by Brit Bennett
He was raised in the projects of Cleveland and he loved that city with the fierceness of someone who hadn’t been given much to love. She’d only been given a town she’d always wanted to escape and a mother who’d made it clear that she was not welcomed back. She hadn’t told Sam about Stella yet—it seemed like another thing about Mallard that he wouldn’t understand. But as rain splattered against the metal fire escape, she turned toward him and said that she had a twin sister who’d decided to become someone else.
“She’ll get tired of all that playacting,” he said. “Bet she comes running back, feeling foolish. You’re way too sweet for anyone to stay away.”
He kissed her forehead, and she held him tighter, his heart thumping against her ear. This was back in the beginning. Before his hands curled into fists, before he called her uppity yellow bitch or crazy as your sister or off thinkin you white. Back when she’d found herself starting to trust him.
* * *
—
MANY YEARS LATER, when her eyesight would begin to fade, she would blame the years she’d spent squinting at sheets of fingerprints and marking their ridges. Roberta told her once that soon the entire fingerprinting system would be operated by machines. The Japanese were already testing out the technology. But how could a machine study a fingerprint better than the trained eye? Desiree saw patterns that most people couldn’t. She could read a person’s life off his fingertips. During training, she’d practiced reading her own fingerprints, those intricate designs that marked her as unique. Stella had a scar on her left index finger from when she’d cut herself with a knife, one of many ways that their fingerprints were different.
Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.
* * *
—
ADELE VIGNES LIVED in a white shotgun house that lurked on the edge of the woods, a house first built by the founder and inhabited by generations of Decuirs ever since. When she’d first married, her new husband, Leon Vignes, had wandered down the hall, inspecting the ancient furniture. He was a repairman who wanted to be a woodworker and he ran a finger along the slender table legs, admiring the craftsmanship. He’d never expected to one day live in a home imbued with so much history, but then again, he’d never expected to marry a Decuir girl. A girl with Heritage. He could trace his own family to a long line of French winegrowers who’d hoped to build a vineyard in the New World before discovering that Louisiana was too hot and humid for grapes and settled instead for sugarcane. Big thinking crushed by reality—that’s what he’d inherited. His own parents had set their sights more reasonably; they’d run a speakeasy on the edge of Mallard called the Surly Goat. The more pious in Mallard would later trace the tragedies to that sinful business: four Vignes brothers, none of whom lived past thirty. Leon, the runt of the litter, the first to die.
The house had faded with time but, somehow, still seemed exactly as Desiree had remembered it. She stepped into the clearing, gripping her own daughter tighter, shoulders stinging with each step. Those brass columns, teal roof, the narrow front porch where her mother was sitting on a rocking chair, snapping green beans into a bowl of water. Her mother still slight, her hair trailing down her back, temples now tinted gray. Desiree paused, her daughter hanging heavy from her neck. The years pushing her back like a hand to her chest.
“Wonderin when y’all would make it out here. You know Lou already called, sayin he seen you.” Her mother was talking to her but staring at the child in her arms. “Mighty big to be carried.”
Desiree finally set her daughter down. Her back ached, but pain, at least, felt familiar. A hurting body kept you alert, awake, which was better than how numb she’d felt on the train, moving but trapped in place. She nudged her daughter forward.
“Go give your Maman a kiss,” she said. “Go on, it’s all right.”
Her daughter clamped around her legs, too shy to move, but she nudged her again until the girl dutifully climbed the steps, hesitating a second before she put an arm around her grandmother. Adele pulled back to get a better look at her, touching her mussed braids.
“Go take a bath,” she said. “Y’all smell like outside.”
