Page 54 of Good Half Gone

We go from there. I ask Marshal about his parents, his life in Sydney. I do not like the way his small eyes linger at my neck,my hands, my legs. He is a multitasker, he sneaks the looks between his story, his voice never faltering.

Marshal is so close in proximity I could pluck a hair from his head. His DNA is accessible. If Leo trusts me enough to sit in on a session with Marshal, it’s only a matter of time before I am in the same room ashim.The thought gives equal amounts adrenaline and dread.

I’m relieved when our time is up. Janiss retrieves her patient and after they’re gone Dr. Grayson turns to me.

“You did well. Were you nervous?”

“Very,” I confess. “I felt unprepared. I haven’t seen any of your notes about him.”

“You don’t need to,” he interrupts. “If you ask the right questions you’ll hear the truth in their answers. Even when they lie the patients are revealing something about their inner life.”

I bite my bottom lip, nodding in agreement.

“He idolizes his childhood and his father, he sounds the most dishonest when he talks about his feelings, it’s like he’s trying to say all of the right things but he’s off mark.”

Dr. Grayson smiles, and then he tells me Marshal’s story.

On a hot evening in September, Marshal Day Monterey drove to Aurora Avenue and stopped outside of the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts to let one of the working girls into his car. I am familiar with the stretch of road: women stand around wearing lingerie and stilettos. Most of them look bored, staring at their phones instead of into the long line of traffic that moves at a snail’s pace. The articles online don’t specify if he chose the girl randomly. There are a lot of details in between I don’t remember, but the story ends in a hotel room a few miles down the street. The manager called 911 when he heard screaming coming from room nine. Police kicked down the door to find the woman Marshal was with in the bathtub: she was alive, bleeding, and without one of her eyes. Marshal had eaten her other eye before he left her in the room.They found Marshal a few blocks away, wandering down a street, covered in blood.

It’s spaghetti night in the staff cafeteria. The pasta is swollen and mushy, the meat gray. I rest my chin on my fist as I stir the mess around my plate. I am technically on a break. Four hours to sleep, or read, or play Xbox in the rec room. I’m too strung out on lack of sleep to sleep. My next shift starts at 10:00 p.m. on the dark side. I am to man the nurses’ station from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., after which I will be on my way home on the nine o’clock water taxi.

I can’t stop thinking about the session with Marshal. I don’t want to small talk with strangers tonight. I need to think. I am dazed, slightly dazzled and anxious. I did not expect to be attracted to my forty-something-year-old boss, I definitely don’t want to be. But the fact is, I thought I’d seen it all, the full buffet of shrinks. They’re predictable—that’s the stability of therapy. You know what they’re going to say, you know how they’re going to say it. There was none of that in the session with Marshal. Dr. Grayson sat with his back to the falling rain doing the opposite of what I thought he’d do. His methods were controversial…aggressive.Intensivemay be a better word? Is that why he is here, on Shoal, to practice the way he wants to without outside involvement? If the world knew what he was doing he’d lose his license, possibly face jail time.

That was just one session.I could learn so much from him, but the knowledge would be unethical. Do I care? Who am I to take the high road when my own reasons for being here are unethical? I finished high school with a 4.0 GPA, I went to college, got my bachelor’s, was accepted into a master’s program—all because my sister was kidnapped. Piper is the driving force behind my perseverance.

If Cal were my biological son, I’d only owe him my life,but he is not my son, he’s Piper’s. One day he will ask for her full story, and to not have it for him… I don’t want to think of that. I’ve come this far.

Marshal Day Monterey.

Ellis Conrad Jr.

Dalton Barellis.

Arthur Barton.

Jude Fields.

The man in D is going to tell me everything.

Chapter18Past

It Turned Outthat Millar Polar did have a son, but his name wasn’t RJ. The twenty-two-year-old man who posed that day as RJ was really named Millar Polar III. He was currently serving time in a state penitentiary in Nevada for trafficking weapons.

