The World in Half (2 page)

“When are you starting?” I ask.

“I believe I just did.”

The next night,
because it’s New Year’s Eve and because Lucy insists, I go out with my friends. Before I leave the house Lucy asks if she can take a picture of me. “I’ve never seen you look so nice,” she says, taking no pains to hide the amazement on her face. I’m dressed in a shimmering silver V-neck blouse, black trousers, and black boots. My hair is long and straight down my back, my bangs long and straight across my forehead.

“You’ve only seen me yesterday and today,” I point out, smiling. But then my mother comes out and corroborates Lucy’s opinion.

“Mira! No jeans!” she says. “Is this always how you dress around your friends?”

“Yes. I wear disco balls to my geophysics classes.”

“I know you thought that was funny, but you should consider it. It would be an improvement over jeans all the time.”

Lucy backs me against a wall and takes a picture. “One more with the flash,” she says.

“Lucy,” I point to my shirt. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got the flash covered.”

“For once,” my mother says, and I roll my eyes, hoping that it comes off as good-natured, before pulling on my coat and walking out the door.

It’s dark by the time I get to campus. Asha buzzes me up to her room and hugs me when I walk in. She has jazz—her favorite since she took a class on Thelonious Monk last quarter—playing softly.

“You look so good!” she says. “Were we supposed to get dressed up? Do you even know where we’re going? Juliette’s still talking about going to the Med, but I don’t know if I feel like it.”

Asha is wearing dark jeans, a slim black turtleneck, and green sneakers. She is, as one of the guys in her dorm told her once, a classic Indian beauty, with thick, wavy hair and flawless golden skin.

I sit on her bed, covered with a Jamawar shawl. “You know she only wants to go there because of Ben, right?” I say.

“That waiter? What’s his last name? Linwood? I think he was in my biology lab.”

“Did you tell Juliette? She’s practically killing herself to find out anything she can about him.”

“Exactly why I didn’t tell her. If she knew where he was every Tuesday and Thursday at three-thirty, she would probably stalk him.”

Asha is leaning over her dresser, lining her almond-shaped eyes with heavy black eyeliner. She licks her pinky and dabs at one of the corners. Then she turns to me and, shaking her finger, says, “So you don’t tell her, either.”

Juliette and Beth arrive together about ten minutes later. They walk into Asha’s dorm room wearing dresses—Juliette a corduroy shirtdress with a wide brown belt around her waist, and Beth a very plain sleeveless black dress that hits at her knees. She has tights on underneath.

The four of us met the first week of freshman year at a barbecue in the courtyard that two of the neighboring dorms threw to welcome new students. Juliette and Beth lived in the same suite, so they came over together, clinging to each other the way everyone did in the beginning just for the comfort of having someone to do things with. Asha was monitoring her veggie burger on the grill and I was talking to my RA. Later, I got in line for a hot dog behind Juliette and Beth. Juliette brokered the introductions, and then Beth and I learned we were in the same major (geophysical sciences), which Asha overheard and which, because she was in the sciences, too (chemistry), prompted her to introduce herself to us a few minutes later as we sat cross-legged on the grass, eating and licking salt from potato chips off our fingers. With the scent of charcoal wafting through the air, we sat outside talking to one another long after all the others at the barbecue had thrown away their plastic plates and wadded napkins and returned to the safe cover of their dorm rooms, until dusk fell and the mosquitoes came out and Asha jumped up because she kept getting bitten. Someone—it must have been Juliette—suggested we all have breakfast together in the dining hall the next morning. We’ve been friends ever since.

“What the hell?” Asha says when she sees them. “Why didn’t anyone tell me we were supposed to be dressing up?”

“What do you mean, why didn’t we tell you?” Juliette asks. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

“This is just the dress I use for interviews,” Beth says, before sitting beside me on the bed and putting her arm around my shoulder, squeezing me in a sideways hug. “How are you?” she asks.

“I’m okay,” I say. She gives me the most pitying smile, lips together, turned down at the corners.

“What interviews?” Asha asks.

“What are we listening to?” Juliette wants to know.

“Sonny Rollins. ‘ ’Round Midnight.’ It’s a standard,” Asha says. “What interviews?”

“It’s nice. Can I download it from you?”

“Sure. What interviews, Beth?”

“The interviews I’m trying to set up for summer intern-ships. Didn’t I tell you I’m trying to get a job at Fermi Lab?”

“Okay, before the three of you get all caught up in your ultra-fascinating science talk, where are we going?” Juliette asks, after coming over and giving me her own hug.

“I heard you wanted to go to Medici,” I say, winking suggestively.

“First of all, I can’t believe you just winked at me like that,” Juliette says. “What are you? Some kind of Playboy Bunny CIA operative?”

I laugh.

“Second, I wouldn’t
mind
going to Medici, unless someone has a better idea.” Juliette adjusts her purple plastic glasses before dropping a glance on each of us in turn. “Medici it is, then.”

The restaurant is just filling up by the time we get there. We slide into a booth near the back and order sandwiches and onion rings and root beer floats. It feels good to be there with them, eating the food we’ve always eaten and having the conversations we’ve always had. We watch for Ben and try to keep Juliette from making a fool of herself when she sees him, since every time he passes through the room she threatens to wave him down and tell him that she thinks he’s amazing. “You don’t even know him,” Beth says. And Juliette replies, “Look at him. What more do I need to know?”

