Page 31 of The Missing Half

For the second time in six months, I am locked in a jail cell. Everything about the booking process gives me déjà vu. The ink that leaves black stains on my fingers, the emotionless gaze of the man behind the camera as he takes my mug shots, the droning voice of the officer as he informs me the magistrate doesn’t work on Sundays, so I’ll have to get bonded out tomorrow morning. It’s all mortifyingly, sickeningly reminiscent of the night I got my DWI last winter.

When I get the chance to use the phone, there’s only one person I can think to call.

“Hello?” Jenna answers. Her voice is standoffish, ready for me to be a pushy telemarketer.

I squeeze my eyes shut, working up the courage to speak. “Hi, Jenna.”

“Nic? What number are you calling from?”

Shame creeps over my skin like a rash. “I’m…at the police station. I drove to the lake to confront Brad and got pulled over on the way home.” I explain about the suspended license, the missed court appointment.

Jenna is quiet. Then: “Shit.”

“I know.”

“What do you need?”

I wish, so badly it hurts, that the answer was “nothing.” I wish I hadn’t needed Kasey to take care of me so much when she was alive, wish I hadn’t needed Jenna to coerce me into looking into her disappearance, wish I didn’t need Brad breathing down my neck just so I could get a minute of work done. But I am the neediest person I know.

“Could you pick me up tomorrow morning? I need a ride back to my place.” I tell her the name of the county jail, which is almost an hour drive from Mishawaka. To get my car back, I’ll have to hire a tow.

“Sure.” It comes out as a sigh.

“And…This is so shitty, but if you have cash, could you bring that too? For my bail. I don’t know how much it’ll be, but last time it was a thousand, so probably something close to that? I have my credit card, but they only accept cash and money orders. I’ll pay you back, obviously.”

I can’t afford that kind of money right now, but I have a feeling that when I tell Brad what happened, he’ll be pretty generous. The thought makes me hate myself.

“Yeah,” Jenna says. “I’ll go get some cash this afternoon.”

I close my eyes, which are starting to sting with unwelcome tears. I want to turn the clock back to a time when my life wasn’t so fucked up, when I wasn’t so fucked up. But as I mentally rewind past today and the moment I decided to drive without my license, past the missed court appointment, past five months ago when I drank too much and then hit a tree, I realize that in order to get back to a time when I didn’t feel so completely broken, I’d have to erase the past seven years. All the mess and meaninglessness are so deeply woven into my life, it’s impossible to separate me from the wreckage. I suppose that makes us one and the same.

“Thank you,” I manage to say.

“Nic? You okay?”

The sound of my name out of Jenna’s mouth splits me open even more, but I don’t want to talk about myself. I can’t handle any more pain or humiliation. I focus instead on the two good things I have left: Jenna and the progress we’ve made on our sisters’ cases.

I clear my throat, cupping my hand over the receiver. “Jenna, what happened last week? Why didn’t you come talk to Brad with me?” There’s a movement out of the corner of my eye. I look up to see the officer who escorted me to the phone making a wrap-it-up signal with his hand. I bow my head and pretend I didn’t see.

“Come on, Nic,” Jenna says. “I told you. I’m taking some time to be with my mom.”

“I know. I know. But I feel like you’re not telling me every—” I’m interrupted by the officer clearing his throat loudly. “I think something else is going on, and I think the reason you’re not telling me is because you want to protect me from it, but you don’t have to do that.”

“Nic,” she says. “I—”

But the officer starts talking so loudly I can’t hear the rest. “Miss Monroe, this isn’t a lunchroom gossip session. It’s time for you to hang up the phone.”

—

I’m so embarrassed about being picked up from jail that when I climb into Jenna’s truck the next morning, I have to force myself to meet her eye.

“How are you?” she says.

“Not great.”

It’s a vast understatement. I have felt so much shame and self-loathing over the past twelve hours, it has sunk into my skin, into my bone. I’ve condemned myself to a life of more fees I can’t afford, more begging for rides and racing to catch the bus, more lawyers who treat me like a delinquent child, more averting my gaze when people ask what’s been going on lately. On top of all that, my eyes burn and my stomach roils from lack of sleep. Just when I’d started to feel I had some direction, some purpose, I’m reminded of what a fuckup I really am.

“I brought you coffee,” Jenna says, nodding toward two to-go cups nestled in the holders between our knees. “And a breakfast sandwich. I was just gonna go with a bag of candy, but I thought you could use a real meal for once.”

I give her a weak smile and grab the coffee. I’m not sure I can stomach any food at the moment. “Thank you.”

