Best Laid Plans (Garnet Run 2)

He kicked off his shoes and slid back into the warmth of the sleeping bag. As he closed his eyes and pulled his hood up over his head, Rye’s brain produced a phantom whiff of the fake pine smell those candles had produced, and a vision of those fake cranberries attended it. His mom would set the boughs out on the shelf over the television and the table next to the kitchen.

He wondered if she still did.

Chapter Six

Charlie

Rye was back.

Charlie saw him come in from the doorway to the office and stayed out of sight.

He looked tired, angry, and sheepish, and Charlie’s heart beat a little faster. Rye looked like a wild animal that had crept cautiously close enough to feed.

He said something to Marie that Charlie couldn’t hear and Marie pointed him toward the back.

“So,” Rye said, standing in the doorway. “You, um, helping me. With the house...thing. What would that look like?”

He had his arms crossed over his chest, nearly hugging himself.

Charlie felt a rush of satisfaction and relief. He was going to be able to fix this. He wasn’t going to have to watch Rye get crushed by a falling beam, or do everything wrong, or get taken advantage of by untrustworthy contractors.

“Well,” he said, keeping his voice calm so he didn’t scare Rye away with his enthusiasm. “I’d need to come into the house and see what we’re dealing with. Then you and I would talk about what your goals are for the space. And we’d go from there.”

“Fine.”

“I’m assuming there’s no electricity?”

“So?” Rye was instantly defensive.

“So, I’d like to come while it’s light out so I can see.”

“Oh. Right. Okay.”

Rye glared at the floor, hands fisted by his sides.

“I could meet you there in about an hour if that works?”

“Okay.” Rye almost seemed to squirm away from the word. “I don’t know why you’d want to do all this work to help me, but okay.”

“I’ll meet you there in an hour,” Charlie said.

Rye nodded and took a shuffling step.

“Thanks.” He said it without turning around and left before Charlie said anything. He seemed be limping a little.

* * *

Rye was sitting outside on the sagging front step, hood up and arms wrapped around his knees, when Charlie pulled up. His long, dark hair tumbled out of the hood and around his shoulders, and when he looked up his gray eyes flashed. He looked young and sad.

When he stood, though, that glare was back; Charlie was starting to think it was just his default expression, so he decided to ignore it.

In fact, Charlie decided he’d just do what he’d do if he were alone, and not worry about Rye. He’d walked through a lot of houses and evaluated a lot of construction jobs. This wasn’t any different.

His willpower on that front was instantly shattered when they walked inside and he saw a hole in the floor and Rye’s wince as he put weight on his right leg. His heart started to beat faster at the thought of what might have happened.

“Did you fall through the floor?”

“Uh, kinda stomped through it.”

Charlie got slowly to his knees and shined his keychain flashlight into the hole in the floor. The boards were water-damaged, certainly, but he couldn’t see enough this way to determine if there was foundation damage too.

He didn’t even like to contemplate all the things Rye could’ve been exposed to—six different types of mold, animal droppings, rabies—

He cut off his thought spiral and pictured windshield wipers clearing the troubling images from his mind.

In the first year after his parents’ death, Charlie had been in survival mode. Take care of Jack, make sure they didn’t lose the house or the business, learn how to be a grown-up.

It was the year after that, around his nineteenth birthday, when the images had begun—broken, bloody thoughts forced into his head against his will: turn on the garbage disposal—see a mangled hand. Stop at the gas station—see it going up in flames. Watch a coworker climb a ladder—see it falling and smashing them to the ground. That they didn’t feel like his thoughts at all made them even more upsetting.

He’d gone to a therapist then, trembling as he told her about the horrifying pictures slipped unbidden into the slide projector of his mind. He had admitted his deepest fear: that they were his thoughts—dark, violent thoughts that meant something dark and violent about him.

She’d settled that fear by giving them a name—intrusive thoughts—and an antidote: the windshield wipers that scraped the images away as if they were a fallen leaf or a sluice of rain. He’d used the trick ever since. The intrusive thoughts had lessened over the years, but had never gone away. Now when they happened, they were mostly about Jack. The fall he’d taken in the autumn had exacerbated them for several months.