Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  The reply came almost at once. Dr. Southern must be monitoring his clinic emails from home. Okay, he wrote. I’ll see what I can do. Back at you soon.

  Fran met up with Zac in the library the next day and brought him up to speed. Right away he offered to come up to Grove City with her. That made her sad because it had been her plan way back when she’d first asked Dr. Southern to set this up. But things between them had changed too much. Even though he needed the answers almost as much as she did, she didn’t want him to be there when she asked the questions. They had started the quest together, but she would finish it by herself.

  “My dad’s going to be there,” she told him by way of shorthand. “He doesn’t really approve of me seeing you anymore.”

  “I wish you approved,” Zac said. “And I wish you believed me when I said I was sorry.”

  “How many times did your dad tell your mom he was sorry, Zac?”

  His face filled with hurt. “That’s not fair.”

  And it really wasn’t. Fran knew that. But she couldn’t make herself feel differently than she did. “I’ll see you when I get back,” she said. “I promise I’ll tell you everything I find out.”

  When she got home from school there was a second email from Dr. S. They can do Saturday. 1:00 p.m. Seems like that might be okay. You don’t have to miss school, and it’s probably more convenient for your dad too. Let me know.

  “Works for me,” Gil said.

  So they were on. Too late to go back now, even if she wanted to.

  That thought brought another one: she wanted to so badly.

  After only an hour or so in the fox’s den, Liz lost all track of time.

  Desperation made every minute seem endless. She was agonizingly aware that every moment she spent here left her children at the mercy of a monster. And she knew better than anyone what the monster was capable of.

  Looked at another way, the time seemed weirdly suspended. There was no sun here, no day or night to measure by. There was nothing that changed or could change. She could have been there for years, or just a few heartbeats. There was no way of knowing.

  This was a terrible place. Oppressive and claustrophobic, even though it had no walls. When she tried to leave, the inexplicable gray stuff that the den was made of pushed back against her, gradually becoming denser and harder until she was forced to give up. There must be a doorway somewhere through which she and the fox had entered, but tracing the walls revealed no obvious breaks.

  Liz wondered if this gray endlessness had anything in common with the colorless void where she had met Beth. But that place had been inside her own mind, while this was … somewhere else. In the fox’s mind, perhaps. That might be why she and Beth had had a presence in that other place, visible face and form, while here she was nothing at all until the fox wanted to lay its paws on her, when she suddenly had just enough substance to make her vulnerable.

  Dealer’s choice. It seemed that whoever lived in these scary hinterlands got to decide how they worked. It was all a matter of will power. But will power had always been Liz’s problem. Even when she had still been in her own body, she had drifted along for years as if the world could push at her but it wasn’t her place to push back. If she ever got out of here, she would do everything in her power to change that.

  In the meantime, she filed the thought away and made another circuit of the walls, hoping to find the exit that had eluded her the first time around. It was easy to believe that she had been led astray. The topography of the place was so strange that anything was possible. How could you stick to a straight line when everything was the same monotone gray and wasn’t even there until you touched it?

  She didn’t find the door, but she did find … pictures. There was no other word Liz could use, although pictures didn’t seem to cover it. Woven into the fabric of the den there were hundreds of still-life tableaux: everyday scenes for the most part, including some of places Liz actually knew. A children’s playground in Highland Park; a street corner on Larimer Avenue; the Costco on Meadow Street.

  The things were fascinating, and very hard to look away from. The colors seemed shockingly brilliant in this monochrome place, and it warmed Liz just to see familiar, normal things again. It was hard to tell what exactly these images were, or how they had been formed. In places they seemed to have the detail and accuracy of a photograph, but it was mainly the figures in the foreground who showed up in this way. The backgrounds blurred quickly into abstract collages of shape and color.

  As Liz looked at them, the figures started to move.

  Mesmerized, she drifted in closer. Wasn’t that the schoolyard at Julian C. Barry? It certainly seemed to be. Kids were milling around the way they did at recess, forming knots and clusters and then drifting apart again. A froth of voices rose around her. A shout. A snatch of song, slightly off-key, the tune one she had never heard and instantly forgot again.

