by Jamie Mason
“That’s what you do?”
“Yeah.”
She seemed to agree with the counter, since that’s where the nods were going.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m okay.” She looked up at him tentatively, worried and so un-Carly-like that it felt like a punch. “Are you okay?”
The words felt bigger than the passage up his throat. “Yeah, sure.”
They both had the same lie, that they were okay. So to keep their own, they had to let the other’s lie go unchallenged.
“Are you going out?” Carly ticked her chin in the direction of the keys still in his hand.
“Yeah. Just for a little bit. Need a ride somewhere?” The hope for a yes from her was a sparkly, pricking thing. Something was getting lost in this goodbye. It felt important.
“No. But thanks, though. I’m not going anywhere.”
• • •
On Jonathan’s drive, his copilot was a relentless wariness. Watching the cars behind him and assigning intent to their distances from him, their turns and lane changes, all while not ramming into the cars ahead of him, it was a water-torture drip of adrenaline. He was glad he’d left the painting in the closet.
But the security system was killing him. The outside cameras alerted to two separate dogs, each with a person in tow, then two dogs trotting along together with no person at all for some reason, and some asshole on what appeared to be her first outing on in-line skates, wearing a groove into the sidewalk, up and down the street on her wobbly training mission.
He had to check all of this while driving with way too much purpose and hard braking. The whole thing on far too little sleep was a trick almost beyond his reach.
His skin stung every time the phone buzzed an alert. He thought of the painting. Owen. Marcelline. Sweat had his shirt sticking to his back. Maybe he should have brought the fucking thing with him.
When the foyer camera alerted, his relief had a certain logic. For all of Owen’s aura of getting shit done, Jonathan was fairly sure he couldn’t teleport.
Owen hadn’t driven up or walked over to the house or Jonathan would have known. It was just Carly.
Just Carly was very nearly the last thing he ever thought.
The camera showed Carly in the coat closet. And then again, still in the coat closet. And in the coat closet with some of the stuff pushed out behind her. Rolls of wrapping paper were among the flotsam in the images sent to Jonathan’s phone.
Interior 1’s last alert in the spasm of notifications showed Carly at the front door with the garment bag.
The outside cameras showed her getting smaller, with her arms full, heading up the street.
Oh, God. Something broke in him.
• • •
“Carly, you need to pick up the phone. What are you doing?”
Jonathan had called twice and let the second one go all the way to voice mail. Her greeting had never been personalized from the phone company’s default message. Voice mail wasn’t a thing for her crowd.
He had to get off the road. He flinched for the brake at the first turn-in but couldn’t bring himself to drive into the McDonald’s parking lot where he’d met Roy so many times before.
Three blocks down had an office park with no such connotations for him. He parked and texted her. You need to pick up the phone.
He dialed. She didn’t. What are you doing? I am not kidding. Pick up. Now.
He felt his lips grinding into a snarl as the ringtone pulsed in his ear. The call rang back through to the generic voice mail. You will be very sorry if I have to call back after this. Pick up. Right now.
Carly answered then, but didn’t say anything.
“Carly, what are you doing? What is going on?”
The breeze, wherever she was with the painting, was all the answer he got.
“Goddammit, answer me. Where are you? What are you doing?”
The wind sound was eclipsed by Carly’s shuddery breathing. Her voice, when it finally came, was just above a whisper. “Why is this a big deal?”
There is a line of what is just too much. Jonathan had felt it waiting out there all his life. There was a seam in the universe that held what you could handle right up next to the vast expanse of all that you could not. It was the line that separated getting by from the thing that would change you into something that no one else would recognize.
He imagined that every person could sense when that line was close—for themselves and also for the people they were about to shove over the boundary.
“Carly, you’re on your way back home. You need to just say that you are and then turn around and make it true. I’m also on my way back. And you’d better beat me there. Do not stop anywhere. Do you understand me?”
He heard a fumbling rustle and then nothing. “Carly?”
She was gone.
• • •
“Hi!” Jonathan was bright and pleasant, but careful not to be too much of either when Ada’s mother answered the door.
“Hi!” She tried to match his tone over the obvious question in her eyes of what he was doing there.
His racing heart sank. “I was just swinging by to get Carly.”
“Oh? I’m confused. She’s not here. Did she say that she was coming over? Ada’s out with her dad this morning.”
He felt the line again, sliding just barely under his toes. His expression blanked. He couldn’t stop it although he knew the effect was startling to people. Jonathan turned and walked away before he made it any worse. “My mistake,” he called over his shoulder.
• • •
Walking into the house again, the feeling of last chance clung to him as if it had been a web spun across the doorframe. He didn’t know what it would take to get this back under his control, but it felt very much as if it had to happen here.
Donna’s face would tell him a lot.
She was at the dining room table on her computer. She looked up as he walked in. “Hi.” She looked tired, stressed, lovely, and not at all on high alert.
“Hi.” His chest ached. “Carly here?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. Honestly, I thought she was with you. Everyone disappears and no one leaves me a note. Real nice family I’ve got here.”
