Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  She lifted her leg hurriedly, scattering dark red polka dots across the carpet’s pale oatmeal.

  She must have knocked her water glass over in the night. Or else Molly had when she climbed into the bed. But what had it fallen against to make it shatter? A short fall onto thick-pile carpet shouldn’t have been enough to break a sturdy tumbler.

  Marc’s words came back to her in a rush. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have done it any time I wanted. Last night, even.

  She had to be crazy. What she was thinking wasn’t possible.

  Then she saw the photo on the bedside table. The glass that fronted the frame was shattered across where something had hit it, just off-center. In that instant she knew.

  Marc had been here. Standing right where she was standing now, looking down on her as she slept. Struggling against his own violent impulses, which she knew from painful experience were strong.

  Was it Molly, sleeping right beside her, that had made him hold off? Or had there been some element of reason? Of calculation? For example, the calculation that he needed her alive a little longer to sort out this irritating business of the assault charge before he came back to seal the deal?

  Either way, he had grabbed up the tumbler and thrown it down again in order to burn off a little of that violent energy before it overwhelmed him.

  Okay.

  Get a grip.

  Okay.

  But Beth had been right about one thing. It wasn’t just Marc she was up against: it was her own reaction to him. The thought of him standing by the bed with the tumbler in his hand while she and Molly slept paralyzed her, made her mind sluggish and unwilling.

  First things first. Clean up the mess.

  She collected up all the pieces of broken glass, using an ornamental bowl as a tray.

  Don’t let them see you’re hurt.

  She limped into the bathroom, holding her left leg stiff and unbending not on account of the pain—her brain was so hot and buzzing with adrenaline that the wound barely hurt at all—but to avoid leaving any more blood on the carpet. She dumped the glass in the little waste bin, just for now. She would dispose of it properly later.

  She washed the deep cut with warm water from the shower head. Then with her foot up on the side of the bath she applied a little disinfectant before covering the wound with a dressing pad and a strip of Band-Aid.

  Business as usual. Clean up the mess. Wake her. Get them both off to school.

  Liz hurried back into the bedroom. Then slowed and stopped.

  “Son of a bitch!” she whispered. She had thought she was following the promptings of her own inner voice. But it wasn’t her voice at all.

  Keep moving! You can’t wake Molly up until you’ve cleared the blood off the carpet.

  “Beth, would you please just … stay out of my head!”

  Relax, princess snowflake. I’m not in your head. You pushed me out of there. Right now, the only thing of mine that’s in your head is these words.

  Which for a moment Liz had mistaken for her own words, her own decisions. A takeover by stealth instead of the violent invasion of the first two times.

  Stop being so melodramatic. And clear up the blood!

  Why? Liz wondered. Why get rid of the evidence? She couldn’t hide this. She shouldn’t even be trying.

  Yes, we can. We need to. How do you think the kids will feel if they know he can get to them any time he wants to? You’re supposed to be able to keep them safe.

  But that wasn’t the reason. Not the real reason. Something else was stirring a long way down, underneath Beth’s words, like a rat in a hole.

  Just get the blood wiped up, for God’s sake! Moll could wake up any moment now and see it.

  That, at least, was the simple truth. Molly was already stirring, smacking her lips as she often did right before waking. So Liz did the cleanup in two stages. First she dropped a towel over the carpet’s sudden outbreak of measles, hiding the dark red spots from sight while she roused Molly and hustled her, only just awake and drowsily confused, through into the kitchen.

  “Look after your sister for a moment, would you, Zac?” she asked. And she was gone again before he could answer.

  There was a can of spray-on stain remover in the hall cupboard—it was almost empty, but hopefully enough for such a small job. Liz scrubbed ferociously with an old washing up brush, turning the dark red to salmon pink. There would still be a stain, but she hoped that nobody looking at it would think of blood.

  The kids’ voices came very clearly through the open door behind her.

  “Which cereal, Moll? Lucky Charms, Corn Flakes or the house special?”

