Page 16 of Good Half Gone

“You don’t know that. We’re like dogs, we’ll eat our vomit if we have to. Even if Piper is not there, we have to tell her…”

I turned the top half of my body toward the window to let her know how I felt. “She doesn’t care. If Piper goes missing, if I go missing—she doesn’t care.”

Gran didn’t say anything to that. She couldn’t. We drove in silence the rest of the way. My lips were chapped, so I opened the glove box and dug around for my lip balm.

When we reached the dingy suburbs of Tacoma, the Prius turned down the saddest street in town. Piper and I called it Mom Row: ugly cement houses painted in pastels; there were bars on the windows and yards filled with dirt and old junk.

This was the place CPS took us from when a fourth-grade teacher asked for a wellness check. Our mother was on a binge that week, and when the social worker knocked, she answered the door high and holding a bottle of Jim Beam. Gran took us in. She would have had us out of there sooner if she knew how bad it was, but our mom cut her off whenever she was using. When the social worker dropped us off at her house that day, we hadn’t seen her in a year.

“You’re so big!” was the first thing Gran said before she grabbed us in one of her hugs and cried into our hair.We were limp in her arms; we’d forgotten how to be hugged.

“I should have known, I should have known,” she kept saying. We didn’t even know—it took months of living with Gran to understand how bad things had been. It was overwhelming to adapt to life in her little place. Three meals a day, a bedroom with twin beds and a change of sheets, constant interest and attention.Did you brush your teeth?Why aren’t you eating your spinach? Don’t you girls know how to use a hamper?We thought she was crazy when she yelled at me for answering the door without looking through the peephole first. We didn’t like it, and then all of a sudden, we did. It was ours…we felt safe.

Going back to Mom Row did not feel safe. We were afraid that we’d have to stay even though our mother didn’t have custody of us anymore.

Gran parked on the street outside a yellow house with a chipped brown door and sighed. She didn’t want to be here either. I picked at a string on my pants as Gran killed the engine.

“Yellow-yellow, you ugly Jell-O…”We made up that rhyme the day we moved into the tiny bungalow, our then-sober mom grinning at us. She locked us out of the house an hour later saying we were annoying her—the first day of many lockouts. We called the house yellow-yellow, a cheerful name for the awfulness within. If I stared too long at the bedroom window, I could hear Piper crying.

Gran knocked on my window, snapping me out of my trance. I got out of the car and stood behind the open door like it could shield me, while she pounded on the front door.

“Open up, Virginia!”

If Mom was using, she wouldn’t be able to hear the banging. She wouldn’t wake up even when Piper and I used to shake her. But Gran kept banging, the thin wood trembling beneath her fist. The light in the living room turned on and the front door was yanked open. I wanted to throw up, but instead I stayed hidden behind the car door like a coward.A man stood in the doorway in his boxers and socks looking enraged. His hair was pressed flat on the side he’d been sleeping on it.

“What the fuck,” he barked, making me flinch.

“I need to speak to Virginia.”

He looked dumbfounded to see a white-haired woman standing at his door; she was clearly not who he was expecting. His gaze moved from her to me and back to her. “Who are you?”

“Virginia’s mother,” she said flatly. “Now get her ass to the door.”

After what felt like a full minute of him sizing up the tiny tyrant that was my grandmother, he tried her one more time.

“She’s sleeping. I’m not gonna wake her up right now—that her kid?”

“One of them,” said Gran. “The other is missing.”

He stared at her, his eyes glazed over like he was looking for the con, and then he turned back into the house and disappeared down the short hallway to the master bedroom. He left the door open—shady thing to do if you were the level of user my mother was. I shifted behind my door shield, wanting to call Gran back to the car.

A minute later my mother appeared wearing only a white T-shirt, skinny, bruised legs poking out the bottom like two pogo sticks. She was carrying her handgun, looking even rougher than her boyfriend.

I closed my eyes and smelled the rain, trying to feel Piper. It was harder being here without her. When we were little we could start and finish each other’s sentences. We had the twin bond, as people so often referred to it, no matter how much we pestered each other now. And now she was gone.

“Ma?” Virginia blinked hard at her mother as if trying to clear her eyesight. She held the gun limply at her side while her boyfriend stood behind her. Coward of a giant, giant of a coward, that’s what Piper would have said if she were here.Her boyfriend and I weren’t so different. I was hiding behind Gran. If we were in a reverse situation, Piper would have been screaming at our mother, blaming her for what happened, but I did nothing but cower. I was afraid of her…even right now as scared as I was for Piper.

She looked like a little kid. It was deceiving—people saw her giant, sad eyes and wanted to protect her, and she used that against them. But I knew the fury that was tucked inside of her, quiet like a mouse until she needed to use it. She’d changed her hair. The dark roots led to a charred-looking blond bob instead of the usual purple.

“What the hell, Ma—what are you doing here?” She caught sight of me and stared right through Gran, who looked like she was braced for a fight.

Gran didn’t waste any time. “Piper is missing. Have you seen or heard from her?” There was no way Piper would ever go to our mother for help; that would be like jumping from quicksand into a meat grinder. Gran was going to do Gran, though, and she needed to come here to check it off the list.

I switched my weight from one foot to the other, desperate to leave…desperate to get back in the car and put the closed door between us, but I needed to have Gran’s back.

“No, she hasn’t come by. You came all the way out here to tell me that?” The buffoon behind her laughed three seconds late. “She’s fifteen, she’s probably with her boyfriend. Don’t you remember how that goes, Ma?” Her voice was nasty—she was gearing up for a fight. Another favorite person to fight with was Gran. My earliest memory was of a fistfight they had in a barn—though Gran always insisted it happened in a McDonald’s. I couldn’t see Gran’s face, but I knew her well enough to see how bad she was struggling.

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I said quickly. My mother’s unfocused eyes found me and then shifted back to Gran. She couldn’t look at me for long,she’d never been able to. I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t convince my mouth to move.

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