down the river
“Based on the information given to us by your care provider, and what we’ve been shown these last few days, the Review Board has come to a decision.”
As far as hearings go, the BC Review Board’s small boardroom meetings were remarkably casual on most occasions. Josh had undergone hearings here before, but always with less fanfare; never the out-of-schedule nightmare he’s living now. The Review Board, comprised mostly of medical and legal professionals of varying familiarity, conducts the meetings as clinically as possible.
(Of course they do. They’re medical professionals; what else do they know?)
Emily, on the other hand, sits a few meters to Josh’s right in the small boardroom. Her presence isn’t unusual, but the role she’s playing is peculiar; she runs the show like it’s a court and she’s the prosecution inching him closer and closer to the noose. The effect of this is palpable: Josh’s shirt is sticky with sweat and it shows in the worried creases of his face.
“Previously, we saw fit that the defendant should be allowed access to the community, granted that he followed a number of conditions. In light of recent events, however, we believe that it would be best for him to serve the remainder of his sentence within a hospital.”
Josh isn’t able to process this immediately in the way it’s presented. It’s delicate, in both wording and delivery, given with a surgical precision intended not to upset. Josh’s psychiatrist is among the board, Mister Action Flick, and he’s got the face he has on whenever Josh is about to throw a fit.
Ultimately, it isn’t until the handcuffs come out that it sinks in: He’s fucked.
It takes three men to cuff him, one to each arm as the third locks his wrists together. The board calls for him to settle down, a command he barely registers and ultimately ignores. The men holding his arms, which Josh peripherally identifies as hospital workers, not true police or guards, don’t drop their grip as he’s restrained; instead, they make to shepherd him to the door and, presumably, to whatever asylum they have planned for him. These men, police or not, are bigger than him. He ceases struggling.
At the table opposite him, Emily stands with her lawyer, looking quietly victorious. Were it not for the air of the courtroom and the need for respect mandated by the review board, Josh could imagine her physically jumping for joy, leaping on top of the table and gloating: Did you really think you could win?
Did he? Did he ever think he had a shot in the dark, without the expensive lawyers and extensive public campaign of two years ago? The public sympathy the year before? The fact that he walked at all was a miracle; did he really think he could get away with it a third time?
Then he thinks: No, he hasn’t done anything this time—his crime is being an alcoholic, an affliction he picked up long before any prank, any death. Emily puppeteered this, and she did it better than he ever did; less gore and more legal rigmarole. After all this time, she came for the last of them.
Incensed, Josh spits at her, sitting prim and pretty: “Are you happy, you bloodsucker? My sisters weren’t good enough for you, so you had to take me out too?” The men attached to his arms restrain him as he tries to jerk his arms away, scowling.
Over the words of the boards, he adds, “Well, you got it, honey! They’re dead, and I’ll be lobotomized in a week. Maybe next time you can kill someone who actually did something to you.”
Emily looks like she wants to bite back a response, even with her lawyer putting their hand on her shoulder to hush her. After a moment, she shrugs it off and, between the sounds of the review board and her lawyer demanding that she stop, she takes a step closer. The space between them shrinks; it grows personal, even with the guards behind him and the lawyer behind her. Her face creases into a frown for a moment, and then, before he’s dragged away, breaks into a private, smug smile.
“Me? I’m just putting away the Washington that should’ve died on that mountain.”
After that, Emily’s lawyer pulls her back and Josh is dragged physically on, steaming.
Chris and Ashley sit further back, in the seats for friends and family (which are, of course, nearly vacant). On some level, seeing them comes with a feeling of pain: he worked hard to restore even a fraction of his image in these last two years, and judging from their presence, it worked. He’s certainly making a show of himself now, isn’t he? Chris look at him sympathetically; Ashley looks at her hands.
Vaira is absent. This realization hits him hard and rests rock-solid in his gut, stirs back up the bitter part of him that resides under his tongue. He thinks back on their last conversation and their mutual threats, and he knows: she ran, either to get out of town and back to London before he spilled the beans or to form a plan to silence him.
He knows: He’s spent a year working with a woman who watched and laughed while he fell out of step, who fled as soon as he was trampled. He had hinged his life and his future on her and detached himself from his friends, the ones still sitting in that room. All in order to work with her. A friendship. A partnership.
