I shift my hands around the steering wheel. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so what?”
“I don’t think he had gotten over it by then. I don’t think he ever got over it.”
“Oh, he must have eventually.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Stop saying that! You’re just trying to make me feel bad.”
“No, I’m not. I mean, you should feel bad, but that’s not why I’m saying it. I just really don’t think he got over it like you think he did.” I nose around cars, switching lanes, suddenly anxious to go faster.
My mother takes a deep breath. “With all due respect, Mira. I don’t think you have any basis for saying that. You don’t know him like I do.”
It feels like being punched, or what I imagine being punched—hard, square in the middle of my breastbone—would feel like. Slowly, I grind my teeth back and forth against each other and blink to keep my eyes from watering up so much that I can’t see the road. I lean my foot a little harder against the accelerator.
Then, as if the discussion is over, my mother turns on the radio. Pointedly, I turn it off again. I swing around a black convertible with its top down into an open stretch of lane.
“You don’t want to listen to the radio?” my mother asks.
“Didn’t you think I wanted a father?” I ask. “I mean, there is no way, is there,
no way
that you couldn’t have thought, wow, maybe Mira would actually like to know her father? Maybe, since he’s not a bad guy like I let her believe he was, she might want to meet him one day or, I don’t know, here’s a thought, call him on the phone or, like, at least
know
that he’s not a bad guy and that he cares about her and wanted to be part of her life. Is there seriously any way you didn’t think that?” A back tire catches the edge of the shoulder and sends us skidding a bit. I feel shaky. My mother, in her own world, doesn’t even flinch. She just looks out the window again.
“Because I honestly can’t imagine a scenario where that wouldn’t have occurred to you at least once.”
“I thought that all the time.”
“Oh my God! Then why didn’t you do anything about it?”
Silence.
“Are you going to answer me?”
Silence.
“Because you could have changed everything. At any time. All you needed to do was tell him once that you still wanted him. He wouldn’t have even needed to come here. It wouldn’t have had to be a big production. But one phone call or one letter and you could have changed everything. I can’t believe you don’t know that. Or . . . never mind. I’m sure you did know it. You had to have. I can’t believe you didn’t do anything about it. I just think . . . it’s so shitty! You have no idea the kinds of things I thought about him my whole life, and if it were up to you, you would’ve let me go on thinking them, and I can’t even tell whether you feel bad about any of it. Mom?”
Silence.
“It’s like you rolled this ball down a hill and you chose to ignore the fact that, if you wanted to, you could stand up and run after it and pick it up off the ground and save it. Instead, you set it in motion and let it keep going until it landed in this ridiculous, stupid ditch, and it’s just so—” I stop. Then I shriek as loud as I can. The long, withering sound echoes within the confines of the car, filling it like a flood, and draining out again just as quickly.
“What do you want me to say, Mira?” my mother asks softly.
I can barely even feel myself driving. I’m just zooming through a blurry city, over potholes and through yellow lights, a skate park on the left, condos on the right, skyscrapers farther afield, streetlights hanging on bowed cables, the wash of gray pavement below and blue sky above. I’m just racing and thinking about it, what do I want her to say? That she’s sorry? That she regrets it? That she would take it all back if she could? That if this stupid fucking disease eats me up, too, the way it’s devouring her, she hopes it’s the first thing I’ll forget? What? What is it, exactly, that I want from her? Is there anything she can offer me now? Or is what I want from her the thing that she already chose not to give me, the thing that there is no way to go back and get now? My father. Isn’t that what I want from her? Somehow, to learn that she could produce him out of thin air. But of course that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. And I take a breath. And another. It’s over now. It’s over.
A long wailing sound slices through my thoughts. My mother bolts straight up in her seat.
“Mira, pull over.”
“What? Why?”
“The police.”
The officer writes me
a ticket for speeding. He says if I hadn’t been going quite so fast, he could have let me go with a warning on account of my spotless driving record, but twenty-five miles over the limit is excessive. He has no choice. I don’t argue. Even after he pulls back onto Lake Shore Drive and motions for us to get off the shoulder and onto the road, I keep the engine off. I need a second to let my head clear. I’m amazed that I’m as composed as I am. My mother is staring out the window again, silent as a rock. Vehicles speed by on the road beside us, shaking our car in their wake. After another minute, my mother flips the vent on the dashboard open and closed a few times, then flattens her hand over it. “Damn it,” she says. She rounds her shoulders and drops her cheek against her outstretched arm. Then she starts crying.
My suitcase stays,
still packed and zippered shut, in the basement for more than a month. I shoved it in the crawl space when I got home with every intention not to look at it again for as long as I could stand it. I wouldn’t need any of the clothes inside it for months anyway. But in late February, just after midterms, Asha calls me in a panic because she needs a copy of
Principles of Geology.
