Half

by Sharon Harrigan

  Artis turned from the window and said he had never hugged us in his life.

  “It would be easier not to grieve for him if you believed that, wouldn’t it?” I said. Easier to believe we hadn’t lost something irretrievable by staying away. Easier not to wish we hadn’t done it.

  We rose from the table, holding our chairs for balance when in the past we would have held each other. Artis started to reach for me, whether to hug or hit, I wasn’t sure, then changed her mind.

  “He had beautiful handwriting,” I said.

  “Did not,” she said.

  “He could spell better than our teachers.”

  “Could not.”

  “How can we forgive ourselves?” I asked.

  Artis replied, “You mean forgive him?”

  We had called each other every day for years and years. We had whispered over the din of bossy babies and infantile supervisors. Through sickness and storms we had always carved a space to let the other in.

  But that night we said no more.

  Artis turned her music on and blocked me out. For once, I didn’t know what she was listening to. We had always shared, an earbud each, before.

  I could barely totter to bed, all my senses impaired. I caught glimmers, though: a street lamp through the bedroom window, the green light of a cell phone charging next to my son’s bright head.

  I’d expected not to see anything at all by myself.

  36

  The next morning, I woke with a headache. I had never wondered before if Paula had one, too. No matter how far away we lived from each other, I had always just known. Without her dreams in my head, mixing with mine, I had slept in fits.

  Everything throbbed. I must have ground my teeth down to dust without my mouth guard on. My boobs were squeezed too tight in the sports bra I had been too drunk to take off.

  In the living room, the boys, wide awake, hid under a card table draped with blankets. “Barack! Pablo!” Mom called. “Time for breakfast.”

  “We both have the same name now,” they said. “Call us Barlo.”

  “Come on out,” Mom said.

  “Not yet,” came a booming voice from their fort. “We’re about to be born. This time, from the same belly.”

  Someone clanked plates in the kitchen. Could have been Paula, could have been anyone. Her every sound, every movement a foreign language now.

  37

  Artis finally emerged from her room. “No run today?” I asked, but she ignored me. She was usually out of the house by six, a pool of sweat by 6:15.

  But she might as well have been out of the country. There she was, belly-flopped on the floor, carpet burning her skin. Run? She could barely stand.

  “Marco,” I said.

  Nothing.

  I tapped my knee, the first phrase of a song I had written just for her. She had always tapped the second part. Before.

  I stretched out beside her in child’s pose. She scooted away, as if my “hocus pocus” might be catchy. That’s what she called my yoga practice, but she used to do it with me anyway. For me, I realized now. But not anymore.

  I thought we had connected during the night, but I realized that it had been a dream. Now her breathing and moving and thinking was nothing but white noise. Was this what life was like for singletons? I couldn’t live a whole day this way.

  I’ll agree with whatever you say if you’ll just come back.

  But I couldn’t form those words. My tongue was stuck behind my two front teeth. And she could no longer read my mind.

  The boys ate funeral cake for breakfast, making chewing sounds they pretended came from the cars they rolled on their plates. They didn’t touch their drinks. “Milk is for babies,” they said.

  “No fair Daddy gets milk,” we had said so long ago, after we had seen him in bed with Mom and her naked breasts.

  Now she slouched on the couch, staring at a telenovela. She didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

  At long last, we had Mom to ourselves. Wasn’t that what we had wanted all along?

  I had to get her out of the house. Away from the mac and cheese and sheet cakes oozing from Tupperware and overflowing from her fridge, the kindnesses of neighbors that turned the cramped kitchen into an extension of the funeral home. Crusted-over pans soaked in the sink. No matter how much we striped them with blue soap, they smelled like sympathy wreaths, sticky tissues, and wet salt.

