by M. R. Carey
She wanted to deny it, but it was true. She had no idea, in the dream, where she was or how to retrace her steps. She couldn’t even remember why she had come here.
“That’s been your problem all along,” the other Liz pointed out, shaking her head. “You never had a plan. You let other people take you by the hand and lead you anywhere they wanted. That’s why you’re in this mess.”
It was all true. It had to be, Liz knew, because she wouldn’t lie to herself. There wouldn’t be any point. She sank to her knees, too tired and too full of self-disgust to go any further. But a spark of defiance made her lift her head to stare herself in the face.
“I’ll change,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” the other Liz sneered. “How?”
“I’ll fight.”
Other Liz shivered, broke apart and reformed, like a reflection on the surface of a pond when the wind picks up.
I’ll believe it when I see it, Beth said. But now would be a good time. He’s here.
When the phone rang, Fran somehow knew who it was. Even though it was after ten o’clock, and it was the house phone that was ringing rather than her cell. Jinx knew it too. She perked up from a light doze, growling reflexively at the waking world. It’s that boy, she snapped. I can smell him over the wire. Why is he calling you so late?
Fran raced down the stairs, Jinx loping beside her, but her dad got there first. She heard his “Hello?” as she hit the landing, and when she made the turn of the stairs he was already saying, “May I ask who’s calling?”
She was in his line of sight now. She came down the rest of the stairs at a more casual pace, and when she got to the bottom her dad handed her the phone, his face studiously impassive. “It’s for you, Frog,” he said unnecessarily. “Mr. Zachary Kendall.”
Fran smiled weakly. Then waited him out. Gil gave a small grunt of acquiescence, retreating back into the living room so she could take the call in private. He was a stickler for the proprieties, and wouldn’t eavesdrop however much he was tempted.
“Hey,” she said when she was alone. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine.” Zac’s voice was a glum monotone, contradicting the words. Wind whipped and whooped behind him, so he must be out in the open somewhere.
“What was wrong with my cell?”
“It just kept ringing. I couldn’t get through.”
Fran tutted, at herself rather than him. She remembered that she had turned the sound right down to zero earlier for the dumbest and most embarrassing of reasons: she hadn’t wanted a random call to disturb Lady J after she fell asleep.
Excuse me? Why is that dumb? Why is that embarrassing?
“Sorry,” Fran said. “I forgot I had it on silent. Is something the matter, Zac? You sound really down.”
“My mom kicked us out.”
His mom should have done that a long time ago. You don’t start growing up until you’re hunting for yourself.
Fran blinked. “What? No way!”
“She decided to repaint the entire house. She sent us upstairs to sleep at Vesh and Pete’s.”
“Well … that’s not kicking you out, exactly,” Fran felt impelled to say.
“Yeah, it is, Fran. She made it so we couldn’t sleep in our rooms. That was the only reason she bought the paint.”
Then maybe there was some really good reason why she needed to be by herself, Fran thought. Sometimes you couldn’t bring the people you loved with you, because of where you were going. The same way she could never have brought her dad to the Perry Friendly. She didn’t say any of these things. She just asked Zac where he was. She was afraid she knew.
“That railway platform,” he told her. “The one you showed me, between Lenora and Negley Run. I’m going to sleep out.”
Fran was appalled. “On concrete? Zac, are you out of your mind?”
“I’ll find something I can lie on. Or sit down on, at least. I think we passed a mattress somebody had dumped a little way back from here.”
“You’ll catch diseases from the mattress and pneumonia from the wind chill. And you’ll probably get mugged for your phone. Do you even have a sleeping bag?”
She heard a stubborn sigh from the other end of the line, and then another blaring, ruffling sound as the wind cut across his words. “I’ve got my coat.”
“You’re an idiot.”
Yes! He is!
“Thanks.”
“Stay on the line, goon. Talk amongst yourself.”
