Page 22 of Good Half Gone

I was fuzzy. My thoughts felt thick and clumsy. Piper’s favorite hoodie was on the floor next to her bed. I pulled it over my head and found a pair of clean jeans in our shared dresser.

I hoped Gran wouldn’t freak out when she woke up and saw me gone.

The phone was ringing. I bolted upright, waking in a gasp. My heart was pounding so hard it hurt. I drowned in my dreams: in lakes,oceans, mud, sometimes vats of uncooked elbow pasta. Even the good dreams ended in drowning.

The ringing stopped abruptly. The light in the bedroom was wrong, too dark. The digital clock next to my bed said it was three o’clock.I slept for four hours?I felt out of my mind, petrified. Squinting around the room, I searched for my cell. It wasn’t next to my bed on the nightstand. A car honked outside the window, Then it all came back: the movie theater, Gran… Piper… They’d taken my cell phone before shoving Piper into the car.

My hands shook as I dialed 411 for directory assistance. A man’s voice came on the line.

“Can I have the number for the Queen Hill Hospital,” I heard myself say into the cordless.

“Do you want me to connect you?”

“Yes.”

I jotted the number down on the Charlie Brown notepad I gave Gran for Christmas and waited for the call to connect. The hospital put me on hold for what felt like an hour. I watched Gran’s Felix the Cat clock in a trance count the seconds with his eyes.

My anxiety was at a boiling point. The dead silence pressed against my ear felt like a bad omen. A voice was going to come on the line and tell me Gran was dead, I just knew it.

“Hello, is this Iris?” She didn’t sound overly serious. In fact, her voice was cheerful.

“Yes…?”

“Your grandmother tried to call you before she went into surgery,” she said.

I stared at my bare feet, stunned. Gran wasn’t dead, she was in surgery? It took my brain a few seconds to catch up, and then a different panic set in.

“I don’t understand. Is she okay? What type of surgery?”

“You can call back in a few hours and check on her. If she’s awake you may even be able to talk to her.”

She didn’t answer my question, but I couldn’t muster up the common sense to repeat it. Thanking Diane, I hung up. The thought crossed my mind to call my mother, but I quickly squashed it. She didn’t believe me about Piper, and she’d make Gran being in the hospital about her.

It was time to call the authorities.

Girls went missing all the time, especially in big cities. They ran away mostly, but what about those other stories—the ones where men took them for other reasons? Audrain and Poley made it clear that they believed her to be a runaway, despite the fact I’d seen hertaken.

I called the station and asked to speak to Martin Audrain or Amanda Poley—neither were available. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or distraught.

With Gran’s phone in hand—and last year’s yearbook—I sat at the kitchen table with my formulating plan.

The messages in Piper’s yearbook were written in fat bubble letters. They were mostly of thehave a great summer!variety, but beneath half of those messages were phone numbers.Call me! Let’s hang out!

I started writing down names and numbers. Someone had to know something. I had a full page of contacts when the house phone rang, startling me, and I wanted to throw up when I saw the caller ID: it was the police station.

“Ms. Walsh, it’s Detective Audrain.”

“It’s not—” I sigh. “This is Iris. My grandmother is in surgery. Do you have news about Piper?”

There was a pause, and when he spoke, he sounded different than he had yesterday. Always sounding different, Audrain was. “I do, I would need your grandmother to come to the station…”

I was already sliding my feet into my sneakers. “My grandmother cannot come to the station, but I’m on my way!” I calculated that I could take the 202 bus and walk the rest of the way.I’d be at the station in forty minutes.

“We need to speak to a guardian, Iris. Do you have any other relatives that can come down—a mom, dad—an older sibling? Who are you staying with?”

“A friend. And no, there’s no one else.” My voice was flat.

Another pause, like he was weighing what to do. It was a weird situation. But there was no way I was going to call my mother. She wouldn’t be helpful, she’d show up drunk or high—or both. She’d make more problems. I squeezed my eyes closed.

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