Every Missing Piece

by Melanie Conklin

  Billy nods slowly, his mouth a grim line.

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  “No.” He huffs like I called him a baby. “I’m not scared of him.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Look, there’s scary, and there’s crud-your-pants scary. This is crud-your-pants scary.” Something clicks. “We should get Stan.”

  Billy clenches his fists. “I’ll show him who’s scary.” He turns away from the window like he’s planning to charge outside all by himself.

  I grab at his arm. “Hold on! Just wait a second!” Then it comes to me—what Cress said before. “We need a picture. Evidence.”

  Billy hesitates, and I hurry to my bedside table, feeling around in the dark for my phone.

  “We should’ve put the traps by the driveway,” he says.

  “We can later.”

  “I’m sick of this,” he says. “I’m sick of always hiding.”

  Finally, my fingers hit hard plastic. I grab my phone and run to the window, but my camera won’t focus on the shadows outside. “Come on,” I say, trying another angle.

  Billy comes back to the window and leans over my shoulder.

  The clouds shift overhead, revealing the glow of a half-full moon. As moonlight trickles through the leaves, the woods brighten, transforming into a tangle of dark lines against a blue-white background. Somewhere in the distance, a car backfires.

  Billy frowns. “He’s gone.”

  I hold my phone to the window, taking pictures of the crooked tree, but he’s right.

  The person-shaped lump is gone, which makes me wonder if he was ever really there in the first place. My stomach twists as I imagine a man out there, watching us.

  I look at Billy. “How did you know he was here?”

  “You ever get that feeling like something’s about to go wrong?”

  Goose bumps rise on my arm. I nod.

  Billy’s eyes get a faraway look. “I always knew when my dad was gonna lose it. I got this feeling in my stomach when it was gonna get real bad. I couldn’t sleep tonight, and my mom was snoring and stuff, so I came up here to see the woods better. And there he was.”

  He sounds a little nuts, but not any nuttier than me hiding from tornadoes or texting my dead father. In fact, we sound a lot alike.

  He rubs his eyes, and I think about how awful he must feel.

  “I’ll get my sleeping bag,” I say. “You can sleep up here tonight.”

  That seems to break the spell, because he finally looks away from the window and nods.

  39

  THE SYRUP TO MY WAFFLE

  In the morning, Billy’s sleeping bag is empty. I walk downstairs, stretching my stiff arms with a groan, but when I get to the kitchen, it takes me a minute to process what I’m seeing.

  There are booby traps everywhere.

  And I mean everywhere.

  Loops of twine connect the kitchen chairs to the doorway, where spike balls hang from the ceiling, ready to deploy. More twine stretches across the wide entrance to the den. Billy is passed out on the couch, his arms flung over his head. His face is peaceful.

  Shailene’s up, though. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. I wonder if Billy told her about the person-shaped lump from last night, or if it’s up to me to say something. She needs to know, but I’d rather it came from him.

  Stan ducks under a spike ball to hand her a cup of coffee. “Good morning,” he says to me, as if it’s perfectly normal that our house looks like it’s been attacked by angry elves.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Shailene says. “That boy loves booby traps more than balloons love air.” She gives a weak laugh, but her eyes are rimmed in red.

  I poke my head through a gap in the twine. “It’s kind of like a game, right?”

  She smiles a little.

  “Have a seat,” Stan says. “I’ll make you a waffle.” He has the big waffle press out on the counter. Another Saturday tradition from me and Mom. Sometimes we mix cheese and sausage into the batter to make stuffed waffles, but Stan is a purist. He makes the batter exactly by the recipe, including sifting the flour even though Mom says sifting flour is nonsense. I watch him measure out a ladle of batter and pour it evenly over the waffle grid.

  The clock reads 7:22. Mom must not be home from work yet.

  I should tell them what happened, but I don’t know how to start. None of the pictures on my phone show anything. There’s no proof of what we saw. Cress would tell me to wait until I had evidence, but the last thing I want is Mr. Holcomb coming back here again.

