Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  You are swaying to the rhythm of bread rising

  Buoyant with waiting

  Trickling into the ocean with your big toe

  Panting with foamy breath from so much carrying

  Then swoosh! You float—

  The icing of expectation holds you up

  XO

  A: I knew it! You’re pregnant, too.

  P: I’m not even showing yet.

  A: You forgot I can read your mind.

  We gave birth. Two brown boys, one lighter than the other. Barack and Pablo. One of them looked just like his grandfather the cardiologist, all ears and fuzzy head. The other Sebastian’s double. Both with rounded faces and chins. Would we have to admit that it was true, as the ancient Greeks proposed, that babies only inherited from their fathers?

  A fault line from Portland to Seattle caused the biggest earthquake in recent history. Sea levels rose, and coastal houses, once worth millions, couldn’t be sold for scraps. We wondered what we could have done if we hadn’t become singer and soldier, leading the lives Dad trained us for. We might have changed the world. Or was that a delusion of grandeur?

  One of us took a three-month maternity leave, back in the States. Then Sebastian took paternity leave.

  One of us started writing songs about birth. Who knew there was such a big market for music about motherhood? Colson got a job teaching in the Bronx, finally allowing the move to an apartment with hot water.

  One of us wanted her baby to meet his maternal grandfather. One of us said, “If you visit him, you’re dead to me.” Guess which twin won that argument? The one who knew how to give orders.

  A: I bought a copy of your album for Mom.

  P: That explains the one sale we had this month.

  A: Ha ha. She liked it.

  P: I bet she enjoyed my descriptions of our crappy childhood.

  A: Come on. It wasn’t that bad.

  Pause for comic effect.

  A: The album, I mean.

  On the subway or in a chopper, a flash through our bodies, a zap. We each knew when something happened to our sister. She twisted her wrist leading training exercises with new recruits. Or she tripped on stage. Broke a leg or a heart or a record. We knew when she healed, too. We saw calm wash over the sky, a denim prewash dye.

  A: Somebody stole my guns. Just now while we were out to dinner.

  P: They steal your diamond stud?

  A: I never take it off.

  P: I’d know if you did.

  A: Wish I’d been home.

  P: So you could shoot the guy?

  A: So I could protect my family. I worry about yours.

  P: Maybe I should buy a gun.

  A: Exactly.

  P: So somebody could break in and steal it.

  One of us played at Madison Square Garden, sandwiched between the circus and a basketball game. How had the band gotten so big?

  We had changed diapers and nursed at two-hour intervals and given up coffee and gluten and dairy to try to stop colic, and we were so bleary-eyed we looked like vampires. Then we woke up one day (had we even slept?), and we were filling auditoriums and writing code for an army of drones that could reduce American military casualties by half.

  We spent holidays with our in-laws, still meeting Mom only when we knew Dad was away. We flew in for Ya-Ya’s funeral but left the same day and in the crush of relatives managed not to talk to Dad at all. When Mom mentioned his name, we pretended we didn’t hear.

  We befriended rock stars and heroes. We didn’t know what those words meant, but they sounded good. Some people used them to describe us.

  We shook our fingertips, and the sky expanded with storm, just like Dad had taught us, though we never admitted he had. We flicked our wrists and lightning flickered. We harnessed this power into our guitars and guns.

  Some days we almost forgot we had a family, besides each other and our doting husbands, sons, and dogs. Then one day, we were forced to remember.

  Part Three

  32

  It started with the call that came the same time every year: “Come home.” We could almost hear Mom lean into the palm that held her cell, almost see her other hand twisting a ringlet that had fallen from her bun, legs jiggling with enough nervous energy to light a window display. “Please come see your family for Christmas.”

  We wanted to make her happy. But we didn’t want to see Dad.

  So we said, “Not this time. Maybe next year.” Our throats burned with the rawness of our lies.

