by M. R. Carey
Jamie stood irresolute, relieved at the change in Beth’s tone but still thrown off balance—as much by how quickly she had calmed as by how suddenly she had flared up.
“I believe you,” she said. “And I … I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time. Like I said, I’m just worried for him.”
She wasn’t making any move toward the door. “Was there something else?” Beth asked, trying not to make it sound like just another way of saying “get the hell out.”
Jamie gestured toward her purse. “I brought some gifts for Molly and Zac,” she said. “I haven’t seen them in ages, and … well, it’s not likely I’ll be seeing them any time soon, is it? But I wanted them to know I’m thinking about them. And if they want to call me, they can. Any time. I hope they know that.”
“Gifts?”
“They’re nothing much, to be honest. Just little things.”
“Leave them on the counter,” Beth told her.
Jamie took two small parcels out of her purse. Paper bags from a store somewhere, folded over and taped shut. She set them down side by side.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
“And if Marc should get in touch with you—”
“The police will be the first to know. You’ll be the second.”
“You’ve got my number, then?” Jamie seemed surprised.
“I can get it from Zac.”
“Oh. Right.”
Jamie took the hint at last and left, asking Beth to pass on her love to Zac and Molly. “Of course,” Beth assured her.
Alone at last, Beth ripped off the wrappings and looked at the two gifts. A braided bracelet for Molly; a puzzle ring for Zac. They both had a homespun look to them: probably Jamie had made them herself.
Beth threw them in the trash and started dinner.
But Jamie Langdon had left a mood of unease in her wake, and it persisted. Did I miss anything? Beth asked herself as she chopped onions, bringing the knife down with more force than was strictly needed. She thought not, but probably every murderer since Cain had made the same calculation and got the same result.
Maybe she should go over to the garden plot and check on how Marc was decomposing. But there were lots of reasons not to. She’d buried him as deep as she could, and layered in a lot of strong-smelling fertilizer to mask the scent of his decomposition. Winter was coming, so nobody would be out on their plots for the next few months. When they came back in the spring, it was likely that Marc would have rendered down nicely.
Plus there was a chance she might be seen, and she had no right at all to be there. The garden plot key had been Marc’s. She shouldn’t even have held on to it after she was done burying him. But there it was in back of her closet along with his two cellphones (sans batteries), his wallet and all of her assorted weaponry. That stuff would take some explaining if the apartment was ever searched. She really needed to get rid of it. But a part of her refused to contemplate throwing away things that might still turn out to be useful—and that applied to Marc’s effects as well as to the weapons.
You never knew.
Fran got home before her dad, which happened a lot. Tonight she was grateful: it gave her a chance to recover from the day.
She kind of hated that she needed to recover. She had had to be self-sufficient for most of her life after learning way back in second grade how irrevocably her cards were marked. If you were known to be a weirdo, if that was the basis of your social identity as it was for her, nobody would cut you any slack. They might pity you, but they wouldn’t want to hang out with you and they mostly wouldn’t go out on a limb by defending or befriending you. The chess club had become the closest thing she had to a tribe, and she enjoyed a fairly high status there because she had better game than any of them, but that guarded respect was as far as it went.
So it shouldn’t have hurt so much to be blown off by Zac Kendall. Their friendship had still had its training wheels on. It shouldn’t have built up enough velocity to do any real damage when it hit the wall. Fran didn’t feel undamaged, though. She felt bruised and resentful and full of useless self-pity.
Also, for the first time in ages, she felt a little bit helpless. She had already been having doubts about her ability to face Bruno Picota. Now she was sure she couldn’t do it. Not alone.
But it was about one chance in a million that Dr. Southern could get her in there anyway, so there was probably no point in worrying about it.
It had been a memorable summer, and an eventful fall. But winter would be the same as it always was. In Pittsburgh you just turned up your collar and went to sleep a little, inside, until the good weather came back again.
Time moved on, but in a lot of ways it seemed not to.
Beth continued to savor the pleasures that came with being alive and in the world. The taste and smell of food, the feel of fabrics on her skin, the music and TV shows she’d missed, the turning of the seasons, the warmth of the house after a brisk walk on a cold day, booze and weed and dark chocolate.
Sometimes, though, she caught herself sinking into a kind of trance. She had forgotten how much of life was about boredom. About slogging on through things that didn’t have any intrinsic interest while you waited patiently for the things that did. That wasn’t what she wanted. She had spent too much effort and pain in getting here to sit around and waste her time now she’d arrived.
So she fought back against the insidious threat of routine. And she enlisted Zac and Molly in the fight by instituting a relentless regime of treats. She took them out to movies and to bowling, state parks and Six Flags, museums once or twice when there was nothing better she could think of. They enjoyed themselves a lot. They rediscovered what being together as a family really meant.
(They weren’t her family, but she tried not to think about that.)
