by Jamie Mason
“Okay, this is where I’m going to ask you to trust me.”
“Okay.” It was a strongly not-okay okay, but Carly couldn’t think of anything else to do but agree. Why was everyone so freaking weird?
“I don’t want to take you straight home.”
It felt like a bubble rising in Carly, the worry that she’d gotten something very wrong. “What, like later? Like tonight?”
“Maybe.”
“But maybe not?” Carly’s voice slipped up on the bubble.
“Hang on. Listen. Everything’s going to be okay. Remember the other day, when you looked at my scars, when I said I could keep a secret? When we found that guy?”
Carly nodded.
“This is going to sound weird, but these scars, the guy, and even why I’m here at all is because of—”
“John!”
Marcelline looked confused. “Yeah, but—”
Carly pointed out the window, bouncing in her seat. “He’s here! John’s here!”
“Shit!”
Marcelline started the car, hands and feet frantically working the wheel and the pedals. She jerked the car out of the parking space, backward and around, flinging them over the blacktop. Carly shut her eyes over a blur of people, posts, and gas pumps speeding toward them.
Marcelline drove them to the opposite exit, with John coming up through the parking lot. They raced past the pump islands, banged over the tank covers, and screeched out into the street.
Marcelline’s car made it through the intersection, while John’s got held up by cars turning into the road between them. The street stretched straight ahead with a bend looping off in the distance.
Carly looked back at the traffic light. “He’s coming.”
“Okay.”
Marcelline went a little faster. When the road curved to the right, she hit the gas and the car dove in.
“He must have seen my car. Can he still see us now?” asked Marcelline.
Carly craned farther around to check the back window. “I don’t think so.” Carly felt the swooping pull of the long turn and tightened in her seat to keep from leaning.
“Okay. Hang on.”
The gentle swell of gravity lunged for full tilt as Marcelline cranked the wheel over hard to take a violent right turn onto a narrow road they’d all but passed. The tires whined through the floorboards and Carly grabbed for the door to keep from pitching into the center console.
“Sorry!” Marcelline called to Carly and to the car. She patted the dashboard like a good horse.
“What are you doing? What is going on? Why are we running away from John? Why is he chasing us? I don’t get any of this.”
Marcelline didn’t answer her and kept checking the rearview mirror until Carly couldn’t suppress the eyeroll and the sound that always came with it in the back of her throat.
Marcelline looked over at her. “I know. Hang on.”
Carly’s imagination was faster than the minute Marcelline needed to get to a point where she could talk. By the time Marcelline finally started, Carly was prepared for news of the zombie apocalypse.
“This is all going to sound really strange. And I hate doing it while we’re driving. But I want you to understand. And I don’t want you to be afraid. Not of me, anyway.”
“But you think I should be afraid of John?”
Carly looked for the answer on Marcelline’s face to measure it against whatever words came out of her mouth.
The scar pulled tight as Marcelline nibbled at the corner of her lip. “I don’t think Jonathan would hurt you.” She stole a quick glance at Carly. “I really don’t. You’re not going to hear me say anything good about him. And it might ultimately be way more about you than it is about him, but I don’t think he would do anything to you.”
“You know him.”
“Huh?” Marcelline was genuinely puzzled.
Carly felt sick. “You came to my house last night. You said you wanted to meet him, but you already knew him. I missed it.”
Marcelline nodded. “He hadn’t seen me in a long time. In fact, he thought I was dead.”
“This whole time, you knew him? Is that why you talk to me? Is that the reason we did the art stuff?”
“Yes and no. I wanted to know something about his life before I saw him again. Yes. That’s why I found you, and why I struck up a conversation with you. And, yes, that’s why I suggested a reason for us to talk more. But the work we did together, all the time we spent, that was because I wanted to. It was great. It is great. Because you’re pretty great. Carly, I hope you believe me.”
She didn’t answer. How could she have missed it?
Marcelline had tricked her with bait—with the art talk, with kneecapping Dylan in the doughnut shop, with showing her what being in control of hard-to-control things looked like.
Flinging the car all over the road, and them all over the car, while they were being chased was hardly what being in control should feel like, though.
Marcelline had baited her with the idea that all of it could fill in the gaps that had been blown into Carly’s life after the thing. And Carly had taken in every bit of it. Every weird thing to see about Marcelline would have been buried under the obviously weird thing that Carly had done by voluntarily laying out her whole life for Marcelline’s approval.
Carly’s own shadow had gotten in the way. A surge of embarrassed tears burned her eyes, but faded. She wouldn’t get caught out again.
“Why did he think you were dead?” Carly looked at the scar as if it would suddenly be an obvious story that Marcelline didn’t have to say out loud.
Marcelline cleared her throat. “Not all of this is worth going into right now.”
“Right. Not that I deserve an explanation or anything. You just don’t want to tell me.”
“I don’t want to tell you everything, no.” Marcelline cast a hopeful, sad smile at Carly.
But she didn’t lie. Not even about the hard stuff. And she didn’t hold back that she was holding back. It didn’t fix everything, but it was something. Carly didn’t feel like crying anymore right now, but that made her feel as weird as everyone else.
