by M. R. Carey
“Nope,” Fran said. “He seems to be fine these days with just a football game and the occasional beer or two with the firefighters. There aren’t any women around, Ms. Kendall. Unless I count as a woman.”
“You don’t, honey,” Liz assured her. “Not in the sense I mean.”
It was said nicely, but it was kind of nasty. Fran didn’t realize until then that Ms. Kendall was talking about sex. It was kind of gross that she would do that in front of both her own kids and someone else’s. But she said some funny things too, about how things had been between her and her husband before he went away. Like about how one time the family had driven halfway to the Finger Lakes before Mr. Kendall realized he’d forgotten the tent they were going to camp in, but because he couldn’t admit that he’d messed up he made out like he’d decided at the last moment to book a hotel instead.
“I don’t remember that,” Zac said, although he was laughing along at Liz’s impersonation of Mr. Kendall as he dithered his way through an increasingly unlikely set of excuses. “We did camp out that time, didn’t we?”
“This was another time,” his mom said, and she shut him down by offering them all seconds. Which they all said yes to, because the carbonara was awesome.
There was cheesecake and ice cream for dessert, and cinnamon tea that Liz made with fresh cinnamon. Then Zac and Fran did the washing up together while Liz whisked Molly away to bed.
“The camping trip,” Fran asked Zac as they worked. “Do you think you were wrong about that?”
Zac looked uncomfortable. “Like Mom said, it must have been another time.”
“But you remember camping out at the Finger Lakes?”
“One time, yeah.”
Changes, Fran thought. Wrong memories, missing memories and changes. Oh my.
She’s just a liar, Lady Jinx growled from under the kitchen table.
But it hadn’t sounded like a lie to Fran. Of course people could tell lies with absolute conviction but Zac’s mom had clearly been enjoying the story, the memory, as she told it. You could see in her face that she was reliving what happened, adding in new details as they came back to her. In Fran’s experience, when liars added in details they did it to make you back off, like card players raising the bid when they had a bad hand. This had been something else.
Liz came back, announcing that Molly wanted both Zac and Fran to come in and kiss her goodnight. Zac went in first because Fran was still drying plates. That left the two women alone in the kitchen for a while.
It reminded Fran of her first visit. She hadn’t meant to say anything, but she found she couldn’t resist. The happy mood of the meal was still with her. She felt at home in Liz’s house, and more even than that she felt that there was a clue to her own big mystery lying right there in front of her, waiting for her to pick it up.
“Ms. Kendall,” she began, “I wonder if … Can I tell you something about my memories?”
Liz looked at her oddly, maybe even a little warily, but she nodded. “Sure.”
“Well, it’s not just memories. It’s lots of things. I guess I’m talking about my symptoms. You know, I have a condition, kind of? A post-traumatic thing. Because of what happened to me when I was a kid.”
Liz didn’t pretend not to understand, for which Fran was grateful. She just said, “Okay.”
“Well, one of the things that happens sometimes is that things around me will change. Not in crazy ways. Not, like a sofa turning into a giraffe or something. It’s more like I might see a red sofa turn into a green sofa, or something like that.”
“You mean you’re color-blind?”
Fran shook her head. “No, not that. It’s not just colors, it can be almost anything. You’ve got that blouse and those jeans on, but say I turned around for a moment, when I looked back you might be wearing a skirt. Or tracksuit bottoms, or … or pretty much anything, really.”
Liz was staring at her with blank incomprehension. And something underneath that, maybe a kind of hostility or disapproval, as though she didn’t entirely like what she was hearing. “Diving suit?” she suggested. “Ballgown?”
Fran laughed, although the edge in the older woman’s voice made her feel a slight pang of unease. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten into this. She was confessing to being a freak, if you wanted to look at it that way. To being mentally ill. Nobody liked being around that. You couldn’t catch a mental illness the way you could catch the flu, but Fran had met a lot of people who didn’t seem able to make that distinction.
“It wouldn’t be that extreme,” she said. “It would have to be something else you could have worn. Something that’s in your closet.”
“How do you know what’s in my closet?” Liz demanded.
“I … I don’t,” Fran admitted. “But …”
“I mean, if you’re making stuff up, you can make up anything, right?”
Fran tried again. “Yes, but it always seems to be stuff that doesn’t look wrong. Small details, like I said, not big hallucinations.”
“But they are hallucinations, sweetheart. All the same. You know that, right?”
Fran had hoped that Liz would say something like “me too!” and that would have given her an opening so she could talk about the other stuff. About being two people in one, or looking like you were. That put-down ought to have warned her off, but having come this far she found she didn’t want to just give up, even though the warm and intimate mood was fading fast. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “It’s going to sound weird, but it’s … well, it might be important. It might mean something to you. Or … or it might not, but I’m going to go ahead and say it anyway, because …” She swallowed. “Because I need to.”
Liz just stared. She didn’t look the least bit enthusiastic, but at least she didn’t say no.
“Did something just happen to you?” Fran blurted. “Something that … that changed you?”
That got the same deadpan gaze from Liz. And for a second or two she didn’t answer. When she did, it was with a single word and it was really no answer at all. “When?”