“I have to write a paper comparing the impact of Lyell’s views with either Darwin, Marx, or Freud for my earth science class, and every single copy of it is checked out of the library, and you know interlibrary loans take too long, and I don’t have any money to go buy a copy because my parents have totally cut me off financially because of the hair thing.”
“They did?”
“Can you believe that?”
“Because you cut your hair off, they cut you off?”
“Mira, please! It’s really not funny.”
I tell her I’ll put my copy of the book in the mail for her. She says no, she’s going to drive to Evanston to pick it up herself.
“The mail will take two days!” she wails. “You think I have the luxury of two days? I’m behind enough as it is. I haven’t even read it yet, even though it’s been on the syllabus since the beginning of time. I can’t believe I let you talk me into taking this class. I was so happy just sailing through my chem major.”
“I didn’t talk you into it.”
“And I really can’t believe we have to write a seven-page paper now. We just finished midterms! Is there no mercy?”
“You can do what I do, and just write one page a day until it’s done. Writing one page at a time is way more manageable than sitting down and writing seven pages all at once.”
“You actually do that?”
“Why? It works.”
“That’s insane, Mira.”
“No, it’s not. It’s totally reasonable.”
“I honestly don’t know, sometimes, who’s a bigger nerd, you or Beth.”
“Definitely Beth.”
“I’ll tell her you said so. You’ll be around this afternoon?”
“I’ll be around.”
As soon as I descend into our basement, I smell the mothballs. Typically the basement smells like a combination of damp earth and the box of dryer sheets that sits atop the washing machine. The uneven concrete floor is ruffled where the smoothing tools came up off a drag. The walls and ceilings are striped with exposed wooden beams that have rusty nailheads popping out at various angles. But that scent. How can I describe it? Instantly it puts me in Panama again. Not as if I traveled back there again in my mind, but as if I stood still while the world around me transformed, blossoming into the place I was in months earlier. It’s as if I’m standing in the middle of it again.
I yank my suitcase off the bumpy crawl-space ledge and let it land beside me with a thud. Lucy is upstairs with my mother, who is attempting yet another crossword puzzle. She still does them every day. “There’s a house for each letter,” she told me yesterday. “It must get expensive for whoever is building all of those houses,” I said. “Oh, Mira, don’t be stupid. They’re not nice houses. Look, they’re just little boxes. Two walls, a floor, and a roof, that’s all.”
I unzip the bag and dig hastily through my layered clothes for the book. I packed it at the bottom to cushion it, I remember. Under the mound of shirts and jeans, I feel it and pull it out. I’m about to close the bag and store it away again, when I glimpse a long, white envelope suspended in the mesh pocket lining the inside of the suitcase cover. On the front of the envelope is the letter M. The letter M, wide and artful. I stare at it for a minute as though it’s a bomb I need to figure out how to disarm before handling it, and then quickly pluck it from the suitcase pocket. I know who it’s from. It has to be. I don’t want to read it.
But of course
later that night, after Asha has come and gone and taken the book with her, after my mother is asleep, mumbling through her dreams, after Lucy is snoring on the couch with her feet popping out past the bottom of an afghan, after I’m alone in my room, sitting at my desk with my legs folded under me, I do.
I know you’re going to leave. That’s okay. My life can go back to normal now. It was taking up a lot of my time showing you around every day. Nardo is always asking me, “Man, when are you going to drop that girl and come back to us?” So he’ll be happy at least.
I don’t know what you want me to say to Hernán. I’ll let him know that I took you to the woman and that you know the truth about your father. He’ll be pissed at me, but whatever. He’ll get over it.
I guess you’ll be in Chicago when you read this. I don’t usually write letters to anyone so I don’t really know what else to say. I knew you would leave. Even before you got your phone call. I knew that as you soon as you found out, you would want to leave. When you walked out of the apartment this morning, I knew it was probably the last time I would see you. I knew you wouldn’t give me a chance to say good-bye. So I just started writing this. Whatever. It’s kind of a shitty effort. Sorry about that. I think you deserve better.
I hope you had a good trip back.
Danilo
It’s written on Hotel Centro stationery. I slide the letter back into its envelope and put it in my desk drawer, next to a box of extra staples. For days, it stays there. For days, it’s all I can do not to think about it. When Danilo wrote “at least,” does that mean that Nardo will be happy, but that Danilo won’t? And he said he doesn’t usually write letters to anyone. Does it mean something that he wrote one to me? And the line I can’t shake, the one I read over and over: he said I deserve better.