Marcelline steered around another bend with a little extra pepper on it. Carly didn’t feel much of anything more than wide-awake. “How do you know him? Was it from a long time ago? From before he and my mom got together?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Ooooh, boy. Whew. Okay. Where to start?” Marcelline was watching the road and her own past, too. “It will make more sense to start in the middle, but you have to understand, none of this is your fault.”
“My fault?”
“What happened to you when you were attacked, I don’t want you to think that anything attached to it after the fact—anything—makes what happened to you less of a big deal. Everything in life ends up being part of a bigger story, but it’s not more important than you. Or what you did. You were amazing. I don’t want this to upset you.”
“What do you mean?” None of the puzzle-piece edges matched. The zombie apocalypse might actually end up making sense.
“The video. It kicked off something more than just what happened to you that day.”
“Pffft. Tell me about it.”
“Now, what do you mean?”
“It changed everything. Just seeing it. I got to see what I did. I got to see how I beat him. It was just weird. Nobody gets to do that.”
“That must have been very strange.”
“It was kinda great.”
Marcelline looked over at Carly, checking for a joke.
“No, seriously. It’s like all this stuff happens in the world and we just have to guess how. You’re doing it, but then it’s over. And then it’s just gone. But not me. I don’t have to guess. I can see it anytime I want. I know, like in slow motion, how I did it. People can do all these things, but they don’t know it, because it goes by so fast that they can’t understand. I just can. Now. A little bit.”
&n
bsp; “Wow.”
“Yeah, cool story, right? But why do you care about the video?”
“Oh, shit. How?” Marcelline yelled. She was looking in the mirror.
John’s red car was streaking up behind them.
Marcelline sped up. A lot. Carly pulled her seat belt at the hip the way her mother did when John drove too fast. Carly turned in her seat to watch him coming.
“Do you know where we are?” Marcelline was looking from the road ahead to the road behind in the mirror so fast, Carly didn’t know how she was seeing anything at all.
“No!”
“Can you look? Pull up a map or something? We need to go where there are lots of people.”
Carly did. They took a left. Not far down, Marcelline took a right and another right and, like stepping through a door into a party, there was traffic. People everywhere. And no John.
Carly felt the absurdity of her question before she said it, like they were in a movie. “Did we lose him?”
“I think so.”
But a few blocks up, his car nosed up to an intersection ahead.
“Oh, come on!” Marcelline smacked the steering wheel. “Son of a bitch!”
A sheriff’s cruiser turned in from the left a few cars ahead of them.
“Hey, hey! Look!” Carly flapped and pointed.
Marcelline laid a calming hand on her arm, gently pushed it down, and also eased her foot off the gas. “I see him.”
The cop passed John. They passed John. Carly looked over at his straight silhouette behind the windshield, but Marcelline didn’t.
“No, speed up!” Carly said. “Catch up to him! Flash your lights or something!”
Carly looked behind them. John let two big gaps pass him by before he turned.
“I can’t,” said Marcelline.
The cold bubble of fear slipped up through Carly again. “Why not?”
“Ask me later. I cannot do all of this at the same time.” Marcelline checked the mirrors a lot and slowly maneuvered them behind the police officer.
Carly watched John fall farther behind until the red flash of his car streaked off onto a highway ramp.
“He’s gone.”
A green arrow lit up above the left lane. “I’ve got to get off the road,” Marcelline said.
She swerved into the left lane, without a lot of room to spare. Marcelline hissed at the tight fit. Carly winced and saw that they looked together, automatically, to the cop ahead to see if he’d noticed. He hadn’t. They sighed in unison and Marcelline looked over. Her in-it-together smile pushed down the fear in Carly.
The story was bigger, whatever it was, but her part in it and Marcelline’s were crossed now. And Carly could deal with it. Was dealing with it. Look at me go. She could do things.
They took the left and ducked straight into the parking lot of a bustling supermarket. Marcelline turned into a spot shielded from the street by a pennant-festooned van, covered with blue and gold wildcat decals and thoroughly soaped windows urging the Cougars to game-day victory. Number Eight was apparently the star player these days. Three number-eight-wearing, blue-wigged people in gold face paint unloaded bags of groceries from a piled cart into the back of the van, filling all the spaces between the tripod legs of a grill and a massive cooler.
Marcelline ignored the sideshow and rested her lips against prayer-folded hands that were shaking. “Oh, this is crazy,” she whispered.
“Where should we go?”
“I don’t know.”
Carly tried to look at the map, but the focus was hard to catch. Her hands were shaking, too. “What do you think he would do? I mean, if he finds us.”
Marcelline swiped her hand over Carly’s forearm. “I don’t want you to worry. I just need a minute. I’m wrecked. He keeps popping up like the damned Terminator.”
A wash of chills rushed over Carly’s back and scalp in a gust of discovery. “Oh, no! I know how he’s doing it. The app!” Carly held up her phone, gripped in her fist as if it would jump away if she’d let it. “John must have Mom’s phone. The app. It’s a tracker on this one.”
“Oh, hell.”
Marcelline looked for Jonathan out of her side of the car. Carly scanned the parking lot from hers.