We’re silent as Jenna pulls out of the parking lot and onto the road. I take long sips of my coffee. With each inch we put between us and the police station, I feel a tiny bit more normal. “Do you wanna talk about it?” Jenna says.

“If by ‘it’ you mean my confrontation with Brad, then yes.”

This was the only thing that got me through the night—the thought that if I could just get Jenna back on the investigation, we might be able to work out the implications of everything Brad and Sandy told me. Which makes me even more frustrated with Jenna’s insistence that she only missed yesterday because of her mom. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that is the full truth, but my gut tells me something else is going on. And yet, as much as I want to push this angle, I heard the exasperation in Jenna’s voice when I brought it up over the phone. I need to take a different approach now. I need to get her invested again.

“Okay,” she says. “What about it?”

“For starters, we were both right and wrong about Brad. He was the one on the playground at Lauren’s church the other week. He was trying to keep her quiet about the affair. But I don’t think he had anything to do with our sisters’ disappearances.”

“Okay.”

I snap my head sideways. “?‘Okay’?” Mere days ago, Jenna was like a freight train of determination to talk to Brad, to prove his guilt.

She sighs. “What? Do you not want me to believe you?”

I want you to tell me what the fuck happened, I think. Instead, I say, “There’s more. There’s a lot we didn’t know about.”

“Like what?”

So I tell her. I tell her about Sandy discovering Kasey and Brad in the alley, and about how Sandy confronted my sister at work. I tell her about Kasey asking for money and her trip to the lake the night she went missing, which still leaves 250 miles unaccounted for on the car.

“Something occurred to me last night,” I say after I’ve given her every detail I can remember. There was so much to recount, we’ve already made it to my apartment. Jenna’s put the car in park, but the engine’s still running. “What if Kasey and Jules were wrapped up in something?”

“What d’you mean?” she says.

“Kasey wouldn’t have asked for that kind of money unless she was desperate. Desperate why, I don’t know. To get out of something, maybe, to pay somebody off. But it looks similar to what Jules did in 2009, doesn’t it? She started acting off and withdrawn, then out of nowhere, she quits her job, moves her entire life, and never tells you why? It all points to something big, don’t you think? Bigger than the two of them.”

Jenna is quiet, so I keep going.

“What if we were right from the start? What if all of this has something to do with McLean? I mean, we got sidetracked with this whole Brad thing, but McLean’s always been a suspect. We still need to look into him. I know the police believe his alibi, but what if they got it wrong? McLean knew both of our sisters, and he’s definitely shady enough to be involved in something. The timeline is throwing me because all that stuff with your sister happened three years before she and Kasey went missing. But what if…”

I glance at Jenna, but she’s staring at a spot on the steering wheel with a faraway glint in her eye.

“Jenna?”

“What?”

“I was talking about McLean. Was there anything that could’ve pointed to Jules being wrapped up in something with someone like that? Did she ever seem desperate for cash? In 2009 or 2012? I know we’ve gone over this a million times, but maybe we missed something.”

Again, Jenna is quiet. A minute turns to two.

“Jenna?”

“Do you ever just imagine Kasey on a beach somewhere?”

I freeze, my coffee cup inches from my mouth. “Um. Sorry, what?”

“For years, whenever I’d think of Jules, I’d always think of the night she was taken. I’d picture her standing beside her car as some stranger creeps up to her in the dark. I’d think of the way he might’ve held a knife to her throat or slammed her head against the top of the car. I’d think of all the violence he could have done to her, of the pain and fear she would’ve felt and the casual way he would’ve taken her life.”

I’m startled to see tears welling in Jenna’s eyes. It’s the first time I’ve seen her cry.

“But recently,” she continues, “I’ve starting thinking about her somewhere else. Somewhere where she’s free and happy. Somewhere where her body is her own. Jules always wanted to go to Thailand—that was her dream vacation. And recently, when I think of her, that’s where I try to imagine her. I imagine her on the beach in cutoff shorts and an oversized T-shirt, her toes in the ocean. Sometimes, I put a pina colada in her hand. And the only reason she can’t call is because the cell reception is shitty.” She lets out a watery little laugh as she turns in her seat to face me. “Do you ever do that?”

When I think of my sister, the oldest she ever gets is nineteen. She’s a teenager curled in her bed, playing with my hair as we laugh about some long-forgotten inside joke. Or she’s in a strange room, duct-taped to a chair, bruises on her face. She’s driving a car, singing with the windows down, or she’s a pile of bones in the earth. I don’t imagine her with a present and future, because that was taken from her a long time ago. “No,” I say. “I don’t do that.”

“You should. It makes things easier.”

“Fine. I will.” I won’t.

