The Vanishing Half: A Novel (4 page)

Maybe it wasn’t too late. They’d only been gone two days. She could always call Sam, tell him that she’d made a mistake. She’d needed a little time to clear her head, that’s all, of course she’d never seriously meant to leave. Her mother pushed the plate toward her again.

“What type of trouble you in?” she said.

Desiree forced a laugh. “There’s no trouble, Mama.”

“I ain’t stupid. You think I don’t know you runnin from that man of yours?”

Desiree stared down at the table, her eyes welling up. Her mother poured milk onto the cornbread and mushed it with a fork, the way Desiree had eaten it as a girl.

“He gone now,” her mother said. “Eat your cornbread.”

L
AT
E THAT NIGHT
, over a hundred miles southeast of Mallard, Early Jones received a job offer that would alter the course of his life. He didn’t know this at the time. Any job was just that to him—a job—and when he stepped inside Ernesto’s, craning his neck for Big Ceel, he was only worried about whether he could afford a drink. He jangled the loose change in his pocket. Could never keep a dollar on him. Two weeks ago, he’d run a job for Ceel, and somehow, he’d burned through the money already on everything a young man alone in New Orleans required, card games and booze and women. Now he was desperate for another job. For the money, of course, but also because he hated being in one place for too long, and two weeks in the same place was, for him then, far too long.

He wasn’t a settling man. He was only good at getting lost. He’d mastered that particular skill as a boy rooted nowhere. Spent his childhood—if you could call it that—sharecropping on farms in Janesville and Jena, down south to New Roads and Palmetto. He’d been given to his aunt and uncle when he was eight, because they had no children and his parents had too many. He did not know where his parents lived now, if they still lived, and he said that he never thought about them.

“They gone,” he said, when asked. “Gone folks is gone.”

But the truth is that when he’d first started hunting hiding people, he’d tried to find his folks. His failure was swift and humiliating; he didn’t know enough about his parents to even guess where to begin. Probably for the best. They hadn’t wanted him as a boy—what on earth would they do with him as a grown man? Still, his defeat nagged at him. Since he’d started hunting, his parents were the only people he had never found.

The key to staying lost was to never love anything. Time and time again, Early was amazed by what a running man came back for. Women, mostly. In Jackson, he’d caught a man wanted for attempted murder because he’d circled back for his wife. You could find a new woman anywhere, but then again, the most violent men were always the most sentimental. Pure emotion, any way you look at it. What really got him were the men who returned for belongings. Too many goddamn cars to count, always some junk a man had driven for years and couldn’t part with. In Toledo, he’d caught a man who’d returned to his childhood home for an old baseball.

“I don’t know, man,” he said, cuffed in the backseat of Early’s El Camino. “I just really love that thing.”

Love had never dragged Early anywhere. As soon as he left a place, he forgot it. Names faded, faces blurred, buildings smudged into indistinguishable brick slabs. He forgot the names of teachers at all the schools he’d attended, the streets where he’d lived, even what his parents looked like. This was his gift, a short memory. A long memory could drive a man crazy.

He’d been running jobs for Ceel, off and on, for seven years now. He never wanted anyone to think that he was working for the law. He caught criminals for one reason only—the money—and he didn’t give two shits about the white man’s justice. After he caught a man, he
never wondered if the jury convicted him or if the man survived prison. He forgot him altogether. And though he’d been recognized in a bar once, and still wore the knife scars across his stomach as a souvenir, forgetting was the only way he could do his job. He liked hunting criminals. Each time Ceel approached him about a missing child or deadbeat father, Early shook his head.

“Don’t know nothin bout none of those people,” he said, tilting back his whiskey.

In Ernesto’s, Ceel shrugged. He had a proper office in the Seventh Ward, but Early hated meeting him there, across the street from a church, all those sanctified folks staring at him as they trampled down the steps. This bar was Early’s kind of place, a little shadowy and safe. Ceel was a hefty man, cardboard-colored with silky black hair. He carried a silver cigarette lighter that he twirled between his fingers while he talked. He’d been twirling that lighter the first time he’d approached Early, in a bar like this one, years ago. Early had listened half-heartedly, watching the light glint off the silver and dance along the bar.

“Son, how’d you like to make some money?” Ceel asked.

He didn’t look like a gangster or pimp but he carried the sleaziness of someone who did barely legal work. He was a bail bondsman, looking for a new bounty hunter, and he’d noticed Early.

“You got a quiet way about you,” he said. “That’s good. I need a man to look and listen.”

Early was twenty-four then, fresh out of prison, alone in New Orleans because he’d figured it as good a place to start over as any. He took the job because he needed the work. He’d never expected to be good at it, so good, in fact, that Ceel kept approaching him with jobs that had nothing to do with bail bonds.

