The Hidden Things

by Jamie Mason

  • • •

  “Did you and Ada have a falling out?” asked Emma.

  Carly looked up from the shading that was going into the portrait all wrong. Too dark. Bad angle. She wanted to throw her pencil across the room.

  “No.”

  “Oh. You’ve just never been here without her is all.”

  Carly looked back down at the drawing and the tears came. She ripped the page from the sketchbook, crumpled the paper, and shoved the wad of it down the long table. “Stupid thing.”

  She sighed and yanked the book back, pushed her hair out of her face, and crooked her arm over the next clean white sheet to start again.

  Emma pulled the sketch pad away. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay, that’s clearly not true. Unless you meant to finish that out as a complete thought, as in Nothing that I want to talk about.”

  Carly wanted to close her eyes and put her head on the table. But she was also buzzing at the same time as if she’d had a giant-size coffee. Her insides felt like pudding.

  She hadn’t been able to think of any way to ask Emma for the ride. It would sound crazy or rude or both, and Emma might say no and not want to meet up anymore because Carly was weird. Or she might say yes. Carly’s stomach hurt to think of that. What huge problem was waiting at the end of a yes? At the end of that drive? How could she keep it a secret if it was bad?

  Carly shook her head. Then made the mistake of looking Emma in the eye and blurted, “I can’t.”

  Emma’s pulled back, and concern transformed her face. The mood contracted around them, suddenly dense and serious. “Hey, I want you to listen to me. You simply not wanting to talk about something is a perfectly acceptable reason not to. You don’t have to talk to me—or anyone—about whatever it is you choose not to discuss. Okay? I will never press you for more than you care to share. But can’t is simply not the case here. Do you understand? You don’t have to talk to me, but you absolutely can.”

  Carly nodded, miserable. A sob pressed against the roof of her mouth. The nodding went crooked and turned back into shaking her head no.

  “Hey. Hey.” Emma rooted through her purse for a pack of tissues and plucked one out for Carly. The small kindness was almost too much. Carly’s throat hurt from all the not-saying and not-crying that was stacking up and crowding out her breath.

  Emma rubbed Carly’s shoulder. She’d never touched her except for incidental bumps and brushes in the close quarters of the drawing lessons. “Listen. I’m your friend, okay? I didn’t expect to be. It was a treat to find someone who I could work out my art geek on. It’s been a while. You’re a kid. But, you’re also a terrific person. Something special.”

  Carly lost the fight and the tears ran down in sheets.

  Emma swept a wider path over Carly’s back. “Wow. Honey. Hey. Whatever it is, you can tell me. If you want to. I promise, I’ll help. Okay? You don’t have to worry.”

  “I don’t . . .” Carly stopped, frustrated. The tears were bad enough. Everything wanted to spill. “I don’t think I should. But something happened last night. John . . .”

  “John what?” Emma’s voice had gone hard.

  Carly’s heart jumped up in her throat. This was getting away from her. “I can’t. It might be nothing. If it’s nothing and I start drama . . . And if it’s not nothing, then maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all, because I don’t know what will happen if I do.”

  “Nothing happens just because you tell me something. It can be a secret, if you need it to be. What did John do?”

  “If it’s bad, you might think you have to do something.” Carly let her eyes fall out of focus on the white field of her sketchbook. She was so tired.

  “It’s all choices. You telling me or not. Or what I do about it—later today, next week, when I’m eighty. No matter what you tell me, if in fact you decide to tell me anything, I will not choose to do anything about it without discussing it with you first. Deal?”

  Carly ached to talk, to let it come rushing out, to not be alone with what she wondered and worried about.

  Emma took her hand away. “Carly, I want you to look at me.”

  Emma raked her fingers through her hair at the temples, pulling the length of it back behind her shoulders. She sat straight on across from Carly, head level, completely face-to-face. She let it stay that way—a pose, a portrait—before she spoke again.

  “You have a good eye for meaning. For intent. You keep surprising me with it when we talk about this stuff.” She pointed at the ever-present art books on the table. “So tell me, just from looking at me, do you believe me when I say that I know what it takes to keep a secret? Tell me if you can see that I know what it means.”

  Carly couldn’t keep her eyes from drifting to the scars, as Emma fully intended. She’d stripped away the shyness of the moment with just the power of her voice, and Carly stared openly at the sunken trench where the point of Emma’s jaw should have been. The skin stretched over the cruel worst of it in a thick, shiny twist, and the damage transitioned past a pocked, warped margin into smooth skin, into what she was everywhere else. It hadn’t always been like that.

  Carly nodded.

  Emma nodded back. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well then, Emma is not really my name.”

  Carly felt a little drop, like a sudden swoop over a hill in a car.

  “What is your name, then?”

  “I’ll tell you, if it looks like we have to do anything about John.”

  • • •

  Emma took her hand away from her mouth.

  When they’d spotted the crappy SUV under the thin canopy of trees, her hand had come up to cover her face as if she’d gasped it straight off the steering wheel. The truck was nearly hidden in the shade next to the falling-apart barn at the end of the blue line on the map in the picture.

  Carly’s face had marked the spot. The idea slithered like snakes. She wanted to delete the screenshot from her phone.

