Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  That shut her up okay, but her face clouded up with hurt and bewilderment and her lower lip was quivering. It was clear that once she got over the shock and disbelief she was going to get loud about it.

  Beth was appalled at what she’d done, and doubly appalled at the thought of Zac finding out. She jumped up out of her chair, knelt down next to the six-year-old and scooped her up, kissing her cheeks and forehead.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said quickly. “That was an accident. It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t cry now. Tell me about … that stuff. What happened at school? I’m listening.”

  Zac came running in at that point, alerted by the loud thud and wanting to know what had happened. “Nothing,” Beth told him. “Moll took a fall, is all. She was running and she fell. Isn’t that right, baby girl?”

  “I took a fall,” Molly quavered. And Beth laughed and gave her a huge hug, making it absolutely clear to Zac and Molly and most of all herself how much she loved her little girl.

  “You okay, Moll?” Zac asked.

  “Yes,” Molly confirmed.

  It passed off okay. Molly threw out a few half-assed sniffles but she didn’t howl. And Zac went back to his room none the wiser. Crisis averted.

  Except that it wasn’t. Not really. Beth felt the way Liz must have felt the first time Beth welled up from inside her like fresh lava and spilled out into the world. Was that me? Was all that rage inside me? Where did it come from?

  And what does it want?

  Liz was starting to dissolve, a little at a time. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, or frightening. Dissolution was just there all the time, spread underneath her like a safety net, tempting her with the promise that all her pain and confusion could end at once.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to think. Ironically, thought was the closest to physical effort she could come. It was as though she was carrying bundles of ideas from synapse to synapse, loading them up and pushing them on their way, then trudging a little further along her train of thought to do the same thing all over again.

  Mostly she thought about the immediate past. Marc’s murder, her eviction from her own body, Beth’s terrifying strength of will and her own helplessness. It was a short meditation, endlessly repeated. In some ways it was like the mindfulness meditations from Dr. Southern’s book, except that in this case the end product was despair. Know That You’re Here, and This Is Now.

  Zac and Molly saved her. Molly came skipping toward her one day, holding Zac’s hand, the two of them wrapped up warm in scarves and gloves against the first inroads of winter.

  “It’s a jerboa!” Molly was saying.

  “A gerbil?”

  “No, a jerboa. It’s a gerbil that lives in the desert. He can jump like a kangaroo.”

  “Wow, that sounds amazing, Moll.”

  Liz was rapt, drinking in the sight of them, the sound of their voices—an oasis in the desert of those arid, empty thoughts. When they walked by her, without even suspecting that she was there, she turned and followed them down the street, straining her imaginary nerves to keep them in sight for as long as possible.

  They outdistanced her very quickly, turned a corner and were gone. But they left her with a hunger that energized her.

  After that day, she moved up the block, stationing herself as close to the house as she dared. When Beth appeared, she kept absolutely still and prayed not to be noticed. When Zac came out alone, or when Zac and Molly came out together, she followed them.

  Only a little way at first. She was as slow as a drifting balloon and couldn’t keep up. But she got a little bit faster every time, and time was a thing she had in abundance.

  It was, of course, the only thing she had. She knew that Beth’s psychic ambush had left her badly damaged, and she was healing very slowly if she was healing at all. But Beth had honed her skills over hundreds, maybe thousands of worlds. Liz felt that if she kept at it, there was a chance she would get better at this.

  When she had a little more control over her speed and direction, she finessed the situation a little. She spent the night hours drifting across the city, block after endless block, until she got to Worth Harbor Elementary or Julian C. Barry. That let her be with the kids for hours at a time. Alternating between Zac and Molly, she spent the whole of the school day with each in turn.

  The journey home, when school let out, took her the rest of the daylight hours. Liz couldn’t take the bus, or hop a lift in one of the many cars. She had tried, but there must be some trick to it that she hadn’t worked out yet. Getting in through the bus’s open door was just about possible, even at her slowly drifting pace. When the bus moved off, though, it passed right through her and left her standing where she was.

  But again, she felt that she was getting faster each time. At full stretch she could match a normal man or woman’s walking speed for minutes at a time.

  In the evenings, Molly mostly stayed home. Home was off-limits to Liz while Beth was there. She took up a vantage point a few houses down the street and waited out the hours of darkness there. Unless Zac left the house. If he left the house, she went with him. She watched his back, though she couldn’t protect him from anything at all.

  A hackneyed expression came into her mind from time to time: what doesn’t kill us, makes us strong. Now making herself strong, in these strictly limited ways, was helping her not to die.

  Amazingly, the flowers and the house call were not the end of the matter. Fran got a Snapchat picture a few nights later, and she opened it before she saw who it was from. It was a shot of the notice board at the half-built station behind Lenora. Next to JAZ SUCKS BALLS was a new notice bearing just three words in Zac’s scrawly handwriting.

  Fran read the words several times over. Then she looked out of the window. It was already getting dark, and the wires from the telegraph pole across the street were dancing in a stiff wind. The forecast was for an overnight low of four below zero. Only an idiot would wait out there in the gathering dusk and freeze their ass off in the hope of a conversation.

