Half Read online

  Also by Sharon Harrigan

  Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir

  HALF

  Sharon Harrigan

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  Publication of this book has been made possible, in part, through support from the Brittingham Trust.

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Madison, Wisconsin 53706

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  Copyright © 2020 by Sharon Harrigan

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Harrigan, Sharon, 1967- author.

  Title: Half / Sharon Harrigan.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019050460 | ISBN 9780299328542 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Identical twins—Fiction. | LCGFT: Fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A78158 H35 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050460

  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.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-32858-0 (electronic)

  To

  James,

  of course

  Prologue

  (Christmas, 2030)

  We wedged Mom between us. Her sharp hips bore into ours as we sat on the hard pew. She nodded toward the blizzard raging on the other side of the stained glass and said, “It’s your dad.”

  “He’s making it snow?” As identical twins, we spoke in unison. People responded to us, at least, as if we did.

  Mom chewed her index finger and kept quiet. We took that as a yes. Apparently, she was still claiming Dad controlled everything and the weather, even though we had just flown in for his funeral. “Preposterous,” we told each other with our shoulders and palms. Whether we meant the weather or the funeral, we didn’t say.

  In the twelve years since we had moved away, monster storms had become the norm. Planes were no longer even grounded for them.

  The eulogies droned on. Ms. Rosen, our fourth-grade teacher, swished up to the pulpit, butterfly tattoos sagging under the stretched skin on her now-ample arms, charm bracelet tinkling. She praised Dad and God in the same sentence.

  Next came Wild Pete, Dad’s old buddy from his days of leading hunting tours in Alaska, his squirrelly mustache muffling a gruff voice. He told the origin story of Dad’s nickname, Moose. We had heard tales about Pete all our lives but had secretly suspected he wasn’t real.

  Our childhood best friends described a man whose beard never grayed, whose shot never missed, who was “always there.” Always where? we asked, only in our heads, in a voice that sounded more like the snarky teens we had been than the thirty-year-old moms we were now.

  We had prepared nothing. Mom could barely stand up, let alone speak, but we, the daughters, should have represented the family. That’s what everyone’s eyes on us said. A young man with a slender purple tie and a square of hair on his flinty chin glared from the other side of the aisle.

  Mom sagged against the wooden pew. Her face, already slim from a lifetime of dieting, turned gaunt. Her still-dark hair—so thick that even in middle age she had enough to pile it high, goddess style, on her head—seemed to thin by the minute. A tiny lily tattoo wilted on the back of her neck. Even the beauty mark above her lip shrank.

  Our five-year-old sons, clutching plush hedgehogs and snapping their bow ties, sat on our other sides. Next to them, our husbands, lost in an incense fog. Tears would have been a relief, but we dammed them back.

  “Marco.” We said it so low it might have been telepathy.

  “Polo,” came our reply, barely audible.

  We reached over Mom to knock knuckles on each other’s thighs. We fingered the single earring we each wore, a diamond stud. As long as we shared this pair, these secret codes, we thought we couldn’t fall apart.

  At the reception, Wild Pete almost tore off our hands, pretending to shake them. Breath thick with chaw, he said, “You’re the ones who killed him.”

  We slipped from Pete’s grip, pushed outside, and leaned against the wall near the church basement steps, eyelashes weighted with snow.

  “We didn’t,” we said.

  Then, “We did.”

  “How could he say such a thing?”

  “You mean, how could he know?”

  We had to hold each other’s coats to keep from falling with the snow. Gusts swirled at our ankles, and snow hooped around our hips. We braced against the scratchy brick, gripping.

  “Why did we do it?” we asked each other.

  “Because of what he did to us. Every year of our lives.”

  We couldn’t live with ourselves if we thought we had killed an innocent man. A jury of two, we had to decide if Dad deserved what we had done to him. The only evidence to review was our childhood.

  We clutched each other’s hands for heat, our bodies so close we could imagine we were attached—“Siamese”—the way we had pretended to be so long ago. Spines in fetal curve, we rewound the tape of our lives in our heads, starting back at the age our own boys were now.

  “Remember?” we said.

  We had never meant to hurt anyone.

  Part One

  1

  We wanted to crawl back in time. Even then. We were only five, but that wasn’t young enough.

  The more we played this game—hovering outside our parents’ door after dinner, trying to hear their mysterious bedroom sounds while pretending we didn’t—the more we wanted to be babies again. Or even to slip back into our mother’s belly, the way we slid into her bed those nights when Dad was away on a hunting trip.

  “I’m half years old,” we said. “How old are you?”

  “I’m half, too.”

  At first we meant we had been alive six months, just half a year. Later, half no longer stood for anything. Half empty, half full.

  We babbled and baby-talked, the way our own children do now when they don’t want us to understand. Our friend Nevaeh had a baby brother, and he was always sucking at his mother’s breast, so we knew milk was food, milk was love.

