by M. R. Carey
She wondered if she should tell Zac about what she was seeing, but she couldn’t imagine how that conversation would even start. “Hey, Zachary, why are there two of your mom? Is that a thing in your family?”
She’s a monster, Lady Jinx said, as if this settled everything.
But it didn’t. Not really.
Ms. Kendall came back into the living room to announce the imminence of bedtime. “No,” Molly pleaded, aghast. “Noooooo. Francine wants to finish the game.”
“Francine will have to live with the disappointment,” Ms. Kendall said. “Sorry, kiddo.” They stowed the Lego back in the plastic worktable. At least, Zac and Fran did. Molly was kept busy making sure that all the Lego characters from all the different franchises got a goodnight kiss.
Zac got a kiss too.
And finally, so did Fran.
“Thank you for coming to play,” Molly said. “You can come back tomorrow for another episode.”
“Maybe not tomorrow,” Fran said, “but I’d love to come back soon.”
“Then you can. Zac will bring you.”
Ms. Kendall picked Molly up and carried her off down the hall with Hermione Granger in one hand and Stormbringer, the Lightning Dragon in the other. She was still talking as she receded out of their sight. “Francine says she wants to come back soon. Zac will bring her for dinner. We’ll have hamburgers again, and corn on the cob, and ice cream. And Fran will make a ship with dragon wings, and I will help her. Then the ice princess will dance, and we’ll—”
“Wow!” Fran marveled.
“She’s just like that. It’s like she’s six kids crammed into one tiny body.”
Fran shied away from the metaphor, but it was a good way to describe the tiny, hyperactive rubber bullet she had just met.
“So,” Zac said, “I told Mom this was a study date. What do you want to study?”
“The depths of your big blue eyes,” Fran said.
“They’re gray,” Zac said with a grin.
“So you can see I need to study.”
But actually she had brought her school bag and actually she did have a history test coming up the next day. Zac didn’t, but he was a day past deadline on his English homework. “It’s for Mrs. Foyle, though. She always gives me an extra day if I ask for one. I think she heard about the court case and wants to give me a break.”
“No,” Fran said. “She’s just a pushover. You could get three days if you played hardball.”
They worked side by side on the sofa in the family room for a while. It was nice, even if they didn’t talk much. Jinx lay curled up at Fran’s feet, bored and disgruntled because Fran couldn’t pay any attention to her. Eventually she fell asleep.
Either Zac had forgotten Fran’s indiscreet brain-fart, or else he’d decided not to mention it. It was nothing in any case, she told herself: she must have misheard something Zac’s mom had said that was totally ordinary and not weird at all. And the other stuff, the way there were two of her and they were a little bit out of sync with each other, was just one more symptom of Fran’s … condition. It would go away as soon as she got steady on the risperidone.
That thought took the edge off her good humor instantly. It reminded her of what Dr. Southern had said, about her meds being part of the problem rather than a solution to it. If that was true then she was in dead trouble, because the problem was getting worse.
He had talked about coming up with a different approach. Fran had no idea what that would even look like.
Zac had noticed the change in her mood. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Right now,” Fran said, “or in general?”
“I meant right now. But, you know, either.”
“No,” Fran admitted. She hadn’t consciously decided to go for total honesty: the word just slipped out.
“Is it anything I can help with?”
She shook her head.
A different approach …
“Although actually …” she said, “I don’t know. Maybe. Possibly. Yes.”
“Hashtag mixed signals.”
“Only signals I’ve got, Zachary. Love them or leave them.” She gave him a smile to show she was joking. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was the best she could do. Zac smiled back, perplexed but interested. Waiting to hear what she was going to say.
“I’d like to take you somewhere,” Fran told him. Weirdly excited at the thought, even though a terrible weight of shame and fear stirred in her belly. “Show you something. A place that … well, it’s hard to explain it, really. You’d have to see.”
Lady Jinx had awakened and come bolt upright. Suddenly she was armored, and her hand was on the hilt of her sword.
