The Vanishing Half Read online

  Inside the department store, Desiree had wandered, walking slowly down the perfume aisle. She knew that Stella worked in an office on one of the top floors but she didn’t know which one. In the lobby, she studied the directory so long, the brusque security guard asked what her business was. She’d faltered, afraid to expose Stella, and he finally shooed her away.

  “Too pushy,” Early said. “You gotta have a soft touch. You come across too desperate, folks sense it. Clam up.”

  They were sitting in a café across the street from Maison Blanche. She’d barely touched her espresso. She was still thinking about the white man Farrah saw Stella with. How happy she’d looked. She didn’t want to be found. What was Desiree doing, trying to drag her back into a life she no longer wanted?

  “You gotta go in there like somebody they tell things to,” he said. “Somebody that gets what she wants.”

  “Be white, you mean.”

  He nodded. “Easier that way,” he said. “I can’t go in with you. Give you away. But you just go in, say you lookin for somebody. An old friend. Not your sister, that raise too many questions. Tell ’em you lost touch, somethin like that. Just keep it light, breezy. Like a white lady with no worry on her mind.”

  So she imagined herself as Stella—not the Stella she once knew but Stella as she was now. Pushing past the giant brass MB door handles, stepping inside the department store. She passed through the perfume aisle with the confidence of a woman who could buy any bottle she wished. She stopped to smell a few, as if she were considering a purchase. Admired the jewelry in the display case, glanced at the fine handbags, demurred when salesgirls approached her. In the lobby, the colored elevator operator gazed at the floor when she stepped on. She ignored him, the way Stella might have. She felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were.

  When she entered the first office level, a white security guard hurried over to help her. She played back Early’s words. Light, breezy, no worry on her mind. She told him that she was looking for an old friend who used to work in marketing.

  Of course he couldn’t find a Stella Vignes in the building directory, but he gave her directions to the department. She rode the elevator to the sixth floor, and when she stepped inside the office, she braced herself for someone to mistake her for Stella. But the redheaded secretary just smiled at her pleasantly.

  “I’m lookin for an old friend,” Desiree said. “She used to be a secretary here.”

  “And what’s the name?”

  “Stella Vignes.” She glanced around the quiet office, as if by speaking her name, she might have conjured her.

  “Stella Vignes,” the secretary repeated, turning to a file cabinet behind her. She hummed to herself as she searched, the only other sounds the gentle clacking of typewriters. Desiree tried to imagine Stella in a place like this. Joining the ranks of other polite white girls sitting at their desks.

  The secretary returned to her seat holding a file folder.

  “No current address, I’m afraid,” she said. “Our last few Christmas cards returned to sender.”

  She was so apologetic, so sorry that she could only give Desiree the most recent address she had on file, a card filled out in Stella’s careful handwriting with a forwarding address leading her to Boston, Massachusetts.

  * * *

  —

  “AIN’T NO SMOKIN GUN,” Early said that night. “But it’s a start.”

  They were sitting together in a darkened booth at the Surly Goat, Early sipping his whiskey slowly. In the morning, he’d be gone again, a new job carrying him off to Durham. But after that, he would go to that address in Boston, see what he could dig up there. She couldn’t imagine how Stella found herself in that city of all places, but it didn’t matter. That scrap of paper held more new information about Stella than Desiree had ever learned.

  She felt, again, overwhelmed by Early’s help, unsure of how she could ever manage to thank him. After they finished their drinks, she walked him to the boardinghouse. He tucked her hand under his arm as they climbed up the muddy steps and she didn’t pull away, not even once they were inside his room. She wasn’t drunk but the room suddenly felt hot. She hadn’t undressed in front of a strange man in years.

  Slowly, then. He was leaning against the worn dresser, waiting, and she pressed against him, trailing her hand down his stomach. He stopped her at his belt.

  “It’s just a start,” he said. “I ain’t no closer to findin her.”

  He held on to her hand, as if he understood that this was a condition for them to go any further.

  “All right,” she said.

  “I might not. She might just be gone. You know that, right?”

  She paused. “I know.”

  “I’ll look as long as you want me to,” he said. “Tell me to stop and I’ll stop.”

  She wrested her hand free, slipping it under his black T-shirt. Her fingers brushed against a rough scar stretching across his stomach. He shivered.

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  Part II

  MAPS

  (1978)

  Four

  In the autumn of 1978, a dark girl blew into Los Angeles from a town that existed on no maps.

  She rode a Greyhound all the way from this unmapped place, her two suitcases rattling in the undercarriage. A girl from nowhere and nothing, and if you’d asked any of the other passengers, they would have noticed nothing interesting about her except that she was so, well, black. Aside from that, quiet. Flipping through a worn detective novel that her mother’s boyfriend had given her for her seventeenth birthday, which she was reading for the second time to find all the clues she’d missed. At rest stops, she clamped that book under her arm, walking in slow circles to stretch her legs. Twitchy. She reminded the Italian bus driver of a cheetah pacing around a cage. He wouldn’t have been surprised at all to learn that she was a runner—that lean, boyish body, those long legs. He smoked his cigarette, watching her make another lap around the bus. Too bad, those legs with that face. That skin. Jesus, he’d never seen a woman that black before.

