The Vanishing Half(96)

“He’s like a wild dog,” he’d heard Adele tell her. “You give him a nice bed, he still feel better sleepin in the dirt.”

She wasn’t wrong. He was a hunter, after all. He wasn’t built for soft quilts and roomy chairs. He only felt like himself with his nose pressed to the trail. Which was why, the next morning, when he heard Stella sneaking out the front door, he followed her outside.

“Mighty early for the train,” he said.

She jolted, almost dropping her little bag. She looked shamed that he’d caught her.

“I have to get back home,” she said.

“Ain’t right to leave like this,” he said. “Without sayin good-bye.”

“It’s the only way,” she said. “If I have to tell her good-bye, I’ll never leave and I have to. I have to go back to my life.”

He understood. In spite of himself, he did. Maybe that was the only way his parents could’ve dumped him. If they’d told him good-bye, he would’ve hollered, clinging to their legs. He would’ve never let them go.

“You need a ride?” he said.

She glanced toward the dark woods and nodded. He led Stella to his car. He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough. He drove Stella past the bus stop, all the way to the train station. She sat in the front seat of his beat-up ride, both hands clutching the bag in her lap.

“I never meant it to be this way,” she said.

He grunted. He didn’t want to look at her as she climbed out of his car. He didn’t want to be the only one to tell her good-bye. He already knew then that he would lie to Desiree when he came home. Pretend he hadn’t heard Stella inching across the hall. The same way he knew, when Stella slid her wedding ring into his palm, that he would never tell Desiree about it.

“Sell it,” she said, not looking at him. “Take care of Mama.”

He tried to hand the ring back to her but by then, Stella was climbing out of his car, Stella walking into the train station, Stella disappearing behind the glass doors. That diamond ring felt cold in his palm. He had no idea what something like that could be worth, and he wouldn’t know for sure until weeks later, when he had it appraised. That bald white man staring at it through his magnifying glass, gazing back at Early warily and asking how he came by the ring again. Passed down through the family, Early told him. Like most truths, it sounded a little phony.



* * *



—

WHEN DESIREE WOKE that morning, she reached across the bed and felt nothing but air. She wasn’t surprised, but she still cried out, touching the empty space across the bed. The night before, she had fallen asleep across from her sister, two women squeezed onto a bed that was far too small. Stella in her old spot, Desiree in the place she’d slept for years. For hours, they stayed up, whispering in the dark until their vision blurred, neither wanting to be the first to close her eyes.



* * *



—

A MONTH AFTER Stella returned to Mallard, her daughter finally called home and announced that she was moving back to California. Her thing with Frantz—and wasn’t it just like her, to call a serious relationship a “thing”?—had run its course, she’d spent all her money in Europe, her heart wasn’t in musical theater anymore. She offered up a few different excuses but Stella, listening, her heart in her throat, didn’t care why. She didn’t even care that her daughter hadn’t said that she wanted to be close to her parents, that she missed them. She had gone home and now her daughter was coming home too. The two events were unconnected, of course, but in her mind, she bound them together, one return triggering the other. She canceled her afternoon class to meet Kennedy outside LAX. Then there she was, walking through the terminal, lugging a bulging suitcase. She was thinner now and she’d cut her hair, blonde waves falling halfway down her neck.

Stella pulled her into a hug, holding on to her for so long that the others waiting at the baggage carousel stared.

“Are you okay?” her daughter asked. “You look different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. Tired.”

She’d spent the past month unable to sleep through the night. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw Desiree.

“I’m fine,” she said, grabbing Kennedy’s hand. “I’m just so glad you’re back.”

“What happened to your ring?” her daughter said.

She almost lied. It scared her, how natural lying was. She almost told her daughter the same story she’d told Blake when she came home, bare-handed for the first time in twenty-odd years. How she’d taken off her ring at work to wash her hands, how she must have left it in the soap dish in the faculty bathroom, how she had hounded every janitor she could find but none could locate it. She’d seemed so distraught that he ended up comforting her.

“Oh it’s all right, Stel,” he said. “I think you’re due for an upgrade anyway.”

He was having the new ring custom made at her favorite jeweler. A lie procuring the first ring, a different one procuring the second. She could never be completely honest with her husband, but somehow, standing in the airport, she couldn’t bring herself to lie to her daughter again. Maybe it was the exhaustion, or her relief that her girl was finally home, or maybe, reaching for the bulging suitcase, she knew that her daughter had running in her blood too. She would always feel that urge to escape tugging at her and never understand why, not if Stella didn’t explain it to her. Her daughter, who would forever be the only person in her life who really knew her.