The World in Half (30 page)

The doctor closes the door to the tiny exam room behind me. My mother lies on the bed with her hands folded on her chest, a half-used tissue sprouting from one hand as if she’s a magician and can, with a flourish, make a dove fly out. Her eyes are open, though unfocused.

The doctor invites me to sit. He gives me the diagnosis. He tells me what I already know: It’s not Alzheimer’s that takes people’s lives, it’s all the things that can happen to them because they have Alzheimer’s. He says pneumonia is one of those things. My mother stares at nothing. She stares at a porous ceiling tile that looks like every other porous ceiling tile. The doctor says, “I’ve already told her all this.” He goes on. When anyone else has pneumonia, the chances for recovery are generally favorable. But in the coming months, as the Alzheimer’s progresses, my mother could forget how to sit upright or how to walk, the sorts of activities that keep her lungs pumping. She could forget how to swallow, and inhale whatever it is she is trying to drink into her lungs instead, flooding them. Her body could forget to do the sorts of things that in anyone else would stave off infection. He doesn’t mean to scare me, he says. He believes in being realistic. He’s seen it before, when caretakers aren’t prepared, when they aren’t vigilant.

It sounds far-fetched. She can be treated. She can take whatever medicine she needs to take. I’ll be there to administer it. There’s still not that much that she forgets outright. It escapes her sometimes how to use certain appliances, like when she put the bread in the toaster and didn’t push it down and stood there watching it, waiting for it to be ready, until she yelled to me in frustration that the toaster was broken and held up two floppy pieces of bread, waving them around like flags. She forgets to rinse the shampoo out of her hair on occasion, and I have to lean her head over the sink to sluice the suds out. She doesn’t get dressed sometimes; and once or twice she’s mistaken the ringing phone for a fire alarm; and she gives answers to questions I haven’t asked; and she puts things away in places they don’t belong, like her clean clothes under her bed, or her nail file in the silverware drawer. But those are the outstanding examples. She’s still mostly fine. Maybe if she got pneumonia again in five years it would be different, but now she’ll be fine.

“She isn’t that far into her Alzheimer’s,” I tell the doctor.

He says, “I know.” Then he says, “She isn’t yet.”

 

 

 

Danilo comes to visit
in November. We’ve been exchanging letters about once a month by then and calling on occasion besides. Living with my mother reminds me every day of how easily things can slip away. It reminds me that while there are some things worth fighting to hold on to, there are others that it’s better just to let go of. There are things, like anger, that you can live without. I let go of being angry with Danilo and Hernán for lying to me like they did. It just wasn’t worth it to hold on. In our most recent correspondence, I sent Danilo the postcard of Panamá La Vieja that I bought that day on Via España and invited him to visit me in Chicago. The next thing I knew, he was calling me to tell me that he’d bought a plane ticket.

When he arrives, it’s snowing. A fine, diaphanous sort of snow. I wait in the heated car, stopped in the pull-through area outside Baggage Claim. Police cars are bleating their funny-sounding horns at vehicles that stay in one place for too long, and people wrapped in scarves and knit hats scurry with their luggage rolling along behind them to huddle under the heat lamps while they wait for their rides. My mother is sleeping beside me, buckled into the passenger seat. I keep my hands warm between my thighs, watching through the window, willing Danilo to appear before a police officer has the chance to ticket me for not moving along. Then I see him. That same brown hair and buttery skin, the same cargo pants and T-shirt, although now he’s wearing an unzipped track jacket as well. He’s carrying a blue duffel bag and looking around, looking unsure. I step out of the car and call his name. He smiles and jogs toward me, across the crosswalk zooming with shuttle buses and taxis. He hugs me, pressing his fingertips into my shoulder blades and shimmying me from side to side like the agitator on a washing machine. He pulls back. I smile. He slides his hands under my coat and under my sweater, his icy skin clutching my waist, and says, “It’s fucking cold here, Miraflores! Feel my hands.” I twist away at the shock, laughing and feeling my heart surge again at the possibility of him.

“Hi,” I say.

