The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort. The

In that little farm town, nothing surprising ever happened, not since the Vignes twins had disappeared. But that morning in April 1968, on his way to work, Lou spotted Desiree Vignes walking along Partridge Road, carrying a small leather suitcase. She looked exactly the same as when she’d left at sixteen—still light, her skin the color of sand barely wet. Her hipless body reminding him of a branch caught in a strong breeze. She was hurrying, her head bent, and—Lou paused here, a bit of a showman—she was holding the hand of a girl, seven or eight, and black as tar.

“Blueblack,” he said. “Like she flown direct from Africa.” Lou’s Egg House splintered into a dozen different conversations. The line cook wondered if it had been Desiree after all, since Lou was turning sixty in May and still too vain to wear his eyeglasses. The waitress said that it had to be—even a blind man could spot a Vignes girl and it certainly couldn’t have been that other one. The diners, abandoning grits and eggs on the counter, didn’t care about that Vignes foolishness—who on earth was the dark child? Could she possibly be Desiree’s? “Well, who else’s could it be?” Lou said. He grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser, dabbing his damp forehead. “Maybe it’s an orphan that got took in.” “I just don’t see how nothin that black coulda come out Desiree.”

“Desiree seem like the type to take in no orphan to you?” Of course she didn’t. She was a selfish girl. If they remembered anything about Desiree, it ...

Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.

A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place.

Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift. He’d married a mulatto even lighter than himself. She was pregnant then with their first child, and he imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.

How Desiree never wanted to be a part of the town that was her birthright. How she felt that you could flick away history like shrugging a hand off your shoulder. You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood. Somehow, the Vignes twins believed themselves

Sun-drunk from the long barbecue in the town square,

when she’d taken center stage, she’d felt, for a second, that maybe Mallard wasn’t the dullest town in America. Her classmates cheering for her, Stella receding into the darkness of the gym, Desiree feeling like only herself for once, not a twin, not one half of an incomplete pair.

She didn’t hate Mallard as much as she felt trapped by its smallness.

Maybe she would have been able to endure all this if it weren’t for everyone’s obsession with lightness.

Her father had been so light that, on a cold morning, she could turn his arm over to see the blue of his veins. But none of that mattered when the white men came for him, so how could she care about lightness after that?

“If it was true, then you’d do something about it,” Stella said. She was always so practical. On Sunday nights, Stella ironed her clothes for the entire week, unlike Desiree, who rushed around each morning to find a clean dress and finish the homework crushed in the bottom of her book bag.

Stella wanted to become a schoolteacher at Mallard High someday. But every time Desiree imagined her own future in Mallard, life carrying on forever as it always had, she felt something clawing at her throat. When she mentioned leaving, Stella never wanted to talk about it. “We can’t leave Mama,” she always said, and, chastened, Desiree fell silent. She’s already lost so much, was the part that never needed to be said.

“I thought—” she said. “I guess I just thought—” She wanted to go to college someday and of course she’d get into Spelman or Howard or wherever else she wanted to go. The thought had always terrified Desiree, Stella moving to Atlanta or D.C. without her. A small part of her felt relieved; now Stella couldn’t possibly leave her behind. Still, she hated to see her sister sad. “You could still go,” Desiree said. “Later, I mean.” “How? You have to finish high school first.”

But then Desiree’s reflection appeared behind her, and Stella looked away, ashamed, almost, to be seen wanting anything at all.

“Which one are you again?” he’d ask. “Stella,” she sometimes told him, just for fun. She’d always been a great liar. The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.

She could mirror her sister, mimic her voice, inhabit her body in her own. She felt special, knowing that she could pretend to be Stella but Stella could never be her.

Telling Stella a secret was like whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight. Nothing escaped her. But she hadn’t imagined then that Stella was keeping secrets of her own.

By the time Desiree found the nerve to leave, she hadn’t spoken to Stella since she’d passed over. She had no way to reach her and didn’t even know where she lived now.

before remembering that she was gone. That she had left Desiree, for the first time ever, alone.

even after six months, Desiree still held out hope. Stella would call. She would send a letter. But each evening, she groped inside the empty mailbox and waited beside a phone that refused to ring.

They funny down there. Colorstruck. That’s why I left.” Not exactly, although she wanted him to believe that she was nothing like the place she’d come from. She wanted him to believe anything beside the truth: that she was only young and bored and she’d dragged her sister to a city where she’d lost herself.

“Negroes always love our hometowns,” he said. “Even though we’re always from the worst places. Only white folks got the freedom to hate home.”

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.

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.

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.

Ceel was a hefty man, cardboard-colored with silky black hair.

was a bail bondsman, looking for a new bounty hunter, and he’d noticed Early.

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.

“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.”

“White folks kill you if you want too much, kill you if you want too little.”

He would grin, glancing between the girls, searching for differences amongst their similarities. She hated that silent appraisal, watching someone compare her to a version that she might have been. A better version, even. What if he saw something in Stella that he liked more? It would have nothing to do with looks, and that, somehow, felt even worse.

He hung up the phone, leaning against the booth. His mind started to unspool backward; he knew how to find a hiding man but how to hide a woman so that she would never be found? Plant misinformation, scatter the trail so that any other man Sam hired wouldn’t even know where to start.

Early was starting to admit. He didn’t know what it was about her but she’d hooked into him like a burr. He couldn’t shake her. Didn’t want to.

Maybe pretending to be white eventually made it so.

“You gotta go in there like somebody they tell things to,” he said. “Somebody that gets what she wants.” “Be white, you mean.” He nodded. “Easier that way,” he said. “I can’t go in with you. Give you away. But you just go in, say you lookin for somebody. An old friend. Not your sister, that raise too many questions. Tell ’em you lost touch, somethin like that. Just keep it light, breezy. Like a white lady with no worry on her mind.”

All there was to being white was acting like you were.

They made up lots of jokes, and once, well into her forties, she would recite a litany of them at a dinner party in San Francisco. Bet cockroaches call you cousin. Bet you can’t find your own shadow. She was amazed by how well she remembered. At that party, she forced herself to laugh, even though she’d found nothing funny at the time. The jokes were true.

Her grievances only made Jude realize how grateful she felt. Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it. On

On the road from El Dorado, Therese Anne Carter became Reese.

She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some.

Jude wanted to change and she didn’t see why it should be so hard or why she should have to explain it to anyone. Strangely, she felt that her grandmother might understand, so she handed her the worn ad. Maman stared at it a moment, then passed it back to her. “There are better ways,” she said.

always wanted to be different,” she told Reese. “I mean, I grew up in this town where everybody’s light and I thought—well, none of it worked.” “Good,” he said. “You got beautiful skin.”

stables or behind the Delafosse barn at night. In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.

to wonder. Now I don’t think I wanna know. I mean, what kind of person just leaves her family behind?” She realized, all too late, that this was, of course, exactly what Reese had done.

he only became Bianca two Saturdays a month in a tiny dark club off Sunset. Otherwise, he was a tall, bald man who looked nothing like a woman, which was part of the delight, she realized, watching the enraptured crowd. It was fun because everyone knew that it was not real.

“You should take that thing off,” she said. “If it hurts you. You don’t have to wear it here. I don’t care what you look like.” She thought he might be relieved, but instead, a dark and unfamiliar look passed across his face. “It’s not about you,” he said, then he slammed the bathroom door shut. The whole apartment shook, and she trembled, dropping her keys. He had never yelled at her before. She left without thinking.