  A few minutes later, Stan ducks under the spike balls and drops a fresh golden waffle on my plate, along with a bottle of Grade B maple syrup. Dad used to say that Grade A syrup wasn’t “the real stuff” because it’s too thin and sweet. Grade B syrup is from later in the season, so it’s darker and grittier, with real maple flavor.

  Shailene watches me drizzle syrup over my waffle.

  Then she watches me cut it into neat squares.

  “You want some?” I ask, but she shakes her head.

  The garage door opens and shuts, and Mom walks up to the kitchen doorway in her mint-green nurse’s scrubs with Frankie on her heels and a church-shaped box of Munchkins in her hand. “Oh,” she says as she takes in the traps. “Is everyone okay?”

  “Getting there,” Stan says. He dodges the spike balls and gives Mom a quick kiss, then whispers something in her ear. She looks from us to Billy, asleep on the couch.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Shailene repeats.

  Stan goes back to the waffle maker while Mom steps carefully over the twine and puts her bag down, then slides her feet out of her shoes to wiggle some life into her sock-footed toes. She sets the Munchkins on the table and Frankie puts her paw on my knee, begging for food as Mom sinks into the chair next to me. Her warm hand squeezes my shoulder. Her green eyes settle on mine. Then her gaze shifts to Shailene, who’s waiting, her shoulders rounded.

  “How are you holding up?” Mom says.

  Shailene sighs. “He’s never been this bad before. I know it’s not right, him acting like this, building booby traps all over creation.” She wipes at her face. “We should go.”

  “Will running really help?” Mom says.

  “I won’t let him terrorize us like this,” Shailene says, her eyes going hard.

  Frankie gives a soft whine and I slip her a dry square of waffle.

  Shailene glances at Billy. “I love him, you know. He’s everything to me. He’s the syrup to my waffle.” Her voice isn’t full of anger this time, just a whole lot of love and worry. If I tell her what we saw, it’ll make her feel worse, but she deserves to know the truth.

  Usually, this is where I freak out. This time, words bubble up inside of me.

  “I know why he did this,” I say. They look at me. I take a deep breath and remind myself that what I saw was real. “We saw someone in the woods last night.”

  Concern clouds Mom’s eyes. “What do you mean, Mads?”

  This is it. The moment of truth, when I have to tell her the one thing she doesn’t want to hear. I have to cry wolf. “I think it was Billy’s dad.”

  “Where?” Stan says. “What exactly did you see?”

  They listen closely as I talk, and when I finish, it’s quiet for a long moment. The clock ticks on the wall. While I was talking, Shailene’s face was angry, but now she’s scary calm.

  “Enough,” she says to no one in particular. She looks at me. “If I report this, will you make a statement to the police about what you saw?”

  I look at Mom, who nods.

  “Yes,” I say. “I will.”

  40

  ELSEWHERE

  An officer comes to the house and Billy and I tell him what we saw. When we finish, Stan says it’s time for a field trip, and I have never been happier for a Stan Saturday.

  This time, we go downtown to one of my favorite places in Greensboro, a museum called Elsewhere. It started as a thrift shop, but now there
are artists who work upstairs and open their studios for tours sometimes. There are three floors of weird stuff, including a texture library, sculptures made of baby dolls, rolls of vintage fabric, toy phones, egg cartons, suitcases, and anything else you can imagine. Dad brought me here after I hot-glued his screwdrivers into a drying rack for crab-apple slices (Frankie’s favorite).

  Now I’m bringing Stan here.

  “Wow,” he says as we walk through the front door and come face-to-face with the endless pile of stuff. The bustle of downtown Greensboro cuts off as the door shuts behind us.

  Stan’s eyes are wide behind his glasses, but Billy’s got his arms crossed. “This stuff’s all busted,” he says, toeing a kiddie wagon that’s missing its wheels.

  “Some of it’s pretty cool, though.” I grab an old metal pulley off the table next to him. “It’s not for sale, but you can build whatever you want while we’re here.”

