Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  The car would still drive. It would get Blondie home again tonight, and maybe it would last through the school run in the morning. Sometime tomorrow, though, or the next day at the latest, the engine would start to run hot. Once it got going it would overheat very quickly, because it would be running without lube. Finding the leak would be easy enough, and you could stop it just by tightening the screw up again, but you had a really short window in which to register what was happening, stop the car and deal with the problem. Otherwise the parts of the engine that were meant to slide frictionlessly across one another would fuse together and stop moving for good and all.

  Beth snaked and shimmied her way out from under the car, collected her tools and hit the road. Her hands were filthy, and there was a broad, glistening streak of oil across the front of her blouse. She could feel some on her face too: she hadn’t been quick enough to get out of the way when the valve loosened. Lucky for her the oil had cooled down enough so she didn’t get burned. All the same, and knowing that she looked like a homeless person, she felt a sense of well-being. Some of the universe’s infinite mountain of shit had been shifted back to where it belonged.

  The warm, fuzzy feelings stayed with her all the way home. She was practically smirking as she grabbed the groceries out of the trunk and headed on up the drive toward the house. It was nearly two hours yet before she had to go pick Molly up from school. Plenty of time to change, and put some coffee on.

  “Ms. Kendall?”

  She hadn’t even registered that there was someone waiting on the porch until the figure—dressed in a bright yellow raincoat with red trim, like a walking hazard sign—popped up right in front of her. She took a step back and dropped the groceries so her hands would be free to fight.

  But as the onions and cans of flageolet beans rolled back down toward the road, she relaxed again. A little, anyway, but not too much. There might still be a fight looming. For now, though, the woman held up both hands in the universal gesture of declared harmlessness.

  “I just want to talk,” said Jamie Langdon. “If that’s okay?”

  During study hall, Fran found Zac waiting for her at their usual table in the library, in the reference bay where nobody liked to sit because it was in full view of the librarians’ station.

  “Pull up a chair,” he said. “First round is on the house.”

  More sour worms. Her dream loomed up in her mind and her stomach lurched. “I’m good, thanks,” she said hastily.

  “So, are you ready to go to work?” Zac asked. “I think we should start with the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, then move on to Mrs. Keith’s grammar exercise if the excitement gets too much for us.”

  “Sure,” Fran agreed. “Sounds like a plan. When Smoot Met Hawley is my favorite movie.”

  “It’s everyone’s favorite.”

  They went on as they usually did, taking alternate sections of their dry-as-dust textbook and reducing each to keynote-style prompts. The excitement never even threatened to reach dangerous levels, but the boredom was amicable enough. It was only spoiled by the fact that Fran knew in advance they wouldn’t just stick to homework. She owed Zac a progress report. And something else besides that he didn’t expect and wouldn’t welcome.

  She kept hesitating, putting off the moment, until he got tired of waiting. “Fill me in on what happened with Dr. Southern,” he said at last, propping the history book up on its broken spine.

  “He said he’ll write to Picota’s doctors at Grove City. Try to set something up.”

  Zac’s enthusiasm was instant, and overwhelming. He let out an incredulous gasp that turned into a laugh. “Sweet! We’re off to the races?”

  Fran tried to moderate his expectations. “He just said he’d try. It’s ten to one nothing will happen. The shrinks at Grove City would have to believe it would be good for Bruno to talk to me, and I can’t see how they’d get to that conclusion. I’m the kid he almost killed. Even just seeing me would most likely have him crawling on the ceiling.”

  Zac waved these pragmatic objections away. “But there’s got to be a chance. And if it goes ahead … Fran, it’s perfect! Being in a room with Bruno would be a million times better than just going back to the motel.”

  Or a million times worse, Fran thought glumly. It might not just be Bruno who was crawling on the ceiling. Aloud she repeated, “It’s most likely not going to happen.”

  Zac didn’t even seem to be listening. “What we should do,” he said, getting out his tablet, “first thing, is we should get our research on. We need to read up on the skadegamutc, so we can talk to Picota on his own terms. Match the radius of his fruit loops. I looked it up on Wikipedia. The tribe that had that story was the Abenaki. So it’s a fair bet that was the tribe Picota’s mom belonged to. Want to see what else we can find out about them?”

  Fran didn’t. Quickly she put out a hand and covered the tablet’s power button so Zac couldn’t turn it on.

  “Actually,” she said, “I wanted to tell you about something else.”

  What had happened with Liz had been bobbing up in her thoughts again and again since the night before. She wasn’t sure how Zac was going to take this new helping of weird shit on top of so much else, but she was certain about one thing: he had a right to know.

  “Tell me what?” Zac looked surprised, then concerned. Probably he could read her tension in her face.

  She took a deep breath, and just went for it.

  “You remember the first time I saw you and your mom at Carroll Way?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you remember me staring?”

  “Yeah. I was staring too. I didn’t expect to meet anyone from school there.”

  “Okay, but it was more than that. On my side, I mean. I was staring because I was seeing something maximally strange.”

  This didn’t feel like a time for half-measures. What she was about to say wouldn’t make any sense at all unless he knew everything. This would be the hardest thing she had ever done, except maybe for going back to the Perry Friendly, but she owed it to Zac not to hold back.

