by Jamie Mason
“Fuck!”
But there was something there, something Jonathan could use. He fished out three fresh pills from the bottle. He put them in his own mouth and chewed fast. The strong bitter tang made his mouth water. He spit into the vodka and threw four more pills onto his own tongue, careful not to swallow any of it. Another huge mouthful of crushed painkiller went into the bottle.
Jonathan swirled the bottle around and held the thin milk up to the light.
He chewed a few more tablets and added them, hacking and spitting into the dregs. He dug narcotic paste out of his molars and scraped the tip of his tongue over the bottle’s rim.
Jonathan slapped his palm over the top and shook the whole works, blending it nearly opaque.
He straddled Roy again, scooped him up against his chest, and forced his head back. The mix went down his throat to some success and some weak minor geysers of failure.
Jonathan upended the bottle, and a thread, thick with spit and medicine, drizzled over Roy’s teeth.
Most of it trickled down with little resistance. The ceiling lights reflected in what didn’t, pooling in the back of Roy’s throat.
Sweating and dizzy, his heart rocking and thumping out of rhythm, Jonathan stared down over Roy’s slack face, holding his jaw with one hand, his other arm around his shoulders, pulling him close and upright. He slid his hand down from Roy’s jaw to his neck, poking and pressing for a pulse. Jonathan couldn’t tell if it was his own hammering heart throbbing in his fingertips.
He put his ear to Roy’s gaping mouth. Nothing, he thought, but listened longer. Did he hear something?
A shadow fell into the hall from the foyer.
“Oh my God!”
Donna and Carly rounded the corner into view.
“Oh my God,” Donna said again.
Jonathan shook his swimming head to clear a path for something to say. “He took some pills. A lot of pills. Get Carly out of here. Take her to Ada’s.”
Donna’s hands were shaking as she keyed into her phone. “Oh, God. I’ll call 911.”
“No!”
Donna’s eyes snapped up from her screen. Carly was looking from Roy’s lolling head to Jonathan’s face. He was mesmerized trying to know how she was reading this.
A small wounded sound parted Carly’s lips. “Oh” was all she said.
“Don’t,” said John. “I already called. They’re on their way. Just get Carly out of here. She doesn’t need to see this.” He pulled his gaze away from his stepdaughter’s, breaking the spell for himself.
“And Donna,” he called to her as they turned for the door, Donna steering Carly by the shoulders and Carly looking back at the tangle of Roy in Jonathan’s arms. He found a sliver of himself still within reach, still right there in his voice when he needed it. “Come right back. Please come back. I need you.”
• • •
He listened for the thunk of Donna’s car doors. He didn’t trust that dying had truly done its job, that it wasn’t still there, lingering, waiting to see if it would be more fun to leave without what it came for and watch chaos take over. He waited to hear them back out of the driveway and checked that they’d rounded the corner before he took a pillow from the sofa and held it over Roy’s face for a long, slow count. It felt like two hundred plus forever. Counting kept the fear at bay, kept him from rushing it. He had to be sure. Now that Donna and Carly had been there, it could only be this way.
Roy never moved. He never made a sound. Jonathan found no pulse.
Jonathan felt lighter. Some of the painkillers had definitely gotten into him. There was a little of the gilded happiness that lived somewhere in the chemistry of the medicine, a surge of well-being that didn’t make any sense in illness, or after being cut open and sewn back together. Or in the postglow of holding a pillow over a guy’s face either.
But it wasn’t half-bad. And it was twice as useful as even that. He couldn’t feel a thing. No nerves at all.
Donna came home, her hair on fire over the lack of an ambulance in the driveway, then all over again at the suggestion that she should please help him put Roy in his truck. They had to leave him for someone else to find.
She told him he was insane. That she didn’t even know who she was talking to anymore. How could he possibly think this was okay?
But he kept going. Twisting it to sound reasonable. To sound like the lesser of the wrong turns they might make in this.
