The World in Half (19 page)

Danilo looks pained at the suggestion, but the more I think about it, the better an idea it seems. “It couldn’t hurt,” I say. “You call her this time. Ask her for Gatún Gallardo. See what she says. You can see how she sounds to you. That’s all you have to do.”

“Do you even remember which woman you called, or do we have to go through all the listings again?”

“She was the second person listed as only Gallardo. No first name.”

Danilo runs his thumbnail along his teeth again, then sighs deeply. “I don’t know,” he mumbles.

“Danilo,” I say. I know it’s just that he doesn’t want me to be disappointed again. “Let’s try one more time. Just this one other person. I’m leaving in like a week. There isn’t that much time left.”

As he stares at me, something in his face, something behind his eyes, crumbles.

“If we can find her number,” he says, “I’ll give her a call.”

 

 

 

We return from Taboga
in the late afternoon, our clothes dried to a crisp. Danilo is hungry again, so we stop at KFC for chicken. I think he chooses KFC because he believes it’s food that I, as an American, will like. I don’t want to disappoint him or spoil the effort by telling him otherwise. We bring it home with us. I’m too exhausted to eat, though, so I go to my room and lie down for a while. Through the wall, I hear Danilo call Nardo and arrange to meet him at the bat-ting cages. After he leaves, I have the apartment to myself, the sounds of halting traffic from the street below drifting in through the windows and the French doors. For the rest of the day, I lie curled up on the bed, my hands pressed between my knees, my hair damp against the pillowcase, as the light outside grows dimmer. I think about my mother for a little while, and about this ridiculous goose chase I’m on, and about sinking under the water with Danilo earlier that day and how crazily much I wanted to reach my hands out and touch his waist and drift closer to him while we held our breath.

I nod off for a time and open my eyes again to pitch blackness. I’m on top of the covers, still in my clothes, my shoes tied on my sockless feet. I sit up slowly, drawing away some strands of hair stuck to my cheek and rubbing my eyes. When I turn on the light, my watch shows it’s two-thirty in the morning.

I’m starving, so I get up and find in the refrigerator the cardboard bucket of chicken, a piece of aluminum foil curled around the top, and take it to the kitchen table. I flip on the soft, peachy light above the table. Ants are climbing over the mangoes in the fruit bowl. Two one-liters of Coke stand on a folded paper towel on the floor beside the refrigerator. The chicken is cold and clammy in my mouth, the fried skin knobby and hardened, but I’m so hungry that it tastes like the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I’ve finished two legs and a wing when Hernán, dressed in boxer shorts and a V-neck undershirt, walks out from his room.

I don’t see him too often these days. He’s taken to staying in his bedroom while Danilo and I eat breakfast, emerging only after I’ve moved on to the bathroom to shower and dress. Even with the shower water running, I can usually hear him pulling plates out and sliding pans around in the kitchen as he prepares himself a meal. By the time I come out of the steamy bathroom, he’s usually tucked himself into his bedroom to eat his food behind a closed door. He stays there either until Danilo and I leave or until it’s time for him to report to work.

Now Hernán looks surprised to see me. I lay the chicken—my second wing—down on a napkin. Hernán clears his throat.

“I was hungry,” I say softly.

He nods.

“Do you want some?”

He appears exceptionally uncomfortable, hanging his hands low over his groin and not moving from where he stands. “I did not know you were awake,” he says apologetically. When he speaks, he sounds different from how he usually sounds. It isn’t until he opens his mouth again—“I was going to watch television,” he says—that I realize he doesn’t have his dentures in.

Hesitantly, he makes his way to the small couch at the front of the apartment. From where I sit, I can see him. He takes a pair of headphones from the drawer of an end table and plugs them into a jack at the back of the television. He slides the headphones over his ears, settles himself on the coffee table, and turns on the television. With his hands on his knees, he watches a black-and-white western. I can’t tell whether it’s a movie or an old television program. Hernán keeps shifting himself into good posture, holding his back and neck perfectly erect for a time before he starts slumping again and then, when he notices he’s wilted, straightening himself.

