Page 48 of Good Half Gone

“No. I’m going to memorize it for later.” I feel like a silly little woman with paper-thin threats.

He doesn’t touch me, but our bodies are close. With his half-closed eyes he looks drunk and sober simultaneously.

“Sol.” He grins, tiny oval teeth like popcorn kernels. “Sol of security.”

It takes concerted effort to turn my back on him—every cell in my body vibrates with the possibility of a surprise attack. My sister’s nightmare—a man grabbing…taking…

I go over the options as I trot downward: strangulation from behind, a shove between the shoulder blades that sends me tumbling down the steep part of the hill, a knife in the tender part of my neck, or a gunshot to the back of the head. All things I’d pictured happening to my sister. I am so close to answers, I can’t risk fighting a pointless battle. I make it to the bottom of the hill, high on adrenaline.

A woman is eating corn chips and reading a Stephen King novel in a chair by the fire, crumbs collecting on her shirt. She doesn’t seem to notice me when I pass.

My run-in with the Clint Eastwood knockoff has shaken me. Replaying what happened is only leaving me more confused. Had I made up his tone—imagined it being more aggressive than it was? When people say to trust your gut, it always goes over my head. I don’t know what gut instinct is supposed to feel like. Since the day Piper disappeared, I’ve considered my gut to be dysfunctional, like some people’s intelligence. If it were an organ, I’d want to have it removed like a gallbladder or a rotten appendix.

I turn the corner. Two people are making out—her back pressed against the wall, his hand on her hips. I scurry past them beetle-like, wanting to look but not having the guts to. Away from their families and friends,people are probably hooking up all the time. No biggie. I reach the end of the hallway right as one of them starts to moan. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind for these overnight shifts.

Chapter16Past

People Who Leftyou were easy to hate—easier to blame. They didn’t care to defend themselves, so you experienced your abandonment in silence. You tended the garden of bitterness in silence. Eventually you started making your own assumptions about why they left. That’s when the garden really got to blooming. My garden was never dreary; on the contrary, my resentment was colorful, my anger bright and binding like a choking vine. There were so many variations of anger that I didn’t know where to look most days.

Cal made sense to me even when the world didn’t. It was easy to understand him. He was helpless. He didn’t choose to be left in a box on someone’s doorstep. Piper chose that for him, and by choosing that, she made it a part of his history. I was raising him having barely been raised myself, and she was where?

In the rotting center of my anger was my mother. She picked the fight by abandoning us first.

The moment Cal was in my arms, I wanted to protect him. I was mad at my sister for not sticking around to do the same.Why hadn’t she come back—or at least given us a reason she left? The note she’d written me had been patiently penned, her neatest handwriting—an order without explanation.Here’s my son, take care of him.

We called Poley and Audrain as soon as we got back to the apartment. It was one of those days where it was easy to track them down. An hour later, they walked in smelling of the outside and of coffee, looking just as awkward as always. We hadn’t seen them in a while—Audrain had grown his hair into a midlife crisis while Poley cut hers short and dyed it jet black.

They handed us each a paper cup of coffee and bent to coo over the baby, who was sleeping in his car seat. Gran was polite, but when she answered their questions, her words were clipped.

“We’ll head out there to talk to Virginia tomorrow. You say she just left the baby on her doorstep in this box?”

“We don’t know who left him, just that he was left.” Gran’s coffee sat untouched beside her. She was perched on the edge of her seat, ready to leap up if the baby made a sound.

“It’s Piper’s handwriting,” I said, showing them the note.

They ordered a DNA test for Cal and took the box and note as evidence.

I didn’t want to give them the box; it was the last thing my sister touched other than her son. I had no use for the police, no patience for the saturated niceness. I didn’t need the DNA tests to confirm who Cal was. I knew who he belonged to when I smelled his head. He wasn’t going to be another kid without a mother. Gran knew the truth, my mother knew the truth, the police knew the truth, but to everyone else, he was mine.

I signed up for a homeschool program so that I could take care of Cal. That was the deal Gran laid out—I could stay home, on the condition I finish high school. I managed to scrape by with C’s in most of my classes and lost so much weight I barely resembled the photos from the year before. Gran and I took shifts: me in the day, her at night—neither of us sleeping enough.We survived on Hamburger Helper, frozen waffles and coffee. Piper’s little boy was our emotional sustenance. Even what we did for ourselves was for him. We ate and laughed and played music in the apartment to keep him healthy and happy. I cried in the shower, silently as to not wake the baby.

Being a mother settled over me like a Washington mist: it left me chilled and damp. And then, as suddenly as Cal arrived in our lives, his presence became normal: the bottles and bouncing and exhaustion were what we did now. It was a welcome distraction; the baby giggles rolled light into the midst of our darkness.

I barely understood my own existence before I was given a brand-new existence to attend to. Cal’s life was to be my apology letter to Piper for letting her down, for not protecting her. For a year I’d avoided looking at my own face in the mirror because my face reminded me of Piper, but I couldn’t avoid looking at Cal’s, and his face was perfect.

I graduated high school when Cal was four. Gran took us to a fancy restaurant to celebrate. Cal wore a little white suit, I ordered steak, and Gran had a glass of wine with her dinner. It was a happy time.

A week after Cal learned about the human skeleton at preschool(knee bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the…), they found something that changed the whole case—broke it wide open.

During a drug bust in Tacoma, officials seized a hundred pounds of meth and four firearms modified for automatic firing; among the trafficked drugs and weapons they found an envelope of Polaroid photos. Poley called and asked me to come to the station to see if I could identify Piper in one of the photos. When I asked why she thought it was Piper in the Polaroid, she told me the girl looked like me.

I brought my study notes for biology and tried not to think on it until I knew for sure. Poley came to collect me from the front of the station,and she wore her hair in a pale blond bob this time, uneven bangs like stacked Legos across her forehead. She looked older and perhaps more guarded than the last time I saw her. She wore blue, except for her shoes, which squeaked against the floor as I followed her to the elevator.

“Where are we going?”

In the past I’d always been taken to one of the little rooms on the first floor of the building.

She pointed to the ceiling as we stepped inside. “My desk. They keep us on the second floor.”

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