He would wash and throw away the bottle Roy had taken from their bar. He would clean up everything. No one knew who Roy was. No one was looking for him. No one would know.
She wouldn’t have to do anything but help him—just a little—only to get Roy into the truck and then follow them in her car to bring Jonathan back home.
She cried. A sudden, strong rain of it.
But she couldn’t argue that she didn’t want the police, and inevitably the newspeople, back in their home and all over their street. Not after what Carly had already been through. We have to think of her. John pounded that point, Donna’s weak spot. Carly had to live in this town. It would be a terrible and utterly useless thing to make her life about this. To make their life about it. It’s not worth it, babe. It can’t be undone.
He told her Roy was a rotten person. That he’d even been responsible for a nice woman’s death back in the day. That’s what I didn’t tell you. The only thing. He was what the cameras were all about in the first place. I’m sorry. Please don’t tell Carly. Please, it will scare her. I’m sorry. It’s over now. If she would only help him, they could make this truly over.
And, most importantly, none of this was their fault. They hadn’t done anything wrong. Roy had done this to himself to punish John for not fixing his broken life years ago. Between this and the kid who’d attacked Carly, it wasn’t fair that she kept having to take on the mistakes of other people. And it would be another mistake not to let someone else find Roy.
It was pointless pain.
And if somehow I’m wrong, it’s on me. I swear it. I will protect you. I will protect Carly. I love you. I’m sorry. Help us, Donna. Help us get through this together.
She did. “But I don’t know what we have after this, John. After all of this. I don’t know what to think. I feel like I don’t even know you. I don’t know what we are anymore.”
He didn’t tell her that she was right and that it didn’t matter. She’d never had what she thought anyway. He didn’t tell her she didn’t need to worry, that he’d be gone soon. As soon as strategically possible.
Roy’s stunt and what they were doing might even be a useful thing. It would keep Donna’s relentless strength in check. She wouldn’t bend the world to find him. She’d bend it the other way—to forget him. She wouldn’t say anything for fear of tonight coming back on her. She’d make it disappear. She’d done it before. She wouldn’t leave Carly vulnerable, losing her to whatever penalty this could carry.
It would work itself out. It always did.
John pulled on Donna’s kitchen gloves to dump half a fresh, unfingerprinted bottle of vodka down the drain. He packed the rest of his pills into a plastic bag, all props to press into Roy’s hands and decorate his dead lap. And he also brought a hose for the tailpipe, and the duct tape to hold it in place. Just in case.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
No ambulance was coming. Somehow Carly had known there wouldn’t be, but she was leaning against Ada’s bedroom window anyway, ear almost touching the screen, sifting the neighborhood sounds for the rising wail of sirens over her friend’s excited babble.
“Holy sh—” Ada’s eyebrows swooped up and she inhaled the it. “Was he dead?” Ada always swallowed the last sound in a cuss word like it didn’t count as much if she said it weird.
“I don’t know,” Carly said. But she kind of did.
Her babysitter’s dog had died when Carly was seven. She had been the one to find her. The dog was in her oval bed, lying on her side with her ever-present rope toy next to her muzzle. There
was no blood. Nothing looked wrong. But Carly never for a second had thought the dog was merely sleeping. It was just different somehow.
The man in the hallway looked that kind of different. Untied. Empty.
Carly’s mother had told Ada’s mother that a friend of John’s had suffered a breakdown and had gotten into the house and tried to kill himself while they were all out to dinner.
Both women said the word suicide the way Ada said the word shit.
That recap was plausible, right up to the part where Donna said the guy was John’s friend. Uh-unh. John wasn’t holding a friend up off the floor. That was for sure. He’d been far more interested in what Donna and Carly thought of the whole scene than whether the guy piled against him was going to be okay.
For the first time in all of this weirdness, Carly had felt afraid of John.
She pleaded with her mother not to go back.
“Please. Please? Just stay here.” Carly held her mother’s arm, but her mother turned to her and pulled her into a hug.
