The Vanishing Half: A Novel (28 page)

“You didn’t leave the hospital name,” Kennedy said. “I could’ve spent all damn day looking for you.”

“But you didn’t,” Jude said.

“Yeah, well, I could have.” Jesus, they were already bickering like siblings. “It’s a big city, you know.”

Jude paused. “Well,” she said, “my mind’s all over the place right now.”

It was exactly the type of thing her mother would have said—sly, meant to guilt her into submission.

“Sorry,” she said. “Is he all right?”

Jude chewed her lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s still under. They won’t let me see him. Since we’re not family and all.”

It occurred to Kennedy then that if she suddenly had a heart attack, right here in the hospital lobby, Jude would be her nearest relative. Cousins. They were cousins. But if Jude told a nurse this, insisting on the right to visit, who would ever believe her?

“That’s absurd,” Kennedy said. “You’re the only one he has out here.”

“Well.” Jude shrugged.

“He should just marry you,” she said. “Get it over with. You’ve been together long enough and then you wouldn’t have to worry about bullshit like this.”

Jude stared at her for a second, and Kennedy thought she might tell her to go fuck herself. She deserved it, probably. But Jude just rolled her eyes.

“You sound like my mother,” she said.

T
HE PHOTOGRAPH WAS
from a funeral, Jude told her. In the cafeteria, the girls sat across from each other at a long metal table, sipping lukewarm coffee, the photo lying between them. A funeral, she’d figured as much—the black dresses and all—but now she glanced back at the picture, those twin girls. Matching hair ribbons, matching tights. For the first time, she noticed one twin clutching the other’s dress, as if she were trying to keep her still. She touched the photo,
reminding herself that it was real. Needing it, somehow, to tether her in place.

“Who died?” she said.

“Their daddy. He was killed.”

“By who?”

Jude shrugged. “Bunch of white men.”

She didn’t know what was more shocking, the revelation or how casually Jude offered it.

“What?” she said. “Why?”

“Does there have to be a reason why?”

“When someone gets killed? Usually.”

“Well, there isn’t. It just happened. Right in front of them.”

She tried to imagine her mother as a girl, witnessing something so horrible, but she could only picture her eight years ago, standing at the end of the darkened hallway with a baseball bat. Kennedy had been a little drunk, sneaking back home after a party; she’d expected her mother to yell at her for breaking curfew. Instead, she was standing at the end of the hall, a hand covering her mouth. The baseball bat clattered on the wood floor, rolling toward her bare feet.

“She never talks about him,” Kennedy said.

“Mine either,” Jude said.

At the end of the table, an old Jewish man hacked into his sweater sleeve. Jude glanced over, fiddling with a candy wrapper.

“What’s she like?” Kennedy asked. “Your mother.”

“Stubborn,” she said. “Like you.”

“I am not stubborn.”

“If you say so.”

“Well, what else is she like? She’s got to be more than stubborn.”

“I don’t know,” Jude said. “She works at a diner. She says she hates it but she’d never go anywhere different. She’d never leave Maman.”

“Is that what you call your grandmother?” Kennedy still couldn’t bring herself to say
our
.

Jude nodded. “I grew up in her house,” she said. “She’s getting old now. She forgets a lot. She still asks about your mom sometimes.”

An announcement crackled over the PA system. Kennedy added another packet of sugar to coffee she’d never finish.

“This is strange for me,” she said. “I don’t think you understand how strange it all is.”

“I know,” Jude said.

“No, you don’t. I don’t think anybody could possibly know.”

“Fine, I don’t know.” Jude stood, tossing her coffee in the trash can. Kennedy scrambled after, suddenly afraid that she’d leave her here. What if she’d pushed Jude away and now Jude decided not to tell her anything more? Knowing a little was worse than not knowing at all. So she followed Jude onto the elevator, riding in silence to the fifth floor, then she sat beside her in the waiting room next to a wilting plant.

“You don’t have to stay,” Jude said.

“I know that,” Kennedy said. But she did.