  “What’s the house special?”

  “Corn Flakes with Lucky Charms.”

  “House special!”

  “Coming up.”

  Liz checked the window of her room, and found it as she had left it. Locked. The front door too, and Molly’s window, and Zac’s. She knew she had bolted the kitchen door, and even a cat would have trouble fitting through the tiny window in the bathroom.

  Business as usual. Right.

  Right.

  She returned to the kitchen, sat down in between Zac and Molly and ate breakfast right alongside them. “I’m having the house special!” Molly said proudly.

  “Yeah, I heard,” Liz said, smiling back at her.

  “It’s Corn Flakes with Lucky Charms. Zac made it for me.”

  “Did you say thank you?”

  “I did, didn’t I, Zac?”

  “You sure did, Moll.”

  The morning routine played out around Liz without touching her. Normally just being with Zac and Molly would have been solace enough to calm her nerves, but right then it was all she could do to keep down the rising panic. She was overwhelmed by a sense of exposure, as though the kitchen was a vast expanse of open ground that offered no cover.

  That feeling intensified when they were walking to the car, when they were driving, when she was dropping first Zac and then Molly off at school. Marc’s nocturnal visit had turned the world inside out, making familiar places seem like unsprung traps.

  When Liz was finally alone in the car, she drove it up to Washington Avenue, parked it in front of the police training academy and took a walk along the southern edge of Highland Park. It was an hour before her shift started, and she really didn’t want to go home again right now.

  She should have called Beebee.

  No. This from Beth, the flat monosyllable landing like a slap. But Beth wasn’t the answer to this; she was just another problem Liz had to deal with. She had to think. Marc might have left his fingerprints somewhere. Beebee had advised her to steer clear of reckless allegations, but now …

  He’s not stupid. Think about it. How did he get in?

  “Oh, be quiet, Beth!”

  It was meant as a whisper, but it came out as a yell. An old woman walking two pug dogs looked across at Liz, startled, then hurried on.

  Let’s keep this between the two of us, shall we? How do you think he got into the house?

  “I don’t know,” Liz muttered.

  Yes, you do. If I know it, then you know it. And hey, you’re not going anywhere, so stop pretending you are and sit down. We’ve got to think this through.

  Liz bridled at the brusque commands. She wanted to tell Beth where to shove it, but she couldn’t argue with that last point. And in any case, she would only be arguing with herself.

  Exactly. First sign of madness.

  The first sign? That sounded wildly optimistic. Liz was afraid she might have passed the last exit a while back. She sat down heavily on a low wooden frame that had been built around a newly planted sapling, offering it minimal protection against passing dogs and carelessly pushed strollers. Still feeling both out of place and exposed, she massaged her hamstrings as though she was in the middle of a run she wasn’t dressed for.

  Let’s meet topside, Beth told her coldly. Now.

  “What?”

  You know where I mean. The
place where we talked before. You remember how to get there, don’t you?

  “This isn’t real,” Liz whispered. “None of it. You’re not real.”

  Doesn’t matter right now. Tell yourself whatever you need to, but we’ve got to deal with this and we’ve got to do it quickly. If we lose the initiative, we’re dead.

  Liz shook her head. “I don’t want to … to see you again. We can talk like this.”

  Yeah, but we’re not going to. As we just saw, you have a tendency to run off at the mouth, and this is private. Anyway, we’re going to need to start trusting each other sooner or later, and now is as good a time as ever.

  “I don’t trust you at all,” Liz said. “You’re exactly the part of me I don’t trust.”

  I’ll try my best not to cry. Now move.

  It would be the first time Liz had visited the colorless mind-space when she was awake. She had no idea what would happen to her body while her consciousness was busy elsewhere. More than that, though, she hated everything about that eerie void. Not to mention its other inhabitant. And now more than ever it felt like surrendering to her own sickness. How could anything good come from that? Talking to Beth, to the fracture in her mind born out of the very fear she was feeling now. All she was doing was diving that much further down the rabbit hole.

