The Vanishing Half(23)

“You sure it was her?”

“As sure that it wasn’t you,” Farrah said. “It’s all in her eyes, honey. Her white man was handsome too. Must’ve been why she was smiling like that.”

Stella leaving her to chase after some man. Stella secretly in love. Stella, who had never been boy crazy, who had rolled her eyes at Desiree mooning over Early, who had never even had a boyfriend before. The frigid twin, the boys called her. But Early told her that the simplest explanation is often the right one.

“You be surprised by what emotion make people do,” he said.

“But I know her,” she said, then stopped herself. She couldn’t assume anything about Stella anymore. Hadn’t she learned that already?

She was exhausted by the time Early suggested she try the Maison Blanche building. She’d only ventured inside once before, days after Stella first disappeared. She’d told herself, riding the streetcar down Canal, that Stella couldn’t be gone for good. This was Stella, fallen into one of her bad moods. Stella playing hide-and-seek, ducking behind the drying sheets. She told herself lots of reassuring things she didn’t believe. Stella would pop back up. She would appear on their apartment stoop and explain herself. She wouldn’t walk away from the best job she’d ever had. She wouldn’t leave her sister behind.

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.