The World in Half Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One - Origination

  Two - Orientation

  Three - Absorption

  Four - Deflation

  Five - Infiltration

  Six - Concretion

  Seven - Saturation

  Eight - Friction

  Nine - Crystallization

  Ten - Erosion

  Eleven - Vibration

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ

  Come Together, Fall Apart

  RIVERHEAD books

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by Cristina Henríquez

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,

  or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do

  not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation

  of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Henríquez, Cristina, date.

  The world in half / Cristina Henríquez.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-02865-0

  1. Panama—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E565W

  813’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of

  the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and

  Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author

  assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.

  Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume

  any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Ryan

  One

  Origination

  More than three thousand miles below the surface of the earth is its core. It’s taken scientists a long time to learn anything about it. Most of them would readily admit that they know more about every other planet in the solar system than they do about the pit that’s at the center of ours. But seismic waves have taught us a few things. There’s a liquid outer core and a solid inner core. The convection currents in the outer core dictate our magnetic fields. The inner core is made of pure iron. Its temperature hovers around 5,000 to 6,000 degrees Celsius. At one time it was molten, so the fact that now it’s not means that little by little the planet has been hardening itself from the inside out. I think about that a lot. And then again, I think maybe the scientists don’t know anything. None of them, after all, have ever traveled to the core of the earth. It would be impossible for any human to get so close to such a fiery heart.

  My mother is humming in the bathroom when Lucy arrives. It’s the last Thursday in December, and gusts of bitter wind rattle the house periodically. The sky outside is as gray as a stone. She’s been in the bathroom for more than an hour now, and so far she has completed the entire score of West Side Story and at least a dozen repetitions of “O Christmas Tree.” She won’t admit it, but she’s nervous. “If this woman’s coming here to see me,” she said yesterday, “I might as well make sure she sees something good.” I tried explaining that Lucy wasn’t coming to judge her.

  “Yes she is.”

  “Trust me, she’s not.”

  “Don’t be naïve,” she said. “Everyone is always judging everyone else.”

  Lucy shows up, exactly like she said she would, at eight a.m. sharp. Through the window I can see her—a heavyset woman in a camel-colored mohair coat and a man’s fedora—shifting her weight from foot to foot and rubbing her hands together to keep them warm. She has a giant canvas tote bag slung over one shoulder.

  “Ding dong,” she says, when I open the door. “Avon calling.”

  “Excuse me?” The frigid air from outside rushes in.

  “I’m sorry. That was a joke.”

  “Are you Lucy?”

  “I like to start things off with a joke. Folks usually get a kick out of it. You might be too young to understand that particular one, though. It started in the sixties. Or was it the fifties?” She waves her hand. “It’s not important. Yes, I’m Lucy. Lucy Carter from Sunrise.”

  We have to wait another thirty minutes before my mother comes out of the bathroom. In the intervening time, I make Lucy a cup of hot tea, which she sips on the couch while we talk idly about whether each of us is from the area (Lucy is originally from Minnesota, though she’s lived here since she was six years old), and the dreary winter they’re predicting we’ll have this year, what I’m studying in school, and how expensive gas is these days. Because it would seem awkward not to point it out, I explain why there are towers of magazines stacked up against one of the living room walls. The magazines are my old copies of Science that my mother dug up from the basement a few days ago. She woke up that morning and said, while she peeled the shell off a hard-boiled egg, “Do you know what we need, Mira? We need order.” The next thing I knew, she was dredging up every back issue of every magazine we’d ever owned and sorting them by issue date. The Science magazines are next to my National Geographics, the yellow spines layered on top of one another straight as railroad tracks. Lucy eyes the towers approvingly and says, “Well, that makes as much sense as anything, I guess.”

  When we’ve exhausted all that and still my mother has yet to make her entrance, I take Lucy on a quick tour of the house. I show her where we keep the flashlights and the batteries in case the power goes out, and where we keep a fire extinguisher under the kitchen sink. I tell her which days the trash is collected, and what time the lamps in the living room are set to turn off every night, and how to jiggle the toilet so that it flushes on the first try. I tell her that I’ve already written out a rent check for the month and that she needs to drop it at the owner, Mrs. Sakac’s, house on Colfax before the fifteenth. I show her that I’ve stuck a Post-it note on the check with Mrs. Sakac’s address. Lucy takes it all in without asking questions or for clarification. Just as we’re about to head down to the basement so that I can show her how to use the washing machine, the knob to the bathroom door rattles.