Fran considered. “Over the last few days. Maybe … the night Zac stayed over at my house. Maybe the day you went to court. Around then. Did you … did you change, Ms. Kendall? Because you look different to me!”
Fran offered this last insight only because she’d waded in so far without getting a response. It was all or nothing.
And it definitely wasn’t nothing. Ms. Kendall’s coldly impassive face switched on like a flashlight. Suddenly she was glaring at Fran in furious, cornered rage. Her hands shot up, one of them slamming Fran back against the counter while the other balled into a tight fist.
Fran uttered a yelp of surprise and flinched away from the blow. But the blow didn’t come. Liz had control of herself again in an instant. She gave a tinkling laugh, lowering both hands to her sides again as though she’d just been demonstrating a dance move.
“Bless you, dear,” she said. “No, nothing happened. And I certainly don’t feel any different.”
The transformation—the two transformations—were so sudden that Fran wondered if she was hallucinating. But she could still feel the imprint of Liz’s hand in the center of her chest. “G-good,” she babbled inanely. “That’s good. I’m glad.”
“What did you think you saw?”
“Nothing. Nothing I can explain. Just … nothing, really.”
Liz smiled.
Fran stared at her wide-eyed, her heart pounding and her mouth dry. She didn’t dare move or take her eyes off Liz, in case Liz changed her mind again and struck.
When Zac came in a moment later to tell Fran that Molly was ready to receive her, she shot out of the kitchen so fast she bumped against him in the doorway. And saying goodnight to Moll gave her a chance to pull herself together a little. But she didn’t stick around long after dinner. She was way too shaken up, and she couldn’t explain what had happened to Zac because she barely understood it herself. Plus she felt like Liz was watching her n
ow, tracking her whenever she was in the room, making sure that she and Zac were never alone together.
She told Zac she was tired and left for home before it even got dark. Zac was clearly surprised and a little hurt that she was bailing so early. He’d been expecting that they would slip away to his room in the course of the evening so Fran could give him the skinny about how things had gone at the clinic. They sort of had a shared ownership deal with Bruno Picota now. But she wasn’t up to talking about that in the light of how bruisingly she had bounced off Zac’s mom, and she couldn’t think of any way to explain to him that would make it better.
If anything, she made it worse. Her muttered goodbye to Liz, eyes downcast, must have given the impression that she was inexplicably sulking after a spectacular home-cooked meal and a lot of collateral hospitality. She must look like a spoiled brat.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Zac said as he walked her to the door. His face when she glanced sidelong at him was full of unasked questions.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed. “Thanks, Zachary.”
“I hope you had a good time. Mom’s amazing, isn’t she? To bounce right back from all the awful shit she’s been through lately.”
Fran couldn’t lie about it. It was pressing hard on every nerve she had. “The meal was great,” she said. “I’ve got to go, Zac. Total collapse. Bye.”
She fled off the porch and down the drive without looking behind her. If Zac gave her a final wave, she didn’t see it. But most likely, after the show she just put on, there was nothing to see.
I’m just glad you’re out of there, Jinx growled. That woman is dangerous.
Fran wanted to disagree, but couldn’t think of a thing to say. She only wondered what had happened. What was it that had changed Zac’s mom?
And what had it changed her into?
So the kid knew something, or had seen something.
But the kid was a freak, Beth reasoned. Nobody was going to listen to her if she spoke up, and she probably knew that well enough herself. There wasn’t any danger from that quarter.
There were two options, though, going forward: to wean Zac away from the relationship—tell him to keep his distance from the damaged little girl with the nosy disposition—or else to encourage it and keep a close eye on her. Either was fine, although she had a preference for the second option. If Zac kept up with Fran, Beth could keep up with Fran’s father. That raised some very pleasant possibilities.
Absently, she poured herself a glass of wine and took a big swallow. There was nothing to worry about from Fran Watts. Whatever she thought she knew, she couldn’t explain it to anyone else in a way that made any sense. She had barely been able to explain it to Beth herself.
Beth emptied the glass and poured another. A fatigue had settled on her in the course of the evening: the body she now wore reminding her of its limitations, which from now on would be hers.
“I’m going to bed, Mom. Goodnight.”
She turned and gave Zac a dazzling smile. “Goodnight, dollface,” she said tenderly.
He laughed at the unfamiliar endearment which had been part of her interaction with the first Zac, many lives and deaths ago. She felt that distance twisting in her gut again as she had when she was driving Molly into school, and she turned away so this other Zac wouldn’t see it in her eyes: a grief she couldn’t hide, and couldn’t explain.
He came over and kissed her. She pressed her fingers against the back of his hand, where it rested on her forearm. “Turn out the light in the hall, would you?” she muttered, still not looking at him.
“Sure. Don’t stay up too late.”
After his footsteps had receded, she slugged down the second glass of wine, gathered herself and rose. It disturbed her profoundly that, for a few moments there, Zac had gone from being her son to being a stranger. She had to shake off thoughts like that. This was the world she had, and she had fought hard to win it. There was no point in repining for the things she had lost.