Fran muted the phone and went into the living room, where her dad was reading a novel. It was Harold Courlander’s The African, which he had bought after reading about Courlander’s lawsuit against Alex Haley.
He took a lot of persuading.
“Frog, the boy should go home to his mother.”
“But his mother made him leave.”
“She made him go one floor up. That doesn’t make him one of the orphans of the storm.”
“He’s not gonna go back, Dad. He’s gonna sleep rough. And I mean really rough. The wind’s going crazy out there.”
They went back and forth a few more times. Gil made it clear that he didn’t like any part of this, but finally he agreed that Zac could come over and sleep on the sofa. One night only, no arguments and no take-backs. “He’s not camping out here while he works through his issues, Frog. And he’ll have to tell his mom where he is. We’re not going behind anyone’s back.”
Fran gave him a fervent hug. “Thanks, Dad. You’re awesome.”
“I am,” Gil agreed dourly. “It’s a heavy burden.”
When Zac arrived, he was looking both sheepish and defiant—probably starting to realize that he’d handled a bad situation really badly but not quite ready to admit it yet. It had already come on to rain, and he was pretty well soaked. Jinx sniffed him loudly, stiff with disapproval.
Fran ushered him into the living room, where he said his thanks with downcast eyes. “It’s really kind of you, Mr. Watts. I promise it’s just a one-off. I had an argument with my mom, but I’m gonna sort it out first thing in the morning.”
“That sounds like an excellent plan, son,” Gil told him. “Did you get any dinner at all?”
“I’m fine, sir. Thank you. I ate at Little Lou’s on Lenora.”
“Okay, then. We might as well say our goodnights, since this space is now officially your billet. I’m sorry we don’t have a guest room to put you up in, but I’ve got a desk in there for when I work from home and there’s no room for a bed. The sofa’s a little bit narrow, but it will have to do.”
“The sofa’s perfect,” Zac said. “I’m grateful. Thank you.”
“Once is enough, son. Don’t drop too many eggs in the pudding. But you’re welcome. If you’ll take some friendly advice, though, storming off into the night is a losing game even in fine weather. Do yourself a favor and find another way of relieving your feelings next time.”
Zac said he would try, stopped himself in the middle of another thank you and took delivery of some sheets and pillowcases that Fran had brought down for him.
“Sleep well,” she said. “Goon.”
“Harsh.”
“I am harsh. You know that about me. I’m the girl who hit you with mashed potato when you tried to be nice to her.”
Impulsively, she gave him a hug. It was hella weird with her dad standing right there, watching, but it still felt like the right thing to do. “She’ll be okay,” she said. “You both will.”
“Thanks, Fran. For everything.” His voice sounded a little husky. She got out of there fast, knowing her dad would follow right behind. Zac was wound up really tight, and if he broke down in tears in front of her it would be the most intimate thing that had ever happened between them. She wasn’t sure she was ready for it, and she knew for sure her dad wasn’t.
The hug was just a friend thing. A comfort thing. She felt the imprint of it all along her body, but she wasn’t going to pretend it was something it wasn’t.
Right. Of course you’re
not.
“Give me a break, your ladyship,” Fran muttered, feeling the blush rise from her collar toward her hairline.
Liz came up from sleep with her heart hammering. Beth’s words had been accompanied by a psychic push, hurling her back up into consciousness, but there was something else besides. A sound, tiny but distinct, had just impacted on her attention. Sprawled in the dark, momentarily as lost as she had been in her dream, she tried to replay the sound, to make sense of it. But she couldn’t parse it until it came again.
It was the ratcheting whisper of a key entering the lock of the front door.
Liz froze every muscle, straining to hear what would come next. Nothing, at first. At least, nothing up close. But a dog started kicking up a commotion somewhere down the block, and the sound peaked and fell as though a door had opened, letting in the world, and then closed again silently.
She knew beyond any doubt that Marc was inside the house.
