The Hidden Things

by Jamie Mason

  Once home, he put the painting in the back of the guest-room closet and nailed up a three-panel metal scrollwork in its place.

  “Wow.” Donna waved her hands at the frenzied wreckage of cardboard boxes burst at the staples. “What are you doing? What’s all this?”

  John startled and nearly swallowed the last nail he’d stashed between his lips while he worked.

  “I thought a change would be good. I got a different mirror, too, see? After I get this up, I’m going to put that new bench together.” He pointed to the long box leaning against the wall. “Goodwill is scheduled to swing by tomorrow to pick up all the old stuff. This place feels all bad mojo now. Thought I’d try to make it feel new. None of us needs to be reminded what happened every time we walk through the door.”

  Donna came to stand beside him. “It’s really nice. I like it. I’ve always said you have good taste.”

  John dipped his head, surprised that the satiny stroke of the small compliment even registered in the moment.

  Donna tapped her lip, thinking and turning a circle in the foyer. “But maybe the other picture would look really good over the fireplace. What do you think?”

  John’s heart kicked his sternum. “I’m just going to get rid of all of it. The whole point is that Carly has to live here after all of this. I don’t want her to see the same things she saw when . . . I want to do this for her, okay? We can paint in here, too, if you want.”

  Donna touched him for the first time in more than a day and a half. “Okay. That’s very sweet.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Emma O’Connor hadn’t had braces on her teeth for more than twenty-one years, but she still ran her tongue over her front teeth whenever she was lost in distraction. In some remote part of her mind, she’d never quite gotten over the feeling of the difference once the brackets and wires came off. Even as a grown woman, some small part of her remained right there at that transition of her teenage self—transformed from wrong to right, at least in the teeth.

  The habit of feeling for it, for reconfirming herself to herself, became a time slip, a subconscious touching base when she fell absorbed in a task.

  The scar running up the right side of her neck into the sunken place that should have been the squared turn of her jaw was a souvenir from a more recent metamorphosis, this time from right to wrong. And also to wronged.

  The scar had finally faded to a quieter shade of pink on the white field of her skin, but it had always been too high to cover with a scarf, so she’d grown out her hair to hide it, as much as it would ever stay hidden.

  The tall, slick, sharp-jawed urban pixie, in good suits and a constant hurry, wouldn’t recognize the shaggy-haired woman in T-shirts and worn-through jeans that she’d become.

  Dragging her fingers along the knotted track of damage and repair on her neck was now part of the ritual fidgeting, along with the habit of sweeping her straight white teeth with her tongue, unconsciously revisiting the reminders of her milestones. She did these things when she was lost in thought—daydreaming, puttering, reading, and especially when she was at the computer, as she was now, clicking through the social media feeds.

  Her mother’s page was set to private, so Emma only caught electronic glimpses of her whenever she commented on someone else’s post. Her brother’s son had become quite a good photographer as his high school years spooled out, so mostly there were just pictures by the dozens, imported from his Instagram feed. But her sister was a Facebook champion.

  Regular days and holidays, big events and little nothings, Bethany chronicled it all. She was so thorough in her updates that some days Emma nearly forgot that they hadn’t spoken to each other in four years. But time had definitely passed. There was a new baby in the family, and also a niece by marriage she’d never met. A favorite cousin had passed away after an illness he hadn’t yet been stricken with when Emma last saw him. There were new jobs and house moves and achievements and sometimes pictures of what someone had for lunch. Everyone got cartoon cakes in their birthday messages.

  But each year on Emma’s birthday, her sister stayed off-line. No one ever mentioned Emma in the lively discussion threads that Bethany hosted. Emma was the ghost at the never-ending cyber-reunion, watching unnoticed, ungreeted. Always and never there.

  Her own social media accounts were not in her real name. They weren’t in the name Emma O’Connor either. The profile picture wasn’t a photo of her. She’d learned to use proxy servers to keep even more distance. She watched her family from more than a thousand miles away, with layers of electronic anonymity protecting everyone from her, and her from maybe no one. She could never be sure.

  When her sister posted something that generated a conversation—with friends and relatives all having their say in back-and-forths that scrolled down the screen—it felt like a gift. Emma checked the feeds throughout the day, pinging home all the time, though they never knew it, but she saved the longer posts and conversations like a sweet treat, a dessert for after the eating-her-veggies part of the day.

  She had the internet and her sketch pads to fill her evenings. And wine. She didn’t bother with the television. It was a showcase of all she couldn’t have in the world, and her jaw hurt if she got clenchy with rage. Beyond that, all the good TV was expensive. The budget bridged the bills, but not with a lot of slack.

  Emma had come into town with a little cash for getting settled. She’d had a suitcase full of clothes—more than half with the tags still attached, a laptop, a box of books, and an art case. Her new life fit into the trunk of an uninspiring but reliable used car. The Toyota’s lines seemed modeled on a squashed loaf of sandwich bread, and it was bread-crust brown, too. She used to care about the finer things, including good, not-brown, cars. This one’s engine gave a pouty yowl when she asked too much of it, but it got her around. And most importantly, if things ever went wrong, it would get her out again with the go-bag she’d been told to keep on board at all times. She never let the gas tank run below half-full.

