The Vanishing Half(99)

“You should really work on your bedside manner,” she said.

On the other end of the line, she imagined Jude smiling.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know any other way to put it.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Okay, I think.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. She’s your grandmother too.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “I didn’t know her like you did.”

“Well, I still thought you should know.”

“Okay,” she said. “I know.”

“Are you gonna tell her?”

Kennedy laughed. “When do I tell her anything?”

She did not tell her mother, for example, that she still talked to Jude. Not all the time but often enough. Sometimes Kennedy called her, left messages on her answering machine. Hey Jude, she said, every time, because she knew it drove her crazy. Sometimes Jude phoned first. Their conversations always went like this one—halting, a little combative, familiar. They never talked long, never made plans to meet, and at times, the calls seemed more perfunctory than anything, like holding a finger to another’s wrist to feel for a pulse. A few minutes they kept their fingers pressed there and then they let go.

They did not tell their mothers about these phone calls. They would both keep that secret to the ends of the twins’ separate lives.

“Maybe she’d want to know this,” Jude said.

“Trust me, she doesn’t,” Kennedy said. “You don’t know her like I do.”

Secrets were the only language they spoke. Her mother showed her love by lying, and in turn, Kennedy did the same. She never mentioned the funeral photograph again, although she’d kept that faded picture of the twins, although she would study it the night her grandmother died and not tell a soul.

“I don’t know her at all,” Jude said.



* * *



—

THAT NIGHT, late in bed, Jude asked Reese to fly home with her.

She was tracing her finger along his thick eyebrows, the beard he hadn’t trimmed in so long, she’d started calling him a lumberjack. He was changing, always. His jawline sharper now, his muscles firmer, the hair on his arms so thick that he couldn’t walk across the carpet without shocking her. He even smelled different. She noticed every little change about him since they’d broken up, right before she moved to Minnesota. He didn’t want to leave his life in Los Angeles. He didn’t want to follow her to the Midwest, hanging off her like dead weight. One day, he told her, she would wake up and realize that she could do much better than him.

All spring, they’d broken up slowly, one piece at a time, picking little arguments, making up, making love, then starting the whole cycle all over again. Twice, she’d almost moved in with Barry; it was better to break up now than delay the inevitable, she told herself, but each night, she slept in Reese’s bed. She couldn’t fall asleep anywhere else.

That year, the first snow had arrived earlier than she’d expected, tiny flurries falling on Halloween. She’d stared out the window of Moos Tower, watching undergraduates scurry past in their costumes. She was thinking about her cowboy sitting on the couch in that crowded party and, again, tried not to cry. But that night, she found him outside her apartment door in a black knit cap covered in snowflakes, a canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

“Goddamn,” he said. “I’m so goddamn stupid sometimes, you know that?”

At the university, she met a black endocrinologist willing to write Reese a prescription for testosterone. They had to scrimp each month to afford it out of pocket, but those street drugs would wreck his liver, Dr. Shayla said. She was blunt but kind—she told Reese, scribbling onto her pad, that he reminded her of her own son.

Now, lying in bed across from him, Jude kissed his closed eyelids.

“What do you say?” she asked.

“Really?” he said. “You want me to?”

“I don’t think I can go back there without you.”

She’d fallen in love with him when she was eighteen. She hadn’t slept a night away from him in three years. In a dingy New York City hotel room, she’d slowly unwrapped his bandages, holding her breath as cool air kissed his new skin.



* * *



—

ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE WAS HEREDITARY, which meant that Desiree would always worry about developing it. She would begin filling out crossword puzzles because she’d read in some women’s magazine that brain puzzles could help prevent memory loss.

“You’ve got to exercise your brain,” she would tell her daughter, “just like any other muscle.”

Her daughter didn’t have the heart to tell her that the brain was, in fact, not a muscle. She tried her best to help her with the clues while she imagined Stella out in the world somewhere, already forgetting.



* * *



—

JUDE WINSTON’S HOMETOWN, which had never been a town at all, no longer existed. And yet, it still looked the same. She stared out the window of Early’s truck, which surprised her when he’d met them in Lafayette. She still expected the El Camino. “That car’s older than you,” Early said, laughing. “I had to junk it.” He was wearing his refinery coveralls, which also struck her, Early in a uniform. He pumped Reese’s hand and pulled her into a hug, kissing her forehead. His beard scratchy like she’d remembered it.