by M. R. Carey
The woman whimpered again.
“Okay?” Liz prompted, squeezing just a little bit harder.
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh God, please! Let me go!”
There was a moment when it could have gone either way. The thing inside Liz, the puppeteer, was seriously considering breaking the woman’s thumb. It was reluctant to let her—to let the both of them—just walk away with no real souvenir of the occasion.
No! Liz found some purchase at last. The ruthless, sadistic calculation gave her something to push off from. She flailed inside her own flesh, uselessly truncated, unable to find the point where her nerve endings connected to her floating, futile point of view.
But futile or not, it had an effect. The feeling of disconnection strobed quickly, off and on, her fingers twitching as they responded intermittently to her will. Liz fought to maintain that control, to push it further as the other part of her, the puppetmaster part, retreated. Its triumphant self-assurance was shot through now with doubt and anger. It hadn’t expected this counterattack.
Liz flexed her fingers, surprised and overjoyed when they responded. She went for broke, dropping her arms to her sides so that the woman’s hand slid out of her grip. Eileen Garaldi found her feet and scrambled away, her eyes full of tears and her cheeks red. “I’m calling the police,” she yelled. “I’ll sue you.”
The puppetmaster wanted to lunge at her but Liz was pulling in the opposite direction. Caught between the two impulses, her body swayed a little on the spot.
“I seriously doubt it,” Liz said. Liz’s mouth said. “But go ahead if you want to. I’ll see you in court. And in some other places that aren’t so well lit.”
The woman broke and fled for the passenger side of the SUV, which drove away with a melodramatic squeal of stressed rubber.
Liz staggered back to her own car, so weak at the knees she felt as though she was about to go sprawling full length on the asphalt. She got inside and just sat there for a while, eyes closed, until the last frigid remnants of that alien presence melted out of her.
I’m going mad, she thought. Or already there maybe, her will and consciousness broken into separate pieces that were at war with each other, that took turns to come out and play.
As before, she came back to herself by tiny increments. She didn’t try to drive for around half an hour. There was no dizziness this time, no loss of balance, but the sense of dislocation was if anything even stronger than before. She needed to be absolutely sure her body would do what she told it to. She tried it out, one muscle at a time, putting it through its paces. Fortunately, there was nobody left in the parking lot to watch her. The school bell had rung long before and the other parents had all departed.
By the time Liz finally started up the car and eased it out into the street, there was no sign of the SUV. No sign of the police either, to her huge relief. For all she knew, though, there could be a general alert out for her by this time. She might get pulled over at any moment. She might get tasered and cuffed right there in front of her daughter’s school.
Under the circumstances, she didn’t feel up to driving around the block to the SuperFresh and getting in the week’s groceries. She went home instead, and sat in the parked car for a while longer wondering what the hell she should do next.
She couldn’t live like this. Nobody could.
Maybe hitting back against Marc and coming out of it in one piece was a gift horse she didn’t want to examine too closely. But she had just picked a fight with two complete strangers. Assaulted them. Turned a pointless wrangle about a parking space into an armed standoff.
And even now, some small part of her—or maybe it wasn’t small at all, but only (for the moment) far away—was thinking that she should have taken it further. Should have done some real damage to make absolutely sure those two impeccably shiny ladies got the point.
No, no, no. It had to stop. Had to. That voice had to be not just silenced but dug out of her brain and safely disposed of.
Liz went into the house at last and called the Carroll Way Medical Center. She gave her name and her policy number and asked if she was covered for a psychiatric evaluation.
“Has it been recommended by a medical professional?” the receptionist asked.
“Not exactly,” Liz admitted. “But I had … kind of … an accident last month. I went to West Penn. They probably sent along a summary of treatment or something?”
“They sure did, Ms. Kendall. It’s right here on your file. But it’s just a note, not an actual referral.”
“So I’m not covered?”
“Well, let me talk to West Penn and have them clarify. I’ll get back to you shortly.”
After Liz put the phone down, she took stock. Her body was doing what it was told to again, but there was a kind of static fizzing along her nerves, as though they were still thrumming from that alien touch.
She locked herself in the bathroom and took a bath. The water was hot enough to be uncomfortable, but she deliberately topped it off every time it threatened to cool. She wanted to feel something, and to have the reassurance that it was her—really, undeniably her—that was feeling it. On an impulse, she dropped in a scented bath bomb that Zac had bought her for her last birthday. It turned out to smell of pretty much everything in the world in about equal quantities, but the sensory overload was exactly what she needed.
Half an hour later she emerged, dried and dressed and trailing clouds of intense floral fragrance. She went through into the kitchen to see what she had in the fridge and the cupboards that could conceivably lie on a slice of bread and pass for a sandwich. The food court was an expense she didn’t need right now. While she was debating between peanut butter and Cheez Whiz, the phone rang again.
It was the receptionist at Carroll Way. “West Penn confirmed a case for treatment, Ms. Kendall,” she said. “They just faxed over the paperwork and it all seems to be in order. You can see Dr. Southern. All of our psychiatric referrals go to him. He comes in on Wednesdays and Fridays, and I think I can fit you in on Wednesday.”