“You know about ’em what I tell you,” Ceel said. “And I ain’t told you nothin yet.”

“Well, I don’t like to be caught up in folks’ affairs. Don’t you have nothin else for me?”

Ceel laughed. “You ’bout the only man I ever hear say that. Everybody else I talk to be glad not to hunt down some mean sonofabitch for a change.”

But Early could, at least, understand how a wanted man thought. The exhaustion, the desperation, the sheer selfishness of survival. The otherwise disappeared baffled him. He certainly didn’t understand married folks and had no desire to get in between them. Then again, a job was a job. Why wouldn’t he take on something light? He’d just spent two weeks tracking a man halfway to Mexico; his car broke down in the desert and he’d wondered if he would die out there, hunting a man he didn’t even care to see punished. If the money was all the same, why not say yes to an easy job for once?

“I’m not grabbin her,” he said.

“Nothin like that. You just call when you find her. Her old man’s lookin for her. She run off with his kid.”

“What she run off for?”

Ceel shrugged. “None my concern. Man wants her found. She from some little town up north called Mallard. Ever heard of it?”

“Passed through as a boy,” Early said. “Funny place. Highfalutin.”

He remembered little about the town, except that everyone was light and uppity, and once, at Mass, a tall pale man had slapped him for dipping his finger into the holy water font before the man’s wife. He was sixteen then, shocked by the sudden sting on his neck, as his uncle grabbed his shoulder, staring at the cracked tile floor, and apologized. He’d spent a summer in that place, working a farm on the edge of town and delivering groceries to earn extra cash. He didn’t make a single friend, but he did nurse a futile crush on a girl he’d met carrying groceries up her porch steps. He didn’t know how she even
entered his mind. He was so young when they’d met; he’d barely known her; by fall, he’d moved on to another farm in another town. Still, he saw her standing barefoot in her living room, washing the windows. When Ceel slid him the photograph, Early’s stomach lurched. He almost felt as if he’d willed it. For the first time in ten years, he was staring at Desiree Vignes’s
face.

The Vignes twins left without saying good-bye, so like any sudden disappearance, their departure became loaded with meaning. Before they surfaced in New Orleans, before they were just bored girls hunting fun, it only made sense to lose them in such a tragic way. The twins had always seemed both blessed and cursed; they’d inherited, from their mother, the legacy of an entire town, and from their father, a lineage hollowed by loss. Four Vignes boys, all dead by thirty. The eldest collapsed in a chain gang from heatstroke; the second gassed in a Belgian trench; the third stabbed in a bar fight; and the youngest, Leon Vignes, lynched twice, the first time at home while his twin girls watched through a crack in the closet door, hands clamped over each other’s mouths until their palms misted with spit.

That night, he was whittling a table leg when five white men kicked in the front door and hauled him outside. He landed hard on his face, his mouth filling with dirt and blood. The mob leader—a tall white man with red gold hair like a fall apple—waved a crumpled note in which, he claimed, Leon had written nasty things to a white woman. Leon couldn’t read or write—his customers knew that he made all of his marks with an X—but the white men stomped on his hands, broke every finger and joint, then shot him four times. He
survived, and three days later, the white men burst into the hospital and stormed every room in the colored ward until they found him. This time, they shot him twice in the head, his cotton pillowcase blooming red.

Desiree witnessed the first lynching but would forever imagine the second, how her father must have been sleeping, his head slumped, the way he nodded off in his chair after supper. How the thundering boots woke him. He screamed, or maybe had no time to, his swollen hands bandaged and useless at his sides. From the closet, she’d watched the white men drag her father out of the house, his long legs drumming against the floor. She suddenly felt that her sister would scream, so she squeezed her hand over Stella’s mouth and seconds later, felt Stella’s hand on her own. Something shifted between them in that moment. Before, Stella seemed as predictable as a reflection. But in the closet, for the first time ever, Desiree hadn’t known what her sister might do.

At the wake, the twins wore matching black dresses with full slips that itched their legs. Days earlier, Bernice LeGros, the seamstress, had come by to pay her respects and found Adele Vignes trying to darn a pair of Leon’s church pants for his burial. Her hands were shaking, so Bernice took the needle and patched up the pants herself. She didn’t know how Adele would handle this on her own. Decuirs were used to soft things, to long, easy lives. The twins didn’t even have funeral dresses. The next morning, Bernice carried over a bolt of black fabric and knelt in the living room with her tape measure. She still couldn’t tell the twins apart and felt too embarrassed to ask, so she gave simple commands like “You, hand me them scissors” or “Stand up straight, honey.” She told the fidgety twin, “Stop wigglin, girl, or you gonna get sticked,” and the other twin grabbed her hand until she stilled. Unnerving, Bernice thought, glancing between the girls. Like sewing a dress for one person split into two bodies.

