The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  “What’s that?” Miss Black asked. “That smell?”

  “It’s my toffee,” said Theo, startled.

  “It’s not your day for sweets.”

  Miss Black said this without actually paying Theo any real attention (she was almost at a roundabout, where she usually hushed us and occasionally swore quietly), but Theo went pale and cried out as if she were being tortured, “I stole it!”

  “Oh!” Miss Black was startled. “Well, er . . . little girls who steal do not get any pocket money. Did you see her take it, Jonathan?”

  “No,” I said, keeping my face expressionless. I was sensible enough to wait until I got home before I ate my own sweets.

  The next day I buy a map, hire a car, and drive northwest. My journey takes a few hours, from the morning into the afternoon, and when I eventually get out of the car the temperature has risen to a lifeless heat, heavy and condensed, the sky cloudless and gray-blue. With the address Mr. Crace gave me in my hand I walk a few blocks, turn a few corners, and there it is: Ithaca City Cemetery.

  The cemetery itself is large: the farther in I go the less the noise of the cars can be heard, dimmed by the pines, which stand unmoving in the windless sun. My father’s grave lies in the shade under a large tree, covered in a dry matting of needles, so that I have to sweep them away to see the stone. I run my fingers over the lettering. Michael Caplin. MC, cut deep. In the cool below the tree I might be back at Evendon, standing before the carved heart. In the dark below the tree I might be in my room at night, looking out onto the terrace at the splinters of crystal, a glass I recognize for the first time, fishing it out of my dream and bringing it into the light. What happened to the sixth one? Theo asked. The sixth is . . . lost in history.

  Mr. Crace told me that my father died here about a year ago, of a heart attack. He had lived in a rented flat in Ithaca for a year prior to his death. Before that his whereabouts were unknown. Mr. Crace investigated further but it seemed Michael had no family here, and no friends that could be found.

  “He appeared to have led a solitary life,” he told me.

  “It’s definitely him?” I asked.

  “Without a doubt. He had identification.”

  I sit on the grass now and try to feel something about my father’s death. But I feel nothing. I was looking for someone I didn’t know, who had as much meaning to me as anyone else lying here under their grass blanket, the other side of the boundary between earth and air. Less meaning, because I could probably go to the family of any of the other deceased and ask them what their husband or son or father was like and they would tell me and it would probably be true. I was not looking for Michael Caplin: I was looking for a half of Theo, a missing half, that she had wanted to see restored. I was looking for her, but she isn’t here.

  I leave the cemetery and walk to my car, to rest my hands on the steering wheel as if waiting for it to turn me, give me an idea of where to go. Once out of the city I drive in the same direction as before, northwest, farther into the land, waiting for the buildings to fall away and let me pass into somewhere relatively deserted, somewhere I can live until I decide what to do. From the air-conditioned car interior I watch the unfamiliar country move by, flickering in the heat wave. The vastness of America seems to be covered by a large grid of road; like a net over the land, staking and portioning it. I am never far from farms, motels, houses with a flag flying outside, gas stations, cafés, areas cleared for development. They peg out civilization in the nothingness, punctuating the length of the road like fillips of sound over the fuzz of an untuned radio.

  Finally I drive down a dusty white and straight track, lined with dry, rustling beech trees, abandoned except for two telephone wires stretching along its length, until I get to the edge of Lake Ontario, as wide and blue as a sea. I pull up at a small harbor. It is quiet; boats knock against each other in the water, a few men stand by a car. A white dog watches me from the back of a pickup truck. The scent of the tarmac rises in the heat.

  I go into the fishing shop, where there are more men, standing and talking. It smells of old shade, the paprika odor of bait. No one pays any attention to me so I stand at the counter and wait until a man with a round beard and moustache joining up with his hair, like a bristly lion’s mane, turns around.

  “Need help?” As I open my mouth he asks, “You fish?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” The brief opening in the conversation seals over; the other men turn away. “I was actually stopping to ask if there’s anywhere nearby that rents houses out.”

