The Hidden Things

by Jamie Mason

  Roy’s truck came into view at the bend, slanted across Jonathan’s driveway. He’d left his door hanging open, inches from having knocked a ding into the rear quarter panel of Donna’s car.

  Jonathan startled at the sight of it. The realization settled down over the pounding in his chest a second later. Of course she hadn’t beaten him home. Not only had he left Donna and Carly sitting at a table at Don Julio’s to wonder where he’d gone, he’d left them there with no way to leave.

  That was going to require some creative explaining to smooth over, unless the scene at the table under the sombreros really was the last time he would ever see them. He hoped not. Then he hoped the other way. Then he opted for the middle sort of hope—that he would just get through this. The rest would work itself out. It always did.

  The driveway had no space for him to leave his car neatly parked. He didn’t like the optics of two crooked cars in front of his house. It could draw attention. The fewer eyes on this mess, the better. He might be able to keep it to just his own two eyes, if he was careful. And if he was lucky.

  Jonathan wasn’t sure how he would answer if anyone asked him if he considered himself lucky.

  So he pulled alongside his mailbox on the street and cut the engine. His phone buzzed in the passenger seat. Exterior 1 had alerted his own arrival. He opened the app and shut down the whole system. The cameras wouldn’t take any more pictures or send any more messages.

  With the exception of the angle of Roy’s truck and its dangling door, nothing looked amiss unless anyone peered into the shade of the portico.

  The stoop, under its peaked roof, was flanked by a twin set of bushy evergreen shrubs. Their height and their glossy dark leaves kept it dim enough to grow moss where the concrete met the damp earth. It was getting on toward dark. The deepening twilight siphoned off more detail from the front of the house by the minute. But because he knew more or less what to look for, Jonathan spied the flaw straightaway. The pane of the left sidelight panel was raggedly darker than the one to the right of the door.

  The east-side camera had shown Roy bending down right where the runoff slope next to the house was lined with river rocks. In his second appearance at the front-door camera, Roy had been back from the side of the house with a gray-brown something in his hand about the smashing size of a softball.

  Jonathan got out of his car and walked to the mailbox. He opened it, then closed it back again, ignoring the sizable stack of envelopes and advertising flyers inside. What he’d really wanted was an excuse to look up and down the street. He’d gotten that, which was good. Better yet, there’d been no one to see.

  No lights seemed to be on in the house, but it would have been much brighter almost an hour earlier when Roy had broken the window and let himself in. The motion lights, both outside and inside, didn’t activate until dark. But John had shut down all the automation with the cameras. Dark was better right now.

  He walked down the driveway, threading between Roy’s truck and Donna’s car. The dome light was still on inside the truck, giving him hope for the battery and for Roy’s ability to get right back on the road as soon as possible, with his tail between his legs or ripped right off if it came to that.

  Jonathan sized up the piles of junk in the truck’s front seats. The jumble was incomprehensible, but the cup holders and center console were tightly packed to overflowing with three open energy drink cans and a handful of mini liquor bottles, their caps scattered over the seat and in the footwell. He pushed the door closed and bumped it latched with his hip to keep it quiet. The light went out.

  Jonathan took his keys from his pocket as he strode up the front walk in a pantomime of a normal evening.

  The fury in him simmered. He felt feverish. He hated to fight his own body for control. As if he really needed another enemy right now. But it would be odd if the jangling tension in his belly weren’t there. It made perfect, seething sense.

  But the dread that he felt, the deep unease at taking the two concrete steps to his own front door, held some unwelcome measure of surprise. He didn’t want to see Roy. He didn’t want to know what it looked like, whatever had transformed in him to bring him around to such a reckless thing.

  Jonathan wasn’t afraid of Roy. Not exactly. But a stretch of dark possibility lay ahead—what would he have to do if Roy tried to be scary? He was a little bit afraid of that.

  Jonathan wasn’t all bark and no bite. He’d bite if he had to, but he didn’t even like the metaphor. He wasn’t an animal. This wasn’t a matter of teeth and claws. He was a man. Nothing as simple as survival was on the line. If he were merely worried about staying alive, he’d get back in the car and drive away.

