A Million Shadows

by Janci Patterson

  Kalif thought about that. “Do you think they would let you in?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the best I’ve got.”

  Kalif nodded. “It’s worth a try. Let’s find a likely candidate.”

  It took us half an hour to find a lead: Mary Castillo, a cognitive behavioral therapist in Burlingame. She was new to the area—the blog post announcing her addition to the clinic was less than a month old. We couldn’t get a formal appointment with her without a referral, but she did take crisis appointments for a cash fee.

  A five-minute talk with the secretary scored me a crisis appointment at noon, which was normally Mary’s lunch hour. I adopted the persona of a woman who had recently lost her husband, because that was immediate, unavoidable, and terrifying, so the secretary could hardly say no.

  I hated scamming saps, but they really were the easiest.

  I wore a drapey shirt and a long skirt to the appointment, with a shawl wrapped over my shoulders that I found in the clearance section of the discount store down the street. I wanted to look weepy in dress and demeanor. As Kalif drove me over, I drummed up tears while watching myself in the rear view mirror. The easiest way to ruin an upset persona was to overdo it—it’s easy to put people off with overblown shows of emotion, instead of drawing them in.

  As I watched myself cry, I stared into my own eyes, older, with crow’s feet in the corners. They looked exactly like my mother’s.

  I covered my eyes with my hand, and shifted them to be rounder. Perhaps I shouldn’t have picked a persona I identified with. It would help me with the acting, but it also made it easier for me to delve into patterns that were familiar, but also unwise.

  Kalif dropped me off in front of the office. There was no reason to think anyone would note our car, or follow him, when we were so far removed from the people we were tracing.

  When Mary called me back into the office, I focused on the way she angled her head as she smiled, the creases in her face as the corners of her mouth tipped up, the pace of her gait as she led me back to her office. A person’s presence is composed of a thousand little mannerisms that come together to paint a picture. Observers learn so much from watching a person move, even if they don’t know they’re remembering it.

  Doing it on purpose was my job. Even though the people at the hospital probably wouldn’t know Mary, they might run into her sometime at a conference, or call her in to consult about a patient. If the general picture they formed when meeting her was the same as the one I’d given them, they probably wouldn’t even bring up their previous encounter, or think anything of it.

  As she sat me down on the couch, I focused on my second task: procuring her ID. Her purse was tucked under her desk, and I scooted toward it under the pretense of adjusting my chair.

  Mary listened as I put forward my story—my husband was gone, my life so empty. Everything reminded me of him. What was I going to do with the rest of my life? I didn’t see a point in living. I delivered the tale with only a slight tremor in my voice, so as not to overdo the act, but I activated my tear ducts as I spoke, squeezing the corners of my eyes so that drops leaked into my lower eyelids. I grew my eyelashes slightly to hold them in, hovering there like little glistening pools.

  The trouble was, Mary listened with her total attention focused on me. She had a pen and paper on her lap, but she didn’t write, only looked me straight in the eye and nodded understandingly, punctuating my story with questions and little bits of advice. That didn’t give me a lot of time to lean toward her purse and extract her wallet.

  Instead, I listened. “It’s normal to feel like this,” Mary said. “Despair is a part of grief. Your world was so wrapped around his, it’s normal to feel off-balance while you learn to live on. It’s okay to hurt.”

  As she spoke, I could feel a burning rising from somewhere deep in the back of my mind. I hadn’t realized the ocean of grief was there until the tide started coming in, and all I wanted to do was hold back the waves.

  Focus, I thought. Work. I was supposed to be studying Mary’s face and body movements, but I felt the exact moment when my tears tipped over the waterfall from acting to real. They slipped past the fence of eyelashes and slid down my cheeks, and I felt my face crumple, even as I tried to keep it straight. My shoulders shuddered, and I wished it was Mom in my place, hearing these words.

  Dad was gone, and the mother I’d known was gone, too. It was normal to feel like everything in the world was different.

