by M. R. Carey
I did, Fran said to her, moving her lips but only a very little. You were always my favorite.
Jinx sat up, and a shiver went through her fur. She stared with avid fascination at the laptop’s screen, where a duel was going on between Lady Jinx and Lady Subtle. I think … she murmured.
“Are we going to get back to some homework?” Zac asked.
“What?” Fran prompted. She was talking to Jinx, whose rigid posture and raised hackles alarmed her a little. Maybe she should have asked before showing the cartoon to anyone else. Except that that would have been completely crazy, because who would she have been asking?
“Quadratic equations. Are we going to work through some of the examples?”
I think I played pretend games too, Jinx said a little wistfully. It feels like a long time ago now. She made a small, sad sound in her throat and slunk away, dropping from the bed to the floor and out of sight.
Fran moved the mouse pointer over to the little x on the browser tab, to close the YouTube window. But something made her hesitate. Something on the soundtrack, that she must have heard wrong. Instead of turning off the video she clicked on the time bar to replay the last twenty seconds.
“You did say you used to be obsessed, past tense?” Zac remarked, nudging her elbow.
“Just a sec,” Fran muttered. “I want to …”
There. When Jinx drew her sword, and shouted defiance against that week’s bad guy, Lord Thule. “You face Oathkeeper, traitor. No evil can stand against her magic blade.”
“Solve the following for all possible values of x,” Zac read aloud. “7x2 + 8x - 3 = 0.”
What was weird? What had struck her ear, or her mind, as somehow not quite right?
“So do we just feed it into the formula? I don’t get where A, B and C come in.”
“A is the quadratic,” Fran said automatically. “B is the straight multiplier. C is the solo variable.”
It was …
“Solo, like Han? It’s a heroic space-bum variable?”
Oathkeeper.
Jinx in the cartoon said Oathkeeper. Not Oatkipper. Her voice was high and fluting but there was nothing wrong with her pronunciation.
So how had Fran come up with that misspeaking?
A low growl from under the bed warned her not to go there.
Liz’s volunteering with Serve the Homeless was done at House of the Covenant Presbyterian Church on Frankstown Avenue.
“I’m not a Presbyterian,” she had told Father Connor the first time she turned up there. “Is that okay?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” the young priest told her. “To be honest, we’ll take actual cannibals at this point.”
Liz didn’t even know for sure what a Presbyterian was. But she fitted in well with the crowd who cooked up the dinners in the massive kitchen and doled them out to Larimer’s homeless community. Most of the other volunteers fell into one of two categories: they were either in late middle age or else they were college kids taking their social conscience out for its first walk. But regardless of age, they were all good people and good company. They had their own in-jokes and their own secret language, which Liz picked up quickly. Mud was any meal that was basically a sauce thrown over rice or pasta; the pay-off was dessert; a twinset was someone who tried to get into both sittings by using two different names, and so on.
An absence of almost a year and a half ought to have left her feeling like an outsider again, but Liz picked up where she’d left off and was welcomed back without comment.
There were some new faces, both among the volunteers and in the docile, uncomplaining line that started to form outside the church a good twenty minutes before the door opened. But there were also lots of people Liz remembered from before.
There was one face in particular she kept on looking for, and not finding. He was in his late fifties, a tall, gaunt man in a long, shapeless coat. He had an unfeasible volume of snow-white hair and a very tenuous grip on reality, and he went by the name of Sergeant Bob.
The sergeant was sort of the reason why Liz had started volunteering in the first place. This was back when they were in the old house on Stoebner Way and the little garden plot at the urban farm had fallen into their lap without them even having to pay for it. Their neighbor, Mr. Newhart, had given them his key before he moved out of the area, and had written down for them (on the back of a Bed, Bath and Beyond voucher) the number of his tiny plot. “It came with the house. I’m paid up for the remainder of the leasehold, which is fifty-three years. It’s meant to lapse when the plot changes hands, and the next guy will pay plenty, but if you don’t tell them, I won’t.”
