The Missing Morgan

By: Lauren Taylor

I always felt a part of me was missing; I never knew it was true.

My mom says I'm an only child, but I never believed her. Last Thursday I found out something that changed my life.

"Mom, why did we have to clean out the garage today? There are so many better things I could be doing!" I yelled at my mom. She was always nit-picking and wanting to clean something. Last week, it was, "Let's clean the basement!" Thursday, I guess, she just felt like cleaning the garage.

"Savannah, we don't even have room to park our car in here! Besides, the more help we have cleaning, the faster it gets done," she explained.

I picked up a box and put it outside, and dropped it, landing with a clank. "Oops..." I hoped that wasn't an expensive vase or anything.

"I'm going to take a break. I'll be back out in a minute," my mom told me. She walked inside.

Yeah, she just left me there, hoping I would clean it up all by myself.

"Thanks."

I picked up an old box with scribble I couldn't read on top of it. I pulled up a dusty lawn chair and sat down. As I opened the box, a spider crawled out from it. I jumped back, startled, then squished it with an old boot. I sat back down and continued to open the box.

There was a ton of old pictures, evidently of my great-grandparents or something. Then I saw a smaller box, labeled "Savannah and..." I couldn't read the writing. It looked like my dad's writing, but I couldn't tell for sure.

I opened the box and saw many baby pictures of me in it. I flipped through the pictures, and found one of me and a little boy, who looked just like me, sitting on the back porch of my old house in South Carolina. I suddenly got a weird feeling in my stomach. It was probably a cousin of mine. We looked just alike, and we we're probably three years old, or so when the picture was taken. We had ice cream all over our face, and we had an arm around each other. I never knew I had a boy cousin my age though. I thought I only had one about six years older than me. I decided to take the picture in my house and ask my mom.

***

"Mom, can I ask you a question?" I walked over to the couch where she was sitting, drinking her tea and watching soaps.

"Sure, honey, what is it?" She gently placed her tea on a coaster, and eyed me carefully.

I sat down beside her, and showed her the picture. "Who's this? Is he a cousin I didn't know about or something?"

My mom's face turned pale and she quickly turned off the TV. She looked as if she had seen a flying goat. She then cleared her throat and sat up very straight. "Honey, let me go get your father. I'll be right back." She stood and abruptly walked to her room, opening the door to go inside, then closing it. I could hear them talking quietly, as if a big secret was about to come forth. I wondered what was going on.

Finally, my mom walked out, my dad trailing close behind. They both sat down beside me. Silence. My dad finally broke it.

"Savannah, we knew one day we were going to have to tell you this, and we're going to be truthful."

Uh oh, I thought. My dad only calls me "Savannah" when he's about to give me a serious talk. I wasn't looking forward to what was about to be said.

My mom held up the picture in front of me. "Savannah, this boy is Mark, Mark Morgan. He was kid-napped, so we think, and went missing when he was four years old. No one has seen him since."

"So is he like my cousin or friend or something?"

"Not exactly, Sunny. He's...he's...you're brother. Your twin brother."

I was in full on shock. My mouth dropped about twenty feet below me. A wave of adrenaline hit me like a rush of cold water. I didn't expect this. I had no words. A million questions raced through my mind, and a million reasons why I had felt so lonely when I was a kid. I still had one important question. "Why didn't I remember this?"

"Because, ironically, two nights after, you were playing on the playground and you fell off the jungle gym, and hit your head so hard, you got amnesia. So, we didn't want you to question us about the boy in the pictures and about the room with so much stuff in it next to yours, we just box up all his things and put them away." Tears came slowly to my mom's eyes.

"It's been eleven years since he went missing. He went missing on March 4, 1992," my dad stated. He got up and opened the cabinet in the TV stand. He pulled out a large brown envelope, labeled, "Mark Chandler Morgan - Unsolved Mysteries." My heart dropped. My brother was even on TV. My dad handed the envelope with the tape to me. "You need to watch this; maybe it will bring back some memories."

***

I put the tape in my VCR and pressed play. I sat back on my bean-bag chair and watched the host appear on the screen.

"Hello, and welcome to Unsolved Mysteries. I'm your host, Robert Stack. Tonight, we will look at a case where four year-old son, Mark Chandler Morgan, went missing without a trace."

It showed pictures of my brother, and even some home video clips of us playing in the back yard. It made me so sad to know I could have a twin brother out there right now, alive, breathing, and running about. Even if he was dead, I wish I knew where he was and how he got there. No wonder my whole child hood was depressing. I had no brother to share the fun with. But I was determined to do one thing: I was gonna find my brother, dead or alive, and even if it took my whole life, I was going to find him.