The Vanishing Half(24)

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 imagined 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.