After the burial, Bernice gathered in Adele’s crowded living room, admiring her handiwork as the twins scampered past. The fidgety twin, who she would later learn was Desiree, pulled her sister’s hand as they wove past the grown folks who huddled and whispered. Leon couldn’t have written that note—the white men must have been angered over something else and who could understand their rages? Willie Lee heard that the white men were angry that Leon stole their business by underbidding them. But how could you shoot a man for accepting less than what you asked for?

“White folks kill you if you want too much, kill you if you want too little.” Willie Lee shook his head, packing tobacco into his pipe. “You gotta follow they rules but they change ’em when they feel. Devilish, you ask me.”

In the bedroom, the twins sat, legs swinging over the mattress edge, and pinched at a piece of pound cake.

“But what did Daddy do?” Stella kept asking.

Desiree sighed, for the first time feeling the burden of having to supply answers. Oldest was oldest, even if by only seven minutes.

“Like Willie Lee say. He do his job too good.”

“But that don’t make sense.”

“Don’t have to. It’s white folks.”

As the years passed, their father would only come to her in flashes, like when she fingered a denim shirt and felt small again, pressed against the rough fabric spanning her father’s chest. You were supposed to be safe in Mallard—that strange, separate town—hidden amongst your own. But even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant that white men could kill you for refusing to die. The Vignes twins were reminders of this, tiny girls in funeral dresses who grew up without a daddy because white men decided that it would be so.

Then they grew older and just became girls, striking in both their
sameness and differences. Soon it became laughable that there had ever been a time when no one could tell the twins apart. Desiree, always restless, as if her foot had been nailed to the ground and she couldn’t stop yanking it; Stella, so calm that even Sal Delafosse’s ornery horse never bucked around her. Desiree starring in the school play once, nearly twice if the Fontenots hadn’t bribed the principal; Stella, whip smart, who would go to college if her mother could afford it. Desiree and Stella, Mallard’s girls. As they grew, they no longer seemed like one body split in two, but two bodies poured into one, each pulling it her own way.

T
HE MORNING AFTER
one of her lost daughters returned, Adele Vignes woke early to make coffee. She’d barely slept the night before. Fourteen years living alone and anything besides silence sounded foreign. She’d jolted awake at every creaking floorboard, every rustled cover, every breath. Now she shuffled across the kitchen, tightening the belt of her housecoat. A breeze floated in through the front door—Desiree leaning on the porch rail, smoke trailing past her head. She always stood like that, one leg behind the other like an egret. Or was that Stella? In her memories, the girls had gotten mixed up, their details switching places until they overlapped into a single loss. A pair. She was supposed to have a pair. And now that one had returned, the loss of the other felt sharp and new.

She slid the pot of water onto the stove and turned to find the dark child standing in the doorway.

“Goodness!” she said. “You about gave me a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl whispered. She was quiet. Why was she so quiet? “Can I have some water?”

“May I have,” Adele said, but she filled the cup anyway. She leaned against the counter, watching the girl drink, searching her face for
anything that reminded her of her daughters. But she could only see the child’s evil daddy. Hadn’t she told Desiree that a dark man would be no good to her? Hadn’t she tried to warn her all her life? A dark man would trample her beauty. He’d love it at first but like anything he desired and could never attain, he would soon grow to resent it. Now he was punishing her for it.

The child set her empty cup on the counter. She looked dazed, as if she’d woken up in a foreign country. Her granddaughter. Lord, she had a granddaughter. The word seemed funny even in her own head.

“Why don’t you go on and play?” Adele said. “I’ll fix us some breakfast.”

“I didn’t bring nothin with me,” the girl said, probably thinking of all the toys she’d left behind. City toys, like choo choo trains driven by real motors or plastic dolls with human hair. Still, Adele went into the twins’ room, freezing a second at the sight of the mussed bed—Desiree slept on her old side—before opening the musty closet. In a cardboard box near the back, she found a corncob doll that Stella had made Desiree. The girl hesitated—the doll must have looked monstrous compared to her store-bought ones—but she carried Stella’s doll carefully into the living room.

A pair. Adele used to have a pair. Healthy twin girls, her first pregnancy at that. She’d given birth in her bedroom, the snow falling so suddenly, she wasn’t sure that the midwife would make it in time. When she arrived, Madame Theroux told her how fortunate she was. There hadn’t been twins in either family line for three generations. If you’d been blessed with twins, the midwife told her, you had to serve the Marassa, the sacred twins who united heaven and earth. They were powerful but jealous child gods. You had to worship both equally—leave two candies on your altar, two sodas, two dolls. Adele, catechized at St. Catherine’s, knew that she should have been scandalized, listening to Madame Theroux talking about her heathen religion at the
birth of her children, but the stories distracted her from the pain. Then Desiree appeared, and seven minutes later Stella, and she held a girl in each arm, wrinkled and pink and needing nothing but her.

