Trespass Against Us, page 21
Eighteen
It’s another two days before the hospital agrees to discharge him. Given the lack of parental supervision Riley has to return to back home, he knows the staff aren’t exactly thrilled. But he’s eighteen and excels in the fine art of making a nuisance of himself.
“You’re going to have to keep on top of wound care,” his nurse says his last night there as she rewraps his bandage for him. “If it gets infected, it’ll be nasty.”
“I know,” Riley says, sitting on his hands to stop himself fidgeting. “It’s not like it’s my first rodeo.”
His nurse pointedly does not look at the matching scars on his cheek. “Yes,” she says, smoothing the end of the bandage down. “Well, hopefully you’ll keep out of trouble for some time now.”
Riley doubts that. He’s itching to get back to Dominic House, but only so he can put it in the rearview mirror once and for all.
If Ethan’s not waiting for him there, Riley thinks he might do something drastic.
When the nurse leaves, Riley waits the appropriate amount of time to appear respectful of the doctor’s orders before he slips from his bed, shuffling into a plush dressing gown and equally opulent slippers Vee had bestowed upon him from the gift shop downstairs.
“You deserve a little comfort,” she’d said when Riley had tried to turn them down. “Besides, as far as hospital fashion goes, they’re practically chic.”
Riley hates to admit that she has a point. They’re unbearably comfortable, and compared to the teddy bear gown he woke up in, the suave navy fluff is much more his style.
He shuffles out into the corridor, sparing tentative looks down both ends. Nobody is watching. The nurses station is out of sight around the corner. Riley tucks his hands in his pockets and strides off through the hospital.
It takes him some time to find what he’s looking for. He hasn’t had much cause to leave his hospital room, and worried about potential reporters lurking in hallways, he hasn’t ventured any farther than the cafeteria.
He doesn’t have to go that far now. Three more hallways and two turned corners. The door to a private room identical to Riley’s looms before him.
He doesn’t knock. When he tries the handle, it’s not latched. The door creaks open.
Josh is propped up against a mountain of pillows, eyes closed in peaceful sleep. Beside him, Jordan is settled in an armchair, magazine creased open atop her knee. When she sees him, her face creases into a smile. “Riley. What a surprise.”
Compared to the last time Riley laid eyes on him, Josh looks radiant. He’s a little paler, but he still has the warm glow to him that Riley is used to. He doesn’t seem like he’s in pain. There’s not even a morphine drip hooked into his arm. Riley takes that as a good sign.
Jordan doesn’t look nearly so good. Her hair is a mess, and her makeup is smeared as if she’d knuckled sleep from her eyes more than once.
“Wow,” Riley says as he steps inside. “You look like hell.”
Jordan raises a finger to her lips. A chill ghosts down Riley’s spine, but then Jordan tilts her head to the left and he realizes there’s one more person in the room.
Alejandro is sacked out on the couch in the corner, laptop open on the floor beside him, a pilfered pillow shoved so awkwardly beneath his head that Riley just knows it wasn’t there when he passed out.
“The idiot’s barely gone home since Josh was admitted,” Jordan says. “I’ve had to drag him out to eat and shower because he was starting to stink up the place.”
Quietly, Riley eases himself down in the much-less-comfortable plastic chair on Josh’s other side. “Who’s been dragging you home, then?”
Instead of answering, Jordan snaps the magazine she’d been reading closed, and Riley gets a glance at the cover for the first time.
It’s a cheap tabloid. The kind of shit Riley’s mom leaves sitting out on the breakfast table after long hours of working the night shift. The headline reads HOAX OR HORROR STORY? HAUNTED HOUSE HOWLS AGAIN!
Riley’s distaste must show because Jordan smiles ruefully. “Sorry. Reading material around here is kind of scarce.” Her fingers beat against the glossy cover. “Kind of interesting to be on the other side of this, though. Usually, I’m the one narrating other people’s tragedies.”
