The Hollow Inside

by Brooke Lauren Davis

  He wouldn’t abandon her. No matter what she did, he couldn’t do that.

  She used the hospital phone to try to call him, but this time, a cold, anonymous voice informed her, The number you have dialed has been disconnected.

  She tried again three more times. Listened to the same recording three more times.

  Then she tried calling the church. It was Sunday, and he always got there early. But one of the female volunteers answered.

  “Can I speak to Pastor Holland?”

  There was a long pause on the other end. “Is this Nina?”

  Nina cleared her throat before she answered, “Yes.”

  “It’s Jill. Jill Bowman. It’s so good to hear from you, sweetheart. I’ve been so worried. How are you doing?”

  With just a little hesitation, Nina told her that she’d had the baby. Jill congratulated her, sounding sincere, asking a million questions about what he looked like and how big he was.

  “Is my dad there?” Nina asked.

  Another long pause. “I think he just needs a little more time. I’m sorry, Nina.”

  Nina swallowed, afraid she wouldn’t be able to speak.

  “Ellis has tried talking to him about letting you come home,” Jill continued. “Many times.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your father hasn’t budged yet, but he’s going to keep trying.”

  Nina knew she was supposed to say thank you, but she still couldn’t bring herself to speak.

  “It’s just—well, honestly, I feel kind of responsible. Ellis feels awful. We should have kept a tighter leash on him.”

  Nina stuttered, “On—what?”

  “You know,” Jill said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “On Jameson.”

  “Jameson,” Nina repeated, still not understanding.

  “Right.”

  Jameson.

  “Ellis told me everything, sweetheart.”

  Nina knew that couldn’t be true. If Ellis had told her everything, they would be having a very different conversation.

  “What exactly did he say?”

  There was another pause, and Jill sounded embarrassed when she spoke again. “He said he caught you and Jameson in the cabin. And, when pressed, Jameson came clean to your father.”

  Nina felt as if she were choking.

  “He should have known better, Nina. And we’re going to make sure he pays some kind of child support.”

  Jameson? Jameson?

  “Ellis and I will keep talking to your daddy. I’ve been praying for you every night, Nina. I hope you’ve been praying, too.”

  “I have,” Nina whispered. “Has—has Jameson told anyone else?”

  The beat of silence that followed told her he’d already lied to everyone in Jasper Hollow.

  She called him next. She was so angry, her body shook with it, and it scared her, how everything she felt now seemed to be too big for her body, like if this went on much longer, then she might just shatter to pieces. She thought of how much everyone would love that, if they overwhelmed her out of existence, and it made her anger burn even hotter.

  When Jameson answered the phone, she could hardly speak. She could only say, “Why?”

  Jameson sounded self-conscious on the other end, like that one word was enough for him to feel the rage and the hurt boiling inside her. He was probably running his fingers through his hair, the same way his brother did whenever he was nervous, Nina thought. “Ellis said this is the best way to protect you, Nina,” Jameson said. “To protect both of you. He told me your dad would never let you come back if he found out you were sleeping with a married man.”

  “But it’s a lie,” Nina growled. “My father won’t forgive me if I keep telling lies.”

  “You think this is easy for me?” Jameson said, his voice cracking with desperation. “Everybody hates me now for knocking up the preacher’s daughter. I’m doing this for you!”

  “You’re doing this because your brother told you to.”

  “This is the only way to keep his family together and maybe convince your dad to let you come back home. Don’t be so stubborn, Nina. Just let me help you. Just let me take care of it, and everything will be fine.”

  Chapter 27

  I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO be here.

  I know I’m not supposed to do anything until I hear from Mom. But Melody told me at the Dawn Festival that Jameson kept some things from the cabin, which might mean he could have something useful. And if I’ve already gotten it for Mom by the time I see her again, then maybe that’ll soften the blow when I tell her Ellis’s latest good news.

  Jameson is sullen the entire way back to Jasper Hollow, slumped against the door, only speaking to me when we start winding up Mattie Mountain and get to a fork in the road, and I ask him, “Right or left?”

  “Left,” he mumbles.

  I lower my window to let the warm night and pine-spiced air roll over us.

  Jameson’s house is a remnant of the old Jasper Hollow, before Ellis saved it. The Jasper Hollow from Mom’s stories. The windows are boarded over. Every inch of the yard is covered by rusted frames of old cars, stripped of their wheels and most of their paint, weeds sprouting from their busted windshields. A foldout chair sits on the sagging porch, surrounded by an army of empty brown bottles—enough alcohol to send most people to the hospital, but he managed to drive all the way to the restaurant just to cuss out his brother.

  He rolls out before I even put the truck in park, landing on his knees in the gravel, then draws himself up with all the dignity he can muster and staggers toward the front door. I follow him in.

  The phone is already ringing. Jameson ignores it, flopping down on the couch and closing his eyes. After three more rings, it cuts off, but it starts up again a minute later, and Jameson growls, “Make it stop.”

  When I answer it, Jill is on the other end, sounding worried. “You made it all right?”

  “Just fine.”

  “He didn’t bother you, did he? I really wish you had let Neil go.”

