Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

“I had to keep going,” Stella said. “You can’t turn back when you have a family. When you have people that depend on you.”

“You had a family,” Desiree said.

“Oh, that’s not what I mean,” Stella said, looking away. “It’s different with a child. You know that.”

But what was different, exactly? A sister easier to shed than a daughter, a mother than a husband. What made her so easy to give away? But she didn’t ask this, of course. She would have felt even more like a child than she already did, glancing over her shoulder to make sure her mother didn’t catch her drinking.

“So it’s you and Mr. Sanders—”

“Blake.”

“You and Blake and—”

“We have a daughter,” Stella said. “Kennedy.”

Desiree tried to imagine her. For some reason, she could only envision a proper little white girl posed on a piano bench, her hands folded on her lap just so.

“So what’s she like?” Desiree said. “Your girl.”

“Willful. Charming. She’s an actor.”

“An actor!”

“She does little plays in New York. Not Broadway or anything.”

“Still,” Desiree said. “An actor. Maybe you can bring her next time.”

She knew she’d said the wrong thing when Stella glanced away. A tiny look, but one that Desiree could still read. When their eyes met again, Stella’s were full of tears.

“You know I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Your daughter—”

“What about her?”

“She found me, Desiree. In Los Angeles. That’s why I’m here.”

Desiree scoffed. How could Jude have found Stella? Her daughter, a college student, stumbling upon her in a city as large as Los Angeles. And even if she had, somehow, found Stella, her daughter would have told her. She never would’ve kept a secret like that from her.

“She didn’t tell you,” Stella said. “I don’t blame her. I was awful. I didn’t mean to be—I was scared, some girl showing up out of nowhere, saying she knows me. She looks nothing like you, you know that. What was I supposed to think? But she found my daughter. Told her all about me, about Mallard. Then she pops up again in New York—”

Desiree pushed off the porch step. She had to call Jude. She didn’t care that it was late, that she was tipsy, that Stella was miraculously sitting on her front porch. But Stella grabbed her wrist.

“Desiree, please,” she said. “Just listen to me. Just be reasonable—”

“I been reasonable!”

“She’ll never stop! Your girl will keep trying to tell mine the truth and it’s too late for all that now. Can’t you see that?”

“Oh sure, it’s the end of the world. Your girl finding out she ain’t so lily white—”

“That I lied to her,” Stella said. “She’ll never forgive me. You don’t understand, Desiree. You’re a good mother, I can see that. Your girl loves you. That’s why she didn’t tell you about me. But I haven’t been a good one. I spent so long hiding—”

“Because you chose to! You wanted to!”

“I know,” Stella said. “I know but please. Please, Desiree. Don’t take her away from me.”

She bent over, crying into her hands, and exhausted, Desiree returned to the step beside her. She wrapped an arm around Stella’s shoulders, staring at the nape of her neck, pretending not to see the gray hair threading through the black. She’d always felt like the older sister, even though she only was by a matter of minutes. But maybe in those seven minutes they’d first been apart, they’d each lived a lifetime, setting out on their separate paths. Each discovering who she might be.

—

IN THE BEGINNING, Early Jones could never fall asleep in the Vignes house. The comfort disturbed him. He was used to sleeping under the stars or cramped in his car or lying on a hard prison cot. Or before all that, piled on a mattress stuffed with Spanish moss, beside eight of his siblings, whose names he no longer remembered, let alone their faces. He was not used to this: a big bed and homemade quilt, the headboard carved by a man nobody talked about but who lingered still in all the furniture. At first, he would lie in bed beside Desiree, under a roof that did not leak, and chase hopelessly after sleep. Sometimes he ended up pacing in front, smoking cigarettes at three in the morning, feeling as if the house itself had rejected him. Other times, he fell asleep on the porch and didn’t wake up until Desiree tripped over him the next morning.

“He’s like a wild dog,” he’d heard Adele tell her. “You give him a nice bed, he still feel better sleepin in the dirt.”

She wasn’t wrong. He was a hunter, after all. He wasn’t built for soft quilts and roomy chairs. He only felt like himself with his nose pressed to the trail. Which was why, the next morning, when he heard Stella sneaking out the front door, he followed her outside.

“Mighty early for the train,” he said.

She jolted, almost dropping her little bag. She looked shamed that he’d caught her.

“I have to get back home,” she said.

“Ain’t right to leave like this,” he said. “Without sayin good-bye.”

“It’s the only way,” she said. “If I have to tell her good-bye, I’ll never leave and I have to. I have to go back to my life.”

He understood. In spite of himself, he did. Maybe that was the only way his parents could’ve dumped him. If they’d told him good-bye, he would’ve hollered, clinging to their legs. He would’ve never let them go.

“You need a ride?” he said.

She glanced toward the dark woods and nodded. He led Stella to his car. He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough. He drove Stella past the bus stop, all the way to the train station. She sat in the front seat of his beat-up ride, both hands clutching the bag in her lap.

“I never meant it to be this way,” she said.

He grunted. He didn’t want to look at her as she climbed out of his car. He didn’t want to be the only one to tell her good-bye. He already knew then that he would lie to Desiree when he came home. Pretend he hadn’t heard Stella inching across the hall. The same way he knew, when Stella slid her wedding ring into his palm, that he would never tell Desiree about it.

“Sell it,” she said, not looking at him. “Take care of Mama.”

He tried to hand the ring back to her but by then, Stella was climbing out of his car, Stella walking into the train station, Stella disappearing behind the glass doors. That diamond ring felt cold in his palm. He had no idea what something like that could be worth, and he wouldn’t know for sure until weeks later, when he had it appraised. That bald white man staring at it through his magnifying glass, gazing back at Early warily and asking how he came by the ring again. Passed down through the family, Early told him. Like most truths, it sounded a little phony.

—

WHEN DESIREE WOKE that morning, she reached across the bed and felt nothing but air. She wasn’t surprised, but she still cried out, touching the empty space across the bed. The night before, she had fallen asleep across from her sister, two women squeezed onto a bed that was far too small. Stella in her old spot, Desiree in the place she’d slept for years. For hours, they stayed up, whispering in the dark until their vision blurred, neither wanting to be the first to close her eyes.

—

A MONTH AFTER Stella returned to Mallard, her daughter finally called home and announced that she was moving back to California. Her thing with Frantz—and wasn’t it just like her, to call a serious relationship a “thing”?—had run its course, she’d spent all her money in Europe, her heart wasn’t in musical theater anymore. She offered up a few different excuses but Stella, listening, her heart in her throat, didn’t care why. She didn’t even care that her daughter hadn’t said that she wanted to be close to her parents, that she missed them. She had gone home and now her daughter was coming home too. The two events were unconnected, of course, but in her mind, she bound them together, one return triggering the other. She canceled her afternoon class to meet Kennedy outside LAX. Then there she was, walking through the terminal, lugging a bulging suitcase. She was thinner now and she’d cut her hair, blonde waves falling halfway down her neck.