  Emma’s car limped and rolled across the rutted lot, then rocked to a stop in the lush, knee-high weeds.

  The man from the foyer was in the driver’s seat. A curve of green garden hose looped from around the back of the truck into the front window.

  Carly had slept a good bit of the drive over, wrung out and helpless to resist the whooshing lullaby of the road under the tires. The brief nap had left her numb. She was horrified, but it felt far away, as if the caring part of her brain was still asleep. She did care, but her mind would deliver that package later.

  Emma unbuckled her seat belt. “Stay here, okay?”

  “Okay.” It wasn’t difficult. She knew what she needed to know. She’d already seen him dead once.

  There wasn’t much to read in Emma’s (not-Emma) body language as she walked to the truck. She’d gone pale and quiet at the story of what had happened at the house the night before—the broken glass and wrecked stuff off the walls, the ragged-looking man who flopped as if he were boneless, John not calling the ambulance, and all of that. She’d said little since she agreed to come out and see what was at the end of the track on the app.

  She stopped halfway across the field, then turned and shaded her eyes from the sun. She looked back to Carly and to the road beyond. Then Emma walked on, slowly, to the stand of trees. Carly saw her arms come up to steeple her hands over her nose and mouth when she got up beside the truck, her back settled down into a contemplative curve. She lowered her head, totally still for long enough that Carly wondered if Emma was praying. Or crying.

  Emma used the hem of her shirt to pull up the garden hose and to cover the door handle when she opened the driver’s-side door. She leaned in, looked, closed the door again. She tucked the hose back into the window. She walked around to the passenger side for a similar routine. She spent some time looking in the back, crawling in partway and coming out with something in her hand.

  She came back, grim faced, to Carly’s side of the car f
irst and opened the glove box to put in a black gun.

  “It’s dangerous to leave that out here. A kid could find it,” Emma said, answering the question Carly hadn’t asked.

  Emma started the car and turned it around in the open field.

  “What happened to him?”

  She steered onto the road. The engine whined high as they sped up. “He killed himself.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Emma ran her tongue over her teeth under her pursed lips, pulling her scar tight and pale. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Do we need to call the police? I mean, because they brought him out here? I mean, my mom . . .” Carly’s throat collapsed on her voice.

  “I don’t think so. Not now. Maybe not at all. Don’t worry.” She looked over at Carly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. Okay?”

  “But what do you think we need to do?” Carly couldn’t keep the hope out of her question. There was the simple kind of hope that Emma would say the whole thing should be left alone. That done is done.

  But there was also the hot, silvery thread of a different type of hope that wanted this whole thing blown up for parts. Carly wanted to know what the hell was going on, to see the machine broken down, harmless and safe to examine piece by piece. She wanted to understand what it was—but without it being what it was anymore.

  Emma watched the road, lost in thought and driving. “So you felt sure they thought you were okay this morning?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can you keep it up? Acting like you’re all right?”

  “I think so.”

  Emma looked away from the road again, back to Carly.

  Carly didn’t feel sleepy anymore. “Yeah, I can.”

  Emma looked down at her gauges and back to the road. “Okay, good. I can, too. We’ll both be fine as far as they know. I’ll drive you home. I think I’d like to meet your stepfather.”

  As they rode on, Carly watched out the window as the wild green nowhere morphed into a woolly green zone dotted with islands of old, crumbling concrete. Then the balance shifted to fresher sidewalks and pavement with only strategic squares of manicured green as they rolled into the places she started to recognize.

  A dark sheet of cloud that had been lurking in the distance overtook them. The rain came suddenly, in loud, uneven plonking that smoothed quickly into a solid roar against the roof and hood.

  They’d been silent for some time, each deep in her own thoughts. Emma adjusted in her seat and rolled her shoulders. She turned up the speed of the windshield wipers. Then she spoke for the first time in miles. “Well, the rain will be useful. A good excuse for driving you home.”

  She twisted again, stretching the muscles in her back. She flexed her fingers off the wheel, one hand at a time. Getting ready.

  “My name is Marcelline.”

  • • •

  “Mom, this is Emma.”

  Yeah, that felt weird. Almost to the point that Carly wished Marcelline had held off telling her. Carly had asked her why she’d changed it, but she said it was a long story for another time.

  “It is so nice to meet you, finally,” Donna said.

  Carly was worried. Her mother looked exhausted. Tired was okay as long as it didn’t look guilty. Carly wanted Marcelline to believe that her mother hadn’t done anything wrong. She wanted Marcelline to love her mother, which was stupid. But people were careful with what they loved.

  Before shaking Donna’s hand, Marcelline pointed vaguely over her shoulder in the direction of the front door and the squall beyond it. “We can thank the weather for running us out of excuses not to finally meet.”

  Marcelline took in the foyer in a sweeping glance, pausing on the scrape marks gouged into the drywall, where the curly metal thing had been pulled away and broken.

  John rounded the corner into the foyer. In the turn, his expression erased—from a man who was mildly interested in what he’d overheard from the kitchen to a blank that Carly found difficult to believe, much less make sense of. She’d never seen him like that. She’d never seen anybody like that.

