by Jamie Mason
But it only took two to live a good life. Carly didn’t remember being anything but happy enough with just the two of them. It was still her default setting: me and Mom.
But Carly was better than halfway to genuinely loving her stepfather. He was fun. He hadn’t made her mother different as Carly had feared he would. He’d blended into the background of Donna’s bustle, as if he were happy enough to be a nice nothing. Everything was almost the same except where they lived—their regular life plus one, with barely a ripple. He made them three, but Carly had not yet thought about him as part of this insane day.
John looked up from the crook of her mother’s neck and gently maneuvered out of her arms. He took a deep breath, came to Carly, and wrapped her up.
“Holy shit, Carlzee.”
She liked the nickname and liked the softball curses he sent her way sometimes, even if her mother didn’t. He was there with them. It was nice. She smiled into his hug.
He pulled her away by the shoulders and fixed her in a hard stare. “You okay?”
She nodded, but had to hold her bottom lip with her teeth to keep her from crumpling into ugly cry face.
John shifted his gaze beyond her, to the cops milling around the living room. He pulled in a deep breath and sucked his teeth, sizing them up like bad weather.
Carly felt forgotten in his grip, and John’s scowl made her look back over her shoulder, too, to double-check that the same nice men she’d been talking to were what he was laser beaming.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
But when his eyes met hers again, the question cranked in her head to a loud, looping Whatswrong whatswrong-ohno-whatswrong?
They both tracked for what they could read in each other’s thoughts. She saw . . . what exactly? And he saw that she did . . . something (NO!). The corners of John’s mouth turned down and he shook his head, just a little. Did he want her not to worry? Was he saying sorry? Sorry for what? The questions hummed in the air between them.
“Mr. Cooper?” The taller detective walked up, hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you. Glad my guys found you. Thanks for your help.”
“Sure,” John said.
“I just got a message that the video clips are up on the website. Do you have somewhere where we can all look at this together? We’ll see if maybe you guys recognize him.”
The security cameras. Carly had forgotten about them. “Oh, wow! You can see him? You saw him—”
Her mother talked over her, grabbing at John’s arm. “Did you get a good look at him? Are the pictures clear enough? Can they use it to . . .”
John chewed at the corner of his lip and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh.”
They filed into the study, Carly, her mother, John, and the five cops left in the house, to see what the local police had posted to their Alerts web page.
Carly discovered, while watching the video, that there were actually two of her in the room, not counting her image on the screen. There was the Carly who could feel her body. She was standing just to the right of her stepfather, who was sitting at his desk manning the mouse and the keyboard.
That particular Carly’s hands were cold and her eyes burned from lack of blinking. That Carly trembled. That Carly felt a little sick watching the video and making a new memory of what had happened. And of what had almost happened.
The second Carly, Carly 2.0, was born where she stood, and she was made of both no and yes. She’d been on her way all afternoon. Carly had felt her stirring with the doorknob in her grip, on her feet, breathing, booming, growing brand-new into her skin. This Carly knew that breath and movement and chance were the parts of the physical fight she was watching on the screen. But she saw an entire machine inside her, a system of Other Carlys that would try things and do things and figure things out at a speed and ferocity that regular Carly didn’t direct.
She was breathless in the hold of discovery. It burned. Tingled. It sang. She was watching with her own eyes something that would never, could never, have been in her memory. That terrible minute was hers again, but from the one viewpoint that she alone on planet Earth was barred from seeing. Outside herself.
A whole silent, hidden life was inside her body waiting, vigilant, to be called on. There were worlds within worlds. The layers between them broke away like sugar glass when they needed to. When they had to. She couldn’t look away from her other self doing the unimaginable.
On the screen, she watched Other Carly give Carly the aim, the strength, and the break from thinking. Other Carly made her try and took away the idea that it wouldn’t work.
If all that, then what else? Then there was more everywhere. Something was working away underneath it all. Everyone, without knowing it, was getting ready. Constantly. Making things. Having ideas they wouldn’t have time to ask permission for. Everyone was inventing fast plans to plug into problems, ways to cope that stayed hidden until, suddenly, they didn’t anymore. Everyone thought they weren’t ready. But that wasn’t all the way true.
The peg turned.
Then Carly felt what was wrong in the room.
The cheerful line of cops behind them were laughing it up, commenting on the looping video. One man slapped his hands together with glee when on-screen Carly’s boot connected with the guy’s head again, and he crashed into a nerveless heap on the tiles.
But the heat of trouble came not from the strangers behind them, but from the left. Her stepfather absorbed most of it, stiff and grim at the computer’s controls. Carly’s mother glowed like the sun, mouth agape.
In a moment of discovery and wonder, Carly had sped right past the obvious thing. Since when are there cameras in the house?
