The Vanishing Half: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Kennedy gets Jude and Reese tickets to her play and ends up having the best performance of her life. Afterwards, Frantz meets all of them for drinks and is excited to socialize with people from Kennedy’s life before she moved to New York. But Kennedy isn’t thrilled by Frantz’s high energy, instead acting nervous about what Jude is going to show her. When the two men go to get drinks for the table, she apologizes to Jude for what she said years ago at the cast party, claiming that she didn’t mean it and that she was drunk—but Jude points out that Kennedy did mean it, even if she was also drunk.

Admitting that Jude’s right, Kennedy asks why she wanted to meet, and Jude gives her an old photograph. She says it was wrong of her to tell Kennedy the truth about her mother in such an abrupt way. It’s not right to tell people the truth as a way of hurting them, she says—she should have considered whether or not Kennedy actually wanted to know the truth in the first place. Now, though, she senses that Kennedy wants the truth. At this point, the men return with drinks, so Kennedy goes to the bathroom and looks at the photograph: it’s of Stella and Desiree as children.

After looking at the photograph in the bathroom, Kennedy goes home with Frantz. The next morning, she feels overwhelmed by what Jude has shared with her, frustrated that Jude has once again created so much confusion in her life. By midday, however, she’s desperate to talk to Jude, but she can’t reach her at the hotel. The receptionist tells her that Jude and Reese left a note with the front desk to tell anyone who called that they’ll be at the hospital all day. Of course, Kennedy doesn’t know which hospital, but she nevertheless runs out to find them, eventually encountering Jude in the nearest hospital.

Jude is distracted. Reese is out of surgery, but Jude isn’t allowed to see him because she’s not considered family. Kennedy feels sorry for her, saying that it’s ridiculous she’s not allowed in—Reese should marry Jude, she says, to avoid this kind of confusion. But Jude just says she sounds like her mother. Kennedy decides to wait with Jude until Reese can leave the hospital, and though Jude says she doesn’t have to, she doesn’t mind—she wants to be with Jude. Sitting in the waiting room, they talk about their mothers, Jude explaining that the photograph she gave Kennedy is from the funeral of Stella and Desiree’s father. She then tells Kennedy the story of their grandfather’s murder. The two cousins pass the time swapping stories about their mothers.

Before parting ways again, Kennedy asks Jude what Mallard is like. Jude tells her it’s a terrible place where everyone only likes light-skinned Black people—so, Jude says, Kennedy would fit in perfectly. Kennedy is caught off guard. She doesn’t think of herself as a Black person. She tells Jude that she’s not Black, but Jude says, “Well, your mother is.” Kennedy doesn’t react well, telling Jude that she can’t tell her who she is. It’s not necessarily that she cares about her racial identity, but that she doesn’t like the idea of somebody else telling her “who she ha[s] to be.”

Kennedy stays in New York for a little while after her play ends, and then she wanders around without telling anyone where she’s going. Just before leaving for her travels, she visits her childhood home and shows her mother the photograph that Jude gave her. Stella is taken aback, but she clings to her lies, insisting that she’s not in the photograph. She points to one of the twins and says, “She doesn’t look anything like me,” and Kennedy can’t tell if her mother is pointing at herself or at Desiree. Shortly thereafter, Kennedy travels in Europe for a while, then returns and stars on Pacific Cove. By the 1990s, though, her acting career is over, so she becomes a successful real estate agent with a knack for getting clients to envision their new lives in expensive homes.