After the twins were born, Adele never built an altar. But later, after her girls disappeared, she wondered if she’d been arrogant. Maybe she should have just built the altar, no matter how foolish it sounded. Maybe then her daughters would have stayed. Or maybe, she alone was to blame. Maybe she’d failed to love the twins equally and that chased them away. She’d always been hardest on Desiree, who was most like her father, confident that as long as she willed good things to happen, nothing could harm her. You had to curb a willful child. If she hadn’t loved Desiree, she would have abandoned her to her own stubbornness. But then Desiree felt hated and Stella felt ignored. That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way. Her blessing had been doomed from the beginning, her girls as impossible to please as jealous gods.

Leon was easy to love. She should have known that he wouldn’t be with her long. All of her blessings had come so easily in the beginning of her life, and she’d spent the back half losing them all. But she wouldn’t lose Desiree again.

She stepped onto the creaking porch, carrying two cups of coffee. Desiree quickly stubbed out her cigarette on the banister. Adele almost laughed—grown as she was, acting like a child stealing sweets.

“I thought I’d fix some breakfast,” Adele said. She handed her the mug and caught another glance at Desiree’s splotchy bruise, barely hidden behind that silly scarf.

“I’m not too hungry,” Desiree said.

“You gonna fall out if you don’t eat somethin.”

Desiree shrugged, taking a sip. Adele could already feel her fighting to break away, like a bird beating its wings against her palms.

“I can take your girl by the school later,” Adele said. “Get her all signed up.”

Desiree scoffed. “Now why in the world you wanna do that?”

“Well, she oughta keep on with her studies—”

“Mama, we’re not stayin.”

“Where you expect to go? And how you expect to get there? I bet you don’t have ten dollars in your pocket—”

“I don’t know! Anywhere.”

Adele pursed her lips. “You rather be anywhere than here with me.”

“It’s not like that, Mama.” Desiree sighed. “I just don’t know where we oughta be right now—”

“You oughta be with your family, cher,” Adele said. “Stay. You safe here.”

Desiree said nothing, staring out into the woods. Overhead, the sky was awakening, fading lavender and pink, and Adele wrapped an arm around her daughter’s waist.

“What you think Stella’s doin right now?” Desiree said.

“I don’t,” Adele said.

“Ma’am?”

“I don’t think about Stella,” she said.

I
N
M
ALLARD
, Desiree saw Stella everywhere.

Lounging by the water pump in her lilac dress, slipping a finger down her sock to scratch her ankle. Dipping into the woods to play hide-and-seek behind the trees. Stepping out of the butcher’s shop carrying chicken livers wrapped in white paper, clutching the package so tightly, she might have been holding something as precious as a secret. Stella, curly hair pinned into a ponytail, tied with a ribbon, her dresses always starched, shoes shined. A girl still, since that was the
only way Desiree had ever known her. But this Stella flitted in and out of her vision. Stella leaning against a fence or pushing a cart down a Fontenot’s aisle or perching on St. Catherine’s stone steps, blowing a dandelion. When Desiree walked her daughter to her first day of school, Stella appeared behind them, fussing about the dust kicking up on her socks. Desiree tried to ignore her, squeezing Jude’s hand.

“You gotta talk to people today,” she said.

“I talk to people I like,” Jude said.

“But you don’t know yet, who you gonna like. So you gotta be friendly to everyone, just to see.”

She straightened the ruffles on her daughter’s collar. She’d spent the night before kneeling in the yard, scrubbing Jude’s clothes in the washtub. She hadn’t packed enough for either of them, and plunging her hands into the filmy water, she imagined her daughter cycling through the same four dresses until she outgrew them. Why hadn’t she made a plan? Stella would have. She would have planned to run months before she actually did, squirreling away clothes slowly, one sock at a time. Set aside money, bought train tickets, prepared a place to go. Desiree knew because Stella had done it in New Orleans. Slipped out of one life into another as easily as stepping into the next room.

Near the schoolyard, beige children pressed against the fence, gawking, and Desiree gripped her daughter’s hand again. She’d laid out Jude’s nicest outfit, a white dress with a pink pinafore, socks with lace trim, and Mary Janes. “Don’t you have something brown?” her mother had asked, lingering in the doorway, but Desiree ignored her, tying pink ribbons around Jude’s braids. Bright colors looked vulgar against dark skin, everyone said, but she refused to hide her daughter in drab olive greens or grays. Now, as they paraded past the other children, she felt foolish. Maybe pink was too showy. Maybe she’d already ruined her daughter’s chances of fitting in by dressing her up like a department store doll.

“Why they all lookin at me?” Jude asked.

“It’s just cause you new,” Desiree said. “They just curious about you.”