Page 15 of The Missing Half

Thank God it’s a Saturday night. McLean’s attention is pulled quickly to a patron at the bar, then another, and even though he keeps looking over at our table, it’s obvious he’s too busy making drinks to break away. The moment Matty brings our food, Jenna asks for the bill.

“We can’t approach him here,” she says after he’s swiped her card. “If what we’re asking gets out, it could jeopardize his job, and then he’ll never talk to us.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

For the first time, Jenna and I are on the same page about our next step. But not because I give a shit about Steve McLean losing his job. Or because, like she’s always telling me, I think we need to strategize our approach. Being in the same room as my sister’s possible killer has the walls closing in around me. I can feel his gaze on my face, my neck, my mouth. It makes me want to crawl out of my own skin.

“I wanna eat fast and get the fuck out of here,” I say.

We do, and it’s only outside the restaurant, sitting shotgun in Jenna’s truck, the doors closed and locked, that I can finally relax. For a moment, we sit in silence, the hot summer air a relief from the prickling chill of Mesquite.

“We can talk to him another time,” Jenna says. “It doesn’t have to be tonight.”

“No. I wanna do it. We can wait in the car till he’s off work.”

“We shouldn’t talk to him here.”

“Fine,” I say. “Then we’ll follow him home.”

I feel Jenna looking at me from the corner of her eye. “Are you sure? We can take a day or two to regroup. He’s not going anywhere.”

“No. If we wait, between both our jobs and my community service, we won’t be able to do it for another week.” The truth is though, I just don’t want to wait. I want to confront this man who harasses the women around him and manages to still charm his way to employee of the year. I want to talk to the man who worked alongside Jules and close to my sister. If he had anything to do with their disappearances, I need to know.

Jenna glances at the clock. “Okay. If he’s bartending, he’ll stay till closing, which means we probably have an hour or two.”

I slump back against the seat. “God, the world can be so fucked up. Here our sisters were murdered all because they were women, alone on the road at night. Then this asshole is groping girls in a back alley and he still gets his name on a goddam plaque.”

“I know,” Jenna says. “Meanwhile, the media literally commodify Jules and Kasey for being young women who died.”

“Fucking exactly.” I wipe angry tears from my eyes. “And they all got it so wrong, you know? All of them.”

Jenna looks over at me but doesn’t say anything.

“Watching the news talk about Kasey was, like, beyond surreal. And not because what was happening was so hard to believe. I mean, it was, but it was more than that. They made her out to be someone I didn’t recognize, a total stranger. When the police came to us for a photo, they told us to choose one that didn’t have much significance, because by the time everything was over, we’d never be able to look at it in the same way again. But we had no idea how much the media would fabricate Kasey’s entire personality based on one fucking picture of her. In the one my mom picked out, Kasey was wearing her favorite jean jacket and her hair was pulled over one shoulder. It looked like her, yeah, but it was such a specific look, like she was a cheerleader who got straight As. And when people talked about her on the news, you could literally hear in their voices that they felt sad she’d disappeared because she was, like, pretty and did well in school. I think one anchor actually used the words all-American .”

I’ve never said this much to anyone before, not to my parents orany of my friends, not to Brad or Sandy. It makes me feel naked, but also lighter too, so I continue. “They painted this whole portrait of her that—you know, it wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t even close tothe full picture. They made her seem boring. Kasey was so muchmore than that. And people bought it too. I used to get all this mail from strangers telling me to have faith, to not give up on God’s plan, blah blah blah. And they would write all these things about Kasey…”

I think back to a card some grandmotherly type had sent, in which she’d handwritten this saccharine poem titled “Nic and Kasey, Sisters Forever.” Somehow it weaseled its way into my brain and I’ve had it memorized ever since:

Two branches of the same tree,

two pieces of a soul.

Where one sister goes, the other will be,

for she is but half of the whole.

“I could just tell,” I continue, “that they thought they knew Kasey because they’d heard about her on the news. But she would’ve hated all that shit.”

“She was lucky,” Jenna says.

“Excuse me?”

She turns in her seat. Her eyes had been unfocused, staring through the windshield, but now they’re sharp. “Sorry. Never mind.”

“No. What did you mean?”

She hesitates.

“Jenna.”

“Fine,” she says. “Do you remember the news talking about Jules’s disappearance before Kasey went missing?”

“Yeah, of course.”

She gives me a look. “Not when they covered the cases together. Before Kasey went missing.”