You wouldn’t dare! she yelped. And then, Fran, we can’t. It’s too dangerous!
“I’d like that,” Zac said. Really quietly. With no winks or innuendo, not trying to make it be something it wasn’t. “I’d like to go with you.”
After that dramatic opening volley, the psychological warfare intensified very gradually—gradually enough that Liz was able to persuade herself for a while that all the things that were happening were random and unconnected.
The third strike in particular felt like a de-escalation. It was a bag of dogshit left on the front doorstep. The bag wasn’t set on fire or anything; it was just thrown down there like a gauntlet. Kids’ stuff, Liz thought. But there was a message on the side of the bag, and that freaked her out a little.
Hope you like the taste, it said. More coming.
Then there was nothing for five days, which got her hopes up. Malice takes a lot of effort even when you’re highly motivated, and most people can only keep it up for so long.
On the morning of the sixth day, the car tires were flat again—all four of them this time, so it took Liz and Zac fifteen minutes to pump them up with the tiny BellAire inflater Parvesh kept in the garage. The same thing happened the morning after, but this time the vandal had squirted superglue into the valve heads. There was no way to pump the tires up again without installing new valves, and no time to call Triple-A. Liz had to abandon the car and take Molly to school by bus while Zac walked in on his own.
He really didn’t mind, he said. For one thing, it meant he’d be walking right past the front door of Francine Watts, his new best friend, and the two of them could walk on to school together. Liz wondered (again) if it was more than a friendship. On the whole, she hoped it was. At seventeen, Zac was well overdue for his first big romantic crush, and Francine seemed like a sweet kid in spite of all the awful things she’d been through.
They had touched on that subject, very lightly, on the night when Fran had come over. There was a moment when Liz was putting away the barbecue utensils and Fran had been helping. Liz said something about how every hour you spent enjoying yourself got you two hours of cleaning and tidying.
“Yeah,” Fran said. “But that’s … you know, it’s worthwhile. Important.”
“You mean the treats?” Liz asked. “Yeah, I agree. You’ve got to build some pleasure into your life.”
“You do,” Fran agreed. “But I meant the tidying. It’s good to be able to find things when you need them.” She folded her hands across her chest, rubbing her elbows as if she were cold, although it was a mild evening. “I freak out if I’m looking for something and it’s not where I left it. It makes me feel sort of helpless.”
“Helpless?”
“Because …” She seemed to become aware, suddenly, of what her hands were doing. She dropped them to her sides. “If there was a zombie apocalypse and you couldn’t find your chain saw, you know …”
“You could rig up a flamethrower out of a hairspray,” Liz pointed out.
“Yeah, there’s that.”
They had conspired to turn it into a joke, but for a second it hadn’t been. Fran had meant every word, at least up to the zombie apocalypse, and Liz had known that helpless feeling too. The feeling you got when the whole world wasn’t where you needed it to be, and everything went into freefall. Fran
was terribly young to have had that feeling, but she seemed to be coping with it pretty well, all things considered. She was tougher and braver than she looked.
The thought of her and Zac maybe being sweet on each other made Liz happy, and put the whole business with the dirty tricks campaign right out of her mind.
Until she got back from taking Molly to school and found a dead pigeon lying on the front stoop. It had been caught in a wire snare, the wire still looped around its throat and beads of black blood congealed in the feathers on its breast. Liz had a good look around. There was no clue to how the bird had got there, but a thin smear of red on the door frame at chest height suggested it might have been thrown, say from the window of a passing car.
She disposed of the remains and scrubbed the porch with disinfectant. Practical and sensible. But there was a panic welling up inside her—exactly the kind of panic Fran Watts had described—and once she’d finished with the busy-work she couldn’t hide from it anymore. She slumped on the living room sofa and sat there for a while in a paralysis of worry, and the only things she could reach for to pull herself out of it were other worries. She had to get to work. She couldn’t afford to be late or miss a shift right now. She needed the job too much.