  We were twin girls, born in 2000, the year of the Golden Dragon. Our dark bangs hung crooked, cut with the blunt scissors sometimes used for discipline. We listened through the hollow-core door as the mattress squeaked, wondering why our parents were jumping on the bed. They never let us.

  We were locked out of the one private room in the house. We wanted to walk in on them now, the way we liked to sneak in on Mom when she tried to escape from us in the bath, slinky and slippery as a mermaid. But even if the door hadn’t been locked, we wouldn’t have dared, not with Dad in there. He was a lion escaped from the zoo. He could hunt us down and eat us in our sleep. He roared, and all his subjects scattered. He was king.

  “I’m so little I can’t walk,” we said, floundering on our bellies, flapping our arms.

&
nbsp; We said, “I can’t even talk,” then “You’re talking now,” and “No, I’m not. You’re reading my mind.”

  As identical twins, we had our own identical language. We understood each other’s taps and scraps of song, our code for “Ignore the sounds behind the door.” We pressed noses to knees, legs bent crisscross applesauce on the dirt-brown shag, which meant: “We can’t do anything to help her, anyway. We’re too little.”

  We lay on top of each other, like the puppies we saw at the pet store. Our dog, Rex, had to live outside, and we weren’t allowed to snuggle him in the house the way we were nuzzling each other now. We wanted to buy him a sister or brother from the pound, the way we had once thought our parents bought us from the hospital, two for one, on double-coupon day.

  The bouncing on the bed became a pounding beat. It shook the floor and squeaked like something breaking. “Earthquake,” we said. “Quicksand.” We meant “he’s big and she’s small.” She was so thin she could have slipped through the metal bars of a cage. If she wanted to.

  We pretended we were in a crib and couldn’t climb out. We made believe we were still at the hospital after being born and there was some hope another family might take us by mistake, the way the cashier sometimes gave Mom the wrong cigarettes at Lucky Seven.

  Mom made animal noises on the other side of the door, dog shrieks, worse than our whimpers when Dad punished us for breaking a glass or sharing a secret. We wanted to save her but were stranded on an island the size of this hallway, and if we stepped out we would drown.

  We half-wanted to open the door. We leaned into it so we could feel the vibrations of Mom’s cries.

  We pressed so hard, our heads pushed the door in, and we fell forward. But no, it was Dad hovering over us, wearing only boxer shorts, his huge hairy hand on the knob. He was on his way to the bathroom. “Kids!” he yelled, stepping on and over us, his bare foot catching our footed pajamas, “Get to bed!”

  To Mom he said, “Don’t you teach these girls about privacy? What about manners?”

  We could see through the legs of his boxer shorts as we lay on the floor facing up. “It’s not her fault,” we almost said. We didn’t want him to make her squeal again with what we couldn’t have imagined was pleasure. But we didn’t talk back.

  Mom pulled the covers over her naked breasts. She flicked her fingers to shoo us away, so we scampered off to our room.

  “No fair! Daddy gets milk,” we said to each other after crawling into our twin beds and pulling rubber ducky blankets up to our chins. “Milk is for babies!”

  We dreamed a kiss on our foreheads, and, like magic, Mom appeared between us, dressed again in her T-shirt and jeans. “Good night, sweets!” she said.

  “Why were you naked?” What we wouldn’t say, what we didn’t dare, was, “What did he do to make you scream?”

  “Your dad likes me that way,” she said, turning red. She seemed unhurt, not like Rex when he had made the same sounds she had made in bed.

  “We like you that way, too,” we said, and stretched our arms to pull her under the covers.

  “You’re way too old for that.” She tore herself from us, far out of reach. “You’re my two big kids. My two eyes and ears. My too, too much.”

  We could see her breasts shining through her T-shirt as bright as the moon in the dark of our room. We imagined her nursing us as we lay in the crook of each arm, safe on her lap, skin touching skin.

  “Enough.” And when she pressed a finger over her lips, Dad appeared like a ghost in the doorway.

  “Why are you babying them?” he said. Then they vanished, the room dark and quiet till we heard their bedroom door close again.

  “Why does the sun rise every morning?” we asked.

  We answered in a fake Mom voice: “Because your dad likes it that way.”

  “Why does it get so cold every winter we freeze our butts off?”

  “Because our butts are too big?”

  “No, because your dad likes it that way.”

  “Why is the sky blue? Why does the devil have horns? Why does fire burn?”

  “Because your dad likes it that way.”

  We spread our palms on our foreheads, over Mom’s kiss so it seeped through our skin to those places—in our ribs or hips, ears or thighs—where Dad had kicked us on the floor. Our pale skin would swell like purple gumdrops the next day, and Mom would say, “No short shorts for you.”

  Dad’s words echoed in our heads: “Why do you make me teach you the same lesson over and over again? Why didn’t you go to bed after dinner like I told you to?”

  We couldn’t answer why we didn’t learn our lessons. Why we didn’t pick up dirty clothes, why we forgot to call him sir. Why did deer run into traffic? Bugs fly into light bulbs?