In the bathroom, Desiree knelt on the cracked tile to run her daughter a bath in the clawfoot tub. She tested the water feeling, somehow, as if she were dreaming. The mirror blackened in the top corner, the chipped scalloped sink, the wooden floors creaking in the places she’d learned to avoid if she wanted to sneak in past curfew. Her mother snapping green beans on the porch, as if it were a normal morning. And yet, they hadn’t spoken since Stella left. Desiree had called home, gulping back tears, and her mother said, “You did this.” What could she even say? She was the one who’d pushed Stella to leave home in the first place. Now her sister had decided she’d rather be white and her mother blamed her because Stella was no longer there to blame.
In the kitchen, she sank into a chair, realizing a moment later, that she’d sat in the same place she always had, Stella’s chair empty beside her. Her mother was busying at the stove, and for a long moment, Desiree stared at her stiffened back.
“So that’s what you been up to,” her mother said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” Her mother turned, her eyes brimming with tears. “You hate us that much, don’t you?”
Desiree pushed away from the table.
“I knew I shouldn’t have come here—”
“Sit down—”
“If that’s all you got to say to me—”
“What do you expect? You come from God knows where, draggin some child that don’t look one lick like you—”
“We’ll go,” Desiree said. “You can be mad at me all you want, Mama, but you not gonna be nasty to my girl.”
“I said sit down,” her mother said again, this time quieter. She slid a yellow square of cornbread across the table. “I’m just surprised. Can’t I be surprised?”
All those times Desiree had imagined calling home. When she’d arrived in D.C., settling in Roberta’s basement, her mother with no way to reach her. Or after Sam proposed, and they took engagement photographs under the cherry blossoms. She’d slid a picture into an envelope, even addressed it, but she couldn’t bring herself to send it. Not because she was ashamed of him—that was how Sam took it—but because what was the point of sharing good news with someone who couldn’t be happy for you? She already knew what her mother would tell her. You don’t love that dark man. You’re only marrying him out of rebellion and the worst thing to give a rebelling child is attention. You’ll understand someday when you have a child of your own. After the wedding, after the cake had been cut, after their friends had wandered boozy and laughing into the streets, she’d slumped in the back of the reception hall in her frilly white dress and cried. She had never imagined that she might get married someday without her sister and mother by her side.
She’d even thought about calling after she’d given birth to a baby girl at Freedmen’s Hospital. When Jude was born, the colored nurse had paused before wrapping her in a pink blanket. “It’s good luck,” she’d finally said, handing her over, “for a girl to look like her daddy.” She smiled a little after, offering reassurance to a woman she believed would need it. But Desiree stared into her baby’s face, enchanted. A different woman might have been disappointed by how little her own daughter resembled her, but she only felt grateful. The last thing she wanted was to love someone else who looked just like herself.
“Would’ve fixed more if you told me you was comin,” her mother said.
“It was sort of last minute,” Desiree said.
She’d barely eaten on the train, nibbling on crackers and gulping black coffee until the caffeine made her jittery. She needed to plan. Mallard, and then what? Where to next? They couldn’t possibly stay here but she didn’t know where else to go. Now she stared around the aging kitchen, missing her own apartment i
n D.C. Her job, her friends, her life. Maybe she’d overreacted—the riots had set everyone on edge. A week ago, she’d watched Sam cry as Walter Cronkite delivered the news, holding him on the couch as he trembled in her arms. The shooter was a madman, maybe, or a military operative, or perhaps even an agent in the Bureau acting on behalf of the government. They were culpable, perhaps, complicit Negroes working for the wrong side. He was rambling and she clutched him until the broadcast ended. That night they’d made love desperately, a strange way to honor the Reverend, maybe, but she didn’t feel like herself that night, overwhelmed by grief over a man she didn’t know.
In the morning, she passed ravaged storefronts with SOUL BROTHER scribbled on boarded shop windows, hasty claims of allegiance written in marker and pasted against glass. The Bureau dismissed early that day. On her walk home from the bus, a scared colored youth—scrawny as the baseball bat he was gripping—demanded her pocketbook.