  So she told him everything. She reminded him about the changes, first of all: her own weird problem that probably went all the way back to her abduction. Then she told him what she had seen the day they had all met up at the clinic, going right the way through to his mom’s brief but major league freak-out the night before. She tried to describe it the way she would write down an incident in her notebook, with no emotion or commentary, as if it had happened to someone else. She thought it might sound more believable that way.

  But she was watching Zac’s face while she talked, and she could see it wasn’t working. He just looked puzzled at first. Then his frown deepened and turned into something else.

  Fran remembered now all the times they’d talked about Zac’s mom. How protective he was of her, and how much he wanted to stand between her and the world. Which—when the world meant his father—Liz had never allowed him to do. Maybe she should have thought about these things before she opened her mouth. It was too late now.

  After she’d finished, she waited for Zac to speak. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. “I know it all sounds kind of bad sci-fi,” Fran said to fill up the strained silence. “But it’s true. Swear to God.”

  “Sorry,” Zac told her with no inflection to his voice. “I don’t even know what that story was about.”

  “It’s about your mom maybe being the same as me.”

  “The same as you, Fran? How, exactly?” The idea seemed to offend him, which in turn gave Fran a vicious twinge of hurt she didn’t want to examine right then.

  “I’d love to find out,” Fran said. “But she didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

  Zac closed up his books. It looked like study hall was over, at least for the two of them. “Well hey, do you think it might be because she didn’t understand the question?”

  “Zac—”

  “I mean, it must have sounded pretty funny, coming out of the blue like that.
‘You used to have a trademark visual effect, but now you don’t.’ I’m not sure I’d know how to react to that, if I’m honest.”

  He’d raised his voice. It made Mrs. Schuler cast a hard look in their direction—the prelude to an intervention. Under the table, Lady Jinx growled: a sudden, indelicate eruption of sound. Fran felt much the same.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m not saying I understand it. I just wanted you to know what happened.”

  “What you think happened,” Zac corrected her. “That’s not always the same thing, is it?”

  Fran did the slow-blink-and-then-refocus that you did when somebody was being a humongous dick. “Wow,” she said.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Fran. You get hallucinations. You told me all about them.”

  “I do, yes. But I know how they work.”

  “How they usually work.” Zac’s tone was flat, unequivocal.

  “Exactly. This was different.”

  “That doesn’t mean you weren’t having some kind of episode.”

  Maybe it was the hard emphasis he put on the word, so it sounded like a curse-word. Or maybe it was the grim set of his face.

  “I’m not saying your mom is crazy,” Fran muttered. Mrs. Schuler was giving them the stink eye again, so she kept her voice as low and level as she could—as though they were still just talking trade protectionism. “I’m not even saying there’s anything wrong with her. I’m thinking it might be the opposite. She seems a lot happier now than she was before. A lot … stronger, somehow. More confident. But one way or another, she changed. When I first met her, she looked … well, exactly the way I looked to Bruno Picota. There were two of her. Now there’s just the one, and I was hoping I could ask her why. But she shut me down hard when I mentioned it. I wanted you to know in case you could find out more. But if you don’t want to, that is totally your choice.”

  “Yeah,” Zac agreed, his tone almost snide. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Fran had an irrational urge to tip the bag of gummy worms over his head. She knew he was angry, but she had thought him incapable of that kind of petty sniping. “Well, I gave you the facts,” she said. “You can do what you like with them. Including nothing, obviously.”

  She gathered her things, blinking away a tear she fervently wished wasn’t there. She was a lot more angry than she was unhappy.

  “The facts?” Zac said. Only now he wasn’t saying it to her. He was saying it to the room, in a big, ringing voice. “I don’t know how to thank you, Fran. You know everything, obviously. You see such a shit-ton of stuff that nobody else can see. It must be a big responsibility, having that kind of a gift.”

  “Zachary Kendall,” Mrs. Schuler said sharply. “If you raise your voice one more time I’m going to ask you to leave.”

  Fran looked at him in wonder. It was as though she had never even seen him at all until then. The revelation that he was capable of that much cruelty somehow took away any of the pain she would have expected to feel from the betrayal.

  “Asshole,” she said without any heat at all. “Have a nice life.”

  She stuffed the last of her books and notes back in her bag.

  “Fran—” Zac said in a voice much more like his own. Now that he had determinedly pushed things to a crisis, he seemed surprised at where they had landed up.

  “Don’t bother,” Fran suggested. “Work hard and play hard, goon.”

  Which was a pretty good exit line, at least. Unfortunately it wasn’t actually her exit. She still had to do the walk of shame, past all the other tables, watched by dozens of her curious classmates who had seen her arguing with Zac and were making no secret of their amusement. Freaky Frankie was always good for some improvised entertainment.

  There were a few whistles and catcalls, which Mrs. Schuler ineffectually tried to shush.

  Fran kept her head down and kept right on going. Lady Jinx guarded her back with a magic sword that—newsflash—didn’t really exist.

  “He’d been really tense,” Jamie said, “as the appeal got closer. He was pretty hard to live with, to be honest.”