 

 

 

For the next four days,
Danilo helps me with my mother, even though it takes the two of them some time to warm up to each other. The first time he steps foot in our house, he doesn’t mention the piles leaning against the living room wall. “She’s putting everything in order,” I explain anyway. “Lucy said that she needs to feel like she still has control over things.” Danilo raises his eyebrows as if it all sounds a little crazy to him. He harbors a muffled fury toward her for all that she did and for the way she irresponsibly and irrevocably altered other people’s lives—mine and my father’s—in order to keep herself comfortable. He’s told me that, in not so many words, and I’ve told him that I appreciate his anger on my behalf, but that if I’ve let it go, he should, too. I remind him of that and, maybe because he can see how much it means to me, or maybe because upon seeing my mother, he realizes that anger toward a helpless target is futile, after less than a day with her, he does.

For her part, my mother eyes Danilo curiously and suspiciously all of that first afternoon, hunching over her cross-words and meals as though she believes he’s going to snatch them away from her at any moment. But the next morning, as Danilo labors over a pan of eggs for us, she marches up to him in the kitchen and says, “Are you a friend of Gatún’s?” It must be something about his Spanish or his accent or his Panamanian features that reminds her of my father. It sends a shiver skittering along my bones to hear her say my father’s name out loud. It takes Danilo less than a second to figure her out. With the spatula in his hand, he says in English, “He is a good man, no? He tell me about you. He tell me to come here take care of you girls.” He smiles big.

For the remainder of his visit, he makes eggs for us in the mornings and picks up fast food in the evenings. At my mother’s request, because she read somewhere that it helps slow the progression of her disease, he generously sprinkles turmeric on everything he makes for her.

Beth and Juliette and Asha drive across the city one day to meet him, and although they stay for no longer than an hour because they don’t want to get in the way of what is already a chaotic day (they all are now), Juliette whispers her approval as she hugs me when they leave. “It’s not like that,” I try to tell her. “We’re just good friends.” Danilo and I have established that unequivocally by now. Juliette holds up her finger, though, and with a playfully beseeching look, says, “Please, Mira. Just let me believe.” I agree to it, because I know that people need to believe in things sometimes even, and often especially, when they aren’t true.

Whenever there’s time, Danilo pulls me outside for stolen minutes to play in the snow, a phenomenon that he can’t get over. He holds his upturned palms toward the sky, trying to catch some of it, and when the flakes melt into his skin and his hair and his pants, he declares that he thought it would be colder. He spins around in circles, kicking up snow in his wake, catching it on his tongue, until his cheeks are bright pink and wet. He runs and slides against the slick grass on his belly with his arms outstretched like Superman. I show him how to make a snowball, and he pelts me with them, laughing like a madman when they break apart upon impact. He attempts to save handfuls of snow by shoving them into a brown paper lunch bag he finds in one of our kitchen drawers and storing the bag in the freezer. He says he wants to take it back with him when he leaves, and though of course he has to know it won’t work, there’s still something sad about watching him, the morning I’m scheduled to drive him to the airport, open the freezer to find a brown paper bag that has frozen into something brittle, without anything inside.

But we spend most of our time together, the good and significant time, in the hushed house while my mother is sleeping. We sit at the kitchen table and talk while Danilo attempts to teach me rummy and while the wind outside scrapes the bare tree branches against the house, or else we lie in my room in the dark and have conversations until one of us falls asleep, something the other realizes only after asking a question and getting no response. Danilo sleeps on the floor next to my bed, buried under two flat sheets, two cotton blankets, and a comforter I borrowed from George Grabowski for just this occasion. When I went to George’s house, I told him some of what had been going on with my mother. He said matter-of-factly, “It’s an awful disease. I’ve seen it first-hand. It steals people. But your mother . . . Catherine . . . well, no matter what it takes of her, she’ll still be more than most people ever are.” He smiled. “Don’t tell her I said that.”

Danilo doesn’t complain that he’s still cold, but when he asks if I have a pair of sweatpants he can borrow and when I see him in my crimson women’s volleyball sweats that I bought on clearance at the University of Chicago bookstore, I grab the afghan from the couch and throw that on top of him as well.

Our conversations are like they’ve always been, dipping and rising, jumping from meaningless to meaningful. We don’t once talk about my father or the future and whether he and I will manage to stay in touch. In a way, promising we will forever or even for years seems unlikely, as far apart as we are—he in Panama, me in Chicago. But in another way, I want to believe that distance doesn’t matter. If he lived in Michigan, would it be much different? Or if he lived in Japan? There is only Here or Not Here. And people make Not Here work all the time. It’s only geography, after all. An illusion. You can live in the same house or in the same neighborhood as other people and, if you draw the right lines around yourself and build the right walls, be as far removed as if you were a continent away. That’s how my mother lives. I want to be different.

