Page 95 of Good Half Gone

“I put her somewhere nice. You’ll like it.”

My breath is ragged. I don’t know how long I can hold on to my sanity. I clench my fists and stare at the rusted gazebo ceiling. I’m starting to feel dizzy. My hand.

“I’m not going anywhere with you, Jude,” I explain calmly. “You are a rapist, a pedophile, and a murderer.”

I have to give it to him, he looks genuinely crestfallen.

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

I finally meet the real Jude, the one I’ve been looking for. He grabs me by the hair closest to my scalp and pulls me up to his face. I refuse to look afraid.

I’m pressed against his body; I feel his heat. It’s revolting. He doesn’t bother with my hands because he has me by the hair. I’m up on my tiptoes, not even a close match in strength. I reach into my pants pocket and shove the Taser into his belly. And then he’s screaming. He falls backward, his body flexed like a dead spider. I’m not done. Before he leaves, I want to take something from him. I Tase him again. I know I’m running out of time. Any minute his buddies are going to break into this clearing and shoot me dead. I’ve been dancing around this goddamn gazebo for fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to pick up the jagged shard of beer bottle glass from between the floor planks.

The louder I scream, the harder he closes his eyes. Now that he’s on his back, I walk around his body until I’m standing above his head. I hold the glass to his eye right as he opens it.

“Where is she?”

He tries to move his head away from the glass, but there’s nowhere to go.

“She’s in the cemetery behind the church. The angel.”

I speak quickly. “You preached a sermon once. An eye for an eye.”

I push the glass into his eye and stand.

As I run, his screams get farther away. I can see what’s left of HOTI through the trees. The rubble looks like an old hag lying in the ashes. I hear the noise as I stumble out of the trees and onto the lawn. A helicopter. I fall to my knees and just sit there as it lands. People in red jackets are cresting the top of the hill. The coast guard. Out of the helicopter jumps Poley. She runs toward me, the wind from the blades whipping a dark ponytail.I’ve never been happier to see anyone in my life. She drops to her knees and wraps her arms around me.

“You’re not pregnant.” I have to yell to be heard.

“I named her Piper,” Poley shouts.

I start crying.

Everyone is converging on us, medical professionals, police, the coast guard. They run for me like a herd.

“They’re locked in a chapel about two hundred yards that way,” I tell Poley. “There are four armed men that I know of. They have a camp in the woods on the east side of the island.”

She breaks away from me to talk to a group of men in bulletproof vests. I’m swept away after that.

I don’t remember anything that happened, not the helicopter ride to the hospital, or the four days I spent lying in the hospital bed. I was roped on painkillers, pretty beat up. Turns out squeezing yourself through impossibly tight spaces can fracture your ribs. I have nerve damage in my hand from the glass—but I have hands, which I’m grateful for.

I remember the first time I saw Cal after everything happened. The way we raced for each other, meeting in the middle. I remember sitting on the ground right where we collided and holding him for ten solid minutes. And I remember Gran, weak as she was—squeezing me tight, tight. She would never say what I did was right, but she wouldn’t say it was wrong either.

On that day, they found Jude hiding in the RV, the glass still poking out of his eye. When they took him into custody, Poley said he showed no emotion. I wonder if that’s the true him, or if any part of what he gave me was real. He wouldn’t confess to killing Piper. But he’d already told me where to look for her. On a rainy day in March, Piper’s remains were exhumed from someone else’s grave. True to his word, the tombstone was in the shape of an angel.There was a lot of police work to be done with her body before they would let us have her back. The autopsy showed that Jude strangled her. I couldn’t stop thinking about that part; Cal’s life had been in his hands the day he killed Piper. Jude had enough human in him to spare his son of the same fate as his three other victims.

He stares at me with his remaining eye—the eye I ruined with a shard of glass sat behind a patch that Jude often reached up to touch. He could have brought Piper back to us. It would have been a long road, but one I would have gladly taken for my sister.

