Page 7 of The Missing Half
The website of the local animal shelter is splashed with colorful photos of glossy-haired dogs licking faces and fluffy kittens sleeping curled in palms, but the actual shelter is a pretty depressing place. It has the kind of kibble-y, wet-fur smell that stings my nostrils and clings to my skin long after I leave, and walking past dog after dog with sad, lonely eyes makes my chest cave in. On top of that, it serves as a weekly reminder of my own inability to take care of Slink, but when presented with the list of community service options from the court, the animal shelter was the only one that didn’t sound terrible.
I’m here now, sitting on the floor of the air-conditioned cat room, my mouth cottony and my head throbbing. It’s been twelve hours since I kicked Jenna out of my apartment. Twelve hours since she took a pickax to my finely tuned numbness. In the short amount of time since then, I’ve been a live wire, jumpy and suspicious. Every woman I’ve seen is either Jenna, following me again, or Kasey, come back from the dead.
I’ve also had this strange nagging feeling since Jenna walked out my door last night, the kind you get after you leave for a trip and know you forgot to pack something but can’t remember what. Maybe it’s just Jenna getting to me, but I can’t stop replaying what she said: No one knows our sisters like we do. If there’s any similarity between their lives, maybe we can find it. I resent Jenna for dredging up a past I’ve worked so hard to forget, and I’m still furious at her for lying, but I can’t help wonder if she could be right. What if this feeling is something important? What if it’s something everybody else missed?
Trying to remember is a sensation I’m not familiar with. In the past, whenever memories of Kasey invaded my brain, I’d bury them. Now, for the first time in years, I want to reach out and grab them, but they’re murky and ethereal, impossible to catch.
I hear the door open, and I look over to find Pam, one of the animal shelter employees. “Here you are,” she says.
As far as volunteers go, I’m the lowest in the pecking order, below the new empty nesters filling their time and the high schoolers who are only here for a line on their college applications. I have to get Pam’s signature on my community service sheet every week, and even though she doesn’t know what I did to wind up here, it’s clear she thinks I’m a criminal. Which, I suppose, I am.
“You were supposed to hose out kennel three,” she says. “I just walked over there and it clearly hasn’t been—” Her eyes lock on my lap. “Is that Banksy?”
Banksy is a skinny calico with a crook in his tail and a missing eye, and he’s currently asleep in my lap. I met him on my first day here and knew the moment I saw his face, with one surly-looking eye and a sewn-shut hole where the other should be, his chances of getting adopted were slim, but the first thing I do when I walk through the door every Saturday is check to make sure he’s still here. Every time I see him curled in the far corner of his cage, glaring through the bars, I feel both relieved and sad.
“Yeah,” I say. “I just had to get him out of his cage, because he threw up in it and I wanted to clean it out.” I can tell she doesn’t believe me. And even if she did, I’m still breaking protocol. There’s a separate room where we put the cats while we’re cleaning their cages, and I am not in it. Nor am I allowed to interact with the animals until all my other duties are done.
“We’re not here to provide emotional support animals for our volunteers to feel better,” Pam says. “Our volunteers are here to help us.”
“Right. I get it.”
“Then start helping. I moved all the dogs from kennel three to the exercise field half an hour ago. I had to get Hillary to man my post to come find you.” Pam always has a way of making volunteering at the animal shelter feel like working at NASA.
I scoop Banksy up, and he glares lazily at me with his one eye.
Pam opens the door, making a show of shaking her head. Just as it’s closing behind her, she turns. “And, Nic? When you say you’re gonna do something, please just do it. Don’t make me come track you down.”
When she leaves, I lock Banksy back in his cage, avoiding his gaze. “I know,” I mutter. “Sorry, Banks.”
I close the cat room door behind me and make my way to kennel three. As I do, my mind flashes to something Jenna said yesterday. One day, Jules woke up and announced she wanted to leave. She said she wanted a change. She’d gotten into a funk. Stopped going out, stopped seeing friends.
