by Jamie Mason
“What can I get you . . . two?”
“I’ll have an iced tea,” said the woman.
“And for you?” The you was the anchor of the waitress’s doubt, and she let the eyebrow inflect it for her.
Roy shook his head.
“Just get something,” the woman said through gritted teeth.
“But . . . I was going to get a scratch ticket. I don’t have enough.”
The woman he’d shot closed her eyes and exhaled slowly through her nose. “Just bring two teas, please. Thank you.”
The waitress stalked away with a semi-scowl and turned back to show it one more time in case Roy had missed it somehow every time he was in here. She disappeared into the back.
The woman across from him rolled her eyes to the ceiling and did the slow breath again.
The worst feeling in the world wasn’t being hated. It was being tolerated. It burned in Roy’s face.
“So are you related to him?” she asked.
“To who?”
She blinked at him.
Roy felt as if he were swimming in quicksand just to think. “Oh! John? Right. Of course, John. I’m sorry. No! I mean, I’m sorry that I said . . . don’t scream. I didn’t mean to say it.”
She was just looking at him. Blank as a wiped chalkboard.
A hot tiredness slid over him. He let his head dip down and watched the dots in the pattern on the Formica tabletop blur together. “You said you would scream if I said I was sorry. And, no, I’m not related to him.”
“Then why are you here? What all do you do for him?”
“I don’t know your name.” He didn’t have a good answer for her question, and that he didn’t know her name was bugging him. So many terrible things tied to this, and she was right here, not at all as John had said. A stranger, but more important than any random person should ever be to another. Back from the dead. After everything, it seemed wrong not to know her name.
“You wouldn’t know my name, would you? It’s not really necessary in your line of work, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
The waitress brought the drinks and banged them down onto the table with no comment. She pulled two straws from her apron pocket and slid them into the middle of the table slowly, deliberately, still signaling some sort of disapproval that Roy couldn’t fathom.
The woman tore the paper from her straw. “Why would you need to know the name of the people you shoot?”
“No! I don’t shoot people!” Roy felt like he was drowning. A thick, crawling desperation of not wanting to be inside himself rose up, filling in every bit of breathing space like a flood of syrup. All his life, sometimes this happened, for a reason or for no reason, this blinding fear. Like he had to hold in a wet scream that was turning him inside out. But he always fled when he felt it coming on, so no one could see. But she had his keys.
She tilted her head and he didn’t know if it was on purpose that she moved so that her hair slipped back over her shoulder, dragging the cover from her scar.
“I wouldn’t. Never.” His throat clicked closed and he coughed.
She leaned in. “You did. You do.”
“No, it was Jonathan.”
“Oh, he made you do it?”
“I mean, he told me to. He told me to be there. But not that. I screwed up. I can’t . . . I shouldn’t have a gun. I didn’t mean to.”
The woman hands gripped hard around her glass. Roy didn’t trust himself to touch his, but he was so thirsty.
“But he paid you. He paid you to do it.”
“No.” Roy shook his head. “Not to do that. Just to be there. I was supposed to make a fuss so that everyone would leave. That’s all.” Roy risked a sip, no straw. His hands weren’t going to be able to deal with unwrapping it. The sweet, cold drink was so good in the middle of something so bad. He blinked fast to clear the tears that were starting. So stupid. He cleared his throat. “He never did.”
She’d gone silent. Each time Roy darted a look up from the tabletop, she was just staring at him with her mouth closed, drawn down a little at the corners.
“He never did pay me, I mean. I didn’t get anything for hurting you. Or those other people. I messed up. If I had done it right, maybe he would have paid me. But . . .”
Silence flowed over from across the table. He didn’t look up again to see it. “It was never going to happen the way he said, though. I know that now. I knew it as soon as I got there and saw everyone. They had guns, too. I think he wanted . . .”
Roy was getting dizzy. The shallow breathing, and the booming pulse, and the dozens of thoughts slashing through his brain at the same time. He planted his hands on the bench seat to steady himself.
“What do you think he wanted?” she finally said.
“I think he meant for me to get hurt. I think that’s what he wanted.”
Roy had never before said it out loud. Who would have ever been there to say it to? Getting it out was a subtraction from his overstuffed skull, a small space cleared in his chest, a vent, a release. It was as if he could breathe. Just a little bit.
The woman shifted in her seat. “For Christ’s sake. Don’t cry. You’re not the one who got shot.”
His head snapped up. She flinched. Roy heard a glassy crack that wasn’t real outside his own mind, he knew. With just a cold little pop, some small piece of handhold broke off, fell away. He wasn’t good at locking a gaze, but so much was there. He couldn’t not look. She was seeing him, hearing him. There was some overlap between them that he couldn’t deserve to crave. She understood.
“My name is Marcelline.”
He swallowed and tried to keep his mouth from twisting into something that could howl. “That’s a very pretty name. I’m Roy.”
“I know.” She swiped at her eyes, then wiped the side of her hands on her lap and blew out another breath. Roy’s heart twisted a spike of pain through his chest and up his neck. His jaw hurt. He looked at her jaw.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never would.”
