Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

Kennedy laughed. “Well, that’s a goddamn understatement.”

“But if you’d just meet me for ten minutes, I have something to show you.”

Her mother had called Jude crazy. Maybe she was. But she was already reeling Kennedy back in. She could have hung up. She could have hung up right then and never spoken to her again. She could have tried to forget about her. But Jude was offering her a key to understanding her mother. How could she say no to that so easily?

“I can’t right now,” she said. “I’m at work.”

“After, then.”

“I have a show after.”

“Where?” Jude said. “Reese and I will come. It’s not sold out already, is it?”

The company hadn’t sold out a single show yet, but still, Kennedy paused, as if she were thinking.

“Maybe not,” she said. “Usually there are a few tickets left.”

“Great,” Jude said. “We’ll come tonight. We’ve been wanting to see a real show while we’re in New York City and all.”

She sounded unbearably innocent, not like the steely, guarded girl Kennedy knew. She was almost charmed by it, but mostly, she felt like she’d found her sure footing again. She gave Jude the name of the theater and told her that she had to go.

“All right,” Jude said. “We’ll see you tonight. And Kennedy?”

“Seriously, I’ve got to go—”

“All right, I’m sorry. I just—well, I’m looking forward to it. Seeing you act again, I mean. I loved your last show.”

She hated how good that made her feel. She hung up without saying good-bye.

Fifteen

In Pacific Cove , Charity Harris was the girl next door, meaning half the fans loved her and the other half found her a total bore. When she disappeared on a cruise ship during her final appearance, Kennedy even received fan letters rejoicing in her misfortune. At the time, it hadn’t bothered her. She didn’t care if fans loved or hated her, it was attention all the same, and nobody had ever felt strongly enough about a character she’d played to write her about it. Still, she’d hoped, driving off the studio lot, that this wouldn’t be Charity’s last scene.

“This is the soaps,” the director told her. “Nothing’s final but a cancellation.”

Charity deserved a better end, she would drunkenly tell friends at bars, well into her forties, far beyond when it was appropriate for her to still care so much. Even if she couldn’t hope for Charity’s miraculous return—a fate that every actor killed off a soap dreamt about—she at least wanted Charity’s story wrapped up neatly, some bullshit chyron about the girl leaving Pacific Cove, moving to Peru to raise llamas, she really didn’t care what.

“But just disappearing?” she said once. “Into the ocean? And that’s it? I mean, what the fuck.”

“ Deserve is a bullshit term,” her yoga instructor boyfriend said. “None of us deserves anything. We get what we get.”

Maybe she felt Charity was robbed because she’d been such a nice girl. A better girl than Kennedy, certainly, who had made her share of mistakes. She’d slept with two married directors, stolen money from her parents when she was too proud to ask for more loans, lied to friends about audition times so she would have a leg up. But Charity was sweet. She’d met the love of her life, show hunk Lance Garrison, when she was rescuing a drowning dog, for God’s sake. Yet when she disappeared, Lance only waited half a season before he was making eyes at the detective’s sultry daughter. Five years later, the two had a big wedding that broke a Pacific Cove ratings record—twenty million viewers, according to TV Guide , which included the wedding in its fifty top soap-opera moments of all time. The episode was even nominated for an Emmy! And in all the glowing reviews, no one even mentioned Charity, or the fact that the happy couple would have never found each other if Charity hadn’t stepped onto that cruise ship, waving gleefully from the deck as she floated out into daytime television heaven.

Perhaps, even more than the lost job, she was peeved that she hadn’t starred in a big soap-opera wedding. She was more upset about that than the fact that she never married in real life.

“I never play the girl next door,” a black guest star told her once. “I guess no one wants to live next door to me.”

Pam Reed smiled wryly at the craft-service table, popping a cherry tomato between her lips. She was a real actor, Kennedy overheard two grips saying. In the 1970s, she’d played a policewoman in a popular action movie franchise until the villain shot her in the third film. Then she’d been a judge on a network legal drama. She would play judges throughout the rest of her career, and sometimes Kennedy flipped on the television and saw Pam Reed on the bench, leaning forward sternly, her hand under her chin.

“TV loves a black woman judge,” Pam told her. “It’s funny—can you imagine what this world would look like if we decided what’s fair?”

She’d played a judge on Pacific Cove that afternoon. Even between takes, she was intimidating in her long black robe, which was why Kennedy, reaching for a cluster of grapes, said the first stupid thing that came to her mind.

“I lived next door to a black family,” she said. “Well, across the street. The daughter’s name was Cindy—she was my first friend, really.”

She didn’t tell Pam that their friendship had ended when, in a fit of childish rage, she’d called Cindy a nigger. She still cringed when she remembered Cindy bursting into tears. She had, ridiculously, started crying too and her mother had slapped her—the first and only time she’d ever struck her. The slap confused her less than the kiss after, her mother’s anger and love colliding together so violently. At the time, she’d thought saying nigger was as bad as repeating any swear word; her mother would have been just as upset and embarrassed had she hollered fuck in that cul-de-sac. But after Jude, Kennedy remembered the look on her mother’s face when she’d dragged her into the house. She was angry, yes, but more than that, she looked terrified. Frightened by her own emotion or, more disturbingly, by her daughter, who had revealed herself to be something so ugly.

She never said the word again, not in passing, not repeating jokes, not until Frantz asked her to in bed. It was like a game, he’d told her, stroking her back, because he knew she didn’t mean it. She didn’t know why she was thinking of Frantz now. Saying that word to him was different than saying it to Cindy. Wasn’t it?

Pam Reed just laughed a little, dabbing her mouth with a cocktail napkin.

“Lucky her,” she said.

—

THE NIGHT JUDE WINSTON CAME to her show, Kennedy left her body onstage.

Any actor could tell you this had happened to him before—better actors had experienced it much earlier in their careers, she was sure. That winter night was the first time she truly knew what it felt like to step outside of herself. Singing felt like breathing, dancing as natural as walking. When she sang her duet with Randy the Farmhand—a lanky drama student at NYU—she felt, almost, as if she were falling in love with him. After the curtain call, the cast surrounded her with cheers, and part of her knew, even then, that it was the greatest performance she would ever give. And she’d only managed it because she knew that somewhere, in the darkened theater, Jude was watching.

In the dressing room, she changed slowly, the magic from the stage disappearing. Frantz would be waiting for her in the lobby. On Thursday nights, he came by after his office hours. He would tell her that she’d been good tonight, great even. He would notice a difference in her, might even wonder what had caused it. And there, waiting also in the lobby, would be Jude and Reese. What she hadn’t expected was to find all three waiting together, Frantz grinning as he waved her over.