  It didn’t have the slackness of sleep, but every muscle under his skin was without inflection. Perfectly balanced in absence. As if he’d been unplugged.

  It didn’t seem to affect Marcelline. She smiled at him, but her eyes sparkled with purpose when John came into the room. Carly wished that Marcelline was better at playing as if everything were fine. It was a little too close to the line. Marcelline lit up and was not trying hard enough, by Carly’s measure, to keep from letting on that she knew anything was wrong. She was being a little weird.

  How could Carly be the best one at this kind of thing? She’d thought Em—Marcelline would have been a little bit smoother than that. The air was buzzing around her.

  Marcelline started across the foyer, hand extended, jacket dripping. “You must be, John, is it?”

  He nodded and a prefab polite expression twitched into his face. “Yep. Hi.”

  “It’s nice to meet you. After all this time.”

  Donna went into hostess mode. “Emma, we were just about to open a bottle of wine. Won’t you join us and wait out the rain a little?”

  Marcelline looked back to Carly and her mother and answered quickly, but straight to John, “I’d love to.”

  Donna smiled, welcoming the distraction of something nice and normal, Carly knew. And it would seem nice and normal if Emma could just keep it together. “Great! Let me just hang up your coat.”

  Marcelline walked back to Donna at the coat closet and surrendered her jacket. As her mom loaded it onto a hanger, Carly looked back at her stepfather. The change in him was horrible. He was looking at Donna and Marcelline putting the jacket away as if he were watching an autopsy. He’d gone a weird color, sickly, and instantly shiny.

  He was really not happy about having company.

  Last night had gotten to him more than Carly had given him credit for. A hint of hope lived in that. Maybe there was an explanation for everything. Maybe it wasn’t completely terrible. Look at him. He was a wreck and trying not to be. Maybe it would be okay.

  They turned back to John.

  Donna startled a little at the way he was watching them. Marcelline wore that same funny look, a tight little smile that she had pointed out to Carly when they’d analyzed the Mona Lisa together.

  Marcelline looked as if she knew something everyone else didn’t. Which wasn’t wrong. Carly just wished again that she’d be a little bit craftier about it.

  “Hey,” Donna said to John. “Can you get the wine?”

  “Yeah,” he said, but crossed over to push the closet door all the way closed first.

  • • •

  The adults finished the bottle together. Carly took her homework into the dining room but got none of it done, ear tuned to the conversation playing out in the living room. Marcelline, as it went on, was fine at being fine. Pretty good at it, really. In the end, Carly was impressed, even a little proud of having a friend like her, even in the awful kind of private joke this was. But most of all, she was so relieved. Marcelline was being nice to her mom.

  This was going to work. Marcelline talked and laughed. She would see what they were about so she could help Carly figure out what to do. Marcelline steered clear, so carefully casual, of anything that would give them away. She wouldn’t leave her all on her own to swim or drown in it.

  “Carly,” her mom called after a while. “Emma’s got to get going. Want to come in here and say goodnight?”

  They all converged in the foyer. Smiles all around. John seemed okay again, hands in his pockets, standing in front of the coat closet, face perfectly John-like.

  “Thank you so much,” Marcelline said. “For the wine and for the shelter. It looks better out there.”

  “Of course,” said Donna. “This was a nice surprise. We all needed this. Thank you for working with Carly. It’s been so good for her.”

  Marcelline pulled her phone from her purse. “So, John, I alre
ady have Donna’s number, but go ahead and give me yours just in case anything comes up. You know how it is. . . .”

  Carly’s body reacted to the pointed pause Marcelline left there, but it was over before she could name it.

  Marcelline had a steady bead on John, who didn’t look away. She said, “You never know what’s next in this art business. Right, Carly?”

  Their attention snapped onto her so suddenly that Carly jumped. “Right!”

  John called out his number in a monotone.

  “Great,” Marcelline said. “I’ll just send a text and then you’ll have mine, too. You can put my name into your contacts.” She gave her phone a solid little tap and looked back up into John’s face. “It’s just spelled the regular way.”

  John’s phone chirred in his pocket. “There it is,” he said, but didn’t check it.

  Marcelline smiled at him.

  Donna reached around John to get to the closet.

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  The women were in front of the door, still in chat mode. But Carly was off to the side, in view of John rooting around in the closet. He’d gone stiff again as soon as he’d taken his hands out of his pockets, and the sick look crossed his face once his head was buried in the shadow of the closet. He was listening, a lightning rod. Donna took a step back toward him and he flinched.

  He moved fast, pushing a big garment bag down the rack, and inexplicably sliding the winter coats more to the center after pulling Marcelline’s jacket off the hangar. He went better than 50 percent less green as he pushed the door closed.

  And as he wheeled back to them, Carly, jangling with a new and indistinct worry, feigned absorption in her fingernails. Her unease didn’t answer to any specific thing, but more than she could explain, she didn’t want John to catch her watching him just now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  Marcelline made it to the car before doubling over. She pretended she’d dropped her keys in case Jonathan or Donna or Carly was watching through a window. She couldn’t breathe. The wine burned her stomach, which had already been scoured raw by everything else in this day.