by Brit Bennett
“Your heart’s racing,” Blake said. He lifted his head, smiling sleepily at her. He liked to fall asleep with his head on her breasts, and she let him because it was sweet.
“I had a strange dream,” she said.
“A scary one?”
She ran her fingers through his graying blond hair.
“I used to have these nightmares,” she said. “That these men would drag me out of bed. It felt so real. I could feel their hands on my ankles, even after I woke up.”
“That’s not why you keep that bat here, is it?”
She started to respond but instead turned away, her eyes filling with tears.
“Something happened,” she said. “When I was young.”
“What happened?”
“I saw something—” But her voice cracked, and she couldn’t say any more. Blake kissed her cheek.
“Oh honey, don’t cry,” he said softly. “I don’t know what you’re so afraid of. I’ll always keep you safe.”
She kissed him before he could say anything else. They made love desperately, the way they had when she was nineteen, touching Mr. Sanders for the first time. The image would have made her younger self blush. Two middle-aged people gripping each other’s bodies, knocking off the covers, as sunlight cracked through the blinds, the alarm clock blaring, calling each to a separate day. Her body changed, his body changing, familiar and foreign at the same time. When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries.
That morning, she was late for class. A quick shower, then she was pulling a blouse onto her damp shoulders, Blake smiling at her through the mirror as he shaved. “I do believe I made you late to work, Mrs. Sanders,” he said, which didn’t have as nice a ring to it as Dr. Sanders, but maybe that was okay. Maybe it was enough to be Mrs. Sanders, maybe it was enough to have her Introduction to Statistics class, and her house, and her family. That dark girl. She saw her again, tried to shake her out of her mind. She’d been arrogant, that was her problem. So focused on what was next that she didn’t appreciate what she’d already gotten away with. She couldn’t let herself slip up like that again. She’d have to focus. Stay alert.
She was running out the door when she bumped into her daughter, lugging a bag of laundry up the steps. Both women jolted, then Kennedy flashed the disarming smile she’d inherited from her father. It was impossible to ever be angry at that smile, and Kennedy had tested it often: when she’d begged for a puppy but left Yolanda to care for him, when she’d failed ninth-grade geometry in spite of Stella’s attempts to help her, when she’d crashed her first Camaro and, somehow, convinced Blake to buy her a second one.
“Well, she’s got to have a way to get around,” he said, and Stella, tired of being the difficult one, finally agreed. Not that she’d had much say. Kennedy learned long ago that if she wanted anything, she ought to ask her father. Telling Stella was a mere formality.
“I was hoping to speak to you,” Stella said. “Listen, about last night—”
“I know, I know, you’re sorry. But if you weren’t going to come, you could’ve just told me. I would’ve given the ticket to someone else—”
“I did see your play! I just had to slip out early, that’s all. I wasn’t feeling well—something I ate, probably. But I promise I was there. I thought it was very clever. The ghosts and all. And that song you did in the saloon. I loved it all. Really.”
Her daughter was wearing big shiny sunglasses so Stella couldn’t see her eyes, only her own face reflected back at her. She looked calm, natural. Not like a woman who had awakened with her heart racing.
“Did you really like it?” Kennedy asked.
“Of course, darling. I thought you were marvelous.”
She pulled her daughter into a hug, running a hand along her thin shoulder blades.
“All right,” she said. “I’m running late. Have a good day.”
She fumbled with her attaché case, searching for her keys, when she heard her daughter call, over her shoulder, “You’ve never been to a place called Mallard, have you?”
Stella never expected to hear that word fall out of her daughter’s mouth, and for the first time all morning, she faltered.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I met this girl from there—she said she knows you.”
“I’ve never even heard of the place. Mallard, did you say?”
That disarming smile again. Kennedy shrugged.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Maybe she was thinking of someone else.”
* * *
—
WHEN BLAKE CAME HOME from work that evening, Stella told him about the dark girl.
All afternoon, she’d debated whether to say anything before deciding that she should. A preemptive strike. She didn’t want him to think that she had anything to hide, and she preferred him to hear the story from her. She hated the idea of her husband and daughter whispering about her. So while he undressed for bed, she told him that a dark girl, claiming to be a cousin, had cornered Kennedy after her play. She watched his face the entire time, waiting to see it change. A flicker of recognition, maybe. Relief that a question he’d always wondered had finally been answered. But he just scoffed, unbuttoning his dress shirt.
“It’s the Camaro,” he said. “I’m sure she saw it and thought, boom. Payday.”
“Exactly,” Stella said. “That’s exactly right. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her.”
“This city, I swear, sometimes.”
They’d been talking recently about leaving Los Angeles. Moving to Orange County, maybe, or even farther north to Santa Barbara. She’d resisted at first, not wanting to leave her job, but now she kept imagining that dark girl creeping up to her again, poking her head in doorways, tapping on the windows. Or worse, the girl following Kennedy around the city, appearing at her shows, stalking her between auditions. What could she possibly want? Again, her face flashed through Stella’s mind. How she’d stood under that eave, wounded.