  “No, I’m fine. No issues.”

  “We’re on our way, but we’re stuck in traffic. It might be another hour before we can pick you up. Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

  “I’m fine, Jill. Really. Thanks.”

  When I hang up, Jameson is snoring, half on the couch and half off it. I poke his shoulder to make sure he’s really sleeping before I start looking through his things.

  His yard tipped me off, but a few seconds of looking around the inside of his house confirms it—Jameson is a hoarder. He’s got five mismatched lounge chairs jammed into his living room, even though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t get many visitors. There are towering stacks of newspapers and catalogs. A bike in the kitchen with a twisted wheel. Boxes full of baseball cards, Little League trophies, and old clothes. A litter box in the hallway, even though I haven’t seen any cats. A cabinet with a shotgun.

  The place is cramped and cluttered and dirty. The exact opposite of Ellis’s. I’m sure people shake their heads and wonder how two brothers could wind up living such different lives. But I might understand it a little better than most.

  This is how I think it is for Jameson—he had his path laid out before him when he was a teenager. He was never as smart or ambitious or athletic as Ellis, so he had no real future prospects aside from staying in Jasper Hollow, marrying a nice girl—maybe even the preacher’s daughter. He’d get a decent job at one of the local places because even though no one liked him as well as his brother, they liked him well enough.

  But when he took the fall for Ellis, this town that had been his home no longer welcomed him.

  Ellis should be grateful, but it was clear at the Watering Hole that he can hardly stand to look at Jameson. He can’t hide his brother away in the little box where he kept Mom’s bow, a memory that he can take out only when it’s convenient. No, his brother is a living, breathing reminder of his shame, parading right out in the open, even if no one else recognizes it.

  Jameson h
as no friends left. No family. Just this mess of a house. I understand what it’s like to want to build the life that you think you deserve. To surround yourself with useless things, just to feel like you have a place in the world. To take ownership of what little you can.

  Unfortunately for me, all this junk makes it really, really hard to figure out what I need.

  Look for something that might remind Ellis of me, Mom had said. The manuscript had the desired impact on Ellis, but she wants to take it a step further. I suggested using the bow somehow, but she’s decided to keep that for herself. So I need to find something else in this mess that we can use.

  My heart starts beating too fast to think clearly, a combination of nerves and rising panic that this was a wasted risk.

  When Mom finally comes to me for news, all I’ll be able to tell her is that Ellis is about to be a whole lot richer, that there’s no fix for the way he hollowed her out, that I can’t save her.

  I start pulling on closet doors, rifling through shelves of medicine, towels, and blankets. Then I open one near the front of the house and meet a wall of dark that sparkles with floating specks of dust, and when I step into it, I nearly trip down a flight of stairs.

  It’s a basement. I put one foot on the first step and wince at the way it creaks. But I can still hear Jameson snoring in the living room, so I hurry down the rest of the way.

  The floor is concrete and sheeted in a thick layer of slippery grime. The only light is a single, naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. The small space is cluttered with boxes, crates, and trash bags. Immediately, I start digging.

  I don’t have all night to look, so I go through everything with frantic speed, holding up objects to the dim light and tossing them aside. There’s an assortment of car parts, old appliances, broken furniture, and boxes of magazines and stained paperwork. I don’t bother to put anything back where I found it—it’s so chaotic down here, I doubt Jameson will notice what I’ve displaced.

  Jill said that traffic might give me an hour before they get here, but that’s not a guarantee. Each minute that slips past, my hands get slicker with sweat and my heartbeat crawls up my throat. I come up with excuses that I can give if anyone catches me down here, but not one of them is convincing.

  I notice that the things closest to the stairs appear to be the least worn. It would make sense that the stuff near the back wall would be the oldest, and the last time Jameson had anything to do with Mom was years ago, when they were teenagers. I focus there.

  Stacked under a few crates is a box so aged that it looks like it’ll fall apart at the seams if I try to pick it up. I rifle through and find that it’s full of framed photographs. Some black-and-white wedding pictures of people I assume are his parents. Some school portraits of Jameson and Ellis.

  And then I find something that makes me take a breath so sharp that I suck in dust and have to swallow down a coughing fit, eyes watering.

  It’s a drawing of a sunflower on the back of a receipt. I’d recognize Mom’s artwork anywhere.

  It’s still in the frame. I pick it up, gently, reverently. She only told me about it once, in a story about how she and Ellis had gotten drunk and she’d drawn this for him, not long before their relationship ended.

  But Jameson is the one who ended up keeping it.

  I don’t have time to consider what that means, because then someone says from right behind me, “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  For a second, I can’t breathe. Then I turn and wrap Mom up in my arms.

  “Quiet. Quiet,” she snaps. She grabs my shoulders, nails pinching, and holds me away from her. Her eyes are too sunken, her cheekbones too sharp, her skin so pale, it looks gray. There seems to be less and less of her every time we meet, and I wonder if there’s going to be anything left by the time this is over.

  “Are you eating enough?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she says in a hard voice that isn’t open for discussion. I close my mouth. “This isn’t the time to be losing your head.”