• • •
Carly, in the last year or so, was only beginning to appreciate that her mother might be beautiful. In that final hour, after the entire group watched and rewatched the video together, the hard set to her mother’s jaw, her flush, and the careful mask of composure managed to light her face and posture like a work of art on display. The image of her, incandescent and restrained, convinced Carly to look at her mother in the way the other people, all men at the moment, must see her. Donna Liddell was lovely. And she was furious, but you’d have to be well versed in her usual expression to notice.
As the police finished getting what they needed for all that came next, Carly watched their eyes—helpless, not predatory—drawn over and again to her mother’s face, her glittering eyes and tight, full-lipped smile. And Carly saw they didn’t get it, but her stepfather did.
She noted the chain of appraisal: John, when he wasn’t casting measuring glances at Donna’s pointed avoidance of him, was watching the other men watch his wife. He didn’t look jealous, though, which surprised Carly. He seemed worried, but more in the way of a juggler. As if one too many bowling pins were flying around, and maybe someone just tossed in a carving knife. He looked as if he were doing hard math.
John saw the last cop to the door. He closed it behind the lieutenant, whom he watched through the side window all the way down the driveway. Carly stood next to her mother at the back of the foyer. The room was oriented around the two of them as they faced John nearly to the angle of how it appeared in the video. Carly looked over her shoulder for the camera.
At the turn of the wall was a motion sensor tucked into the corner, pointing toward the front door and the hall table with the painting over it, where they all stopped on the way in and out of the house for their keys and sunglasses. He’d put in a system that turned on the lights when you walked through the house. That’s what he’d explained to them. The camera had to be somewhere near it, or even in it, maybe. Her eyes roamed the smooth span of wall, crown molding, and baseboard. None of it hinted at anywhere else it might be. Carly moved to her mother’s right side, more out of its path.
John turned around from the door like someone who didn’t want to.
He didn’t try to hide that he was drawing in a big preparatory breath. “Okay. There’s a lot to talk about, but let’s
try to keep things in perspective.”
“Really?” said Donna. “That’s where you want to start? You sure about that?”
“Donna, listen—”
“Wow. No. Stop. Do not make the word listen or my name sound like you think I’m being unreasonable.”
“Come on, I’m sorry. It’s not like I put a camera in the bedroom or near the bathroom or anything. Nobody’s naked in the foyer.”
“Obviously I have no idea where there might be a camera in my house. So where they’re not is hardly the point.”
John’s hand came up, defensive, placating. “I know. I know.”
“I don’t think you do.”
John let his hands fall back to his sides, his shoulders loose under the weight of defeat. Or at least to look defeated, Carly thought, and cocked her head in concentration.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “Where do you want me to start?”
Surprise, like a little pinch, startled Carly. She looked at her mother and saw that Donna hadn’t heard him all the way. Her mother didn’t realize it wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was bait. John wanted her to tell him what would fix this. But no. Filling in the blanks would be less like explaining himself and a lot more like scratching where her mother said it itched.
Carly’s focus went wide and she looked into the thousand-yard distance, listening to the two of them. The match struck and went into the tinder. The argument burst into flames while Carly sorted out how different her mother’s unfiltered, uncalculated upset sounded from her stepfather’s precision in answering her.
• • •
The call came in the middle of their fight. The police had caught the young man who had pushed his way into the house. Carly wasn’t supposed to hear that the boy had a knife in his pocket when they’d found him, but her mother, putting the phone on speaker, the angry conversation with John on pause, had hit the button too late.
Carly couldn’t decide how to feel. The fact of his knife bumped up against the fact of her win. More danger made her mother sag with breathy talk of “so incredibly fortunate.” Carly didn’t want luck to make it seem like she cheated. It didn’t change anything. The freak never got to his pocket.
Carly could tell by how fast and scattershot her mother was yelling at John that it was more convenient for her to be furious than to think about what other night they could all be having right now. They’d all be doing something different—in a police station or in a hospital or someplace worse—if it had gone another way. Carly understood because she didn’t want to think about any of that stuff either.
But she found it hard to be mad at John, even though he was wrong and being somehow really weird about it. He should have told them. That was true. He should have asked.
If there hadn’t been a camera in the foyer, though, or if he’d asked beforehand and her mother had said no, the video wouldn’t exist. Carly would never have known what really happened. That guy pushing her, grabbing her, trying to—Come on, NO, don’t think about that. Her taking him down and getting away. Everything was always going to be different after what had happened. Carly thought of Mrs. Carmichael.
But without seeing it, without really knowing, it might not have been a good change in her.
While John and her mother were arguing, Carly had replayed the video over and over on her phone from the police website. Without John and his bad decision, she wouldn’t have had that jolt, the radioactive spider bite that made her feel so electric tonight. Everything was sharp. Everything glowed. Everything sounded so clear.
It wasn’t right, what John had done and how he was acting. Was a lie of omission as bad as a regular lie? She didn’t know. And she also didn’t know for sure that there weren’t other kinds of lies in the story as well. Hearing and listening had become slightly different tools in the last few hours.
