Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  She opened the door and stepped inside, leaving it just ajar behind her. A ragged rumble of breathing, not quite a snore, came from the bed where Molly was a small bump in a large expanse of duvet. Some nights, because of her bronchiectasis, Molly snored like a chain saw. Tonight she was relatively quiet.

  Beth sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the duvet down a little, exposing Molly’s head and neck and her left arm, thrown across the pillow with the hand curled into a tight, emphatic fist. Molly even had excess energy when she slept.

  “Look at her,” Beth said, keeping her voice low. “Did you ever see anything so beautiful in the whole world? Answer is you didn’t, because there’s nothing out there that comes close.”

  She drew the knife lightly across the tiny nubs of Molly’s vertebrae, barely touching them. The little girl shivered in her sleep and shifted a little.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” Beth muttered. She reversed the knife in her hand, gripping it hard now, the blade pointing down between the first and second of those tiny bumps, beneath which ran the precious conduits of her little girl’s blood and breath; the slender cord that made movement possible.

  Don’t!

  It was a wail of utter despair.

  Finally! But Beth didn’t yield at once. She waited while that milky smudge at her shoulder bobbed and rippled, groping for a semblance of shape and not finding it.

  Don’t hurt her! Please!

  “Why would I want to hurt her?” Beth demanded in the same soft, level tone. “I love her as much as you do. She’s my baby girl, and there’s nothing in the world that’s more precious to me. But listen to me, Liz Kendall. Listen to me, and believe me. I will rip her wide open and watch her bleed out on the ground before I give her up to you. She’s mine. Your whole life is mine. I won it fair and square and I’m not giving it back.”

  “So I’m telling you to get the fuck out of here, and not come back. If you push me, if you make me think for a moment that you’re going to take what’s mine, what happens next is on you. All of it.”

  The stain in the air said nothing. It made a sound, but you couldn’t mistake the sound for a word, or even an idea. It was a shapeless articulation of pain, and of surrender.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it faded. Beth waited until there was nothing left. Only then did she remove the knife from Molly’s neck. It fell from her hand onto the bedroom floor. She was trembling all over where a second ago her hand had been steady as a rock. All her self-control collapsed at once. A sudden rush of nausea took her by surprise, her throat filling up with sour bile that she forced down again with a huge effort. In its wake came quick, strangled sobs.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she gasped. “Oh baby, I didn’t mean a word of it. Not one fucking word. I would never—I couldn’t ever—”

  She gathered the little girl up in her arms and squeezed her tight. Molly squirmed and cried out as she woke, with no idea of what was happening or who was holding her.

  “It’s all right now,” Beth told her again and again. As if it had been someone else’s hand holding the knife, as if she were the protector rather than the threat. “It’s all right now, baby girl.”

  Liz made it as far as the bottom of the street.

  Well, almost. A hundred yards shy of East Liberty, she drifted to a halt and more or less ceased to exist. She was so close to nothing the difference didn’t seem to matter: a weightless, dimensionless pinprick of despair. Cars passed through her infrequently. The noise of their engines passed through her too, no more substantial and no less.

  The world penetrated and dismantled her like an endless parade of camels padding serenely through the eye of the same damn needle, which couldn’t move or evade or close itself or do anything very much except endure.

  It had taken her so long to get this far! After the sucker punch that threw her out of her own body, she had fallen for an endless time, and lost herself along the way. Her thoughts had scattered like raindrops in a squall, had settled wherever the wind took them, so each little thought had had to crawl for miles to find its neighbors.

  She had collected herself the way you collect roadside garbage. Made a junk sculpture of her own mind, which she was now using to think. With no brain to keep her thoughts in, it was the best she could do.

  She had found herself in darkness at first, and wondered if she was in hell. But the glaring yellow lights that bore down on her, two by two, and turned sullen red as they passed, made it clear at last that this was not the afterlife but the Fort Pitt Tunnel. She had crossed the Monongahela River, not the Styx. That was miles from Larimer. How had she come so far? Maybe distances worked differently when you were a ghost. And dead or not, that was what Liz now was. The ghost of herself, exorcised and dispossessed. Maybe not even a full ghost at that. Just the bits she could find and bring together.

  She couldn’t even move at first. She didn’t know how to interact with the space around her, since she didn’t fill any space to start with. She was like a camera feed without a camera, a space into which the world emptied its images of itself.

  And then, slowly and imperfectly, its sounds. Dopplered engine roar; fluting wind; the thud-space-thud of tires hitting a pothole.

  But if Liz could see without eyes and hear without ears, why shouldn’t she walk without legs? The invisible pinprick had invisible resources of its own. Over the space of days, measured by the coming and the waning of the light, she worked and worked at shifting her point of view, furiously pushing at the margins of reality until they gave just a little.

  She moved. Ponderously, painfully, as if she was the most massive thing in the world rather than the least. But still, a win was a win.

  She found her way home. Slower than molasses, a tiny ship that left no wake, she forged on mile after mile until she was back among familiar streets.

