The Vanishing Half(76)
She was running out the door when she bumped into her daughter, lugging a bag of laundry up the steps. Both women jolted, then Kennedy flashed the disarming smile she’d inherited from her father. It was impossible to ever be angry at that smile, and Kennedy had tested it often: when she’d begged for a puppy but left Yolanda to care for him, when she’d failed ninth-grade geometry in spite of Stella’s attempts to help her, when she’d crashed her first Camaro and, somehow, convinced Blake to buy her a second one.
“Well, she’s got to have a way to get around,” he said, and Stella, tired of being the difficult one, finally agreed. Not that she’d had much say. Kennedy learned long ago that if she wanted anything, she ought to ask her father. Telling Stella was a mere formality.
“I was hoping to speak to you,” Stella said. “Listen, about last night—”
“I know, I know, you’re sorry. But if you weren’t going to come, you could’ve just told me. I would’ve given the ticket to someone else—”
“I did see your play! I just had to slip out early, that’s all. I wasn’t feeling well—something I ate, probably. But I promise I was there. I thought it was very clever. The ghosts and all. And that song you did in the saloon. I loved it all. Really.”
Her daughter was wearing big shiny sunglasses so Stella couldn’t see her eyes, only her own face reflected back at her. She looked calm, natural. Not like a woman who had awakened with her heart racing.
“Did you really like it?” Kennedy asked.
“Of course, darling. I thought you were marvelous.”
She pulled her daughter into a hug, running a hand along her thin shoulder blades.
“All right,” she said. “I’m running late. Have a good day.”
She fumbled with her attaché case, searching for her keys, when she heard her daughter call, over her shoulder, “You’ve never been to a place called Mallard, have you?”
Stella never expected to hear that word fall out of her daughter’s mouth, and for the first time all morning, she faltered.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I met this girl from there—she said she knows you.”
“I’ve never even heard of the place. Mallard, did you say?”
That disarming smile again. Kennedy shrugged.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Maybe she was thinking of someone else.”
* * *
—
WHEN BLAKE CAME HOME from work that evening, Stella told him about the dark girl.
All afternoon, she’d debated whether to say anything before deciding that she should. A preemptive strike. She didn’t want him to think that she had anything to hide, and she preferred him to hear the story from her. She hated the idea of her husband and daughter whispering about her. So while he undressed for bed, she told him that a dark girl, claiming to be a cousin, had cornered Kennedy after her play. She watched his face the entire time, waiting to see it change. A flicker of recognition, maybe. Relief that a question he’d always wondered had finally been answered. But he just scoffed, unbuttoning his dress shirt.
“It’s the Camaro,” he said. “I’m sure she saw it and thought, boom. Payday.”
“Exactly,” Stella said. “That’s exactly right. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her.”
“This city, I swear, sometimes.”
They’d been talking recently about leaving Los Angeles. Moving to Orange County, maybe, or even farther north to Santa Barbara. She’d resisted at first, not wanting to leave her job, but now she kept imagining that dark girl creeping up to her again, poking her head in doorways, tapping on the windows. Or worse, the girl following Kennedy around the city, appearing at her shows, stalking her between auditions. What could she possibly want? Again, her face flashed through Stella’s mind. How she’d stood under that eave, wounded.
Stella’s mistake had been to think that she could settle anywhere. You had to keep moving or the past would always catch up to you.
“You know those people downtown,” she said. “High out their minds, half of them.”
“Hell, more than half,” Blake said, sliding in bed beside her.
The first time she’d ever been white, Stella couldn’t wait to tell Desiree what she’d done. Desiree would never believe it—she didn’t think Stella was capable of doing anything surprising. But that evening, when Stella returned home, she passed her sister in the hallway and said nothing. A secret transgression was even more thrilling than a shared one. She had shared everything with Desiree. She wanted something of her own.
She was forty-four now; she’d spent more of her life without Desiree than with her. Still, as the weeks passed, she felt Desiree’s pull on her tighten, like a hand gripping her neck. Sometimes it felt like a gentle rub; other times, it choked her. She blamed the dark girl, although she hadn’t seen her since that night outside the Stardust Theater. The city was large; the girl would never find her again. Stella never thought of her as a niece. Niece didn’t seem the right word for a girl you didn’t know, a girl who looked nothing like you. Then again, wouldn’t Desiree feel the same way about Kennedy? Sometimes even Stella stared at her daughter and saw a stranger. It wasn’t Kennedy’s fault that Stella had decided, long ago, to become someone else. Now her whole life had been built on that lie and the other lies Stella stacked in order to maintain it, until one dark girl appeared, threatening to send them all tumbling down.