  Though if this was normal, I didn’t like it one bit.

  Mary’s face creased in sympathy, and I memorized the lines. She reached for a box of tissues, and pulled out the last one. She handed it to me. “Hang on,” she said. “I have some more in my cabinet.”

  I looked down at her purse, and could feel the waves receding. This was good. This was right. Who needed to talk about my feelings when I could stay on my feet and function?

  Better to hold it together than to fall apart. I couldn’t be like my mother. If we both fell apart, what would become of her?

  Mary dug through a cabinet behind her desk. While her back was turned, I plucked her lanyard and work badge from her purse and tucked it into my pocket. Since she was already here, she wouldn’t likely find it missing until the end of the day, at which point I’d already have been in to see Mom. Besides, there was no logical reason she’d look for her ID in a hospital in San Mateo.

  As I left her office, I shoved back the feelings I’d had talking to Mary. There wasn’t time for this now, and if I failed, there never would be. I had a job to do, and crying didn’t play into it.

  If I could just keep her words out of my head, Mary’s persona was going to work fine.

  Twenty

  Armed with Mary’s identity, a brand new outfit, and a tiny pinch of guilt over scamming the shrink, I breezed into the psych ward. I gave my ID to the nurse at the front desk, and he paged the psychiatrist on duty to clear me to go back and see Mom. I wasn’t a visitor now, but a medical professional, and since Mary’s clinic didn’t share a records database with the hospital, they had no way to know that I’d never been “Anne’s" therapist. Once I had the clearance, he marched me down the hall, opened Mom’s door, and ushered me in, closing the door behind me.

  Mom sat on the bed with the sheets gathered up to her waist. Her eyes looked sunken and her skin was pale and translucent, revealing every vein, like an exaggerated image of a woman who felt like she was disappearing. Against her sallow skin, the scars stood out, looking more pink and angry than ever. Other than that, she looked like herself. She wore a plain t-shirt instead of a hospital gown, which I figured the hospital must have provided because the shirt she’d come in with had been stained with bile.

  I scoured the walls, trying to decide if we were being recorded. There’d been cameras in the hallway and the door in this room had a large Plexiglas window, but the room was so bare, there was nowhere to hide a camera.

  Mom looked up at me, her face blank. I didn’t say anything, just offered her my hand.

  After we exchanged signals, Mom’s eyes widened. She kept her voice quiet, probably to avoid being overheard from the hall. “Jory,” she said. “Where have you been staying? You can’t go back to the apartment. It’s not safe—"

  I knelt by her bed and squeezed her hand. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m not staying there. I’m staying in a hotel.”

  Mom leaned back on her pillow and squeezed my hand. “Of course you are. You’re a smart girl. I just wish I’d been there to help you find a place.”

  I tried not to visibly react. Mom hadn’t helped me do much of anything for weeks. If I could handle stealing all the money we needed for food and rent, not to mention the drugs, I could get myself a hotel room. Besides which, since she didn’t know about Mel’s break-in, as far as she knew, if she’d been with me, I wouldn’t have needed the hotel room to begin with.

  But that was beside the point. Bringing it up now wouldn’t help either of us.

  “I’m
so glad you’re here,” she said. “When they said it was my therapist, I hoped it was you.”

  Of course she had. If she’d thought otherwise, she’d have run before I entered the room.

  I squeezed her hand. “I’m glad I could get in to see you. Are you doing okay in here?”

  Mom looked around at the room, her face focusing. “I can’t stay. I’ve been working on a plan.”

  I refused to let myself cringe. She had a plan that she’d been careless enough to let slip in her refusal to work with the doctors. If she were on top of her game, that would never have happened. “I think you should stay. Let the doctors take care of you—"

  “I’m fine,” Mom said. “The doctors say I should be able to eat normally. There’s no lasting damage.”

  I froze my face muscles in place. No lasting damage? To her stomach. Because she’d swallowed half a freaking pharmacy.