  “Hold on,” my mother calls from inside. “I’m coming.”

  The knob rattles again. We wait.

  “It’s locked,” my mother says.

  “Unlock it,” I say.


  There’s nothing but silence. The knob is still. I step forward and try to turn it. “Mom, unlock the door.”

  “Hold on.”

  I don’t dare look back at Lucy. It’s embarrassing. I just keep my hand on the knob and listen through the door while my mother fiddles and curses and, finally, turns the lock. When she walks out, she’s wearing a plaid wool pencil skirt, a purple turtleneck sweater, sheer brown hose, and her best heels. She pauses outside the bathroom door, as if she’s just stepped onto a stage. Then she says, as though nothing happened, “Were we going down to the basement?”

  Later, after my mother has given Lucy her own tour and after the two of them have had time to ease into some semblance of comfort with each other, we all sit together at the kitchen table and go over the routine: Lucy will move into our house for the next three weeks. She will sleep on the couch. “I’m hoping you can provide sheets and blankets, but I’ll bring my own pillow,” she says. “Nothing against your pillows. I’m sure they’re fine. But my neck needs a buckwheat pillow, and I’ve found that most people don’t keep those around.” Lucy will be with my mother all day, every day. At this, my mother makes a face. “Well, I’m not going to Velcro the two of us together. I just mean I’ll be in the house whenever you are. And if I need to leave the house, I’ll bring you with me. And if you need to leave the house, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” My mother opens her mouth and Lucy quickly corrects herself. “Not anywhere. But you know what I mean.” Lucy will do all the driving. She will use her own car. “It’s a reliable Volkswagen Rabbit,” she assures us. “Never had a single repair.” She will implement safety precautions around the house: cover the outlets with plugs; lock up our household cleaners; install night-lights. She will help my mother in all the ways that she can and all the ways that are necessary, but she is not, she takes care to stress, a babysitter. For anything for which my mother doesn’t require assistance—“I would guess that’s still most things at this point,” Lucy says—my mother will be on her own. Nor is she here as hired entertainment. “I can be very entertaining,” she says, “but that’s hardly the point.” Lucy knows, because I marked it on the paperwork, that my mother had to leave her job a month earlier. One of the lawyers in the office where she worked as the receptionist approached her one day after a batch of billing statements my mother was supposed to have sent got returned to the office for lack of postage. He told her that they were all fond of her and had always known her to be capable, but that the work had gotten away from her lately, and that they didn’t want to fire her, but they hoped she would see it was time for her to leave. My mother, who almost never goes with the flow of anything, said she did see. During her lunch that day, she scribbled a letter of resignation. Since then, though, my mother hasn’t quite known what to do with herself. After spending her entire adult life working—never calling in sick, dismissing the idea of vacation—she has no clue how to pass the time. For her, being unemployed is like wandering through a dark and beguiling forest. I assume, though, that’s what Lucy is referring to when she says she’s not entertainment. She’s not here to fill my mother’s time for her, only to keep her safe.

  “When are you starting?” I ask.

  “I believe I just did.”

  The next night, because it’s New Year’s Eve and because Lucy insists, I go out with my friends. Before I leave the house Lucy asks if she can take a picture of me. “I’ve never seen you look so nice,” she says, taking no pains to hide the amazement on her face. I’m dressed in a shimmering silver V-neck blouse, black trousers, and black boots. My hair is long and straight down my back, my bangs long and straight across my forehead.

  “You’ve only seen me yesterday and today,” I point out, smiling. But then my mother comes out and corroborates Lucy’s opinion.

  “Mira! No jeans!” she says. “Is this always how you dress around your friends?”

  “Yes. I wear disco balls to my geophysics classes.”

  “I know you thought that was funny, but you should consider it. It would be an improvement over jeans all the time.”

  Lucy backs me against a wall and takes a picture. “One more with the flash,” she says.

  “Lucy,” I point to my shirt. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got the flash covered.”

  “For once,” my mother says, and I roll my eyes, hoping that it comes off as good-natured, before pulling on my coat and walking out the door.

  It’s dark by the time I get to campus. Asha buzzes me up to her room and hugs me when I walk in. She has jazz—her favorite since she took a class on Thelonious Monk last quarter—playing softly.

  “You look so good!” she says. “Were we supposed to get dressed up? Do you even know where we’re going? Juliette’s still talking about going to the Med, but I don’t know if I feel like it.”