“Sweetheart, I need to go back. It’ll be okay. John’s all alone over there. It’s horrible.” But Donna clung to Carly as if she didn’t want to let go.
Carly had an in, maybe. A quick opportunity. The right arguments, in the right order, could be tumblers in a lock. “The ambulance will be there any minute. In just a few more minutes, he won’t be alone. Maybe even before you can get there. Then we can go back together. We could both be there. For him. But I want to go back with you.”
Her mother petted Carly’s hair, hesitation in her stroke.
So Carly kept at it. “There’s no reason for you to be there right now. You’ll just be in the way. I don’t mean that in a bad way! I mean, your car will literally be in the way. Please?”
“Honey, I have to go. I can’t just leave him there with this. I can’t do that to him.” Donna peeled herself out of the hug. “It’s not right. I’ll be back to get you as soon as they’ve taken that guy to the hospital, okay?”
Carly shouldn’t have said there was no reason. That was a dumb mistake. The chance was passed. It was pointless to fight it.
And there still weren’t any sirens.
“Okay,” said Carly. “I just need to get something out of the car.”
So, for the second time that day, Carly silenced her notifications and slid her phone into the pocket behind the driver’s seat. Just to see.
Ada was skeptical when Carly suggested they check where exactly her phone was.
“Now you forgot it in your mom’s car?”
“It’s been a superweird day. Gimme a break. I just want to see if John makes them go to the hospital with that guy. I wanted to be there, not here. No offense. This is freaking me out.”
Her mother’s car didn’t go to the hospital. But it didn’t stay at home either.
Carly didn’t want Ada to know that. She put her back against the wall and held the phone up at an inconvenient angle.
It didn’t take long for Ada to lose interest in watching Carly watch the phone. She flopped back on the bed with a peevish “Whatever.” The ceiling didn’t hold her attention for long either. Ada picked up her ukulele and made the background music to the long movie of Carly tracking the little bubble with her own face on it, scrolling along, dragging the blue line over the map for twenty-two minutes.
The more she had to look at her own face, staring and staring at it to keep track of where her mother was going—trying to picture where it was and if she’d ever been there before—the more her face on the screen stopped feeling recognizable to her. That’s really me?
She thought of the video of the thing. How it had felt watching herself. Here she was again, sitting in as a spectator, in two places at once, cataloging her response to a situation she hadn’t created and didn’t want.
Avatar Carly stopped and smiled up from the phone, pinned in place for almost ten minutes. Carly kept an eye on the clock and screenshotted the map after the car hadn’t moved for a while. She texted the image to her own phone, which was, at that very moment, in the seat pocket behind her mother, tagging along on this ride to wherever. Then she deleted the picture and the text from Ada’s phone.
The app turned Carly’s face toward home. But App Carly bypassed the real Carly, still stranded at Ada’s. The car stopped at their house for another half hour. Then her mother and John came to pick her up, together.
Her mother’s forehead looked cramped, stuck in ridges that were propped up by stress-slanted eyebrows. She’d been crying. But she worked hard to sound cheerful and hopeful. Everything was fine. They got him to the hospital in time. The guy was going to be okay. He was getting help.
John was loose in the joints, a freshly oiled machine. He was relieved that the guy was finally where he needed to be. This whole thing, as messy and unpleasant as it was, had been a long time coming. He’d tried hard to keep Donna and Carly out of it. It was ugly. It was his past. He was so sorry that they’d had to see it. But in the end, he was glad it was out of his hands finally. It was over. Things would be better now.
Her mother was lying.
Her stepfather was telling the truth.
He kept checking Carly during the tag-team explanation of things, just as he had when she’d seen him on the floor in a tangle with the dead guy. John studied her, and Carly let her gratitude be the only thing he saw. It was easy to calibrate, to make it look like relief and happiness that things were going back to normal. He smiled at her. She felt Other Carly take control of her face. She smiled back. He thought they were on the road to fine.