  Don’t! He’s tricking you!

  “I don’t think he is. Look what he said.”

  It doesn’t matter what he said! It’s a trick!

  Fran went downstairs and suited up for the cold. Gil had been working in his tiny study: he left his keyboard and came to the door to watch her. “Little late for a walk, Frog,” he observed.

  “I was feeling a bit cooped up, is all,” Fran said. “I just want to walk around the block a couple of times.”

  Liar!

  Fran didn’t need Jinx’s accusation to feel ashamed. She hated hiding anything from her dad, but this would be way too hard to explain.

  “Put a hat on,” he told her. “And a scarf.”

  “Way ahead of you, Dad-of-mine.” She gave him a hug and fled, keeping her face turned away so he wouldn’t see it and guess that there was more to this than she was saying.

  There was already a serious bite to the air, so she walked quickly. At first she thought Jinx hadn’t come along at all, but then she realized the fox was keeping a long way behind, muttering low in her throat. Fran didn’t try to catch the words: she already knew Jinx’s opinion of what she was doing.

  The streets were mostly empty as she headed up toward Lenora. One of the homeless guys who pitched their one-man tents along the stretch of wire fence behind Saint Peter and Paul yelled something at her, but it didn’t sound threatening. He waved a blanket or a coat, like maybe he was offering her something to keep herself warm. She kept on walking and didn’t answer in case he was offering something else.

  Once she threaded her way through the bushes behind the playground and stepped down onto the tracks, the night closed in on her for real. The nearest streetlights were just a vague glow on the horizon now, and the dark seemed to bring the cold to bear in some weird way. The air was just chillier here.

  In spite of the dark, it was easy to follow the railway line. It was a lighter strip, as neat and regular as an air
plane runway, between the walls of solid black that were the bushes. This would still be a great place to get mugged, though.

  There’s nobody here, Jinx told her coldly. Just him. Nobody else.

  From a long way away, as she approached the platform, she could see a moving pinprick of light, small but very bright. It was the screen of Zac’s phone, she realized. He had it on flashlight mode and he was waving it around in his hand as he walked rapidly up and down the platform to keep warm.

  She was suddenly aware that Jinx had stopped moving. Glancing down, she saw that the fox was sitting back on her haunches, staring ahead of her. Not straight ahead, though: not at Zac’s light, but off to one side of it.

  “What?” Fran asked.

  Jinx shivered and shook herself. I don’t know, she said. I thought … it doesn’t matter. She trotted on again, her body low to the ground as if she were stalking prey.

  By the phone’s light, as she stepped up onto the end of the platform, Fran could see the sign Zac had made: the three words that had dragged her out into the dark and brought her here.

  YOU WERE RIGHT.

  He had seen her coming too, and turned to face her. The phone lit up his face from underneath, so his smile of welcome looked sinister and horrible.

  “Hey, Fran,” he said. “It’s really good to see you.”

  “That’s nice to hear, Zac. But my ass is freezing off and it’s a school night. You’ve got five minutes. Go.”

  Zac nodded, accepting her terms without argument. “You said my mom had changed. She has.”

  Fran indicated the sign with a brusque gesture. “I already got that much,” she said testily. “Specifics.”

  “It’s really hard to explain. She’s kind of … not there, a lot of the time, even when she’s with us. She’s thinking about other stuff, not listening when we talk. If I call her on it, she loses her temper and says she’s got a lot on her mind.”

  “And?”

  “She doesn’t bother to cook dinner anymore. Most nights she just orders takeout, or if she’s going out she tells us to fix something for ourselves. If she’s staying home she goes into her room, right after dinner, and watches TV with the door closed. A lot of times, though, she goes out and leaves us to it. Comes back after midnight. A few times she’s even stayed out all night and I’ve had to get Molly ready for school in the morning and walk in with her.”

  It was clear from Zac’s face that there was more. In the biting cold Fran wasn’t inclined to be patient. She made a winding-up gesture, even though she hated when people did that to her and it made her feel like kind of a douche.

  “She doesn’t do any grocery shopping, either. I have to do it. And I had to re-up Molly’s inhalers when they ran out. She didn’t even mark it on the calendar, which she always does, like, three months out.”

  “So she’s making you take a bit more responsibility. That’s not such a—”

  “I think she’s hitting Molly.”

  Fran left her half-finished sentence hanging in the air, all her impatience and irritation draining away at once in the shock of what she’d heard. The expression on Zac’s face was almost worse than the words. He looked like he’d just said God is dead or something—like there was a hole in the world and he’d given it a name.

  “You think?” Fran asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I didn’t see it with my own eyes, no.”

  “Then what makes you think it’s happening?”

  “I sort of heard it. At least, I heard something. I was in my room, doing homework with some music playing. And there was a sound like a bang, and then Molly saying ‘ow,’ and it fell right in a quiet bit of the song so I heard it really clearly. I jumped right up and came out of my room. They were both in the family room. Mom was holding on to Molly, rocking her a little. She said Molly fell over while she was playing or something.”

