The Vanishing Half(11)
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.
* * *
—
THE 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.