Then there were treats that were just her own. Red wine, and sometimes white, and sometimes spirits. A blunt at the end of the day, scored from her co-worker Tandy whose brother was a dealer. She got herself laid at least once a week, under cover of going out with the girls from work, leaving Zac to babysit his sister. Always one-night stands: no names, no pack drill, no questions asked or quarter given. Just wham, bam, thank you Sam. That was the only way if you wanted to avoid getting saddled with a loser or a psycho. Her plan to make a move on Gil Watts had come apart when Zac and Francine’s friendship broke up without warning, but that was probably for the best. Might have been hard to keep that one clean and simple, and clean and simple were her watchwords now.
Sleep still eluded her. The body slept, but Beth’s consciousness never went offline. She just let the body fall away from her for a few hours and spent the night in watching and thinking. Once or twice, when she was in this untethered state, she drifted through the walls of the condo to spy on the neighbors. But their lives were suffocatingly dull, and she always felt exposed when she was away from her flesh-and-blood nest for very long. Anything might happen to it while she was away.
She had read somewhere that you couldn’t survive indefinitely without rest. Probably that was true for most people. For her, though, flesh and spirit seemed to have reached an accommodation that worked for both. Body and soul could spend the night apart, then come together again and be none the worse. She felt a little ragged and raw in the early morning sometimes, but she burned that off soon enough if she kept moving.
And she did keep moving. Constant activity was an antidote for a lot of things, including thought. There were many topics it didn’t do to think about too much when it came down to it: this wasn’t her world, and the fit was never going to be perfect. Whenever the kids reminded her of some treasured moment she had no memory of, the parallax chafed her. When some trick of Molly’s speech or a fleeting expression on Zac’s face reminded her of her own kids (guaranteed original and genuine), and how their sweet lexicon of words and actions had died with them, it hurt her heart.
She was still wedged into this life at a slightly
awkward angle.
But she was alive. That was the salient point. She intended to stay that way.
She managed to hide her vacillations from the children. If anything, her awareness of the secret gulf between them made her more attentive to their needs. She tried to tie herself to their lives by a thousand slender threads, since the big cables of consanguinity were gone for good.
Some of those threads were material things, gifts she’d bought them. Maybe that idea had grown out of Jamie Langdon’s visit, but Beth suspected it was another symptom of her dislocation, her sense of being out of place. Money felt no more real than anything else did, so she spent a whole lot more of it than she had. She bought Zac a new electric guitar and amplifier (“You want to follow in the family tradition, right?”), and Molly a bike. Not forgetting her gifts to herself, of course. She had a new black leather jacket, a Patrizia Pepe with two rows of silver studs bracket- ing the diagonal slash of the zipper. The black Nissan Rogue sitting in the driveway set it off really nicely, and consoled her every time she climbed behind the wheel.
The other thing that gave her a great deal of satisfaction was how smoothly she had managed to extricate herself from Liz’s pre-existing friendships and obligations. The informal network of play dates depended on reciprocity, so all she had to do there was stop having other people’s kids round to play and the invites had quickly stopped coming. The Sethis had been harder to dislodge, but it was all a question of finding the right lever. She had had to refuse about a dozen invitations for lunch, dinner and impromptu parties, but the couple had finally got the message when Beth started telling them jokes with homophobic punchlines. Visibly hurt and puzzled, they had retreated into their own space.
Beebee would be next, but as long as the search for Marc continued it was safer to stay on the cop’s good side. At least this way Beth got progress reports—the progress, thankfully, being entirely in the wrong direction. Illusory sightings in St. Clair, Philly and distant Ithaca kept the local cops scampering like mice while Marc rendered down quietly and inexorably a few blocks north.
Jamie was the only irritant who refused to go away. She called Beth at least once a week to ask if there had been any news, always in the same meek and stolid tone, ready to be disappointed and accepting the curt thumbs-down without argument every time. She hinted once or twice that she would love to see Zac and Molly if they wanted to come over. “Maybe spell you for a night or two, if you want to go away. It would be no trouble …”
Right, Beth thought. Borrow my kids, debrief them at your leisure. Where does Mommy go? Who does she see? What happened on the night of …? No trouble at all.
“I’ll ask them,” Beth said every time. And didn’t. She had nothing to gain from that transaction.
She was doing great, all things considered. But she didn’t let her guard down, and she took nothing for granted. So when the shit and the fan did finally stage a short reunion tour, around mid-November, she wasn’t caught out. It was almost as though she’d been expecting it all along.
It was about one in the morning. The kids had crashed out hours ago, but Beth was still awake. Or rather she was awake again. Having tried and failed to get to sleep, she was propped up on her pillows, working her way through season ninety-three of some bullshit crime drama.
Out of nowhere, the screen of the tiny flatscreen flickered for a second and then righted itself. That was all the warning she got, but she was instantly alert. The flicker was inside her eye, not inside the TV. Something had tried to slip past her guard into her mind, but it hadn’t gotten very far at all.
She didn’t sleep again that night. She turned out the light in the end for the sake of appearances, but she couldn’t even bring herself to close her eyes. She sat unblinking in the dark and waited for an attack that didn’t come.
The next day she had a full shift. She tried to shrug off her exhaustion as a body thing, but it dogged her through the day. Everything seemed to take twice as long as it should, and to be about three times as irritating.