The exchange is sticking in my brain like a popcorn kernel between teeth. There’s something there I’m not seeing, something I’m not remembering. What I told Jenna was true: Osceola, where Jules and Jenna moved, means nothing special to me. I don’t know anybody there. I’ve driven through it plenty of times, but I’ve never thought of it as anything more than one of Michiana’s many towns. Is it possible, then, that I know something about Jules Connor? I did go to the bar where she worked quite a few times that summer, but back then she was just one face among many.
I pass by a dog, a little yippy-looking thing with tangled white fur. He starts barking, and then the whole kennel is barking, and whatever memory was tapping at the edge of my mind is gone.
—
Two days later, I’m in the church basement where my weekly AA meeting is held, sitting in a circle of chairs. The room smells, like it always does, of pine cleaner, coffee, and cologne.
I resent having to be here, but AA is a requirement of my probation, so I’ve been going every Monday night for the past four months. I still haven’t gotten used to the rubbed-raw way it makes me feel though. Like going into surgery without anesthesia, hands digging in open wounds. Each time I walk through the door, I hear the sound that’s been haunting me ever since getting my DWI. A squeal of tires against pavement, the metal crunch as I clip that tree, all of it muffled through a fog of booze.
Today though, memories of my accident are buried beneath the nagging sensation I’ve had ever since talking to Jenna. Far from dissipating, the feeling’s only gotten stronger over the past few days, like a vibration that’s gone up in frequency. Something about Jenna and Jules moving to Osceola is important—I’m sure of that now—but I can’t figure out what.
People make their way to the circle, Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. My AA group is made up of an unlikely assortment of people, old and young, rich and poor, high-functioning addicts and the opposite. Numbing oneself, I suppose, is universal.
Nancy, a woman of perpetual flowing layers and long chunky necklaces, is our meeting chairperson. “All right, people. Let’s find our seats,” she says, then gives a few introductory words about the program. After that, the man I call Sad Henry, a middle-aged man I’ve only ever seen in a suit and tie, does a reading about step eight while Candy Ilana streamlines Skittles beside him.
“Thank you, Henry,” Nancy says when he finishes. She looks around the circle. “Who’d like to get us going tonight? Step eight is a doozy. It’ll take guts.”
There’s scattered laughter. Step eight is making a list of all the people we’ve harmed. As she scans the room, Nancy catches my eye, and it throws me off guard. My mind had been circling: One day Jules woke up and announced she wanted to leave. I cut my gaze away.
From the opposite side of the circle, a voice says, “I’ll go.”
I look over to see Michaela. She’s probably ten years older than I am, but her skin is like leather that hangs too loose over her bones. She’s wearing a pink sweatsuit even though the high today was ninety-seven. The top is zipped all the way to the hollow of her neck.
“Um, yeah, hi,” she begins. Her voice is like crunching gravel. “The people I’ve harmed are my girls. For anyone who doesn’t know, three years ago I drove me and my girls home from a Fourth of July party. And, uh, I’d been drinking and I got into an accident. My oldest, Lexi, was okay. Few cuts and bruises, nothing too bad. But my youngest, Natalie—she broke her collarbone. I lost custody after that. They’re staying with my mom now. She loves them, but she doesn’t wanna be raising young kids anymore. She already did that. So, she’s another person I’ve harmed.”
I’m half in the room, half in my head. I hear Michaela’s words, but I’m fixated on Jenna’s: Jules had gotten into a funk. Stopped going out, stopped seeing friends.
“Anyway,” Michaela continues, tugging the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands. “I saw my girls this weekend, which is great, but also tough because it reminds me how much of their lives I’m missing. Every time I visit, Lexi’s wearing clothes I’ve never seen before. And she learned how to do a cartwheel without me there to teach her. And Natalie, she had her hair in these little braids, and they looked so cute. But I started crying when I saw them because I used to be the one who braided their hair, you know? That used to be me.”
Michaela keeps talking, but I’m no longer listening. Because it’s hit me, the memory that’s been clawing at the edge of my mind. And with it, a realization has suddenly come crashing through: Something I told the police that summer wasn’t true.