John said there was a man who’d stalked him when he lived in San Diego. But he said “San Diego” as if the words were unfamiliar in his mouth. He said that the man was a nut, a pitiful loser, but that he didn’t want to ruin the poor guy’s life if it was something John could handle on his own. So he’d put in the cameras and monitored them closely.
John said the man wasn’t a danger to Carly or her mother, but Carly heard a wrong note. The peg turned. He didn’t believe it when he said it. Of that, she was sure.
Carly’s phone lit up with two notifications, and another as she read the screen. Her friends were starting to check in: Is that YOU?!?!
The video had jumped into the social media stream.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
Once the police explained to John what had happened at his house, he’d kept one track of panic running, and one of face management. Hours of concentrating against looking too worried to the police, or not worried enough to Donna and Carly, was just about to the limit of his talent.
When they’d caught the little shit who had tried to hurt Carly, John let the adrenaline divert fully to the Donna problem. He let hope tamp down the immediate concern about the video, about its being out there on the police website. The cops had kept the media down at the end of the block, and the case was solved fast. It would sink. Everyone would be well on their way to the next thing in hours, if not sooner. It would be great if a celebrity death or a terrorist attack or something else happened in the next ten minutes. But either way, this was over. That part of it, anyway.
But he was exhausted. There wasn’t enough juice left in him to be as good in the fight as he needed to be.
As fast as he could make it up and say it out loud, the playback began, with a twinge at every point he could’ve been smarter. He saw—just too damned obviously—all the moments as they sped by when he could have made a better choice of words or gestures.
Donna, in a slow spot in the argument, made him show her all the cameras. When they came back inside, she’d gone quiet, but opened a bottle of wine. She poured two glasses. He took that as a good sign.
“I don’t get it, though. Why did you only put one camera in the front hall?”
Most people didn’t realize the value of not speaking when they didn’t have to in a tight spot. Vacuum, meet nature. John wasn’t most people. He fought that little fact of the universe and always tried to keep his mouth shut when it served him well to do so.
He squinted at what she’d asked and shook his head, a perfect picture of innocent confusion. At the very least, the maneuver bought time. Seconds were money in a tricky conversation. And sometimes a bewildered look made a generous person discount their own questions as nonsensical or unfair before they’d let the other person feel too bad.
She looked away from him and into her wine. “I mean, what if somebody, that guy you’re so worried about or someone else, what if they broke in through the back door? Or had come in through the garage?”
Shit. He was tired and dull. “I don’t know, babe. I didn’t think about it. I put that one camera in to cover the front door, and then I just realized how much money I’d spent and how maybe it was overkill already. . . .”
Her head snapped up, eyebrow a hard arch over a sparking glare. “Overkill? You thought it was overkill, but you canceled the monitoring? The one thing that could have actually helped in an emergency? That doesn’t even make any sense. It doesn’t even seem like you. It’s not like you to let something go at that. It’s so . . .”
Donna stopped, her mouth working around the rest of her sentence. It set off a warning tingle in his jaw. She took a big bolstering gulp of her wine.
“It’s just so half-assed.”
John had to clamp down hard not to react. Bitch. The muscles in his legs jumped. His chest craved a huge breath to yell back out. He ached from holding still against every instinct. But too much ground had been lost to even suck air in a way that looked out of place.
He had to move, though. The energy had to go somewhere. He reached out, put his hand over hers, tensing to keep the gesture gentle and steady. He curled his fingertips into
her palm. “The important thing is that Carly is okay.”
Donna’s head dropped in exhausted resignation and she slid her hand out from under his as if it were slimy. “Do you really think I need you to tell me how great it is that nothing worse happened to Carly?”
Donna dragged herself out of the chair shaking her head. She refilled her glass from the bottle on the coffee table, clearly on her way out of the room.
But not without a parting shot. She turned at the doorway, watching him over the rim of her glass, and he dared not look away.
“Why are you so bad at this?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. “Carly!” she called. “Get a bag together. We’re going to Ada’s.”
There had been punishment in Donna’s threat to go, but even beyond the upset of the fight, they were all restless in the house. It didn’t feel right, standing around in the alien echo of trespass.
A parade of strangers had sized up their foyer—the bargain-wood bench stained to make you think walnut, its basket cubbies and jacket hooks above, the granite-and-iron hall table that weighed like a piano, the oil painting right above it that weighed a hundred times more than that in worry. They had peered at the things that were the backdrop to any normal night at home. The creep who had attacked Carly, the police, and the uncounted number of clickers who had already watched the video, all of their scrutiny had left everything feeling pawed.
With all three at the end of their energy, it was like trying to settle into a museum display. It was what normal looked like, but not what it felt like.
But even after everything that had happened, Carly said she didn’t want to leave. The guest room had been her idea, a compromise that kept everything simpler.
“There’s no way this night isn’t going to be weird no matter what,” she said. “But why does it have to be that weird? Can’t you guys just sleep in different rooms until this gets worked out? Tomorrow will be completely stupid if we leave now. Mom, you can stay in my room with me, if you want. If that’s better.”