  This was about the kind of life he wanted and the irretrievable time he’d invested in getting near to having it.

  The front door was closed, but unlocked.

  Jonathan turned the doorknob. The hard stop at the end of its rotation marked the line to cross. Push, and he’d be inside with Roy. Whatever had changed between the two of them, it was likely to change a hell of a lot more before Jonathan crossed this threshold again going the other way.

  Or he could open his hand. Let the knob roll back. Let the door stay closed. He could still just leave.

  No, he couldn’t.

  Jonathan pushed open the door. The coat closet was shut. He didn’t turn on the foyer lights. The brightness would leap out of the broken window into the neighborhood. It would be a beacon to helpful assholes everywhere as they walked their dogs or strutted back the way they’d come in their crazy green shorts and glowing headbands.

  Broken glass from the busted side window crunched under his shoes in the dim entryway.

  “Roy, it’s me. You want to come out and talk about this?”

  The question rang into silence. No answer came back.

  Jonathan stepped farther into the foyer. The gloom was heavier every few feet into the house. His ears strained to reel back some clue as to where Roy was in the darkness. All they caught was the ghostly ring of silence.

  He leaned into the hall bathroom and flicked the switch inside the door. The foyer dawned into slightly better focus in the soft new light.

  Some of the broken glass had dark edges. There wasn’t enough light to call it red for sure. But it was red. He knew it. Drops—round, raised buttons of black that hinted at maroon—dotted the beige tiles.

  Roy had set the rock he’d used to break the window on the very end of the armrest on the hall bench. Like the quarters on the curb. Centered. A precise call for help. It swept goose bumps over Jonathan’s arms.

  The scrollwork decoration he’d hung to replace the Flinck had been hurled to the floor and lay in the rubble of its broken frame.

  Roy had seen the video. Somehow he knew about the painting.

  Jonathan called out again into the quiet house. “Let me rephrase that. You definitely want to come out and talk about this.”

  He chewed the inside of his cheek.

  “Goddammit, Roy! This will not go well for you if I have to come looking. Don’t make this worse.”

  All the nothing that echoed into the dark was just what Jonathan needed. The dread evaporated. He’d tear the house apart looking for Roy, and it would be great practice for tearing Roy himself apart once he found him.

  Neither turned out to be necessary. The hunt lasted two seconds. As Jonathan rounded the hall that led to the kitchen and the garage beyond, he stumbled over Roy’s outstretched legs. He lay sprawled across the floor where he’d slid down from his slump against the wall.

  Roy had been in the family room. Jonathan knew this because the bottle of vodka leaning against Roy’s thigh had been in the bar cabinet next to the television.

  He’d also been in Jonathan and Donna’s bedroom. Nobody in the family took any regular medicines, and the uncapped prescription bottle beside Roy on the floor was most likely Donna’s Xanax, which had been in the nightstand drawer for when she couldn’t sleep before flying or presentations.
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br />   The details of what he was looking at lined up on their own to make an awful kind of sense.

  “Oh, God. What have you done?”

  Roy raised his head as if he would respond, but it wobbled and flopped to the other side.

  “Goddamn you, Roy.” Jonathan nudged him hard with his toe, but even that little release threatened an avalanche. He pulled back his leg and landed a hard kick into Roy’s bony hip.

  Roy groaned and struggled up, but only made it as far as propping up on his elbows. He fell back, head thudding into the wall.

  Jonathan itched to kick him again, but stepped over his legs and hit the light switch for the overheads in the hallway. He looked to see how much it lit the foyer. Not too bad.

  He squatted next to Roy. The pill bottle was empty and definitely used to hold Donna’s Xanax. He didn’t know how many there would have been. The prescription had been for thirty and was months old, but she didn’t take them often. The vodka bottle still had a solid third left in it, but he felt that it had been more than half full. John had opened it weeks ago. He set it aside.

  He shoved Roy’s head upright and held it there, gripping his hair, the strands swollen with grease, shudderingly slick between his fingers.

  “What the fuck is this? What are you trying to do?” Jonathan shook Roy’s head in his fist with the rhythm of his words.