  Mom told our sons that Michigan was the land of perpetual snow, so they begged us to take them there. She didn’t admit that these snowstorms were monstrous. Ten years had passed since our meteorology professor said they would be. Not every place had warmed. In Michigan the weather just became weirder.

  “The state is even shaped like a giant mitten,” Mom said. The boys spun around and around, littering the floor with shredded paper, shouting, “White Christmas!”

  Then we texted each other:

  “Wish we could take the boys to Michigan.”

  We could if Dad was gone.

  The words were too terrible to say aloud or to tap out on our phones, but we couldn’t stop the thought from creeping in. That we wanted him out of the way. Not hunting. Not working. But gone for good.

  We had barely finished texting when Mom rang again. The summoning call came in the dark, a slit of moon lighting our phones.

  “Dad,” she said.

  We almost knew what would come next. No, we did know.

  “Dead.”

  Decades removed and several states away, we could still hear each other’s twin cries. A common foe had fallen. A foe who had kept us connected.

  As soon as we hung up with Mom, we called each other. We tapped our thighs, clicked our tongues, whistled air through sore throats. One of us started a tune the other finished. Our wordless words said:

  “We did this to him.”

  “You heard what Mom said. Cardiac arrest.”

  “That could be a symptom, not a cause.”

  “I didn’t know he had a heart to be attacked.”

  “Marco,” one of us finally said aloud.

  “Polo,” the other replied. Then our voices ground down to hums.

  Mom couldn’t have said what we thought she had. Not because Dad was too young. People die young every day. But because he was sturdier than the rest of us. Because he learned in the army how to survive. Because he could hack Alaska. Because his skin was like tree bark. Because we were too young to be fatherless. Because our children had not yet met him. Because we didn’t understand our power. Because he was . . .

  What was the word we had learned in fourth grade? The word that had told us we had infinite time to change our minds. Immortal. We believed in this word, whether we realized it or not, till we couldn’t anymore.

  We didn’t remember saying good-bye on the phone. We didn’t think we had hung up. But in the morning our husbands found us still on the floor, flopped there like fish. We downed coffee strong as whiskey, bought tickets, and packed our bags. Then, at last, we flew.

  33

  We returned to our parents’ house, parents ourselves. It had been how many years since we came home for Christmas, the trips endlessly “postponed”? Our new homes were hundreds of miles and hundreds of dollars away, and we had said we were too busy changing diapers and changing our names.

  At the funeral, the priest spoke partly in Greek, and we didn’t understand. In English, he said Dad was in heaven.

  Dad’s friends said, in their eulogies, “He’s not gone, he’s just merged with the eternal.” They said, “He returned to a better place.” “He’s in the mind of God.” “He’s up in the sky looking down.” “He’s waiting for us to join him in the clouds.”

  Looking down on us, for sure.

  Who knew Dad had had so many friends? So many came, even though the horrible weather encouraged hunkering down at home. More than one person said, “He always shoveled my walk”;
someone else said, “That man could charm the teeth out of a lion’s mouth”; someone else, “There aren’t many like him left.” Had we accidentally crashed the wrong funeral?

  Wild Pete, Dad’s sidekick in Alaska, limped up to the podium. “The sky opened up today, and one of their own returned home.”

  Everyone stared at us. Especially one man. His purple skinny tie was as pointy as his fuzzy chin.

  After the funeral, we stood next to the coffin with Mom and greeted all the people Dad hadn’t managed to piss off enough his whole life to alienate. More than we had ever seen at a funeral for someone who wasn’t famous. Men he had worked with at Ford. Guys he had played cards with at the VFW. Neighbors, tow truck customers. Even some army buddies. People said, “He wasn’t like the rest of us. That’s the best way I can describe him.”

  Ms. Rosen, still wearing her signature long skirts and dangly bracelets, squeezed us in a hug and kissed the tops of our heads, as if we still only came up to her armpits. She recounted the time Dad had trained our class for the spelling bee. He had returned every year to coach, she said.