  Except what choice did she have, really? If Marc was really out to hurt her, which seemed hard to deny now, Liz was going to need all the help she could get. Beth had such confidence. Such unshakeable self-belief. And such ruthlessness. Face it, she had everything Liz needed right now. Her psychotic breakdown couldn’t have come at a better time.

  First things first, she told herself. Once she resolved this current crisis, and put it behind her, she would deal with Beth. Until then, she would take the help that was offered and try not to think too much about where it was coming from.

  She closed her eyes and tried to find the state of calm self-awareness that she got from the mindfulness meditations. Too much to hope for in her current state, but she moved her thoughts in that direction, a little at a time, like someone inching forward into a darkened room.

  She was there before she knew it. The mind-space opened around her, bleak and endless and absolutely empty. There was no sign of Beth.

  You’ve got to let me in, Beth said. The way you did back home.

  Liz hesitated. Now that she was here, she felt intensely reluctant to do that. Letting Beth borrow her voice had been one thing. Limited, consciously willed and controllable. Liz felt instinctively that allowing her full access to the mind-space would be a very different proposition.

  You can stay where you are, she said. Or thought. Or thought she said. In any case she formed the words and meaning passed between the two of them. She had finally figured out how to speak here, although she couldn’t have explained even now what it was she was doing. I like it like this. Me in here, you out there.

  Don’t be paranoid. We’re on the same side.

  So you keep saying. Okay, I know where Marc got the key. He took a copy of Zac’s key when the kids were staying over with him.

  Exactly. Along with the word came a sense of patronizing approval. Beth was pleased and surprised that Liz had thought it through. And that should tell you something. Marc is angry now because you got the restraining order and because you’re talking to the cops, but he had the key ready and waiting. He was already thinking there might be a time when he wanted to pay you an unsupervised visit.

  Liz said nothing. She tried hard to think of another theory. Nothing came.

  So if you think he’s going to slip up, you’re kidding yourself. He’s not just coming at you in a blind rage, he’s been working on this. Fingerprints wouldn’t help you. He’s been in your house legitimately a thousand times. Shit, he bought a burner so he could talk to you without leaving a trail.

  Maybe the till receipt … Liz offered.

  Right. Of course. Because that’s what people do when they buy disposable cellphones. They use their credit cards to make sure they leave a nice, wide trail behind them. Probably take out the extended warranty too.

  Beebee, Liz thought. Beebee would help if Liz asked her to.

  Will you please try to focus? You can only figure out what to do if you know what it is you want.

  Liz gave a strangled laugh. Unlike her words, it stayed inside her throat and did not translate. I want to come out of this alive.

  Good. So let’s dig down into that a little. Suppose you call the cops, and they believe you. What’s the best outcome?

  They arrest Marc.

  For what? He hasn’t done anything.

  He broke into my house! Liz protested. He violated his restraining order!

  Do we have to go over this again? You can’t prove a thing.

  Okay, they can give us some protection.

  Sure. For a month. Or a week. Or a couple of days. Not forever. So that’s not the answer, is it?

  I suppose not, Liz said bleakly.

  We need to put him away. Make sure he gets jail time, and lots of it. No suspended sentences, no second chances. County lock-up. If you’re lucky, someone shanks him before he gets out. Either way you move so far away he never gets even a smell of you again.

  Liz winced to hear it put so baldly into words.

  Right? Beth pressed.

  Right.

  Okay, then. That nest egg you were thinking about last night. The one you were going to use to buy cameras. How much is in it?

  About three thousand dollars.

  Nice. Very nice. That gives us something to work with. Let me put a proposition to you.

  “Well, this isn’t a baseball bat,” Crusher said almost reverently. “I mean it is, obviously, but it’s so much more than that.” He hefted the sleek, black baton and swung it to and fro a few times, making an impressive swishing sound in the air. Then he offered it to Liz so she could try it for herself. She took the bat gingerly, feeling Beth’s eager interest behind her own queasiness.