  We lay in the beds we had made for ourselves, half awake, half asleep. Half innocent, half guilty, half understanding everything he said.

  Dad taught us other lessons, too. How to dog paddle, throw a snowball, and fry a perfect egg. He taught us Arabic words he had picked up in the army, little shrapnel sounds, sharp and rapid fire. But we preferred soft baby talk, words hushed the way we were on hunting trips with him.

  He said he would teach us how to be as quiet as a dead man. How to hold our tongues and breath and bladders. How to disappear into the forest, become the wind, and wait for prey.

  One day Dad threw Rex into the covered truck bed with us and drove for hours, till the factory smoke disappeared and the asphalt roads turned to dirt. Dad wedged the brown truck we called the Bull between two No Trespassing signs. We flung open the doors and spilled into the woods. Rex shot ahead, sniffing rabbits out of holes, while we girls hauled ammo and water. The leaves smelled like belly button fuzz and soggy cereal. Our seedling legs bent in the wind, but we tried to keep up with the strides of Dad’s tree trunk thighs.

  We wanted to inherit his speed, so we raced to catch up, our three steps barely big as one of his. In the country, his arms and feet and shoulders expanded. Even his beard.

  Everyone called him Moose. Lou became Loose when he left home, he explained. Between dropping out of school and becoming our dad was a year in Alaska, when his buddies changed the L to M. Moose stuck. It fit like skin.

  “Can we be Moose, too?” we asked. “Moose Jr.?” It never occurred to us that he would say “junior” was only for boys.

  “I can’t call you two the same,” Dad said. “You confuse everyone enough already.”

  “So who gets it?”

  “Whoever catches me.”

  By the time we realized what we were supposed to do, he had already bolted out of sight. Phlegm choked our throats. We sped after him, through bittersweet and green briars, slipping on leaves and flinging the brambles out of our path and into each other’s thin skin.

  One of us, fleeter of foot, could have won—if the other hadn’t pulled her back. We averaged ourselves so much, almost no one knew the mismatch of our speeds, our muscles, our voices, our minds.

  We might have caught him, had we not been holding hands. His feet flashed so fast, all we saw in his place was lightning in the cloudless sky. That’s how he made the weather, we figured. Maybe he could teach us, too, if we ever found him again.

  He was gone.

  Maybe we would have to live in the forest and eat mushrooms. Maybe we would accidentally eat a poison one and die. If we weren’t hunted down first.

  The tears we sucked in thickened to syrup behind our eyes. Our blood ran cold as sap; our feet took root. When we opened our mouths to yell, only wind came out.

  We were all alone.

  Except for the mountain lions and bears—which sounded exactly like our heartbeats. To hide from predators, we climbed a tree and waited in its crook. We didn’t talk or pee. Our breath came soundless, through our skin.

  Quiet as a dead man.

  Dad finally returned. How long had it been? Had we turned into trees?

  Rex ran at Dad’s heels. Two rabbits with broken necks dangled from Dad�
�s hands. Quick, before he left again, we parachuted from the tree into his arms.

  “You vanished,” he said.

  We folded, heads to chests, bellies to knees. He had told us to catch him, and we failed.

  He fingered the metal on his belt. We knew what that meant, and we bristled. Could we make his belt vanish, too, the way we just had—but never come back?

  “I said I’d teach you to disappear into the woods,” he said. “And you learned. Took me a whole year in the army before I knew as much as I just taught you.” Our favorite chocolate bars appeared in his palms, then slipped into our pockets—one with peanuts, one plain. Everyone else always gave us the same.

  He slapped our backs, the way he hit his buddies when he told a dirty joke. He said he would make us rabbit coats, that he had been saving the pelts for us. We would be the envy of our kindergarten class.

  He didn’t pull off his belt and crook us over his knees. Not yet, at least. We never knew when he would. Instead, he took out his pocketknife. “Now let me teach you how to clean these buggers up.”

  He lay the rabbits down on moss. Hands on ours, he helped us slit our dinner, throat to tail. We pushed back the rusty taste in our mouths, locking teeth. The animals’ insides spilled out. And—as soon as we found a bush to hide behind, pretending to pee—so did ours.

  When we got mad at Dad, we said his secret name, only to each other. Lou became Loooo became Ewwww—what we called a slimy brown banana, on sale and way past expiration. “Call me sir,” Dad said when he was mad at us.

  When Mom called Dad “dear,” we heard “deer.” We heard “skin” milk instead of “skim.” From a skinny cow? We said “melk” instead of milk, the Michigan way.

  Dad called Mom her real name, Sera, only when he yelled. Mostly, he said “babe,” though drunk, he would call her Hera. “My goddess.” And if anyone asked, he would explain, “It’s a Greek joke. My folks come from Athens.” But from the other side of his bedroom door, we heard him grunt, all serious in worship of her, “Oh god oh god oh god.”