“Great,” Liz said. “Thank you. Um … I hate to be a broken record, but what’s the situation with my policy?”
“As this is arising out of a physical trauma that was covered, you get six sessions covered too. If you carry on after that you have to pay.”
Thank you, nonexistent God! “That’s great,” Liz said. “Yes, please. Sign me up.” She ran through her week’s schedule in her mind. She had been intending to do a shift at Serve the Homeless on Wednesday, the only day when she finished early at the Cineplex, but she hadn’t been back there long enough yet for Father Connor to build her into the duty roster. She wouldn’t be letting anyone down. “You think I could get an appointment at the middle of the afternoon?”
There were a few seconds of silence, apart from the tap of an occasional key. “6:20 p.m. is the only slot I’ve got left.”
Liz didn’t hesitate. “6:20 p.m. it is, then. Thank you.”
She finished making up her lunch and headed out for the Cineplex. Wednesday afternoon seemed like it was a long way away. The best thing to do until then was to put aside all thoughts of this and bury herself in the ordinary and the everyday. She felt a certain amount of trepidation—even dread—at the thought of describing what had just happened to a stranger. But mostly it would come as a relief. Saying it out loud would turn it into someone else’s problem. Dr. Southern would tell her how to make it go away.
Gil Watts’ hours at the fire department were meant to be nine to five, but he worked a lot of weekends and more than a few evenings. He was a systems inspector, which meant that he went wherever he was sent and stayed as late as he had to. The upside of this was that when he needed to borrow a couple of hours in the middle of the week he could usually swing it.
He was there waiting for Fran when she came out of school, leaning against the passenger side of the car so he could open the door for her and give her a heel-clicking bow as if he was her butler.
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��Okay, Frog?” he asked her as she shoved her school bag down between her feet and strapped in. She waited a couple of seconds before closing the door so that Jinx could jump in and clamber over into the back of the car.
“Yeah,” Fran said. “Fine.”
Gil wasn’t making small talk, and neither was she. He meant: did it come on again during the day? Had she had any hallucinations? And she was telling him that she had stayed within spitting distance of normal the whole day through, so yay!
Jinx curled up on the back seat. It occurred to Fran to wonder, just for a moment, why Jinx insisted on using doors and windows as though she was real but was content to ignore gravity and acceleration if they became a nuisance. Just because, she assumed. All of Lady J’s rules had exceptions, and she herself was the exception to almost everything. She was a secret Fran shared with nobody, not even Gil. The cherished symptom that she needed just in order to function, so she cheated and didn’t think of her as a symptom at all—even though Jinx came and went as she pleased and was only ever nominally under Fran’s conscious control.
Maybe you’re my symptom, Lady J said prissily.
“Pretty sure I’m not a fox dreaming I’m a little girl,” Fran whispered, too low for her dad to hear. The thought made her smile in spite of herself.
Jinx snorted and curled up on the seat, pretending to be asleep. She was just being cranky because she didn’t like Dr. Southern and hated when Fran had a session with him. Fran thought Dr. S was a good guy, pretty much, and did a tough job as well as he could. Jinx saw him as the enemy, which was only natural when you thought about it. He prescribed Fran medication that sometimes made Jinx not be there anymore. They were never going to be friends.
Gil had booked her a 5:30 p.m. appointment—her usual time, which she had agreed with Dr. Southern a long time ago. Dr. S put a lot of store by the healing effects of routine, as though sanity was something that could rub off on you. Fran was well positioned to see the flaw in this argument: she didn’t spend a whole lot of time with the sane people at her school, or even with the other weirdos. She was the cat who walked by herself. But she appreciated not having to miss lessons and then play the enervating game of catch-up.
“Do you want me to sit in?” Gil asked her as he eased out of Negley Run into the heavier traffic on Washington. He made it sound like he didn’t mind either way, although Fran knew how much he agonized about this stuff. He had been with her through the worst times, right after her abduction, and then again when she fell to pieces after her mom died. He had suffered along with her, hating that he couldn’t protect her against all the horses that had already bolted and the stable doors that had hit her in the face. He often joked that he was a pencil pusher at the fire department, not a hero with a sooty face and a fire ax. “I’m not in the rescue business,” he would say. But it killed him that it was always already too late for him to rescue his little girl. He would have died to do it, Fran knew.
But since he couldn’t, it did no good to either of them to make him sit through her sessions. “Nah,” she said as casually as she could. “It’s just same old, same old. I guess he’ll bump up my meds a little bit, and we’ll be out of there.”
“Yeah,” Gil said, watching the road. “I guess.” The corners of his mouth tugged down a little.
The waiting room at the clinic had exactly the same magazines it had had on their last visit, and the one before that. Gil picked up the May 2015 issue of Car and Driver, not for the first time, and read an article about a big, gleaming object called the Lambo Centenario. It probably cost more than he’d earned in Fran’s whole lifetime.
Everyone sat together at Carroll Way in the one big waiting space, so there was nothing to indicate to anyone else that Fran was there to see a psychiatrist. Even so, she felt exposed and anxious, as she always did. She leaned back as far as she could in her chair so her dad and her dad’s magazine shielded her from the outside world.
