The Vanishing Half

You couldn’t separate the shame from being caught doing something from the shame of the act itself

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.

In that little farm town, nothing surprising ever happened, not since the Vignes twins had disappeared.

She knew he missed this, not sun-dappled beaches or frozen city sidewalks but brown countryside rolling flat into acres of woods.

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.

When she’d first moved to Los Angeles, she’d found the traffic a little beautiful. All those people going places.

Her daughter, who would forever be the only person in her life who really knew her.

“It wasn’t that,” Stella said. “I met someone.”

“You did all this for a man?”

“Not for him,” she said. “I just liked who I was with him.”

“White.”

“No,” Stella said. “Free.”

You didn’t just find a self out there waiting—you had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be.

All the stories she knew were fiction, so she began to create new ones. She was the daughter of a doctor, an actor, a baseball player.
She was taking a break from medical school. She had a boyfriend back home named Reese. She was white, she was black, she became a new person as soon as she crossed a border. She was always inventing her life.