Read Online The World in Half by Cristina Henríquez - Free Book Online Page A

wait,” I say. “This is worse: it’s also sunny.”
    “Sunny!” Beth wails. “I’m in the middle of a Chicago winter here, Mira! I don’t even know what that word means anymore.”
    “It means everything over here is going fine.”

    I call my mother after that, as I told her I would, but Lucy informs me that she’s already in bed.
    “She’s okay?”
    “She’s great. And you? How are the volcanoes?”
    “The what?”
    “Isn’t that where you are? At a volcano observatory? Am I getting the name of it wrong?”
    “No, that’s right. It’s—They’re very . . . volcanic.”
    “I should think so.”
    Then, I don’t know what makes me ask but I say, “Lucy, do you think it was okay for me to come here?”
    “You have to live your life,” she says.
    “I know. But I think maybe it was bad timing.”
    “There’s no good timing now. It’s only going to get worse. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do what you need to do.”
    I press my tongue into the back of my teeth. “Yeah.”
    “Mira, it’s okay. She’ll still be here when you get back.”
    “Yeah.” I feel like crying now.
    “She’ll still be here for a long time, even if you have to look harder to find her.”
     
     
     
    No one said the word “Alzheimer’s” until the third doctor. The first dismissed the symptoms as depression, assuring us that my mother, at forty-five, was far too young to worry about “other possibilities,” as he put it. The second, we stopped going to after my mother deemed him unacceptable because of the poor quality of his teeth.
    “Am I going to die?” she asked me on the way out of the parking garage after our visit with him.
    “What?” I asked. I was driving.
    “I have no idea what he said to me. He could have said I was going to die tomorrow, for all I know.”
    “You weren’t listening to him?”
    “Did you see his teeth? They looked like corn on the cob. How could I concentrate with corn on the cob yapping in my face?” She shook her head and rolled down her window as we snaked through the aisle toward the exit.
    “I don’t think they were that bad.”
    “Mira, I will shoot myself in the head if I have to go on looking at his corn teeth.”
    “So you want to switch doctors?”
    “Very astute.”
    Doctor number three, Dr. Wu, was the one to give her the diagnosis. I didn’t go with her to the appointment. She showed up at my dorm afterward, buzzing my room from the lobby, without any prior warning that she was coming. When I went down and saw her, she had a lavender scarf looped into a small flounce around her neck and a manila envelope tucked under her arm. She was folding and refolding one corner of the envelope.
    “I didn’t know you were coming today,” I said.
    “I need to talk to you. Do you want to take a walk?”
    Instantly, my stomach started kneading. By then, of course, I already had my suspicions. “What’s going on?”
    “I’ll tell you, but go get your jacket first. Hurry up.”
    It was a brilliant Chicago day, the sun high in the sky, a bracingly cool wind echoing off the lake. We walked without talking. The tree leaves swished, like muffled static, as they were tousled in the breeze. I had on jeans cuffed up past my bare ankles, my black low-top Converse sneakers, and a green-and-white-striped long-sleeved tee. I hadn’t washed my hair in days, so it was greasy, held back with bobby pins. We walked down the sidewalks that fed out to the east, then under one of the stone archways that held above it train tracks, then across the grassy lawn surrounding the Museum of Science and Industry. When we got past the fence to the footpath that ran along the lake, my mother took a left. She pursed her lips and pulled them back again as she cast her gaze across the water, the sunlight shimmering wildly off the surface. Small black birds circled overhead, and every now and then one of them cawed. I fidgeted with the hems of my sleeves, stretching them over the heels of my