  I needed to get away from our baby pictures framed on the dressers. The dollhouse we had played with as kids, which Mom still used for the daycare babies. Dad’s spelling bee plaque, displayed on the wall of the tiny master bedroom. His wolf teeth and beaver pelts and arrowheads. I needed to get away from his guns in the safe, not nearly locked up enough, because I knew where he kept the key, in his underwear drawer. Taking Mom to breakfast was just an excuse.

  I pulled a high-tech winter hat over my short slicked-back hair, which suddenly didn’t feel short enough. A shaved head would have been better. A start over. “Coming with us?”

  “I need some time alone.” Artis had never said anything like that before.

  Mom stopped tying her winter boot, as if the sound of the laces rubbing against each other had made her hear wrong. “What?”

  Artis sat up and crossed her hands in front of her chest. Mom urged her to her feet, patted us both on the bottoms, scooted us along toward the front door, the way she had when we were tiny.

  I threw my sister her coat, and she zipped into the down, the hood’s fake fur swallowing her face. She had always followed me before without waiting to be asked.

  Of course Mom wasn’t hungry. “How about Fantasyland instead?” she asked, clicking into the shoulder belt as I started the car.

  Artis climbed into the back and slammed more loudly than necessary.

  “So much for global warming,” Mom said. “It’s been snowing here for months.”

  “This is what happens when ice caps melt.” I waited for the windshield to defog. “Sometimes heat waves. Sometimes freakish storms that last forever.”

  Mom whipped her arms through the air. “I think it’s your dad.”

  “I know. You said that at the funeral.” I shot my sister a look that said, our crazy parents, a look we had perfected over the years. But Artis stared out the window, avoiding my eyes.

  Then I drove south and made a wide right toward the rec center, where Mom said there was still a Fantasyland in the basement every Christmas season. Would a little nostalgia be good for her? It was worth a try. My rental swerved on the slippery roads, the sky a whiteout.

  38

  Paula, as always, drove like an old lady. Why had I let her take the wheel? Oh yeah, because my headache was turning into a fucking migraine. If migraines actually exist. Maybe this was just what it felt like to be cut off from her, my head spinning away from my shoulders.

  We pulled into the empty parking lot. This “winter wonderland” had always been swarmed when we were kids. We would have to fight the crowds and wait in line. The latest blizzard must have kept everyone away. Maybe the place was closed due to weather.

  No such luck.

  We walked down to the basement, past the wooden Fantasyland sign. Everything looked exactly the same as it had twenty years ago. The same as twenty years before that, Mom said, when she was a kid. It was a world where no one had ever heard of computers. Let alone drones that could deliver packages or drop bombs on the same day.

  From half a dozen glassed-in displays, animatronic dolls stared at us, creepy and silent, waiting for someone to press the start button so they could dance and sing.

  Mom pressed the button on the “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” display, and I knew that when the music began to seep out of the speakers, the gap-toothed little girl doll with blonde braids and a gingham dress would point to her mouth as her lips moved stiffly in sync with the words.

  But the start button didn’t start a thing.

  Broken. Which might explain why no one was here.


  At least we hadn’t brought the boys. They didn’t need to see the bursting seams on the doll’s dress, the random unlit letters, the metal patches where a polar bear’s fur had gone AWOL in the “White Christmas” display.

  I used to think the dolls moved on their own. I used to think electricity was another name for magic. In other words, I didn’t use to think.

  Dad sure loved Christmas crap. He was so damn sentimental.

  We all sat down on the bench in front of the glass case. Paula fidgeted. Mom pushed the button on “Two Front Teeth” again and again. She never gave up, did she?

  Finally, she moved over and pressed the button for “Frosty the Snowman,” and the song blasted from the speakers so loud we couldn’t think.

  When the song ended, I pressed the button again. Thinking is overrated.

  39

  Our little guys needed to see this place. They were only five, and they already spent too much time with their screens. It was so simple, this mechanical technology. More . . . I don’t know . . . authentic.

  I said all that, but no one heard me, with Artis pressing buttons and playing songs at the volume of a siren. “Silver Bells.” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” She knew we needed to talk to Mom.