T
HE HOSPIT
AL RELEASED
R
EESE
that evening. When Jude wheeled him outside, Kennedy glanced up, startled to find the sky already cloaked in navy blue. For hours, she’d sat beside Jude in the waiting room, flipping idly through magazines, wandering down to the cafeteria for more coffee, or sometimes just sitting there, staring at that picture. She called in sick to her show. Admitted the flu had gotten to her after all. And in spite of every reason she had to leave, she stayed there in that quiet hospital room, until a brusque white nurse told them they could go. She thought about calling home. Frantz always tried to ring her before her shows, he’d worry if the understudy picked
up. Still, she hailed a cab and helped Jude guide Reese inside. He was still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and the whole ride to the hotel, his head kept lolling onto her shoulder. Jude squeezed his thigh, and Kennedy glanced away. She couldn’t imagine needing anyone so openly.

She could have said good-bye outside the hotel, but she climbed out too. She and Jude didn’t speak. They each wrapped an arm around Reese’s waist, and together they lugged him inside. He was heavier than he looked, and by the time they reached the elevator, her shoulders burned. But she still held on until they made it inside the hotel room and gingerly lowered him onto the bed. Jude sat on the edge of the mattress, pushing the curls back from his forehead.

“Thanks,” she said softly, but she was still looking at Reese. That tenderness in her voice only meant for him.

“Well,” Kennedy said. She should’ve left but she lingered in the room. Jude would spend a few more days in the city while Reese recovered. Maybe Kennedy could stop by the hotel again tomorrow. Surely Jude couldn’t stay inside this dingy room all day, watching him sleep. Maybe they could go out for coffee or lunch. She could show her around the city so she’d be able to say that she did more in New York than see a mediocre musical and sit in a hospital waiting room. Jude walked her down to the lobby, and Kennedy slowly wrapped her scarf around her neck.

“What’s it like?” she said. “Mallard.”

She’d imagined a town like Mayberry, folksy and homey, women leaving pies to cool on their windowsills. A town so small that everybody knew your name. In a different life, she might have visited over the summer. She could have played with Jude in front of their grandmother’s house. But Jude just laughed.

“Awful,” she said. “They only like light Negroes out there. You’d fit right in.”

She’d said it so offhandedly that Kennedy almost didn’t realize it.

“I’m not a Negro,” she said.

Jude laughed again, this time uneasily.

“Well, your mother is,” she said.

“So?”

“So that makes you one too.”

“It doesn’t make me anything,” she said. “My father’s white, you know. And you don’t get to show up and tell me what I am.”

It wasn’t a race thing. She just hated the idea of anyone telling her who she had to be. She was like her mother in that way. If she’d been born black, she would have been perfectly happy about it. But she wasn’t and who was Jude to tell her that she was somebody that she was not? Nothing had changed, really. She’d learned one thing about her mother, but what did that amount to when you looked at the totality of her life? A single detail had been moved and replaced. Swapping out one brick wouldn’t change a house into a fire station. She was still herself. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed at all.

That night, Frantz asked where she’d been.

“The hospital,” she said, too exhausted to lie.

“The hospital? What happened?”

“Oh, I’m all right. I was with Jude. Reese had surgery.”

“What type of surgery? Is he all right?”

“I don’t know.” She’d never asked. “Something with his chest, it looked like. He’s fine now. Just a little out of it.”

“You should’ve called. I’ve been waiting up.”

She would leave him. She’d always had a good sense for when it was time to leave. Call it intuition or restlessness, call it whatever you want. She’d never been the type to overstay her welcome. She knew when it was time to leave Los Angeles, and a year later, she would know to leave New York. She knew when she ought to be with a man for six weeks or six years. Leaving was the same, regardless. Leaving
was simple. Staying was the part she’d never quite mastered. So that night, when she looked at Frantz in bed, his dark brown skin shimmering against the silver sheets, she knew that she wouldn’t stay with him much longer. Still, she sat on the edge of the bed and slipped his glasses off, blurring right in front of his eyes.

“Would you still love me,” she said, “if I weren’t white?”

“No,” he said, tugging her closer. “Because then you wouldn’t be you.”