Jenna looks at me expectantly.

“What?” I say. “Now?”

“Yes. Close your eyes and picture Kasey somewhere safe. Somewhere she always wanted to go.”

“Jenna. I don’t want to do this right now.”

“Just try it, Nic.” Her voice is unusually forceful.

I stare at her for a moment, then finally, close my eyes. “Okay,” I say. “I’m imagining her on a beach—”

“No. Don’t use mine. It has to be specific to Kasey. Where did she always say she wanted to go?”

“I don’t know,” I say, but then suddenly I do. “Nashville, I guess? She always said it had one of the best music scenes in the world.”

“Good,” Jenna says. “Picture her there.”

I envision Kasey in a piano bar. Not one of the big ones that only do covers of country songs but a dive that specializes in seventies rock. She’s in ripped jeans and a T-shirt, nursing a glass of red wine. I imagine her singing softly beneath her breath while the man at the piano plays something by the Rolling Stones. For a moment, she looks happy. But then I think of her car pulled over on the side of the road, her door flung open, the overhead light flickering in the black night. I picture a man walking toward her, and the happy version of my sister vanishes.

“It’s not working,” I say. “I can’t just imagine Kasey alive and force my brain to believe it. I want to find answers.”

“Well, I don’t,” Jenna says. “It’s too much. It’s too hard. Between that and my mom—” Her voice cuts off. “I’m sorry, Nic. I know I pulled you into this.”

“Wait. You’re giving up ?”

“I need to be there for my mom.”

“And you can be,” I say. “You can take as much time as you need. I know I’m not the most patient person in the world, but there’s no deadline on this. Take a week with your mom. Take a month. I don’t fucking care. But you can’t just drop this. Not now.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I really am. But maybe you should think about taking a break from all this too. It’s obviously not helping with everything else you have going on.”

“Wow. Thanks.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” I say. “And I know why you said it too. You’re trying to get me to stop. You’re trying to shelter me. I just wish you’d tell me what you’re trying to protect me from.”

“I’m trying to protect you from the pain of it,” she snaps. “Okay? The pain of continuing to look into our sisters’ cases only to find nothing…Believe it or not, and despite how much of an asshole you can be most of the time, I’ve actually come to kind of like having you around. And I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

My throat tightens. I’ve always gotten the feeling that everyone who’s showed up for me these past few years—my dad, Brad, Sandy—they’ve all done it out of a sense of obligation, a leftover love for the person I was before Kasey disappeared. But Jenna has only known the person I am today. And despite my impatience and bitterness and cynicism, she cares about me. I want to tell her that I like having her around too, that she’s the first person I’ve let in in years. No one could ever fill the place that Kasey occupies in my heart, but during these past few weeks with Jenna, the enormous weight that settled onto me when my sister disappeared has begun to feel just the tiniest bit lighter.

But all I can say is “I’m not going to stop. I can’t.”

“Fine. In that case, you’ll be okay without me. You’re stronger than you think. I know you don’t believe that yet, but you are.”

“I’m really not. The first time I tried to talk to someone without you, I wound up in fucking jail.” I shake my head. “The point is, we can work around whatever you need to do for your mom. Hell, I can help you.”

“You’re not listening to me,” Jenna says. “It’s too much. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You don’t actually expect me to believe that, do you? I know you, Jenna. On the first day we met, you told me that when Jules didn’t come home that night, you went looking for her. It’s been seven years and you haven’t once stopped searching—until now. So, what happened? Just tell me the truth.”

“Nothing happened! How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“Then you’re a fucking quitter.”

“Says the woman who’s never finished a single thing she’s ever started.”

The words crack against my cheek like a blow. Still, they just reinforce my belief that something else is going on here. Jenna wouldn’t aim that low unless she was deliberately trying to push me away.

“I’m not quitting this,” I say. “Because we are closer than we’ve ever been. When we started, I didn’t think we’d learn a single thing the police hadn’t already told us. But we did. You can’t just drag me into this and then leave when the answers don’t fall into our laps after a month.”

Jenna smacks her palms against the steering wheel. “This is the end, Nic.”

“It doesn’t have to be—”

“For my mom,” she says. “It’s the end for my mom. I don’t know how long it’s gonna take, and I know I don’t have the best relationship with her, but I’m not going to spend the last few weeks of her life chasing answers we’re never going to get. I wish I could have given her some closure, but we’re never gonna know what happened to Jules and Kasey. We never had a chance.”

Her face is wet, tears slick against her lips. “So, please,” she says, “don’t call me or text me about it again. You can do whatever you want, but you’re gonna have to do it alone.”