The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

“She’s in there.” He was a couple of steps ahead of her. She couldn’t see his face. She just wanted to see Will’s face and to tell him. Carrie tried to tell her husband not to open it—she started saying we’re not ready—but Will threw the door open anyway.

That’s when it appeared, standing in that backlit door frame, slices of orange trickling out into the dreamscape hallway. It was a woman possessed.

She was chalk white, but not just in skin color. She appeared to have been carved from one large piece of chalk and all of her was white, so white that she was something most unnatural. In her left hand she held a red leash that held back a black dog.

And then suddenly Will was gone—off the screen of her mind—and Carrie was face to face with the chalk woman in the doorway. The black dog on the red leash barked once and threatened to lunge forward. Carrie stepped back, opened her mouth in a silent scream. The dog barked again and shook Carrie from her nightmare.

She woke, in her bed in the dark. And then she was in the sky near the stars, falling.

It was hopeless to fight, to try righting herself. She was surrounded by blackness, the occasional pinprick of starlight flashing by as she fell. Arms and legs and feet flailing and that horrible sense of unbalance. Her stomach lurching with each new turn and the sky and the ground flipping and switching and swirling into the same damn thing.

And then Carrie realized that she was wrong. She wasn’t falling. She was sinking, and just like that, she was under the water. Deep underwater and what she had been doing was burying herself further under. Not breathing.

Panicking. Chest tightening. Looking up through bulging eyes, those pinpricks of light now the glistening of water at the surface, a million miles above her.

“Carrie.”

A voice from somewhere not where she was. She was so far down, too far down for voices.

“Carr!”

Will. It was Will, again, but still so far away.

And then the whole world lurched to the side. The ocean shook, the light of the surface blinked out entirely and Carrie gasped while she rose, straight up now in her bed, in her room, in the soft light of morning.

Will sat next to her, on his side of the bed. She was awake now, truly awake this time but still gasping for air, still trying to catch the breath that was stolen from her in sleep.

“Jesus, Carr. Are you okay?”

When she found her voice, finally, Carrie just smiled. She reached her right hand out, touched Will’s shoulder, and squeezed it just a little. “Thanks. That was a bad one.”

Carrie and Will moved into the house early in the summer, but they continued to pay the rent on their one-bedroom in Brooklyn. They had lots of stuff, both in the apartment and in a storage facility, and their work schedules simply didn’t allow them to take the time needed to move properly. So they moved improperly and over the course of several months.

Finally, by late August they found themselves in their silver Jetta, making the last of countless trips up the parkway, the transition from buildings to trees less jarring each time. The trunk and back seats were packed, but they were done. They crossed the Connecticut line and, just like that, Will and Carrie were former New Yorkers.

The new place was nice. It had a little yard with a firepit dug out in the back. Carrie liked the white picket fence. Will liked the finished basement. They both liked how big it was, comparatively, of course, in relation to their Brooklyn apartment. They talked often in those days about getting a dog.

Autumn arrived and the house became drafty at night. The doors creaked and the floorboards moaned. The house contracted and expanded and breathed when it had to. Routines formed and life changed. New things became comfortable things. Slowly, the house became home. Slowly, it all began again.

Late in September, Carrie’s parents got into an argument with Will. Normally tepid, especially around the in-laws, this time, Will exploded. He even threw his phone, cracking its screen down the middle as the glass rectangle skipped across the kitchen tiles. Carrie, more shocked than angry, tried to make things better. She gave up after a week of being in the middle of an unwinnable war.

Later, on a random October Wednesday, Carrie was called into her boss’ office and he laid into her about her slipping job performance. He spoke in generalities, frustrating Carrie into an uncomfortably obedient silence. She’d been “put on notice,” whatever the hell that meant, and all of a sudden, her steady, high-paying job with its nice big Christmas bonus became less steady.

Life was, slowly, becoming less steady for Will and for Carrie, but the drip drip drip of bad news didn’t seem overwhelming. It seemed like life.

Will’s freelance work had dried up at the end of the summer—right after they’d left Brooklyn, actually, and he was feeling less and less connected to the world he’d known so intimately. A decade’s worth of contacts and clients seemed to lose interest once he’d left their city.

Then, on a mid-October Friday morning, Carrie clicked the button and opened the garage door and turned the key in the Jetta and nothing happened. Frantically, she called the office and apologized before she even said hello, and then she and Will and their neighbor Harold had jumper cables attached to his little green Honda, and Will was pushing down on the pedal but nothing was happening. “Dead,” Harold was saying from behind the wheel of his Honda. The engine was dead.

Carrie made another call, and a tow truck was on the way. She was late to work that day, and then again the following Monday and Tuesday when her Uber drivers each passed by the white picket fence and the stalled Jetta in the driveway.

“Bad