  “What did Molly say.”

  “She said she fell down. But that was all she said. You know how she is. Every tiny thing is a story with her. But this … she didn’t have a single thing to say about it. She was just standing there, with Mom’s arms around her, stiff as a board and not saying a word. She didn’t even look at me when I asked her if she was okay. She looked down at the floor.

  “Her eyes were red like she’d been crying, or maybe like she wanted to cry. I asked her if she was okay and she said yes. Just that one word. Yes. Then she turned her face away so I couldn’t see it.”

  Zac looked off into the darkness as though he was re-enacting the scene as he remembered it. His face was still lit up all pale and ghastly by the light from the phone.

  “It just wasn’t like her,” he muttered. “She should have been the one telling me all about it at the top of her voice, and Mom should have been the one shushing her and telling her not to make such a big deal. It felt like the whole thing was the wrong way round.

  “I asked Moll about it again the next morning when I walked her into school. She didn’t say anything. I mean, she wouldn’t answer me at all. She zipped right up. That’s when I started thinking maybe it wasn’t just that one time. You don’t get scared like that after just one time.

  “Most days Mom picks her up from school, you know? Unless she’s on full shift. And then it’s just the two of them until I get there. I’m scared of … I don’t know. What could be happening when I’m not there.”

  “That’s awful, Zac,” Fran said. In spite of herself she reached out and put a hand on his arm. Jinx gave a low growl from the very edge of the platform where she had planted herself like a watchdog. Fran thought it was because of the physical contact, but then Jinx dived right off the edge and disappeared into the dark.

  “Yeah, it’s awful,” Zac agreed, pulling her attention back to him. “But also it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not … she can’t do this stuff. You know about my dad, right? How he used to lose his temper sometimes and hit out? Not at us—at Mom. But Mom was always afraid he might hurt us too. She used to put herself in between in case …” His hands completed the sentence, pantomiming something the dark hid from her—and dislodging her hand in the process. “So it makes no sense that she would ever, ever hurt Moll. Or me. She couldn’t do that. I mean, I thought she couldn’t. And I still can’t figure any of it out. So here I am. And I guess I’m coming to you because you seemed to spot it before it even happened.”

  Fran glanced off into the darkness. Jinx had vanished from sight out there. Maybe she’d seen or heard something and was investigating it. More likely she was just washing her hands of all this.

  She looked at Zac again. His hangdog face, his slumped shoulders, begging for help he couldn’t ask for in actual words because he knew he didn’t have any right to.

  And if it had just been him, then maybe Fran could have walked away. But she knew she couldn’t walk away from Molly.

  Zac was still watching her, waiting for an answer. She already knew, pretty much, what she was going to say to him, but she had to set him straight on a couple of things first.

  “I didn’t spot it before it happened,” she told him. “It just happened earlier than you think. I think it was the night you slept at my house. The night before the trial. But I don’t have any idea what it was that changed or what it meant. I’m pretty sure your mom knows, because of how angry she got when I asked her about it, but there was no way she was going to spill the beans to me. If you want the truth, maybe you should just ask her.”

  “I can’t do that,” Zac protested, appalled. “I’m scared for her, Fran. Really scared. I feel like I’d just be adding to the pressure.”

  “The pressure?”

  “Well, because …” The light from the phone went all over the place as he shrugged or waved his hands or something. “She wouldn’t act this way if she was herself. If she was right with herself. Something has to be weighing on her. Bending her all out of shape.”

  The all-purpose something again. It was hard to imagine
what that something could be. It cast such a long, sick shadow.

  “All the more reason to ask her,” Fran said. But she didn’t really think Zac would get anything out of Liz. She didn’t really think he would ask the question. It was down to Fran. It was always going to be, because it was her question too.

  “I’m going to see what I can find out,” she said.

  “How?” Zac asked. “Find out from who?” And then, after a very long silence, he said, “You’re going to talk to Picota?”

  “Yes.”

  “You still think all of this is connected?”

  “Yes. And you still don’t see how it can be.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then why come to me, Zac?”

  He shook his head slowly, as though the logic of it escaped him. “I just felt like I had to tell you,” he said, his voice only just above a mumble. “Because you tried to warn me, and I hurt you. I felt like I owed you the truth.”

  Lady Jinx trotted out of the darkness again and jumped up onto the platform. She looked from Fran to Zac, then back again without a word.

  “You don’t owe me anything,” Fran said.

  “Not even an apology?”

  “No. You gave me that, and I accepted it. Remember?”

  “But I … I’d like us to be—”

  “We’re good,” Fran said. “Don’t sweat it.”

  She turned on her heel and walked away. It must have seemed pretty abrupt, even rude, but she didn’t want Zac to see that she’d started crying. He looked so sad, and so bewildered, and however this came out it wasn’t going to make him any happier. The best she could hope to find in Grove City was an explanation—or a clue that would lead her to an explanation. It wouldn’t be some kind of magic medicine that would change Liz Kendall back to the way she was before.