  “But Mom,” I said. “This isn’t about—"

  “Jory,” Mom said sharply. “I realize that you panicked when you found me like that. I understand. But you have to recognize how much danger you’ve put me in. Calling 911? What were you thinking? You should have been able to tell by my face that I was fine.”

  I held perfectly still. A part of me argued that she was right. I’d called the authorities. I’d gotten her locked up here. I should have helped her myself, or waited for her to come out of it.

  But the other part of me wanted to scream. She’d done this, not me. I didn’t make her swallow one of those pills, let alone all of them at once.

  “I thought you were dying,” I said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Mom took my hand again and squeezed it. “Don’t be silly. I made a mistake. I’m fine now.” She looked around her and shivered. “Or I will be as soon as I get out of here.”

  A mistake? I lowered my voice. “No one takes that many pills by accident, Mom. I just think—"

  “Jory,” Mom said. Her voice grew sharper by the minute. “Obviously you’re not thinking. Do you think the Carmines aren’t combing the medical records? It’s a miracle they haven’t found me already.”

  Telling her Aida was looking out for her would be the quickest way to get her out the door. Saying Kalif was doing it wouldn’t be any better. “I know,” I said. “But you were in danger at home, too.”

  Mom shook her head. “I know. We should have been more careful. Staying so close was a mistake. And we should have been moving more often.”

  I clenched my teeth. She was still going on like she hadn’t been a danger to herself.

  A part of me wanted to let it slide. She knew she’d gone too far. Did I have to rub her nose in it?

  Except I’d done profiles of addicts before. They’d go to rehab, sometimes over and over. They’d always promise things would be different, but they wouldn’t be.

  I wanted Mom to be the exception, because she hadn’t been taking the pills for that long, but I couldn’t imagine that the path to being exceptional was lined with rugs to brush things under.

  I didn’t know why I hadn’t realized that before. It seemed so obvious now.

  “Mom,” I said. “I’m tapped into the hospital records. I’m keeping the Carmines from finding you. We both know they can’t hold you if you don’t want to be here, but I’m glad you’ve been choosing to get help. For both of us.”

  Mom gave me a sharp look and dropped my hand. “You’re tapped into the system?”

  My shoulders sank. That was a stupid thing to say, wasn’t it? She knew I couldn’t do that without Kalif’s help. “Yes,” I said. “So you don’t have to worry.”

  “What do you think they’re going to do for me in here?” she asked. “I’m not crazy. I just got carried away. Once the stomach pains and the dizzy spells go away, I’ll be fine.”

  I sat up straighter. Dizzy spells? She’d played it off like there wasn’t any physical damage, but the drugs must have messed with her system.

  At least stomach scars wouldn’t show.

  I tried to speak firmly. “I just think you should talk to them about Dad.”

  “No,” Mom said. “How can I? We have no death records, no certificate, no grave, not even any pictures.”

  They didn’t have a name to investigate. The person she claimed to be didn’t exist, and I imagined hospitals saw a lot of people like that—people who couldn’t pay, or got hurt doing things that were illegal. “They’re not going to investigate you. They’re going to try to help you.”

  Mom looked angrily down at her sheets. “Still.”

  I tapped my fingers against the cold bed frame. I was probably right. They probably wouldn’t do any research into who Dad was. But if they did, the story wouldn’t add up. Even undocumented immigrants had death records, and that created the kinds of red flags we were trying to avoid. It was paranoid, but we had to be paranoid to survive.

  “I know we have to be careful,” I said. “I didn’t even call 911 as soon as I should have, because I was so worried about what would happen to you. But if you come home without getting treatment, what’s going to be different?”

  “Everything,” Mom said. “I’ve scared myself straight, okay? No more heavy pills. I’ll just take the bare minimum of what I need to get some rest and get by.”

