The Evolution of Mara Dyer

by Michelle Hodkin

  My mother shot him a withering look, and then the three of us walked out into the sub-Saharan humidity and into the car.

  I was happy. So happy that I almost forgot what landed me in the hospital in the first place. What landed my father in the hospital in the first place.

  “So what do you think?” my mother asked me.

  “Hmm?”

  “About the Horizons Outpatient Program?”

  Had she been talking? Had I not noticed?

  Either way, I was out of time. “I think—I think it sounds okay,” I finally said.

  My mother let out a breath I hadn’t noticed she’d been holding. “Then we’ll make sure you start ASAP. We’re so happy you’re coming home, but there are going to be adjustments. . . .”

  There’s always another shoe.

  “I don’t want you home alone. And I don’t want you driving, either.”

  I bit my tongue.

  “You can leave the house as long as Daniel’s with you. And if you come back without him, he’ll have to answer for it.”

  Which wasn’t fair to him. Which they knew.

  “Someone will take you to and from the program every day—”

  “How many days a week is it?”

  “Five,” my mother said.

  At least it wasn’t seven. “Who’s going to take me?” I asked, peering at her. “Don’t you have work?”

  “I’ll take you, sweetheart,” my dad said.

  “Don’t you have work?”

  “I’m taking some time off,” he said lightly, and ruffled my hair.

  When we pulled up onto our street, I was surprised to find myself annoyed. It was the picture of suburban perfection; each lawn meticulously edged, each hedge carefully trimmed. There wasn’t a single flower out of place, or even a stray branch on the ground, and our house was just the same. Maybe that was what bothered me. My family had been through hell and I was the one who put them there, but from the outside looking in, you’d never know.

  When my mother opened the front door, my little brother rushed into the foyer wearing a suit, pocket square and all.

  He smiled with his whole face, threw his arms wide open and seemed like he was just about to launch himself at me, but then stopped. He teetered on his toes. “Are you staying?” he asked cautiously.

  I looked to my mother for an answer.

  “For now,” she said.

  “Yes!” He wrapped both arms around me, but when I tried to do the same he jumped away. “Watch the suit,” he said, glaring.

  Oh, boy. “Have you taken over the operation of some Fortune 500 company while I was gone?”

  “Not yet. We’re supposed to dress up as the person we most admire and write a speech from their point of view for school.”

  “And you are . . .”

  “Warren Buffett.”

  “I didn’t know he was partial to pocket squares.”

  “He isn’t.” Daniel appeared from the kitchen, his fingers wrapped around a very thick book, the title of which I couldn’t read. “That was Joseph’s special touch.”

  “Wait, isn’t it Sunday?” I asked.

  Daniel nodded. “It is. But even with the entirety of spring break to practice, our little brother doesn’t appear to want to wear anything else.”

  Joseph lifted his chin. “I like it.”

  “I like it too,” I said, and ruffled his hair before he ducked away.

  Daniel grinned at me. “Glad to have you back, little sister.” His eyes were warm, and I’d never felt happier to be home. He ran a hand through his thick hair, creating a gravity-defying mess. I cocked my head—the gesture was unusual for him. It was more reminiscent of—

  Noah glided out of the kitchen before I could finish my thought, holding his own massive book. “You’re completely wrong about Bakhtin—” he started, then looked from my parents, to me, to Daniel, and then back to me.

  Scratch that. I’d never felt happier to be home until now.

  “Mara,” Noah said casually. “Good to see you.”

  Good did not do my feelings justice. All I wanted was to pull Noah into my room and pour out my heart. But we were under observation, so all I could say was, “You too.”

  “Mr. Dyer,” he said to my father, “you’re looking quite well.”

  “Thank you, Noah,” my Dad said. “That gift basket you brought kept me from starving. The hospital food nearly killed me.”

  Noah’s eyes met mine before he answered, “Then I’m thrilled to have saved your life.”

  8

  NOAH SPOKE TO MY FATHER, BUT HIS WORDS were meant for me.

  An unsubtle reminder of what he did for me after what I did to my father, and it stung. Everyone kept talking but I stopped listening, until my mother pulled me aside.

  “Mara, can I speak to you for a second?”

  I cleared my throat. “Sure.”

  “You guys figure out what you want for dinner,” she called out, then led me down the long hallway into my room.

  We walked by our own smiling faces on the wall, past the gallery of family pictures. When I passed my grandmother’s portrait, I couldn’t help but look at it with new eyes.

  “I want to talk to you about Noah,” my mother said once we were in my room.

  Stay cool. “What’s up?” I asked, and slid onto my bed until my back leaned against the navy wall. Despite everything, I felt oddly relaxed in my room. More like myself in the dark.

  “He’s been spending a lot of time here, which I know you know, but also after you were—gone.”

  Gone. So that’s how we were going to refer to it.

  “Noah’s become one of Daniel’s close friends, and he’s great with Joseph, too, actually, but I also know you’re . . . together . . . and I have some concerns.”

  She wasn’t the only one. Noah came to the hospital today because he knew about Jude. He knew I was in trouble. He came because I needed him.