  I took a few deep breaths and one big om, and then I grabbed my sister’s wrist to finally stop her.

  If I had to hover there all day, covering the start button with my back so Artis wouldn’t keep pressing it, I would.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Mom. I waited for Artis to join in, but she said nothing, digging her heels into the worn-down carpet and stuffing her hands deep into her pockets.

  For the first time, I saw the pain carved into Mom’s face for what it was: her mourning Dad’s death, yes, but more than that, the grief we had caused her many years ago, by making believe Dad was already dead.

  The squint lines around her eyes, the broken capillaries in her cheeks, the crush and hunch of her shoulders: We had done that to her body, hadn’t we? Etched ourselves into her.

  Mom shook her head, meaning what, I didn’t know. That she didn’t believe me? That it wasn’t enough? That we wouldn’t get off that easily? Side to side her chin swung, her mile-high hair drooping, starting, finally, to feel the tug of gravity.

  I felt it, too, and began to collapse in on myself. It was too hard to do this alone. I sat and pressed the fake fur of my hood into my face, then hung my head so low I could have mopped the tile with my cropped hair.

  40

  What Paula means is,” I began. With her nose between her knees, she was in no position to contradict me. And Mom didn’t know we couldn’t speak for each other anymore.

  “She’s sorry you didn’t visit your dad.” Mom finished my sentence.

  “No.” No way in hell, I wanted to say, but the army had taught me to address my elders with respect. Damn, she was making it hard, though.

  “You didn’t return his phone calls or emails or texts, either,” Mom said. “He threatened to drive up to campus and knock down your door, but I always stopped him.”

  As if she could block his way with her flimsy torso, holding him back with her spindly wrists.

  “That’s not what I want to talk about,” I said. “There’s something else. Paula’s too chicken to tell you. She’ll just write a song about it, all cryptic guitar riffs and pretentious electric violin, and you’ll have to guess, along with all her fans, which parts of the song really happened.” I sat up straight, like the statue of Winged Victory but in a tight sports bra. “Wild Pete knows. He said it last night: So you’re the girls who killed your dad.”

  “I heard,” Mom said. “But he didn’t mean it.”

  “Why would he say it then?”

  “People go crazy at funerals. Like Ya-Ya. Remember what she said?”

  “When Papu died? But she was right. That’s the point. Dad did kill his dad. You told us.”

  “I told you what?” Mom said. “Papu had a stroke. Everyone knew.”

  “In college we texted you and asked if what she said was true, and you didn’t respond.”

  “I never got that text,” Mom said.

  “You didn’t say no.” I rubbed my eyes to soften the throbbing in my head. Instead I just dislodged a lash. Who knew they could be so sharp? “We thought that meant yes.”

  Mom raised her voice, maybe the first time ever. She had to wait till he was gone to find her inner tiger? “If there’s one thing I taught you,” she said, “one thing I thought I was doing right by my girls, it’s that no always means no, and only yes means yes.”

  Dad really didn’t kill Papu. Of course not. How could we have imagined he could do such a thing? Purple dots flashed in front of my eyes, then two sharp lines. Was this really a migraine or just a hangover? The shapes blurred into gumdrops blooming on our little legs, his elbows ramming into her ribs. We never knew if he would someday go too far.

  Another reason we believed he could kill? Because we could.

  “I’m glad Ya-Ya was wrong,” I finally said. “But Wild Pete was right.”

  “Don’t listen to him. He spends so much time in the woods, he’s like an animal,” Mom said.

  “No. That night you called us, we wanted to come. But we couldn’t, not with Dad there. So we wished he was dead. And then you called and said he was.”

  Mom let out a sigh that echoed all the way to the North Pole.

  That sigh made me feel small again. I pulled my feet up onto the bench, looped my arms around my shins, rested my chin on my knees. Paula barely managed to pull her head and torso up. She sucked in her lips, then opened her mouth.

