Page 46 of The Missing Half

Chapter Forty-five

When Kasey stops talking, the only sound is the distant buzz of insects, the night unfurling quiet and expansive beyond the truck windows. But I feel suffocated—as if all the loose threads I’ve been working so hard to weave together are forming a straitjacket around me.

There’s that time Kasey had said, with a look of fear in her eyes, Be careful tonight. Don’t drink too much. Don’t go anywhere alone. She hadn’t been trying to keep me safe from McLean or some stranger. She’d been trying to protect me from myself.

There’s the business card that apparently scared her into leaving, the one I got one random night when my friends and I went to Harry’s Place. I dredge up the memory, so benign I hadn’t thought twice about sharing it with Jenna the first day we met. A detective had approached us at the bar, told us one of the bartenders had gone missing, and asked if we knew anything about it—but we didn’t even know who Jules Connor was. Then he gave all of us his card in case we thought of something relevant. He hadn’t been onto me; it had just been routine.

There are the headlights Kasey told me she saw that night as she drove off from the scene. They hadn’t belonged to a cop car, as she’d originally feared, but to Jenna’s.

And then there’s the accident. Kasey assumed I’d blacked out the night Jules died, but as she relived it, the memory started coming back to me: swerving drunk in the dark, my tires squealing as I clipped what I thought was a tree. It’s the same memory that’s been haunting me since my DWI months ago, ever since I started trying to get sober and my mind started to get just a little clearer. The two accidents were so similar, I’d conflated the memories of them in my mind.

I push the truck door open and stumble out, the night spinning around me. I gulp in a breath, then another, my face tingling with the sudden influx of oxygen. A scream rips through me, cutting through the night like the wail of a wounded animal. After everything Jenna and I did to find the monster who took our sisters, it turns out the monster is me. Darkness fills me up, turning my insides black and rotten. I am nothing but a mixture of badness and self-loathing. I’m unforgivable, unlovable. Killer, a voice sneers inside my head. Murderer.

I scream until it gags me, then I contract over myself. But I vomited everything up earlier, and nothing comes out except saliva and the acidy dregs from my stomach.

Finally, I drag a hand over my mouth, then turn back to the truck, to Kasey. Wordlessly, I slide onto the seat beside her. All I want is to turn back time, to undo everything I did that summer, to start again. But there’s nothing I can do or say to change all the damage I’ve done. I am scraped out by pain, hollowed by guilt.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” Kasey says.

Yes, I think. “No. You were right to. You shouldn’t be the only one who has to live with the truth.”

I look over at her. Her eyes are full of despair and pity, but there’s a glint of something else behind that—something like relief—and I know a part of her must feel lighter to be telling the truth after all these years. To finally be sharing the burden.

“Fuck, Kasey, I—I’m so sorry.” I will never be able to say it enough. “I ruined your life.”

“It was my choice,” she says. “To protect you. And me. Our futures.”

I try to see my old life through her eyes, all the potential I had at seventeen. I could have left Funland, gone to college, made new friends who didn’t drink for the fun of it. I could have done more, been more. But what Kasey failed to consider in all her careful preparations was how her supposed death would tear my life apart. She’d simply exchanged one life of pain for another. But I can’t tell her that. Not when she sacrificed so much.

“I would’ve done anything to keep you safe,” she says. “You would’ve done the same for me. You did. Tonight.”

We share a fleeting glance, her words conjuring Jenna’s ghost so tangibly between us that I can’t hold her eyes, and we lapse into silence. Where do we go from here? I think. What do we do?

“We should get going,” Kasey says eventually. “We still have a long way to go.”

As we pull back out onto the street, I say, “Where did you go that night?” Those un-accounted-for miles on our odometer represent the last missing piece to this nightmare. “The night you—I—hit Jules? Where did you put her body?”

Kasey looks unbearably tired, so much older than her twenty-six years. She has long been ravaged by the guilt I am just starting to feel. It has robbed her of her youth. “Remember the road trips Mom and Dad used to drag us on when we were kids?” she says. “The ones to visit Aunt Jean in Dayton?”

“Yeah…”

“Do you remember what we used to say when we passed that one swamp?”

A shiver laces up my spine as I think back to those drives and the way the two of us would hold our breath, cheeks puffed out dramatically, as we passed the swamp—our twist on the cemetery classic. “Somewhere like that,” I say, parroting our younger selves, “has to be full of dead bodies.”

“It was the first place I could think of,” Kasey says. “That’s where we’re headed now.”