  “Houses?” The man rubs at his beard.

  “Bob’s got a house,” someone else says suddenly.

  They all look at a man who is presumably Bob. Bob has a tabby beard and a checked shirt; an unlit cigarette dangles from his hand like a useless finger. He looks uncomfortable.

  “He’s joking with you,” says Bob.

  “Now, it’s a prime location,” says the first man. “Might need a little decorating.” There is laughter. I gather that the house is a wreck.

  “It’s a wreck,” Bob says.

  “Could I see it?” I ask him. “Please?”

  He stares at me, then shrugs, and says, “Alright.”

  The house is at the end of another chalky white road through the trees, glaring in the sun, jolting our slow cars. When we get out, Bob simply shakes his head as if irritated with the house, for wrecking itself. (You’ve embarrassed us both, the head shake says.) The white paint is peeling in strips away from the faded timbers of its sides, the verandah droops, the pale grass is balding and scuffed. Thin, straight trees stripe the clear patch before the house with scattered shade. These jack pines, birches, and poplars make the same hiss-shush as the cicadas, the rustling bracken. Everything is dry, the green is silvery up close, bleached out.

  I notice the house has its own small white beach, breaking off into the water where a rusting boat is half floating, half sinking. The trees in the distance to either side reveal other houses, a luxury apartment block going up far across the water, but directly in front of me there is no other side of the lake; just an edge of water, turning into sky.

  “So here it is,” Bob says shortly, obviously feeling that he has wasted a journey.

  “May I see inside?”

  Within the house there is a not unpleasant sodium smell of age, dried out wood. The floors are sagging; one window at the back is cracked and taped up. There is a card table in one room; an etiolated flowered sofa in another. As we walk around, the sun comes in at the back of the house, resting on the walls, suddenly soft, lighting up the empty floorboards.

  “How much?” I ask.

  Bob frowns; his face collecting up in bunches of wrinkles and cracks and beard. “One thousand dollars a month.”

  “Thank you. I’ll take it. How long can you rent it out for?”

  Bob stares at me. He lights his cigarette, it goes out, he doesn’t bother relighting it.

  “Ah . . . how long would you like it?” he says.

  “I’m not sure at the moment. A few months. Maybe longer. I can give you the cash now.”

  He rubs the back of his neck. “It’s got no furniture. You have your own furniture?”

  “No. That’s fine, though. I can get some.”

  We stand there for a while.

  “Have you stayed around here before?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “There’s a hole, in the floor there.”

  “Oh, yes. I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Look,” he says. “Just give me six hundred. That will be fine.”

  Bob Heilman drives off eventually, shaking his head. I sit down on my new sofa, in my house, this house that, for me, exists only at the present moment in time.

  That night I lie on the sofa; I will have to buy a mattress tomorrow. The night here is densely black, combed by the sweeping sounds of the lake. It takes me a long time to attain a state near sleep; sleep itself is a challenge I will tackle another day. I listen to the flies doing th
eir rounds of the ceiling.

  My mind wanders. The past flows out.

  I remember teaching Theo her biology homework. She sat with her hands on either side of her head, forcibly tunneling her eyes at my diagram.

  “These are crops,” I said, drawing them. “And some flies.”

  “They’re dots, not flies.”

  “Use your imagination. This is a bird. And . . . a cat.” I ignored her giggles. “Now, if the farmer puts pesticides on the crops, and the flies eat the crops, and the birds eat the dead flies, and the cat eats the birds, the pesticides accumulate up the food chain.”

  “What happens to the cat?”

  “It dies. Okay—no, no, it doesn’t die. It just has a stomachache.”

  “Poor cat,” said Theo, drawing the diagram in her own book. She looks up and smiles; her sudden, uncertain smile. “Thanks, Jonathan.”