  She didn’t notice the bus driver watching her. She barely noticed anyone staring at her at all anymore, or if she did, she knew exactly why they were looking. She was impossible to miss. Dark, yes, but also tall and rangy, just like her father, whom she had not seen or heard from in ten years. She took another slow lap, trying to find her place in that dog-eared book with the cracked spine. She’d loved detective stories ever since she was little; she used to sit on the porch while her mother’s boyfriend cleaned his gun and told her about the men he hunted.

  Later, it’d seem like a strange bonding activity for a grown man and a little girl, but she’d already learned that Early Jones was a strange man. Not her father but the closest to it she would ever come. She liked watching him slowly disassemble the gun while she peppered him with questions. You could find just about anybody if you were good at lying, he told her. Half of hunting was pretending to be somebody else, an old friend searching for his buddy’s address, a long-lost nephew trying to find his uncle’s new phone number, a father inquiring about the whereabouts of his son. There was always someone close to the mark that you could manipulate. Always a window in if you couldn’t find a door.

  “Ain’t that exciting,” he told her, chewing on a toothpick. “Most of it just sweet-talkin old ladies on the phone.”

  He made finding the lost sound so easy that once, she’d asked if he could search for her daddy. He didn’t look up at her, swabbing his brush inside the gun barrel.

  “You don’t want me to go lookin for him,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he said. “He’s not a nice man.”

  He was right, of course, but she hated how certain he was. How could he possibly know? He’d never even met her daddy.

  She’d always im
agined her father driving up in his shiny Buick to rescue her. She’d step out of school one day and find him waiting. Her father, tall and handsome, smiling at her, arms open. The other kids would gawk. Then he’d bring her back to D.C., and she’d go to school and make friends and date boys and run track and go off to college in a place so unlike Mallard that she would hardly believe that Mallard even existed, that she hadn’t just imagined it.

  But ten years passed, no phone calls or letters. In the end, she rescued herself. She won a gold medal in the 400 meters at the state championship meet, and miracle of miracles, college recruiters saw her. She’d run as hard as she could and now she was getting the hell out. At the bus station, she’d stood at the base of the metal steps while Early loaded her suitcases. Her grandmother slipped her rosary over her neck before her mother pulled her into a hug.

  “I still don’t know why you wanna go all the way out to California,” she said. “There’s some perfectly good schools right here.”

  She laughed a little, as if she were kidding, as if she hadn’t been trying to convince Jude to stay. They both knew that she couldn’t. She’d already accepted the track scholarship from UCLA—as if she could even think about turning it down—and now she was standing in front of a bus, waiting to climb on.

  “I’ll call,” she said. “And write.”

  “You better.”

  “It’ll be fine, Mama. I’ll come back and see you.”

  But they both knew that she’d never come back to Mallard. On the bus, she fiddled with the rosary beads, imagining her mother traveling away from Mallard on a bus like this. Except she hadn’t been alone, Stella beside her staring out into the dark. Jude held the worn paperback in her lap, pressing against the filmy window. She’d never seen a desert before—it seemed to stretch on forever. Another mile ticked by, carrying her further from her life.

  * * *

  —

  THEY CALLED HER TAR BABY.

  Midnight. Darky. Mudpie. Said, Smile, we can’t see you. Said, You so dark you blend into the chalkboard. Said, Bet you could show up naked to a funeral. Bet lightning bugs follow you in the daytime. Bet when you swim it look like oil. They made up lots of jokes, and once, well into her forties, she would recite a litany of them at a dinner party in San Francisco. Bet cockroaches call you cousin. Bet you can’t find your own shadow. She was amazed by how well she remembered. At that party, she forced herself to laugh, even though she’d found nothing funny at the time. The jokes were true. She was black. Blueblack. No, so black she looked purple. Black as coffee, asphalt, outer space, black as the beginning and the end of the world.

  At first, her grandmother tried to keep her out of the sun. Gave her a big gardening hat, tied the straps tight around her chin even though it choked her. She couldn’t run with the hat on, and she loved to run, which couldn’t be helped, although Adele begged her to wait, at least, until the sun went down. She’d spent her summers reading indoors, or when she felt like she was going crazy from being cooped up, she chased shade around the yard, wearing the big choking hat, long sleeves clinging to her sweaty arms. She would get no darker, although she seemed to the longer she lived in Mallard. A black dot in the school pictures, a dark speck on the pews at Sunday Mass, a shadow lingering on the riverbank while the other children swam. So black that you could see nothing but her. A fly in milk, contaminating everything.

  In homeroom, she sat in front of Lonnie Goudeau, the varsity pitcher, who threw paper balls at her back all period. He was gray-eyed with auburn hair licking up the back of his neck, his cheeks splashed with freckles. A beautiful boy. So she prickled when she imagined him staring at her, rolling up his sleeves, his forearms so light you could see the brown hair, and flexing, the paper pinched between his fingers. Then she felt the soft pat against her neck, the boys behind her snickering. She never turned around. Once, Mr. Yancy caught Lonnie and sentenced him to detention. On her way out, Jude passed him wiping down the chalkboard and he smirked at her, sliding the eraser through the dust. She replayed that moment her whole walk home. His lips, caught between a grimace and a smile.

