Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

“That’s not young?” she said.

He didn’t answer, and she wished she hadn’t said anything at all.

On the weekends, she attended impassioned meetings held by activists who organized petitions and letter-writing campaigns and demonstrations intended to shame the government out of its indifference. She volunteered with a student group that handed out condoms and clean needles in downtown Minneapolis. She visited patients who had no family, brought them magazines and playing cards. She thought about death constantly, and still, only on the afternoon that her grandmother died did she find herself unable to touch the cadaver. It was silly, but she couldn’t even look at him. She kept imagining her grandmother lying lifeless on a slab somewhere. Maman would never donate her body to research. She would hate the idea of strangers touching her, and besides, she was a Catholic who still believed that cremation was a sin. On Judgment Day, her body would be resurrected, so she needed to keep it intact.

“Just bury me in the backyard in an old pine box,” Maman used to say. This was years ago, when her grandmother began to realize that she was sick. Her memories ebbing and flowing like the tide.

That whole year, Jude had read every book she could find on Alzheimer’s disease. She studied the illness desperately, as if understanding it would make any difference. It didn’t, of course. She was only a first-year student and she wanted to be a cardiologist, anyway. The heart was a muscle she understood. The brain baffled her. Still, she borrowed books from the medical library, reading all she could. Inside her grandmother’s brain, protein fragments hardened into plaques between nerve cells. Brain tissue shrank. Cells in the hippocampus degenerated. Eventually, as the disease spread through the cerebral cortex, her grandmother would lose the ability to perform routine tasks. She would lose her judgment, control of her emotions, language. She would not be able to feed herself, recognize people, control bodily functions. She would lose her memory. She would lose herself.

“Don’t you waste all that money on me,” her grandmother had said. “I won’t be around to see none of it.”

She didn’t care about the outfit she was buried in, what Scripture might be engraved on the headstone, which flowers adorned her. But no cremation, absolutely not. She was adamant about that. Jude never pressed her even though she didn’t understand. If God could reassemble a decaying corpse, then why couldn’t he reanimate ashes? But she didn’t want to picture this either, her grandmother burned, flecks of bone and skin swirling in an urn. She left lab early.

At home, Reese stirred soup over the stove. He was shirtless, barefoot in jeans. He was always shirtless these days. You would’ve thought they were living in a cabana in Miami, not freezing in the north.

“You’re gonna catch pneumonia,” she said.

He smiled, shrugging. “I just got out the shower.”

His hair was still wet, tiny beads of water dotting his shoulders. She wrapped her arms around his waist, kissing his damp back.

“My grandma died,” she said.

“Jesus.” He turned to face her. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “She’s been sick—”

“Still. Are you all right? How’s your mama?”

“She’s fine. Everyone’s fine. The funeral’s Friday. I wanna fly down.”

“Of course. You should. Why didn’t you call me?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking. I couldn’t even look at the cadaver. Isn’t that stupid? I mean, I knew it was a dead body before. What makes today any different?”

“What do you mean?” he said. “Today is different.”

“We weren’t really that close.”

“Don’t matter,” he said, pulling her into a hug. “Kin is kin.”

—

THAT AFTERNOON, in a Burbank makeup trailer, the telephone rang seven times before the hairdresser yanked it off the hook, then shoved it at the blonde sitting in his chair. “I’m not your personal secretary,” he whispered loudly, handing over the phone. He didn’t know why the talent—which she was, in spite of his own taste—didn’t respect his time, why she was always late, why she didn’t tell her stalker boyfriend, or whoever kept calling, to bother her later. She told him that she wasn’t expecting a call but rose to answer anyway, hair half teased in a style that would mortify her decades later when she saw grainy clips from Pacific Cove on the internet.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s Jude,” the voice said. “Your grandma died.”

Stupidly, Kennedy thought first about her father’s mother, who’d died when she was little, her first funeral. It was the your that threw her off, not our grandmother. Her grandmother, the one she had never met. Would never meet. Dead. She leaned against the counter, covering her eyes.

“Oh Christ,” she said.

The hairdresser, sensing tragedy on the other end of the line, excused himself. Finally alone, Kennedy reached for a pack of cigarettes. She’d been trying to kick the habit. Her mother finally succeeded, now she nagged her about it all the time. Sometimes she told herself she’d quit cold turkey. She’d throw out every pack of cigarettes she owned. Then she’d always find loose ones hidden in her drawers, in the glove compartment of her car, tucked away for her future self. She felt like a junkie, really. Quitting was the only time she felt addicted. But she could quit later. Her grandmother had died. She deserved a cigarette, didn’t she?

“You should really work on your bedside manner,” she said.

On the other end of the line, she imagined Jude smiling.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know any other way to put it.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Okay, I think.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. She’s your grandmother too.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “I didn’t know her like you did.”

“Well, I still thought you should know.”

“Okay,” she said. “I know.”

“Are you gonna tell her?”

Kennedy laughed. “When do I tell her anything?”

She did not tell her mother, for example, that she still talked to Jude. Not all the time but often enough. Sometimes Kennedy called her, left messages on her answering machine. Hey Jude, she said, every time, because she knew it drove her crazy. Sometimes Jude phoned first. Their conversations always went like this one—halting, a little combative, familiar. They never talked long, never made plans to meet, and at times, the calls seemed more perfunctory than anything, like holding a finger to another’s wrist to feel for a pulse. A few minutes they kept their fingers pressed there and then they let go.

They did not tell their mothers about these phone calls. They would both keep that secret to the ends of the twins’ separate lives.

“Maybe she’d want to know this,” Jude said.

“Trust me, she doesn’t,” Kennedy said. “You don’t know her like I do.”

Secrets were the only language they spoke. Her mother showed her love by lying, and in turn, Kennedy did the same. She never mentioned the funeral photograph again, although she’d kept that faded picture of the twins, although she would study it the night her grandmother died and not tell a soul.

“I don’t know her at all,” Jude said.

—

THAT NIGHT, late in bed, Jude asked Reese to fly home with her.

She was tracing her finger along his thick eyebrows, the beard he hadn’t trimmed in so long, she’d started calling him a lumberjack. He was changing, always. His jawline sharper now, his muscles firmer, the hair on his arms so thick that he couldn’t walk across the carpet without shocking her. He even smelled different. She noticed every little change about him since they’d broken up, right before she moved to Minnesota. He didn’t want to leave his life in Los Angeles. He didn’t want to follow her to the Midwest, hanging off her like dead weight. One day, he told her, she would wake up and realize that she could do much better than him.