  In the morning I investigate the house. The once-white kitchen is surprisingly functional. The refrigerator works; the oven heats up, and gives off a smell of stale fat. I find a mouse family in one of the cupboards. At first I have no idea what they are; the newborn mice in their nest made of scraps are squirming pink, like fingers. The mother looks up at me, nose whirling. I close the cupboard door again quietly.

  All the rooms are bare, their wallpaper going yellow, peeling in corners. There are pink flowered curtains in one room, a pink lampshade that has become a fairy castle for spiders. On the window frame someone has scratched T loves J. That’s how life is now—these sudden pains waiting around corners, in hidden places. I leave the room, closing the door behind me. Later I find an old Easter card half under the sofa. It says Dear Bob, Lois, and Terri. We must meet soon! This is our new house number. Have a lovely Easter! So it is Terri who loved J.

  I wonder what I have got myself into, with Bob, who has presumably lived in this house, left, and failed to return. But I haven’t got the energy to puzzle it out: I wander outside instead.

  It is early but already the morning feels exhausted; faltering in the overbearing heat, the buzzing, still heat that rises from the trees and the cracked, baked white shore. The lake feels strange to me; it is tidal, edgeless, but it is not the sea. There is no hiss of water over sand, just a faint lapping sound. I am not on the edge of land; I am in the center of land so vast it holds seas inside it. I think of Wales; its tiny convoluted roads, its dark green, the flickering light off leaves and water. My old country was a wild garden; America is an exposed plain, naked and indifferent under the blazing sky.

  A large car, shiny and dark, appears at the end of the drive, surprising me. It bumps down until it stops in front of the house, black-windowed and confusing, and then a woman springs out.

  “Hi!” she gives me her hand while remaining far enough away to give me a thorough look. “You must be Jon Anthony. I’m Terri, Bob’s daughter. Great to meet you! Thought I’d pop over and check everything was going okay for you here.” She is an attractive, tanned woman, wearing a pair of tight jeans and a tight top.

  “It’s fine, thank you.”

  “I was kind of curious you decided to stay at all.” She pauses and looks behind me at the house. “I mean . . .! When my father told me he’d let this place for a few months I just jumped in my car and drove right down!”

  “Did you used to live here?” I ask when I realize she is here for conversation, and doesn’t intend to leave without getting some.

  “Oh yeah, right up until I was sixteen. But then my mom ran off and Dad and I moved, but he kept the house. I told him to sell it. I said, ‘Dad, you’re just letting a whole lot of money go to waste having that house sitting there.’ He said he’d rent it out but I never heard of him renting it to someone till now. People used to ask—they thought it might be nice to lease it out for a couple of weeks in the summer. He always gave them a crazy price and of course they never paid it. Now no one even asks, it’s such a dump. I heard he charged you less.”

  I nod.

  “So, what do you do?” she asks curiously.

  “I . . . was an architect. I’m taking a break for a while.”

  “Wow,” she says. The sun has moved and is in my eyes. I glance back at the house and shift on my feet, signaling retreat. Unfortunately I can’t pretend I have something to do. I have nothing to do, and we both know it.

  “So, do you know anyone around here?” she asks. “I can show you around if you like. I could do with some company. Me and my husband are estranged—he had issues with his ex, she was very controlling. So whenever I ask him to do the dishes it’s, like, I’m controlling him. Then he didn’t want children either.” She sighs and gets out a cigarette. “Do you smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Good for you. I’m actually down to two a day—I got a hypnotism tape to help me quit. I was on about twenty a day before.”

  Go away, I think, trying to beam this thought at her. Go away, go away, go away. But she is still there, solid in the sun, lighting her cigarette and pulling her girlish top down over her midriff. In the end I say I have a headache and that I’m going to go and lie down. After she has reluctantly driven off, with a wave and a telephone number—“Call me soon, okay”—I go back to sitting by the lake.