  Abruptly and without warning, Liz was transported. She lay on her stomach on hard asphalt. The heels of her hands throbbed as though they were on fire. Mocking laughter sounded from all around her in different timbres.

  It hurt her, that laughter—more than the ache in her hands, or in her hip which was throbbing too. She hated it and she was afraid of it, because it meant that they (Which they? Who were they?) were only getting started. Fear rose up in the front of her mind, dense and cloying. She knew the drill, and she had no expectations that anyone would help her out of this.

  “How’d you like that, bitch?” a girl’s voice shouted.

  “She’s not a bitch,” someone else said with gleeful spite. “You’ve got to have something going on to be a bitch. She’s just a freak!”

  Liz tried to roll over so she could get back up onto her feet. Nothing happened. She had a body again, somehow, but she was forced to accept that it wasn’t hers. It wouldn’t do the things she asked it to. Even the basic things.

  And as she pulled on the puppet strings of its nerves, and as they refused to respond, she was shaken free. Back to the dank, pervasive grayness of the fox’s den.

  She fled.

  That had been real, a real moment that someone else had lived, and however it had come to be here there was something obscene and wrong about her going into it and reliving it (leaving aside the question of how that was even possible!). There was no way she was going to do it again.

  She stuck to that resolve for a very long time (it felt long; again, there was no way of knowing). Finally, though, when the sheer emptiness and the knowledge of how helpless she was threatened to overwhelm her, she sneaked back to the pictures and looked again. She was ashamed, but she had to escape from this place, even if it was only for a few seconds.

  Choosing at random, she found herself peering into a room. There was a window that looked out onto a tiny yard. Four flower boxes evenly spaced along the edge of a cement-floored patio. The side of another house and the uprights of a kids’ swing set. It was a sunny day. The sunlight shining through the open curtains was what drew her, and then—as her other senses started to engage—the sound of birdsong.

  It happened again, just like before. Without any transition, she was inside the picture. Inside the room. The heavy, sour reek took her by surprise: a smell of sweat and vomit cut with the astringency of disinfectant.

  The eyes she was looking through now had no interest in the sunlight outside the window. They were looking at a single bed, and at a woman lying in the bed. The woman had brown skin like burnt parchment. It was a face she knew well and loved more than any other. She felt those things, strongly and undeniably. At the same time, the woman was a complete stranger. Liz had never met her and had no feelings about her at all. The feelings belonged to someone else.

  The woman was struggling to talk. It was clear that she was very weak, that the effort was exhausting her. And it was wasted in any case, because her voice was so thick and silted up with sickness that the words were unintelligible. The woman’s claw-like hand was much more eloquent, squeezing L
iz’s hand tightly, holding on to that contact as the world folded itself down to this moment and this room.

  And then it was over. The woman’s eyes didn’t close and her grip was still tight, but she was very obviously dead. It was as though a door had slammed shut. One moment she was there, and the next … nothing Where there had been something, where there had been so much, nothing. And Liz sank to her knees, reduced to nothing herself, crying out wordlessly.

  But the sound meant Stay with me! Stay with me! Don’t be gone!

  Numbed, Liz fell out of the vision and into herself. Grief pulled her down, paralyzed her for long moments. She felt its rounded outline within herself like a new planet with its own gravity.

  Why did I love you? Why am I lost without you? What am I now?

  Those were all, every one of them, the wrong questions. It hadn’t been her in that room; it had been somebody else. A child, she thought. The woman’s hand had enclosed hers easily, and she had felt what it was like to be enclosed, to be small and safe and wrapped up in that warm, endless presence.

  She had no lips or tongue, no mouth, but a word shaped itself within her. Mommy.

  She should have stopped right there. There was no excuse for going on except that she was an exile from her own body, tethered to nothing and terrified of dissipating altogether like an exhaled breath. These grim, indelible tableaux, as she relived them, gave her the precious illusion of weight and substance.