I wrap the bones and bits of skin from my chicken in my napkin and throw it away. I don’t want to go back to bed, so I walk over to Hernán and tap his shoulder. He startles and jerks his body back. He exhales when he sees it’s only me, and slides the headphone off one of his ears.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I whisper.

He curls his lips around his gums.

“Can I watch with you?”

“Television?”

“I’m not tired.”

He looks distressed at the request, so I’m about to tell him that I’ll just read in my room instead when he holds out his hand toward the chair and motions for me to sit. As soon as he unplugs the headphones, sound rushes into the room. He scrambles to jab the volume button on the set until it’s just loud enough to be heard. He puts the headphones away and sits on the couch. We watch for several minutes—a group of men tie up their horses and unfurl their bedrolls in an open field—but it’s clear he’s ill at ease, glancing at me every few seconds then staring at his hands. I think maybe he’s embarrassed to be seen in his underclothes or to be seen without his teeth. Maybe he’ll relax before long. But at the first commercial he stands up and says, “I think I am tired after all.” He makes a show of yawning and stretching his arms overhead.

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” I say. “I can go to my room. You should stay out here.”

“No, I think I’m tired.” Then he gazes at me, as if something in my face is causing him immeasurable grief, before grimacing and padding out of the room, back down the hall, to his bed.

All of a sudden, I just want to go home. I’m sitting here cross-legged in an armchair, in someone else’s house, in someone else’s country. Belonging halfway doesn’t make it mine. Belonging to someone who belongs to it all the way doesn’t make it mine. I feel like a fraud. And like a failure. And like I’m in everybody’s way.

The front door clicks. Danilo walks in and, when he sees me, grins, evidently unfazed that I’m awake in the middle of the night, fully dressed, watching television. He heads for the kitchen, grabs the bucket of chicken, kicks off his sneakers, and comes out to join me, plopping himself on the couch.

“What are we watching?” he asks, pointing a drumstick at the television.

“I think it’s an old movie. I don’t know what it’s called.”

He blinks heavily. He’s drunk.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out today, in Taboga,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look good.”

“Thanks.”

“Something happened?”

I don’t respond. I don’t know the answer. Or maybe I do. No, nothing really happened, but I feel misplaced, unwelcome, homesick, hopeless.

“Hey, Miraflores, tell me something about him. Something good.”

He’s trying to pep me up. “About my father?”

“No, about Michael Jordan. Yes, about your father!”

I’ve already told him everything I know. What else is left to say? “He loved my mother.”

“Of course he did.”

“I mean he really, really loved her. I don’t know if many people get love like that.”

Danilo chomps on a thigh. Then he rubs his eyes and says, “Miraflores, can I tell you something?”

I tense. “Sure.”

“It bites ass that we don’t have a maid. Everyone else in this fucking country has a maid in their house, but Hernán insists—
insists
—we don’t need one. And frankly, that’s bull-shit. I’m eating chicken out of a bucket because we don’t have a maid. I want, you know, like homemade
arroz con pollo
for dinner. I want fucking
corvina
cooked up the way I like it. Is that too much to ask?”

“I guess not.”

“You guess not? I’ll tell you. It’s not.”

“You could make those things, couldn’t you?”

He shakes his head. He has one whole arm around the bucket as if he’s holding a child. “I do breakfast, but that is all that I do.” He closes his eyes. I have an urge to climb on top of him. When he opens them again he says, “Why are you all the way over there?”

“I’m like four feet from you.”

“You should come over here. Come on, we’ll watch television together.”

Something’s going to happen, I think. How could it not? Not too quickly, but not too slowly, I move over to the couch, narrowing the distance between us from four feet to about four inches. I can feel every atom in between.

“Did you eat?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You ate this?”

“I ate two legs and one and a half wings.”

“Impressive. Listen, though, maybe you don’t know because you’ve never had it . . . Have you had it? But I am telling you that real fucking Panamanian
arroz con pollo
like everyone else gets in their house would have been better than this shit.”

