Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  “Okay, you want to tell me why?”

  I can’t, Liz thought bleakly. I don’t even understand it myself.

  “He was on top of me,” she said. “Choking me.” It was absolutely true. It was also irrelevant. That wasn’t why she’d done what she did; it was only when.

  “Can anyone corroborate that?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Parvesh said. “We saw the whole thing. We live upstairs. We heard the noise through the floor and ran down. The kitchen door was open, so we let ourselves in, and we saw Lizzie on the floor with this man—” He nodded his head in Marc’s direction. “—on top of her. She’s Elizabeth Kendall and he’s her ex-husband, Marc. Marc with a c. He had his hands around her throat. We were so amazed that for a moment we couldn’t think of what to do. We just shouted at him to get off of her. But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even seem to hear us. Then Lizzie grabbed the bottle up off the floor and swung it, and that was when we stepped in. Am I missing anything, Pete?”

  “That’s how it went down,” Pete agreed.

  “Look at her neck,” Parvesh told Officer Brophy, “if you don’t believe us.”

  “I didn’t touch her,” Marc yelled. “They’re lying. She just went for me!”

  Officer Brophy ignored Marc while she took up Parvesh’s invitation. She walked across to Liz and leaned in close to look at her bare throat. “Could you tilt your chin up a little, ma’am?” she asked politely. “If it doesn’t hurt too much.”

  Liz obeyed. Officer Lowenthal whistled, short and low. “Nasty,” he murmured.

  “How’s the gentleman looking?” Brophy asked the paramedic. She shot Marc a very brief glance.

  “He’ll need stitches,” the paramedic said. “They both will.”

  “You just got the one ambulance?”

  “Yeah. The other one is out in Wilkinsburg.”

  “Okay, then you take him. Officer Lowenthal will accompany you, and I’ll follow on with Mrs. Kendall. Len, you ought to cuff him to a gurney in case he gets argumentative.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lowenthal said.

  “This is insane!” Marc raged. “Look at me! I’m the one who’s injured. I’m the one who was attacked.” He swatted away the paramedic’s hands and pulled the dressing pad away to display his wounds. The eye looked fine, if a little red. The semi-circular gouge made by the bottle ringed it quite neatly, but there was a strip of loose flesh hanging down from his cheek as though Liz had tried to peel him.

  “That does look pretty bad,” Officer Lowenthal allowed. “You just hit him the once, ma’am?”

  “Once,” Liz agreed. “Yes.” And hey, she thought but didn’t say, that’s a one in my column and a couple of hundred in his, so he’ll probably still win the match on points even if he doesn’t get a knockout.

  She shook her head to clear it. It didn’t clear. “Please,” she tried again. “My children. I can’t leave them on their own. I haven’t even seen them yet. They don’t know what’s happening.”

  The two cops got into a murmured conversation that Liz couldn’t catch.

  “Well, you go on in and talk to them,” Brophy said eventually. “While we get your husband’s statement.” Ex-husband, Liz amended in her mind. Took the best part of two years to get that ex nailed on the front, and nobody ever uses it. “They can ride with you to the hospital, if you want. Or if you’ve got friends who can look after them …”

  “We’d be happy to do that,” Parvesh said.

  “… then they can stay here until you get back. Up to you. You go ahead and talk to them now while we finish up in here.”

  “I’m making a lasagna,” Pete said to Liz, touching her arm as she went by. “If they haven’t had supper, they can eat with us.”

  Liz gave him a weak smile, grateful but almost too far out of herself to show it. “Thanks, Pete.”

  “I was attacked with a bottle!” Marc said again, holding fast to this elemental truth. “She shoved a bottle in my face!”

  “You told us that,” Officer Lowenthal said. “But she missed the eye. You got lucky there.”

  “I’m filing charges. For criminal assault!”

  “Okay,” Brophy said. “We’re listening, sir. Tell us what happened.”

  Liz got out of there. She didn’t want to hear a version of the story where she was the monster and Marc was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The trouble was, if she told the truth she had to admit that there had been a monster in that kitchen. She had no idea where it had come from, or where it had gone when it left her.

