Alone in my apartment, I went to my closet and pulled out the box, the one I hadn’t opened in years. When I’d driven up to my former home in northern Michigan after my mother’s death, I’d confronted a giant mess of books, old disks that wouldn’t fit into any kind of computer anymore, external hard drives, handfuls of flash drives, and piles of actual papers. I had looked through her email account and at the current project on her laptop, but I hadn’t bothered with the rest of it. I’d just put it in the box and dragged it back to my dorm, and it had traveled around with me ever since.
I hadn’t been curious about her work but this box also represented so much of my childhood. I remembered how she’d been upset because her research wasn’t proceeding well or because of writer’s block, and then her anxiety would crank up about publication. Finally, she would be crushed that no one was interested in her accomplishments, not her academic peers and definitely not the general public. I closed the box and tried to close up my thoughts on the issue, too. I wouldn’t give this to that woman Pandora or to anyone else, and I wasn’t going to look at it anymore.
But the next day, when I went to lunch with Levi’s sisters, it was still on my mind and I asked my two companions a question about their own lives. “What was the word you used? Dimidiate?” Liv asked me. “I don’t know what that is.”
I explained it again, how it meant a division into two parts. “It means being split, and I wondered if you guys might feel that way, with personal stuff in opposition to your careers,” I said.
“I feel like I’m split into fifteen or twenty different pieces,” Ava answered. “This new volunteer thing is killing me.”
“What new volunteer thing? Aves, did you seriously sign up to be the class parent? Why?” her sister demanded.
“No one else was doing it! I want to help the teacher and she really needs a parent to organize the field trips, because otherwise the kids won’t get to go. I don’t want Everly to miss out,” Ava answered. But then she admitted, “I don’t have the time for it. I spent hours last week trying to get the other parents to fill out some stupid form and there were three who wouldn’t. I’m thinking of driving to their houses and threatening them with Emerson’s cat.”
“That won’t work anymore, because Levi tamed her,” I said.
“Remember the baby raccoon in our driveway?” Liv reminisced. “It had been abandoned by its mom and he rescued it,” she explained to me.
That reminded me of something, but then Ava started talking about how Levi had made friends with a neighborhood dog that hated everyone and had ended up trying to take it to college to live in the dorm.
“He kind of did that with Coral. She moved herself into his apartment,” I said. “We leave our doors open so she can go back and forth across the hall, but she wants to be with him all the time.” Who could have blamed her?
“That sounds right. He was always the type to jump in and help. Like every ten minutes with August,” she mentioned to her sister, and Liv nodded as I frowned. “Just as long as he doesn’t let commitments to others mess up his life.”
“Ava, you’re one to talk!” Liv protested.
“I know,” she sighed. “That whole division thing is very hard. It’s a cliché but a lot of the time, I do feel like I’m shorting people.”
“Yourself,” her sister said. “You’re shorting yourself.”
“You don’t have to worry about Levi,” I reminded her. “At least you can let go of that.”
“How is his job going? How is it really going?” Liv asked. “He says, ‘Great, best thing I ever did,’ but what’s the truth?”
“He doesn’t like it much,” I confessed. “He won’t say it to me, either, but I can tell.”
“You can tell,” Ava echoed, and to my surprise, she smiled. “I’m glad that you know him so well,” she explained. “I’m glad he has you.”
He did, and I was going to figure out this issue with August, too. It was clear from how his sisters were talking that they weren’t aware of the latest developments, even though Levi had been discussing his friend’s problems with Hunt, Liv’s husband. That guy was keeping it to himself just as Levi wasn’t sharing his feelings about his job.
“Levi needs to do something creative,” Liv announced, and I thought about his novel. He often worked on it—maybe not asmuch as he would have liked, since we were spending more time together and there was always Coral to deal with, and now the problems with his best friend. They were in a lot more contact lately, talking and hanging out together, which was probably good for August and did make Levi feel easier about his well-being. They’d been spending time at their old hang-out spot in the park and also at his apartment, where I had been able to hear them laughing. Apparently, Coral was also a fan of the guy, because Levi had reported that she cuddled with him, too.
“Your brother may be too busy to work on his creative stuff, but I’m going do something about it,” I said, which couldn’t have made much sense to them. It was my responsibility, though, because he would have a lot more free time if it wasn’t for me and my cat.
It was nice to see them both and it persuaded me that Ava and I were forming good bonds. Maybe Liv and I would be able to form some, too? I was also glad to hear about the existing bonds that Levi had with his siblings and I wished, not for the first time, that I could have experienced that myself. I did have the half-brothers and sisters out in Oregon, but it was possible that they didn’t even know about my existence. Our mutual father hadn’t wanted anything to do with me or my mother, but after reading her emails to him, I didn’t blame him like I had when I was a child and alone. She had threatened to do all kinds of things to him and to his wife—not just to expose what had happened in the hotel room (the act that had resulted in me), but also to make their lives miserable by telling his boss,his colleagues, his parents, and everyone else that he was a miserable cheater.
He’d stopped responding to her and after a while, her messages to him had petered out, too. As far as I was aware, she hadn’t followed through on those threats to reveal their affair, but who knew what else was in those weird old computer discs and all her other piles of stuff? Maybe there was more that didn’t fit into the narrative she’d spun in the fourth chapter ofDimidiate, which was called “Disassociation.” She’d talked about leaving the father of her child because he refused to allow her to pursue professional success, that he had tried to stifle her and her academic aspirations.
Of course, that had been a lie, as had many other of the parts of the book. I had read chapter seven, “Dissonance,” in total disbelief. She’d told the story of her wealthy family and their insistence on outdated gender and social norms, and how she’d left all that behind to live the life she chose despite their consistent efforts to draw her back into the fold. Actually, I had found out about ten years before (when I’d had the wherewithal to look them up) that my grandparents were deceased and they had both worked in a factory. “Dissonance” had been an appropriate title, but not in the way my mother had meant.
Levi came over to my house later that afternoon. “Hi,” he said as he entered, Coral trailing behind him. “I heard that lunch was good, and that you managed to talk Ava out of another volunteer job. Thank you for that.”
“Liv and I both convinced her not to be the room parent,” I said. “Jeff is going to take over until they can find a permanentreplacement. And Liv bullied her into leaving a message with the orthopedist to set up another appointment about the pain in her shoulder.”
“Did you tell her to leave me alone, too? Because she texted about pulling back and letting me live a little.” He sat in my old desk chair. “What are you doing?”
“I didn’t say to leave you alone, but I described how you were succeeding on your own, without her supervision,” I said first, and then looked at the box in front of me that was the answer to his second question. “This is what’s left of my mother, all her decades of work.”
“It’s not a very big box.”
