The Missing Half

by Ashley Flowers

The idea of a female with actual bad intentions would gobsmack him.

But more than that, I learned years ago that numbness is better than pain. I’ve been not talking for so long, I’m not sure I’d even know how to start.

Over time, my grief has morphed to anger. Now it lives just beneath my skin. Prick it and I bleed.

When someone dies, most people’s reaction is to slap some reductive, feel-good label on their legacy. Her smile could light up a room. He was the life of the party. The claims are so blanketed, they leave no room for nuance, for reality. Even I, who’ve spent years learning better, still do it. Hadn’t I, just a few minutes earlier, searched for some superlative to stick in front of Jules’s name? As if prettiest, smartest, or funniest was the only thing that could give her life meaning. Hypocrite, I think acidly.

My emotions get too heavy to hold.

Hope is an intoxicating sensation.

It shouldn’t feel like a betrayal, but it does. This is what I do, assume everyone else is frozen in time because I am.

I never got the feeling the police were hiding anything. I always thought their lack of updates was because they just had so little to go on.

And these are just the things for which he’s gotten caught. Which makes me wonder: What else has he done that he’s gotten away with?

People are always taking care of me—Brad, my lawyer, my probation officer—but they seem to do it more out of obligation than affection.

“God, the world can be so fucked up. Here our sisters were murdered all because they were women, alone on the road at night. Then this asshole is groping girls in a back alley and he still gets his name on a goddam plaque.”

Two branches of the same tree, two pieces of a soul. Where one sister goes, the other will be, for she is but half of the whole.

My loathing for this guy is so strong that it’s reorienting his features into something deformed and monstrous.

For the millionth time in my life, I wish I were a different kind of person. A better kind.

These are the people who don’t know what real loss is, don’t understand how it worms into your brain and infects your blood. They wouldn’t understand how sometimes, even now, I pick up my phone to call Kasey, and when I remember, it feels like a hole being blown through my chest. They wouldn’t understand how nighttime turns every stranger into a stalker, a predator, someone to both fear and despise. Even now, I’m a hornet’s nest of anxiety, a knife’s slash of pain.

Was Brad scared that night because Kasey had disappeared? Or was he scared because he thought their secret hadn’t gone with her?

I have her calm and analytical mind to balance my own frenetic one.

I like to pretend I’m nothing like my parents, but that’s far from the truth. I drink like my mom, and for seven years, I’ve been just like my dad too: content to hide my wounds from myself so long as it meant I never had to examine the pain. But all that does, I realize now, is make the sores fester and grow.

It unnerves me—the quiet normalcy after the burst of violence.

I did nothing wrong, and yet everything I loved in my life was on the line.”

“I’m so sorry, Sandy,” Brad says. “I had no idea you knew.” Sandy lets out a disdainful laugh. “Of course you didn’t. Because I was a well-behaved, middle-aged, stay-at-home mom. I was invisible. Even to my own husband.” “Invisible? No, I—” She lifts a hand, cutting him off. “Oh, please. I can’t remember exactly when it started, but I woke up one morning, and suddenly you only seemed to notice me when the dishes went unwashed or dinner wasn’t on the table on time. Nobody thinks housewives have lives or stories or feelings, let alone secrets.”

It was obvious she knew exactly why I was there. And the look on her face…well, it was also obvious she’d forced herself to forget about me, convinced herself the affair was a victimless crime. Like I said—invisible. But, confronted with the wife of the man she was sleeping with, she started crying almost instantly.”

“Brad,” Sandy snaps. “I’m reliving the worst few weeks of my life right now. And if I have to sit here and explain how my husband risked everything we built together because of his utter stupidity and a pair of perky breasts, the least you can do is not interrupt me.”

I realize that in order to get back to a time when I didn’t feel so completely broken, I’d have to erase the past seven years. All the mess and meaninglessness are so deeply woven into my life, it’s impossible to separate me from the wreckage. I suppose that makes us one and the same.

I don’t want this numbness to pass. I don’t want to feel whatever comes next. I want to disappear.

I can’t keep living like this. I can’t keep avoiding my pain by drinking myself to sleep and hoping someone else will come along and clean up after me. I can’t keep bailing when something starts to get scary.