The Vanishing Half: A Novel (32 page)

A
LZ
HEIMER
’
S DISEASE WAS
HEREDITARY
, which meant that Desiree would always worry about developing it. She would begin filling out crossword puzzles because she’d read in some women’s magazine that brain puzzles could help prevent memory loss.

“You’ve got to exercise your brain,” she would tell her daughter, “just like any other muscle.”

Her daughter didn’t have the heart to tell her that the brain was, in fact, not a muscle. She tried her best to help her with the clues while she imagined Stella out in the world somewhere, already forgetting.

J
UDE
W
IN
STON
’
S HOMETOWN
, which had never been a town at all, no longer existed. And yet, it still looked the same. She stared out the window of Early’s truck, which surprised her when he’d met them in Lafayette. She still expected the El Camino. “That car’s older than you,” Early said, laughing. “I had to junk it.” He was wearing his refinery coveralls, which also struck her, Early in a uniform. He pumped Reese’s hand and pulled her into a hug, kissing her forehead. His beard scratchy like she’d remembered it.

“Look at you,” he said. “All grown up. Can’t hardly believe it.”

He still looked strong even though his hair was beginning to gray, silver creeping up his sideburns, threading through his beard. When she teased him about it, he laughed, touching his chin. “I’m gonna cut it off,” he said. “Rather walk around babyfaced than lookin like Santa Claus.”

“How’s Mama?” she said.

He wiped his forehead, pushing back his baseball cap.

“Oh she all right,” he said. “You know your mama. She tough. She’ll push through.”

“I wish I’d been here,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if she meant that. She’d never known what to say around her grandmother anyway. But she wished she could have been there for her mother, who was never supposed to endure this alone. There were supposed to be two women comforting her grandmother at the end, one on each side of the bed, one holding each hand.

“It’s all right,” Early said. “Nothin you could’ve done. We just glad to have you now.”

She squeezed Reese’s thigh. He squeezed hers back. He was staring out the window, lips slightly parted. She knew he missed this, not sun-dappled beaches or frozen city sidewalks but brown countryside rolling flat into acres of woods. The white shotgun house appeared, looking the same as she’d remembered, which seemed wrong since her grandmother would not be sitting on the porch to greet them. Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles.

You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

S
HE SPENT THE EVENI
NG
helping her mother cook for the repast. Early went to finalize everything at the funeral home and brought
Reese with him. She stared out the kitchen window, watching both men climb into the truck, wondering what on earth they’d find to talk about.

“Y’all still happy?” her mother said. “He treat you good?”

Desiree wasn’t looking at her, bent over the oven to pull out the tray of yams.

“He loves me,” Jude said.

“That’s not what I asked. That’s two separate things. You think you can’t ever hurt nobody you love?”

Jude chopped celery for the potato salad, feeling that familiar surge of guilt. Four years she’d known about Stella and hadn’t said a word. She’d never expected that Stella would reemerge on her own, that one morning her mother would call her, fighting tears, and expose her lies. She’d apologized as much as she could, but even though her mother said she forgave her, she knew that something had shifted between them. She’d grown up in her mother’s eyes, no longer her daughter but a separate woman, complete with her own secrets.

“Do you think—” She paused, scraping the celery into a bowl. “Do you think Daddy loved you?”

“I think everybody who ever hurt me loved me,” her mother said.

“Do you think he loved me?”

Her mother touched her cheek. “Yes,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait around to see.”

T
HE MORNING OF T
HE FUNERAL
, Jude awoke in her grandmother’s bed because, her mother told her, two unmarried people would not be sharing the same bed in her house. She was still trying to nudge them down the aisle, if a statement that obvious could be considered a nudge. She did not know that Jude and Reese had talked, once or twice, about marriage. They wouldn’t be able to, not without a new
birth certificate for Reese, but still they talked about it, the way children talk about weddings. Wistfully. Her mother thought they were hip intellectuals who considered themselves too cool for marriage. Which was better than her understanding just how romantic they were.

Jude carried clean sheets to her old bedroom, helped Reese make the bed, not even pointing out that her mother and Early were also unmarried, in the eyes of the law and the Church. She couldn’t fall asleep until morning. She wondered, foolishly, if she might feel her grandmother’s presence somehow. But she felt nothing and that was worse.

In the hallway, she turned, pinning back her hair, while Reese zipped her black dress.

“I could hardly sleep last night,” she said. “Without you there.”

He kissed the back of her neck. He was wearing his good black suit. Her mother had asked him to help carry the casket. She’d heard them talking last night in the kitchen while she brushed her teeth. Her mother told Reese that she considered him a son, wedding or not, but she hoped at least that he wouldn’t make her wait forever to become a grandmother.

“I’m not sayin it has to be now,” her mother was saying. “I know y’all both busy. But someday, that’s all. Before I’m old and gray and can’t hardly move around. You would make a good daddy, don’t you think?”

He was quiet a minute. “I hope so,” he said.

N
EAR THE END OF HER LIFE
, Adele Vignes had told Desiree stories about her childhood that were so vivid, Desiree wondered if her mother was confusing them with her soap operas. A girl she’d hated in school who’d tried to push her down a well. Her brothers dressed in all black to steal coal. A poor boy bringing her a carnation corsage
for senior prom. She’d bring up one of these anecdotes in front of the television, where she sat watching her soaps each afternoon. The shows seemed like the perfect form for her. Each day, the stories inching forward, but at the end of the week, the world essentially unchanged, the characters exactly who they had always been.

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.”

D
ESIR
EE
V
IGNES 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?

A
DELE
V
IGNES 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.