Quickly and quietly she came up off the bed and stepped away from it, taking a position where the door as it opened would blindside him. She slipped the taser out of its holster. It took three attempts. Her hands had started to tremble when the key turned in the lock, and now they were shaking badly. She fought to keep them steady, taking aim at the edge of the door. When Marc pushed it fully open and stepped into the room, he would be sideways on to her, an easy target. His eyes wouldn’t have had time to adjust, so he wouldn’t see her. And he would be moving slowly so she would have plenty of time to aim and shoot.
Something rustled in the hallway. Footsteps? There was no rhythm to the sound: it was just a single scuffle. Then after a few seconds, another.
The dust sheets. She should have rolled them up, at least from out in the hallway. Marc had stopped, trying to figure out what he was walking on. And the longer he hesitated, the more his eyes would adjust to the dark. Liz wanted an ambush, not a fight. He would definitely win in a fight.
Against you. Not against me.
“Beth!” The name escaped her in a hoarse, ragged whisper. “Don’t talk to me. Please! I n-need to—”
What, focus? You were out cold until I woke you. You can’t do one thing right. Not one!
Now there were footsteps, audible, clear, approaching the door. Liz was still holding the taser out in front of her, her finger on the trigger, her arms wracked with tremors that kept a lockstep with her racing heart.
Shit! Let me in. Let me finish this.
The door opened, and Liz fired. Straight and true.
But too soon. The door was still swinging inward, its movement intersecting her line of fire. The taser’s twin tips bounced off the door frame and fell slackly to the floor. Two dull impacts that achieved nothing except to make Marc turn his head in her direction.
He leaned forward, peering into the dark. He had heard the noise, but hadn’t seen her. She still had a chance. She leaned sideways, groping for the baseball bat. Her fingertips touched it, but at the wrong angle. It fell with a blunt, accusing thud.
Marc stepped into the room, heading not for the bed now but for Liz. There was something in his hand that might or might not be a knife.
Liz dived for the bat as he raised the thing up and back. Knife or not, he was going to hit her with it. Arm bent at the elbow, thrusting downward.
Her fingers closed on smooth, cold neoprene. She swung the bat in a wild arc, still down on one knee, and caught Marc’s conjoined hands a glancing blow. The thing he was holding fell at her feet.
From this close up there was no mistaking it. It was a knife. Not a kitchen knife, but some misbegotten macho thing with a cross-guard and a curved tip. She was staring at the confirmation of everything Beth had said, everything she had fought against believing, from that nightmare montage of her own unhappy endings right down to the present hyper-real, hallucinogenic moment.
Marc had come here to kill her.
With a sob of anguish and protest she rose from the floor—a little quicker than him because he was still trying to figure out what had hit him. His night vision hadn’t kicked in properly yet, Liz realized. He didn’t know what she’d hit him with, where his knife had gone or where exactly she was in the solid mass of shadow in front of him. She took a second swipe with the bat. It hit him in the side of the head, but not nearly hard enough. She had held back, involuntarily slowing and softening the blow. Afraid of her own violence as much as his.
Nonetheless Marc staggered, backing away and raising his arm to ward off another attack. He didn’t need to. Liz just ran, the open door an irresistible temptation. She forgot all her plans in a second: she had to get away, and that was all that mattered.
The knife, you idiot! The knife!
Too late for that. Too late for the baseball bat too. Her elbow hit the door frame as she raced through into the hallway and the agonizing jar made her drop her weapon. She almost tripped on it as it bounced end over end between her feet.
She headed for the kitchen at a dead run. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she thought, the words bubbling up in her mind like vomit, impossible to keep down.
“You cunt!” Marc growled, from much too close behind her.
What was in the kitchen? The other baton or the gel pistol? And whichever it was, where had she put it?
The breakfast bar loomed ahead of her, a barely visible dark gray bulk against the lighter gray of the ambient air. She skirted it without slowing. With a whimper of terror she threw herself at the side door and wrestled with the handle. It didn’t open. She had locked it herself and put the key … somewhere. Not here. Not where she could find it now, with death bearing down on her like a juggernaut, like a train, like the force of gravity.