  Asha is wearing dark jeans, a slim black turtleneck, and green sneakers. She is, as one of the guys in her dorm told her once, a classic Indian beauty, with thick, wavy hair and flawless golden skin.

  I sit on her bed, covered with a Jamawar shawl. “You know she only wants to go there because of Ben, right?” I say.

  “That waiter? What’s his last name? Linwood? I think he was in my biology lab.”

  “Did you tell Juliette? She’s practically killing herself to find out anything she can about him.”

  “Exactly why I didn’t tell her. If she knew where he was every Tuesday and Thursday at three-thirty, she would probably stalk him.”

  Asha is leaning over her dresser, lining her almond-shaped eyes with heavy black eyeliner. She licks her pinky and dabs at one of the corners. Then she turns to me and, shaking her finger, says, “So you don’t tell her, either.”

  Juliette and Beth arrive together about ten minutes later. They walk into Asha’s dorm room wearing dresses—Juliette a corduroy shirtdress with a wide brown belt around her waist, and Beth a very plain sleeveless black dress that hits at her knees. She has tights on underneath.

  The four of us met the first week of freshman year at a barbecue in the courtyard that two of the neighboring dorms threw to welcome new students. Juliette and Beth lived in the same suite, so they came over together, clinging to each other the way everyone did in the beginning just for the comfort of having someone to do things with. Asha was monitoring her veggie burger on the grill and I was talking to my RA. Later, I got in line for a hot dog behind Juliette and Beth. Juliette brokered the introductions, and then Beth and I learned we were in the same major (geophysical sciences), which Asha overheard and which, because she was in the sciences, too (chemistry), prompted her to introduce herself to us a few minutes later as we sat cross-legged on the grass, eating and licking salt from potato chips off our fingers. With the scent of charcoal wafting through the air, we sat outside talking to one another long after all the others at the barbecue had thrown away their plastic plates and wadded napkins and returned to the safe cover of their dorm rooms, until dusk fell and the mosquitoes came out and Asha jumped up because she kept getting bitten. Someone—it must have been Juliette—suggested we all have breakfast together in the dining hall the next morning. We’ve been friends ever since.

  “What the hell?” Asha says when she sees them. “Why didn’t anyone tell me we were supposed to be dressing up?”

  “What do you mean, why didn’t we tell you?” Juliette asks. “It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “This is just the dress I use for interviews,” Beth says, before sitting beside me on the bed and putting her arm around my shoulder, squeezing me in a sideways hug. “How are you?” she asks.

  “I’m okay,” I say. She gives me the most pitying smile, lips together, turned down at the corners.

  “What interviews?” Asha asks.

  “What are we listening to?” Juliette wants to know.

  “Sonny Rollins. ‘ ’Round Midnight.’ It’s a standard,” Asha says. “What interviews?”

  “It’s nice. Can I download it from you?”

  “Sure. W
hat interviews, Beth?”

  “The interviews I’m trying to set up for summer intern-ships. Didn’t I tell you I’m trying to get a job at Fermi Lab?”

  “Okay, before the three of you get all caught up in your ultra-fascinating science talk, where are we going?” Juliette asks, after coming over and giving me her own hug.

  “I heard you wanted to go to Medici,” I say, winking suggestively.

  “First of all, I can’t believe you just winked at me like that,” Juliette says. “What are you? Some kind of Playboy Bunny CIA operative?”

  I laugh.

  “Second, I wouldn’t mind going to Medici, unless someone has a better idea.” Juliette adjusts her purple plastic glasses before dropping a glance on each of us in turn. “Medici it is, then.”

  The restaurant is just filling up by the time we get there. We slide into a booth near the back and order sandwiches and onion rings and root beer floats. It feels good to be there with them, eating the food we’ve always eaten and having the conversations we’ve always had. We watch for Ben and try to keep Juliette from making a fool of herself when she sees him, since every time he passes through the room she threatens to wave him down and tell him that she thinks he’s amazing. “You don’t even know him,” Beth says. And Juliette replies, “Look at him. What more do I need to know?”

  The restaurant is warm and dim, the dark wood furniture worn and etched with people’s names and initials. Wilco is playing on the sound system. We finish our onion rings and order mocha pie as the students continue to amass and get louder. When Juliette stands up and announces she’s going to the bathroom, Asha says she’ll accompany her to make sure she only goes to the bathroom and doesn’t somehow veer off course into the path of a certain Ben Linwood. Juliette sticks her tongue out at Asha, and Asha says, “You better keep that thing where it belongs.” Beth and I laugh.