Page 43 of Possessed By Shadows

“No. But I haven’t been to the garage.” She took the plate and began digging through the sugar for the donuts. “Thanks for breakfast.”

I offered to hold the plate while she dug. She finally retrieved the first one with white sugar covered fingers, stuffing the whole thing in her mouth. She waved at the door. “Unlocked,” she said with squirrel cheeks.

“Thanks, squirrel monster. What am I looking for inside?” I grabbed the handle and pulled it open, holding it for her. After getting out of the army, being homeless a while, and then in a mental ward for a bit, I’d come to live with Lukas. It had only lasted a few weeks before I’d met Micah. Our almost instant attraction and connection, had meant I moved in with him fairly quickly. I wondered if that was part of why Lukas treated Micah so poorly now. Jealousy? Or something else?

The unit looked the same as always. An almost sort of immaculate spread of space with too little furniture and very tight walls. Technically, Lukas’s apartment was bigger than Micah’s and my space. But it wasn’t laid out that way. It had to be the walls and lack of ceiling height that made if feel cramped.

I knew if left to his own devices, Lukas could actually be a bit of a slob. Which made me suspect that Sky was cleaning regularly. At least the common areas. I put the plate down on the kitchen island, hoping to contain all that powdered sugar to the marble countertops. That was the one perk of Lukas’s place, a full kitchen. Oven with stovetop, microwave, massive sink, a full-size fridge, dishwasher, and tons of counter space including the sizeable island.

It was all wasted on Lukas since he rarely cooked. But I did like to borrow his kitchen sometimes to make something special. Our little toaster oven didn’t give us much for cooking options. And the mini-fridge at home barely held a week full of groceries. But we didn’t have room for more. And since we made it a weekly event to restock the cupboards and fridge, it didn’t bother me. We had less food waste, ate out less often, and rarely ate more than two meals a day.

Micah called it fasting. Said it was a politically correct thing now, but he’d been doing it for years. His lack of morning personality meant he ate lunch before he went into work and usually dinner when he got home. That was it. But I recalled that being a very European way of eating too. More than a handful of places I’d been in my life hadn’t even offered breakfast. I was okay with breakfast food for lunch, and hoped to get home early enough to make exactly that before we both headed into work.

I pulled a towel out of a drawer and handed it to Sky. The sugar went everywhere. It didn’t matter how hard you tried to contain it. It was like glitter. “So what am I looking for?”

“I left the box open on his bed.” Sky didn’t even look at the open door to the bedroom, instead choosing to stare at her plate. “And no, I didn’t know.”

Know what? I didn’t demand though, but made my way to the bedroom. There was a closed lid box on the bed. It was almost like one of those fancy shoe boxes you could buy for storage. Not cardboard exactly, but maybe on the inside underneath the black linen-fabric? And I did know a lot about fabric these days thanks to my boyfriend being a total textile nut.

I opened it to find a weird array of stuff. From folded up pages, to a giant mess of orange prescription bottles. Was Lukas taking meds? I’d suspected something for depression, especially recently, but he hadn’t confirmed or denied any of it. I tried not to push. Just because I couldn’t take medications without severe reactions, didn’t mean he hadn’t found something that worked for him.

The bottles had pills in them. All of them. There had to be almost two dozen. I recognized a few of the names as anti-depressants. But some were anti-psychotics. All with his name on them, not mine. I knew they hadn’t been leftovers of mine. It had been a long time since I’d taken anything, and I wasn’t sure what the last one even was. But enough of these were familiar that I knew I’d taken many at one point.

The dates were all different, even a few different doctors. When I set the last bottle aside and began unfolding the paper, it appeared to be a lot of the instructions for the medications. The normal pharmacy paper that comes with a lot of the stuff, telling a new user what to expect for side effects and results. I always hated reading those, since side effects were always death or suicidal thoughts.

Maybe that was part of this. Was he on something that was affecting him in a negative way? But all these bottles seemed to be months if not a year old. Most still with a good number of pills in them. So, not used for long, if at all.

At the bottom of the stack was another file of papers. These were write-ups from his time as a cop. Stuff that seemed very mundane, like not showing up on time, or missing a scheduled shift, even one for “acting unprofessional during an interview”, whatever that meant.

The last in the stack were termination papers. That made me pause. It was a formal letter, including copies of a lot of the write-ups, citing the reason for termination wasas stated. Then a long list of grievances. All of which seemed minor until the end, which specified, “Mental evaluation cites unwillingness to get treatment for instability.”

Wait, what? There was an attached medical report. I’d had many of my own, including ones coming from the military when I’d been discharged. It was flowery words to describe that they didn’t think he was capable enough to continue working as a detective. Much like mine had been to continue to be a soldier.

My head was reeling now. Lukas hadn’t quit. He’d been fired. For mental health issues. My first thought was to be enraged for him, that he could fight this, get his job back. It was a long list of things of excuses, some severe like going AWOL, but most inconsequential, like paperwork missing or not completed, even small grammatical errors on documents. Why would any of that need to be in his employee records? Forgot a comma, well you’re fired, was a strange sentiment from the police force. How unruly had he gotten? All of this stuff was a glaze-over retelling with very minimal details. The military had done the same to me. An incident had been listed as a traumatic event in which had deteriorated my mental health. Lukas had at least a dozen very vague instances stated. Legitimately fired for being bad at the job, or pushed out?

No details of course. Nothing. Not in the box or that I could outwardly see anywhere. But the slew of drugs and many medical reports indicated he hadn’t been unwilling to try things, but either that nothing worked, or that much like me, he found he couldn’t take any of it.

Maybe none of this was about me at all. But about Lukas, whatever he saw, haunted him, and forced him out of his job. I really needed to get some answers from him soon because I no longer knew what to feel. Angry? Sad? Worried? Betrayed?

Sky stood in the doorway, still partially covered in sugar, but eyes watery. “He’s sick,” she whispered.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “In a lot of people’s definitions, I am too.”

“But you’ve worked through it. Micah helps.”

I had, and he did. Maybe that was part of the aggression Lukas had developed. He had wanted me to find a focus, and I had, in Micah. But he was still floundering. I really needed to find my brother and demand some answers.