His thoughts were that dream-running-in-deep-sand kind of slow.
She pulled back in her seat to see him better. “What’s wrong?”
“I need you to call Carly for me. I need you to find out where she is.”
“Why? What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“Yes and no. No. I mean, Carly is physically okay. She’s been under a lot of stress lately. Obviously, we all have. But she’s in a little bit of trouble. She took something that doesn’t belong to her.”
“Carly stole something? What? Like shoplifting? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Can you just call her please?” He nodded at her phone beside her computer. “Let’s just give her a chance to make this right. I don’t want to say too much.”
Donna’s own line of too far was coming for her. John knew she’d outpaced disaster by five steps, always. Her whole life, she’d been faster and stronger than anything that had pursued her. Her competence had been both a shield and a weapon. But since meeting him, more—way more—had been rolling toward her that she hadn’t known to outrun.
Jonathan rubbed her arm as she called Carly. “Let’s just find her and hear what she has to say.”
“She’s not answering,” Donna said, worried and shaking her head.
Jonathan thought his teeth might break from grinding.
“Let me just see where she is.” Donna took her reading glasses from the table and swiped and tapped at the screen of her phone.
“You can see where she is?”
Donna waved him off, ignoring his question. She tilted her head at what she was looking at. He swiveled around to see it with her. A map. Carly’s face in a circle above a blue arrow on the loose grid of streets.
&nbs
p; “She’s over by the library,” Donna said.
She looked at him. He saw her, but all of his vision had become peripheral as his sight turned inward, watching, seeing how this had arranged itself. He grabbed the back of the closest chair at the table and squeezed until the edge of the wood bit painfully into the pads of his fingers.
They got to the same answer at the same time.
“Was she meeting up with Emma?” Donna asked. “Did she mention that to you?”
“Fuck!” he screamed, and pulled the chair to slam down into the floor. “No!”
Donna had gone white and rigid. He breathed deep and smiled, but it landed like a slap and she recoiled from him.
“It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” He took her phone. “Let me take this. I’ll go get her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
Carly knew the word impulse mostly as a concept, but also as a vocab word in English. It had only been a short time that she’d thought of it as anything self-descriptive. She was the good one, the one who used her head. She was careful. She was courteous, which was only another kind of careful. She was the kid who still asked permission for sweet snacks at home, the one who always said please.
No one ever used the word impulse and meant it as a good thing. What was accomplished impulsively was a cautionary tale. Bad. Sometimes ruinous.
But to Carly, the idea of it had gotten hooked to the pulse syllable of the word. Impulse. A lurch of the heart that set something off like a starting gun. The thing was, starting guns were never aimed and they weren’t guides. Just bang and you’re off, and therein seemed to lie the problem.
When she’d seen the video of the thing, the one element she could solidly match up to the unclear memory was the pounding of her heart and the way it had somersaulted in her chest just before she’d flipped the whole scene to her advantage. She did remember the leap of NO! under her sternum, and the yank of the impulse that had spurred her to do what she did. And it had worked.
After that one moment, all-head Carly, Miss Please and Thank You of the Twenty-First Century, wondered if impulses were always bad, if they always led to trouble. Now she had precedent.
She was shocked by all she hadn’t talked herself out of lately.
She’d been basically spying on everyone she knew since the day after the thing—rummaging around in their voices, rifling through the words they chose, pickpocketing all they hadn’t said out loud. Both thrilled and a little ashamed by it, it was automatic now to ransack people’s postures and expressions to steal what they didn’t want you to know. She’d taken it all the way to really spying: tracking, lying, scheming, stealing. And today. This morning. It was hard to think past the panicked wow.
Standing in the library, she’d been trembling so hard she’d had to clamp down on the shakes to scroll through her contacts to find Marcelline’s number after having impulsively hung up on her stepfather.
At least Marcelline wasn’t laughing at her. She wasn’t acting as if Carly were stupid. She was taking it seriously. She would help.
“I took it.”
Carly heard Marcelline make a little sound. An “Oh”-like gasp knocked out of her, instead of sucked in.
Carly didn’t want to be in trouble with Marcelline. Defense came tumbling out. “I know! It’s crazy. I’m sorry. But I wanted to show it to you anyway. I mean, before. I was just going to take a picture of it, but Mom said he got rid of it. And it’s weird that he made such a big deal out of hiding it. Isn’t it? I thought it was really weird. So I took it. Do you want to see it? But it can’t be about that dead guy? There’s no way, right? Can it?”
“Carly, where are you?”
“At the library. The bad thing, though, is John’s superpissed that I took it. I don’t think it’s about the suit.”
“He knows you have it?”
“Yeah, he saw me on the camera. He’s really mad. I’m kind of scared.”
“How long have you been in the library?”
“I just got here.”
“Honey, you can’t stay there.”
A spike of ready-to-run bolted through Carly, but also a blaring Why? zipped up her spine. She’d come by herself, but now she felt truly alone. “Can you come get me?”
