Page 55 of Good Half Gone

Six months after Piper went missing, a tenth grader accused Colby Crimball of sexual harassment.His parents scooped him and his brother up and relocated to Florida—a privilege of the wealthy. They were both currently attending FSU. Matt looked just as basic as I remembered him to be—square face with an all-American confidence. Colby was sleazy—narrow-shouldered with all his features pinched in the middle of his face. In his photos, he always had his arm slung around a girl in a bikini. It seemed the only purpose of his social media. He wore his sleepy eyes, backward cap, and a frat boy smile with more entitlement than his brother. I hated him. Why should he get to live a carefree life? He was there when she went missing, as far as I was concerned. He was working with RJ—Millar, or whatever his name was—and Angel that day.

Colby denied everything of course, and without the other three guys, he couldn’t be linked to her disappearance. I’d hit a wall. The investigation hit a wall. The case went cold again.

It was ninety degrees the day I climbed into Gran’s attic looking for Piper. Gran had moved into her house by then, and Cal and I were living in student housing two blocks from campus.

Moving out was one of the dumber things I’d done in the last year, but I wasn’t ready to admit that yet. In my triumphant march to independence, I’d forgotten that I was still a kid dealing with trauma…raising a kid. I needed my Gran; I needed my sister. The loneliness of caring for a four-year-old alone was overwhelming. Moving out on our own had only compounded my issues, and Cal was stuck in daycare more than was good for him.

Gran had us over for dinner a few nights a week. It was after a Sunday lunch of chicken and biscuits that the tide went out and the depression came in. Cal was napping in the spare bedroom. His naps were sweaty and deep; he always woke up in a good mood, which was more than I could say for myself. I beat Gran at Scrabble and made an excuse to go to the attic for my old books.

“What are you up to?” She sighed. “I don’t like it already.”

I knew she wouldn’t. She thought that when I looked at Piper’s things I got depressed, when really, I got depressed and looked at Piper’s things. I’d stopped trying to explain that to her; she didn’t get it. She had photos and mementoes of Piper everywhere—all over the walls.

“I want to look at some pictures and notes of Piper’s.” I opened the closet where she kept her games and stacked the Scrabble box on top.

“Why?”

“Do I need a reason?”

She thought about it. “No.” She turned to the sink and picked up the blue sponge.

That was it? That was all she was going to say? I took it as a good sign.

Access to the attic was in Gran’s bedroom. It had a pull-down door that released a rickety old ladder. It was an adventure getting up that thing. Due to the low ceiling, I had to crawl to the plastic tubs that held what was left of Piper’s life. Black with red handles.

Outside the sealed attic windows, it was a sweaty summer. By the time I unclipped the lid off Piper’s tub, my T-shirt was damp. I knew exactly what I was looking for. It took me a few minutes to paw through the books and stuffed animals before I found it. The shoebox labeled2010–2012 Pious Piper—which was mean of me, but at the time I’d been mad at her for disappearing.

I took the box down the ladder and set it on the kitchen table. Gran was in the backyard with her shears. I knocked on the window and told her to put sunscreen on. She held up her arm to show she already had, and I gave her the thumbs-up. Sometimes I didn’t know who was mothering whom. I sat at the table and flipped off the lid. I’d seen all this stuff before; it served the dual purpose of shrine and investigation.If Piper touched it once, I’d touched it a thousand times since.

Particularly, I was looking for the notes she’d written to her church friends. Sometimes they passed scraps of paper back and forth in services. Other times they used the notes section on the back of the church program.

There was something in particular that was bothering me. A sentence. Piper hadn’t written it; her friend Susannah had. It was scribbled on a church program, the writing getting more and more cramped as it neared the margin. It surfaced in my memory like dreams sometimes do—maybe it was Scrabble that triggered the thought, but once I had it, I couldn’t make it go away. Call it an itch. I found what I was looking for and spread it flat on the table, running my palms over the creases.