I apologize to Danilo for not being able to take him around Chicago the way he took me around Panama, and for his entire trip instead to be about my mother. He says, “Doesn’t matter. The only thing I wanted to see in Chicago anyway was you.” He tells me that Hernán ordered a new Shakira video and that he watches it with his headphones on in the morning before he leaves for work. I ask him to tell Hernán that I’m sorry for not having said good-bye. And I tell him that I’ve been thinking about what he wrote in his letter, about how the men building the canal thought they were cutting the world in half.

“For me, it was my mother’s disease,” I say. “There was my world before it and my world after it, but the Alzheimer’s runs right down the middle.”

I think about it a lot, actually. Of course, the world already has its halves—the hemispheres. Hemispheres of the earth. Hemispheres of the brain. Except that my mother’s brain—her mind, her life—fractured, is fracturing still, into a thousand pieces. But I don’t know how to say all of that in Spanish. It doesn’t matter. As usual, Danilo understands me.

“I know,” he says, and nothing more.

My mother and I drive him back to the airport the day he leaves. From the backseat, Danilo holds his hands on my shoulders the whole time, until I have to pull over just past Pita Inn on Dempster because I’m crying so much that I can’t see. I don’t even ask if he has a license. I just let him switch seats with me and drive while my mother compulsively tunes the radio and I navigate, telling him when to turn and when to merge onto 294. A hundred times I consider giving him directions that will send us looping back to my house.

When we pull up to the curb outside the international terminal at O’Hare, my mother says, “I’ve always thought your country is very lovely.” Danilo says, in English, “It is. You would like to see it again, anytime you are welcome.”

My mother smiles and says in Spanish, “Thank you for the offer.”

Standing next to the car as it runs, the exhaust puffing into the brisk early-winter air, Danilo hugs me for what feels like a full five minutes before letting me go. “You’ll write to me this time?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him.

“And you’ll come to Panamá sometime soon?”

“Yes.”

“You know where I am. And you have your map. You know how to find me.”

 

 

 

And that might be the end,
or the end might come later, when one day I make it back to Panama, or one day I don’t and continue my life in a different direction, or one day my mother passes away, or one day the tangles and plaques in my own mind start sprouting like weeds and I can’t remember what came before and I can’t predict what will come next. I don’t know. It’s impossible to say where things begin and where they end. Memory doesn’t have seams to hem it in. It just goes on and on in both directions. And so, there was this story, but before that

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

and before that,

a woman named Catherine is born. She crawls on the hardwood floor and sucks her thumb. She brings a cheese sandwich to school for lunch every day. She sits in the backseat of a wood-paneled station wagon while her parents sit in the front, not speaking to each other or to her. She gets in trouble for spilling grape juice on the front of her school uniform. She dreams of horses. She sews her own prom dress. She shaves her legs with soap and a razor. She meets a boy named Brant Strickland. She says yes when he proposes. She moves to Panama. She meets another man. She understands what it means to fall in love. She lets other people decide her life. She misunderstands what it means to be a good girl. In a way, she breaks her own heart. She has a daughter. She is alone. She grows gruff and stubborn as steel. She is short with cashiers. She works as a pizza delivery driver, a waitress at a chain restaurant, a receptionist, a receptionist again, a receptionist once more. She dreams of a life as an actress, a life less practical, full of whimsy. In a different way, a life of escape. She has brown eyes embedded with flashing flecks of gold. She has freckles that march across her slender shoulders and over the bridge of her nose. She talks in her sleep and sings in the shower. She takes pride in dressing up and doesn’t understand the philosophy behind dressing as though you don’t care to impress. She cooks dinners at home. She grows scared of the stove. She forgets to turn it off. She forgets a lot of things. She doesn’t feel them slip away, but when she goes to look for them later, they’re gone. She is stern with the rules. She reorganizes everything. She has her soft moments, those times when she is tender and bruised, but mostly she is a plank of wood, braced and erect, weathering anything and everything. She puffs her chest out to the world and walks through it—all the way to the end of it—without taking a breath.