“I’m on my way. But I don’t want you to stay there.”
“Should I go wait at the school?”
“No. It’s Saturday. You won’t be able to get inside. You’ll be out in the open. He’ll probably look for you at Ada’s house and the library, but then maybe the school.”
“I could walk to the Y?”
“It’s too far. Okay, I know. Go to the back of the library, by the other parking lot. Cross over to the gas station. Go into the ladies’ room and lock yourself in. Don’t answer your phone, even if it’s your mother or Ada. Not just now. Okay? Promise me. And don’t open the door for anyone but me. If someone calls to you while you’re in there, make like you’re puking. Just say you’re sick. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Is this bad? Did I do the wrong thing?”
“No. It’ll be okay. Go now, sweetheart. Go fast.”
• • •
At the back of the gas station, the ladies’ room seemed like a terrible place to hide. The heavy, rust-flecked door was kicked in at the bottom corner, bent like someone else had gotten the same idea once and it hadn’t gone well. The metal collar on the doorknob spun and clattered when she turned it.
Things weren’t much better on the inside. A brass latch and a ragged do-it-yourself hole drilled into the jamb took the place of the bolt that no longer lined up to its slot. It looked like it had been salvaged from a boat wreck.
Carly slid the latch home and twisted the little tab lock in the handle, but wasn’t sure it caught on anything. She retreated to the middle of the tiled floor. And waited.
The air was humid and vivid with the smell of wintergreen over plumbing problems. The ceiling pressed down like a low lid and held everything tight under its seal. No sound got back into this corner of the thick-walled building. She could hear herself swallow and breathe, and nothing else.
The painting made the bag heavy and lopsided. The floor was gross enough that she thought all the way to how she would feel about picking the bag up again if she set it down. Instead, Carly hugged it to her chest, redistributing its awkwardness. Her bare arms sweated against the slick fabric.
Her phone rang. The bag slid down from her new one-armed grip as she scrabbled for her pocket. The corner of the painting inside the bag scudded along her shin and jabbed the base of her big toe as it settled.
Her mother was calling. The longing to talk to her seared through Carly like pain. She didn’t know what John had told her. Carly didn’t know if her mother was mad at her. Or worried. Maybe she should answer, just to at least tell her side of the story. But she couldn’t. She’d said she wouldn’t. She wanted to. No.
There was a muted jingle and someone turned the doorknob and the door thudded against the clattery latch. The phone stopped ringing.
Whoever it was pushed on the door again.
Carly’s eyes went hot with tears and her lungs burned on the expired timer of her overdue next breath.
A voice called out, faint to louder as it came closer. Marcelline.
“Sorry! Sorry. I think that’s my girl in there.”
There was a shuffling of position in the narrow hallway outside, then a soft tap on the door. “Carly, honey, it’s me.”
Carly unlocked the door and Marcelline smiled at the unsmiling woman in the hallway, who looked back and forth between them, taking score on how long it would be before she got her turn in the restroom.
Marcelline held up a finger as she squeezed through the door that she didn’t open all the way. “We’ll be out in just a second.”
She slipped in and latched the door behind her.
Carly’s face felt splotchy hot under the wet streaks.
“Oh, honey.” Marcelline pulled her into a hug. “
It’s going to be okay.”
“My . . . my . . .” A sputtering sob overran her words. Just too much. Everything all at once. “My mom just called. I . . . didn’t . . . didn’t answer it.” She coughed and hitched into Marcelline’s shoulder.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. I know that was hard. You did fine. We’re going to get this all straightened out, okay?”
Marcelline unwound her arms from Carly to take her face in her warm hands. She did the serious eye-to-eye thing that usually felt so high drama, but it actually helped this time. The volcano swell of crying surged down in Carly.
“I know everything’s been crazy. Too crazy. But it’s going to be all right.”
Marcelline pulled some toilet paper off the roll and Carly dried her face with the shreds of it as it dissolved in her tears.
They both looked at the bag crumpled in a heap and leaning against Carly’s legs.
“May I?”
Carly nodded.
Marcelline didn’t hesitate to kneel on the grimy floor. She unzipped the bag all the way to the bottom. She pushed the suit off the painting and worked its corners free.
She made the little reverse-gasp sound again.
She smiled and shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were shiny. “In a gas station bathroom,” she whispered.
She looked up from the floor, glowing.
“What?” said Carly.
The door clanged in its frame. The voice from the other side was muffled. The mood, though, came through just fine. “Hello? There are people waiting out here.”
“Let’s go,” Marcelline said.
• • •
Marcelline carried the bag out, and Carly couldn’t help but notice that she held it as if it were glass. She put it in the footwell first, checked it over, shook her head, went into the trunk for a blanket, and moved the whole bag onto the seat. She bunched the suit under the painting and wrapped the whole thing in the blanket, tucked up tight like a baby in bed. She buckled the belt over the bundle of it.
“Wow,” Carly said. “What’s with all that?”
“Hop in.”
Once they were in their own seats and as secure as John’s suit, Marcelline turned to her.