  But they were grim. There wasn’t a single happy moment in the entire gallery. Everything here was of a piece, a torture chamber of humiliations, fears, accidents, defeats and disappointments, betrayals, injuries, disasters natural and otherwise.

  Either the fox had found these stolen, human memories here and built this part of its den around them or else it had purposefully brought them from somewhere else.

  In which case the relevant question had to be: what did it use them for?

  On Saturday they set off early. Gil was driving, and he had told Dr. Southern to be at the house for 9:30 a.m. By 9:35 they were on the road. Fran rode shotgun, while Dr. Southern sat alone in the back.

  There was no small talk in the car. Dr. Southern essayed some observations on the Steelers’ front lineup, but Gil wasn’t in the mood and his responses were monosyllabic. After the first few miles, Fran asked if she could turn the radio on. She found a soft rock channel, and it stayed on for the rest of the journey.

  Fran had been afraid that Lady Jinx wouldn’t come, given how strongly she disapproved of this expedition. She certainly wasn’t with them when they started out. But a few miles along the road, Fran saw her out of the corner of her eye, sitting in the back seat next to Dr. S. She was wearing a sullen scowl and making a big show of being wedged into a corner by Southern’s bulk.

  It’s like sitting next to a big enormous pig, she growled. And he just farted, so he even smells like one.

  Grove City turned out to be a town rather than a city, and a pretty nice one at that. Fran had been expecting razor wire and checkpoints: instead they drove past the spacious gardens of the Christian college, a movie theater with an old-fashioned marquee display above its front door and a big monument to Richard “Dick” Stevenson, former congressman and local benefactor. There was a statue of “Dick” with his arms half spread out like he was explaining something. The sun gleamed off the statue’s bronze forehead, making it look just a little bit like the dead congressman had got himself into a sweat.

  Even the psychiatric hospital, when they finally got to it, seemed very bland and ordinary from the outside. It had a very high wall, but painted on the wall was an awesome mural. The mural depicted dinosaurs in a Jurassic paradise, sunning themselves on the banks of a mighty river. Fran knew that there had been some important archaeological finds along the Ohio and its many tributaries, but the closest the Ohio came to Grove City was about fifty miles. “Yeah,” Dr. Southern said when she pointed this out. “I think maybe whoever commissioned that picture had an ax to grind against the Christian college.”

  Gil laughed out loud at that. Fran didn’t get it, but was glad that some of the tension in the car had finally been released.

  They parked up in a lot where there were flower beds rather than concrete dividers separating the rows of cars, and went on into the reception area. That was where the facility stopped trying to pretend it was something it wasn’t. They found themselves in a tiny, wedge-shaped space, with a window in the wall on one side and a sliding grille of thick bars on the other. The bars had been painted vivid sky-blue, and there was a sign above them that read SALLY PORT EGRESS MUST BE CLEAR AT ALL TIMES. The word CLEAR was in bright red.

  Dr. Southern told the man at the window that they were expected, and handed over the letter he’d gotten from Dr. Trestle, Bruno Picota’s senior clinician. The man looked more like a prison guard than a receptionist. He was six feet tall or so, well muscled, and he stood at his desk even though there was a chair right behind him, as though he was standing to attention. His hair was cut very short and although he was clean-shaven, the lower half of his face was dark with virtual stubble.

  The man said he would notify Dr. Trestle that they’d arrived. In the meantime, he asked for their ID. Fran’s dad and Dr. Southern handed over their passports, but all Fran had was her birth certificate. The man took them away and made photocopies of them, then handed them back along with three little keys. He pointed to a bank of wide, shallow lockers like safe deposit boxes on the wall next to where they’d come in. He told them to put all the things they had with them in the lockers, especially their phones and anything else they had that was electronic. Then he took the keys back because they weren’t even allowed to have the keys with them when they went through to the other side of the blue bars.

  After they had done all that, they still had to wait because Dr. Trestle hadn’t shown up. Since there were no chairs, they just stood in a line. Gil asked Fran if she was okay for about the twentieth time, and she told him again that she was. It was a lie. She was actually really scared, though she was comforted a little when she saw that Lady Jinx had put her armor on and was standing on guard next to the blue gate.