  “We didn’t know,” we said.

  You didn’t know squat. Did she say that aloud or just burn it into us with her eyes?

  Next in line was the man with the purple tie who had glared at us across the aisle. He pulled tissues from his pants and offered them, but we shook our heads. Was he mocking our dry eyes with his, puffed red? Then he plucked two business cards from the other pocket and planted them in our palms. He was a software designer for human prosthetics. Ezekiel. “Call me Zeke,” was the first thing he said. “It’s what my family calls me.”

  Wild Pete was next in the receiving line. He clawed us raw with his weathered skin. Mouth lost in beard, swaying arms furry with gray. He smelled like mulch and wet chewing tobacco. “So you’re the girls who killed your old man?”

  “How could you say that?” we said to him. To each other, only with our eyes, we replied, How did he know?

  We slid away, through the back door, into the storm. Wild Pete muttered to the others as we left. All we heard was, Huff huff huff. Then Those damn girls.

  You killed your dad. We had heard it before. That’s what Ya-Ya had said to Dad at his own father’s funeral.

  Hadn’t we left so we wouldn’t become like him? But look: we had.

  We propped ourselves against brick. We toppled onto each other, elbow to elbow, hip to hip.

  “Wild Pete’s right. We killed him,” we said into empty air.

  “Not too loud.” But there was no one to hear. Everyone else lingered in the church, though the funeral had ended ages ago. Soon they would find us out here, if the snow didn’t bury us or render us invisible.

  “We caused a heart attack with our thoughts? That’s not the kind of world we live in.” We said this as the sky fell onto the middle of the country and the sea rose up and swallowed the edges of land. As the fires swooped down in the west like a dragon disturbed in its lair. What kind of world did we live in again?

  “We’ve made things happen with our minds before.”

  In a flash we saw ourselves on Groundhog Day so long ago, when we had said, “Make it spring,” and the mounds of snow melted into mush. In the truck when Dad had taught Mom to drive. We had thought the word stop and made the truck stand still.

  “No one would believe us.”

  “No one would believe we talk to each other like this, either,” we silently said. “Tell the army you’re hearing voices, and you’ll be put on disability. If you’re lucky they’ll call it a casualty of PTSD.”

  This thing, this thing we could do, this thing we had done to Dad, we hated this thing, even if it was what had turned us into singers and soldiers, rock stars and heroes. The ability to want something so much we made it so. We didn’t know what this thing was, but we knew where it had come from.

  Him.

  We hung onto each other’s fingers. Our only hope to stay up, we knew, was to find a way to hold each other.

  We seemed to stay there for years.

  We watched the rerun of our lives from the time of Papu’s funeral to Dad’s. We might have remained in the cold till our own last rites if our husbands hadn’t excavated us and defrosted our fingers with the heat behind their necks.

  Colson and Sebastian had somehow wrangled our sons and our mom, wrapped the leftovers in plastic, loaded the cars, then driven home to our parents’ house. Mom’s house. That new phrase sounded so small.

  34

  We tucked in our sons, warm on the floor next to the beds we would share with their dads. Mom popped a pill and collapsed even before the boys did. She had relinquished her room for the couch. She couldn’t bear a half-empty bed, she said, and watched TV until her eyelids closed and the living room became a sea of snores.

  We drank while the rest of the house slept. We listened to our men, their deep breathing synchronized and loud in the small house. We listened to our little boys.

  Our elbows on the Formica kitchen table, moon shining on snow through gauzy curtains our only light, we guzzled the Jack Daniels Dad used to spoon-feed us. Medicine to make us tough. We took turns from the same glass, and now it made us soft instead. We could have cut each other with butter knives.

  One of us said we should have visited for Christmas. At least once in a while. At least once. We didn’t have to stay away just because he had grounded us all those years ago. Because he had threatened to have our tubes tied, to sterilize us like animals. We didn’t need to cut him off just because he had killed his dad.