  41

  I. . .” The word felt sharp against my tongue. I didn’t like saying it. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Mom peeled off her coat, pushed Artis and me together, and placed her hands on both of our thighs. “It’s not your fault your dad died.”

  “You think we didn’t know our own power?” I plucked a vial of essential oil from my pocket and inhaled long and deep. Lavender for tranquility.

  “You didn’t do it.” Mom sat still as a picture, even as Artis bristled at her touch. “It’s not possible.”

  “You don’t need to humor us,” I said. “We know what we’re capable of.”

  She sounded too calm, almost robotic. “You didn’t kill your dad—” She removed her hands from us and steepled them in prayer. Her eyes ticked back and forth between us.

  “You don’t understand—” I said.

  “—because I did.”

  My sister and I turned toward each other and then back toward Mom. We both bit down hard on our fingers at exactly the same time. In sync again for a second, glazed eyes staring at Mom. We could have chomped through the bone and not felt a thing.

  42

  What. The. Frick. Frack. Paddywack. All those years in the army, and that was the best expletive I could come up with, and even that only in my head. All that bubbled from my mouth was a moan. Something like “Moooooom.” At least I managed to make it sound obscene.

  “It’s not easy,” Mom said. “This, what I’m doing now, telling you about it. This, the thing I did, a few days ago.”

  Her words echoed off the walls, amplified by each crack in the paint. “Let me squeeze in here with you,” she said. She pushed between us as insistently as she’d pushed us together only a few minutes earlier.

  I couldn’t have moved on my own if I had wanted to, not my ass or my big mouth. Her monologue, a medusa, turned me to stone.

  “I couldn’t tell you yesterday, at the church,” she said. “Or on the phone. People wouldn’t understand.”

  I stared at the patterns of light and dark on the ceiling, cupping my chin. Paula laced both hands over her face, squinting through fingers.

  It was just last Saturday morning, Mom explained, when Wild Pete rang the doorbell. I could almost see him, second-skinned in ski pants and face mask, hail pounding as he pushed the door shut behind him, his stomp on the mat speckling Mom’s black ballet slippe
rs and floor-length purple nightgown with slush.

  Dad still lay in bed. He had been sick and tired, and the weather stirred up outside was anything but welcoming, but he insisted on hunting down a tree for Christmas. Pete had brought his axe. Ever since he had moved back down to the lower forty-eight, years after we left for school, he and Dad had spent every spare moment out in the elements, again.

  Pete swatted Mom on the ass. She wanted to slap him back, hard, but she stopped herself, balancing carefully so the steaming mug she had poured for Dad wouldn’t spill and burn her hands. The hands she would need to keep steady later that day.

  Pete had always been sweet on her. Dad wasn’t the only one who called her “goddess.” “Didn’t you know that?” she asked Paula and me. We shook our heads. So she’d humor Pete for the day. Just so he would go along with their plan.

  Mom brought Dad his coffee and helped him dress. Flannel and jeans, no coat or boots, his skin too thick for that. He was sweating, already, in his sleeveless undershirt.

  He tried to scoop her up and carry her over the threshold out of the bedroom, then fell to the floor. “Promise?” he asked.

  She nodded from the waist up. “I’ll get those girls home. You just pick a big fat tree, and I’ll decorate the house for them.” Mom parted the blackout drapes and waved through the living room window as they left, her tiny hands half-swallowed by the gauzy curtains beneath, the two men bathed in blinking colored lights.

  In minutes, Pete’s truck had already gathered a second sleeve of frost. Dad brushed it off with gloveless hands, then both men jumped into the cab, carving a tunnel with the vehicle through the white fog. The pickup shrank in the distance—a clown car, a windup toy.

  It was the weekend, so Sunflower was closed, and she was alone. No plastic T. rexes roared from chubby toddler hands. No diapers leaked onto her lap as she bottle-fed and stroked and swayed and put to bed the babies warm as little overheated engines.