  Lonnie Goudeau was the first person to call her Tar Baby. A month after she moved to Mallard, he found a copy of Brer Rabbit in the class bin and gleefully tapped the shiny black blob on the cover. “Look, it’s Jude,” he said, and she was so startled that he knew her name, she didn’t realize that he was making fun of her until the whole class dissolved into laughter. He was chastened for disrupting silent reading, the book quickly removed by their blushing teacher, but that night after dinner, Jude asked her mother what a tar baby was. Her mother paused, dipping their dirty plates into the sink.

  “Just an old story,” she said. “Why?”

  “A boy called me that today.”

  Her mother slowly dried her hands on the towel, then knelt in front of her.

  “He just wants to get a rise out of you,” she said. “Ignore him. He’ll get bored and cut all that out.”

  But he didn’t. Lonnie flecked mud at her socks and threw her books into the trash. Jostled her chair leg during exams, yanked the ribbons in her hair, sang “Tutti-frutti, dark Judy” as soon as she was in earshot. On the last day of fifth grade, he tripped her down the school steps and she scraped her knee. At the kitchen table, her grandma pulled her leg onto her lap, gently swabbing the blood with a cotton ball.

  “Maybe he likes you,” Maman said. “Little boys always act real mean to girls they like.”

  She tried to imagine Lonnie holding her hand, carrying her books home from school, kissing her, even, his long eyelashes tickling her cheeks. Sitting beside him in a movie theater, or on the top of the Ferris wheel at the carnival, Lonnie’s arm around her. But all she could picture was Lonnie splashing her in a mud puddle or sticking chewing gum in her hair or calling her a dumb bitch, Lonnie punching her until her lip burst open and her eye swelled shut. After, her father would always storm out while her mother sobbed on the floor, her face buried in the couch cushion. Once, he didn’t leave right away. Instead, he pulled her mother’s face into his stomach, petting her hair. Her mother whimpered but didn’t pull away, as if she were comforted by his touch.

  Better to picture Lonnie beating on her. That other thing—that soft part—terrified her even more.

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE THE INSULTS AND JOKES, before the taunting, the muddied socks, the kicked chairs, the empty lunch bench, before all of that, there were questions. What was her name? Where’d she come from and why was she here? On her first day of school, Louisa Rubidoux leaned across their shared desk and asked who was that lady walking with her earlier.

  “My mama,” Jude said. Wasn’t it obvious? She’d walked her to school, held her hand. Who else would she be?

  “But not your real mama, right?” Louisa said. “Y’all don’t look nothin alike.”

  Jude paused, then said, “I look like my daddy.”

  “Well, where’s he at?”

  She shrugged, even though she knew. Back in D.C., where they’d left him. She missed him already even though she could still see that bruise on her mother’s neck, even though she could remember all the bruises she’d seen on her body over time, dark splotches on that strange topography. Once, at the swimming pool, she’d stared as her mother started to change in their stall before stopping, midway, when she discovered a fading bruise on her thigh. She quietly put her clothes back on, then told Jude she’d decided to just sit by the pool today and watch her. When they arrived home, her father greeted her mother with a kiss, and Jude realized that if she tried, she could pretend that the bruises came from someplace else. Her relationship with one parent magically untethered to the other. So when she thought of her daddy, he was sprawled beside her on the rug, flipping through the comics. Not dragging her mother by her hair into the bedroom—no, that was some other man. And after the broken glass was swept, the blood wiped off the tile,
after her mother retreated into the bathroom, a bag of ice pressed against her face, her real daddy returned, smiling, stroking her cheek.

  “How come I don’t look like you?” she asked her mother that night. She was sitting on the worn rug in front of the couch while her mother braided her hair so she couldn’t see her face but felt her hands still.

  “I don’t know,” her mother finally said.

  “You look like Maman.”

  “It just work that way sometimes, baby.”

  “When are we going home?” she asked.

  “What’d I tell you?” her mother said. “We got to be here a little while. Now stop wigglin around and let me finish.”

  She was beginning to realize what she would soon know for sure: there was no plan to go back home or to go anywhere else, even, and her mother was lying each time she pretended that there was. The next day, she was sitting alone during lunch when Louisa cornered her, flanked by three beige girls.

  “We don’t believe you,” Louisa said. “About that bein your mama. She too pretty to be your mama.”

  “She’s not,” Jude said. “My real mama’s somewhere else.”

  “Where at?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. I haven’t found her yet.”

  She was thinking, somehow, of Stella—a woman who resembled her just as little but would be a better version of her mother. Stella wouldn’t make Daddy so angry that he beat on her. She wouldn’t wake Jude in the middle of the night and force her onto a train to a little town where other children taunted her. She would keep her word. Stella wouldn’t promise that they would leave Mallard again and again, only to stay.

  “You gotta watch your mama,” her father had warned her once. “She still like those folks.”