The picture that accompanies the headline is a shot of Dominic House, alight with blue and red. Riley can make out a grainy ambulance with his gurney being loaded into it. They’ve paired it with a zoomed-in photo of Jordan’s face as she leans over him, weary and rattled.
Riley wonders if he ought to be grateful that it’s her and not him. He wonders what the article says. He wonders if, this time, the denizens of the internet have deigned to treat them with a modicum of compassion instead of fascination.
Jordan offers him the magazine. “Want to borrow it?”
“No,” Riley says decisively.
Jordan laughs quietly, setting the magazine down. Riley notices for the first time her nail polish is chipped. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen it anything less than perfect. “God,” she says, cracking her neck. “I’d kill for a decent cup of coffee.”
“I wouldn’t call it decent, but I could probably smuggle one from the cafeteria if you wanted,” Riley offers.
“Yeah?” Jordan asks, eyebrow raised. “And how much would that cost me?”
“Eight bucks,” Riley says.
“For a single cup of coffee?” Jordan asks. “Your prices just get steeper and steeper. A girl could go broke around you.”
“She still could yet,” Riley says. “I got the feeling the police were really hoping there were some charges I wanted to levy against you—and if they couldn’t find them, they’d be happy to make some up.”
Jordan pulls a face. “At the very least, I’m guilty of gross negligence—”
Riley pitches his voice up. “‘Don’t worry about that—that’s what we have insurance for.’”
She looks at him dryly. “Mimicry isn’t your strongest talent. Don’t give up your day job.”
Riley kicks his feet up on the corner of Jordan’s chair. “My day job fired me, so it seems like I’m free to pursue whatever I want right now.”
Jordan’s face drops in dismay. “What? Didn’t anybody call to say you were in the hospital?”
Riley had missed two shifts while recovering from surgery, and once he’d finally been reunited with his phone, his messages had been full of increasingly frantic calls culminating in a stern “If you can’t be bothered to come in, don’t come back.”
Chantelle had sent him over a dozen messages. The first one featured nothing but a photo of the tabloid Jordan had been reading followed by a string of question marks, so any hope she didn’t remember Jordan’s visit had died a quick death. Riley had deleted the rest of her messages without reading them.
“Anybody who might have thought to call was also in the hospital,” Riley points out. “It’s fine. If they hadn’t fired me, I was going to quit.”
Jordan doesn’t immediately reply. Riley’s gaze slips back to Josh. Finally, he says, “The others told me he broke his back. That he won’t be able to walk again.”
Jordan sighs. “May not be able to walk again,” she stresses. “Spinal injuries are complicated.”
“How’s he holding up?” Riley asks.
“You know what? Surprisingly well.” Jordan huffs out a laugh. “He always was the strongest out of the three of us.” Then: “It probably helps that he doesn’t remember jack shit.”
Riley’s head snaps back up to her. “What?”
“It turns out falling from the second floor of a derelict house can wreck more than just your spine.” She pauses. Riley wonders if he’s supposed to laugh. He’s rarely heard something less funny. “Doctors say he might get the memories back over time. Might not.”
Riley takes a moment to digest that. “Good.”
“Good?” Jordan repeats skeptically.
Riley thinks about what the past two years have been like, the long nights of staring at the ceiling, wondering how much of what he remembered was fact or fiction. The nightmares that sank their claws into more than just the delicate skin of his face to leave their scars behind.
He thinks about what it might be like to have the privilege to live in a world where he didn’t have to worry about what may live in the haunted corners of every place he stepped.
“After everything we all went through,” Riley says, “somebody deserves to sleep easy at night.”
Jordan doesn’t answer immediately. Her fingers knot together in her lap, white at the knuckles. “I feel like I have a lot I should be apologizing to you for.”
“Maybe,” Riley allows. “But I needed to go back. I’m glad I went back.”