“I believe you.”
“He told me you died.”
“He probably thinks I did.”
Roy snatched up his glass and lost himself in getting through a deep drink of it without dropping it, spilling it, or choking on it.
He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “Are you here to . . . Were you looking for him?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Sort of. For four years I didn’t know anything about what happened after Owen got me out of there that night. I don’t even know Jonathan’s full name. Then I saw the painting in the video. I had to come and—”
“John doesn’t have it. Those people do.”
“What people?”
“That big guy. The people that night. They stole it from him.”
“Roy, what are you talking about? It’s in his house. It’s right there in the foyer.”
“No, he doesn’t have it.”
“He does.”
Roy didn’t want to be contrary. His grandmother had called him so one time when he was a kid, on the afternoon his mother finally died. It seemed like the worst thing you could be in a bad situation, next to stupid.
But John had told him what happened that night after it was all over. John didn’t have the painting, and it was all Roy’s fault that he didn’t. With his screwup, Roy had killed Marcelline and cost John not only the picture, but all the money he was going to get for it. And, of course, the money he’d planned on giving Roy, the payment for going along with the plan.
Not having the painting was the reason John hated him so much.
“No,” Roy said, keeping it simple. He didn’t mean to argue. He should stop shaking his head, he knew. But he couldn’t help it.
“Roy, he took a quarter of a million dollars and the painting that night.”
He wanted to say no again, but his tongue felt glued to the bottom of his mouth. The back and forth of his head slowed like the last notes of a windup music box.
&nb
sp; Marcelline couldn’t seem to close her mouth. Amazement. Pity. “You’ve never been there? To his house? You haven’t seen the video. You don’t know. All this time. Oh my God.”
They talked for almost two hours. They ate tuna salad sandwiches. The waitress glowered for a bit, but seemed to lose interest with Roy blending into the scene like everyone who had ever sat in this diner and ate a sandwich with someone. The two of them sat across from each other, having a conversation like normal people. It wasn’t a normal conversation, he knew that. But still.
They sat and ate and she talked, then he talked. Like normal people. She nodded. He did, too. She showed him the video, but he had to take her word for it that it was the same painting. You could barely see it. But he believed her. She wouldn’t lie. It was okay.
She laughed when he warned her off the coffee because he figured they swapped out for fresh grounds maybe once every two weeks, and he thought his heart would break from how happy he was that she wasn’t dead. And that she wouldn’t drink bad coffee because he’d warned her.
She went quiet after she’d paid the check, staring into the hot tea that she’d gotten instead.
“What are you going to do?” Roy said.
“I don’t know exactly.” She moved the little folder with the receipt and the tip in it so that it lined up just even with the edge of the table. “If he knows I’m alive, it changes everything. You understand that, right?”
Roy said yes automatically, even though he wasn’t sure he did.
Marcelline clasped her hands and slid her arms onto the table to the elbows, leaning in so that he would tilt toward her, too.
“Roy, if he knows I’m alive, the person it changes everything for is you.”
“Oh.”
“You’re the only person who can say what happened that night, the only one who can back up my story. And you were always the only one who knows who he was before. You’re the only one who can put it all together. Before, it was just his word against yours. And . . .”
“I know. Who would believe me?”
She chewed her bottom lip. “It’s not your fault. He made it this way. He moved everything around the way he wanted it.”
Roy nodded.
Marcelline patted the table with her fingertips and looked up at him from under her study of the tabletop. “I have an idea.”
Roy held his breath.
“You can get in and take the painting—”
“He’ll kill me!”
“He won’t. He won’t know until it’s all over. And then he won’t be able to do anything about it. Meet him tomorrow like you were going to. Stay cool. Act normal. Ask him for twenty bucks and get out of there. Then later, or the next day even, break a window, take the painting. In and out. I’ll pay you.”
“It’ll be on camera! Just like the video you showed me! He’ll know it was me.”
“You’ll be gone before he can do anything about it. Do you think he’ll say anything? He can’t.”
The panic was back in Roy, climbing his throat. But so was the shining want of something that someone was offering. She was selling him a way to not feel so awful. A way to not have to ever see John again. Roy wanted to do what she said. He wanted to make this end with her not hating him, with him not hating himself.
She kept going. “If I do it, if it’s me on the video, he’ll know I’m alive. Then you’re a danger to him, for real. You have nothing. Do you think he’ll ever let you have anything? You have no way of getting out of here, Roy. Where I am, I can’t even help you. But if you get the painting, he’ll never be able to say anything about it. What could he do? You’ll be gone.
“I can get rid of the painting. I know how. I don’t know if I can get my life back. I don’t know if you can get your life back either. But maybe we can have something else. Something good. And we can take it away from him.”
There it was. He could make the worst thing he ever did right. Or righter. Something good.
He said yes. He’d never owned much of a no.
She told him where John’s house was. She showed him the video again so that he’d know just where to find the painting. It was right inside the door. Five steps, max.
Marcelline bought him a tank of gas and gave him $20 that made him sick to take. She said she’d be at the same pump at six o’clock at night and eight o’clock in the morning for the next three days, just like John’s times so it would be easy to remember.