  Billy doesn’t say anything, but his eyes linger on the pulley.

  We pay for admission, and Billy wanders off while Stan and I dig through the bins at the front of the store. The objects are grouped by kind and color. Dad loved that this store found a new use for everything and that nothing ever went to waste. He said the idea that something disappears when we throw it away is wrong. Nothing vanishes, no matter how much we’d like to think so. Like he said, everything goes somewhere.

  “What do we do?” Stan asks in an almost-whisper.

  “You can play with stuff. Or look around. Or create something. It’s up to you.”

  He nods, but his brow furrows as he follows me around the tables.

  The suitcases on the top shelves are my favorite. Each one has a paper tag hanging from a thin white string. I like to imagine that they’re full of all the weird stuff from people’s lives. If I could only keep a suitcase worth of things, I’d take Dad’s picture, and Croc, and Mom’s rolling pin, but also the plans I found in the attic, and my photo albums, and the little box of things I’ve collected from my trips with Stan. I didn’t intend to do it. The ticket stubs and pamphlets had piled up, and last week, I put them in a shoe box. Now Stan is part of my collection, too.

  “We should do it,” I say to Stan, and his brows rise.

  “Do what?”

  “The house plans from Dad. We should build the room for the baby. If that’s okay.”

  Stan smiles. “Of course it’s okay. Tell you what, how about we talk to John about it? Maybe his company can do the work.”

  “Can it be a surprise for Mom?”

  “We can do our best.” Stan beams like we’re accomplices, and a warm glow gathers in my belly, like I’ve had a big mug of hot chocolate. On my own, there isn’t much I can do to surprise Mom. But I’m not on my own anymore. And soon there will be four of us.

  Billy appears from around the corner. “You have to see what’s upstairs.”

  Stan hangs back, letting us run up on our own.

  At the top of the stairs is a giant mobile—a sculpture made of all kinds of stuff, like a ladle tied to a garden rake that’s hanging from a pair of pantyhose, which is also connected to an old bike tire. Billy tips the end of the ladle, and the whole thing moves, dipping and rotating.

  “That’s so cool,” I say, and he nods.

  “Are you excited about your new place?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you like your room?”

  “It’s kind of cool,” he says with a tiny smile. “There’s a closet with a secret passage.”

  “No way.”

  He grins, and the room gets quiet. It’s just us and the mobile, slowly twisting through the air. It’s weird to think Billy and Shailene will be moving out soon, now that I’ve gotten used to them being there.

  On our way out, I see a pile of action figures, and mixed among the soldiers and cowboys is an astronaut. He’s a perfect fit for the Friendship 7, with his big white back-pack and his shiny metal visor. I wonder if the museum would make an exception to their rules in the name of saving a “friendship.” I take a picture of the astronaut and text it to Cress.

  41

  THE LAST DAY

  There are days that feel like endings, like the last day of summer vacation or the last day of school. On days like those, something is over but something new is about to begin. It’s sad but good, in a way. That’s how it feels in our house on Sunday.

  We all know that on Monday morning, Billy and his mom are leaving.

  It’s also the last full day I have to work on my Living Museum project. Our presentations are on Wednesday. My costume’s ready, but I still need to finish Miss Rivera’s packet. Most of the questions are basic—your person’s name, where they were born, what they accomplished—but there is one question that I’m stuck on:

  If this person could give you one piece of advice, what would it be?

  I can remember a lot of things Dad used to say, but I don’t know what he’d say to me.

  Standing in my room, wearing clothes that look like Dad’s, with his plans and surveyor stand in front of me, I don’t know which step to take next. It feels like Dad is the most gone he’s ever been. Like every trace of him has floated away, out the window and into the woods.

  My chest is tight as I text him. “Are you there, Dad?”

  I spend way too long staring at my phone, waiting for a reply that will never come.