Stella’s mistake had been to think that she could settle anywhere. You had to keep moving or the past would always catch up to you.
“You know those people downtown,” she said. “High out their minds, half of them.”
“Hell, more than half,” Blake said, sliding in bed beside her.
The first time she’d ever been white, Stella couldn’t wait to tell Desiree what she’d done. Desiree would never believe it—she didn’t think Stella was capable of doing anything surprising. But that evening, when Stella returned home, she passed her sister in the hallway and said nothing. A secret transgression was even more thrilling than a shared one. She had shared everything with Desiree. She wanted something of her own.
She was forty-four now; she’d spent more of her life without Desiree than with her. Still, as the weeks passed, she felt Desiree’s pull on her tighten, like a hand gripping her neck. Sometimes it felt like a gentle rub; other times, it choked her. She blamed the dark girl, although she hadn’t seen her since that night outside the Stardust Theater. The city was large; the girl would never find her again. Stella never thought of her as a niece. Niece didn’t seem the right word for a girl you didn’t know, a girl who looked nothing like you. Then again, wouldn’t Desiree feel the same way about Kennedy? Sometimes even Stella stared at her daughter and saw a stranger. It wasn’t Kennedy’s fault that Stella had decided, long ago, to become someone else. Now her whole life had been built on that lie and the other lies Stella stacked in order to maintain it, until one dark girl appeared, threatening to send them all tumbling down.
“Did you ever have a sister?” Kennedy asked one night. Stella, bending over to sweep crumbs off the table, stiffened.
“What do you mean?” she said. “You know I d
idn’t.”
“I just thought—”
“You’re not still thinking about that black girl, are you?”
But her daughter bit her lip, staring out the darkened window. She was—she just hadn’t said anything about it, which felt like an even bigger betrayal.
“My God,” Stella said. “Who do you believe? Some crazy girl or your own mother?”
“But why would she lie? Why would she say those things to me?”
“She wants money! Or maybe she just wants to poke fun at you. Who knows why crazy people do things?”
Blake wandered into the kitchen, pausing, like he always did before stepping into one of their arguments, as if to remind himself that it wasn’t too late to disengage and pretend this had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t been interested enough in the dark girl to say much else about it, except that if Kennedy saw her again, she ought to call the police. Now he squeezed his daughter’s shoulder.
“Just drop it, Ken,” he said. “You can’t let that girl get to you.”
“I know, but—”
“We love you,” he said. “We wouldn’t lie to you.”
But sometimes lying was an act of love. Stella had spent too long lying to tell the truth now, or maybe, there was nothing left to reveal. Maybe this was who she had become.
* * *
—
IN JUNE, Stella and Blake surprised their daughter with the keys to a new apartment in Venice. They’d pay the rent for one year while she went on auditions, and after, she’d have to go back to school or find a job. Technically it wasn’t a bribe, but when Stella handed her ecstatic daughter the keys, she felt so awash in relief that it seemed like one. Maybe now her daughter would stop barraging her with questions about her past. She’d always worried about Kennedy discovering her secret and rejecting her, Blake leaving, her whole life disintegrating in her hands. What she hadn’t pictured was doubt. It would almost have been better if Kennedy just believed that dark girl. Instead, she seemed to mull over her claims, sometimes considering them, sometimes rejecting them, and Stella never knew where she would land. She couldn’t predict what she might ask, or what she believed, and the uncertainty made her crazy. The new apartment would at least be a distraction. Maybe even a solution.
On a Saturday morning, she and Blake helped their daughter move in. Blake assembled furniture in the bedroom, and Stella wiped down the kitchen drawers, remembering the apartment she and Desiree had shared in New Orleans. The walls were paper thin, the floorboards always creaking, a water splotch growing across the ceiling. And yet, in spite of that, she’d loved that place. She’d been so grateful to leave Farrah Thibodeaux’s floor that she hadn’t even cared how tiny and cramped this new apartment was. It was hers and it was Desiree’s, and she’d felt as if they were both on the cusp of lives too big to even imagine. She teared up, and Kennedy startled her, hugging her from behind.
“Don’t get all sappy,” she said. “I’ll still come by for dinner.”
Stella laughed, dabbing her eyes.
“I hope you like this place,” she said. “It’s a nice little apartment. You should’ve seen mine in New Orleans.”
“What was it like?”
“Well, it could’ve fit in here, twice over. We were always on top of each other—”
“Who was?”
Stella paused. “I’m sorry?”
“You said ‘we.’”
“Oh. Right. My roommate. This girl I lived with, she was from my town.”
“You never told me that before,” Kennedy said. “You never tell me anything about your life.”
“Kennedy—”
“It’s not about that,” she said. “It’s not about that girl at all. It’s just like, it’s impossible to know anything about you. I have to beg you just to tell me about some roommate you had and you’re my mother. Why don’t you want me to know you?”