The flicker at the corner of her eyes didn’t recur at the Cineplex, or on the drive home, but it was there again as soon as Beth opened the front door. As though it had been waiting for her.
Well now.
She cooked and served a meal, her mind elsewhere. The potatoes were half-raw and the meat cooked dry. When Molly bitched about it, Beth didn’t even respond.
“I think it’s too tough for her to chew, Mom,” Zac said.
“Make her something else, then,” Beth muttered. She took herself away to her own room and locked the door. Could she be wrong? She wasn’t wrong. She felt it again, a tentative touch. Saw it way off at the very edge of her visual field, a virtual ripple trying to pretend it wasn’t there at all.
“Well, hey there, girl,” Beth murmured. “It’s been a while.” She kept her voice cold and casual, almost inflectionless.
The ripple went through a few shivery permutations without resolving into a definite shape.
“You’re looking good, Lizzie,” Beth said. “Have you lost weight or something?”
She waited for a response. When it didn’t come, she started to doubt herself all over again. The stain on the air was so faint it could be no more than an after-image. Still, the things that had gotten her this far included a healthy—maybe more than healthy—dose of paranoia. Better to assume the worst and go from there.
“You think you’re ready for round two?” Beth said aloud. “I can promise you, you’re not.”
That was just stating a fact. If this tiny optical illusion was Liz, there was no way she could push Beth out and take her place now that Beth was alert and armed against her. Hell, she couldn’t have done it even with a surprise attack. Beth was way stronger than her to start with and she had the advantage of position.
But under that certainty there was a doubt. If this was Liz, then Liz was more tenacious than she seemed. She should have faded away like a bad fart a long time ago.
Beth sat up, keeping the same iron-hard expression on her face, the same indifferent tone in her voice. “Ring the bell and come out punching,” she said. “By all means. Whenever you feel the urge. I’ll chew you up and spit you out, you sad little fuck.”
She waited for a long time, but nothing at all happened. After maybe half an hour, she went back out to the kids. Zac had made Molly an omelet. Molly had eaten it, and now wanted to talk about it: unedited highlights, play-by-play and color commentary both. Beth watched TV and pretended to listen.
“Is everything okay?” Zac asked.
“Just a headache,” Beth said. “Thanks for picking up the slack there.”
“You want some Tylenol?”
“I just want to sit.”
She endured another sleepless night. The next day she was feeling wrung out by mid-morning. She grabbed a half-hour nap in the car after she finished her shift, not caring if anybody saw. It was the house where she had to be on her guard. That was the only place where the crappy little special effect manifested itself.
Enough was enough. She needed to shut this shit down before it went any further. The question was how.
Assume the worst and go from there. If this was Liz, then Beth needed something that would make her back off or come on strong: something that would decide the issue once and for all.
She had an idea what that something might look like. Liz was just Beth without balls. Her reactions might be different but her buttons were more or less in the same places.
That evening she bided her time. Did some laundry. Watched some soaps. Went through the motions with the kids. But keeping one eye open the whole time for the tiny spots of turbulence in the air that announced her invisible house guest. She was there, off at the edge of things but never entirely out of sight. Clearly she was settling in to become a permanent fixture.
Over my dead body, Beth thought.
She put Molly to bed. Kissed Zac goodnight, telling him not to stay up too late—then stayed up herself until the light u
nder his door went out. The house made stretching and creaking noises as it cooled around her.
She sat in the kitchen, dragging the short, thin blade of a paring knife through the sharpener again and again.
When the air moved in the corner of the room, the smallest possible shimmer like a heat haze that couldn’t get its act together, Beth nodded a welcome.
“Just the two of us now,” she said. “Girls together. Much more cozy.”
She held up the knife. Its edge had a blue shine to it. “You think that’s sharp enough?” she asked.
No answer from the special effect.
“I know,” Beth said. “Sharp enough for what, right? Can’t use it on you, obviously. You’re way too thin to cut.”
She paused, licking lips that felt a little dry. “That is you, isn’t it, Lizzie? You came back, even though it was obvious nobody was missing you. The kids are safer with me. Happier too. You should see all the stuff I’ve bought them. The fun we have. They don’t need you. Nobody ever did.”
She got to her feet slowly. “But you’re never going to believe that, are you? Never going to take the hint. So let me show you something. One mother to another.”
Her heart was beating faster than she would have liked. She refused to admit the possibility that she was afraid of Liz. Liz was, after all, a doormat, a woman who could be relied on to surrender when the going got even a little bit arduous. But Beth wanted her gone all the same. Not conditionally or temporarily, not pushed down into some sinkhole from which she could crawl up again at her leisure. Gone forever.
She walked to the door, through it, down the hallway. Past Zac’s door to Molly’s. The stain in the air followed her, although it moved so slowly that it almost seemed to be standing still. Got you good, didn’t I? Beth thought. You can barely even crawl. I bet it took you a month or so just to scrape yourself off the pavement. Why the hell would you think you stand a chance against me now?