The Vanishing Half(7)

“She’ll get tired of all that playacting,” he said. “Bet she comes running back, feeling foolish. You’re way too sweet for anyone to stay away.”

He kissed her forehead, and she held him tighter, his heart thumping against her ear. This was back in the beginning. Before his hands curled into fists, before he called her uppity yellow bitch or crazy as your sister or off thinkin you white. Back when she’d found herself starting to trust him.



* * *



—

MANY YEARS LATER, when her eyesight would begin to fade, she would blame the years she’d spent squinting at sheets of fingerprints and marking their ridges. Roberta told her once that soon the entire fingerprinting system would be operated by machines. The Japanese were already testing out the technology. But how could a machine study a fingerprint better than the trained eye? Desiree saw patterns that most people couldn’t. She could read a person’s life off his fingertips. During training, she’d practiced reading her own fingerprints, those intricate designs that marked her as unique. Stella had a scar on her left index finger from when she’d cut herself with a knife, one of many ways that their fingerprints were different.

Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.



* * *



—

ADELE VIGNES LIVED in a white shotgun house that lurked on the edge of the woods, a house first built by the founder and inhabited by generations of Decuirs ever since. When she’d first married, her new husband, Leon Vignes, had wandered down the hall, inspecting the ancient furniture. He was a repairman who wanted to be a woodworker and he ran a finger along the slender table legs, admiring the craftsmanship. He’d never expected to one day live in a home imbued with so much history, but then again, he’d never expected to marry a Decuir girl. A girl with Heritage. He could trace his own family to a long line of French winegrowers who’d hoped to build a vineyard in the New World before discovering that Louisiana was too hot and humid for grapes and settled instead for sugarcane. Big thinking crushed by reality—that’s what he’d inherited. His own parents had set their sights more reasonably; they’d run a speakeasy on the edge of Mallard called the Surly Goat. The more pious in Mallard would later trace the tragedies to that sinful business: four Vignes brothers, none of whom lived past thirty. Leon, the runt of the litter, the first to die.

The house had faded with time but, somehow, still seemed exactly as Desiree had remembered it. She stepped into the clearing, gripping her own daughter tighter, shoulders stinging with each step. Those brass columns, teal roof, the narrow front porch where her mother was sitting on a rocking chair, snapping green beans into a bowl of water. Her mother still slight, her hair trailing down her back, temples now tinted gray. Desiree paused, her daughter hanging heavy from her neck. The years pushing her back like a hand to her chest.

“Wonderin when y’all would make it out here. You know Lou already called, sayin he seen you.” Her mother was talking to her but staring at the child in her arms. “Mighty big to be carried.”

Desiree finally set her daughter down. Her back ached, but pain, at least, felt familiar. A hurting body kept you alert, awake, which was better than how numb she’d felt on the train, moving but trapped in place. She nudged her daughter forward.

“Go give your Maman a kiss,” she said. “Go on, it’s all right.”

Her daughter clamped around her legs, too shy to move, but she nudged her again until the girl dutifully climbed the steps, hesitating a second before she put an arm around her grandmother. Adele pulled back to get a better look at her, touching her mussed braids.

“Go take a bath,” she said. “Y’all smell like outside.”

In the bathroom, Desiree knelt on the cracked tile to run her daughter a bath in the clawfoot tub. She tested the water feeling, somehow, as if she were dreaming. The mirror blackened in the top corner, the chipped scalloped sink, the wooden floors creaking in the places she’d learned to avoid if she wanted to sneak in past curfew. Her mother snapping green beans on the porch, as if it were a normal morning. And yet, they hadn’t spoken since Stella left. Desiree had called home, gulping back tears, and her mother said, “You did this.” What could she even say? She was the one who’d pushed Stella to leave home in the first place. Now her sister had decided she’d rather be white and her mother blamed her because Stella was no longer there to blame.

In the kitchen, she sank into a chair, realizing a moment later, that she’d sat in the same place she always had, Stella’s chair empty beside her. Her mother was busying at the stove, and for a long moment, Desiree stared at her stiffened back.

“So that’s what you been up to,” her mother said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” Her mother turned, her eyes brimming with tears. “You hate us that much, don’t you?”

Desiree pushed away from the table.

“I knew I shouldn’t have come here—”

“Sit down—”

“If that’s all you got to say to me—”

“What do you expect? You come from God knows where, draggin some child that don’t look one lick like you—”

“We’ll go,” Desiree said. “You can be mad at me all you want, Mama, but you not gonna be nasty to my girl.”