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

basement was exactly as it had been just after Christmas, when Will had made trips, one after the other, to return decoration boxes to their offseason resting places. Looking around the room those months later, he felt buoyed by the fact that there was no snarling beast or knife-wielding intruder lurking through the bowels of his home. Finally, satisfied with his search, Will turned back towards the stairs.

The knocking began again.

Sharp and loud, and coming from the back corner of the room where the Bilco doors opened out into their small backyard. The knocking was coming from those doors, from the outside, Will realized for the first time. Whatever it was, it was in his backyard, in the night.

Will hesitated, his mind cycling between pushing open the doors from the inside from the basement, or rushing back up the stairs to the kitchen and peeking out at the yard from the window above the sink. His pocket buzzed, jostling the thoughts from his mind.

Wake up Will

“What?” He said to no one. And then another brief moment of thought. Before. Will unlocked his phone, flicked through his previous messages from Carrie.

You fell asleep on the couch didn’t you

Will?

Lol

Wake up Will

A wash of comfort, of familiar real-world talk. Of Carrie. Then three more knocks from the Bilco doors. Will bolted up the stairs, flew through the doorway to the kitchen and leaned hard against the sink. He flicked on the light switch next to him and the backyard was awash with an orange halogen haze.

Peering out the window over the sink, Will scanned the yard. There was nothing there. Just orange. Just haze. Just the night and everything it held. But there was no one there, that was for certain.

Except.

On the concrete landing just in front of the Bilco doors. A shape. On the ground. Something.

Calmly—or, as calmly as he could manage—Will opened the door to the yard and walked out, throwing a long black shadow across the orange field. There, on the landing by the doors to the basement was a mask. Chalky white. Rubber nose.

He bent down and took a closer look at the thing. A child’s Halloween mask. Chills up his spine. Rain from above. Soft droplets of water dinging the top of his head. A buzz, from his pocket.

You know what happens if you don’t get up

Will swallowed. Pinched his bare forearm. Actually pinched himself to make sure he was awake. It hurt. He was awake. He felt a cold rush of panic but he left the mask where it was and went back into the house. He closed—and locked—the door to the backyard, closed—and locked—the door to the basement.

“Fucking kids.” Another buzz in his pocket.

Go to bed...you’re gonna be up all night if you don’t get up

So he did.

In the morning Will went back outside, picked up the chalky rubber mask and examined it in the stark light of day. In the stark light of reason.

“Fucking kids,” he said again, and this time he meant it. Will tossed the thing into a neighbor’s garbage can on his way to the coffeeshop down the street. He never told Carrie about it.

Will spent as much of the day out of the house as he could, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through jobs online, looking for the right fit. Applying to some. Hearing back from none.

Carrie came home that Sunday evening and everything went back to normal. Or, as normal as things had become. They still hadn’t seen Carrie’s parents. Will even avoided Facebook in an attempt to block them completely from his sight, if not from his mind.

By springtime, Will officially went on unemployment. He was getting, per week, what he used to make in a couple of days. Payment due dates became increasingly panic-inducing scenarios. Sleep was lost. Fights were had. The “unimportant” bills went unpaid. Trips to the grocery store became mini-battlegrounds of attrition.

The little perfect house with its white picket fence was becoming less perfect, much smaller. Arguments replaced the quiet lazy sounds of Sunday mornings reading the paper. They cancelled their subscription to it in the new year, to save wherever we can, as Carrie put it. That, of course, also led to a fight.

The winter seemed endless. By March, it was still “freezing fucking cold,” as Will liked to say under his breath on his morning walks to the coffeeshop. (You know, those lattes cost us 30 bucks a week, Will.)

By April, Carrie and Will were barely talking. They were ghosts in the night, passing each other on their way to haunt the living. Carrie, to work. Will, to look for it.

By May, Will had managed to wrangle a couple of clients. He’d started to pull in some money—not much, but enough to make some of the due dates a little less stressful. Enough to make shopping trips a little less awful.

By June, their relationship was back nearly to normal, but Will was back on unemployment and Carrie’s job security was becoming less so. Though the days were getting longer, darkness was creeping in at all angles. It was, they knew, about to get worse than ever.

For months they were able to rely on savings to bail them out, some money they’d tucked away from their wedding and from all those nice big bonuses Carrie used to get. Even after the down payment, they had managed to save enough for a rainy day. But now it was pouring, and there was no end in sight.

In those darkest days, they clung to each other, Carrie and Will. At night, in bed, Will held on to Carrie like the whole damn world was being blown away by a tornado and she was his storm shelter. She did the same, inching closer to him late in the night as they both slept, texting him more during the day.

August was the worst. Financially, for sure, but also just in terms of stress. Carrie’s workload kept her at the office later and later every night,