“You can do this,” she said.
Roy nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” She smiled, a small sad twitch at the corners of her mouth that had nothing to do with her being happy, but everything to do with trying to help him not be too sad. Or too scared. He wanted to die.
• • •
John didn’t show up the next morning at the eight o’clock time either. Roy waited until ten. It felt weird. He counted to sixty to cancel out the sick flutter in his middle and to see if he could make his counting match up to a real minute. One twenty. Two minutes. Six hundred. Ten. John had never missed both times of a meetup before. Marcelline was relying on Roy, but he didn’t know what it meant that John hadn’t come after Roy left the quarter on the curb.
Roy avoided the service station and Marcelline, burning up gas just to drive miles out of the way around it. He went back to the McDonald’s at six. Just in case. No John. He didn’t know what to think. Maybe John hadn’t seen the coin. Maybe someone had picked it up. Maybe something had happened to him?
Would that change anything? He owed Marcelline this.
Roy had plenty of gas in the Explorer for a change, but he’d only had a bag of pork rinds and a bottle of tea since the sandwich with her at the diner. His stomach squeezed down into a grumbling knot and stayed that way, twisting and stabbing every now and again to remind him that it was still empty.
The twilight thickened into nightfall, and Roy drove old back roads to a spot he’d found where the crumbling asphalt bled into a sloping grassy verge so close to the riverbank that it flooded when it rained. But it hadn’t rained in a while, so the run down to the water was nothing but bare, bent grass. Roy pulled the truck off the lane and rolled down the windows. The frogs were louder than the old engine’s idling.
John didn’t hate him because of the painting. John hated him to keep him easy, to make him do what John wanted him to do. Marcelline had understood this. So she forgave Roy for shooting her. Did she know that her forgiveness also kept him easy? That it made him do what she wanted him to do?
He was so tired, but he hated sleeping. He couldn’t remember a time when thinking everything would be okay hadn’t turned out to be a trick of the light. Peace was a feeling that seeped away as soon as it ever settled in him, something that blended into the air with every breath he let go of. And just as meaningless.
The thought of breaking a window in John’s house held surprisingly little glee for Roy. Just another ugly thing in an ugly life. He tried to picture delivering the painting to Marcelline, her triumph, her hugging him in happiness and even gratitude. It would pay. He could maybe . . .
Hope hurt in his already-groaning stomach. He wasn’t the only way for her to get the painting. She could do it herself. He was so tired.
He put the truck into neutral and let off the parking brake. His right foot held the whole thing in place. He pumped the brake, rocking the big truck on its exhausted springs. The tree frogs chirruped, call and response. The truck was so full that it would sink like a boulder.
Roy knew that he would be able to stay still as the water rushed into his lap, into the crook of his arms as he held the steering wheel, all the way up to his unscarred jaw.
But he didn’t know what he’d do when it closed over his head. Would he sit still and just let it happen?
He slid his foot off the brake. The truck lurched down the bank a full roll of the tires, slipping backward toward the water, then a little faster into the next rotation.
Roy jammed his foot back down and stomped
the parking brake into place. The truck snapped to an obedient stop, just waiting for its command. Give it gas and go forward, back onto the road and into tomorrow, to do what she’d asked of him. Or give up the brakes, pull up your fool foot and let it go, relent into the slide, and surrender backward. Either way was fine with the truck. It didn’t mind.
He grabbed up the lace pillow that still smelled of flowery perfume only at the edges. He covered his face with it and screamed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
* * *
“Mom, where’s the picture that was hanging in the front hallway?” Carly asked.
Her mother looked up from her computer, distracted, mentally replaying the question that she hadn’t clearly heard when Carly asked it. “Um, John took it down when he nailed up that new thing, but I don’t know where he put it. I think he got rid of it with the rest of the stuff. Why? Did you want to hang it up somewhere? Is there a blank space we need to fix?”
“No. I was just going to take a picture of it to send to Emma. We were talking about it. She showed me a painting in one of the art books, and it looked so much like the one we have. Had. I thought she would think it was neat.”
Her mother smiled and went back to typing. “I should come over one of these days with you and Ada. It’s been so crazy around here, but I do want to meet her in person. I look like Mother of the Year leaving it at just the one hello text. Plus, it would be fun to see how you guys work, to see how she teaches you.”
“You’d like her. She’s awesome. Ada still won’t draw anything, but you can’t tell her she’s not an art expert now.”
“That’s fun. Ada can be an art expert if she likes. Just look at me. I’m great at eating, a total foodie, but barely any kind of cook at all. Are you guys meeting up with her this afternoon?”
Carly stifled a sigh. She knew they couldn’t meet up every day. “She said she can’t today. She’s busy. Maybe tomorrow, though.”
Her mother looked up again. It took nothing these days to see her expression fall into a version of that same look she’d had on her face when she came running into Mrs. Carmichael’s house. After the thing. Her mother was still worried, and every time she got that look, it rattled Carly into a reminder of all there was to worry about in the world.