Oh Susannah, oh Susannah, oh Susannah valentine! Hope he likes me, hope he writes me, hope he gives me what is mine. Her handwriting looped dramatically. She was being silly—but not.It’s not really yours, is it?What I presume is Susannah’s handwriting is small and crowded like her teeth. I lift the page closer to my face to make out the words.

What is that supposed to mean?Piper was pissed.

Susannah drew a smiley face and a heart.Not yours yet, she wrote underneath.

My sister responded with a sad face.

Soon, Susannah wrote next to the sad face, then underlined it.You were made 4 each other.I presumed the series of hearts drawn at the bottom of the page was made by my sister. She was very agreeable if you said what she wanted to hear. From what I recall of mousy-faced Susannah, she liked to challenge what my sister said and then backtrack when Piper called her out. The girl could play victim better than most people could play themselves. “Susannah.” I say it out loud in an effort to peel forgotten memories from that dismal period of my life. Had people called her Suzie? Suz? She was privy to Piper’s secrets.

Gran kept her photo albums in her bedroom. When we lived in the apartment, she kept them in the living room on her bookshelf, but after Piper went missing, she grew protective of them. They were a visual shrine to my sister, and to look was to remember. They disappeared one by one, and then one day their shelf held only dust. The albums were a tribute to our childhood; even before she got custody of us, she’d take us places and use an entire roll of film to record what we were doing.

There were gaps in the albums, spaces of time when our mother wouldn’t let us see Gran. In one photo with her, we’re toothless and standing outside of the zoo; in the next we’re at a Seahawks game and we have not only our two front teeth, but also the beginning swells of breasts. I remembered the stranger who took our photo exclaiming how beautiful we were, and Gran’s face had visibly changed, her pride in us so evident she was still beaming as the shutter clicked. It was a relief to be loved that much. The hollow was still there from our mother, echoing and empty, but a new chamber had formed in the space next to it—a carved-out tunnel that led to the light. Gran.

There were certain photos that I wanted to see, particularly the ones from the summer before Piper went missing. We’d spent a week in either June or July, camping with her church—that was the summer everything changed. It was so subtle no one really noticed until it was too late.

We were excited to go; we’d planned our activities and researched the campground for weeks before the trip. But Piper ditched me two days in to hang out with a bunch of holy rollers who memorized Scripture for fun. I didn’t get it. It was like she forgot how to be herself after that, and consequently forgot how to be my sister.

The albums were in Gran’s closet. I had to wait until she went to the grocery store to sneak in her room to get them. She’d bought them in a set of four: olive leather with white stitching around the edges that was meant to be trendy. She’d stacked them upright so she could pull them out easily.I ran my finger over their spines, deciding which to pull first. The cracks branched like a palm, leather veins crisscrossing and then abruptly ending. Gran may have been a librarian, but I knew she wouldn’t arrange them chronologically; she’d put her favorite first.

I took the first one out and sank to the carpet. Ha! It felt good to be right when everything was so wrong. The album I held was a full year of us being together, the after-custody photos. It was moments like this that I felt closest to her—when I could predict how she did things. I paged through the happy times, all neatly labeled: twins at the pumpkin patch, twins getting their ears pierced at the mall, twins camping with church. We were not Piper and Iris, but “twins.” I knew that Gran felt guilty about our mom and the way she turned out—that’s why having two girls was better than one—two girls was double the penance. She took that bull by the horns and mothered the hell out of us.

I put my finger on the photo of the three of us at Thanksgiving dinner, sitting around her small kitchen table. We were all cheesing before the prayer, holding hands and looking over our shoulders at the camera—which Gran had propped on the kitchen counter and set with a timer. A turkey, a tureen of gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans and rolls—the best spread we’d ever had. Our cheese was genuine, and that meal was the bomb.

Later that night our mom called, and we took turns letting her blame us for ruining her Thanksgiving. Gran had invited her, but she never showed. Not that we wanted her to—spending holidays with Mom always ended with her drunk and us hiding in our room while she sobbed on the living room floor about how her life hadn’t turned out like she thought it would.

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