  The door gave her some problems, but that was because she still wasn’t thinking straight—or thinking much at all (the urgency that filled her and dragged her through the night came from somewhere deep and unexamined). It seemed to her that a door must still be a barrier when really it was an irrelevance. After staring at it from almost zero distance for a day and most of a night, she pushed herself straight through it. There was a brief interval of darkness and she was on the other side with no loss of momentum.

  She drifted up the hall, steering by the faint, warm glow from under her bedroom door. She was through the maze at last. The only thing left to do was to confront the minotaur.

  And, after all that effort, Beth had vanquished her in the space of a minute. She had forgotten, somehow, in her endless, painfully protracted battle charge that she had no weapons to fight with, no advantage to push, no plan.

  She wasn’t fighting a monster; she was trying to lay single-handed siege to a fortress. So naturally she had failed. What was worse, and completely unexpected, was how she had failed. By threatening Molly, Beth had won this battle and all possible future battles. Liz wouldn’t dare to go near her after this, or even to enter the house.

  Which meant she was leaving her kids in the care of a woman who was prepared to use them as hostages to save herself.

  I can’t even cry, Liz thought in blank despair. I can’t even scream.

  What did that leave?

  In the days and weeks after her second decisive victory over Liz, Beth was riding higher than ever. She rewarded herself in all the ways she could think of, luxuriating in the feeling that she was now, finally, safely embedded in her new life.

  The paranoid part of her played up from time to time even then: it reminded her that a feeling of invulnerability was dangerous. In the absence of an enemy, you could defeat yourself just by becoming too cocksure, too arrogant. But arrogance was in her nature, as was hedonism. She gave them both free rein in spite of that nagging inner voice. There was so much to enjoy in this brave new Pittsburgh, and lots of lost time to make up for.

  Increasingly, though, her pleasures were solitary. She had to admit to herself that her
relationship with Zac and Molly had soured a little.

  It had already started before that night with the knife and the ultimatum. The steady diet of treats was bound to pall in the long run, leaving all of them a little spent and exhausted. But when it did, Beth was caught unawares. She hadn’t realized how much she had come to rely on the frantic partying as a shield, holding the kids at one remove with moments of regimented enjoyment.

  When they were all together in the house, she kept being reminded—at moments when she least expected it—of how strange these two children were to her. As familiar to her as her own right and left hand, but still … alien. A word here. A gesture there. A laugh. A frown. A headshake. A tone of voice. All of them just a little off, but a miss was as good as a mile.

  Molly still slept with her night light on. Beth had been through this with the real Molly before she turned five, not wanting to indulge her in things that would only make her weak. Of course, weak was fine in Liz Kendall’s family. Weak was the house style.

  Zac was just as bad. She had watched, with contemptuous amusement, while he picked the hot jalapeño slices out of his chili before he ate it. The real Zac would have slathered hot sauce over the top and asked for more.

  But when you came right down to it, it really wasn’t about these small details. It was about the sense, the unshakeable instinct, that lay underneath them—and it expressed itself through those telling words. The real Molly. The real Zac. They weren’t around anymore to plead their case. To be the yardstick against which every other Zac and Molly had to be measured. They were dead. The only place where they persisted was in Beth’s mind.

  That thought inserted itself like the edge of a crowbar between her and her comforts. Between her and this life. The distance was almost too small to see, but it was like the gap that sat at your heel if you didn’t lace your shoe up tight enough: chafing and scraping until it drove you insane, not so much with the pain as the inevitability. Every step you took brought it back, again and again and again.

  But the whole business with the knife somehow brought things to a head. When she held the knife to Molly’s neck, she was telling herself the whole time that she didn’t mean it. That was the only way she could do it at all. But even as a bluff, it left an aftertaste. Whenever she touched Molly, or talked to her, it rose between them like a wall. Beth couldn’t have done that to her own child. She would have had to be insane. But she wasn’t insane, and she had done it. The paradox dragged her against her will toward an unpalatable truth.

  When Molly was playing her endless, pointless games. When Zac was playing guitar. When the three of them were eating together, or driving to school, or watching TV. These things were no more than smoke and mirrors. Beth ate, and drove, and watched, woke, slept and walked alone.

  For Fran, time went forward in a way that brought no change and didn’t even make any promises.

  The week after she and Zac stopped counting each other as friends, he sent her a long email that was chock-full of apologies. She knew him well enough to believe all or most of them. He hadn’t meant to hit out at her. He just reacted badly to anything that threatened his mother, and the timing had been especially disastrous because he was still bouncing back from that big row he’d had with his mom on the night before the trial-that-never-was. He hated himself that he’d brought up Fran’s mental health problems against her. He hated that he’d abused things she’d said to him in confidence. He would never forgive himself for hurting her.

  It wasn’t easy to write back to him, but she made herself do it.

  Hey, Zac. Don’t worry about it. I know you’re a good person, and it makes sense that you’d beat yourself up for doing shitty things. But the shitty things are still there, and they’re not going to go away. I can’t forget them anymore than you can, and frankly I can’t see myself ever talking to you about stuff that matters anymore. We can still talk about everyday stuff, obviously. Say hi to me any time you like, and I’ll say hi right back. I’m not going to blank you or anything. And if you need a spare pen or a quarter for the drinks machine, I’ve got you covered. That’s as far as it goes, though, okay? We blew the rest of it, which is too bad because I liked hanging out with you. Give Molly a hug from me, goon, and take one for yourself. No hard feelings.