She’d imagined, more than once, telling her daughter the truth, about Mallard, and Desiree, and New Orleans. How she’d pretended to be someone else because she needed a job, and after a while, pretending became reality. She could tell the truth, she thought, but there was no single truth anymore. She’d lived a life split between two women—each real, each a lie.
“I’ve just always been this way,” Stella said. “I’m not like you. Open. It’s a good way to be. I hope you stay that way.”
She handed her daughter a sheet of shelf paper, and Kennedy smiled.
“I don’t know any other way to be,” she said. “What do I have to hide?”
Part V
PACIFIC COVE
(1985/1988)
Fourteen
In 1988, exhausted from her pursuit of artistic seriousness and, more importantly, pushing thirty, Kennedy Sanders would begin to appear on a series of daytime soap operas, and a month after she turned twenty-seven she would finally land a three-season arc on Pacific Cove. It would be her longest acting job ever, and even decades later, she would sometimes be stopped in the mall by some gooey-eyed fan who called her Charity Harris. It was the role she was born to play, the director told her, she just had a face for the soaps. She must have frowned because he laughed, touching her arm way too close to her tits.
“It’s not a knock, babe,” he said. “I just mean—well, I can tell you have a flair for the dramatic.”
There was nothing wrong with melodrama, she told her parents when she’d called to share the news. In fact, some of the greatest classic actresses—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo—trafficked in it from time to time. Her father was glad that she was moving back to California. Her mother was glad that she was working. After she hung up, she wandered around a Burbank shopping mall where, a year later, she would be stopped by a middle-aged woman outside a shoe rack and asked for an autograph. She was jolted each time someone approached her in public. They recognized her? Just as she was, before costumes, before hair and makeup? At first, she was thrilled, then it unsettled her, the idea of anyone noticing her before she noticed them.
* * *
—
AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF characters she played in the soap world before landing Pacific Cove: a conniving candy striper who steals a baby; a teacher who seduces her student’s father; a stewardess who spills water on the lead, maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally, the script was unclear; the mayor’s daughter who gets seduced by the show rogue; a nurse who gets strangled in a car; a florist who hands the star a rose; a stewardess who survives a plane crash to later be strangled in a car. She wore black wigs, brown wigs, red wigs, and eventually, when she played Charity Harris, her own blonde waves. She only played white girls, which is to say, she never played herself.
On the set of Pacific Cove, the cast and crew referred to her as Charity, never her real name, and later, in an interview with Soap Digest, she would tell a reporter that it helped her stay in character. She preferred readers to think that she was a method actor than know the truth: that no one had bothered to learn her real name because they did not expect her to stick around. Three seasons in the soap world was like three seconds anyway, and when the show ended in 1994, Charity Harris would appear in the finale for a millisecond as the camera swept over photographs on the wall. Only the most passionate fans would remember her most prominent arc, the nine months she’d been kidnapped by her lover’s stalker and tied up in a basement. For months, she’d twisted in the chair—screaming, pleading, begging—and not until years later would she realize that her biggest storyline was not being a real part of the show.
She brought her mother to set once. She’d warned her beforehand that the soundstage could get chilly, so ridiculously, her mother had worn a bright blue sweater in spite of the ninety-degree heat in Burbank. Kennedy gave her a little tour around the sets, pointing out the exterior of the Harris house, the town hall, the surf shack where Charity worked. She even brought her to the basement where Charity wa
s currently trapped, only three months into her abduction.
“I sure hope they let you out of there soon,” her mother said, collapsing Kennedy and Charity like the rest of the crew. It was the most her mother had ever validated her as an actor. Strange that the greatest compliment an actress could receive was that she had disappeared into somebody else. Acting is not about being seen, a drama teacher told her once. True acting meant becoming invisible so that only the character shone through.
“You should just change your name to Charity,” the Pacific Cove director told her. “No offense but when I hear your name, I just think about a guy getting shot in the head.”
* * *
—
HERE’S SOMETHING she hadn’t thought about in forever:
Once, when she was seven or so, she was sitting in the kitchen on a step stool, watching her mother frost a cake. She was wedged in a corner, trying to learn a new yo-yo trick so halfheartedly that she was just flinging the toy, sending it clattering to the tile, waiting for her annoyed mother to tell her to stop. She did things like that often—desperate things, too small to get her in trouble but irritating enough to earn attention. But her mother wasn’t even looking at her—she wasn’t the type to transform a chore into a bonding opportunity. Honey, let me show you how to knead bread. Or come here, baby, this is how you make frosting. Her mother seemed relieved once Kennedy aged out of asking to help in the kitchen.
“It’s not that I don’t want your help,” her mother always said. “But I can do it faster on my own.” As if that last part contradicted the first one, not justified it.
Why was she baking a cake in the first place? She wasn’t the type to bake for no reason. She contributed store-bought cookies to bake sales, transferring them into a tin so nobody would notice. Her father’s birthday, maybe. But it was summer, not spring, or else she wouldn’t have been home from school in the middle of the day, bored, watching her mother smooth the tiny ripples of frosting.