Josh laughs, an angry noise. The unhappy expressions on Chris and Ashley’s faces turn to that of unsettled anxiety, which only increases the noise. He’s still chuckling quietly when they manhandle him to the back of the board room.
Sitting there, quietly as a wraith, is Melinda Washington. Josh’s mother says nothing to him, and he is shocked silent when he sees her. She is thinner than she used to be, her hair greying without evidence of her obsessive touch-ups. She looks sadder, now. For the first time in who knows how long, Josh feels a pang of regret. She’s lost a husband, two daughters, and all that’s left for her is him.
Without speaking, he tries to tell her goodbye.
They pass her and leave.
— — —
The short trip through the office to the van is short and relatively quiet. Separated from Emily and the rest of them, his desire to struggle fades quickly and he deflates, allowing himself to be nearly dragged.
“You know, you don’t have to keep holding me. I’m not a fucking animal.”
Neither of them say anything, and they don’t let him go, but he likes to imagine the hold on his upper arms gets a little gentler. At the van, a third man steps out of the back and helps the others guide Josh inside. His original guards see him sitting pretty, speak with the other man out of earshot, and then leave. Josh’s last sight is of their backs turned before the van doors are closed off. Good riddance.
Rubbing his arms as best he can while cuffed—a job made easier by the fact that they aren’t traditional handcuffs, instead being two links connected by a short chain—Josh surveys the van. The other man, a scruffy-looking guy with maybe twenty pounds on Josh, sits on the bench across from him. Despite the fact that he’s wearing the same hospital uniform as the rest of them, this man looks a little raggedy. Josh wonders if he’s down on his luck or just a fucking slob. He winks at the man when his gaze lingers on Josh for a little too long for his taste, but he seems unperturbed.
Josh has been in a transport van, years ago; this one is shittier. Less secure. In some hospital vans, the entire back is built to feel more like a cage with two sets of doors, one securing whoever is inside and one for the actual back doors to the van. There’s no bars to this one keeping him contained, although he certainly feels like a prisoner regardless.
To Josh’s left is a wall with a grated window which allows him to see, with some difficulty, the people in the front seat. All he can see of the driver is the back of his head, which is sporting a rather fantastic bald spot. Tragic. The woman in the passenger seat’s high bun looks less ridiculous in comparison. Maybe if she sheared it off and slapped it on him they’d both look a bit less fucking idiotic, Josh thinks.
The messy man calls up to the driver that they’re ready to go, and Josh watches them pull away from the hospital, wringing his hands and feeling a mounting sense of doom.
He isn’t sure how long they’re driving for before one of them speaks to him. The stare of the man across from him has Josh sitting with his head ducked, forehead resting on his hands to try and curb his ever-increasing dread. When the woman in the bun finally addresses him, it takes him a moment to notice.
“Where ya headed, hun?” she asks, jokingly, in a thick Southern drawl. Josh laughs, bitterly, looking at his hands. It’s a few more moments of silence before he replies, mockingly, in an accent that’s intended to sound Minnesotan but lands closer to his native Canadian:
“It’s a beautiful day.”
If the woman is taken off-guard by this apparent non sequitur, she doesn’t show it. “Now, it doesn’t seem like you can see it too well from back there.”
“Guess not,” Josh replies.
The van falls back into strained silence for a moment, before the feeling of being watched forces Josh into speaking again.
“So, you’re a long way from home, huh?”
Before she answers, the woman’s head tilts thoughtfully. When she does, she finally turns to look at him, and in the same moment her voice changes: the cadence shifts, the tone deepens, her accent smooths itself out.
“Oh, love. You’ve got no idea.”
For the first time since his sentencing, Josh’s face lights up. Shock, disbelief, and joy all fight for shared custody of his facial features as he recognizes Vaira, disguise shed, and the realization breathes some life back into him.
A beat later, and he remembers: He threatened to expose her. The context of the discussion slips past his facilities as they lose the capacity for higher thinking. The blood drains from his face as he’s taken over by the need to get the FUCK out of there, skedaddle, BLOW THIS HOT DOG STAND.