That usually worked okay, but today the outside world got a little pushy. Sitting right across from Fran was a boy she knew from school. Skinny. Sandy-haired. Paler than the average white dude by about three or four color swatches. He wasn’t in any of the same classes as her but she had seen him around the playground and they had once been in the semi-finals of a citywide public speaking competition together. Neither of them had made it through to the final.
Zac. Zachary Kendall.
With the name came a few more memories. A Clock Reads T-shirt that he wore for a while after everyone else had stopped, which probably meant that he actually liked their music. A stupid joke he told in her hearing once. “You see all those ‘Keep off the grass’ signs, right? How do you suppose they got there?” His ride, which was a beat-up old thing that looked as though it would fall apart if you farted too loud. Only it was his mother’s ride, of course, because he’d only just started driver’s ed. And that was his mother sitting next to him.
Fran stared at her hard. Then she stared a lot harder.
There was nothing that remarkable about Zachary Kendall’s mom. She was a short, slight woman with close-cropped black hair that looked pretty good on her. Her eyes were vivid green, with a little blue in one of them which was freaky but also quite cool. She wore a gray sweatshirt, faded jeans and brown leather ankle boots that were either meant to be vintage or had just gone bald in places. On her wrist there was a bracelet that flashed every now and then when it caught the light. None of which mattered at all.
What mattered was that Zac Kendall’s mom was changing. Nothing else was. The rest of the room looked fine. The rest of the people in it looked fine. It was just this one woman who was acting up.
As Fran’s hallucinations went, though, this was a fresh twist. Normally when she was seeing changes in the world around her, it would be a specific detail that was altered: red into blue, metal into plastic, old into new. If the woman’s hair had grown longer or her brown leather boots had turned into high heels, that would have felt like familiar ground.
With Zac Kendall’s mom, though, something different was happening. It was like there were two of her at the same time, overlapping each other and holding the exact same pose, but not quite in sync when they moved so you caught the lag if you were looking at the right moment.
Fran tried hard not to stare but her gaze kept being dragged back. She couldn’t help herself.
It’s a monster, Lady Jinx said. But it hasn’t seen you yet. Run away!
Fran shook her head, keeping the movement as small and subtle as she could. It’s okay, Lady J, she said inside her mind. Lying. Actually it was another assault on the normal world, bubbling up out of her rucked and twisted brain. Another reminder that nothing about her life was ever going to get back to being okay.
Zac Kendall was looking at her now. He had seen her staring. Resolutely, Fran looked away. It was bad enough that he’d noticed her at all. If he noticed her acting crazy, the story would go all around the school. She had had way more than enough of that stuff already. Having accidentally caught Kendall’s eye once, she made sure not to do it again.
Then the receptionist called her name and told her to go to consulting room 14. She had to walk past Kendall and his mom on the way. Kendall pretended she didn’t exist, and she extended the same courtesy to him. Jinx, though, gave both the boy and the woman a piercing glare as she followed Fran out of the room, baring her teeth in a very convincing threat display.
Fran made her way down the corridor and knocked on door 14, then went on inside.
Dr. Southern was sitting in a plastic chair that was inadequate for his bulk, but he stood up as Fran came into the room. “Frankie!” he boomed. “Long time no see. Sit, sit.”
He ushered her into the ancient floral-patterned armchair that sat in the corner of the room. Like Southern himself, it was too big for this tiny space. It was also too soft, the deep cushion sucking your butt in and down so you had to choose between perching on the edge of it like a trapeze artist on a swing or sitting right back and get
ting half swallowed into its innards.
Fran always took the first option. Perching made it easier to look down at the paisley-patterned carpet if she got uncomfortable under Dr. Southern’s unblinking stare.
Jinx ignored the chair and went and sat on the window ledge. Fran was surprised that the fox had come into the consulting room with her, given her strong feelings about Dr. Southern. Maybe it was because of Zac Kendall’s two-in-one mom. Maybe Jinx thought Fran needed a bodyguard. Whatever it was, Jinx had put on her armor and her sword belt.
“How’s the chess?” the doctor asked Fran, pulling her back to reality.
Fran nodded. “Pretty good, yeah. We’ve got tryouts for regionals next week and I’m playing lots of games against the computer.”
“Winning?”
“Losing two out of three. But I shoved the difficulty setting right up to the top, so that’s not a bad average.”
“Still into the Hedgehog Open?”
“Of course. On account of it’s still awesome.”
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s fine.”
“I bet he was surprised to see Juju make that catch.”
“Nope. He won a bet on that.”
Dr. Southern guffawed. He was a Steelers fan too, but Fran was pretty sure that if he wasn’t he would have found some other thing to hang his small talk on. He always started their sessions with the same two topics, and with that box ticked he always got right down to business.
Like he did now. “So we’ve got some kind of a relapse going on,” he said. “Is that right?” He sat back down again, the plastic chair creaking a little under his weight.
There’s a Krispy Kreme box on the desk there, Lady Jinx said in a voice that dripped with contempt. Look! Right next to your file folder. He’s been pigging out on donuts. A whole box of them. Piggy piggy piggy! I bet he doesn’t give one to you.