Page 47 of The Missing Half

Chapter Forty-six

We drive the rest of the way in silence. I still have one last question—or rather one last favor—to ask of Kasey, and I chew it over in my mind.

We reach the outer edges of the swamp hours later, when the moon is hanging directly above us in the sky. Other than it and thestars, the night is dark, the swamp an infinite blackness. I point the beam of a flashlight Kasey grabbed from her home earlier intothe tree line, but the darkness swallows it. A cacophony of wildlife hums in the air, frogs trilling, mosquitos buzzing.

“You ready?” Kasey says. I try not to think about what we’re doing, but it creeps into my brain regardless. We’re hiding a dead body—Jenna’s body. “We can’t take the tarp. It’ll stand out too much. We’re going to have to move her as she is.”

Kasey opens the back of the truck, and we stare at the roll of blue plastic. All I want to do is run back to the passenger seat and put my head between my knees until it’s all over, but I can’t let Kasey carry this burden for me. Not this time. Taking a fortifying breath, I climb into the bed of the truck.

“Let’s get her out up here,” I say. “Then we can push her to the edge together.”

I reach a hand to help Kasey up, and her eyes widen ever so slightly in surprise. This is the first time she’s ever seen me take the lead, the first time she hasn’t had to guide me through my own mess. After a moment’s hesitation, she puts her hand in mine.

Awkwardly, we unroll Jenna’s body, then heave it out of the truck bed. I grab her ankles and Kasey grabs her wrists, and together we start to carry her to the tree line. Our only source of light is from the flashlight I hold with my mouth, and it shines an eerie spotlight on Jenna’s corpse swinging in our grip. Her head lolls heavy on her bent neck, exposing the soft underbelly of her chin. Her hair drags through the grass on the ground. I’m grateful I can’t see her eyes.

“Let’s put her down,” Kasey says through panting breaths once we reach the trees. “It’s hard navigating in there. Most of it’s just mud and water, and it’s really dense.”

Dense is an understatement. Within seconds of stepping through the tree line, I’m covered in stinging scrapes, the underbrush more like a wall than individual plants. We make it less than ten feet before we need to put the body down again.

“Shit,” Kasey says, glancing over her shoulder. “We’re already almost at the water.” Sure enough, I look behind her and see moonlight bouncing off its black surface. I grab the flashlight from my mouth, and the bright beam turns the water a murky greenishbrown.

We catch our breath, then continue deeper into the swamp. Soon the hard ground turns soft, our shoes squelching in mud. And then we’re in the water. In all the dark places around us my mind conjures threats: snakes coiled in the earth, spiders hanging over our heads, fish slipping against our legs in the watery depths. This is how we make our slow progress—moving through the water to solid ground and then back to water again, catching our breath every few feet, Jenna’s lifeless body suspended between us.

“What about here?” I say when we’ve made it to a patch of harder terrain. It feels as if an hour has passed. My clothes are soaked, my arms and legs sting with scrapes, and my muscles are starting to fatigue. Soon, I won’t be able to lift Jenna anymore. “This feels far enough, don’t you think?”

Kasey looks around. “Yeah, okay.” She hesitates. “We need to weigh her down, make sure she doesn’t float. I don’t think anyone will find her back here, but we can’t take the chance.”

“Jesus,” I say. I hadn’t thought of that.

“We can do it with rocks. You know, fill her pockets.”

I shine the flashlight in slow arcs on the ground so we can search for anything heavy. When we find a rock, one of us picks it up then tosses it into a pile.

“Hey, Kase?” I say after a few minutes. “If you never want to see me again after this, I’d understand.” I have a new and painful thrum in my veins, as if my heart is pumping poison. My fault, my fault, my fault. If I were her, I don’t think I’d ever be able to even look me in the eye.

Kasey is quiet for a long time, staring down into the mud. Finally, she says, “When I was here last time—with Jules, I mean—I was terrified. I was alone, and I didn’t have a flashlight because I’d been in such a hurry I’d forgotten to bring one, and I kept thinking I was going to get caught. It was irrational—there was probably no one else around for miles—but I couldn’t get it out of my head that someone was going to see my car and walk into the swamp and find me. And if that happened, I knew I’d go to prison for the rest of my life.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She shakes her head. “That’s not why I’m telling you this. That night, I had this moment where I just…panicked. I thought that someone was right behind me and that I was going to get caught and my life would be over. And I realized then that if I went to prison, it was you I was going to miss most. Just the little moments, you know, the two of us hanging out, talking. Mom and Dad were in their own worlds, but you were always there next to me. You may have been the reason I was there in the first place, but it was still you I was going to miss.” Her voice fades. “What I’m saying is, there’s nothing you could ever do that would make me stop loving you. You’re my sister.”

Tears stream down my cheeks and into my mouth. It is unfathomable to me that I could be lovable after everything I’ve done, but perhaps that’s what she’s trying to say, that sisterhood is knowing someone fully and loving them anyway. “Thank you.” It isn’t enough. Nothing will ever be enough.

I look up to the sky, to the stars peeking out beyond the canopy of trees. It’s time to ask my last question.

“Can I stay with you after this? I mean, like, live with you? I know I’ll have to start over, to disappear like you did, and maybe you’ll want to start over too, move to another city, get a new name. But I was thinking we could do it together this time. I…I don’t know. What do you think?”

Kasey hesitates. “What about your life back home?”

I think of everything I have back in Mishawaka: a dad who’s lost in denial, a dead-end job with a boss I used to love and now hate, a crappy apartment, no friends, no pets. I have nothing to go back to but a criminal record and legal red tape. I will tell Kasey all of it someday soon. But for now, I just say, “I’d rather start over with you.”

She studies my face. “We can’t do it right away. I need you to go back home after this and act like everything’s normal. Just for a while. Just till we know no one is missing Jenna.”

The idea makes me unbearably sad. I’ll be missing her, at least.

“But eventually,” Kasey continues, “if you want to come join me—”

“I do.”

“Then…yeah. If that’s what you want.” She smiles and it looks sad, but there’s something else there too, something brighter.

We tuck all the stones we’ve found into Jenna’s pockets, her shoes, her bra. Then, together, Kasey and I roll her corpse into the water. For one sickening moment, I think she’s not going to sink, but then the swamp gurgles around her and sucks her down. Soon, all I can see are the strands of her hair disappearing into the black. If I didn’t know what it was, I might think it was nothing more than underwater grass.

I know we are not in the same exact spot Kasey put Jules’s body all those years ago, but I can’t stop the image that swims into my mind: Jenna’s body settling beside her sister’s at the bottom of the swamp, their ghostly hands floating side by side. It makes me think of that poem some stranger wrote in a card all those years ago:

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 look to Kasey, and the two of us begin to retrace our steps back to the truck. Both sets of sisters reunited at last.

I’m just not sure the right ones survived.