The garden plot had been a wonderful addition to their lives. But in taking it up they had had to evict Sergeant Bob, who had been sleeping in the tiny shed. Liz had felt guilty and dismayed about that. Marc said yeah, it was a shame, but who else in Pittsburgh got to live rent-free? “And it’s a goddamn shed, Lizzie. He’s way better off finding himself a proper bed in a shelter somewhere.”
So Liz had found him one. And in the process she had found the Pittsburgh Cares website, which had led her to House of the Covenant. It had worked out pretty well, really. The only thing Liz could afford to donate was time, and precious little of that, but time was what the Serve the Homeless mission needed.
So since her return, she had looked out for Bob, hoping to catch up on his news and reassure herself he was still okay. But for the first few weeks, he was a no-show.
“You could ask the other veterans,” Violet Shoen suggested. This actually made Liz laugh. Bob wasn’t a vet. The vets mostly stuck together and looked out for each other, and they had a certain way of holding themselves when they came to the front of the line, like charity was something they endured in the same way as they had endured combat. Bob was a loner, belonging to a regiment of one. His rank was self-awarded.
Three nights after her face-to-face encounter with her imaginary alter ego, Liz finally caught up with him. He had come along to the hall but hadn’t joined the line. Just sat down in a corner, almost out of sight behind some stacked up boxes.
Liz brought him a bowl of stew and sat down beside him. She slid the bowl in front of his face, the spoon already in it so he could just help himself. But he didn’t. He looked at the bowl as though he wasn’t quite sure what it was he was seeing.
“How are you doing, Bob?” she asked him gently. “Everything okay with you?”
Bob blinked a few times and shook his head as if to clear it.
“Weather’s going to turn soon,” Liz tried again. “Are you sleeping over at Clancy House these days, or are you on the street?”
Bob cleared his throat. It took a while. “Had a room,” he said at last. “Had to move out.”
“Was that at Clancy House? On Allemania?”
“No.”
“Well, was it somewhere in Garfield, or East Liberty? If there’s a new shelter you should tell Father Connor, in case he doesn’t know about it yet. He can add it to the bulletin board.”
Bob looked at Liz for the first time. He frowned. It didn’t seem like he remembered her, but that had happened before. Bob’s mileage varied from day to day. From hour to hour, even.
“Not a shelter,” he said.
“No?”
“No. It was a motel, kind of a place. Shut down, way back. But there was too many people there. All hours of the night. Talking. Shouting.”
Liz felt a cold fizz of unwelcome surprise. It couldn’t be. Could it? Coincidences didn’t follow you around like that.
“Was it the Perry Friendly?” she asked. Hoping hard for the answer no.
“Was a motel,” Bob repeated. “Over to Homewood. Closed down, boarded up, yeah. People should all’ve gone.” He stared at Liz with myopic intensity. “You were there,” he said. “Couple of times. I think maybe you was on fire. Or mebbe it was the girl was on fire and you lit her up. Thought better of you than that, to be honest.”
He discovered his stew at last, dug hi
s spoon into it and took a half-hearted mouthful. He didn’t eat it, though. Just kept it on his tongue like he was waiting for Liz to leave before he did anything so intimate as swallow.
Liz left him to it. She was more than happy to let the conversation lie. In her current mood, with her personality split down the middle and the other half committing hate crimes, she couldn’t shrug it off as she normally would. Bob was a substance abuser who lived rough: his mind was inside out most of the time. But still, she wished his delusions hadn’t crept so close to the edge of her comfort zone.
And the night wasn’t over yet. The rest of her shift went by without incident, but when she walked out to her car, chatting with Violet and a couple of the other volunteers, she found it comprehensively vandalized. Someone had spray-painted the word WHORE all along the driver’s side, SLUT down the passenger side and BITCH across the trunk.
“Oh my God,” Liz said blankly.