  “You left me.”

  She sighs. “It was only a few days, darling.”

  “But—”

  “You need to trust me. That’s the only way we can make this work.”

  She looks into my face for a long moment, pressing her lips together like she wants to say something else. But she doesn’t.

  “How did you know I was here?” I ask.

  “I told you I’d be watching. And I also remember telling you not to do anything like this without talking to me.”

  “But you said—”

  She turns her sharp eyes on me again. “Stop pretending you did this to help. You did this to prove something.”

  I look down at my boots and bite the inside of my cheek.

  But then I square my jaw and meet her eyes. “Ellis is getting his own TV show,” I tell her.

  I can see the way she flinches, like someone shoved a knife between her ribs. I knew it would hurt her, and I planned to be more tactful about it, but maybe there’s a tiny bit of me that still resents the way she abandoned me.

  She shakes off the information, saying, “We’ll talk about this later.” Then she shifts her focus to the framed drawing in my hands. Her breath catches when she sees it, like she wasn’t quite prepared. She reaches for it with unsteady fingers, like she’s reaching toward the girl she was when she drew it. But she stops just short.

  “We need to get out of here,” she says.

  I follow her up to the main floor. Mom pauses at the top of the stairs, listening for the steady rattle of Jameson’s breathing. Then she walks slowly, quietly, to the front door. I glance at Jameson when we pass through the living room, still sprawled on the couch, his head hanging over the armrest and his handsome face turned to the ceiling, his mouth open vulnerably.

  Mom gets the front door open quietly but not soundlessly, and I look over my shoulder again. When I’m certain we haven’t woken him up, we both step carefully onto the front porch. Mom pulls the door closed behind me, and then we’re free.

  She brought the van with her—I can just barely see the back end of it through the branches, where she hid it in the trees. I’m looking at it when I take my first step down the stairs.

  My foot lands just half an inch too far, and my heel comes down on the edge of the step.

  I slip.

  I fling my hands out to steady myself, and Mom rushes forward to catch me, her arms around my waist. She steadies me, and I manage not to fall.

  But I drop the drawing.

  The frame hits the edge of the bottom stair, and the glass shatters.

  Loud enough to wake Jameson.

  Mom says, “Go.”

  The glass in the frame is mostly destroyed, but the sunflower drawing is still stuck inside, so I scoop it up, and we make a run for the van. We’re just a few yards from it when I hear Jameson’s door bang open.

  I fling the van’s back doors wide and toss the drawing in, and I’m about to jump in after it when Jameson yells from his front porch, his voice numb with shock, “Nina?”

  He recognizes her.

  Shit shit shit shit shit, he recognizes her.

  The van’s wheels are already spinning, and I have to throw myself in before I’m left behind. The tires catch, and then we’re tearing back down the mountain, and I wrench the doors closed behind me.

  It takes me a few tries to crawl to the passenger seat because I slam into the walls every time we hit a sharp turn.

  A horn blares. I whip my head around and see Jameson’s truck catching up to us, swerving around a curve.

  “Shit,” I hiss.

  Mom is already going as fast as she can without sending us over the side of the mountain, and maybe we’ll be able to stay ahead of him for a while longer, but once we get to town, someone is bound to notice and call the police. And once the police get involved, this is all over.

  “Mom?”

  She keeps her eyes on the road. Thinking.

  “We have to st
op,” I say. “He recognized you. We have to talk to him. Maybe we can convince him not to tell anyone. It’s our only option.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Mom—”

  Then she takes a sudden right and slams on the brakes.

  “What are you doing?”

  The nose of the van is up against the mountain, the tail still sticking out into the road.

  The street behind us lights up, Jameson coming on fast.

  Then Mom steps on the gas.

  The van hurtles backward, and I slam forward, busting my forehead against the dashboard. The flash of pain between my eyes is enough to blind me for a few seconds. But I hear everything.

  The van rams into Jameson’s truck, and the sound is so loud, it fills my skull. The windows shatter, metal screeches against metal, and the whole world quakes around me. The last time I heard this sound was when we crashed the van through my father’s garage door, the night we ran away.

  I reach for her, because I’m certain that we’re about to plunge over the edge.

  But we don’t. Jameson does.

  We slide to a stop, and there’s a flash of relief as the van stills, but then I can hear Jameson’s truck rolling down the side of Mattie Mountain. On and on and on. And there’s nothing for Mom and I to do except stare at each other and listen. The lights from the dashboard shine in her blue-black eyes.

  When it’s over, I step out of the car, legs trembling so hard, I fall. The first thing I see is the guardrail, split like a rope. By the time I crawl to the edge and peer down, Jameson’s car has settled on a ridge.

  The boy who kept Mom’s drawing all those years, crushed like a tin can.

  “Phoenix. Phoenix, get back in the car.”

  Mom’s hands are on my shoulders, hauling me up. She shoves me into the passenger seat and slams the door. Then, just like that, we’re on our way back to Jameson’s house.

  “I told you,” Mom says. “I told you. You should have waited for me. I could have gotten it myself. This didn’t need to happen.”