She doesn’t look like she believes him. “I know you probably think you needed closure, but—”
“It’s got nothing to do with closure.” Ethan flashes through his mind, the warmth of his smile. “Well, not in the way you mean, anyway.”
Jordan’s quiet for a second. “The police wanted all the footage we filmed.”
Riley had anticipated that. “Did you give it to them?”
Jordan leans back in the seat. “No. I wiped it all shortly after you lot were sent off to the hospital. Alejandro regaled them with the tale of his terrifying walk from Dominic House, and I took the distraction to sneak away.”
That, Riley hadn’t anticipated at all. He suddenly understands the police’s fixation with her. “That’s evidence tampering.”
“You call it evidence tampering—I call it covering our asses.”
Riley snorts. “So. Still feeling agnostic?”
Jordan laughs. It sounds painful. She runs a hand through her hair. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I am. What I do know is that if people saw the things we caught on film, most of them would think it was a prank. But some of them wouldn’t. And some of them would want to go there to find out themselves.”
The idea of anybody deliberately seeking out Dominic House ever again makes Riley’s stomach turn. Even now, with Father Thomas and Jacob gone, it feels . . . sacrilegious. Like playing with fire. “Some places men weren’t meant to tread.”
“Some places,” Jordan says, “have a body count I don’t want to add to.”
“What are you going to do now?” Riley asks. “With the show, I mean.”
“Keep ghost-hunting,” she says instantly. “And if the channel wants to axe us, we’ll go back to being independent.”
Riley raises a brow. “And if you wind up in another place with a body count?”
She grins at him. “Then I guess our equipment will malfunction again.”
That’s good enough for Riley. He gets to his feet, casting one final glance at Alejandro, asleep in the corner, Josh passed out in the bed. Then he looks back to Jordan. “About that twenty-five grand,” Riley says. “Is that still being honored?”
“Of course it’s still being honored.” Jordan frowns. “Hell, I told the suits we should have doubled it as hazard pay, but they said insurance was already on their ass for paying for private hospital rooms for the lot of you.”
At least that answered that. “How soon?”
“Should be in your account by the time you’re discharged,” she says. “Why? Have you got big plans?”
“Thinking of going on a road trip,” Riley replies nonchalantly.
“Oh?” Jordan asks, interested. “Anywhere good?”
Riley smiles at her. “No clue,” he says. “But the company sure will be.”
Before
Eventually, people stopped talking about Dominic House. They stopped talking about Riley. A school shooting two states over. A celebrity overdose in New York. Abuse allegations among the Hollywood elite. Riley’s tragedy became old news, shoved aside to make room for fresh horrors.
Riley, who lived with that horror every waking moment, could barely fathom how much his life had stretched to accommodate the weight of it.
Every morning he woke from nightmares and stared at the ceiling until his alarm went off. He showered quietly, so as not to wake his mother, recovering from the night shift. Buttered toast for breakfast when there was bread. Nothing when there wasn’t. One crowded bus ride into town and seven hours of making coffee, feeling the prickle of eyes on his face; TV-screen familiar but unplaceable, a dozen news cycles out of date, his scars a compulsion unto themself.
A bus ride home. Empty hours of watching TV on the couch, canned laughter ringing in the empty apartment. A text from his mom, the same as the one above it, and the one above that: can you pick up groceries tomorrow?
Sure, he texted back, the most they’d spoken in days.
The clock hit midnight. Like a robot, Riley undressed and climbed into bed. Beside him, Ethan smiled, trapped beneath his ageless glass.
Rinse. Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Every moment, Riley thought of Dominic House, of its smudged windows, its towering walls. The chapel’s cross threatening the sky like the blade of a knife. His skin crawled with imaginary flame, and his scars ached beneath imaginary fingers.
I could go back, he thought every morning as he lay in bed, waiting to rinse and repeat. I could go back. Ethan’s there. He’s still there. I know he’s still there. I could—
This alarm went off, and Riley rinsed and repeated.