  In the afternoon I go to the nearest town to buy food. The supermarket is in a broad gray park of other stores, their large signs and painted metal sides too bright, too cheaply done. The building is large—everything in it is large. Instead of a bag of corn on the cob I buy a sack, for only a few dollars. Cartons of orange juice are oversize, ice cream comes in buckets rather than tubs. Losing momentum, I abandon my list and buy a few random things instead, going back out to the car park, where a woman pauses from unloading her children and stares at me.

  “Excuse me,” she says, “I know you, don’t I? Are you on television?”

  “No. Sorry.” I get into my car as quickly as possible; she is still looking at me, frowning as I drive away.

  This has happened to me before: Are you somebody? people ask—a question no one seems to think is odd. I know what it is; they recognize Eve in me. When I look back at myself I can see why. I unconsciously spoke the way she did, I sat up straight, I held my head up as if I were entitled to something, whether I believed it or not. I learned Eve’s manner, without understanding that it was an act, or what it was an act of.

  I spend the next few months doing very little. Some days I drive miles to the forests and go walking. Part of the appeal of this lies in the danger that I might lose my way back; get found years later, under layers of leaves and mulch. I see chipmunks, black squirrels, birds. I see bear droppings, but I never get anywhere near a bear. Perhaps they back off from my scent; they can smell that I am inedible, with my accumulation of pesticides.

  In town I arrange for my post to be redirected from the London flat to the local post office, to leave some conduit of communication open. But, having done this, I find myself avoiding the post office. Bob Heilman tells me, when he comes over to see how I am, that letters are accumulating there for me. I wonder which of these letters are work related—if I am willfully destroying my career. I don’t care whether I am or not. I look back and see that I was climbing the rope of an Indian magician: once I got to the top, I vanished.

  Bob wanders around his former family home with evident discomfort. He asks what I have been up to with a wondering frown; the beginnings of suspicion. Bob often asks me what I will be doing when the summer is over, in accordance with our mutual pretense that I am a holidaymaker. He nods when I say I am waiting for a call, for family, for business. (I can’t even remember the various lies I’ve told him.) “No hurry,” he says.

  After Bob leaves I read a book bought at the supermarket about the Mayas (in which George Bennett makes a couple of dignified appearances), until it becomes dark. I’ve never read very much—not since I was young, when my favorite story was Little Red Riding Hood. This wasn’t the watered-down modern version, but the one Eve gave me, by Charles Perrault. (“This is more like what
goes on in the world.”) In the original no one is regurgitated, and there is no woodcutter. At the time I thought it was a fair story and wasn’t sorry for Little Red Riding Hood. I thought she was a pretty stupid girl if she was fooled by a wolf in a dress.

  I’m not tired but I am bored of the Mayan book, and as I only bought one, this leaves me with nothing else to do except go to bed. I have put a new mattress on the whining, bowed bedframe—a space-technology mattress, which I bought because it promised a good night’s sleep. It has yet to deliver on its promise, but it is very comfortable, a heavy, rubbery slab, firm like muscle. Lying on it I can feel my back lengthening minutely, uncurling into the hollows.

  I wonder if there will be a time when everything that happens doesn’t remind me of something vaguely connected to the past. I hear the frogs outside and I remember the night Theo stayed up in the toad-hatching season, going back and forth with a bucket, taxiing the tiny toads across the road they were trying to cross. I hear the shushing of the trees and I think of the walk down to Llansteffan beach, single file, drinking that undrinkable wine.

  It takes nothing at all to bring back how Evendon used to be in the evenings. Alicia reading in the lamplight in the gold parlor, her silk legs always neatly folded around each other, tidied away. Eve, in one of her rare moments of relaxation, reading letters. Theo lying on the floor, resting her elbows on a cushion, her legs waving absently like anemones.

  “I heard this puzzle and I can’t solve it,” Theo said to me. “There are two doors—one leads to happiness and one to despair. The doors are guarded by two men. One always lies and the other always tells the truth. You have to ask one man one question to find out which is the right door.” She looked at me expectantly. “I thought you’d be able to answer it.”