Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

The first time her mother called her Stella, Desiree had just helped her into her chair. She was searching for the remote in the couch cushions but stopped suddenly.

“What?” she said. “What’d you call me?” She was so confused that she’d sputtered, “It’s me, Mama. Desiree.”

“Of course,” her mother said. “That’s what I meant.”

She seemed embarrassed by the slipup, as if it had only been poor manners. Dr. Brenner told them not to correct her mistakes. She said what she believed in her mind to be true; correcting her would only agitate or confuse her. And normally, Desiree didn’t. Not when her mother called Early Leon, not when she forgot the names for ordinary things—pan, pen, chair. But how could her mother forget her? The daughter who’d lived with her for the past twenty years? The one who cooked her meals, eased her into the bathtub, slowly administered her pills. Dr. Brenner said that was the nature of the disease.

“The far stuff, they remember,” he said. “Nobody knows why. It’s like they’re living their lives backward.”

Here was the backward story: the present and its tedium receding, all those doctor visits, the endless pills, the strange man shining lights in her eyes, the television programs she could never follow, the daughter watching her, rising each time Adele lifted out of her chair, any time Adele tried to go anywhere. She found herself in the strangest places. She went out to take a walk and fell asleep in a field for hours until the daughter, crying, wrapped her in a blanket and brought her home. She was a baby, maybe. The girl was her mother, or her sister. Her face switched each time Adele looked at her. Once there had been two. Or maybe there still was, maybe every time she closed her eyes, a new one appeared. She only remembered the name of one. Stella. Starlight, burning and distant.

“Where did you go, Stella?” she asked once.

This was toward the end, or, rather, the beginning. She was waiting for Leon to come home from the store. He had promised her daffodils. Stella was sitting next to her, rubbing a powdery lotion into her hands.

“Nowhere, Mama,” she said. She wouldn’t look at her. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

“You did,” Adele said. “You went somewhere—”

But she couldn’t think of where. Stella climbed into bed with her, wrapping her arms around her.

“No,” she said. “I never left.”

—

DESIREE VIGNES UP and left Mallard, people would say, as if there were anything abrupt about her departure. No one had expected her to stay past a year; she’d remained for almost twenty. Then her mother died, and she decided, finally, that she’d had enough. Maybe she couldn’t live in her childhood house after losing both her parents, although their final moments could not have been more different. Her father died in the hospital, staring into the faces of his killers. Her mother had simply gone to sleep and not woken up. She might have still been dreaming.

But it wasn’t only the memories that pushed her out. She was thinking, instead, of the future. For once in her life, looking forward. So after she buried her mother, she sold the house, and she and Early moved to Houston. He found a job at the Conoco refinery, and she worked at a call center. She had not worked in an office in thirty years. Her first morning, she shivered under the air-conditioning as she reached for the phone, trying to remember her script. But her supervisor, a thirtysomething blonde girl, told her that she was doing a fine job. She stared at her desk, shadowed by the praise.

“I don’t know,” she told her daughter. “It just seemed like time to move on.”

“But you like it there?”

“It’s different. The traffic. The noise. All the people. It’s been awhile, you know, since I been around so many people.”

“I know, Mama. But you like it?”

“Sometimes I think I should’ve left sooner. For you and for me. We could’ve been anywhere. I could’ve been like Stella, lived a big life.”

“I’m glad you’re not like her,” her daughter said. “I’m glad I ended up with you.”

At the call center, she sat down each morning to dial the lists of phone numbers. It wasn’t easy work, her young supervisor told her on her first day. You have to be okay with rejection, people hanging up on you, cursing you out.

“Won’t be worse than nothin folks have said to my face,” she said, and the supervisor laughed. She liked Desiree. All the young girls did. Called her Mama D.

After her first week, she’d memorized the script, reciting it to herself when she sat on the bench outside the office, waiting for Early to pick her up. Hello Name—you were always supposed to personalize it—my name is Desiree Vignes with Royal Travel here in Houston. As a seasonal promotion, we’re giving away three days and two nights of hotel accommodations in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area. Now I’m sure you’re thinking what’s the catch, right? She always paused here, laughing a little, which either endeared her to the caller or gave him an opportunity to hang up. She was surprised by how often they stayed on the line.

“You got a sweet little voice,” Early told her once, grinning at her across their porch.

But what seemed more likely is that people were lonely. Sometimes, she imagined cold-calling Stella. Would she recognize her voice? Would it still sound like her own? Or would Stella sound like a lonely person who wanted her to keep talking, just to hear another voice on the line?

—

ADELE VIGNES WAS BURIED on the colored side of St. Paul’s Cemetery. Nobody expected any different. This was the way it had always been, the white folks in the north side, the colored folks in the south. Nobody complained until the year the eucharistic ministers at the white church that owned the cemetery cleaned tombstones for All Souls Day but only on the north side. When Mallard protested, the deacon did not want a fight, so he dispatched two grumbling altar boys with sloshing buckets to scrub the headstones on the colored side too. Jude almost laughed when her mother had told her—that was the solution, not desegregating the graveyard, just cleaning the headstones on both sides. A strong hurricane could flood the cemetery, the old caskets swinging open, filling with brown water. Some gravedigger rooting through the mud for gold watches and diamond rings, marveling over his good fortune, would step over bones, not knowing the difference.

At the cemetery, she watched Reese lift her grandmother, Early lined up across from him, four other pallbearers behind. Across the open earth, the priest blessed the body, his hand tracing the sign of the cross through the air, and like that, her grandmother was lowered into the earth. She rubbed her mother’s back, hoping that she wouldn’t turn around. She couldn’t look at her face, not right now. During the service, she’d held her hand, imagining another woman sitting in that pew, Stella worrying her fingers along a strand of rosary beads, joining her sister in silent grief.

At the repast, the town gathered inside Adele Vignes’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mallard’s lost daughter. She was in medical school now, they’d heard from her mother; half the room expected her to walk in wearing a white coat. The other half was skeptical, figuring that Desiree Vignes was exaggerating. How could that dark girl have done all those things Desiree said?

But they did not find her amongst the dead. She had slipped out the back door with her boyfriend, holding his hand as they ran through the woods toward the river. The sun was beginning to set, and under the tangerine sky, Reese tugged his undershirt over his head. The sun warmed his chest, still paler than the rest of him. In time, his scars would fade, his skin darkening. She would look at him and forget that there had ever been a time he’d hidden from her.