Page 39 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“Are you angry at her because of what she wrote about you?” she asked, panting as she kept up with my pace. I had been taking all those walks and I was in much better shape now. “Don’t you see how exceptionally important she was? Don’t you feel any obligation to promote her?”

I stopped. “I don’t feel anything,” I answered. “Good luck with your dissertation and goodbye.”

“But…” She shook her head. “I don’t understand you.

My mom is just some dumb housewife who never accomplished fuck-all besides raising six kids, but your mother did amazing research and her social commentary was groundbreaking!

She wasn’t recognized in her time but my dissertation will bring her the attention that she deserves.

I’ll make her famous, like she should have been all along!

Don’t you want to be a part of uplifting her legacy? ”

“No. I don’t have anything to do with my mother’s legacy.”

“But that’s not true!” she insisted. “Her pregnancy, your birth, and your childhood are integral issues in Dimidiate .”

“I’m not an issue.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s such a pivotal work. It really informed the way I want to approach my life and career.”

There was a lot I could have said about what a mistake she was making if she let my mother’s life be her guide, but I didn’t. “Please leave me alone.”

I walked away again and this time, she didn’t follow me.

I glanced back once to check, and saw Pandora frowning and watching my retreat.

It wasn’t too much of a distance to my apartment, just a couple of miles, so I kept going, walking home instead of heading back to Ava’s house or letting Levi know where I was and when I’d get back.

But I should have known that someone was watching.

“ Buenas tardes ,” Hernán said when I answered his call. “What are you doing right now?”

“Walking.”

“Levi isn’t with you and it’s getting dark there soon.”

“In a few hours,” I pointed out. “And how do you know where he is?”

“I know many things,” he said. “This isn’t a time when you usually do your walks and you’re not in the same area. Did you meet with your new client?”

“She was lying about that,” I told him. “Pandora didn’t really want to hire me, she wanted to pump me for information.”

“What?Why?”

I explained, giving him the broad strokes of the story. “She seems to be interested in my mother’s last book, Dimidiate .”

“Like in heraldry, when two coats of arms are split and then joined together?” he asked, and I was aghast.

“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’s un 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 world had 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.

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.