Sometimes when I’m alone, I think about Leo. I pretend he’s separate from Jude—it’s sick, and I always feel guilty after. I can’t understand how someone could pretend on the level he pretended. It disgusts me more than it hurts me. That’s how I’ve survived.

Of the two hundred patients and staff that were on the island that day, one hundred eight survived. There was a private memorial service for them on the island. The immediate family put wreaths into the water from a boat while the rest of us watched from shore.

Before Jordyn ran HOTI, she lived in B hall as a patient. Her promotion came when Jude killed Dr. Grayson and he needed help with his charade. Jordyn got free rein of the hospital, an apartment in the Victorian section, and control—a rare commodity for patients. In exchange all she had to do was show up and keep her mouth shut. Which she did until Dalton’s bomb detonated. I asked Poley to find out if she had any family, but as it turns out, Jordyn was telling the truth. I paid for her wreath myself, and handed it to the captain, who promised to put it in the water for me.

When police searched Jude’s cabin, they found Piper’s diary. A notebook stuffed under the mattress. We finally had the answers to what happened the day she went missing.

When Poley brought the man who posed as RJ in for questioning, he turned on Angel for a plea deal.

The beginning of Piper’s nightmare started after they drove away from the movie theater. At 3:45, the man I knew to be RJ bound her wrists in the back seat of the car while Angel maneuvered the Ford down the planned route. They both worked for a sex trafficking ring, and it wasn’t their first job. RJ pushed Piper into the trunk through the lowered back seat. Eager to head home, he got rid of her bag like he was told, and drove the Pontiac onto the 4:20 ferry. He was on his way home for dinner, though as he recalled in his statement, he hadn’t been able to eat. Angel William Fennery was on trial for his portion of my sister’s kidnapping.

Piper was taken to the stash house, where they took the Polaroids that Poley showed me that day. She was moved often and they kept her drugged. The night she got away from the traffickers, they were driving her to a house in Sultan. She recognized the area as being near the church, saw the train coming, and in one very brave moment, she opened the car door while they were driving and jumped out. They were near a field. She’d always been a fast runner, but that night she ran like her life depended on it. She had a plan. It came minutes later, the eerie whistle and theclack clack clackof the wheels traveling over points. By then the car had spun to a stop, and four men inside of it were pursuing her across the field. But Piper had a head start; Piper was racing the train, not them. She didn’t care if the train killed her. At least it wouldn’t be them. If she was going to die, Piper wanted them to die too. Bracing herself, ignoring the pain in her muscles, she pushed them harder and harder. The train, hauling cargo from Portland to British Columbia, was moving at a speed of forty-nine miles per hour as it passed through. She never looked back. Piper went flying over the tracks, landing on her side. She missed being hit by seconds.When she looked back, she was alone, her kidnappers trapped on the other side of the train. She knew they’d come after her, so she ran.

Piper ran faster than she ever had, but not in the direction her kidnappers anticipated. She ran next to the train until it passed her. Instead of running for the woods, she doubled back across the field. There was nothing in that direction but miles of farmland, and then some distance away was Freeland, the tiny town at the end of suburbia. There was no Starbucks, or chain grocery store, or even a Walmart within twenty miles, but she knew the area well. She knew where Pastor Jude lived with his wife and baby. She knew he’d help her because they were seeing each other. But he hadn’t. Piper wrote about their relationship and her pregnancy with optimism. She thought he was going to leave his wife and be with her. Jude told her he’d take care of everything. She wrote letters to Cal, and some to me too. She drew pictures and wrote poems and imagined what her baby would look like. The entries got darker after Cal was born. She became distrustful of Jude and tried to run away. Her last entry was her planning her escape. And then there were no more entries. We think he killed her when he caught her.

I am what’s left of us—one side of the yin-yang. The one left to tell her story. I don’t know how I’m going to explain to Cal what happened to his mother. I’m dreading the day he asks. He is my boy, my joy, my peace. He is a tiny piece of Piper that I get to keep safe. I am happy. I don’t expect I’ll ever feel whole again, but for Cal’s sake, I pretend to be.

In the end, that’s what we’re all doing anyway.

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