“Silence your phone and give it to me.”
“Turn it off?”
“No. Leave it on.”
Carly did and handed it over.
Marcelline got out. “I don’t know if you’ll get this back.”
Carly shrugged. “I don’t have bad stuff on there, so it’s all in the cloud. Duh.” She smiled bravely into her trembling cheeks.
“Right.” Marcelline smiled back.
She walked around her car, head down like she was looking at the tires. In one smooth sweep of her arm, Marcelline slid Carly’s phone into one of the tailgaters’ remaining shopping bags.
She hurried back to her seat, dropped the car into gear, and pulled away from the van. “Go, Cougars.”
• • •
“So what will you tell me about this?” Carly asked.
They’d caught their breath in exhausted silence.
“The short version is that it’s about the painting. In some circles, it’s famous. It’s worth millions.”
Millions. Carly looked at the blanket-wrapped lump buckled in behind Marcelline and realized that millions was a concept in the same category as light-years. She didn’t really know what that was equal to in real life.
“And it’s stolen.”
“He stole it?” Carly went goggle-eyed at the image in her mind of her stepfather as a cat burglar.
“No. Jonathan didn’t steal it. I mean, not the original theft. But he ended up with it. People got hurt.”
A list of reasons waded into the tears that finally sprang up in Carly’s eyes—all of it changing John in her memory into something else, something that pulled so many things in her life out of their happy shape. “Did he do that to you?”
Marcelline clenched her teeth, and the ruined side of her face jumped grotesquely. “Not exactly. But he let it happen. He caused it. And he . . .” She sighed. “Let’s let that be enough for right now.”
The awkward pause cooled off.
Marcelline took a deep breath. “Anyway, I can’t understand how Jonathan would risk hanging it in your house. What a crazy thing to do. But there it was in the video. Just the corner of it. I saw it online. It’s what brought me here.”
“He didn’t do it. Hang it up, I mean. My mom found it and really liked it. She hung it up when we were unpacking.”
Marcelline laughed. “Poor Jonathan. He must have just about crapped his pants. I almost feel sorry for him. Almost. ‘Poor Jonathan’ is not a thought that sits very well in my head.” She laughed again.
“You always call him Jonathan, but it’s just John. It’s not shortened or anything. I mean, not on his driver’s license and the bills and stuff. Just John. But you know what’s weird? This big huge guy who came to the house the other day called him that, too. When they were talking, he always called him Jonathan.
Carly replayed the guy filling up their doorway, flirting with her mother, menacing Carly by not trying too hard not to. “Wait. He kept looking at the wall. Marcelline! He kept looking at the place it was hanging before. He knew about it, too! I knew he must have seen it in the video. But he was looking for the painting.”
Marcelline hadn’t said anything during Carly’s moment of revelation. In fact, she’d gone like a hole in the air, dead silent. Staring at Carly, openmouthed.
The driver behind them tapped his horn as a friendly reminder that the light had turned green.
Marcelline ignored him. “A huge guy came looking for Jonathan?”
• • •
They parked by a playground buried in a neighborhood miles from Carly’s house. At the end of the story, Marcelline leaned back in her seat, hands folded over her lips, deep in thought. “He’ll come looking for the painting. The first place is your house. Shit.”
<
br /> “But my mom . . .”
“I know.”
When Marcelline reached for her phone, Carly felt a pang for her own. Not having it was like not having her hair. She knew she could live without it, but it felt really weird.
So she stared out the window, listening to Marcelline’s side of the call.
“S? Hey, it’s me. Sorry I hung up on you. . . . Yeah, I’m fine. Fine-ish anyway. . . . I don’t know.” She smiled at something the other person said. “Yeah. I know. Um, I need you to do something. You’re not going to like it. I think I might need you to get in touch with Owen Haig for me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
* * *
Boxes. That was what allowed Samantha to have both her career and a life.
She disconnected from the call with Marcelline and looked at the collection of boxes that lined her shelves and decorated her tables and spare desk space. There were even more of them at home—little jeweled ones, some with sweetly plinking music, big decoupaged hatboxes, glass, inlaid wood, onyx, resin, leather-covered pressboard. They were all empty.
People thought they were knickknacks. Her odd little collector’s fetish. Just what you ought to get Samantha for her birthday or Hanukkah. But that wasn’t it at all. They served as pretty prompts to remind her of their metaphorical counterparts, lovely little warnings for her to never forget how all of this worked.
The magic of compartmentalization wasn’t in that it kept things separate. That was merely the practical function of containment. The separation let a whole lot of people stay in her life because they thought she worked in hospital public relations. But it also let the president of France’s personal secretary have her number in his phone under the guise of a plumbing company. It kept scores of wealthy and influential people from ever knowing they were often talking about the same person when they gossiped, in lowered voices, about knowing someone who could do this or get that. It let her help the FBI some days and thwart them on others. It let her talk to her mother three times a week.
No, the true blessing of the psychological box was in the lid. The idea, the image of it, was a simple mnemonic device that forced a pause into her decision making. When Samantha was about to change something, to open a lid as it were, there was the question What does it mean to pry this open, to risk getting this mixed in with something else?