  But was he there because he wanted to be? I didn’t know yet, and part of me was afraid to find out.

  “I’m nervous,” my mother continued. “With all of the pressure you’re already under—I’d like to speak to Noah about your . . . situation.”

  My face flushed with color. Couldn’t be helped.

  “I wanted to ask your permission.”

  A conundrum. If I said no, she might not let me see him. He was the only person on the planet who knew the truth, so being cut off from that—from him—was not an uplifting prospect. And if she didn’t let me see him, and he still wanted to see me after we had the chance to actually talk, sneaking around would be tough.

  But my mother talking to Noah? About my precarious mental health? I could almost feel myself shrinking.

  My fingers curled into my fluffy white quilt but I don’t think she noticed. “I guess,” I finally said.

  My mother nodded. “We all like him, Mara. I just want to set some parameters for you both.”

  “Sure . . .” My voice trailed off as my mother left and I waited in near-agony. Words like “schizotypal disorder” and “antipsychotics” would surely come up. Any sane boy would surely run.

  But after a few minutes, I realized that I could still hear my mother’s voice—were they talking in Joseph’s room? It was only two rooms away. . . .

  I stood, and leaned out of my doorway and into the hall to listen.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  Not my mother’s voice. My father’s.

  “I’d rather them both be here where we can watch them; his parents are in and out all next week, and there’s no supervision there anyway—”

  My mother wasn’t talking to Noah—she was talking to my father, about Noah. I edged out farther into the hall and slipped into my brothers’ bathroom—right next door to Joseph’s room—so I could eavesdrop properly.

  “What if they break up, Indi?”

  “We have bigger problems,” my mother said bitterly.

  “I just don’t like thinking about what something lik
e that would do to her. Mara’s really—she scares me sometimes,” Dad finished.

  “You think she doesn’t scare me?”

  Maybe I didn’t want to hear this conversation after all. In fact, I was becoming rather certain that I didn’t, but I appeared to be rooted to the spot.

  My mother raised her voice. “After watching what my mother went through? This scares the hell out of me. I am terrified for her. My mother was mostly functional, thank God, but if we knew then what we know about mental illness now? Maybe I would’ve realized it was more serious before it was too late—”

  “Indi—”

  “Maybe I could have gotten her the help she needed and she could have had a more fulfilling life—she was so alone, Marcus. I mostly thought she was eccentric, not delusional.”

  “You couldn’t know,” my father said softly. “You were just a kid.”

  “Not always. I wasn’t always a kid. I—” My mother’s voice cracked. “I was too close to see it—that there was something really wrong. And the one time I said something to her about talking to someone? She just—she just shifted. She was so much more careful around me after that; I wanted to think—I wanted to think she was getting better but I was too preoccupied with my own—in college, sometimes I went months without hearing from her, and I didn’t—”

  A long pause. My mom was crying. My insides curled up.

  After a minute, she spoke again. “Anyway,” she said, quieter now, “this is about Mara. And it’s scary, yes, but we can’t act like she’s an ordinary teenager anymore. The same rules don’t apply. I didn’t—I didn’t see the Jude thing coming.”

  My shoulder was pressed against the bathroom wall and it began to hurt, but I found I couldn’t move.

  “She’s a complicated—she’s complicated,” my mother finally said.

  She’s a complicated case was what she almost said.

  “And you really think Noah being here, you think that’s helpful?”

  “I don’t know.” My mother’s voice was stretched and thin. “But I think trying to keep them apart will only create a unit: them versus us. She’ll run in the opposite direction.”

  True.

  “And if Noah’s here, then Mara will want to be here, and that will make her easier to watch.”

  Also true, unfortunately.

  “She’s not in school anymore, she doesn’t have any friends here that I’ve met—it’s not normal, Marcus. But it is normal for a teenage girl to want a boyfriend. Which means that right now, Noah’s the most normal thing in her life.”

  Little did they know.

  “She’s comfortable around him. He pulled her right out of that depression on her birthday—I think he helps keep her in the here and now, and we need her to stay there. My mother was so isolated.” Her voice cracked on the word, and there was another long pause. “I don’t want that for her. It’s good for her to have someone her own age who she can talk to about things.”

  “I wish she had someone female,” my father mumbled.

  “He won’t take advantage.”

  Oh, really?

  “I’ve talked to him,” Mom added.

  Kill me.

  “Come on, he’s a teenage boy. I just don’t see what he’s getting out of this—”

  Thanks, Dad.

  “Mara isn’t really allowed out, they won’t be together at school—”

  My mother interrupted him. “If you expect the worst from people, that’s exactly what you’ll get.”

  “I wonder what his family thinks about him spending so much time here.” A diplomatic change of subject. Well played.

  Mom made a derisive noise. “I doubt they’ve noticed; they’re a mess. His father is some kind of business mogul and from what Noah’s said, he sounds like a raging asshole. The stepmother is always out because she can’t deal with it. The kids basically raised themselves.”

  I’d met Noah’s stepmom—and she seemed nice. Like she cared. Noah’s father, on the other hand . . .

  “Wait—a business mogul—not David Shaw?”

  “I didn’t ask his name.”

