Chapter Twenty-Nine. Ingrid
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
INGRID
When Izzy and I were little, Dad used to pop a Jim Croce cassette tape in and start singing along, loud and out of key, which meant it was time for us to crawl into his lap on the rocking chair.
By the third or fourth song, we’d pretend to fall asleep, so that he’d carry us up the stairs to bed together, one of us in each arm.
Mom followed close behind, always afraid he’d drop us.
They’d tuck us in, and we’d wait a full minute or two before crawling back out to play Barbies.
Dad told me later that they were never fooled, that they could hear our giggles from under the door, that they would stand together and listen, muffling their own childish laughter.
Kids let you see the world new again, he said.
And in the dark, Izzy and I would strip down the dolls, dress them back up, lost in our own little world.
Pageants were just more of that, a way to play together into our teenage years.
Dad is outside now, working in the yard. The drone of the lawn mower buzzes all the way upstairs and over the surface of my skin.
I drag the heavy rolling chair from the office, its wheels thumping and shuddering across the floorboards.
Balancing in the center of the seat, I stand carefully so it doesn’t roll out from under me, then reach for the string dangling from the ceiling.
The hinges creak, and the attic door yawns open.
When I climb up the thin wooden rungs of the ladder, I’m met by a wall of stagnant heat.
Stooped beneath the low ceiling, I navigate through Christmas decorations and the cotton-candy glass of insulation.
It doesn’t take me long to find the cardboard boxes, Dad’s neat labeling and humor still legible on them—PAGEANT STUFF, PAGEANT STUFF MOM WON’T THROW OUT, DEAR GOD MORE PAGEANT STUFF.
I kneel on the splintery, unfinished plywood floor.
A trickle of hot sweat rolls down my forehead and I wipe it away with my forearm, as the storm of questions churns up inside me. I open the first box and begin shuffling through time—ivory sashes, high heels, and tins of photos.
The photos are ones I took. The first time I’d tried developing my own film, Izzy was with me, holding my hand in the dark, as we watched an image appear, seemingly from nowhere and nothing, onto a blank sheet of paper.
Izzy’s fingers between mine, her body leaned in, her breath on my ear, tickling the tendrils of hair at the nape of my neck as she whispered, Do you see it, Iggy? Do you see?
But I don’t even know what I’m looking for, digging down through memories, through the days surrounding Izzy’s disappearance, hoping to find something, to remember anything that matters.
I flip the pictures, one after the other.
Izzy with her arms around her friends in the cafeteria, her long hair pulled back with that blue scarf she always wore.
Izzy at a pasture party, sitting on Ben’s lap, both their smiling faces vivid in the bonfire’s glow.
Kennedy Claire in Mom’s bedroom, trying on her sash and crown.
All those podcasts that cover Izzy’s story focus on the “beauty queen” angle, but the truth is Izzy wasn’t even a contestant in Miss Lone Star the year she went missing.
She had backed out, her schedule already full with track meets and honors classes, and she was stressed about college in the fall, stressed about Ben.
It’s our last chance to do it together, I’d whined.
It’ll make it easier for you to win, she said. With both of us there, I’ll just split the votes. She had a point. It had happened to us before.
But, as Mom’s only daughter in the competition, exactly twenty-five years after she won the very first Miss Lone Star Princess crown, I had the hearts of all the judges.
Then, three days before the pageant, Kennedy Claire and I were practicing the opening number routine in the living room when my high heel gave out, snapping clean beneath me, and I came down hard. A bright spark of pain flared up my leg so fast it stole my breath.
Kennedy Claire shrieked and dropped to her knees beside me. Oh my God, Iggy! Her hands hovered over me, fluttering like she didn’t know where to touch first, before she bolted for the kitchen.
By the time she came back with an ice pack, tears were stinging my eyes. She guided me onto the sofa, propped up my foot, and wrapped my ankle tight, her movements crisp and urgent.
It wasn’t enough, though. There was no way I could do my gymnastics routine.
At first, I begged Izzy to do it in my place.
No one will know it’s you. But she hadn’t tumbled since sophomore year and didn’t have time to learn a whole routine, so we settled on that magic trick instead—Izzy disappearing from one end of the stage and me “magically” reappearing on the other end in an instant.
Inherently less impressive, given everyone knew we were twins.
Then Izzy really did vanish, and none of my silly teenage concerns—pageants and boys and final exams and dorm preferences—mattered anymore.
“Honey?” My dad’s voice comes from the bottom of the ladder and feels like a splash of cool water down my back.
“Up here,” I say. “Don’t climb that ladder, Dad. I’m coming down.” I shove a stack of photos into the back pocket of my jeans and hurriedly put back the sashes and the empty tins. But then I see the black high heel, the one that snapped beneath me. Mom never did throw anything out. Dad was right.
I hear the creak of the bottom rung. “Seriously, you’re going to fall,” I holler out, squinting as I turn the heel so it catches the dim light coming up from the open attic door. It’s broken in one clean line, and the edge is coated in what seems to be a thin layer of dried glue.
Suddenly the attic walls seem to tighten around me, the insulation like glass splinters sticking a fever into my damp skin.
Because the way this shoe broke—it doesn’t look like it happened by accident.