The restaurant is warm and dim, the dark wood furniture worn and etched with people’s names and initials. Wilco is playing on the sound system. We finish our onion rings and order mocha pie as the students continue to amass and get louder. When Juliette stands up and announces she’s going to the bathroom, Asha says she’ll accompany her to make sure she only goes to the bathroom and doesn’t somehow veer off course into the path of a certain Ben Linwood. Juliette sticks her tongue out at Asha, and Asha says, “You better keep that thing where it belongs.” Beth and I laugh.

As soon as they’re gone, Beth says, “Did I tell you before that you look really nice tonight?”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“We usually only see you in your sneakers and jeans.”

“Excuse me, but I wear tops, too.”

Beth smiles. “I’m just saying, it’s nice to see you dressed up.” She presses the back of her fork against some leftover piecrust still on her plate and watches it crumble through the tines. Then she looks up. “I can’t believe you’re not going to be here next quarter. Who’s going to meet me for coffee at the C-Shop?” She sighs and lays her fork down. “Did I tell you I saw Dr. Herschel on the last day of finals? He asked me how you were. I didn’t even know he knew we were friends. I mean, he has a lot of students to keep track of. Although maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since all your professors love you.” Dr. Herschel is the chair of the Geophysical Sciences Department.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said you were fine.” She looks at me and blinks. “Just tell me one more time that you’re fine.”

“I’m fine.”

At midnight, as anyone might have predicted, Juliette jumps up from our booth, streaks across the room to where Ben is standing with an empty round tray tucked under one arm, takes his face in her hands, and kisses him. He drops the tray, but boy if he doesn’t kiss her back with gusto. Asha walks over to the group of guys at the booth behind us and asks, with exceeding politeness, if any of them would consider spending his New Year’s kiss on her even though she is not dressed as prettily—the word she uses—as her friends. All four guys raise their hands.

When she rejoins Beth and me at our table, I say, in a lightly mocking tone, “Would any of you consider—”

“Stop,” Asha says, blushing.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to date American guys,” Beth says.

Asha writes on a napkin: “Date.” And under that: “Kiss.” “Do those look like the same thing?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “What’s the Hindi translation?”

“Hilarious,” says Asha.

When we leave, it’s gotten so cold outside that we run the whole way back to Asha’s dorm, our lungs stinging by the time we arrive. Juliette and Beth are both staying overnight, sleeping on the floor, but because I didn’t clear it with Lucy first, I tell them I’m going back. We hug good-bye and I promise to call them the minute I get back from Panama. They want pictures, they say, and if anything, anything at all happens while I’m there, they want to know about that, too. They’ll be keeping their cell phones on.

Outside, on the sidewalk, I walk past my car, across the street, down a narrow path that leads to the heart of campus. In the distance the sounds of horns and the unnerving snap-pop of amateur fireworks punctuate the air, but from where I stand I can’t see another soul. There is nothing around me but the towering Gothic buildings, the stark trees, the snow-dappled grounds, and the deep black sky, opaque as velvet, domed overhead. I fist my hands into the pockets of my coat and take a long breath, the cold air tingling in my chest. Pieces of my hair sweep lightly against my cheeks, caught in the icy breeze. Not even a month earlier I walked by this same spot, one of hundreds of students streaming silently past, on my way to class or to my dorm. Now, though, I have other places to go.

Two weeks ago,
I was in my mother’s bedroom, looking for a medical bill that she wanted me to find. Her doctor’s office kept sending us a bill that she swore we had already paid, and though she called and tried to straighten it out with them, they insisted that they had no record of the payment. The person on the other end of the line apparently told my mother that if she could produce the record in question and send it in, they would be able to sort everything out and cancel the charge.

When I walked into my mother’s room that day, the bed was unmade. The pillows, flattened where her head had lain, were propped against the wall. The flimsy wooden dresser with its trifold mirror was piled with every trinket or piece of jewelry she had ever owned: chipped seashells she proudly told me once were from the Atlantic; barrettes I hadn’t seen her wear in years; chopsticks; plain rings; beaded necklaces; tarnished brooches; nail polish bottles; sample tubes of perfume, the liquid inside browned like whiskey. And next to the dresser, a metal filing cabinet, four drawers tall.

I started with the second drawer from the top, the tabs of the file folders ruffling against the underside of the drawer above as I slid it out. The folders weren’t labeled, so I flipped several past my fingertips and peered inside. Receipts, credit card statements, instruction manuals—the usual. When my fingers pried open a folder near the back, I stopped. It looked like it was full of letters. Some of them were typed on onionskin paper, some handwritten in blue ink. All of them were in Spanish—I could see that easily—and addressed to my mother.
Querida Catarina,
they said, one after the other. I pulled the folder back enough to see the name signed at the end of each: Gatún Gallardo. I caught my breath. My father.

 

 

 

The topic
of my father has always been off-limits in our house. For a long time, the sum of my information about him consisted of knowing that he was a man my mother had an affair with while she was stationed with her husband in Panama. I always thought of him as a man who, upon learning she was pregnant, decided he didn’t have much interest in raising a child, so he let her, and me, go. It isn’t a story my mother ever verified. It isn’t even a story that I tested out loud. It’s simply what I pieced together from what little I knew about him, about their situation, about the past. And it seemed easy enough to believe. My father, after all, had never contacted me, and on the few occasions I brought him up, my mother usually told me not to worry about him or else just gazed at me with the kind of excruciating sorrow that would shut anyone down.

Of course, other details leaked out over the years. At some point I learned his name and that he had lived in Panama City, Panama, his entire life. I knew that he was fifteen years older than my mother and that he smoked cigarettes. I knew that he worked at the Panama Canal, that he had a wide jaw and a huge smile, that he was skinny as a toothpick, that he kept a comb in his back pocket. And I thought I knew that he was a man who had broken my mother’s heart. Until I read the letters.