Vaira seems to notice the change, because she manages to get out a “Hey—” before Josh has jumped to his feet. Before the Raggedy-Man Doll has the chance to get up, he kicks at the back door of the van, with little success. In his periphery, he registers that Vaira’s yelling at the driver—ordering the man to slow down—and suddenly the van is breaking, and Josh stumbles backwards against the grating separating the front seats from him.
The other man stands; Josh collects his footing. To the backdrop of Vaira’s shouting and his own pulse throbbing in his ears, Josh jukes around the other man and throws his weight, hard, against the metal doors of the van.
Suddenly, the sight of the interior of the van is replaced, ever so briefly, of that of the sky; and then of the trees; and finally, overwhelmingly, that of the road as he makes contact with it. The explosion of pain through his shoulder as he lands squarely on it gets little time to be appreciated as he keeps tumbling, coming to a stop on his back with what has to be a fantastic concussion and several hellish cases of road rash. Not that he’s really in a position to be able to tell.
After some time, the amount of which is honestly indeterminable to him by now, the glare of the sky above him is broken up by the silhouette of Vaira standing over him, unarmed and looking exasperated.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
That’s a good question. If he could take her in a fight before, he certainly couldn’t now. From what he can tell, he isn’t in a position to stand up on his own.
“T… Trying not to get killed and, uh, and failing spectacularly, I guess.”
Vaira sighs, kneeling down seemingly to make sure he isn’t in danger of dying. She’s not a doctor, but after wiping the grit out of some of his nastier scrapes and checking him over she seems content that moving him won’t result in him being paralyzed forever. She waves over the men as she responds.
“No, you idiot. I’m not killing you, I’m taking you home.”
Ordinarily, he would have doubted this, seeing as though he did threaten to tattle on her to her sister and New York at large. As he lays there, however, he notices she’s entirely unarmed, which is reassuring. He’s seen or heard wind of a few of her rodeos, and the girl loves her guns.
Josh allows the men to gingerly help him to his feet; a task he’s not really able to do right now on his own, seeing as though his hands are bound and there’s an excruciating pain in his shoulder when he moves his arm. Once he’s standing, he takes the effort to feel around his shoulder for the damage, a movement that is accompanied by a grotesque grinding noise. Something —his collarbone?—is very broken indeed.
She watches his self-examination, concern melting into fatigue. “You’ve really complicated this, you know. This was intended to be the part where we stage your dramatic escape, choking out our dear friend here on your way out, but I really doubt you’re up for that right about now.” She shrugs when he pauses to shoot her a glance. “Well, I would do it, but I’m not exactly the one handcuffed here, am I? Shame on me for not planning on you crippling yourself.”
“Maybe a heads up next time, then, instead of whatever the fuck that was.”
“The con’s less real if you’re in on it, honey,” Vaira scoffs, “And you’re a shoddy actor under stress.”
“And you, uh— you can tell that from, what, Skype arguments? I feel, I feel like I know a few people who might argue.”
“And as much as I would just love to hear their outlined points, we’re on of a bit of a schedule here! So if you could get to the point, that would be lovely.”
“Point is, pussy, I can fucking choke out a dude with a broken arm,” he scowls.
Vaira’s eyebrows arch upwards. “Then prove it, Dicaprio.”
Directing his attention from the argument at hand to the men—both of which are now standing uncertainly, watching—Josh takes pause. He’s certainly physically capable of strangling someone, but he sure doesn’t know these men.
She reads his hesitation: “They know what they signed up for, love. I’m paying them well.”
It takes only a moment from there for him to ready himself. Indicating that the man who had been in the back of the van with him should follow along, Josh staggers back to the vehicle. The man has to give him a boost up and into the interior, which is embarrassing to a part of him resting in the back of his mind, but after a few moments they’re both where they would have been.
“Alright. Uh, hold your breath?”
Josh has to have Mr. Slob Thomas sit and use the height advantage to actually raise his arms high enough to choke him out. He pauses, and not because of the pain, but steels himself: They know what they signed up for. He’s done this before, on people who didn’t know it was coming. He’s done it on someone who did. The only difference is that, this time, he’s not wearing a mask: it’s just him.