He’s so drunk and so energetically angered by it that I just smile. The lights from the screen flicker in the dark and the sounds from the television, distant voices and riotous laughter, seem to float weightlessly somewhere miles from us. I try to look as casual as possible. I tuck my hair behind my ears and skirt my bangs across my forehead lightly with my fingertips. Danilo sits slumped into the cushions. He laughs after a few minutes, wheeling his upper body around like a wobbly bowling pin and, at one point in the rotation, casting himself toward me. I think, This is it. He’s going to kiss me. But instead he tilts his head and puts his mouth to my ear. His hair smells sweaty.

“Don’t tell Hernán, but this show kind of sucks,” he whispers. Then he reels back. “Hey, where is the old man, anyway?”

“He’s in bed.”

“What did you do to him?”

“What do you mean, what did I do to him? I didn’t do anything. I was eating in the kitchen and he came out, so I offered him some chicken but he said he was going to watch TV, and then I asked if I could watch TV with him. That’s all.”

“You’re sure?”

“Why?”

“I just think it’s weird that he’s in bed. He’s usually up watching his shows now.”

“He usually watches TV in the middle of the night?”

“Just since you’ve been here. He made me go with him to buy those headphones so the sound wouldn’t wake you up.”

“Why doesn’t he just watch TV during the day, when I’m awake?”

“What?”

“Is he trying to avoid me?”

“Did I show you my bruise?”

I wrap my hands around my ankles. “Hmmm?”

Danilo rolls the sleeve of his T-shirt up over his shoulder. “Motherfucker Nardo hit me with his baseball bat.”

There’s a spot the size of a plum on his arm. It’s pink, giving way to brown.

I touch it gingerly with my fingers. “Did he do it on purpose?”

“Yeah, that’s a good question. You ask him that.”

My nails are short and unpolished. They look so strange to me, running over his skin. I just keep staring at them, afraid to look up at his face. I’m waiting, waiting. I circle my fingers around the perimeter of the bruise. I drag them up to the peak of his shoulder, just under the edge of his cotton T-shirt.

All at once, Danilo drops his sleeve and hands me the bucket of chicken. “Anyway,” he says, and flips open his phone even though I didn’t hear it ring.
“Aló.”
He smiles.
“Emelinda. ¿Quiúbo?”
He pads away with the phone to his ear.

The cardboard tub is on my lap. I squeeze the rounded rim in my fingers and listen for a time to the sound of his voice, of him making plans to meet up with yet another girl, as it drifts softly through the air.

M
y mother wants to know where the hell the Judean Plateau is. She’s been cursing more lately.

“How many letters?” I ask. I’ve embargoed myself in my room, afraid to come out and face Danilo after the embarrassment of last night. Maybe, I think, he’s even repulsed by me, the way I was acting like an obsequious little hanger-on when all he had tried to do was be nice to me. He’s probably already complained to Nardo about the fact that I somehow got the wrong idea.

“Six. Is it Judean like Jewish?”

“Exactly. So where do you think it might be?”

“New York.”

“ ‘New York’ is seven letters.”

“Did I tell you that Lucy made homemade strawberry jam yesterday?”

Earlier, she said it was blueberry.

“Save some for me. I’m going to be home soon, you know.”

“I know. I have it on my calendar.” She hums absently for a moment. I hold the phone away from my ear, straining to discern any evidence that either Danilo or Hernán is awake yet, but there’s nothing. Why do I want to see him? I want to explain myself. No, not really. I don’t want to revisit last night. Well, then, I just want to make sure everything’s okay between us, that I didn’t ruin a friendship or whatever other sort of “-ship” we have going on.

“Israel?” my mother asks.

“Yep. To the east is the Transjordan Plateau, which has almost the same topography in reverse.”

“More than I need to know, Mira.”

“Sorry.”

“So everything’s good? What are you doing today?”

“Just more research. About volcanoes.”

“Tell me where you are again?”

“I’m in Vancouver, Washington.”

“Those are two different places.”

“Well, there’s a place in Canada called Vancouver. And there’s a place in the United States called Washington. Actually, there are a lot of places in the U.S. called Washington. Okay, but that doesn’t matter. I’m in Washington state, and there’s a city here called Vancouver.”