But her gratitude was not made of what he thought it was. She was grateful for knowing what she was looking at. And for her new way of listening to people. Carly knew this was all bullshit. They could say what they wanted, but they couldn’t make her believe it.
• • •
The house felt strange. Again. John had taped a patchwork of cardboard over the broken window before they brought Carly home. They’d cleaned up every spot and shard of what had happened. The house smelled of ammonia and lemon polish, and the flat electrical whiff of the vacuum cleaner. But the air still held a fading haze of wrongness.
Carly wanted them to open all the windows and doors and let the wind sweep through the house. She wanted them to blast music, run the ceiling fans, the oven fan, the bathroom fans, the plug-in fan her mother used for white noise to sleep by. Carly wanted them to crank up the air conditioner and the heater all at the same time.
Change the air. Change the temperature. Pour sound into the corners like witching salt in scary movies. Let it all fly away through the window screens instead of settling over the floor like a ground fog she had to walk through.
But she didn’t say any of that. It would be too much for her mother, who only wanted Carly to be all right.
So she was all right.
She barely slept, though. All night she rode waves of thin dozing, sinking down into meandering thoughts that didn’t make any sense, then rising back up, overheated, to try to figure out what to do.
She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to do it right now, but it was ages until daytime and any good excuse to leave the house.
She wanted to go to the place on the map where her mother had gone. She wanted to know what was out there.
But she had no way to make that happen. She’d never skipped school before. She imagined walking in the front door of the school and heading straight out the back again before the first bell rang. People did it. She knew they did. But it was all in the pronoun. They did. She didn’t.
In the morning, her head hurt and the light reflecting off the countertops was too bright, but she didn’t want to make a face that anyone would ask her about. How Carly was feeling was apparently the topic of the day. Her mother found a dozen different ways to ask her if she was okay. John found a dozen more.
So she ate all her breakfast and asked for more eggs and a refill of juice. Who did something like that who wasn’t feeling 100 percent? She was
extra-portions-fine, as far as they knew.
Her mother practically cried with happiness, and Carly wouldn’t let on that she was this close to barfing it all over the kitchen floor.
John hovered over breakfast with them, which wasn’t what he normally did on school mornings. He chattered about taking the day off. He’d cut the grass and call the gutter man and order the mulch they’d been meaning to get. And he’d get the sidelight glass replaced.
Yeah. Fixing what the not-dead dead guy broke was just one chore among many. No big deal.
Carly didn’t trust her poker face enough to look at him even though she could feel him trying to draw her into a good long head invasion, pulling at her with his own stare while he talked.
He asked if she wanted him to pick her up from school later.
No. No, she did not.
But it came out on a smooth fib. “No, that’s okay. I’m going to the library to meet up with Emma. We’re going to get in some more drawing practice.” She glanced up at the grown-ups. “Ada’s coming, too.” She held out her glass for more juice. “It’ll be fun.”
Which brought them to what they really wanted to know—what was she going to say today, out there to everybody, about last night?
That was easy. No fib required.
“I’m not saying anything. As if. It’s over. It’s been weird enough around here lately. And Ada will be on my side. She won’t say anything either. Or I’ll feed her ukulele to the fire pit.”
• • •
Carly texted Emma: Can you come to the library today?
The read receipt ticked over immediately.
She waited for a reply, bouncing her pencil off its eraser against the lunch table.
“Can you not?” Ada scowled at the jittery drumming.
Carly stopped and Ada went back to her math homework.
Emma hadn’t sent back a message.
Carly typed again. Please?
Read.
Sure. Right after school?
Yes OMG thanks.
Carly hadn’t been able to think of a way to leave school, the daydream plot getting crazier and more unlikely by the hour. She couldn’t do it. It was funny what she had in her and what she didn’t. But now she had the rest of the day to think of a way to get Emma to take her out there without having to tell her why.