by Brit Bennett
“You and Blake and—”
“We have a daughter,” Stella said. “Kennedy.”
Desiree tried to imagine her. For some reason, she could only envision a proper little white girl posed on a piano bench, her hands folded on her lap just so.
“So what’s she like?” Desiree said. “Your girl.”
“Willful. Charming. She’s an actor.”
“An actor!”
“She does little plays in New York. Not Broadway or anything.”
“Still,” Desiree said. “An actor. Maybe you can bring her next time.”
She knew she’d said the wrong thing when Stella glanced away. A tiny look, but one that Desiree could still read. When their eyes met again, Stella’s were full of tears.
“You know I can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Your daughter—”
“What about her?”
“She found me, Desiree. In Los Angeles. That’s why I’m here.”
Desiree scoffed. How could Jude have found Stella? Her daughter, a college student, stumbling upon her in a city as large as Los Angeles. And even if she had, somehow, found Stella, her daughter would have told her. She never would’ve kept a secret like that from her.
“She didn’t tell you,” Stella said. “I don’t blame her. I was awful. I didn’t mean to be—I was scared, some girl showing up out of nowhere, saying she knows me. She looks nothing like you, you know that. What was I supposed to think? But she found my daughter. Told her all about me, about Mallard. Then she pops up again in New York—”
Desiree pushed off the porch step. She had to call Jude. She didn’t care that it was late, that she was tipsy, that Stella was miraculously sitting on her front porch. But Stella grabbed her wrist.
“Desiree, please,” she said. “Just listen to me. Just be reasonable—”
“I been reasonable!”
“She’ll never stop! Your girl will keep trying to tell mine the truth and it’s too late for all that now. Can’t you see that?”
“Oh sure, it’s the end of the world. Your girl finding out she ain’t so lily white—”
“That I lied to her,” Stella said. “She’ll never forgive me. You don’t understand, Desiree. You’re a good mother, I can see that. Your girl loves you. That’s why she didn’t tell you about me. But I haven’t been a good one. I spent so long hiding—”
“Because you chose to! You wanted to!”
“I know,” Stella said. “I know but please. Please, Desiree. Don’t take her away from me.”
She bent over, crying into her hands, and exhausted, Desiree returned to the step beside her. She wrapped an arm around Stella’s shoulders, staring at the nape of her neck, pretending not to see the gray hair threading through the black. She’d always felt like the older sister, even though she only was by a matter of minutes. But maybe in those seven minutes they’d first been apart, they’d each lived a lifetime, setting out on their separate paths. Each discovering who she might be.
* * *
—
IN THE BEGINNING, Early Jones could never fall asleep in the Vignes house. The comfort disturbed him. He was used to sleeping under the stars or cramped in his car or lying on a hard prison cot. Or before all that, piled on a mattress stuffed with Spanish moss, beside eight of his siblings, whose names he no longer remembered, let alone their faces. He was not used to this: a big bed and homemade quilt, the headboard carved by a man nobody talked about but who lingered still in all the furniture. At first, he would lie in bed beside Desiree, under a roof that did not leak, and chase hopelessly after sleep. Sometimes he ended up pacing in front, smoking cigarettes at three in the morning, feeling as if the house itself had rejected him. Other times, he fell asleep on the porch and didn’t wake up until Desiree tripped over him the next morning.
“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 daug
hter 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.
She gripped the suitcase handle, staring down at the worn carpet.
“I gave it to my sister,” she said. “She needs it more than I do.”
Kennedy stopped. “Your sister?” she said. “You went back there?”
“Come on, honey,” Stella said. “We can talk in the car.”
Traffic would be a nightmare. She knew this long before she inched onto the 405. Bumper to bumper, red taillights as far as she could see. When she’d first moved to Los Angeles, she’d found the traffic a little beautiful. All those people going places. She was frightened to drive on the freeway, but once she got the hang of it, she went for drives alone in the middle of the day for the peace of it. She liked studying the cloudless sky, the pale blue mountains up ahead. Her baby girl strapped in the backseat, babbling along with the radio.
“You can ask me what you’d like,” she said, gripping the steering wheel. “But when we get home—”
“I know, I know,” her daughter said. “I can’t say anything.”
“It hurts to talk about,” she said. “You understand? But I want you to know me.”
Her daughter turned away, glancing out the window. They weren’t far from home but this was Los Angeles. You could cover a lifetime in eleven miles.
Seventeen
They named the dead man Freddy.
He was twenty-one, six foot two, one hundred eighty pounds, the victim of an enlarged heart. In their more morbid moments, the lab called him Fred the Dead. At the University of Minnesota, all of the medical students named their cadavers. It personalized death, the faculty said, it restored dignity to the undignified process of dying. To the undignified process of science. This was what people had in mind when they imagined donating their bodies to research: a group of twentysomethings in lab coats jokingly brainstorming names, each year at least one group so lazy they dubbed you Yorick and got on with it. Weirdly enough, naming Freddy made his body less intimate to Jude. It wasn’t his real name. He’d lived and died a completely different man, one they would never know beyond the details inscribed on his chart. He’d barely lived at all, really, and now he would quite possibly live a more interesting life here on the slab in their basement laboratory.