  Cooking sounds travel up through the floorboards. Mom and Shailene have decided that a special Sunday dinner is in order for Billy and his mom’s last night here, which is another one of those weird ending-and-beginning moments. I think of the day that everyone we knew came to our house after Dad died. No one wore black because he wouldn’t have wanted it that way. I remember how Mom said we would have a party to say good-bye, and how sometimes it felt like a party, but other times it felt the way I do now, so heavy I can’t lift my foot to take a single step.

  There’s a knock at my door.

  I expect Billy to pop in—he’s out in the garage with Frankie—but it’s Mom who appears. Her mouth opens when she sees me, standing there looking like a sad imitation of Dad.

  I start to cry, and she’s at my side, her arms around me.

  She holds me while I make all those awful noises that go along with breaking your heart.

  “Oh, my girl,” she says, pressing me to her. “Look at you.” Her fingers trail Dad’s plaid shirt, which I’ve rolled up to fit my arms. Her eyes get shiny. I know how this must look.

  “It’s for the Living Museum at school,” I say. “Everyone dresses up as someone important from history. I’m going as Dad.” I have everything on that I’m taking to school. Everything but the mustache, which I’m planning to draw on with Mom’s eyeliner pencil.

  “Oh,” Mom says. Her eyes travel to the surveyor’s stand. “Oh.”

  “I need to know what advice he would give me. For my project,” I say, trying not to hiccup. “I found everything else, but I don’t know what he would say.”

  Mom nods slowly, then leads us to my bed, where we sit with Croc in my lap. His purple plush has worn through in places, revealing the webbing underneath.

  “I wish I’d known what you were working on,” Mom says. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone, honey. I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted with Shailene and the baby—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not,” she says, “but I’m here now. What is it you need to know?”

  I show her the packet, and she reads the question:

  If this person could give you one piece of advice, what would it be?

  “Well,” she says. “I think your dad would say it’s not your job to save everyone else. Sometimes you have to let other people take care of you, too.”

  “But he died because of me.”

  “No, honey,” Mom says. She takes my hands in hers. “What happened to your father was an accident. It was a terrible, horrible accident that no one could have seen coming, but it’s not your fault. He made a
choice, Maddy. He chose you.”

  I hear what she’s saying, but I still feel guilty.

  “If I could change it, I would,” she says softly. “I would give anything to bring him back.” She takes a breath and looks me in the eyes. “I love your father so much, bug. I miss him, too. I’ll always miss him. Just because someone’s gone doesn’t mean you stop loving them, even if you start loving someone else. There’s room in your heart to love so many people. I think Dad would want us to be a family again. He’d want that for us.”

  She smiles, and I know she’s right. Maybe I don’t have to choose between Dad and Stan. Maybe I can keep them both. A weight lifts off my heart.

  “I think it’s wonderful that you’re going to share your father’s story with your friends,” Mom says. “He will never be forgotten. Not for one moment. Not ever.”

  The pressure in my chest fades. It’s not going away forever, but for now I can breathe.

  “Do you want to do the safety checks?” Mom asks in her gentlest voice.

  I start to say yes, but then I realize that what I want more than a familiar routine is to show Mom everything I’ve gathered about Dad. To share it with her and to hear her stories about him, which say so much more than any fact can ever tell.

  “Can you tell me about the night you met at the fair?” I ask.

  “Of course,” she says. “It was one of the best nights of my life.”

  42

  GOOD-BYE

  With Billy and Shailene there, the kitchen is full, but we’ve learned how to work together. Even Frankie knows that Billy is her best bet for treats now. She never strays far from his side, even when I drop an accidental potato peel on the floor. By the evening, there’s enough food for an army, and it smells like a holiday has arrived.

  Only this is no holiday—it’s good-bye.

  When everything’s ready, we tear into the food: quiche lorraine, cucumber salad, roasted pork shoulder, mashed potatoes, and spoon bread. There are pies for dessert, too, but they’re cooling in the kitchen. Billy eats everything, but he’s back to being quiet.