  Roy opened his eyes and worked his mouth to unstick his lips from his teeth. He heaved in a breath as if his lungs were nearly rusted shut. “You . . . You lie . . . d.”

  Jonathan let him go and his hands twitched into fists against his thighs. He leaned into Roy’s face and said through gritted teeth, “So. What.”

  That woke Roy up. He coughed and battled for a breath. He raised his head, his filmy red eyes glaring back into Jonathan’s—not bold, exactly, but no longer afraid. Accusing. Caught and caged, but safe. As if he knew he was out of reach. Untouchable.

  Roy thought he was dying. And he didn’t mind.

  A little sick feeling rose at the back of Jonathan’s throat. His heart pounded out of step with anything he felt about Roy. Roy dead was nothing. Roy dead was absolutely fine.

  But dead isn’t dying. Dying was a thing, a length of time, a noun, not just a verb, a presence, a third entity in the hallway with them. It had to be dealt with, and it was warm, not cold as they make it out to be. It was a humid, dank thing. He could smell it, feel it stealing all the air around them with its own slow, patient breathing.

  Dying can be complicated. Messy. Dying can be tricked into stopping.

  Roy’s lids slipped closed, but he hauled them back to halfway. Then, of all things out of place in the moment, a smile pulled at the right side of Roy’s mouth. He was fucking smiling. But his chin trembled, shaking in a horrible effort to hold the smile in place. Whatever that smile meant to Roy, it also hurt him. His eyes shimmered wet, the red of them glowing at Jonathan through the tears.

  Watching him struggle with that pitiful grimace, a shiver slid over Jonathan’s back.

  Roy grunted to clear his throat. “I didn’t do what you said.”

  Jonathan laughed through his nose. A wave of exhaustion made his crouch too painful to hold any longer. He turned and flopped down next to Roy on the floor, their backs against the wall together.

  “You sure didn’t,” Jonathan said. “And aren’t you awfully proud of yourself? I told you I’d kill you if you came here, but you did it anyway. And then went and saved me the trouble.” Jonathan swatted the empty pill bottle. It smacked the opposite wall with a plastic clatter. It bounced back and wound down in slowing circles between Roy’s pitiful, frayed boots.

  This fucking day. Jonathan righted the vodka bottle from the floor where it had spilled some of what it had left to offer. The craving for a burning throatful of the stuff couldn’t vault the gross certainty that Roy had put his mouth on it.

  Jonathan closed his eyes and tilted his head up against the wall. The hall lights were orange against his lids, almost like daylight. He sighed.

  Roy might be dying. Probably was. In the hallway. What the hell was he supposed to do with that?

  “Roy, in my father’s stuff, in all that junk I let you take, was there anything about where it all came from? Anything else about the painting?”

  Roy’s head had fallen forward, boneless, chin to chest in a way that looked wrong.

  “Hey!” Jonathan nudged him, and Roy flinched to a slightly firmer slump.

  “Roy.” Jonathan shook him. “Roy! Wake up!”

  Roy mumbled and groaned. Disjointed words tumbled out—haunting, high-pitched murmurs in a steady moan of broken-down old-man noises, like a radio grabbing things out of static. “Good . . . okay . . . she’s okay . . . fine . . . I will . . . I’ll get it . . . but . . . I . . . why is it like this?”

  Shit.

  Jonathan was back on his haunches again, then down to his knees, getting into Roy’s face, ignoring the rotting-fruit-and-rubbing-alcohol smell that trickled out on his shallow breaths.

  “Roy, wait. Wake up. Hey!” Jonathan shook him, more gently this time, but faster. “Hey. Hey. Do you still have any of that stuff? From the garage? Is any of it out there in your truck?”

  Roy rolled his head in a swinging negation, but didn’t open his eyes. “Doan know.”

  “Not good enough.” Jonathan shook him and slapped Roy’s cheek, hard enough to sting, but not too bad. Not even close to what Jonathan wanted to do, but he reined in the rest. “Roy! There was a whole box of stuff. You took it all. Do you still have any of it?”

  “Din’ take it. I worked for . . .”