  If.

  If it had left her.

  Zac and Molly were sitting on the sofa next to an impassive police officer with a Burt Reynolds moustache. They jumped up when Liz came into the room and ran to her, hugging her high and low at the same time. The cop gave her a nod of acknowledgment, or else he was giving them permission to embrace.

  Zac’s arms reached around Liz’s shoulders, his head bending down to touch the top of hers. As soon as he hit puberty, Zac had started to grow like he’d drunk a magic potion, but he had yet to fill out horizontally even a little bit. Now, at age sixteen, he was a willow twig, where his father—shorter and broader and a whole lot harder—was more like the stump of an oak. He had his father’s red-blond hair, though, where Molly’s was jet-black and—just like her mom’s—had less tendency to curl than a steel bar.

  Molly had been born tiny, her five-pounds-and-one-ounce birth weight landing her right on the third percentile line, and she had stayed resolutely tiny ever since. Some of that was probably medical: severe bronchiectasis had played hell with her ability to latch onto the breast and feed, leading to a lot of broken nights and baby hysterics and a short-term failure to thrive that left a long-term legacy. At Moll’s sixth birthday party, only a few weeks before, Liz had served up the cake on a set of bunting-draped kitchen steps instead of the dining room table so Molly wouldn’t need to stand on a chair to blow her candles out.

  But Molly was tenacious, and she had a way of being where she needed to be. Right now, she squeezed her way past her big brother to get a better purchase on her mommy. Her stubby arms closed around Liz’s leg, where she held on like a limpet.

  God, Liz loved them so much. They were the counterbalance for everything else, for the years of abuse at Marc’s hands and the slow extinguishing of all her other dreams. Because of the kids, her life made sense and had a shape. A meaning. Because of them, she had never forgotten how to be happy, however bad things got.

  “Are you okay?” Zac asked her.

  “Mommy is okay,” Molly mumbled into the back of Liz’s thigh. “Mommy is fine.” Molly seldom asked questions about the things that really mattered. Generally, she made categorical statements and dared the universe to contradict her.

  “Mommy is,” Liz agreed, giving them an arm each. Taking as much reassurance as she gave. In actual fact, her head was throbbing and it hurt her to breathe. Her mind kept rushing away at reckless speed and then lurching to a halt, again and again. Even if you ignored the fact that she’d just had some kind of psychotic episode, there were lots of ways in which the word okay was a loose fit on her right then. But she very much wanted Zac and Moll to not be afraid anymore, to believe the crisis was over.

  “We had a kind of an … an accident in the kitchen,” she said, trying to keep her tone light, “but everything’s okay now.”

  Zac gave her a searching stare, reading in everything she wasn’t saying. “Then what’s the matter with your voice?” he asked. His gaze went down to the bruises on her neck and his eyes opened wide. “Oh, Jeez! Mom …”

  “Everything’s fine,” Liz repeated firmly, with a meaningful glance down at the top of his sister’s head. Molly’s dark, spiky hair was quivering slightly, a reliable emotional antenna. “And don’t curse, okay? I’ve just got to go to the hospital to get my hand looked at.” She held up the bandage for them both to see—a much safer topic than the bruises. “I cut myself on a vinegar bottle, whi
ch is why I smell like a half-made salad. Zac, can you take Molly upstairs to Pete and Vesh’s? They’ve said you can stay with them until I get back.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, buddy, it’s best if you stay here. You’ve both got school tomorrow and there’s no telling how long I’ll be gone. Plus I’ll just be happier if I know the two of you are here. Together. This doesn’t have to wreck your day.”

  Zac gave her a very intense look, indicative of all the things he wanted to say but couldn’t because Molly the limpet was right there listening.

  Finally, reluctantly, he nodded. “Call us when you’re coming back,” he insisted.

  “I will. I promise.”

  Liz bent to pick Molly up, but the instant rush of wooziness told her that was a bad idea. Instead, she delivered a fleeting kiss to the top of her daughter’s head and straightened again quickly. She led Molly over to the sofa and sat her down, the cop scooching out of the way to make room.