  “It must be,” my father said, and let out a low whistle. “I’ll be damned.”

  This I wanted to hear.

  “You know him?”

  “Know of him. There were some federal indictments handed down a year ago for the executives of one of his megacorporation’s subsidiaries—Aurora Biotech? Euphrates International, maybe? There are dozens, I don’t remember which.”

  “Maybe he needs a white-collar defense lawyer?”

  “Har har.”

  “It would be safer.”

  “That depends.” Dad’s voice was louder now. He must have opened Joseph’s bedroom door to leave.

  “On?”

  “Who you’re getting into bed with,” he answered, and left the room.

  9

  I EDGED AWAY FROM THE DOOR AND WAITED FOR my parents’ footsteps to disappear. The way they talked about me—what they thought of me—

  Especially my father. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he said.

  “I just don’t see what he’s getting out of this.”

  He thought I had nothing to offer Noah. That he had no reason to want to be with me.

  Even as I rebelled against the idea, a tiny, miserable part of me wondered if he might be right.

  I eventually pulled myself together enough to stave off a good cry—at least until I was back in my room. But much to my surprise, it was already occupied.

  Noah’s long legs straddled my white desk chair, and his chin rested lazily on his hand. He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t look anxious. He didn’t look anything. He just looked blank.

  You are my girl, he had said at the courthouse.

  Was it still true?

  Noah arched an eyebrow. “You’re staring.”

  I blushed. “So?”

  “You’re staring warily.”

  I didn’t know how to frame my thoughts, but something about Noah’s coolly indifferent tone and his languid posture kept me from moving closer. So I just closed the door and hung against the wall. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was discussing Bakhtin and Benjamin and a thesis about de se and de re thoughts as relevant to notions of self with your older brother.”

  “Sometimes, Noah, I feel an overwhelming urge to punch you in the face.”

  An arrogant grin crept across his mouth.

  “That doesn’t help.”

  He glanced up at me through those unfairly long lashes, but didn’t move an inch. “Should I leave?”

  Just tell me why you’re here, I wanted to say. I need to hear it.

  “No,” was all I said.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what it is that’s bothering you?”

  Fine. “I didn’t expect to see you here after . . . I didn’t know if we were still . . .” My voice trailed off annoyingly, but it took several seconds for Noah to fill the silence.

  “I see.”

  My eyes narrowed. “You see?”

  Noah unfolded himself and rose then, but didn’t approach. He backed up against the edge of my desk and leaned his palms against the glossy white surface. “You thought after hearing that someone who hurt you—someone who hurt you so badly that you tried to kill him—was alive, that I’d just leave you to deal with it on your own.” He was still calm, but his jaw had tightened just slightly. “That’s what you think.”

  I swallowed hard. “You said at the courthouse—”

  “I remember what I said.” Noah’s voice was toneless but a hint of a smile appeared on his lips. “I would say you’ll make a liar out of me, but I was one long before we met.”

  I couldn’t wrap my mind around his words. “So, what, you just changed your mind?”

  “The people we care about are always worth more to us than the people we don’t. No matter what anyone pretends.” And for the first time in what felt like a long time, Noah sounded real. He was still as he watched me. “I didn’t thi
nk you had to make the choice you said you made then. But if I did have to choose between someone I loved and a stranger, I would choose the one I love.”

  I blinked. The choice I said I made?

  I didn’t know if Noah was saying that he didn’t care about what I’d done, or if he no longer believed that I did it. Part of me was tempted to push him on this, and the other part—

  The other part didn’t want to know.

  Before I could decide, Noah spoke again. “But I don’t believe you have the power to remove someone’s free will. No matter how much you might want to.”

  Ah. Noah thought that even if I did somehow put the gun in that woman’s hand, I didn’t make her pull the trigger. And so in his mind, I wasn’t responsible.

  But what if he was wrong? What if I was responsible?

  I felt unsteady, and pressed myself more tightly against the wall. “What if I could?”

  What if I did?

  I opened my eyes to find that Noah had taken a step toward me. “You can’t,” he said, his voice firm.

  “How do you know?”

  He took another step. “I don’t.”

  “So how can you say that?”

  Two more. “Because it doesn’t matter.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand—”

  “I was more worried about what your choices would do to you than what the consequences would be for anyone else.”

  One more step, and he’d be close enough to touch. “And now?” I asked.

  Noah didn’t move, but his eyes searched mine. “Still worried.”

  I looked away. “Well, I have bigger problems,” I said, echoing my mother’s words. I didn’t need to elaborate, apparently. One glance at Noah’s suddenly tense frame told me he knew what I meant.

  “I won’t let Jude hurt you.”

  My throat went dry when I heard his name. I remembered the frozen frame on the psych ward television, the blurred image of Jude on the screen. I remembered the watch on his wrist.

  The watch.

  “It’s not just me,” I said, as my heart began to pound. “He was wearing a watch, the same one you saw in your—in your—”

  Vision, I thought. But I couldn’t quite say it out loud.

  “He had the same watch as Lassiter,” I said instead. “The same one.” I met Noah’s eyes. “What are the chances?”