The bus took its time in coming, and she only just made it to Bakery Square for ten o’clock. Since she was the last to clock in, Nora put her on cleaning, which sucked a little but was absolutely fair because she applied the same rule to everyone. Vacuuming up stale popcorn, steam-washing the toilet stalls and freeze-blasting wads of gum out of the carpets wasn’t fun, but it was something you got used to. Unfortunately, it occupied Liz’s body but left her mind free to obsess. By the end of the day she was exhausted, not with the physical labor but with thinking about what she was going home to.
Nothing, as it turned out, but her nerves were still on edge and she was jumping at every random sound. She went through the evening routine like an automaton, barely aware of what the kids were saying to her. Over dinner Molly told a complicated anecdote about what happened when Gina Pasko tripped Elena Casablanca over with her jump rope and said it was an accident but then laughed like it was funny. Liz heard one word in ten, and had to copy Zac’s facial expressions because she wasn’t clear enough on the through-line to react on her own behalf.
After Molly was in bed, she told Zac about the dead bird, and showed him its corpse in the trashcan. She felt like he needed to know, but she regretted it when she saw how rattled he was. “Mom, you should call the cops,” he pleaded. “Call Beebee at least. Someone needs to do something about this.”
“I’m not sure what they can do, Zac.”
“Me neither. But let’s at least ask them!”
“If it happens again, I will. Maybe, you know, it will just stop by itself.”
“Why would it stop. If he’s trying to scare you …”
“He?”
Zac shrugged. “Someone.” But they both knew who he meant by he, and Liz had thought it too. She just hadn’t admitted it to herself until then.
If you walked down to Lincoln Avenue and headed west across the bridge, you found yourself in Homewood. There were actually two bridges, two broad double spans of red-brown stone butting up together in kind of a V shape, with a little half-wild hinterland spreading out under and all around them.
Zac and Fran stopped halfway across, with the traffic on Washington Boulevard roaring past underneath them. In the slanting late afternoon light, their bodies were dots at the end of the long exclamation points of their shadows.
“Where does the other bridge go to?” Zac asked.
“It’s part of the Pennsylvania Railroad,” Fran told him. “It’s called the Brilliant Cutoff Viaduct, and it’s a historical landmark. You see the trees? They grow all along the top. You’re not meant to walk up there but you can climb up the cutting from Silver Lake Drive and go right across.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Zac said.
Fran shook her head pityingly, but she didn’t mean it. She did it to make him laugh. “Chicken. Come on.”
She led the way and he followed, looking more and more uneasy as they came off the far end of the bridge and struck off from the main drag into the side streets. But Zac’s nerves were nothing compared to Jinx’s. Every now and again Fran caught sight of her, tailing them from a hundred yards back, sneaking from one thin patch of shadow to the next, peeping out from under cars and behind dumpsters. Panic showed in her wide eyes and in her posture, her forelegs bent and her front end scraping the ground.
She had been incandescently furious with Fran ever since Fran first suggested this expedition. She hadn’t said a word as she and Fran were walking home, and she had forsaken the foot of Fran’s bed when it got to bedtime. She went off to her den, a purely hypothetical place where Fran couldn’t join her. This seemed to Fran to be a good indicator of her own mixed feelings: the part of her that manifested as Jinx telling the rest of her that she had shit for brains.
Today at school, Jinx had made a point of letting Fran glimpse her again and again so she could stalk away each time with her tail and snout high, showing her intense disapproval in the only way she could. But now, as they got closer and closer to their destination, she was there. She had to be on guard when Fran was doing something dangerous, however much she disapproved.
“How much further?” Zac asked, trying to make the question sound casual.
“Almost there,” Fran told him, although she had nothing to go on beyond an address and a quick reconnaissance on Google Maps. She was doing all this on a kind of autopilot, trying not to think about it too much in case she realized how crazy it was and finally talked herself out of it.
The neighborhood had delaminated around them. Every block here had at least a couple of houses that were still lived in, but they got further and further apart. Mostly the buildings were boarded up and silent, the overgrown yards silted up with ancient garbage.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” Zac asked, visibly anxious. “Homewood is supposed to be dangerous.”