The volunteers rallied round her, and so did Father Connor. He was mortified that something like this should happen when Liz’s car was parked right out in front of the church. He insisted on helping her scrub the car clean, and Violet stayed to help.
It was hard work. The paint seemed to be some kind of acrylic, and only lifted off with a hell of a lot of scrubbing. Even then, if you stood at a certain angle the swearwords were still there. They had left ghosts of themselves on the car’s blue paintwork, which Liz had to hope would fade with time.
“I’m going to preach a sermon about this,” Father Connor promised. “If it was local kids, Liz, I’ll get you an apology at the very least.”
Liz assured him that it was fine, that it didn’t matter, but her brave face kept slipping. All that hate and spite out of nowhere made her feel like she’d been kicked in the stomach. She got away as quickly as she could, finding that the priest’s well-meaning sympathy only made her feel worse.
“I just felt so exposed,” she told Zac after she got home. “I know it’s only a car, but it was like someone was taking it out on the car because they couldn’t get to me and they still wanted me to feel it.”
“Assholes are everywhere,” Zac said, hugging her. “It’s nothing, Mom. You have to not let it get to you. People who pull this shit are cowards, and they’re not worth you losing any sleep over.”
He was half-right, and Liz clung to that half. The rest of it was knowing that whoever painted that shit on her car knew the driver was a woman. Had maybe watched her as she walked into the church; had bided their time until the doors were closed and everyone was busy inside.
She told Zac she wasn’t sweating it. That was a half-truth too. It had shaken her badly, but it wasn’t anywhere near the top of the stack when it came to her big worries. The impending trial trumped this sleazy little stunt, and so did Beth.
Beth trumped everything.
Liz hadn’t realized until afterward, but using the meditation tape as a way of making contact with her other self had largely sabotaged her therapy. The mindfulness stuff had seemed to be working, calming her and making her feel more in control of her own emotions. But since that imaginary conversation with her imaginary alter ego, she was afraid to use the tape again.
That vision of another possible life had left her devastated and terrified. It was as if her unconscious mind had decided she wasn’t scared enough of Marc already; that the full experience required more paranoia and more violent imagery. Afterward she had been too wrung out even to move. She had ached all over, inside and out, as though she had caught herself a dose of the flu.
The next night, and the night after that, Beth was silent. No sign of her during the days either, though Liz was hyper-alert for any sign of her presence. She hoped that meant the confrontation had healed her—that the broken-off piece of her own mind to which she’d given a name and a history had now been reabsorbed into the totality that was Liz. But what if using the meditation tape set Beth loose again? What if she came back in Liz’s dreams or—God forbid—into her waking life?
Dr. Southern had called it right. Living with Marc had meant shrinking herself down into a narrower and narrower space—jettisoning in the process whatever didn’t seem to fit. Year after year, until finally the parts of herself she had hidden away, denied or just ignored had reared up and demanded to be heard.
Well, Liz had heard them, and once had been enough. She missed the peace and calm the meditations had brought her, but if the price of having that was meeting Beth again then she would just have to do without it.
She tried to tire herself out with unnecessary chores, washing and drying the dinner dishes by hand, tidying the kitchen cupboards, reorganizing the endless boxes of superannuated junk in the garage. But in spite of everything, she went to bed wired and she slept in fitful snatches.
She didn’t meet Beth, or dream about her, but she had the feeling, each time she woke, that someone had just left the room. She was alone, but if she had opened her eyes a moment earlier …
In the morning her head was heavy, as though she was working off a hangover. The light hit her eyes from the wrong angle and every sound had a jagged edge to it. Reading her mind, or more likely her face, Zac took some of the strain and got Molly ready for school. They were late heading out, despite his best efforts.
They were even later arriving. Someone had let the air out of the car’s two back tires, leaving spent matchsticks in the valves to hold them open.
So now it was Fran’s turn to be the guest. It was nice, mostly, but also a little weird.