  Beth could think of a million answers to that one but she just laughed, amused in spite of herself. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  The two of them were sitting in the living room—the worst option by far unless you counted all the others. Going into the kitchen and sitting up at the counter was what you’d do if a friend called, an invitation to intimacy, so to hell with that. Staying out on the porch ran the risk of someone overhearing what Jamie had to say. Parvesh Sethi, to name but one, worked from home and kept his windows open.

  So the living room it was. But Beth hadn’t bothered to fix coffee. The best way forward here was to hear her out and shine her on, but that didn’t require Beth to be hospitable. The last thing she wanted was for Jamie to get comfortable.

  To be fair, Jamie looked anything but. She kept smoothing down the hem of her raincoat, which she hadn’t taken off, and her dark eyes darted around like they couldn’t find anything they liked enough to settle on. She had a thin face and a tall, angular body. She was a goddamn clothes horse, more or less, with the arms folded out at asymmetrical angles. Christ only knew what Marc had seen in her.

  “I know,” Jamie said. “You had it a lot worse than me. He never hit me. I didn’t believe what you were saying to start with, but as the trial went on I kind of had to accept … you know, that there was another side to him. We talked. About you, and what he’d done to you. He swore to me he’d changed, and he could never be like that again.”

  Beth raised an eyebrow, allowing her skepticism to show. “Lovely,” she said. “He told me that too. Couple of times a month on average. Is this what you wanted to talk to me about, because really, that’s between you and him.”

  A nice touch, she thought, that present tense.

  “No,” Jamie said with a faint, unhappy smile. “No, I don’t think it would be right to ask you to talk to me about any of that. I’m just scared for him, that’s all. I know everyone’s assuming he ran away to avoid going to jail, but that doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “No?” Beth asked, openly sarcastic.

  “No. He didn’t pack. Not a thing. I mean, like, not even his toothbrush or his shaver. It’s not as though he’s rich, Ms. Kendall. Far from it. Most of the time he’s not bringing in a red cent, and we just live on what I can make from my mail order business. We’ve got a few hundred bucks in a savings account, but I looked and he didn’t touch it. If he ran, he ran with maybe twenty dollars and some change in his pocket.”

  “Maybe he wanted to make a fresh start. Or maybe he had some funds you didn’t know about.”

  Jamie picked at her hem some more. She shook her head slowly. “Maybe,” she admitted. “I think there were a lot of things I didn’t know. He used to go out at night sometimes, and if I was awake when he got back in he said he’d just been out walking because he couldn’t get to sleep. But I could see how tense he was when he said it, like he was ready to lose his temper if I took it any further. So I knew there was more to it than that.”

  She looked straight at Beth for the first time since she’d sat down. “But he loves those kids,” she said. “I can’t imagine him leaving them.”

  Can you imagine him killing them? Beth thought. I can.

  This was easy. It would only have been hard if she had any respect for this woman, and she wasn’t in any danger of that. “So you were still tiptoeing around his temper,” she said, “even after he promised he was a changed man. What does that tell you?”

  Jamie was still staring at her—a troubled gaze, not an accusing one. “I told you: he never hit me. That was the truth. I would have left him if he had. And he was never cruel to the kids. I wouldn’t have stood for that either.”

  “Good for you. Best way of keeping the kids safe, though? Don’t let him near them in the first place.” Beth didn’t try to hide her contempt. She still didn’t feel like she needed to.

  Jamie sighed and looked a
way at last—down at her hands. “Okay,” she said softly. “I guess that answers that.”

  “What?” Beth felt a small twinge of alarm. What had she given away? She had felt in control until now.

  Jamie looked up again. In spite of Beth’s snarking tone, her expression was still calm and sad. “I didn’t know how to ask, but … I thought he might have been with you. When he was sneaking out. That he might be coming round here. That the two of you might be … you know.”

  It was such a grotesque suggestion that Beth gasped out loud. “Jesus!”

  “I know. It sounds ridiculous when you were dragging him up on assault charges. But he really believed he could persuade you to change your mind. And I …” She hesitated.

  “You thought his methods of persuasion might include sex?” Beth stood up involuntarily. The alarm was gone, replaced by pure, white-hot indignation. Underneath that, her stomach lurched with nausea at the bare thought of it. “You thought I’d let him touch me? Let him do me?”

  “I’m sorry.” Jamie held up her hands again, the way she had out on the driveway. “I never intended to give offense. I’m just trying to make sense of all this.”

  “Get out,” Beth said. “Get the hell out, right now, before I slap your stupid face off.”

  Jamie seemed astonished at her sudden vehemence. Clearly she didn’t appreciate the enormity of what she’d just suggested. “Okay,” she said.

  She picked up her things hastily, but Beth was already wrestling with herself, trying to damp down that flaring filament of rage. There was too much at stake here. Spiking Blondie’s car was one thing, but Jamie could cause genuine trouble for her. She had to be careful.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with an immense effort. “That was rude. Seriously, though, I would never let Marc within a mile of me. There’s a court order, so I’m sure he would have had more sense than to come, but we’re through in any case. We were through a long time ago. Please don’t make any mistake about that.”