She went to her room and prepared for bed. Wearing blue cotton pajamas, she slipped between the sheets, lay down and closed her eyes. But as tired as she was, sleep refused to come. Her awareness prowled around the inside of its new home: her thoughts wouldn’t let her rest.
But the body could rest. She slipped free of it and let it lie there, a becalmed ship with nobody on the bridge. Breath and heartbeat regulate themselves, she knew. There was no danger of her physical self hitting a crisis while her mind was elsewhere.
In any case she wouldn’t wander far. A part of her was still touching the outer fringes of Liz’s nervous system, alert for any warning signals. She floated just above the unconscious flesh, aloof from it but ready to drop back and take over again in an instant.
It was a good compromise. Beth knew very well that lack of sleep was toxic in the long term. The body had to have its down time. Well, the body was getting what it needed. She needed nothing, and could stay awake and on guard.
It was strange that there should be this duality—that her naked will, having once fought its way free of her own dying body, remained a thing apart from this new body she had won. She could put it on and take it off, and still be herself.
The ghost in the machine.
The monster that was part of the family.
The best of both worlds, she told herself. The very best.
The next day, Beth got on with the wider project of becoming Liz. Family life had a shape that she barely remembered, and it was fractal. There were things that happened every morning or every day or every week or only came around once in a while, and she was going to have to get her head around all of them—partly helped and partly hindered by her own memories of a subtly different set of routines with her original family.
The day-to-day stuff was the most urgent and the most obvious. Liz’s day—like her own before she died—was built around things that wouldn’t move. Breakfast and drop-off for the kids, a stint at the Cineplex—just half a shift today, 10:00 a.m. till 2:00 p.m.—and another trip to Giant Eagle so she could fix dinner.
She needed to get better at this, obviously. You didn’t drop by the supermarket every day: you planned your meals in advance and bought for the week. And when you were on a fixed income, you didn’t resort to takeout or restaurant outings very often. These limitations chafed her. She wanted to celebrate her return with hedonistic excess, not sensible housekeeping.
She was interested, though, in how this Giant Eagle was different from the one she remembered in her own neighborhood. The produce aisle was in the right place but everything else was shifted around, and there was a pharmacy in the back where her own store had had a deli counter. She couldn’t help feeling that the original store had been better. More choice, cleaner light and the prices …
She had to derail that thought and laugh at herself. It was like impostor syndrome in reverse: she was seeing the entire world as an inferior replica of her own world, when it was just different. If it didn’t seem to measure up, that was because the present moment never did: memory’s rose-tinted airbrush was too powerful.
Beth shrugged off the whole stupid issue and filled her basket with fine foods. Tonight she would cook a cassoulet with medallions of lamb and Italian sausage. The kids wouldn’t know what had hit them. There was a ton of ice cream left, but she added a key lime pie—something she hadn’t tasted since her resurrection and suddenly felt a hankering for.
As she transferred the groceries to the trunk of the car, she got another attack of impostor syndrome. Her former ride had been a Nissan Rogue. Liz’s Rio was like Liz herself: underpowered and self-effacing, a car that begged you not to take any notice of it. Every time Beth climbed inside it, she felt like she was putting on a piece of Liz’s damp, crushed personality.
Okay, that was a project for another day.
Maybe tomorrow.
Preoccupied with these thoughts, she ignored for a few seconds the sense of déjà vu that had just crept over her. Out of the corner of her eye she had
seen something—or someone—she recognized. She looked around and realized at once what it was.
A blonde woman had just stepped out of a big black SUV, parked a few spots along. It was the woman Beth had rumbled with at the school: not Eileen Garaldi, but the other, blonder one whose name she had never learned.
Beth watched the woman walk into the store, oblivious, her fat ass wobbling as she went. My goodness me, she thought. No need to check my watch, because it’s obviously payback time.
She briefly considered some options involving matches and firelighters. Giant Eagle would sell both, but there were CCTV cameras all over the parking lot and arson was a crime for which the camera footage would be pulled and scrutinized, no doubt.
Keying wasn’t.
Beth circled the SUV a couple of times, incising shallow, concentric ruts in its bodywork. It was restful and cathartic, and it gave her time to come up with other ideas. On the third pass, she had a lightbulb moment.
There was a toolbox in the Rio’s trunk, one of the cheap black plastic ones the Triple-A used to give out with memberships. She went back to the car and took a couple of items out of the box—an adjustable wrench and a tiny Maglite. She went back to the SUV, the tools held close to her side so nobody passing by would get a glimpse of them. Not that anyone was looking.
Back when she was seventeen and stupid, Beth had had a brief fling with a guy named Byron Bruce, whose father owned a garage. Byron had been around cars since he could walk, and intended to follow in his dad’s footsteps. Beth had had to feign an interest in cars in order to hang with him, and she had picked up some stuff almost by accident.
With a final look around to make sure nobody was in her line of sight, she dropped down and squirmed her way under the SUV. Groping with both hands, holding the Maglite in her teeth, she eventually found the oil filter screw and twisted it loose. Not all the way: just enough for a slow ooze of oil to appear along the lower edge of the filter. She ducked her head away quickly as the first couple of drops spattered down.