak.

“Miraflores? Is it you?”

“It’s me.”

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.

And at night, I sit in my room and try my best to relax. Often that means bringing myself down off a cliff of frustration I have just scaled in trying to deal with her. Other times it means restlessly pushing aside the idea that I can’t do this anymore, that I’m not cut out for it. I sit sunken in anger because I’m young! and I’m supposed to be in school! not doing this! I sit resenting my mother for making taking care of her my job. I sit scolding myself for having such a thought. And I cry a lot. In the dark, lying in my bed. I don’t sob, but I weep, and the tears that come out are hot against my skin. It’s enough to make up for all the times I didn’t cry before, all that time I spent trying so hard to ignore what I was feeling. I’ve been trying so hard to keep the biggest goddamn news of my life from soaking in. I’ve been looking in every other direction to distract myself from what’s happening with her.

I wipe my cheeks with the heel of my hand again and again. When I get tired of doing that, the tears just stream down the sides of my face, curling under my earlobes and dampening my pillowcase.

That summer, another family nearby wants to hire Lucy, and though she assures me she won’t take the job if my mother and I need her, the other family is offering more than twice what I can afford to pay her now, even after insurance, so I tell her to go. She still comes by at least once a week to check in and make sure we’re okay. When she does, she stays long enough to make lasagna or some other food that we can store in the freezer and live off for days.

Then something breaks. The delicate balance I think we have achieved is upended. I lose my footing. I lose my traction on the life I’ve gotten used to.

It starts when I wake up once in the middle of the night to the sound of my mother’s coughing. I rush to her room and watch her, the way her tongue hollows against her lips as she sputters. I think, it’s going to be over in a minute. She’ll calm down and she’ll be fine. But she goes on—that raw, wordless punch beating through the air.

“Mom,” I whisper in the dark as I shake her arm. “Mom!”

She stops coughing, opens her eyes, and stares at me. She looks scared.

“Are you okay?”

She blinks wildly.

“Mom? Can you talk?”

She starts coughing again.

The doctor
says she has bacterial pneumonia. At home, when she refused to speak even when she wasn’t coughing, I loaded her in the car—in her pajamas and socks—as fast as I could and drove her to the hospital. Because I was scared and didn’t know what else to do, I called Lucy and asked her to meet us there. She said she would.

The two of us sit huddled and anxious in the waiting room chairs with their blond wood and pilled navy seat cushions. It’s October, and Lucy is wearing a crocheted red shawl, twisting the fringe tight around her fingers until her skin bulges and changes colors, and then letting it go again. I’m in my usual—sneakers, jeans, and a gray cardigan—and all I can do is pull my sleeves over the heels of my hands and release them to spring back up to my wrists, over and over. Everyone else in the waiting room is either dozing or flipping through a magazine.

When the doctor emerges, he calls my name. I gather my coat in my arms and stand. I wait for Lucy, but she doesn’t budge.

“That’s us,” I tell her.

“No. It’s you. You should go.”

“It’s okay. Come with me.”

Lucy shakes her head. The doctor is waiting with the door open, his hand on the knob.

“You deserve to walk in there as much as I do,” I say.

“Mira, go.”

Later, I’ll come to understand this exchange not as the selfless gesture I take it for at the time, but as Lucy’s way of clipping my wings. I’ll understand that she knew, as I must have known but didn’t want to admit, that she won’t be able to keep coming by forever, checking in on us, cooking occasional meals. Even if my mother hangs on for years, there’s no guarantee that Lucy will be able to hang on with us. She already has another job. She could get yet another one on the other side of the city. Or she could be reassigned downstate. And if my mother does pass on, then what? Lucy might be generous enough to stick around as a friend for a while, but eventually I would have to figure out what to do for myself, with my own life. Later, I’ll understand that she knew all of that. She was nudging me along.