The Vanishing Half(30)

On Halloween, Erika draped herself in a sparkly purple dress and tiara, Jude reaching for a lazy pair of cat ears. In the bathroom, she sat on the toilet lid while Erika hunched in front of her, powdering electric blue on her eyelids.

“You know, you could look real pretty if you tried a little,” she said.

But the bright blue only made her look darker, so Jude dabbed at her eyes during the whole ride over. Later, Reese would tell her that the blue eyeshadow was the first thing he noticed about her. In the cramped apartment, she’d stumbled after Erika, squeezing past witches and ghosts and mummies. When Erika fished in the ice-filled bathtub for beers, Jude ducked into a doorway, overwhelmed by it all. She’d never been invited to a stranger’s party before, and she was so nervous, she didn’t even notice, at first, a cowboy sitting on the couch. He was golden brown and handsome, his jaw covered in stubble. He wore a rawhide vest over a blue plaid shirt and faded jeans, a red bandanna tied around his neck. She felt him watching her, and not knowing what else to do, said, “Hi, I’m Jude.”

She tugged at the fringe of her skirt, already embarrassed. But the cowboy smiled.

“Hi Jude,” he said. “I’m Reese. Have a beer.”

She liked how he said it, more of a command than an offer. But she shook her head.

“I don’t drink beer,” she said. “I mean, I don’t like the taste. And it makes me feel slow. I’m a runner.”

She was rambling now, but he tilted his head a little.

“Where you from?” he said.

“Louisiana.”

“Whereabouts?”

“A little town. You haven’t heard of it.”

“How you know what I’ve heard of?”

“Trust me,” she said. “I know.”

He laughed, then tilted his beer toward her. “You sure you don’t want a sip?”

Maybe it was his accent, southern like hers. Maybe his handsomeness. Maybe because, in a room full of people, he’d chosen to talk to her. She took a step toward him, then another and another, until she was standing inside his legs. Then a loud group of boys jostled into the room with a keg, and Reese reached out, pulling her into safety. His hand cupped the back of her knee, and for weeks after, when she thought about that party, she only remembered his fingers lingering at the edge of her skirt.

Now, in the damp library, she flipped through the atlas, past Louisiana to the United States to the world.

“When I was little,” she said, “like four or five, I thought this was just a map of our side of the world. Like there was another side of the world on some different map. My daddy told me that was stupid.”

He’d brought her to a public library, and when he spun the globe, she knew that he was right. But she watched Reese trace along the map, a part of her still hoping that her father was mistaken, somehow, that there was still more of the world waiting to be found.





Five


On the road from El Dorado, Therese Anne Carter became Reese.

He cut his hair in Plano, hacking off inches in a truck stop bathroom with a stolen hunting knife. Outside of Abilene, he bought a blue madras shirt and a leather belt with a silver stallion buckle; the shirt he still wore, the buckle he’d pawned in El Paso when he ran out of money but mentioned wistfully, still feeling its weight hanging at his waist. In Socorro, he began wrapping his chest in a white bandage, and by Las Cruces, he’d learned to walk again, legs wide, shoulders square. He told himself that it was safer to hitchhike this way, but the truth was that he’d always been Reese. By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume. How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?

In Los Angeles, he found a cleaning job at a gym near UCLA, where he met body builders who told him where to get the good stuff. At Muscle Beach, he lingered on the edge of the crowd as men bulging out of tank tops preened under the afternoon sun. Ask for Thad, someone said, and there he was, a giant of a man, hairless except for his scraggly beard. When Reese finally mustered the nerve, Thad brushed him aside with a big paw.

“Boy, come back with fifty dollars,” he said. “Then we got somethin to talk about.”

All month he scrimped and saved until he raised the money and found Thad at a bar off the boardwalk. Thad steered him into the men’s room and pulled out a vial.

“You ever shot up before?” he asked.

Reese shook his head, staring wide-eyed at the needle. Thad laughed.

“Christ, kid, how old are you?”

“Old enough,” Reese said.

“This shit ain’t nothin to play with,” Thad said. “Make you feel different. Make your baby makers slow. But I guess you ain’t worried about none of that yet.”

“No sir,” Reese said, and Thad showed him what to do. Since then, he’d bought plenty of steroids off plenty of Thads, each time the transaction feeling as grimy as when he’d first stood in that dirty bar bathroom. He met meatheads in dark alleys, felt vials pressed into his palm during handshakes, received nondescript paper bags in his gym locker. Now, seven years later, Therese Anne Carter was only a name on a birth certificate in the offices of Union County Public Records. No one could tell that he’d ever been her, and sometimes, he could hardly believe it either.

He said this matter-of-factly, under the glowing red light of the darkroom, not looking at Jude as he lowered the blank photo into the developer. Weeks after the Halloween party, they’d started meeting here. She hadn’t expected to ever see him again, and might not have, if, on the ride home, Erika hadn’t mentioned that she’d seen that cute cowboy before, working at the gym nearby. Jude began to run there even though she hated running indoors—no sky, no air, just running in place, staring at her own reflection. She hated every part of it except for when Reese eased up beside her, wiping down a stationary bike. He leaned against the handlebars and said, “Where’s your ears?”