The World in Half (3 page)

I stared at that last one for a long time, my heart thrumming in my chest. The handwriting was all capital letters. In the earlier ones he had drawn little cartoonish sketches after the signature, which was always his full name and the only thing in cursive.

It took me nearly an hour to read them all, translating in my head as I went. A few times, I had to stop and look something up in my Spanish-English dictionary, the filmy plastic cover rolled back at the edges, soft as petals.

When I gently laid down the last letter, I could see translucent circles near the edges where the oil from my skin had seeped into the paper. I pinched the paper again between my fingertips in exactly the same spots and slid it with shaky hands, along with all the others, back into the folder.

 

 

 

Both Lucy and my mother
are there to bid me good-bye the day I leave. It’s a Sunday, three days after Lucy arrived. I would have liked more time at home with them both, to make sure this arrangement was going to work out, that Lucy would be able to handle my mother and that my mother would at least tolerate Lucy, but everything about this trip was so last-minute that there wasn’t much I could do about the accelerated timing. I found the letters and I made a reservation. I was afraid that if I thought about it all for too long, I wouldn’t go through with it at all.

Lucy and my mother are sitting together at the kitchen table, my mother doing the crossword and trying to persuade Lucy to help with the clues she can’t unravel, and Lucy eating a bowl of cereal. Next to my mother’s elbow is a paper towel with a heap of eggshell and the white of a hard-boiled egg on top. She always digs out the yolk and eats it first.

“Good morning,” Lucy bellows as I walk in.

“Good morning!” I bellow back, smiling. I feel good, alive with the frisson of anticipation. I feel like anything is possible.

“What’s all this yelling?” My mother frowns.

I pour myself a bowl of dry cereal and sit at the table with them, and the three of us pass the time talking about my mother’s puzzle and then, for a while, about what Evanston used to look like before a movie theater and glass condominiums and an Urban Outfitters moved right into the middle of it. “They closed Sherman Restaurant!” my mother exclaims at one point, and Lucy gasps and throws a hand to her mouth at the indignity.

When the doorbell rings, my mother gets up to answer it.

“Hello, Catherine. Happy New Year.”

George Grabowski is standing on our front step wearing a Chicago Bears parka. In his hands he’s holding a potted plant, the base wrapped in metallic cellophane.

“I brought you this,” he says, proffering the plant. “New life. New year. I thought it would be appropriate.”

“George Grabowski. Our neighbor,” I whisper to Lucy. “He’s in love with my mother.”

Lucy raises her eyebrows.

He isn’t bad-looking, George Grabowski. He has ruddy cheeks, and flecks of gray in his eyebrows and sideburns, and he keeps himself clean-shaven. But he has never, in all the years I’ve known him, made any sort of progress in his quest to woo my mother. I was there when he told her once that she was beautiful. My mother replied, “Well, perhaps I should make you an appointment with an eye doctor, then?” George managed to look only amused, not crestfallen.

“Hello, Mira,” George says, waving at me past my mother.

“Happy New Year,” I say. I grin at Lucy.

She smiles and whispers, “She doesn’t like him?”

I shake my head.

George tries his best to keep up the conversation at the door several minutes longer while Lucy and I try our best to listen without appearing as though we’re listening. When my mother walks back to the table a few minutes later, the plant in hand, she says, “What am I supposed to do with this thing?”

“Take care of it,” I mumble with a half-eaten spoonful of cereal in my mouth.

She stares at me blankly. “How?”

“You took care of me. I think you can figure out how to take care of a plant.”

Lucy takes the pot out of my mother’s hands and examines it as if she’s appraising it. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

The taxi arrives not more than an hour later. The driver carries my suitcase to the curb and drops it in the trunk with a thud, letting it fall awkwardly against the spare tire, then waits in the car while I say my good-byes. Lucy looks on from inside the house while my mother and I stand in the front yard by the flagpole we never use. The ground is damp from melted snow and my feet sink a little into the soil.

“So you’re leaving,” my mother says. “For how long again?”

“Three weeks.” I’m shivering with nerves.

“Well, I wish you had told me about it earlier.”

“Come on. It’s not that long,” I say. There’s a certain pleading laced through my voice that she not make this more difficult than it already is. My determination is fragile. If she makes enough of a fuss, I might cave. I might stay. “It will be over before you know it.”

She pinches her lips together and stares at my shoulder. “I meant to ask you, have you seen my black beaded necklace?”

She’s asked me the same question three times in the last week. “It’s on your dresser.”

She nods, her nose blooming pink from the cold. “Three weeks is a long time,” she says.

I wince.

“Who knows what could happen in three weeks,” she says.

“Nothing will happen.”

Everything around us is quiet except for the clink of the rope beating against the flagpole in the breeze.

She sighs, then smiles. “Have fun.”

“Your black beaded necklace is on your dresser,” I say.

All the times I imagined it, I thought that what I would see from an airplane window would be this: rivers as thin as dried earthworms, treetops as lush as clumps of moss, patches of farmland laid out like pressed handkerchiefs, mountain valleys rounded like soft dimples, the earth in miniature. But the only thing outside the window is white air with, occasionally, bands of sunlight radiating through. It’s beautiful and breathtaking, being that close to the marbled sky, but it isn’t what I hoped to see.

The man in the seat next to me smells of a garlicky sweat, a stench that lifts off him each time he stirs, and he often does, stretching his arms over his head and cracking his fingers. I try to ignore him and read the copy of
Principles of Geology
that I brought with me. I got it in high school as a graduation gift from my earth sciences teacher. The pages are worn and highlighted and notated and dog-eared from all the times I’ve read it. The man touches me once when I doze off, to announce excitedly, “Drink cart,” and point to a flight attendant standing in the aisle with a plastic cup raised in her hand like a trophy. I order water. He orders a tomato juice with lime and a tiny bottle of vodka.

The two of us, along with at least a hundred others, are en route from Chicago to Houston. From there I’ll continue to Panama City, Panama. I have no idea what to expect. I know everything I’ve read about it in my guidebook—how much to pay for a taxi from the airport, what the temperature will be like, what areas of the city to avoid, what kinds of payments merchants will accept. But that’s all superficial. I don’t know what really to expect, underneath all of that.

After he finishes his drink, the man next to me says, “So, do you speak English?”

“Me?”

“You know English?”

“Yes.” I don’t feel like telling him that I know Spanish, too. Not absolutely, totally fluently, but well enough. When I was younger, my mother tried to teach me a little—the words for colors and numbers and animals and foods—anything she had learned when she lived in Panama. When we exhausted her vocabulary, she sent me every Wednesday night for a year to a Spanish class at the YMCA. She was always like that, pushing me to spend my time learning and studying and learning and studying because, she said, that was the way to become more than you knew you were. By the time I got to high school and started taking Spanish as an elective, I was the best student in my class. My teachers couldn’t believe how naturally it came to me. And they couldn’t believe, when they heard about it, that I hadn’t minded, all those years, taking Spanish classes outside of school. It wasn’t exactly that I hadn’t minded, though, as much as that I hadn’t known better. I didn’t know until I was older that not everyone my age was spending weeknights learning a second language. I didn’t consider the reason for it, either, but I think it boiled down to this: Spanish was just something my mother had fallen in love with, the way other parents are in love with music or baseball or books. She wanted to share it with me the way people want to share the things that mean something to them with those they care about. And she wanted to give me a connection to some part of my background. She wanted to hold open a doorway to myself.