  Her cover was that she was an artist escaping an abusive marriage. She hated that story so much she’d surrendered her outgoing nature to keep from telling it. She would only ever break it out to get by in the unavoidable social crossings that required a little history to get through. And she tried to tell it only to men. Women might want to console her or to share their own angers and terrors, and Emma would be left lying way more than she was good at.

  So she talked to men when she talked at all. She’d say the word abuse and their eyes would drift to the scars on her face and neck. Discomfort would close their mouths. And they wouldn’t open them again until the topic had changed. So she would obligingly let them off the hook and talk about something else to get what she needed in order to return to her sketch pads, internet, and wine.

  When she’d needed a job, the Craigslist search led her to Eddie Delahunt, who, like every other man, squirmed under the weight of her tale and lowered his eyes from the implied nightmare of the right side of her face. But she was pleasant and still exuded her old competence, and he hired her on the spot to care for his eighty-six-year-old mother, June.

  The pay was a small weekly stipend and a garage apartment with a bed, a desk, four cane-backed chairs around a glass dinette set from the eighties, and an internet connection. Bare bones. Anonymous, but friendly. The stuff that fresh starts and soul starvations were made of.

  Caring for June had slowed Emma’s days to the speed of a body that had seen nearly ninety years. There was so much to notice at that pace. The bottom line—that there was only this one life and what you chose to drag through it—worked at Emma’s conscience. Haunting her family electronically reminded her of what she used to be not all that long ago.

  Her sister’s latest Facebook conversation beckoned. With June full of her bird’s portion of dinner and her last vice, a nightly gin and tonic that was practically homeopathic for its mere whiff of Bombay Sapphire, Emma tucked her into bed and raised the safe
ty rail. The evening’s pills went down with a little Ovaltine, and June’s dentures went into the soak. Emma brushed the old woman’s hair and felt herself relax in tandem with her. She kissed June’s cool forehead, furrowed as it tended to get in the later hours, as the confusion rose with the moon. Emma put on Rosemary Clooney’s greatest hits and set it to auto-repeat.

  She’d come back later to check on June before she went to bed herself. Eddie had already called in for his nightly debrief of his mother’s day. His conscience jousted with his work schedule, and it soothed him to know how she was doing without having to do it all himself.

  Emma poured a glass of Malbec and clicked into her sister’s feed. Bethany had posted a video that had already kicked off a roll of commentary. If Emma was lucky, she might even catch a post snapping into the chain while she was watching. It always startled her. A little thrill to be psychically caught by the only people she’d want to be caught by. Could they feel her there, watching as they typed?

  She previewed the stacked responses first. Hi, Mom, she thought, as she always did when their mother showed up on the screen.

  Emma took a big swallow of wine to put a different kind of lump in her throat.

  Several people she knew (because she couldn’t bring herself to admit it was had known, unfixably past tense) had commented—Wow! Grrl power! That was awesome! That poor baby.

  She started the video, primed with interest, fully ready to be with them in spirit and as impressed as everyone else, trying to be content to click on what they had clicked and watch what they had seen. With them, but not.

  The video had a nature-show feel to it. The built-in dread of the camera’s vantage point stopped Emma’s wineglass halfway to her mouth—a young girl in the role of the antelope, with a grim young lion-guy prowling after her. Emma watched him close in and corner the girl at her front door. The next camera shift brought up the interior of the house.

  Even if the advancing progress bar at the bottom of the frame hadn’t shown that the adventure was almost over, the natural rhythm of narrative did. The fight, life-or-death, would happen inside the house. One way or the other, it was nearly The End.

  But all Emma knew in the moment of the scene change was the burning spur of a beginning. Not a starting gun, but a cannon, a bomb blast. Heat swept up her body as she stared at the screen in disbelief. She moved her glass toward the desk, but the base hit the edge of the wood instead of landing home. Emma barely flinched as it crashed into shards on the floor.

  The foyer of the house on the computer screen was bog-standard suburban. A six-panel door. A plain glass light fixture up above, full of flame-shaped bulbs. Big beige tiles set in a diamond pattern on the floor. A bench along the left wall faced off with a hall table against the right.

  The desperate struggle played out between the human animals in the middle of the image, but Emma couldn’t pull her eyes away from the right side of the screen. The historian, the expert hiding within the scarred, quiet caregiver, stirred.

  Above the table, with just a corner showing at the edge of the field of capture, was a painting.

  This was no print. The light didn’t slide off it as it would against any slick, glossy paper. This surface drew in light as only oil paints could. Its texture simmered the plain ambient sunlight in the colors: russet ocher for the mill and the waterwheel, strokes of slate and white that called to mind the silver ridges on peaks of river water flowing over stones. Even in this rough resolution, she could make out a fine web of craquelure in the ancient varnish that spoke to its age. Centuries.

  Decor stores sold aged-looking replicas of all sorts of great masterworks. But not this one.

