The Half Life of Molly Pierce (16 page)

I go and sit in the chair.

Might as well.

All my anger has dissipated.

In his eyes I’m the reason we’re here in the first place. I might as well behave. Get the most out of it. I could try and hand things back to Molly, but she’s definitely not willing. The book thing upset her. She has no idea why, but some things just get under our skin.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I say.

“Can you explain to me, then—”

“I have my reasons for everything. I don’t have to tell you.”

“So don’t tell me. But you do know I can get her the medication? I can give it to her parents; they can slip it to her so she doesn’t even know she’s taking it. So you don’t even know. I can make you go away, Mabel. If you don’t cooperate.”

“If you don’t trust me, do it,” I say. “Do it. And see how long she lasts without me.”

I stand up. Our time is up and I feel sick.

I’m halfway to the door before he says, “I do trust you, Mabel. I trust you implicitly. I trust you with Molly’s life.”

“Good. Because her life is my life, and you have to help her. But you can’t do it without me. If you give up on me, you give up on her.”

Just a moment of calm between us. The air in the room relaxes; I breathe for the first time in minutes. A hint of a smile on Alex’s mouth.

“Day or night,” he says.

“I know.”

And I leave.

Somehow the next two days pass and it’s Saturday. My mother lets me sleep late. She must have spoken to Clancy and Hazel; they’re avoiding me like I’m infectious. My father tiptoes past my doorway like he’s terrified I’ll pop out screaming.

I thought I had control over the memories, but Mabel isn’t gone.

She isn’t gone yet. And she’s the one pressing play.

Other than that, she keeps her distance. She doesn’t come out anymore. She doesn’t answer the questions I shout inside my head. They reverberate against the walls of my skull and fall untouched to the tips of my toes.

The time I woke up a few miles from New York?

Alex had threatened to put me on drugs.

“Just watch what I’ll do,” she had said.

“Just watch what I’ll do to her.”

But you can’t really call it kidnapping, can you?

You can’t kidnap your own body.

I do research online. Mabel is called my alter. She is omniscient. Some alters are and some aren’t. The blackouts are normal. I can’t remember what she does. And it’s also normal that I can’t feel her.

I can’t feel her.

I wake up Saturday to the memory of Mabel and Alex’s fight over the book. I can’t deny the fire in her voice, the flame in her eyes.

She’s so different from me.

She gets angrier than I do and she’s louder than I am and her voice even sounds different. Not like an accent, exactly, but a lilt. A limp.

Me, I always sound like I’ve given up on my sentences halfway through them. And how can I expect anyone else to believe me if I can’t believe myself?

The memories change. They move into late winter, early spring. Lyle and I are inseparable. We go everywhere together; I cling to him like a lifeline.

Mabel clings to him like a lifeline.

He’s self-centered and full of himself and loud and obnoxious but he loves her. He loves her and she chose someone else.

His brother, of all people.

Snow falls and every memory I have brings me closer and closer to whatever happened a year ago, to whatever brought Lyle and Mabel together.

I know she’ll tell me. She’ll let me see it bit by bit until I’m ready to understand.

Which means waiting. It means reliving every detail until I get to the day in question.

So I pay attention to my relationship with Lyle. I watch as we progress backward from best friends who sort of hate each other to best friends who love each other to best friends who are unsure of how close they are. How close they’re supposed to be and how close they’re getting.

Mabel teaches Lyle, laughing, how to braid her hair and he shows her how to play his favorite video game and they spend hours drinking soda, shooting bad guys.

When Sayer texts me, I don’t answer.

It’s not me you love.

And if Mabel doesn’t want to talk to you, I have no business talking to you either.

When Erie calls me late on Saturday morning, I tell her to come over. I take a quick shower and I knock on Hazel’s door, wrapped in a towel with my hair dripping onto the carpet.

She’s reading a book on her bed, her head propped up on pillows and one leg crossed over the other. She jumps up when she sees me.

“Molly. Hi,” she says.

“Hey.”

“Do you need something?”

“Are you busy?”