“Come on, you white bitch!” he screamed, slamming the bat against the pavement, as if he could drill to the center of the earth. She fumbled with her leather strap, too afraid to correct him, recognizing herself in his terror and fury, when Sam leapt in front of her, arms raised, and said, “This my woman, brother.” The teen ran off into the din. Sam swept her inside the apartment, holding her against the safety of his chest.
The city lit up four nights. And on the last night, Sam gripped her naked body and whispered, “Let’s make another.” It took her a moment to realize he meant a baby. She’d hesitated. She hadn’t meant to, but the thought of another baby anchoring her to him, another baby to worry about every time Sam was in a rage—she could never have another baby with him. Of course she didn’t tell him this, but her hesitation made it clear, and later, when he’d grabbed her throat, she knew exactly why. She’d wounded him while he was still grieving. No wonder he’d gotten angry. So he liked to throw his weight around a little. Who could blame him, living in a world that refused to respect him as a man? She didn’t have to be so mouthy. She could try harder to make a peaceful home. Wasn’t this the same man who’d stood between her and an angry boy’s bat? The same man who’d loved her after her sister abandoned her and her mother refused her phone calls?
Maybe it wasn’t too late. They’d only been gone two days. She could always call Sam, tell him that she’d made a mistake. She’d needed a little time to clear her head, that’s all, of course she’d never seriously meant to leave. Her mother pushed the plate toward her again.
“What type of trouble you in?” she said.
Desiree forced a laugh. “There’s no trouble, Mama.”
“I ain’t stupid. You think I don’t know you runnin from that man of yours?”
Desiree stared down at the table, her eyes welling up. Her mother poured milk onto the cornbread and mushed it with a fork, the way Desiree had eaten it as a girl.
“He gone now,” her mother said. “Eat your cornbread.”
* * *
—
LATE THAT NIGHT, over a hundred miles southeast of Mallard, Early Jones received a job offer that would alter the course of his life. He didn’t know this at the time. Any job was just that to him—a job—and when he stepped inside Ernesto’s, craning his neck for Big Ceel, he was only worried about whether he could afford a drink. He jangled the loose change in his pocket. Could never keep a dollar on him. Two weeks ago, he’d run a job for Ceel, and somehow, he’d burned through the money already on everything a young man alone in New Orleans required, card games and booze and women. Now he was desperate for another job. For the money, of course, but also because he hated being in one place for too long, and two weeks in the same place was, for him then, far too long.
He wasn’t a settling man. He was only good at getting lost. He’d mastered that particular skill as a boy rooted nowhere. Spent his childhood—if you could call it that—sharecropping on farms in Janesville and Jena, down south to New Roads and Palmetto. He’d been given to his aunt and uncle when he was eight, because they had no children and his parents had too many. He did not know where his parents lived now, if they still lived, and he said that he never thought about them.
“They gone,” he said, when asked. “Gone folks is gone.”
But the truth is that when he’d first started hunting hiding people, he’d tried to find his folks. His failure was swift and humiliating; he didn’t know enough about his parents to even guess where to begin. Probably for the best. They hadn’t wanted him as a boy—what on earth would they do with him as a grown man? Still, his defeat nagged at him. Since he’d started hunting, his parents were the only people he had never found.
The key to staying lost was to never love anything. Time and time again, Early was amazed by what a running man came back for. Women, mostly. In Jackson, he’d caught a man wanted for attempted murder because he’d circled back for his wife. You could find a new woman anywhere, but then again, the most violent men were always the most sentimental. Pure emotion, any way you look at it. What really got him were the men who returned for belongings. Too many goddamn cars to count, always some junk a man had driven for years and couldn’t part with. In Toledo, he’d caught a man who’d returned to his childhood home for an old baseball.
“I don’t know, man,” he said, cuffed in the backseat of Early’s El Camino. “I just really love that thing.”