  Molly’s breathing problems, diagnosed before she was even born, made others—especially Liz—a little overprotective of her, but she was fiercely stoical on her own account when it came to physical hurt, picking herself up with a shrug after every fall. It was emotional upheaval that wrecked her, turning her into a tiny incendiary device packed with anxiety and woe. Liz wanted to give her five minutes of normality before she headed for the hospital. Zac knew what she was doing and played along, prompting Molly when Liz asked what they’d done with their day.

  “You made a tower, didn’t you, Moll?”

  “I made a Lego tower. For Harry Potter and Ron and Hermione and some dragons from the dragon lands. And the roof lifts off so the dragons can come out.”

  “That sounds cool.”

  “It’s very cool. I brought it back in the car so you can see it.”

  “And Jamie did your nails,” Zac reminded her.

  “Yes. Jamie did my nails.” Molly held out her hand with the fingers extended. Her nails had been painted in five Day-Glo colors—the colors of the rainbow with indigo and violet missed out. Jamie was Marc’s new partner, who had taken him in after he and Liz separated—soon enough and casually enough that Liz felt sure they must already have been having an affair. She’d done a good job with the nails, neat and even, and if nail varnish looked a little bit weird on a six-year-old it was still apparent that Molly was enormously proud and pleased.

  “Lovely!” Liz exclaimed.

  “It’s like Princess Peacock Feather,” Molly said. “She has all the colors. Yellow and pink and green and blue.”

  “Red and orange and purple too,” Liz finished the rhyme. “Only you don’t have pink or purple.”

  “Yes, I do!” Molly exclaimed. She held up her other hand, which had the rest of the spectrum and then some. Liz shielded her eyes, pretending to be dazzled. Molly giggled in delight.

  “Did you read a chapter of your book?” Liz asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Do one now with Zac, okay? And take a puff on your nebulizer before you go to bed. I’ll see you both in a little while. Be good.”

  “We’re always good,” Molly said with incontrovertible certainty.

  “Molly is,” Zac amended. “I’m chaotic neutral.”

  It was a roleplaying game joke, and Liz just about got it. “So long as you don’t crit-fail on your SATs,” she said. “Finish that test paper, okay?”

  “Trust me,” Zac told her. And Liz did, a hundred percent, so she didn’t nag him any further. She kissed them both and withdrew.

  Zac took over from her seamlessly. He kept Molly busy getting her reading scheme book, Little Witch’s Big Night, out of her school bag and finding her place in it. When Liz got to the doorway and looked back at them, he mimed “call us” with his thumb and his pinkie finger. She nodded that she would.

  She went back into the kitchen. She just about made it there on her own two feet. Then she had to lean against the wall for a few seconds while her gyroscope rocked and rolled and readjusted. The dizziness ought to have gone by now, surely? Maybe she had a concussion.

  Could a concussion dislocate your brain from your body? Turn you into a passenger inside your own skin?

  The crowd in the kitchen had thinned out. Marc and the guy cop, Lowenthal, and one of the two paramedics had left together in the ambulance. Parvesh had also gone, presumably upstairs to check on the lasagna. Officer Brophy was taking a statement from Pete, who was courteous but categorical. “Yes, I would totally say it was self-defense. He had his hands on her throat. He was trying to kill her.”

  Brophy asked Pete a couple more questions about where he was standing when he saw all this stuff and where Marc and Liz had been when he first came into the kitchen. Then she let him go, put her notebook away and turned to Liz. “We should go on over to the hospital,” she said as Pete waved goodbye and made his exit. “Get your injuries looked at. Get them photographed too. This is most likely going to court.”

  “I have to get treated at the Carroll Way Medical Center,” Liz said.

  The cop looked doubtful. “Will Carroll Way even be open outside of office hours? I know for sure it doesn’t have an emergency room. I’d better drive you over to West Penn.”

  Liz demurred. “Maybe I’ll just leave it,” she said. “I mean … I probably don’t need the hospital anyway. I’ll be okay. You could take the photos here, right?”

