Free The World in Half by Cristina Henríquez Page B

classmates would be. I was kneeling in a patch of clover, looking for a sprig with four leaves, just like I’d been doing every recess since the snow had melted, while the other kids shrieked on the swings or played hopscotch on the asphalt. I looked up and saw the girl, skinny, wearing a white dress that was much too fancy for school. She was standing in front of her mother, not far from me. They surveyed the yard, and then her mother pointed at me and said, “Why don’t you introduce yourself to her? She looks nice, mi hija, and I bet you she speaks Spanish.” I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want her to approach me. I didn’t know why her mother would have said that about me. But I knew that I wasn’t who she thought I was. I wanted to be. I wished I could have said, in Spanish, “Hey, come over here and we’ll look for a four-leaf clover together,” but even though I knew a few words by then, I didn’t know enough. I felt embarrassed by my failings. I felt, even then as I still do now, like I’ve let everybody down, like there is supposed to be more to me than what I know, like there’s a hollow space carved out along my side that somehow never got filled in. So I stood up quickly and brushed off my knees and ran over to the kids watching hopscotch, trying my best to blend in and fade away. I remember standing there and trying to figure out what I was exactly, but when I started thinking about it, I got lost. Maybe I had always felt that way, at least a little bit. In between the two countries that were both part of me, I never knew where I was or where I was supposed to be.
    The driver keeps his window open a crack to ash his cigarette. Synthetic stuffing spills out of a tear in the seat next to me. Buildings and signs—Panagas, Super 99, Empanadas Don Carlos, Félix B. Maduro, Farmacias Arrocha—pass by in a blur. After a while the driver reaches back and raps his knuckles against my window. “Two minutes,” he announces.
    We pull up along a street tightly lined with tumbledown shanty houses, their zinc roofs almost flat, their multiple layers of peeling paint stained by water damage. Many of the front doors are open, and people sit in the doorways impassively, their elbows on their knees, thin sandals or worn slippers on their feet.
    The driver tosses out his cigarette and rolls up his window as we near. He locks his door. When we stop I pay him, and he looks back at me with bored eyes. “You want that I wait?” he asks, testing his English.
    “Please.”
    He turns off the engine, then props his elbow against the door and ruffles his hand through the back of his hair. He keeps the windows closed.
    We’re across the street from my father’s house. I’m staring at it right now. Maybe he isn’t home, or maybe he doesn’t even live there anymore, but it almost doesn’t matter. At one time at least this was his house, the place where my father cooked his meals and slept and got dressed in the morning and dreamed of me at night. The structure is covered in a faded salmon-colored paint. There is a heap of rusted auto parts in the front yard. A disused woven hammock lies like a dried corn husk on the ground between two trees.
    Come on, Mira, I tell myself. This is why you came here. Get out of the car. Go to him. Come on. In one fluid motion, I open the car door and hurry across the street, practically skipping over the pavement as if it’s hot and volatile lava. The neighbors are watching me from their stoops. From behind the front door, a clanging noise erupts and then settles, as though someone dropped a pot on the floor. My father. My father is in there. I knock.
     
     
     
    Before I got out of the taxi, I remembered being in school the day I learned that the seven continents we take for granted used to be one huge landmass. All the world lumped together in one place. If humans had been around back then, the entire population of the earth would have lived on one gigantic island. I obsessed