  “I don’t give a shit. Is there still stuff in your truck from back then?”

  Roy finally looked at him again. His back was sagging more with each gravelly breath. “Did you know? Why . . . ?”

  “Goddammit, Roy. Just tell me what you did with it.”

  Roy arched up, pulling straighter. Eyes closed. They slid open again with a quivering effort. His lips barely moved. “No.”

  “What?”

  “No.”

  Jonathan’s rage burned in his face, but his voice was quiet. “Don’t you say no to me, you useless piece of shit.”

  The ghost of Roy’s earlier smile surfaced and receded on his lips. But he kept staring. His shoulder twitched hard. Involuntary or a shrug, Jonathan couldn’t tell. “No.”

  Jonathan shouted into Roy’s face, “Do you want to die?”

  And that it was possibly the stupidest thing Jonathan had ever said out loud was more than he could take. He went cold all over.

  Roy wheezed out a shallow laugh into Jonathan’s trembling face. His eyes glittered, remote but piercing.

  Jonathan slammed the palm of his hand into the wall next to Roy’s head and pushed up from the floor. He stomped through the house to his bedroom. At the back of his drawer full of T-shirts, he pulled out what was, as far as he knew, the only other prescription in the house. Painkillers. Percocet and Vicodin from his own shoulder surgery and dental work, tucked away for safekeeping.

  He hadn’t taken them for long when they’d been prescribed. He couldn’t enjoy being woozy and warm, adrift on imaginary goodwill, quick to smile, and maybe a little too prone to honesty in the hazier moments. He didn’t trust the waking dream of nothing to lose. Some of the pills were years old.

  He’d only ever taken a dose or two to get him through the worst of whatever pain he had, and the rest went into the drawer for emergencies. That Roy was still breathing right now was an emergency. He didn’t know how much time he had before Donna and Carly found a way home.

  Jonathan’s pulse strobed in his eyesight, throbbing in a sharp headache that had sprung up in his temple. What choice did he have? Roy did this. Roy wanted this and was always going to have gotten all the way to doing it at some point.

  All the things he’d watched Roy fuck up scrolled fast through his memory, an exercise that seemed in the service of something not quite under Jonathan’s control as he came bac
k through the house with the pills. It teased him with images of the unsanded splinters bristling on the deck railing. The brush marks in the paint on his father’s kitchen wall. The soap dried in streaks on the hood of his car. The bad green haircut of a poorly mowed lawn. The mountains of useless junk Roy burrowed under like a rat, just like Jonathan’s father. Every flinching, whining, mealymouthing, sloppy, inconvenient encounter. Marcelline dying on the ground.

  Roy’s usual half-assed results weren’t going to cut it this time. This wasn’t personal. Halfway would be a disaster.

  Roy had slid down low on the wall in Jonathan’s absence, chin to rattling chest now, sipping tiny breaths between long pauses.

  Jonathan kicked him again, just to wake him up. “Hey!” He got down on the floor, straddling Roy’s right leg to be in front of him. He shook out a pill and shoved it into Roy’s mouth, shuddering at the wetness on the tips of his fingers as he drew them back from Roy’s lips. He poured vodka into Roy’s mouth over the pill.

  “Swallow that.”

  Roy sputtered and choked. Most of the vodka went down his shirtfront. So did the pill.

  Jonathan rammed it back in. “Goddammit. Swallow this.”

  He didn’t, except for some of the vodka again.

  Fear bloomed a vine into Jonathan’s guts. Cold slithering, twisting, pushing up, crowding his lungs.

  He was doing this, so it needed to get done. There wasn’t time for this bullshit.

  “You sonofabitch.” Jonathan lost his aversion to Roy’s mouth in the desperation of the situation. He poked two pills deep onto Roy’s tongue, poured the vodka, then held Roy’s jaw shut and pinched his nose closed. Nothing happened. Was he dead?

  Roy gurgled after a moment, gulped weakly, and dribbled copiously. Jonathan pried his mouth open. The pills were still there, stuck, but trailing a chalky white streak of dissolved Vicodin down the back of Roy’s tongue.