Love had never dragged Early anywhere. As soon as he left a place, he forgot it. Names faded, faces blurred, buildings smudged into indistinguishable brick slabs. He forgot the names of teachers at all the schools he’d attended, the streets where he’d lived, even what his parents looked like. This was his gift, a short memory. A long memory could drive a man crazy.
He’d been running jobs for Ceel, off and on, for seven years now. He never wanted anyone to think that he was working for the law. He caught criminals for one reason only—the money—and he didn’t give two shits about the white man’s justice. After he caught a man, he never wondered if the jury convicted him or if the man survived prison. He forgot him altogether. And though he’d been recognized in a bar once, and still wore the knife scars across his stomach as a souvenir, forgetting was the only way he could do his job. He liked hunting criminals. Each time Ceel approached him about a missing child or deadbeat father, Early shook his head.
“Don’t know nothin bout none of those people,” he said, tilting back his whiskey.
In Ernesto’s, Ceel shrugged. He had a proper office in the Seventh Ward, but Early hated meeting him there, across the street from a church, all those sanctified folks staring at him as they trampled down the steps. This bar was Early’s kind of place, a little shadowy and safe. Ceel was a hefty man, cardboard-colored with silky black hair. He carried a silver cigarette lighter that he twirled between his fingers while he talked. He’d been twirling that lighter the first time he’d approached Early, in a bar like this one, years ago. Early had listened half-heartedly, watching the light glint off the silver and dance along the bar.
“Son, how’d you like to make some money?” Ceel asked.
He didn’t look like a gangster or pimp but he carried the sleaziness of someone who did barely legal work. He was a bail bondsman, looking for a new bounty hunter, and he’d noticed Early.
“You got a quiet way about you,” he said. “That’s good. I need a man to look and listen.”
Early was twenty-four then, fresh out of prison, alone in New Orleans because he’d figured it as good a place to start over as any. He took the job because he needed the work. He’d never expected to be good at it, so good, in fact, that Ceel kept approaching him with jobs that had nothing to do with bail bonds.
“You know about ’em what I tell you,” Ceel said. “And I ain’t told you nothin yet.”
“Well, I don’t like to be caught up in folks’ affairs. Don’t you have nothin else for me?”
Ceel laughed. “You ’bout the only man I ever hear say that.
Everybody else I talk to be glad not to hunt down some mean sonofabitch for a change.”
But Early could, at least, understand how a wanted man thought. The exhaustion, the desperation, the sheer selfishness of survival. The otherwise disappeared baffled him. He certainly didn’t understand married folks and had no desire to get in between them. Then again, a job was a job. Why wouldn’t he take on something light? He’d just spent two weeks tracking a man halfway to Mexico; his car broke down in the desert and he’d wondered if he would die out there, hunting a man he didn’t even care to see punished. If the money was all the same, why not say yes to an easy job for once?
“I’m not grabbin her,” he said.
“Nothin like that. You just call when you find her. Her old man’s lookin for her. She run off with his kid.”
“What she run off for?”
Ceel shrugged. “None my concern. Man wants her found. She from some little town up north called Mallard. Ever heard of it?”
“Passed through as a boy,” Early said. “Funny place. Highfalutin.”
He remembered little about the town, except that everyone was light and uppity, and once, at Mass, a tall pale man had slapped him for dipping his finger into the holy water font before the man’s wife. He was sixteen then, shocked by the sudden sting on his neck, as his uncle grabbed his shoulder, staring at the cracked tile floor, and apologized. He’d spent a summer in that place, working a farm on the edge of town and delivering groceries to earn extra cash. He didn’t make a single friend, but he did nurse a futile crush on a girl he’d met carrying groceries up her porch steps. He didn’t know how she even entered his mind. He was so young when they’d met; he’d barely known her; by fall, he’d moved on to another farm in another town. Still, he saw her standing barefoot in her living room, washing the windows. When Ceel slid him the photograph, Early’s stomach lurched. He almost felt as if he’d willed it. For the first time in ten years, he was staring at Desiree Vignes’s face.