  My heart sunk. The bare minimum. As much as I wanted to believe her, I knew Mom wouldn’t get by on just that. Or, if she could, our definitions of "minimum" were clearly very different. “That’s how this started,” I said. “You were just trying to get some sleep. I get that. But it slipped so easily into more, and pretty soon the pills were impairing you more than they were helping.”

  Mom grit her teeth. “Stop it. This has been so hard on you, with your Dad’s death. You’re remembering it worse than it was.”

  It was all I could do not to raise my voice. I wasn’t remembering it wrong. If anything, I was understating how bad things had been. I knew it, but I couldn’t tell if Mom believed the crap story she was giving me, or if she was just trying to get me to drop it.

  Or worse, trying to make me believe things really would be better, when there was nothing to indicate that this was the case.

  I held my breath. More than anything, I wanted to help her. But I didn’t have the first clue how. And if the doctors in here couldn’t help her, either . . .

  A cold hand seemed to grip me by the throat.

  I couldn’t lose my mother, too.

  My hands tightened on the edge of her mattress. I had one last card to play. “I need you to get help, Mom. Because if you die of this, then it won’t matter that the Carmines never found you.”

  Mom gave me a disgusted look. “Don’t be dramatic.”

  I could feel my persona faltering, growing smaller and younger. I corrected, holding onto Mary with every muscle. “I mean it. I need to be able to leave the house, and know that you’re going to be okay. I need to be able to . . . I’m not going to be right there with you forever, right? I have to know you can hold yourself together, even when I’m not there.”

  Mom narrowed her eyes at me. “So you can run off with Kalif. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s helping you now. You ran straight to him, and it’s only a matter of time before he betrays you.”

  I stood up. The urge to scream at her, to throw things, to generally behave like a child was so overwhelming that I had to back away. “It’s not about him,” I said. “I’m growing up. It’s not like you still live with your parents. I would have been moving out in a few years anyway, if we were a normal family.”

  Mom shook her head. “But we aren’t.” Her eyes shifted to the Plexiglas window. Outside, I saw a nurse pass by. Was I looking anything like a therapist? Was I being impartial enough? Or was I completely blowing my cover?

  “It wasn’t the same for me,” she said. “My parents weren’t shifters. When they realized what I was, they locked me in the basement. My father called me a freak.”

  My gut wrenched. I didn’t know that. Mom never talked about her family
.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Mom might have been a mess these last months, but she’d never do anything like that to me. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to say that you need to get stable because—"

  Mom’s eyes turned to steel. “Because you have better places to be.”

  My body shrunk, literally. I cut my eyes toward the door, afraid that someone would have seen, but the window showed only the wall beyond.

  “It’s not like that,” I said. My voice had shrunk to match my body. I was holding onto my persona, but only barely.

  Mom waved at the door. “If you want to go, go. I left home at fourteen, and I survived fine then.”

  A wave of terror washed over me. I backed up against the wall. Dad was gone and he’d been the only stable thing she’d ever known. Now I wanted to leave, too. How could I even suggest such a thing?

  But the months in the tiny apartment, watching her drug herself nearly to death, aching for Kalif . . . I couldn’t go back to that. Even now she was pushing me, manipulating me into doing what she wanted.

  I should be angry. I should be pissed at her for saying these things to me.

  But all I felt was terrified, and she was using it against me.

  So how could I stay?

  Mom looked at me and she must have seen something that mattered, because her face softened. “Sweetie, I’m sorry. Of course you called Kalif. You must have felt so scared and alone.”

  The ocean that threatened to drown me back in Mary’s office began to lap at me again. I couldn’t let it pull me under. One of us had to hold it together.

  “You’re safe here,” I said. “You know I can handle this, right? You know I would never put you in danger.”

  Mom thought about that, and my chest tightened. She must be thinking about the last time I tried to protect her.

  The time I let my father die.

  But Mom smiled softly and nodded. “Yes. I believe that. But you can’t go back to Kalif. You see what a risk that is, right? It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s you. When I think about what will happen if his family gets ahold of you . . .”