“Um…” I squish up my face, trying to think back. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Exactly. Because her disappearance wasn’t on the news. At least, not really. A handful of local stations covered it for a few days, but even they just did it in passing. It was only when Kasey went missing that the media started talking about their cases together. And even then, they’d always have Kasey’s photo really big and Jules’s really small, if they showed it at all. Do you remember the picture of her they used? She looks like a girl from no money who grew up to be a bartender, which she was. She wasn’t beautiful like Kasey, she never had braces, she looked like a smoker, which, again, she was. But nobody cares about that girl. Whenever the TV anchors mentioned her, they had this tone—it was so messed up—like they were all surprised Kasey was taken, but Jules, you know, that was kind of to be expected.”

Had I noticed this back then? It feels vaguely familiar, like a dredged-up memory, but I can’t be sure. That year I was so blurry from grief that I only had one word, one name in my brain: Kasey, Kasey, Kasey. Now that makes me feel insensitive, narcissistic.

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” Jenna says quickly. “No, no, no. I don’t want an apology—at least, not from you. I hated how the media made our sisters compete in death. I’m not gonna do it with you now. You’re not the one I blame.”

There’s a painful swelling in my chest and I have the urge to grab her hand, to hold it in mine, but I don’t.

“Plus,” Jenna says. “Jules just got a head start. The media eventually tore Kasey down too.”

I haven’t listened to every news story or read every blog about our sisters like Jenna has, but I know what she’s talking about. It happened fast, only a month or two after Kasey disappeared. One day, she was America’s favorite missing girl; the next, she was a specimen to be examined and picked over. Somehow, the media discovered the names of the two boys Kasey slept with in high school and suddenly she was a slut. What was she wearing the night she’d been taken? they asked. Could she have gotten herself into a bad situation with a man? Some podcaster without a single relevant credential called her a nymphomaniac. Then, when he found out she shoplifted a bottle of nail polish once upon a time, she was suddenly that and a sociopath.

That story was the worst because my sister had only done it to protect me, like she had so many other times in her life. She was with me in the drugstore when I slipped the little bottle into my back pocket. Kasey told me it was obvious and to hand it over. “We can’t get this,” she said. “Mom would be so mad if we spent five ninety-nine on something called”—she flipped the bottle over and laughed—“ rendez-blue. ” But then she looked into my face and sighed. “Oh, all right. But let me.” She tucked it into her jean jacket.

“Yeah,” I say to Jenna. “The ironic part is that I was so much worse than my sister ever was. She was always picking me up from parties, holding my hair back when I got sick from drinking too much. Yet she’s the one who gets crucified because she had the bad luck of getting taken. She was only nineteen. Nineteen. And still the entire fucking country raked her over the coals for every mistake she ever made. They didn’t seem to understand that everybody’s an idiot when they’re a teenager. Most people just have the good luck to stay alive long enough to grow out of it.” Not me though, I guess.

“Jules was twenty-four,” Jenna says. “She was finally growing up, you know. I could literally see her future start to expand, to brighten. Like, she discovered she loved to draw and did that all the time. She never talked about doing it professionally or anything, but I could see her start to think about it, start to dream. And then she was taken and all that was erased.”

She reaches across me into the glove compartment and grabs a bag of peanut M&M’s. This time she pours some into her own palm before handing it over to me. We eat in silence, and the minutes tick by. Thirty minutes turn to sixty, then to ninety. We watch people exit the restaurant and drive away until there are only a handful of cars left.

Eventually, Jenna breaks the silence. “What would you do?” she says. “You know, if Steve McLean is the one who took them?”

“What would I do to him, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

I’ve thought about it over the years—of course I have. But whenever my daydreams get vindictive, the man who took Kasey is always faceless, and the violence I wreak on him sort of fades to black. Now, despite knowing Steve McLean is a bad man, inserting his face into this scene stops me in my tracks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “We’re not sure he did it.”

“Take McLean out of the equation, then. Let’s say it’s just some guy. But you know with absolute certainty that he did it. He took and killed your sister. What would you do then?”

The faceless man is easier to imagine. In my mind, the two of us are in an empty room with a metal chair. I tie his hands to the legs as a lightbulb swings slightly over our heads. I punch him in the jaw, and when he falls over, I kick him in the ribs until he cries out. But what happens after that, when he’s bleeding from the lip and pleading for his life? Maybe I turn him in to Wyler. Though none of that feels quite right. “I don’t know,” I say. “What would you do?”

Jenna doesn’t hesitate. “I’d buy a gun. I’d drive to his house and shoot him in the head.”

I look over at her, but she doesn’t look back. She just stares through the windshield. “Oh, hey,” she says after a moment. “There he is.”

I follow her gaze to the front door of the restaurant. It’s open, and Steve McLean is walking through.