“No,” she says. She lays the book down on the comforter. “No, what’s up?”

“Do my hair?” I ask. “And, um—pick out something I can wear?”

She sits at my window while I change. A blue patterned dress with a darker blue cardigan. I leave it unbuttoned and then I sit on the floor in front of her and she braids my hair.

Once Hazel told me that if I kept secrets from her, she’d keep secrets from me.

Once Hazel told me that, yes, I acted different sometimes. But nobody could tell except her.

When she finishes braiding my hair, she sits back on the window seat.

“Mabel said bye,” she says.

Of course Mabel would say good-bye to my sister.

You can’t leave my sister without saying good-bye. She demands to be acknowledged.

“When?” I ask. I turn around to look at her.

“The other night. After you’d gone to bed. I think she does that a lot, so you won’t be able to tell.”

“That’s sneaky.”

“She has to be sneaky,” Hazel says.

Erie gets here a few minutes later. She lets herself in and we sit on my bed, exchanging stories. Mostly, she tells me about Mabel. How she never noticed. When she found out, she was shocked.

I’m not surprised. I doubt Erie notices a quarter of the things she’s supposed to. And like Hazel said, Mabel’s sneaky.

She asks me about Sayer.

I tell her, I don’t know. I think we’re done.

There’s not much to say after that.

She leaves that night, after lunch and dinner, and I clear up the plates in the kitchen as my parents and Hazel settle down in the living room to watch a movie.

Upstairs, I change into pajamas and spend a while cleaning up my room. Putting clothes away, bringing dirty water glasses down to the kitchen. Finally it’s good enough and I’m just about to get into bed when someone knocks on my door and Clancy pushes into the room before I have a chance to answer.

I sit cross-legged as he walks around touching things, avoiding what he so obviously wants to say.

“Listen, Molly,” he begins, but then he stops. He sits down on the bed with me and he looks like he wants to take my hand but he doesn’t. “How far have you gotten?”

He doesn’t say much.

But when he does . . .

I’m crying before I even realize it.

“He was my friend,” I whisper. “Clancy, he was my friend.”

How far have I gotten?

Far enough to properly feel the loss of the boy on the motorcycle.

Far enough to miss him.

Far enough to grieve.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“Y
ou shouldn’t drink so much, Lyle,” I say. He’s got a bottle of whiskey tucked into an inside pocket of his coat. I know it’s there even though he’s been trying to hide it from me. He doesn’t like when I tell him what to do, but you know what, Lyle? Tough shit. Friends have to tell each other what to do sometimes, and you’re so insistent on being my friend. Well, this is the cost.

“Relax, Mabel. It’s the weekend,” he says.

It’s Thursday.

I’m about to point that out to him when he takes a false step and I watch as his foot goes out from under him. He lands waist deep in a pile of snow and I’m dying laughing as he tries to worm his way out of the drift.

What he’s trying to do is climb up a snowbank to reach a broken window in this warehouse. The snow’s so deep it’s covered up the door, and all the ground-floor windows are boarded shut.

It was my idea to come back here, so I can’t say anything.

“Little help!” he demands, and I start digging him out with my hands. I’m not wearing gloves, so it’s only a matter of minutes before my fingers are completely numb. By the time I get him out, he’s so cold he can’t bend his legs and fresh snow has started to fall from the gray November sky.

Coldest one on record since sometime in the seventies.

“Oh come on, Lyle, forget it,” I say. My face is red and my fingers are aching and inside my boots, I can’t feel my toes anymore.

“You want to get inside, we’re getting inside,” Lyle says. He has his mouth set in a line of grim determination, which might be impressive were his teeth not currently chattering.

“It’s really fine. I’m fine. We can go watch a movie or something. Find someplace warm.”

“Around back,” he says, “I think there’s another way in. We drove all the way out here, we might as well try.”

I attempt a shrug but find my shoulders unresponsive, frozen stiff inside my insufficient jacket.

