The World in Half Read Online Free PDF

what will happen to me by the time this trip is over, but right now, at the start of it, I am Robert Falcon Scott, and Panama as well as everything that might happen there is my fantastic unknown.

    I lied to my mother about this trip. More than two weeks ago, I booked the ticket online and then walked into her room to tell her I’d been invited on a Geophysical Sciences Department trip to the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington. There was no way she could have known that I was really going to Panama.
    “I’ll be gone for three weeks,” I said. “The trip is for the first three weeks of the quarter.”
    She said, “There was a human head on the kitchen counter this morning.”
    I was sitting on her bed while she stood in front of her dresser and applied makeup. I was watching her face in the mirror. In the lower corner of it, I could see my own—my wide, dark brown eyes; my long, straight nose; my pale lips, shiny with ChapStick; my black hair pulled into a low, haphazard ponytail loop; my bangs cut in a blunt line, dusting the tips of my thick eyelashes.
    “A human head?” I asked.
    She nodded.
    When I walked into the kitchen, there was a cantaloupe on the counter.
    Back in her room, I said, “I think it’s gone now.”
    “What is?”
    “Mom, did you hear me before?” I didn’t know why I was pressing it. She had already taken the news better than I thought she would.
    “You mean about the trip?”
    “Yes.”
    “I heard.”
    I wasn’t going to tell her the rest: that I had arranged to take the entire next quarter off. Later, I would. But not yet. I wanted to avoid the inevitable fight the news would trigger. My mother would argue that taking a quarter off was the first step down a slippery slope that ended with me, in a heap at the bottom, quitting school altogether. There was no way to explain to her that taking a quarter off was no big deal, that people did it all the time. Even when I talked to the dean about it, he’d said I was the third person that day to come to him with the same request. He’d told me that my scholarship would remain intact as long as I took off for no longer than one year. Everything would be fine. But none of that would matter to my mother. To her, it would signify the beginning of the end. She had always made it clear that there was no messing around when it came to school. She wanted more for me than she had for herself. That sort of thing. By the time my mother was my age, she had been herded to a small, local Catholic college along the banks of the Hudson River at the insistence of her parents, who wanted to keep her close by. The point of going to college, as my mother tells it, was not so much to gain an education as it was to find a husband—a singular obsession with her parents, who believed, even in the late seventies, that the best any woman could do was to find a good man. In the shadowed wings of my mother’s life, her parents were conspiring to help her winnow her marriage prospects until they finally settled on one man, a U.S. Marine named Brant Strickland, whom she wedded before transferring with him to his station in the Panama Canal Zone. He and my mother were divorced less than a year later. “It wasn’t right from the start,” she told me once when I asked her about it. “It wasn’t right from the start or from the middle or from the end. It was never right.” And why hadn’t she gone to college after that? “Because, Mira, after that you were making your grand entrance.”
    She held out a tube of lipstick the shade of apricot and said, “What do you think of this color?”
    “I promise I’ll be back soon,” I said, unwilling to let it go. “And someone will be around, you know, to help you.”
    “All fine,” she said, and gazed again at the mirror. She pressed her lips together and released them with a faint popping sound.
     
     
     
    As soon as I step off the plane and into the airport, I get swept up in the masses of