The Vanishing Half(40)

He was still wearing a T-shirt and boxers, and she suddenly felt self-conscious, tugging the sheet over her breasts.

“Stop what?” he said.

“Looking at me like that.”

“But I like looking at you.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “you’re nice to look at.”

She scoffed, turning back to the window. He didn’t mind that she was dark, maybe, but he couldn’t possibly like it. Nobody could.

“I hate when you do that,” he said.

“What?”

“Act like I’m lying,” he said. “I ain’t those people back home. Sometimes you act like you’re still back there. But you’re not, baby. We’re new people here.”

He’d told her once that California got its name from a dark-skinned queen. He’d seen a mural of her in San Francisco. She hadn’t believed him until he showed her a photograph he’d taken and there the dark queen was, seated at the top of the ceiling. Flanked by a tribe of female warriors, looking so regal and imposing that Jude was heartbroken to discover that she wasn’t even real. She was a character from a popular Spanish novel, an art history book said, about a fictional island ruled by a black Amazon queen. Like all colonizers, the conquistadors wrote their fiction into reality, their myths transforming into history. What remained was California, a place that still felt like a mythical island. She was in the middle of the ocean, sealed away from everyone she’d once known, floating.



* * *



—

PERHAPS THE STRANGEST part of that fall was that she started to dream about her father.

Sometimes she was walking beside him along the street, holding his hand as they passed through a busy intersection; she jolted awake as the cars whizzed past. Other times, he was pushing her on a playground swing, her legs stretching in front of her. In one dream, he was walking in front of her on a track, and she ran to catch up but could never reach him. She awoke, gasping.

“You’re shaking,” Reese whispered, pulling her closer.

“It was just a dream,” she said.

“About what?”

“My daddy.” She paused. “I don’t even know why. We haven’t talked in so long. I used to think he’d come looking for me. He’s not even a good man. But part of me still wants him to find me. Isn’t that stupid?”

“No.” He was staring up at the ceiling. “It’s not stupid at all. I ain’t talk to my folks in seven years but I still think about them. My mama used to like my pictures. She showed everybody in church. I took so many photos of her but I left them behind. I left everything.”

“What happened?” she said. “I mean, why’d you leave?”

“Oh, it’s a long story.”

“Then tell me some of it. Please.”

He was quiet a long moment, then he told her that his father had caught him fooling around with his sister’s friend. He’d been home alone, pretending to be sick while his family went to a tent revival, rifling instead through his father’s closet. He tried on crisp dress shirts, practiced Windsor knots, walked around in slick leather wingtips. He had just splashed himself with cologne when Tina Jenkins appeared on the lawn and tapped on the windowpane. What was he doing? Was he in some type of play? His costume wasn’t bad, he just needed to do something with his hair. She’d pinned his ponytail to the back of his neck.

“There,” she said. “Now you look more mannish, see? What’s the play? And do you have anything to drink?”

He ignored the first question and tended to the second. Later, Tina would tell her parents that the gin made her do it. The gin that he’d poured in two big glasses, replacing his mother’s Seagram with water. She did not tell her parents that she’d kissed him first, or that they’d only stopped because his family had come home early.

“My daddy had one of those belts with the big silver buckle,” he said. “He told me if I wanted to be a man, he’d treat me like one.”

She clenched her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Long time ago.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “It wasn’t right. He had no right to do that to you—”

“I used to think about drivin down to El Dorado,” he said. “Tell him to try me now. It ain’t right to feel that way about your own daddy. Chokes me, like I can’t even breathe through it. Then other times, I think about just walkin around town. No one recognizin me. It’d be like showin up to your own funeral. Just watchin life go on without you. Maybe I knock on the door. Say, Hi Mama, but she’d know already. Even though I look different, she’d still know me.”

“You could do it,” she said. “You could go back.”

“Would you go with me?”

“I’d go anywhere with you,” she said.

He kissed her, pushing up her shirt, and she reached unthinkingly for his. He stiffened, and she shrank when he pulled away. But he disappeared into the bathroom, and when he came back out, he was shirtless, bending over her in the bandage wrapped around his chest.

“I need it,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

She pulled him on top of her, her fingers trailing up his smooth back, touching skin and skin and cotton.