Three weeks after opening
that letter, I get another.
Actually, I did write to my parents once. Hernán made me do it. He bought this fancy lined paper and gave me a pen and sat me down at the kitchen table and told me to write. I complained that I didn’t have anything to say to them, so he dictated. I don’t remember what I wrote exactly, but it was short. Just like, Hi, Mom and Pops. How’s everything in Brazil? Maybe I could come visit you sometime. Or do you have any plans to come back to Panamá? You should give me a call. And then Hernán made me write down our phone number in case they didn’t already have it. Can you believe that? I was smart enough to get it, you know. No one likes to believe that maybe I’m actually smart. But I understood that basically it was Hernán being like, Fucking come get your kid already! I’m tired of taking care of him. I mean, seriously, what’s up? We folded that thing into some crazy shape to get it to fit into the only envelope Hernán had, and then we mailed it. I never heard back from them.
Anyway, you should call me sometime. Or you could write me back. You know the address. I know you’re supposed to include the return address on the outside of the envelope, but I thought about it and I don’t like the idea of that too much. It seems like bad luck or something. Like if I include it, then the letter could be returned. It’s like tempting fate. And, you know, I do want it to get to you. So.
This might also be a good time to confess that I got your address from the hotel records. They still had a copy of your information in their file. I didn’t know how else to get it. Don’t rat me out, though.
Ciao.
Danilo
And then again a month after that.
It’s going to sound like I’m making this up, but seriously there was a dude from Chicago in the hotel today. I asked him if he knew you, but he gave me a funny look and then held his arms out wide and said, “Chicago. Big.” He didn’t speak much Spanish. I saw him again tonight after dinner (I hung around the hotel today because Hernán said he needed the company). He was having a drink at the bar and talking on his cell phone. I think he’s one of those real estate investors that are fucking everywhere in this city lately. Do you know that Donald Trump is building condominiums here? He’s famous in your country, right? He’s very famous here now.
I’m out of things to say and it’s late. Hernán should be getting off soon so we can go home.
Danilo
And then a package another month after that.
Hernán wants me to tell you that he’s sorry. He’s gone to, like, thirty confessions about it already. He said, “Tell her that. Not less than thirty!” He wants to make sure you know that he was only trying to protect you. He says that hope is a very, very fragile thing and that when you steal it from someone, it can be like stealing their soul. He’s convinced that taking away hope is much worse than giving someone the truth, and that those were the alternatives he was forced to choose between. You understand all that, right? He only did it because he cares about you. Fuck. I don’t know. Are you ever going to write me back? Probably not, huh?
I ate a whole cake yesterday. I don’t know why I just decided to tell you that, except that it seems a little funny. I rescued it from the trash. That bakery near our apartment was going to throw it out because the decorator fucked up and spelled the kid’s name wrong whose birthday it was. I was just walking by when I saw one of the employees carrying it back to the huge metal garbage container out there. I asked what she was doing and she told me they were tossing it. Man, I could smell the frosting from where I was standing. I told her I would take it off her hands for her, and she didn’t even hesitate. I was thinking I could stand there on the street and eat it, but then I got nervous that some of those street dudes would try to come over and talk themselves into a piece. Well, I don’t know if I was nervous, but I just didn’t want to deal with that. So I took the cake back to the apartment and put it on the table. I was just going to have one slice at first and save the rest for Hernán and me to share. But I don’t know. I sat down, and the next thing I knew, I had eaten the whole thing. Shit was good, too. You might have liked it, even though the cake part was yellow, which I know isn’t your favorite.
So, anyway. I guess that’s all from this side of the world. I know you know a lot about the canal, like probably more than most of my paisanos do, but did you know that the dudes who used to work on it in the beginning when they were digging it all out used to say that they were cutting the world in half?
Hey, I know how you like maps, though. I know I said you couldn’t find your life by looking at them, but I think I might have figured out a way. I just think there’s more for you here. There’s more
of
you here that you might want to find. Anyway, you should look at page 2.
Aren’t you ever going to write me back? I probably shouldn’t even send this one, even though I know I will.
Danilo
And oh yeah. More goodies! This girl I know makes these things and tries to sell them around the city but she’s usually shit out of luck. No one’s buying. I guess we aren’t a very introspective people. But I had a little extra cash so I offered to take one off her hands. I asked for one that had a geology theme but my only choices were either this or a flower. You don’t seem like a flower kind of girl. But I was thinking you could use it. You could write everything down. I know you’re worried about forgetting everything, but this way maybe you won’t. Even if it does happen to you one day, you would be able to read about your life like it was a book, you know. You wouldn’t forget. So, anyway, use it if you want.