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

luck, Carr,” Will said as they sat on their new blue couch in their new white living room and he flicked through the little pictures on the screen hanging from the wall. “It’s just a shitty stretch, that’s all. Happens to everyone. We’ll be okay.”

Will wasn’t an overly positive person, so his attempt at reassurance had done little to calm Carrie’s nerves. If anything, his illogical conclusion had worried her. Instead of talking about it, though, she got up from the couch and stomped up the stairs and slammed the door to the bedroom, leaving Will on the couch with a sea of bad options on the screen in front of him.

In that moment, Will could feel the space between him and his wife. A kitchen, some stairs, and two unlocked doors separated them, sure, but the distance seemed so much greater. Like an ocean or like space or like the end of a novel. Behind him, Will heard the sound of the heat clicking on and felt the wooden pop of the floor under his feet. Above, Carrie’s footsteps paced softly.

The late October winds kicked up and the whole world slowed down when Will’s father had a heart attack. A big one, the surgeon had told him in the waiting room late in the night. The halogen above Will flicked blue and white as he sat on a cruddy green couch, listening but not listening as the doctor described how his father was resting and alive but not yet out of those dark woods.

He was okay, Will’s father. Eventually, he was okay. It was a process and an ordeal and real life seemed less real for a while but things settled back down into normalcy. Still, death lingered. The thought of it, anyway. It was just enough to raise the hackles.

If you were paying attention.

If you were looking in the right places.

The morning after Halloween, Will got up first, left Carrie to lie there a bit, blinking away the dream of the chalk-white lady. She closed her eyes, shook it from her brain. Finally, Carrie walked downstairs, the smell of coffee drifting along with her.

The holidays drifted in, as they tend to do, slowly at first and then barreling through like a storm. Carrie and Will spent Thanksgiving at Will’s parents’; Carrie did cartwheels to sell that decision to her own parents, saying Will needed to be close to his dad that year.

Christmas was more difficult. The truth was, Will hadn’t spoken to Carrie’s parents since their phone call fight months earlier. The feud lingered well into the new year.

Death lingered, too.

First it was Chris Cornell, the singer, and that one landed hard for Will. Either before or maybe after it was Bowie and Prince and then a former president. Somewhere in the middle, Will lost a great aunt and Carrie lost a couple of older cousins. They all kind of blended together, though, and Carrie kept finding dead mice in the house and an election went the wrong way and still, after all those months, Will couldn’t land steady work.

And still, after all those months, Carrie wasn’t back in the good graces of her increasingly mercurial boss.

One Friday night, deep in the wintertime, Carrie was (grudgingly) in San Francisco on a business trip with her boss, and Will was alone in the house. Carrie’d left that Thursday and wasn’t to be back until late Sunday night. Will’s phone would buzz every now and then, next to him there on the couch, with a text message from her.

San Fran tacos are good

San Fran tacos are also 9 dollars more than CT tacos

Miss you

Love you

Kill you

Will looked at his phone again, squinting as the white harsh light of the still-cracked thing illuminated his otherwise dark living room.

Kiss you

He chuckled. The basketball game blared from the TV on the wall in front of him. Leaning back on the blue cushion, Will felt the world start to slip away, the announcers’ voices swirling into the nonsensical ether of encroaching sleep. The knocking from the basement stirred him back to life.

He sat up, instinctively checked his phone.

Kiss you

He waited for a moment, listening for the sound again. Hoping it wouldn’t come. Of course, it came. Three knocks, echoing from down somewhere in the basement. Will felt his stomach suck upwards as tiny icicles of fear ran down his head to his groin.

He got up from the couch, padded slowly to the kitchen. The door to the basement loomed in front of him, its gold-plated knob shining in the moonlight. Or maybe that was just the way it seemed to Will, standing there and hoping against all the world that the knocking sound would stop.

It didn’t. It came, louder now and more distinct. Four knocks this time. Echoing, real. Then again. And again. Each time exponentially louder than the last. Each time exponentially more real.

The buzzing in his right hand made Will jump. Carrie, texting.

You fell asleep on the couch didn’t you

Will didn’t answer. He quietly put the phone in his pocket, felt it buzz once more. Standing directly in front of the basement door, he grabbed the round gold knob and twisted.

Another knock, just then, but this time much different. Just one, but this one seemed to shake the whole house at its foundation. Will let go of the doorknob, felt the tile under him move. He held his hands out to his sides to steady himself. To keep the world from drifting.  An overreaction, Will thought, but still.

The unreason of the situation gripped him then, thoroughly and completely and he could feel it in all the nooks and crannies of his insides. In that place where terror and curiosity meet, Will found the strength to reach out and to turn the knob, flick on the light switch to his right and walk down the wooden stairs. They moaned under the weight of his feet, each wooden squeak as loud as a car wreck in the otherwise still house.

The