“How do you know that?” I asked. “It’s a really rare word.”
“It comes from the Latin,” he explained, and treated me to (another) lecture on the origins of Romance languages and also more about heraldic combinations.
“Yes, ‘dimidiate’ can relate to coat of arms stuff,” I finally interrupted, “but it also refers to anything cut in half. In science,it can mean that part is underdeveloped or missing, like one antler on a deer is tiny and the other is normal-sized. That was what my mother was talking about in the book, how her life had been sliced in two and her role as a scholar and researcher was diminished by societal demands, like the pressure to have a partner and a child.” Every chapter name began with the letter D and the second one, “Disappointment,” centered on my birth. “It was all about how her career had been ruined before it really began because of unfair expectations on her. Then the book flopped and she was crushed. That led to her death.”
“What do you mean?” Hernán asked. “Did she…”
“She put hunks of concrete in her pockets and walked out into the lake on a stormy day in late fall. She drowned,” I answered. I had been in college when I’d gotten the call and then had driven north. Not too long after that, I had gotten soaked with a cup of beer in a bar.
“That’s a terrible thing.” His voice was quiet. “Pobrecita.”
I knew what that word meant, but she had always been so unhappy that I had never been sure what I thought about it all. Maybe now, she had some peace…I rubbed my eyes. “I better go,” I said. “I need to pay attention as I walk.”
“All right,” he agreed, but I was sure that he’d be watching my progress on his phone after we hung up. He did something else, too, which I found out shortly.
“Hey,” Levi called through his window as his car slowed next to me. “Need a ride, dollface?”
“I’m almost home.” But I walked over anyway. “Did Hernán text you?”
“He called. He was worried,” he answered. “Hop in.”
I did and sighed. “How do you say ‘busybody’ in Spanish?”
“He’sun entrometido, but it’s because he cares. He said that the woman you had the meeting with had lied to get information from you. What’s going on?”
“She’s writing her dissertation for her PhD, and the subject is apparently my mother,” I answered. “She wanted to ask me questions and she wanted to know if I had any unpublished papers.” I looked out the window. “That’s a pretty house. It looks like it has a terrace above the front porch.”
He glanced over and nodded. “That is pretty. Did you answer her questions?”
“No. But I do have files of my mother’s research. That box and my clothes were the only things that Grant left when he moved out of our apartment.”
“Big of him.”
“The woman, Pandora, also wanted to know if I had the suicide note.”
The allusion to my mother’s death didn’t seem to surprise Levi, so he must have looked her up after I’d shown him her picture online. “No one is entitled to see that,” he said.
“There was no note. There was no explanation at all,” I continued, “except what I knew about her from what she’d written in her books. She was disappointed and sad. The worldhad let her down and she had let herself down because she’d been unable to overcome it.”
“That’s a shame. And that woman today doesn’t need to hear it from you if she can read about it herself.”
“Pandora said that the dissertation would make my mother famous.”
“She sounds about as pompous as I’d expect,” Levi said.
“It was my mother’s dream to make a mark somehow.” I rubbed my eyes. “It’s nice that someone is interested in her and I don’t know why I’m so emotional about it. She died so many years ago.”
“You got ambushed,” he replied. “That wasn’t fair and it would have shocked anybody.”
“I was really worried about how I was acting. Not that I was going to put concrete in my pockets, but that I was going to live the rest of my life like she did, with everything off-kilter and wrong. That was when I signed up for the therapy.”
“You had something really terrible happen to you, too,” Levi said. “You were injured and the person you lived with let you down.”
“My mother…no,” I said, stopping myself. What was the point of talking about her and her issues? I changed the subject to the lunch I would have the next day with his sisters. Ava had texted that I wouldn’t get the chance to meet another of the Curran women, because her husband was sick.
When we arrived at our building a moment later, I thanked Levi for picking me up and said that I needed to be by myself for a while.
“Ok. I’m across the hall,” he reminded me.