  Fran

  She almost wrote Francine, but that would just have been histrionics. She pressed SEND and shut the lid of the laptop right away. The alternative would have been to sit there hitting the refresh key every twenty seconds in case he sent a reply. If he did, there wouldn’t even be any point in reading it. It wasn’t like she could change her mind after setting it all out so reasonably and clearly.

  She had ambushed herself with her own eloquence.

  In every other respect, life went back to what counted as normal. She had a few episodes, but they didn’t escalate. If anything, they became less intense with time. She went back to her old dosage but carried the spare pack of risperidone around with her all the time in case she needed to step it up.

  And Jinx was just Jinx—her old self, unfailingly sweet and supportive. Since the threatened visit to Grove City hadn’t come off, there were no bones of contention between her and Fran anymore. So Fran still had one BFF. Or none, depending how you counted.

  It was easiest not to think about it. Any of it. Along with the narrowing of the days that winter brings, Fran felt her mind narrow, and she didn’t particularly resist. School and homework and chess club were her horizons now.

  In spite of everything, though, she had the sense that something was in the air, still impending. Her dad would have said that the other shoe still hadn’t dropped. Fran had no idea what that really meant, but it conjured up a picture in her mind of a heavy boot sailing down through the sky, heading straight for her. That was a pretty good description of how she felt.

  Maybe for that reason, she kept her head down even more than she usually did and tried not to do or say anything that would attract the lightning. She stayed home a lot. She handed in all her assignments bang on time as though God was going to be signing off on her report card. When she saw Zac Kendall coming, she turned and walked the other way. Lady Jinx covered her retreat with Oatkipper at the ready.

  Sometime in early November, Dr. Southern called her on her cell. This was unusual. He almost always used email to contact her, with a cc automatically going to Gil. So she knew before he even said a word what this was about.

  “Grove City said yes,” he told her, sounding both pleased and apprehensive. “They asked me to fix a time with you.”

  Caught on the hop with no cover in sight, Fran temporized. “I’ve got a lot of work to do before the end of the semester. We’ll have to wait a while.”

  Dr. Southern was nonplussed. “I got the impression you felt really strongly about this, Frankie,” he said. “I sold it to the Grove City guys very hard. We went back and forth for weeks while they bounced it up the ladder to their senior clinician—a guy named Trestle who is seriously hard to get hold of. And he had it out with Bruno Picota, and—to my absolute amazement—came back with a yes. They think it’s a done deal. They’re expecting me to confirm a time.”

  Fran felt bad for Dr. Southern, and ashamed of her own cowardice, but she held her ground. “I can’t do it right now,” she said, which was the simple truth even though the stuff about being too busy with school assignments was just nonsense. She was way out in front of her work and could make it to the Christmas vacation at a stroll. What she couldn’t do—or didn’t think she could do—was face Bruno Picota all on her lonesome own.

  She thanked Dr. S for his help and hung up as soon as she could.

  Was that the other shoe dropping? She thought not.

  Then Zac made a second attempt at an apology, and he did it in a way that was heavy-handed and kind of stupid. He sent her flowers, and since they arrived while she was at school Gil opened the door to the delivery guy and signed for them. He was bemused and inclined to disapprove.

  “I did
n’t know you and Mr. Kendall were divorced,” he said to Fran when he handed the flowers over. It was a big bouquet and must have cost a lot, which only made it worse.

  “He disrespected me,” Fran said.

  Gil nodded slowly, solemn-faced. “Did he now? Anything I should know about?”

  “No. It’s all good. But we’re done.” She had used that highly formal word to stop her dad from making any more jokes on the subject, and it worked. He took her at her word and left it right there.

  He also went to the door when Zac called at the house a few days later. Fran didn’t hear the words that passed between them, but she heard her father’s tone and she was pretty sure Zac wouldn’t come round again.

  Good riddance! Lady Jinx growled from under Fran’s bed.

  “Yeah,” Fran said bleakly. “Absolutely.”

  For better or worse, things pushed themselves into new configurations.

  Beth found that there was a limit to how much bullshit she was prepared to take. The next time Molly dragged her heels getting dressed in the morning, floating around the kitchen like she had all the time in the world, Beth grabbed her shoulder, led her back to her bedroom and shoved her inside, telling her sharply to get her ass in gear and then closing the door on her.

  Then a few days after that, Beth was watching some show or other and the kid came trotting up to bend her ear with some story about what had happened when la-di-da pulled yak yak yak’s hair and then blah blah blah and et cetera got involved, and …

  “Mommy’s busy,” Beth said. “Just go away and play with your toys, okay?”

  Molly looked bemused for a second, like that couldn’t be right, but then momentum carried her onward. “And Miss Summerson said—”

  Beth never got to hear what Miss Summerson said. She planted her hand dead center on Molly’s chest and pushed her backward. She hadn’t meant to knock the kid down. She just misjudged the mass by a little, forgetting how slight Molly was and how little force was required to destabilize her. The little girl went over hard.