As my mother drags away my date, I wander in the direction of the den. As expected, my father is sitting in a reclining chair, readingThe New England Journal of Medicine. Dad’s black hair is now threaded with gray, as is his beard, but his dark eyes still scare the shit out of me. I instinctively straighten my posture as I carefully arrange the coats on an empty sofa.
My father looks up at the sound and peers at me over the rim of his reading glasses.
“Mason,” he says in a deep, rumbling voice several octaves lower than mine. “I’m glad you were able to make it.”
I nod.
“How is school going?” he asks. “At the top of your class, I assume.”
I nod again. “Yes, sir.”
“Of course,” my father says. “You’re my son, aren’t you?”
My father stands up, and I straighten my spine further, but I’m still not as tall as he is. He’s six foot one, and I’m an inch shy of six feet. It kills me that I didn’t even hit six feet. And when I stare at people, they don’t cower in fear. They just smile at me and maybe ask me if I want to go on a date with their granddaughter.
I’m nothing like my dad. And that disappoints the hell out of him.
“Well, I’m going to get washed up for dinner,” my father says as he brushes off his pants. “I’ll see you at the dinner table, Mason.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, letting out a breath as my father leaves the room.
I lag behind in the den. This one room feels like a castle compared to my dorm back at school. It’s nice to be able to walk across the room without bumping into furniture or tripping over Abe’s dirty laundry.
I cross the room and find myself at my father’s desk. It’s a large mahogany piece that cost a small fortune—I’m no stranger to expensive furniture, but I actually gasped when I saw the price tag on it when it was delivered last year. I sit down at the desk, wondering when I’ll have enough money to afford a den of my own that looks like this. I still have four years of medical school ahead of me, then a long, low-paying residency. My parents lend me a lot of money, but they wouldn’t be willing to bankroll me if I wanted to buy a house, and I’d never ask.
I try to open the desk drawer, but it’s locked. Typical of my father. I feel around under the drawer and immediately touch the outline of the key that is taped to the bottom of the drawer. My father is still using the same hiding places.
Open the drawer.
I hear the command loud and clear, as if someone is speaking to me, right in my ear. A deep male voice that I can’t identify. I look around the room, but nobody is there.
Huh. That’s weird.
Open the drawer, Mason.
“Hello?” I say aloud. Someone definitely said something that time. Iheardit. I glance over and see that the door to the room is closed. I’m alone.
The television? Could it be the television? I walk over to the set and examine it for a second—it’s not turned on. The stereo is off too. And besides, they saidmy name.
Where the hell did that voice come from?
I return to the desk and examine the drawer. When I was younger, it used to be a game to unlock my father’s desk drawers without him knowing about it. There was never anything interesting in the drawers back then. Usually, I just found some boring bills, and once, I found a copy of their mortgage, with numbers so high that it made me dizzy. I’m a little old now to be digging around in my father’s desk drawer. Still, I find myself pushing the key into the lock.
I don’t know what I had expected to find. But I hadn’t expected to find a .357 Magnum.
I pick up the gun, and a handful of bullets roll to the front of the drawer. I know how to shoot. My dad firmly believes in the right to bear arms and had taken me to a range for shooting practice when I was younger. We even went hunting a couple of times, but we didn’t kill anything, probably because I was so loud that I scared all the animals away. This gun feels lighterthan the ones I had held before, easily concealable in one’s pocket. But still really powerful.
Take the gun.
The sound of the command startles me, and I nearly drop the gun on the floor. I blink my eyes, desperately looking around the room.
“Who’s there?” I snap.
The room is empty.
I take a deep breath and study the gun in my hand. My father keeps it around for protection, but the house is already alarmed up the wazoo. There’s no way anyone is getting into this fortress, and even if someone did, isn’t there some statistic that showed that you’re more likely to accidentally shoot a family member than a burglar? Or something like that.
I’m certain now that nobody else is in the room. But this voice is real. I heard it loud and clear. And it seems to somehow know something I don’t.