W
HEN SHE LEFT
F
RANTZ
, she wandered a year, not telling anyone where she was going. Her musical had ended and she was beginning to tire of theater, although she’d stick around years longer, joining improv comedy troupes, auditioning for experimental plays. Acting seemed to be the one thing she never knew when to quit. Before she fled, she saw her mother one last time. They were sitting together in the backyard, sipping chardonnay by the pool. It was an unnaturally bright winter day. She was shocked by the warmth, shocked that there had ever been a time when she hadn’t found the idea of a warm February day remarkable. She closed her eyes, sunning her legs, not even thinking about poor Frantz, huddled by their rattling radiator.

“I used to come out here in the mornings,” her mother said. “When you were at school. I never had anything to do, but somehow, I was always floating out here, thinking.”

It was a lovely day. Kennedy would remember this later, how she could have said nothing, could have lain out there in that sunlight forever. Instead, she handed her mother the photograph.

“What’s this?” she asked, tilting her head to look at it.

“It’s from your father’s funeral,” Kennedy said. “Don’t you remember?”

Her mother said nothing, her face blank. She stared at the picture.

“Where’d you get this?” she said.

“Where do you think?” Kennedy said. “She found me, you know. She knows you better than I do!”

She hadn’t meant to yell. She just expected her mother to feel something. She would show her a picture of her family and her mother would start to cry. Wipe away tears and finally tell her daughter the truth about her life. Kennedy deserved that, didn’t she? One moment of honesty. But her mother pushed the picture back toward her.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she said. “I don’t know what you want me to say—”

“I want you to tell me who you are!”

“You know who I am! This,” her mother said, jabbing at the picture, “is not me. Look at it! She doesn’t look anything like me.”

She couldn’t tell which girl her mother was pointing at, her sister or herself.

J
UDE LEFT HER PHONE NUMBER
on the back of the photo. For years, Kennedy didn’t call.

She kept the picture, though. She carried it with her everywhere she traveled: Istanbul and Rome, Berlin where she lived for three months, sharing a flat with two Swedes. One night they got blitzed and she showed them the picture. The blond boys smiled at her quizzically, handing it back. It meant nothing to anybody but her, which was part of the reason she could never get rid of it. It was the only part of her life that was real. She didn’t know what to do with the rest. All the stories she knew were fiction, so she began to create new ones. She was the daughter of a doctor, an actor, a baseball player.
She was taking a break from medical school. She had a boyfriend back home named Reese. She was white, she was black, she became a new person as soon as she crossed a border. She was always inventing her life.

B
Y THE EARLY 1990S
, her acting jobs began to dry up for good. No director had much use for a blonde in her thirties who hadn’t yet proven to be a star. She played a few older sisters on a handful of network shows, then a teacher or two, and then her agent stopped calling her at all. She felt too young to be washed up, but then again, she had ridden an improbable string of luck. Her whole life, in fact, had been a gift of good fortune—she had been given whiteness. Blonde hair, a pretty face, a nice figure, a rich father. She’d sobbed out of speeding tickets, flirted her way to endless second chances. Her whole life, a bounty of gifts she hadn’t deserved.

She became a spin instructor for two years, the studio placing photos of Charity Harris on the flyer to attract customers. But she grew tired of sweating all the time, her legs twitching and cramping, and so, in 1996, she finally decided to go back to school. Not real school, she told everyone, laughing at the thought, but realty school. She’d sold ads for shitty products on daytime television for years, why couldn’t she sell a house? On her first day, she sat awkwardly at the tiny desk, staring at the handout the teacher was passing down each row.

What Clients Value in a Real Estate Agent:

• Honesty
  

• Knowledge of the housing market
  

• Negotiation skills
  

She could learn most of this, she told herself, except for the first bullet point. She had been acting her entire life, which meant that she was the best liar that she knew. Well, second best.

I
N HER FIRST YEAR
at San Fernando Valley Real Estate, Kennedy sold seven houses. Her boss Robert told her that she had the Midas touch, but she privately called it the Charity Harris effect. She had the type of face that people vaguely remembered, even those who had never watched
Pacific Cove
. Everyone thought they knew her. And of course, the
Pacific Cove
fans always showed up to her open houses, long after the show had ended.