The flashlight baton.
Let me in!
The flashlight baton was in here somewhere. On the countertop right behind her.
Let me in!
Right behind Marc too. He had been close on her heels when she came into the room and she had lost seconds she didn’t have in scrabbling at the locked door. He strode toward her, cutting her off from the countertop, boxing her into a corner that contained nothing. Nothing she could use. Nothing but him, and her.
The knife was in his hand again, but this time he held it low down, the blade angled upward. He would stab her in her stomach, in her chest, in her arms as she tried in vain to fend him off. It would be slow, and bloody, and terrible.
Let me in! Beth screamed and screamed and screamed.
And yeah, Liz thought, despairing. Go ahead. Save me, if you can, because I can’t save myself.
Sinking to her knees in surrender. Conditioned by a thousand bruising collisions to fold herself up small and hope the worst knocks landed on parts of her that wouldn’t break.
Something rose as she fell. Spread itself like wings through her and above her and around her. A funneled force like a gale hit her full on, snatched her up and hurled her headfirst into a blistering, unbearable cold.
She moved away on a curving trajectory, as slowly (it seemed to her) as a flower opening. But the slowness was inside her as well as outside. Her mind sparked feebly and failed to catch.
She was looking at a woman, and the woman was down on her knees. She looked as though she was praying, or maybe just bowing to something inevitable. Her hair hung down over her eyes and her shoulders sagged. A wink of red light from some electronic device (the standby LED on the kitchen microwave, Liz’s subconscious supplied) illuminated the curve of her cheek while throwing her eyes into shadow.
But the posture of surrender was an illusion. It was only the strained, strange slo-mo that had sustained it for this long. The woman was rising to her feet. There were muscles moving in those dropped shoulders, and further down still the woman’s hands clenched, splayed fingers gathering into fists.
She rose like a rocket, rippling the air, and in rising passed right by Liz’s sluggish, floating point of view. Liz got a good look at the nearer of those hands. A bracelet circled its wrist: three small garnets, a larger tourmal
ine, then three more garnets, all on a band of white gold.
I have a bracelet just like that, Liz thought.
And the truth hit her. Not all at once like an avalanche but in broken pieces, pulses of hectic bright and dark that strobed inside her mind.
This was her own body she was looking at.
She was seeing herself from the outside.
When she had let Beth in, she had imagined that it would be like a telephone call: that Beth would borrow the parts she needed for as long as she needed them.
But it wasn’t like that at all. Liz had been expelled, decisively, from her own flesh. She was still drifting away with the force of that sudden, violent push.
And if her body was also still moving (as it clearly was) independently of her (which was impossible to deny), then it was because someone else was now in the cockpit. At the helm. Sitting firm and confident behind those eyes (which to Liz were lakes of darkness in which the glaring red dots of the microwave light now floated like twin buoys).
Beth.
Beth had cast her out.
So—the last domino falling, the last line of the equation—Beth was real. Her existence was not contingent on Liz’s, which meant (had to mean) that she was not a part of Liz’s sick mind.
That she was, after all, exactly what she said she was.
Another version of Liz, streamlined and perfected by endless pain and unencumbered by pity or mercy, come from a long way off to finish what Marc had started when he killed her.
It felt so good she almost died right there.
It wasn’t like the other times. The other times she’d had to work around Liz’s conscious mind, leaning in at an awkward angle and straining to make Liz’s body do the things that needed to be done. It had been a struggle, and it had tired her out very quickly, which was why she hadn’t been able to stay for long. But now …
Now Liz’s complete abdication, her willed surrender, allowed Beth to step inside her all at once and top to toe. She was putting on Liz’s body, sliding herself into every fold and recess, every last particle. The rightness of it was like putting on a glove. She fitted so well, so precisely. She luxuriated in the sensation as though Liz’s flesh and blood were warm, fragrant water in which she wallowed.