  “Tilt it in your hands,” Crusher invited her.

  She did. Left. Right. Left.

  “What do you feel?” The store owner’s big, bearded face was split horizontally by a tombstone-toothed grin.

  “The weight keeps shifting,” Liz said. “Is there something inside it that moves?”

  “There is!” Crusher applauded her, just with his fingertips. “There surely is! You got it in one, Ms. Kendall.”

  Liz had picked Paladin Home Defender out of the phonebook on the grounds that their Larimer store was only a few blocks north of the Cineplex. She had started having second thoughts as soon as she looked at the prices, and they metastasized into third and fourth thoughts when she met the store’s manager and sole staffer, Ken Crowther. “But you can call me Crusher, ma’am. Seriously. Most folks do.”

  Crowther certainly looked like a Crusher. He was well over six feet tall and heavyset, with old, blued-out tattoos all the way up both arms in which skulls and daggers featured strongly. But he was soft-spoken, with a New England accent that hinted of old money and prep schools, and when he came in close he smelled of the kind of hard candy that Liz used to buy when she was seven in the form of beads strung on an elastic band to make a necklace. Caught up in the contradictions, her judgment was suspended.

  But the most striking thing about Crusher was the pleasure he took in his job. Whenever he picked up any of the weapons in the store to demonstrate them to Liz, he looked like the class nerd handing in his homework. To Liz’s pre-emptive “No guns,” he had nodded vigorously as though he totally understood—one connoisseur to another—and said, “Our non-lethal section is right over here.”

  On balance, Liz decided she found him creepy. Beth was contemptuously amused, convinced that at least part of the guy’s courtesy and charm was born out of a fervent wish to get inside Liz’s pants.

  She was pulling against the whole non-lethal thing too. You’ve got to be able to put Marc down hard, she reminded Liz for about the tenth time.
<
br />   Liz wasn’t disputing that. But hard didn’t mean permanently.

  “So there are two steel sleeves in here,” Crusher was saying now, waving his arms over the Baltimore BelterTM in a vivid pantomime, “one inside the other. When you’re raising the bat to strike, the inner sleeve goes up and it cantilevers the outer, heavier sleeve downward. So the handle beds into your grip, really strongly. Then you take your swing, the bat comes down, and all that weight goes up to the tip again. It actually accelerates in your hands. When you hit with this, you hit harder than you think you’d be capable of.”

  Liz tried a few swings, but failed to find a rhythm. It felt like the bat was alive and trying to squirm out of her grip.

  Crusher watched her performance with a judicious eye, pursing his lips. “It takes a while to get used to it,” he said tactfully. “If you just want the stopping power, though, you need to take a look at this baby.” He took down another baton. It was tapered like the Belter, and the color was once again a somber, serious black, but the inspiration here seemed to be a steak tenderizer rather than a baseball bat. The business end of the thing was covered in hard plastic studs like tiny pyramids, blunted at their very tips but still clearly intended to embed themselves in whatever you swiped at. The grip was thicker than the Belter’s, and it had a single button situated right by where your thumb would be if you held it one-handed.

  “You’ve got your reaching distance,” Crusher said, “which is gonna be close to six feet even for a petite lady like yourself. LED flashlight in the tip. Belt clip here, see, and the balance … well, you’ve only got to feel it.”

  He put it in Liz’s hands so she could feel it. It felt like the baseball bat, more or less, but at least it didn’t move of its own accord.

  “What’s the button for?” she asked.

  Crusher gave her another schoolboy smile. “On this model it’s a burst function for the flashlight. Point it at your intruder and hit that button, he gets eight thousand lumens—eight treble-zero!—bang smack in his eyes. He won’t see a thing for the next ten minutes, guaranteed. Most intruders are going to throw in the towel right there. If he keeps on coming … well, you get to play piñata.”