Lyle has already started off around the far end of the building, so I jog to keep up with him, hoping the sudden movement will start the blood flowing in my veins. I guess he has the same idea as me, because suddenly we’re running full speed around the warehouse, laughing and pelting each other with snowballs and tripping and falling and getting up again. I think I almost break my ankle, but it’s so cold I can’t even feel it.

The warehouse is big. It takes us a few minutes to reach the other side, and by now the snow is falling in earnest and there’s a clean sheet of white over everything. It occurs to me that my car will be covered by the time we get back to it but I don’t care about that. The roads, too, they’ll be a mess, but all I want is to get inside this warehouse.

When I first mentioned it, I expected Lyle to throw a fit. Why would I want to come back here, right?

I don’t know.

That’s the truth.

I’ve never been an overly sentimental person, which I guess comes from being Molly’s hidden half. I’ve never had anything to be sentimental about. Everything I own is Molly’s. My favorite pair of shoes? They’re Molly’s. My favorite book? It’s on Molly’s bookshelf. My favorite place to sit? By the window in Molly’s bedroom.

Hard to be sentimental when you have nothing to be sentimental about.

I tried to keep a journal once, but I wasn’t good at that either.

What would I write in it?

Had a few hours today to watch TV.

Helped decorate the Christmas tree. They thought I was Molly.

Had five minutes to send a text to Lyle. Gotta erase it quick before Molly comes back and sees it.

I should have been a spy in another life.

There’s no one better than me at avoiding detection.

But it’s fine. So I’m not sentimental. But why the warehouse? Why bother coming back here?

I don’t know.

Only there’s no place else in the entire world that I have. That I have, and that Molly knows nothing about.

The warehouse is mine.

And what a prize it is.

Drafty and big and dangerous and half falling apart in places.

But it’s mine.

And alters can’t be choosy.

Ahead of me, Lyle slips again but catches himself before he goes down. We’ve come around the other side of the building now and I see the door before he does. I’ve stopped running but I start again, pushing past him with a laugh and sprinting for it. Even from here I can see it’s all rotted. Even from here I can see how fragile it is. How a few good kicks will bring it down.

He’s by my side in a flash and we work at it together, kicking our frozen feet against the old, termite-eaten wood. Each impact sends a bolt of pain up my leg, and I wonder briefly about frostbite, about freezing to death.

With an impressive rip, the bottom half of the door collapses inward.

Just enough room to wiggle underneath.

I go first with Lyle right behind me, pushing my butt as I swat at his hands like they’re flies.

It’s fairly light inside. The upper windows aren’t boarded and most of them are cracked in places, so it’s freezing but the snow acts like a hundred tiny mirrors and sends blinding rays of light inside.

“Over here,” Lyle says.

This was his place before it was mine. He knows it better than I do and I follow close behind him as he leads me deep into its labyrinthine belly. We pass people, dark shapes huddled under blankets, faces peering out at us, eyes lost in shadow and just the tip of a nose visible. Lyle puts his arm around my shoulders and nobody bothers us. They know him. He is the boy who brings them bread and cheese sandwiches. He is the boy who brings them bottles of water, who pleads with them to go to the shelter in town. Get a shower; spend the night in a bed. But the snow is their shower, they say. These blankets, this floor. This is their bed.

One man calls Lyle by name and we stop for a minute outside his house. You have to call it a house. There is an old metal office desk, a chair. A tarp for a roof. A bed and a pile of magazines. Everything is neat and organized. When I came here for the first time, I was by myself. This man is the only one who introduced himself. He asked me if I needed anything.

What I needed, I couldn’t take from him.

The man holds out a cup and Lyle tips a generous amount of whiskey into it.

The man’s name is Sport. That’s what he calls himself.

Lyle says, “All right, Sport?”

And Sport says, “All right, Lyle.”

We go deeper into the pit of the warehouse.

The homeless people dwindle in numbers and the junkies appear, their gaunt faces shining out of the shadows like flashlights. They slink away from us. They know Lyle, too, but they can’t be bothered with him and he can’t be bothered with them.

They’re harmless, he told me once. They’re harmless if you don’t look them in the eyes or stay too long in their corridors.