  Officer Brophy had no time for that idea at all. “Look, Ms. Kendall, you need stitches in your cuts and you need to be checked for a concussion. Plus, to be honest with you, you’ll weaken your position if you don’t do this properly. Your husband’s lawyer will say your injuries were trivial or maybe even invented. Take my advice and cover your ass.”

  But that was the point. Liz’s ass was far from covered. “I’ve got a terrible insurance policy,” she told the cop. “It’s from my previous job. There’s a co-pay unless I use that one place. I don’t have the ready cash right now, and I can’t afford to get into any more debt.”

  “Well, you’re between a rock and a hard place, Ms. Kendall,” Brophy said after a moment. “I can take the photos, sure, but I can’t give expert testimony on your injuries. Your husband might walk on account of the evidence looking less robust than it should. Plus, you know, you really should get looked at. Suppose you’ve got internal bleeding or something? I mean, how much is the co-pay likely to be?”

  “A couple of hundred, maybe,” Liz hazarded. But it could be anything. The last time she’d used the policy was when Zac got a wisdom tooth removed, and the billing had been unfathomably complex. One damn form after another after another until she wanted to scream and rip the damn things up and turn the small print into smaller and smaller print until there was nothing left.

  But there was no gainsaying Officer Brophy’s point about the evidence trail. If there was something she could do to keep this from happening again, she had to try—and kick the financial fallout into the middle distance. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

  The cop drove her to the hospital in her city-issued Taurus, keeping up a breezy conversation throughout as though she thought Liz needed to be distracted from what had just happened. After the fourth or fifth time Liz called her “Officer Brophy,” she told Liz firmly that her name was Bernadette. Beebee. She had been an officer for seven years, but had only been in Larimer for two of them. Before that her beat was Lincoln-Lemington, on the other side of Negley Run, which she said she missed a lot. “Nicer people there,” she said, “which is not to denigrate, but you know. Sometimes if you live in a shithole the shit sinks into you a little bit.”

  At any other time, Liz would have jumped to Larimer’s defense. She liked it here. Liked the urban farm, the shops on Bakery Square, the zoo. Liked walking over the bridge on a Monday evening to the Cineplex where they would pick up the staff discount and then, if she was feeling flush, she’d treat the kids to supper at the Burgatory (best milkshakes in the U.S.!) or Plum Pan.

 
They had moved here way back when Liz got pregnant for the first time. Marc had hated the new house and the new neighborhood, a serious step down from South Oakland where they had been renting before. “How the hell do you bring a kid up in a place like this?” he had demanded rhetorically, throwing up his hands to indicate the house, the street, the whole damn shooting match.

  “You make a home,” Liz told him, with the duh strongly implied. And that was what she had done. Happily, even joyously, one day and one brick at a time.

  The police car took a right onto Liberty without slowing down much. “Like rush hour,” Officer Brophy growled. “Where the hell is everyone going at this time of night?”

  It felt to Liz like a very fair question.

  Her thoughts dipped into the past again, but it was the more recent past this time: the moment when she picked up the bottle and hit it against the kitchen floor. Three times. The violent exhilaration when she pushed it into Marc’s cheek was disturbing enough, but that cold calculation was terrifying. She had smashed the bottle because if she had just swung it against Marc’s face it would have hit with a dull clunk and he would have gone right on throttling her. So she had used the tiled floor to make the bottle fit for purpose. Whatever had been inside her, moving her, had read the situation, found the tools and executed a plan while Liz had been thinking about pharaohs and icebergs and imminent death.

  The puppeteer had saved her. But she hoped more than anything in the world that it would never happen again.

  A brief, hiccupping whoop from the police car’s siren scattered her thoughts. A car mooching along in front of them pulled quickly to the right, out of their way.

  “Sometimes they pretend they don’t see you,” Beebee said. “Can’t make like they didn’t hear.”

  Fran Watts clawed her way up out of a shallow, sweating sleep. Quickly, in a panic, as if she were scaling a ladder and something nasty was right behind her.

  She came up fighting, scrambling backward, twisting to bring her legs up and kick her attacker right off the bed onto the floor before he could get a proper grip on her.