He knows how much time it takes for someone to pass out, and goes just shy of the mark. Enough to leave bruises— on the other man, of course, but also thick welts on his wrists, which scream out in tandem with his shoulder.
When it’s over, he sits down with a huff and pats the man’s back as both of them catch their breath. Vaira whistles through her teeth.
“We should probably get going, if you’re done hurting yourself. This little staging has taken a bit longer than I thought it might.”
A few gasps of air, and Josh stands back up. This time, it’s Vaira who helps him out, and she indicates the forest beside them. “It’s just a bit of a jog through here. Once we’re close to the other side, we can take care of you.”
They take one last glance back at the van before they go: the men are already setting up some scene that Vaira must have planned with them beforehand. Her final goodbye is jovial:
“Thanks for your compliance, gents! Au revoir!”
It feels enough to Josh. With it, the two of them turn and enter the woods.
— — —
“Before we do this, I need you to answer something.”
At the end of their trek, or what seemed close to it, Vaira confidently led the two of them to a site she’d apparently planned for the occasion. The marker was a tree that had been, at some point, split, resulting in a hollow depression when it healed. From the looks of it, something had grown or lived there– certainly, something organic remained. Inside, Vaira had taken the time to hide a backpack; a shabby thing that looked like any hiker might have lost. Taking off the worker’s jumpsuit she had somehow acquired, she was dressed in street clothes underneath. Before shoving it inside the backpack, she pulled out a pair of bolt cutters, and began to give him her offer.
“If we leave here, I’m going to be taking you with me to New York. Obviously, you can’t tell anyone that you’re with me, or how you escaped.”
Josh nods in understanding, but she stops him.
“More importantly, you won’t be able to come back here ever again. You have to leave it behind, forever. There’s no visiting Mum or Dad or your other friends if you go with me. And I mean that.”
Now, he hesitates, and she adds: “We’re not at the point of no return yet. You can still go back, say you panicked, tried to escape, and thought better of it. I can’t say that your situation won’t get worse because of it, but it’s an option you have.”
It begs the question: Stay or go?
When Josh thinks of home, it’s Vancouver. He spent most of his late life in Los Angeles, of course, after his father rose to brief prominence and decided to stay there full-time, but it felt like an extended vacation. The friendships he’d made in high school were lost long ago in the shadow of the mountain.
So, Vancouver. The memories he cherished of the city weren’t that of the last few years of his life, alone in a house meant to last him the college years he never finished; meant for three. They’re younger— his childhood, before even the worst of his episodes, just a child with his sisters, his parents, and his friends.
Chris and Ashley, despite everything, attended his sentencing and testified in his favor. Even his mother saw him off. For a moment, Josh can’t fathom writing these people in his life off, especially now that the number is a fraction of what it used to be.
The other side, however, is both Vaira and his freedom; a freedom not guaranteed by his imminent incarceration, alone in an institution where by no means should anyone ever bother to visit him. Vaira’s side is atonement, a goal he’s spent the last year dangling over his head like a carrot keeping him alive. Through Vaira’s work, he knows, he can finally put this behind him.
An institution is a nice thought, but it won’t help him. His face hardens; he reaches a resolution.
“Do it.”
She cuts the chain.
— — —
One taxi ride later and the two of them arrive at an out-of-the-way gas station. Josh walks around the back to wash the blood from the cuffs off of his wrists and from the road off of his face before tying a jacket Vaira had stowed away into a makeshift sling. It’ll hold up until she can dig up someone to check it out, he figures.
The gas station is shitty, but that was probably the point of choosing it. Vaira’s scoping out the shitty first aid section when Josh walks in and from what he sees, it consists mostly of band-aids and Bactine. He supposes that could work for the road rash.
While she frowns in that aisle, Josh makes his way to the back and grabs a Coke and a bottle of aspirin. On his way to the counter, he pauses and grabs an ugly ball cap from a rack—the Giants, he notes with a vague displeasure, not that he even watches sports—and adds it to his small pile.
The attendant, a younger kid who could very well still be in high school, looks dubiously at Josh’s injuries and makeshift sling.
“Car accident,” Josh supplies helpfully.