  Emma could envision the rest of the painting without trying—a smallish, fairly tame terra-cotta and green landscape, the tree trunks, the bridge, the terraced land stepping off into the background. The mountain plateau. The pair of travelers in the foreground seemed brushed in as nearly an afterthought, as if they were put in self-consciously when the painter remembered mankind. The greens of the foliage were interesting, the finest element of this work in her opinion, the painted light on them converged in the center of the picture, well rendered in carefully layered shades of color under a storm-surly sky.

  The odd ivory obelisk at center left would be just past what this video’s angle showed. She wanted to nudge the screen, to drag the cursor as if she could bring the painting down to show her what she knew was there, to prove that she was right.

  The value of story could make a treasure out of anything. In the art world, a good story, a heavy history, could take a mundane landscape and make it priceless, make it something worth killing over.

  The painting, Landscape with Obelisk by Govaert Flinck, long mistaken for a minor work by the master Rembrandt van Rijn, was a case that proved the point.

  Emma doubled over in her chair, her arms gripped around her middle, holding in a sob. The shock of seeing the Flinck without warning had wrung the heat out of her. She was freezing. But her scar burned.

  It had been a fantasy to know what had happened to it. And what had happened to Jonathan. She’d dreamed of using that knowledge to get her life back. The dream had been her companion, her coach, the air in her lungs.

  After Jonathan, she’d spent nearly a year disappearing and healing, learning to talk and eat naturally around a jaw that didn’t work quite right. The task after that was surrendering to the truth—that the danger in getting caught trying to find the painting and force a homecoming was too great. For her and for her family. It was too dangerous for her even to research. So she hadn’t.

  Anyone looking for the painting (and people had been looking for it for nearly thirty years) would be dragging the electronic net for anyone else who might be searching for it. They would all be her enemies. Jail or worse, depending on who found her first.

  She’d tried letting it all go as the months wound out, click by click on the computer, her friends and loved ones and the hope of ever righting this wrong fading from the forefront of her thoughts. After four years, the heat of wanting it was all but lost at the vanishing point. She’d acclimated to a shortened focus, to days made of helping June through fits of oddly happy, if uncooperative, dementia. Emma’s nights were spent drawing and drinking and cyberstalking her people.

  And now a reset. Revenge was her heartbeat again. The painting was right there on that flat, cold screen, but also very much on a nail on a wall in a house somewhere.

  Emma was unsurprised by the jolt coursing through her, and at the wild urge to grab a few things to add to her duffel in the trunk of her car. She wasn’t even shocked by the sudden satisfied rage, the mental image flaring back into her mind’s eye after all this time, the ugly but good daydream: Jonathan bleeding out and her just letting him.

  But what did knock her sideways and press a howl out through her gritted teeth was the fear of that hope, of failing and of having to let it all go again, and the sudden wish that she’d never seen the video at all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  Waiting suited Roy. He kind of liked it. Other people got upset over their minutes ticking off into the air, or draining away into the floor under their feet, or soaked up into the pavement under their slow-rolling wheels. The chance to get ahead of their to-do lists dried up, and it meant a lot more to most people than it did to Roy. He never minded the blameless moments that trickled out in between the things he should be doing. He found them peaceful.

  Waiting in traffic wasn’t too bad. Or on line for a lottery ticket, or in this case just passing an hour in his truck with his eye on the corner where John would be turning into sight.

  He didn’t ever count time spent waiting. It was the easiest time of all. In delays that couldn’t be blamed on him, he could disappear without trying. And hiding from the world was practically his part-time job. It was better not to be seen at all than to be seen screwing up. It was self-preservation.

  He craned to look farther down the road, between the
buildings, watching for the flash of John’s red car.

  The envy of how easy life seemed for other people was an injury that Roy couldn’t really feel anymore. It was an old pain, part of the background hum of being him. But just like being able to put your hand on your knee with your eyes closed, no fumbling, he knew where to find that feeling. It was the YOU ARE HERE marker that flagged his place in the food chain.

  No matter what it was, he was well aware he was about to get it wrong. In some small way, or in a big way, someone would be annoyed with Roy. Someone would be disgusted. Someone would be furious or done with him altogether. Or worse, someone would have something to say: a curse, a recap, a lecture, or a lengthy, earnest sermon of advice.

  And he, being on the wrong side of whatever, would have to withstand it and agree and say he would do better next time. He’d have to nod a lot and try to keep from shrugging or looking sad. They hated that. It was blood in the water for some people. And Roy couldn’t get angry when it was only true. So he didn’t.

  Roy couldn’t tell if other people worried about the same things he did. He didn’t know if anyone else always had an ear cocked for bad luck slinking up behind them, ready to climb their pant leg and ride them like a horse into the next mistake.

  Waiting was a chance to rest.

  Roy stretched against the seat and stole a glance away from the road to dig out the half-empty bag of barbecue pork rinds crushed against the center console by all of the God-knows-what that was crammed into every inch of space on the passenger side.

  He settled back into his seat and checked the road again for John’s car, watching the street for every second of forewarning he could get. He only needed a little money to make it through to payday. Just twenty bucks. Thirty at most. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t asked for dozens of times. But it didn’t get easier. John hated it. So did Roy.