Excerpt from Divide Me By Zero by Lara Vapnyar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My mother kept working on that book for as long as her mind was still functioning and for a time after it stopped.

There were about 20 of these cards dispersed around the room. Some perfectly coherent, even brilliant, others showing both the inevitable deterioration of my mother's mind and her desperate attempts to stave it off.

One of the cards had fallen to the floor. I picked it up and put it back on the table.

It said: "Divide me by zero." Nothing else. No date. I wasn't sure if my mother had written it in a state of confusion or if she had had some deeper meaning in mind. As a child I was fascinated by this concept. I kept asking my mother what would happen if you divided something by zero. She would say: "Nothing!" But I didn't believe her. I thought of division as a physical action. You could take a piece of bread and divide it by two, and you would have two pieces. "Nothing" happened when you divided something by one, the piece would stay intact then. Dividing by zero must have a different outcome! I kept pushing buttons on my mother's huge calculator, forcing it to divide something by zero again and again. It would beep and the screen would scream "error," as if guarding the answer from me, refusing to let me into this mystery. What was that mystery? I'd pester my mother. "Not all mysteries can be solved," she told me once. "Certain things are simply beyond our grasp or understanding."

Could the "Divide me by zero" card mean that she had finally been let in on that mystery? As she was about to die?

It's tempting to say that my mother started working on her last book right after she received her terminal diagnosis, but this wouldn't be true. It was good news that inspired her to start writing. The first flash card for my mother's book is dated December 10, the day her GE told her that she definitely didn't have cancer. He had scheduled the colonoscopy because the symptoms pointed to colorectal cancer. Turned out that she did have metastatic cancer at the time. Just not colorectal. Her cancer was someplace else, so the colonoscopy didn't show it. He couldn't see it.

My mother had told me about her symptoms too, but I didn't really believe her, because her symptoms appeared when I decided to leave Len. She was vehemently against the divorce, and I felt that she developed her symptoms to stop me or, if she failed to stop me, to punish me. We've had a history of doing that to each other—you'll see.

I wouldn't let her health worry me. I needed to focus on my divorce, which was a long time overdue. Sixteen years overdue to be precise.

On the day of my mother's colonoscopy I was hiding out in Victor's Manhattan apartment, fending off angry phone calls from Len. At one point Len called to tell me that he was going to take my kids away. I ran out on the roof terrace so I could listen to Len scream at me in private. The terrace was covered with snow. I was barefoot. The sun reflecting off the snow was blinding me, but my feet were freezing. I had to run across the terrace from one snowless spot to the next, hunched over as if it could shield me from the cold or Len's hatred. I was a monster, Len said. I had ruined his life and the kids would be better off if I died. The kids were at my uncle's place in the Poconos—I had sent them there so they could absorb and store as much normalcy as they could along with fresh mountain air. I had a quick scary thought that Len might drive there and kidnap them, but I managed to recognize this thought as crazy right away. As much as Len wanted to destroy me, he would've never done anything to hurt the kids. I imagined Len pacing across the living room of the New Jersey home of his skiing buddy. Pale, balding, scared, confused, holding on to the idea of me as a monster, because this was the only thing that dulled his pain. Fighting a devious monster must feel so much better than accepting the banal situation of his wife leaving him for another man. I hadn't loved Len for a long, long time, and I feared and hated him at the moment, but I also couldn't help but feel perverse affection for him. We'd been married for 17 years, we were used to taking care of each other. I felt like it was my duty to protect him from this pain, even though I was the one causing it. But then I knew that any gesture of kindness would only make his pain worse.

From Divide Me By Zero by Lara Vapnyar. Used with the permission of the publisher, Tin House Books. Copyright © 2019 by Lara Vapnyar.