Good Half Gone by Tarryn Fisher

Author:Tarryn Fisher [Fisher, Tarryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2024-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16 Past

People Who Left you were easy to hate—easier to blame. They didn’t care to defend themselves, so you experienced your abandonment in silence. You tended the garden of bitterness in silence. Eventually you started making your own assumptions about why they left. That’s when the garden really got to blooming. My garden was never dreary; on the contrary, my resentment was colorful, my anger bright and binding like a choking vine. There were so many variations of anger that I didn’t know where to look most days.

Cal made sense to me even when the world didn’t. It was easy to understand him. He was helpless. He didn’t choose to be left in a box on someone’s doorstep. Piper chose that for him, and by choosing that, she made it a part of his history. I was raising him having barely been raised myself, and she was where?

In the rotting center of my anger was my mother. She picked the fight by abandoning us first.

The moment Cal was in my arms, I wanted to protect him. I was mad at my sister for not sticking around to do the same. Why hadn’t she come back—or at least given us a reason she left? The note she’d written me had been patiently penned, her neatest handwriting—an order without explanation. Here’s my son, take care of him.

We called Poley and Audrain as soon as we got back to the apartment. It was one of those days where it was easy to track them down. An hour later, they walked in smelling of the outside and of coffee, looking just as awkward as always. We hadn’t seen them in a while—Audrain had grown his hair into a midlife crisis while Poley cut hers short and dyed it jet black.

They handed us each a paper cup of coffee and bent to coo over the baby, who was sleeping in his car seat. Gran was polite, but when she answered their questions, her words were clipped.

“We’ll head out there to talk to Virginia tomorrow. You say she just left the baby on her doorstep in this box?”

“We don’t know who left him, just that he was left.” Gran’s coffee sat untouched beside her. She was perched on the edge of her seat, ready to leap up if the baby made a sound.

“It’s Piper’s handwriting,” I said, showing them the note.

They ordered a DNA test for Cal and took the box and note as evidence.

I didn’t want to give them the box; it was the last thing my sister touched other than her son. I had no use for the police, no patience for the saturated niceness. I didn’t need the DNA tests to confirm who Cal was. I knew who he belonged to when I smelled his head. He wasn’t going to be another kid without a mother. Gran knew the truth, my mother knew the truth, the police knew the truth, but to everyone else, he was mine.

I signed up for a homeschool program so that I could take care of Cal.

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