Two years after Dominic House—after Ethan—Riley stood behind the counter jabbing the rusty buttons of the register. Next to him, Chantelle tugged his sleeve and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Jordan Jones?”
Jordan smiled at him, red hair, red mouth.
You can understand why I had to approach you, she said.
I can see that you need time to think about things, she said.
I’ll be waiting to hear from you, she said.
And Riley went home, and he sat on the bed that carried him through a sea of nightmares every night. At his elbow, Ethan watched, waited.
In the morning, Riley would lie in bed. He would stare at the ceiling. He’d think sad thoughts about a happy boy. He’d suffocate beneath his misery. One step closer to brain death with every day.
Rinse. Repeat.
Riley picked up his phone. He called the number. He opened his mouth and said—
Nineteen
In the morning, Riley stuffs what little has migrated to the hospital with him into a complimentary plastic bag, changes into a clean set of clothing Vee had ferried him, and stuffs his wallet and phone in his back pocket. His chest still aches, but the bandages are fresh, and he signs himself out without a backward glance.
Outside, the sun is searingly bright. Riley stands on the curb and blinks against it, hand held high as he tries to squint into the distance. There’s a bus stop somewhere nearby. He recalls from last time he was here. For the life of him, he can’t remember which direction it’s in.
A horn blares and a car comes to a stop in front of him, right beside the NO DROP-OFF sign. The window rolls down and Vee leans out. She’s wearing expensive sunglasses he knows she didn’t own a week ago. “Get in, loser. We’re going shopping.”
“You know I haven’t seen that movie,” Riley tells her and cracks open the passenger door.
Inside, the air-conditioning feels like a blizzard. Riley pointedly turns the vent away from himself, but Vee ignores him, peeling away from the sidewalk too fast for the hospital parking lot. She’s not wearing her sling, and her cast looks clunky against the steering wheel. He’s reasonably certain she’s not meant to be driving yet but knows better than to say anything.
“So,” Vee says, “you want to tell me why I had to find out you were checking out from Jordan of all people?”
Riley would like to know that, too, considering he’s reasonably certain he hadn’t breathed a word to Jordan either. “Sorry. I was going to call when I was home.”
She looks over her sunglasses at him, unimpressed. “Or you could have told me yesterday afternoon, when I spent three hours demolishing you at Scrabble in the hospital rec room.”
Riley could have. He’d decided not to. “Sorry.”
She sighs, the car slowing to a stop at a set of traffic lights. “I thought after everything, you might finally learn how to reach out. I guess that was a lofty wish.”
“I didn’t want to bother you,” Riley says, and it has the advantage of being mostly true.
“Riley, if there’s anything that the last two years have taught us, it’s that things go better for all of us when we’re there for one another, don’t you think?” The light goes green. Vee adds, “If there’s something else you want to tell me, now’s the time.”
Riley stares straight ahead, hands tangled in the plastic bag sweating in his lap. He teeters one way. He teeters the other.
From the corner of his eye, he can see a barely healed scab along Vee’s jaw. A bruise above her eye, hidden by the wide lenses of her glasses.
Riley loses the fight with himself. “I’m leaving town.” Vee’s head snaps to him. The car swerves, and Riley clutches at the dashboard. “Eyes on the road! Eyes on the road!”
She looks back out the windshield, but her hands are clutching the wheel. “What?”
“You heard me,” Riley says.
“But college—”
“I never applied.”
Silence sits. Vee doesn’t look at him, but he can tell she wants to. “You didn’t tell me.”
Riley lets go of the dashboard. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“You’ve been planning to leave for that long?”
Riley hadn’t thought so. The longer he considers it, the more he realizes he might have been. “I don’t know.”
Vee says, “And I assume you’re not going alone.”
Riley doesn’t look at her. “No.”
Silence again. Finally, they turn onto Riley’s street, drifting to a stop in front of his apartment building. They sit for a moment, Vee letting the car idle, and then she sighs. “And you’re sure?”