The Polars were your basic brand of criminals—nothing impressive, nothing clever. Dad was in prison for drug possession, mom served time for identity theft and fraud. I couldn’t find an address for Shana Polar, but that hadn’t deterred me—her date of birth was listed next to her booking photo.

My mom went dark for months at a time; the only one who knew how to find her was Gran, and that was only because my mother needed money. Gran always gave it to her. I found Shana’s Facebook page and scrolled until I found a string of birthday posts. Two years ago, MichaelLisaHeppernam posted a gif of balloons on her wall—Happy Birthday from Mom and Dadtyped underneath in the comments. No one had liked the post. Michael and Lisa were easy to find. Old people were bad at the internet.It always alarmed me how accessible they made themselves. Once I had their address, I looked up their house on Google Earth. Not much to see—a mossy roof, rectangular in shape, and surrounded by patchy grass. The house was smaller than yellow-yellow. RJ/Millar spent time there growing up. I wanted to see where a sex trafficker grew up.

The next day, I caught the bus to their neighborhood, then walked two blocks to the dingy brown single-story. The yard was ripped up, mostly weeds, mud, and broken toys. I don’t know what I was hoping to find other than RJ’s origins. His grandparent’s house wasn’t going to give me any answers. Shana Polar, formerly Heppernam, had RJ when she was fifteen if I was doing the math correctly. Now in her forties, the gaunt cheeks and gray skin reminded me of my mother, except Shana wasn’t as pretty. She had a crooked nose, crooked chin, crooked fucking son—I hated her with all of my crooked fucking heart. If she hadn’t brought her kid into the world my sister wouldn’t be missing. Logically, I knew that wasn’t true, but it hadn’t mattered at the time. It took a team of human filth to traffic women; RJ was a single turd in the sewer. I needed someone to blame other than myself. Shana was visually accessible.

No one noticed me on the first day. People in the neighborhood were as damp and dirty as the streets, eager not to make eye contact. A needle lay in a pile of brown leaves. I kicked it into the gutter to get it away from the kids. Who was I kidding? The kids in this neighborhood probably lived with needles in their homes: Piper and I had. I hung out on the steps of an apartment building across the street and looked at my phone until it got dark. Other than a light turning on there was no activity. On the second trip I arrived later, just in time to see an old man shuffle to the mailbox. RJ’s grandfather. I recognized him from the MichaelLisaHeppernam Facebook profile.

I promised myself that my fifth visit would be my last. It was on my sixth that I saw Shana. I wasn’t sure it was her at first: I held my breath when the door to the squat brown house opened and a woman walked out.Leaning on the wall next to the door she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket and lit up. The front door was still open. She yelled something into the house, and a second later a kid came running out. He couldn’t have been older than three; was he hers? He darted past her and ran for something in the yard, his arms in front of him. For real, was this her kid? I stood up, incensed. How dare she bring another one into the world. She barely acknowledged the little guy was there, pacing the patch of sidewalk in front of the house with the phone pressed to her ear and gesturing wildly with her cigarette hand. He played with random objects he pulled out of the mud, holding them up for her to see: a stick, a rock, an old piece of toy. Nothing caught her interest. Eventually he wandered to the corner of the yard and climb on top of an overturned bucket. Her back was to him when he fell. He sat in a heap in the dirt, crying and staring up at her hopefully. When she finally noticed he was crying, she acted annoyed. She walked over and yanked him up by one arm, dragging him back inside the house. Whether she was that kid’s mom or not, she wasn’t the cuddly tender type, and I felt sorry for him. I was being too harsh…maybe…but probably not.

When the police finally got around to questioning RJ about the Polaroids, he played dumb.

I held him responsible—aside from being the oldest person there that day, he’d been the one to manhandle Piper into the back seat.

Dupont was living in New York with his dad’s family. I kept tabs on him through social media. Dupont’s role had been less, the intermediary for mischief. Did he know what he was arranging when he hooked Colby up with Piper that day? He knewsomething, definitely more than he was saying.

---