“So is Larimer,” Fran shot back.
“Fair.”
“Just means it’s poor, Zac. And mostly black. You know that, right?”
She led him across the old freight yard and into a kind of broken no-man’s-land of shut-down warehouses, vacant lots and the occasional dead office block. Sometimes these tumble-down derelicts had FOR SALE signs out in front of them, as though their current state of disrepair was just a temporary thing, but it was hard to believe they were fooling anybody.
At the end of a long stretch of nothing, between two boarded-up buildings with the freeway overpass as a distant backdrop, Fran found what she was looking for. A wrought-iron arch, its elaborate scrollwork red with rust, curved over two brick gateposts that stood about twelve feet high. Beside them, a mildewed lightbox sign advertised WEEKDAY SPECIALS, CABLE TV AND POOL.
“This is it,” Fran said unnecessarily.
“Let’s not go in the pool,” Zac said.
“But I brought my swimsuit!” she protested, and they both laughed like idiots. It wasn’t that funny a joke, but laughing burned off some of the tension that seemed to have been growing in both of them since they crossed the bridge.
Fran led the way up a broad driveway whose concrete was all in pieces like a slab of toffee that had been hit with a hammer. It was pretty well furnished for a driveway. They passed a rotting sofa, a couple of office chairs and an ancient roll-top desk. Butterfly weed and goldenrod grew between these out-of-place items, the flowers dazzlingly bright as though someone had set them on fire and then hit the PAUSE button.
Fran was suddenly aware that it was just the two of them standing in the driveway. She looked back. Jinx was sitting on the sidewalk where they’d just walked in, staring forlornly after them.
I can’t, she said. There was something bleak and broken in the way she said it.
I’m sorry, Jinx, Fran said inside her mind. I think I have to.
With a pang of guilt that made no sense at all, she turned away. Jinx’s responses were her own responses, of course, so she must be getting some kind of emotional comfort out of having one small part of her say no no no! while the rest of her took a boy she barely knew into the frozen, fucked-up heart of her psychic landscape.
They had come to the motel’s parking lot, where they had to pick their way carefully because there were concrete dividers hidden in the speargrass that came almost up to their waists. There was a heavy dirge of flies and crickets, cut through with sharp, sweet skeins of birdsong. At one end of the Perry Friendly’s decayed frontage, there was a second scrollwork arch that led through into a rear courtyard. Fran headed in that direction.
The courtyard was secluded and eerily quiet, surrounded on three sides by the motel’s two stories of rooms. The fourth side was the back of an advertising hoarding, leaning at a slight angle now because two of its supports were gone. Ragged strips of paper, bleached yellow-white by the sun, hung down from it like stalactites—all that remained of the last AD it had held.
All the windows had been boarded up, and even the graffiti on the boards had a historical flavor. It referenced the Wu-Tang Clan, Ludacris and the 41-0 margin by which the Steelers had once, in times gone by, beaten the Browns in Cleveland.
The weeds here were thicker still. They came all the way up to the building as if they were trying to push against it and knock it down. There was even a tree growing up through the stairs at one end of the arcade, its upper branches thrusting between the concrete risers and the wrought iron of the rails. Fran thought of the hands of a prisoner, shoved up through steel bars.
It was completely still. The crickets and the birds all seemed to have stayed in the parking lot out front. Fran had the ridiculous sense that the building was aware of her. Had maybe been aware of her all this time, even when she had been elsewhere, doing other things. Nonetheless, she made herself move.
Some of the doors had lost their numbers (presumably they were lying in the weeds under their feet), but the door to room 22 was still hanging in there. It was right at the end of the arcade, on the ground floor. Like all the other doors they’d passed, it had a steel L-beam with a dozen big rivets in it all the way up its right-hand edge, sealing the door to the jamb. It looked formidable, but when Fran put her hand against the door and pushed, she felt it give. The rotten wood didn’t cleave to the rivets at all. They both put their shoulders to it and it opened with a soggy sigh.