Once she got past the smell, Jude liked working with cadavers. She didn’t have to joke about them to mask her discomfort; she never felt sick at the sight of a dead body. Lectures bored her but she was rapt during labs, always the first to grab her scalpel when the professor asked for volunteers. People lived in bodies that were largely unknowable. Some things you could never learn about yourself—some things nobody could learn about you until after you died. She was fascinated by the mystery of dissections as well as the challenge. They had to search for tiny nerves that were impossible to find. It was almost like a little treasure hunt.
“That’s gross, baby,” Reese said. He always squirmed away when she came home smelling like formaldehyde. He made her shower before kissing him. He never wanted to be touched after the dead people. He’d always been more sentimental, at least she thought, until the afternoon that her mother called to tell her that her grandmother had died. She stood in her windowless office, holding the phone against her cheek. She was TAing that semester and had been given an office she rarely used. Nobody had the phone number except for Reese and her mother, in case of emergencies. She’d been so startled to hear her mother’s voice that it hadn’t dawned on her the only reason she might be calling.
“You knew she was sick,” her mother said. She was trying to comfort her or maybe just alleviate her shock.
“I know,” Jude said. “Still.”
“It wasn’t painful. She was smilin and talkin to me, right up until the end.”
“Are you all right, Mama?”
“Oh, you know me.”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
Her mother laughed a little. “I’m fine,” she said. “Anyway, the service is Friday. I just wanted to let you know. I know you’re busy with school—”
“Friday?” Jude said. “I’ll fly down—”
“Hold on. No use in you comin all the way down here—”
“My grandmother is dead,” Jude said. “I’m coming home.”
Her mother didn’t try to dissuade her further. Jude was grateful for that. She’d already acted as if notifying her of her grandmother’s passing had been some inconvenience. What type of life did her mother think she was living that she couldn’t interrupt with that type of news? They hung up and Jude stepped out into the hallway. Students buzzed past. A friend from the biology department waved his coffee at her as he ducked into the lounge. A weedy orange-haired girl tacked a green poster for a protest onto the announcement board. That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.
* * *
—
WEST HOLLYWOOD WAS A GRAVEYARD, Barry said the last time he’d called. Every day, a new litany of the dying.
There were the men you sort of knew, like Jared, the blond bartender at Mirage with the heavy pour. He’d wink then tilt the bottle of gin into your glass, as if he were doing you a personal favor and didn’t treat everyone to his generosity. His memorial was in Eagle Rock. There were exes or enemies like Ricardo, known as Yessica, a queen who’d beaten Barry at more balls than he would ever admit. He’d asked to be cremated and Barry had stood along the shore at Manhattan Beach while he was scattered into the ocean. Then the men you loved. Luis had just been admitted to Good Samaritan Hospital, and when Jude called, he kept talking about how a nurse told him that Bobby Kennedy had died there.
“Can you believe it?” he said. “I mean, a president died here.”
She didn’t have the heart to tell him that Bobby Kennedy was never president. He died running for office, a young man with promise.
“Not that young,” Barry said, when she called him after. “He was in his forties.”
“That’s not young?” she said.
He didn’t answer, and she wished she hadn’t said anything at all.
On the weekends, she attended impassioned meetings held by activists who organized petitions and letter-writing campaigns and demonstrations intended to shame the government out of its indifference. She volunteered with a student group that handed out condoms and clean needles in downtown Minneapolis. She visi
ted patients who had no family, brought them magazines and playing cards. She thought about death constantly, and still, only on the afternoon that her grandmother died did she find herself unable to touch the cadaver. It was silly, but she couldn’t even look at him. She kept imagining her grandmother lying lifeless on a slab somewhere. Maman would never donate her body to research. She would hate the idea of strangers touching her, and besides, she was a Catholic who still believed that cremation was a sin. On Judgment Day, her body would be resurrected, so she needed to keep it intact.
“Just bury me in the backyard in an old pine box,” Maman used to say. This was years ago, when her grandmother began to realize that she was sick. Her memories ebbing and flowing like the tide.
That whole year, Jude had read every book she could find on Alzheimer’s disease. She studied the illness desperately, as if understanding it would make any difference. It didn’t, of course. She was only a first-year student and she wanted to be a cardiologist, anyway. The heart was a muscle she understood. The brain baffled her. Still, she borrowed books from the medical library, reading all she could. Inside her grandmother’s brain, protein fragments hardened into plaques between nerve cells. Brain tissue shrank. Cells in the hippocampus degenerated. Eventually, as the disease spread through the cerebral cortex, her grandmother would lose the ability to perform routine tasks. She would lose her judgment, control of her emotions, language. She would not be able to feed herself, recognize people, control bodily functions. She would lose her memory. She would lose herself.
“Don’t you waste all that money on me,” her grandmother had said. “I won’t be around to see none of it.”
She didn’t care about the outfit she was buried in, what Scripture might be engraved on the headstone, which flowers adorned her. But no cremation, absolutely not. She was adamant about that. Jude never pressed her even though she didn’t understand. If God could reassemble a decaying corpse, then why couldn’t he reanimate ashes? But she didn’t want to picture this either, her grandmother burned, flecks of bone and skin swirling in an urn. She left lab early.