The Vanishing Half(77)

“Did you ever have a sister?” Kennedy asked one night. Stella, bending over to sweep crumbs off the table, stiffened.

“What do you mean?” she said. “You know I didn’t.”

“I just thought—”

“You’re not still thinking about that black girl, are you?”

But her daughter bit her lip, staring out the darkened window. She was—she just hadn’t said anything about it, which felt like an even bigger betrayal.

“My God,” Stella said. “Who do you believe? Some crazy girl or your own mother?”

“But why would she lie? Why would she say those things to me?”

“She wants money! Or maybe she just wants to poke fun at you. Who knows why crazy people do things?”

Blake wandered into the kitchen, pausing, like he always did before stepping into one of their arguments, as if to remind himself that it wasn’t too late to disengage and pretend this had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t been interested enough in the dark girl to say much else about it, except that if Kennedy saw her again, she ought to call the police. Now he squeezed his daughter’s shoulder.

“Just drop it, Ken,” he said. “You can’t let that girl get to you.”

“I know, but—”

“We love you,” he said. “We wouldn’t lie to you.”

But sometimes lying was an act of love. Stella had spent too long lying to tell the truth now, or maybe, there was nothing left to reveal. Maybe this was who she had become.



* * *



—

IN JUNE, Stella and Blake surprised their daughter with the keys to a new apartment in Venice. They’d pay the rent for one year while she went on auditions, and after, she’d have to go back to school or find a job. Technically it wasn’t a bribe, but when Stella handed her ecstatic daughter the keys, she felt so awash in relief that it seemed like one. Maybe now her daughter would stop barraging her with questions about her past. She’d always worried about Kennedy discovering her secret and rejecting her, Blake leaving, her whole life disintegrating in her hands. What she hadn’t pictured was doubt. It would almost have been better if Kennedy just believed that dark girl. Instead, she seemed to mull over her claims, sometimes considering them, sometimes rejecting them, and Stella never knew where she would land. She couldn’t predict what she might ask, or what she believed, and the uncertainty made her crazy. The new apartment would at least be a distraction. Maybe even a solution.

On a Saturday morning, she and Blake helped their daughter move in. Blake assembled furniture in the bedroom, and Stella wiped down the kitchen drawers, remembering the apartment she and Desiree had shared in New Orleans. The walls were paper thin, the floorboards always creaking, a water splotch growing across the ceiling. And yet, in spite of that, she’d loved that place. She’d been so grateful to leave Farrah Thibodeaux’s floor that she hadn’t even cared how tiny and cramped this new apartment was. It was hers and it was Desiree’s, and she’d felt as if they were both on the cusp of lives too big to even imagine. She teared up, and Kennedy startled her, hugging her from behind.

“Don’t get all sappy,” she said. “I’ll still come by for dinner.”

Stella laughed, dabbing her eyes.

“I hope you like this place,” she said. “It’s a nice little apartment. You should’ve seen mine in New Orleans.”

“What was it like?”

“Well, it could’ve fit in here, twice over. We were always on top of each other—”

“Who was?”

Stella paused. “I’m sorry?”

“You said ‘we.’”

“Oh. Right. My roommate. This girl I lived with, she was from my town.”

“You never told me that before,” Kennedy said. “You never tell me anything about your life.”

“Kennedy—”

“It’s not about that,” she said. “It’s not about that girl at all. It’s just like, it’s impossible to know anything about you. I have to beg you just to tell me about some roommate you had and you’re my mother. Why don’t you want me to know you?”

She’d imagined, more than once, telling her daughter the truth, about Mallard, and Desiree, and New Orleans. How she’d pretended to be someone else because she needed a job, and after a while, pretending became reality. She could tell the truth, she thought, but there was no single truth anymore. She’d lived a life split between two women—each real, each a lie.

“I’ve just always been this way,” Stella said. “I’m not like you. Open. It’s a good way to be. I hope you stay that way.”

She handed her daughter a sheet of shelf paper, and Kennedy smiled.

“I don’t know any other way to be,” she said. “What do I have to hide?”





Part V





PACIFIC COVE


   (1985/1988)





Fourteen


In 1988, exhausted from her pursuit of artistic seriousness and, more importantly, pushing thirty, Kennedy Sanders would begin to appear on a series of daytime soap operas, and a month after she turned twenty-seven she would finally land a three-season arc on Pacific Cove. It would be her longest acting job ever, and even decades later, she would sometimes be stopped in the mall by some gooey-eyed fan who called her Charity Harris. It was the role she was born to play, the director told her, she just had a face for the soaps. She must have frowned because he laughed, touching her arm way too close to her tits.