The nice stuff came out on top. Zac and his family lived on the ground floor of a split-level duplex on Mayflower Street that was a little on the small side for a family of three but had its own little apron of garden. There was even a gas barbecue out there, with a spherical canopy about the size of a soup bowl. Zac’s mom got it going and cooked burgers and corncobs for them all, which gave the potluck supper out on the patio something of a festive atmosphere in spite of the heavy traffic going by right on the other side of the fence.
Afterward they played Lego with Zac’s kid sister Molly, who was as cute as a button but only half the size. Molly had a crazy imagination. She mixed up all her Lego sets so the Harry Potter characters got to hang out with dragons and cowboys and big, Frankenstein-like Duplo guys. Fran found one of the Ghostbusters and Penny from The Big Bang Theory in there too.
“Blue pieces are magic,” Molly told Fran confidentially.
“Just the blue pieces?”
“Yes. Just the blue ones. So if you want to make something that’s magic, it’s got to have some blue in it. That’s the rule.”
“Well, rules are rules.”
Zac caught Fran’s gaze and they both smiled. She could see how much he loved Molly, and how much he liked that Fran was prepared to kneel down on the carpet and play games with her. But the truth was, Fran was enjoying herself. Having no brothers or sisters of her own, the only time she ever got to do this little kid stuff was when her younger cousins came over, which was about once every ice age.
Jinx liked it too. She couldn’t play with the Lego, of course, but she sat beside them and watched them avidly, her triangular snout turning this way and then that way as though she was watching a tennis match.
So that was all great. The weirdness came from Ms. Kendall, Zac’s mom. Liz, as she invited Fran to call her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t nice; she really was. She definitely had something or other on her mind, so even during dinner when she was trying hard to be welcoming and to take an interest she had kept drifting off into her own thoughts. But Fran didn’t think that was something she could help, and she didn’t blame her for it.
No, what rattled her was that there were still two of Liz, overlapping but not quite in phase. One Liz’s movements lagged behind the other’s as though she was a very short chorus line that hadn’t rehearsed its routines properly. Viewed from this close up, the effect was even freakier and more unsettling. It had a rhythm to it that was almost hypnotic.
Normally, Fra
n was painfully aware, something like this would be the first pebble in an avalanche. When the changes started, they escalated fast. But what was happening with Liz seemed to be different. She didn’t bring on other changes. In fact, she didn’t really change herself: there were just—inexplicably, but unmistakably—two of her.
Fran tried hard not to stare, but she couldn’t help herself. When Zac’s mom noticed, Fran scrambled hastily for an excuse. “I really like your bracelet, Ms. Kendall,” she blurted. It was true, at least. The bracelet was the same one Liz had been wearing at Carroll Way. It was white gold, with several small stones bracketing one large pink tourmaline, and Fran thought it was very cool. “I got it when I was about your age,” Liz said, seeming pleased but also surprised that Fran had noticed it. “It was the first gift my ex- husband—Zac and Molly’s dad—ever gave me. The shiftless bastard.”
Fran gaped. The unexpected curse-word took her by surprise. But Zac didn’t even seem to notice it, and Molly kept right on playing.
“The … the two of you don’t get along anymore?” Fran stammered.
Liz seemed to be surprised in her turn by this blunt question. “Actually, Fran, it’s not something I really feel comfortable talking about,” she said. And Zac shot Fran a slightly anguished glance.
Fran mumbled an apology and went back to the game, her cheeks burning.
“Why would you want to ask her that?” Zac whispered to her, the next time his mom went out of the room.
“Yes, Francine,” Molly chimed in primly. “Why would you want to?”
Fran and Zac both burst out laughing, and the little bubble of tension popped. But Fran was left with a sinking feeling just the same. Was she hearing voices now as well as seeing things? Because that would be great!
And either way, she had just torpedoed whatever first impression she’d been making and left both Zac and his mom thinking she was rude and graceless. She already knew how protective he was of Liz: she couldn’t have chosen a worse thing to screw up on.