  Which was now sliding open at last, making no noise at all except for the sound of a motor rumbling inside the wall—and then a single heavy clang as the gate hit the unpadded end of its track.

  A man stepped through and walked straight over to them, looking calm and unhurried, no matter that he’d made them wait so long. Fran’s first thought was that he had to be a nurse or an assistant of some kind, both because he was young and because he was physically very small and slight. But when she got a good look at his face she revised that estimate. There was an intensity about his expression that seemed like it had to go along with some kind of authority: you couldn’t walk around a psychiatric hospital looking like that unless you were either a doctor or an inmate—and since he was wearing a white coat (admittedly over jeans and a T-shirt) the first was more likely than the second. His dark eyes darted left, right, center, ending on Fran.

  “Neither of these gentlemen looks like a Francine,” he said, “so I’m thinking that has to be you. Welcome to Grove City, Ms. Watts. I’m Kenneth Trestle.”

  He put out a hand and Fran took it automatically. The shake was brief but vigorous. Mostly in Fran’s experience men only shook hands with other men. But Dr. Trestle didn’t offer to shake with Dr. Southern or her dad. He took a while even to acknowledge that they were there. When he did, he just looked at them both expectantly, waiting for them to introduce themselves.

  Dr. Southern did that for both of them, and then he started to thank Dr. Trestle for allowing them to visit his patient. Dr. Trestle shook his head quickly, cutting him off. “Let’s not take anything for granted just yet,” he said, “shall we?”

  Fran’s dad looked from Trestle to Southern and back again. He frowned. “Okay, I must be missing something,” he said. “We just drove sixty miles to get here because you said this was on.”

 
Trestle wagged his finger like a teacher warning a little kid not to misbehave. “What I said was that I would allow Ms. Watts to have a meeting with Bruno Picota. That I would give my approval for that to happen.”

  Gil’s scowl deepened. He didn’t seem to like having Dr. Trestle’s finger up in his face. “Yes,” he agreed. “Exactly.”

  “What I didn’t say, therefore, was that you could just push her in there and slam the door. She and I, we need to have a little talk first.”

  “About what?” Gil demanded.

  “Ships and shoes and sealing wax. But mostly Bruno Picota.”

  Trestle ran a hand through his thick black hair. The hair stood up after the hand’s passage and didn’t lie down again. “I think many good things could come out of this meeting,” he said. “I’m hopeful, as far as outcomes are concerned. But Bruno is fragile. I’m prepared to say that on the record. He’s fragile, and his recovery is a work in progress. And Ms. Watts—” He gave her a nod, not offhand but respectful, as if he didn’t want to talk about her in the third person without acknowledging that she was still in the room. “—well, she’s still very much a part of his delusional system. It’s hard to predict what might happen when he sees her, but I want her to be aware of some of the possibilities.”

  “So you’d like to brief us,” Dr. Southern summarized, “before the meeting.”

  Dr. Trestle wagged his finger again. “Her, my esteemed colleague. I would like to brief her, not you. As far as you and Mr. Watts are concerned, I intend to observe full patient confidentiality. You’ve had all you’re going to get from me. But I’ll talk to Ms. Watts about Bruno, if she wants to hear it, and I’ll grant her fully supervised access if she wants to take it. Up to half an hour, depending on how things go.

  “That’s the deal, and it’s not negotiable. So give me a yes or a no and we’ll take it from there.”

  For a few seconds, nobody said anything at all in reply to this speech. Fran had come here with mixed feelings in the first place, and Dr. Trestle’s words played on her worst fears. Picota was still as nutty as a fruit bat, was what she was hearing, and he was still fixated on her. But she hadn’t come all this way to turn around and go back again, and she needed to know what Picota could tell her. So she wanted to blurt out a yes! straight away. But she knew she needed at least one of the grown-ups to say yes too, and grown-ups—even her dad—were apt to think they knew better than you did what was good for you. She could ruin everything by jumping in too fast.