The Vanishing Half

There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.

Her mother would never forget Stella. She would stare into the mirror for the rest of her life, reminded of her loss. But Jude wouldn’t add to her grief. She would talk to her mother on the phone, days later, and not say a word about Stella. Maybe she was like her aunt in that way. Maybe, like Stella, she became a new person in each place she’d lived, and she was already unrecognizable to her mother, a girl who hoarded secrets. A liar.

“You tell yourself no before anyone even says it to you.”

The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.

It embarrassed him a little, to tell the truth. He respected the natural order of things but you didn’t have to be cruel about it. As a boy, he’d had a colored nanny named Wilma who was practically family. He still sent her a Christmas card each year. But Stella wouldn’t even hire colored help for the house—she claimed Mexicans worked harder. He never understood why she averted her gaze when an old Negro woman shuffled past on the sidewalk, why she was always so curt with the elevator operators. She was jumpy around Negroes, like a child who’d been bit by a dog.

Then other times, I think about just walkin around town. No one recognizin me. It’d be like showin up to your own funeral. Just watchin life go on without you.

She laughed suddenly. After all those years, he still felt delighted by that laugh, stunned to be caught in its blast.

She didn’t understand exactly what he meant, but she liked being part of an us. People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.

When they arrived home, her father greeted her mother with a kiss, and Jude realized that if she tried, she could pretend that the bruises came from someplace else. Her relationship with one parent magically untethered to the other. So when she thought of her daddy, he was sprawled beside her on the rug, flipping through the comics. Not dragging her mother by her hair into the bedroom—no, that was some other man. And after the broken glass was swept, the blood wiped off the tile, after her mother retreated into the bathroom, a bag of ice pressed against her face, her real daddy returned, smiling, stroking her cheek.

Better to picture Lonnie beating on her. That other thing—that soft part—terrified her even more.