Vaira walks up behind Josh, tossing some generic antibacterial ointment onto the pile. She slides the attendant a ‘hundo and gives him a pointed look.
“Uh– yeah. Is that all?”
Josh taps his chin in thought.
“Do you have any Reds?”
After the gas station, Vaira calls up another taxi. She directs the driver in a different direction from before. Josh looks at the label on his newly-bought aspirin for all of half of a second before popping off the lid and downing some like a shot. It takes him a few seconds to get it down, even with a Coke chaser.
Vaira watches, dubious. “Could you wait until we’re home to kill yourself, please?”
He shoots her a sorrowful look. “Me? Never. Just taking the edge off, babe.”
“It’s a shame this date of ours got a bit twisted,” she replies, mock rueful. “I’d just hate for you to die and let all of this planning of mine go to waste.”
He fishes the antibacterial ointment out of the shitty plastic gas station bag and opens it in front of her, rubbing it melodramatically into a scrape on his forehead. “Aftercare is the most important part, you know.”
She barks a laugh, smirking. “Easy, cowboy. Save it for later.”
Josh isn’t sure how long it takes, but Vaira finally stops the driver and the two of them step out onto an empty street. He pulls the ball cap further down his face, regardless, paranoia creeping in through the silence. She sets off confidently– again, in the opposite direction– and Josh follows her, falling into a terse silence.
It’s some twenty minutes that they walk before Vaira stops them in front of an open storage complex. She tells him to wait out front while she enters, and he obliges her, despite the vague anxiety gnawing at him. He smokes one of the Reds.
When she returns, another ten minutes gone, Josh has already burned through one and is on his second, which he reluctantly drops and grinds underfoot. What a crime to add to his tally, he thinks— littering.
The end of the journey finds Joshua being led into a medium-sized storage unit full of his worldly possessions. Standing in the doorway, jaw agape, Josh looks around at the neatly stacked boxes and furniture: most of it is from the back rooms, from the looks of it, which held things he couldn’t bring himself to dispose of. Things from school, mostly, and from old film shit he’d taken part of while he was still the so-called prodigal son. In the back, behind a carefully-built divider, he thinks he makes out the items from his garage. His sister’s things.
Vaira gives him a few moments to take it in before speaking.
“Sorry, love. It didn’t seem like it was going your way, so I relocated your things in preparation. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Josh hovers closer to a nearby box, stacked with items from what used to be his office. Near the top is a family photo—Beth had won something at school, he’d had his head too far up his own ass at the time to really care about what—and in celebration they’d all gone out to some ice cream parlor. He’s crammed in the corner of a booth, arm around the back to make extra room for his sisters shoved in beside him. Beth’s making a face at the camera. Hannah’s holding onto her twin’s arm and positively beaming. Josh smiles around a straw. It’s the only photo of them he hadn’t hidden out of sight.
“The rest of it is in New York. I rented out the apartment next to mine, and it’s all yours. Maybe I won’t even make you pay rent.”
A snort of a laugh, and she guides him towards the back. Just out of sight from the entrance is the pad she showed him how to make, plugged in and humming softly in the corner. Beckoning him home.
Tuned into his continued silence, Vaira speaks up again. “You’re awfully quiet. Is everything alright in there?“
He doesn’t laugh this time, although his mouth plays upward into a smile. “I… I, uh, yeah. I’m good.” Playing with a fabric hanging out of a nearby box, he continues, “I’m just… yeah. I appreciate you doing… all this. Not just busting me out, but, like…” He gestures to the storage around them. “Hell, I kind of expected them to take this shit out to the dumpster if, I was, um— if I went to the hospital.”
"Oh lamb, don’t worry about it too much. You’d do the same in my place, yeah? If you were as brilliant as I am, at least.” She chuckles. “But seriously, you and I are a team. Despite certain recent disputes, I wouldn’t leave you out to dry like that.”
The silence stretches on for a beat before Josh sighs and seems to deflate. “Right. Anyway, just… thanks. A lot.”
Vaira replies: “So? What do you say? Would you like to go home?”
With a final goodbye of a glance at the belongings around him, he nods. They step on the pad and go.