  The other said it was all his fault, the prick. What about our bruises?

  But maybe everyone had them, back in the days of corporal punishment. It took two to fight. Or three.

  We had always fought with him about the heat, so now we turned it up high. Not that we would ever let our own children play with the thermostat.

  Dad would have loved the snow-glow through the window. This was his favorite season, frozen mounds turning white to gray to charcoal, the drifts so deep bodies could be buried in them and not discovered until the Easter thaw. Dad had worn a winter beard, his fur, without a coat. “It’s better to be too cold than too hot,” he said. “You can always put more on in the winter. But in the summer there’s only so much you can take off.

  “Remember his Christmas lights?” we said, lacing our hands, prayerlike, on the table. We nodded and he appeared, sprung from the sharp edges of our knuckles.

  He had yelled, “Kids! You’ll never guess what I brought home.” But we could. It was always the same. Colored lights and white lights. Icicle lights and blinking lights. Lights that spelled Merry Christmas and motion-detection lights that played his favorite Christmas song: “You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why.” The boxes blurred and became bottomless, an endless loop of lights.

  “Know why Christmas is in winter?” he had asked.

  “Because of solstice?” we had said. Our third-grade science unit was on the sun and moon.

  “Solstice is for pagans,” Dad had said. “Winter is dark; Christmas has lights.”

  The colder the air, the happier Dad was, showing off for Mrs. Tuck next door. We watched her watch him through her picture window as he shoveled snow in only a muscle shirt, his biceps glistening.

  We stopped hoping the boxes he brought home would be presents for us: pogo sticks or friendship bracelet kits. They were always lights.

  We complained to each other but bragged to the neighbors. Dad was Santa Claus, we told them, our whole block the North Pole. Lots of kids had pogo sticks, we said, but whose house lit up the whole Milky Way? After the electricity was cut, the lights bill too high, the icicles and candles hung dark, sadder than no decorations at all. Dad refused to take them down. And he kept buying them, the surplus strings filling up the garage. What a gyp, we had said, only to each other, the zombie lights mocking us almost as much as the neighbor kids did.

  We hadn’t even gotten present
s that year. Had we?

  From the backyard Dad’s latest hound howled at the moon, after midnight already. He wasn’t Dad’s anymore. Who did any of us belong to now?

  We thought we’d always belong to each other. As surely as one season turns to the next. Yet outside the window, moonlight turning snow into falling stars, this hungry winter just might rage forever. And look at us, averting our eyes like strangers on the subway.

  What could we count on anymore?

  Not you.

  With that singular word, the cold came inside.

  35

  We’re no better than dogs, running away.” We weren’t the ones who spoke this time. It was just me, Paula, pounding my fist on the table.

  My puny biceps didn’t do much damage. Artis could have knocked a hole right through.

  I downed the dregs of whiskey, the alcohol singeing my throat. It hurt like burning off a wart and made my voice melt when I said, “He took care of all of us the year the lights went out. Remember?”

  “I’d rather not,” Artis snarled at me. We had argued plenty with him, through the years, but never about him before.

  “Don’t be a coward.” Maybe the whiskey made me use Dad’s words, with his emphasis, which always implied “or I’ll make you regret it.”

  My sister faced the window, hot breath on frost, pretending she hadn’t heard me. I told her how the night the lights died was Christmas Eve. Dad had excavated camping gear, and we all huddled around a propane lamp and pretended we were in a tent in the middle of a forest. Mom roasted marshmallows with her cigarette lighter, and Dad spun a story of spending a night in a tent in a forest and spotting a bear. He hadn’t been scared—Dad would never admit to fear—but his tall tale seemed so real that we twins shivered. We scooted closer to him, Mom too, and he let us huddle around him. The lamp dimmed as the propane burned up. Only a pinpoint left, just before the dark closed in, he finally opened his arms and pressed us to his chest.