The Vanishing Half(29)

Desiree splashed water on her face. He wanted to pull her back into bed. There was never enough of her. He could never love her the way he wanted to. Full. A full love would scare her. Each time he returned to Mallard, he thought about bringing a ring. Her mother, at least, would finally respect him; she might even begin to think of him like a son. But Desiree never wanted to marry again.

“I’ve been through all that already,” she said, with the same weariness of a soldier talking about war.

It had been a war, in a sense, one that she could never win and only hope to survive. She’d told him about all the ways Sam had hurt her: slamming her face into the door, dragging her by her hair across the bathroom floor, backhanding her mouth, his hand streaked with lipstick and blood. She touched Early’s mouth gently, and he kissed her fingertips, trying to reconcile that quiet voice he’d heard over the phone ten years ago with the man she described. She didn’t know where Sam lived now, but Early, of course, had traced him already. He lived in Norfolk with his new wife and three boys. Exactly what the world didn’t need, three boys growing up to be spiteful men. But he’d never told Desiree this. What good would it do?

“Jude called last night,” Desiree said.

“Yeah?” he said. “How she gettin on?”

“You know her. She never tell me much. But I think she good. She likes it out there. She said to tell you hi.”

He grunted. Doubtful, thousands of miles away, that she was even thinking about him at all. He only reminded her of the father who wasn’t there.

Desiree patted his stomach. “You take a look at that leaking sink, baby?”

At least she asked nice. Not like Adele, who barely looked at him across the table. Called out “chair’s wobbly” when she passed him on her way to work. Treated him like a glorified handyman. And maybe he was. He was the man of a house he barely lived in. He was the father to a daughter who didn’t even like him.

In the kitchen, he squeezed under the sink, his back aching. Everything was catching up with him now, nights spent sleeping in his car, hours hiding in some crawl space. He wasn’t young anymore, not the same young man who’d felt a jolt of energy each time he set out on a new job. Now it was only tiredness, boredom even. He’d hunted every type of man there was. He’d still never found the people he’d searched for the longest.

On the best nights, he settled in Desiree Vignes’s bed, rubbing her feet. He watched her brush out her hair, listened to her hum. He shucked off his pants and she climbed in bed in her nightgown, and even then it felt like too many layers—a lie, really, that they were telling themselves—because as soon as she turned out the light, his boxer shorts were around his ankles, her nightgown pushed up to her waist. They tried to be quiet, but after a while, he didn’t care about anyone hearing, not when there were too few nights like this. On the road, he tried to remember how to fall asleep alone.

“Gets harder, you know,” he told Desiree one night. “More time goes by. Sometimes folks slip up, but—”

“I know,” she said. Her skin looked silvery in the moonlight. He rolled toward her, touching her hip. She was so slender, he forgot sometimes, the longer he was away.

“She might come back on her own,” he said. “Homesick. Maybe she gets older, figures none of this is worth it.”

He reached over, touching Desiree’s soft curls. He was so hungry and so full of her, he could hardly stand it. But she rolled away from him.

“It’s too late,” she said. “Even if she comes back. She’s already gone.”



* * *



—

IN LOS ANGELES, no one had ever heard of Mallard.

All freshman year, Jude delighted in telling people that her hometown was impossible to find on a map, even though few believed her at first, especially not Reese Carter, who insisted that every town had to be on a map somewhere. He was more skeptical than the Californians who easily believed that some Louisiana town might be too inconsequential to warrant a cartographer’s attention. But Reese was a southerner also. He grew up in El Dorado, Arkansas, a place that sounded even more fantastical than her hometown yet still existed on maps. So one April evening, she dragged him to the library and flipped through a giant atlas. They’d just stepped in from the rain, Reese’s wet hair looping across his forehead in loose curls. She wanted to push his drooping hair back, but instead, she pointed at a map of Louisiana, below where the Atchafalaya River and the Red River met.

“See,” she said. “No Mallard.”

“Goddamn,” he said. “You’re right.”

He leaned over her shoulder, squinting. They’d met at a track-and-field party her roommate, Erika, had dragged her to last Halloween. Erika was a stout sprinter from Brooklyn who complained about Los Angeles endlessly, the smoggy air, the traffic, the lack of trains. Her grievances only made Jude realize how grateful she felt. Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it. On move-in day, Erika had glanced at Jude’s two suitcases and asked, “Where’s the rest of your stuff?” Her own desk was cluttered with records, photographs of friends taped to the walls, her closet stuffed with shimmery blouses. Jude, quietly unpacking everything she owned, said that her other things were still in storage. She knew that she liked Erika when she never brought it up again.