Cross My Heart, Hope To Die

by Sara Shepard

  “Hey, Ms. Rigby.” She looked around to make sure no one could overhear her, though the library was mostly empty. “I’m doing some research for a presentation.”

  “What’s the topic?”

  “Uh, mental illness.”

  Ms. Rigby leaned back in her chair thoughtfully. “That’s a pretty big subject to tackle all at once. Anything specific you’re interested in?”

  “Well, I’m interested in … violent cases.” Her pulse quickened mildly just saying the words out loud.

  The librarian nodded. “The violent ones are always the most interesting, aren’t they?” she said. “I have to admit, Abnormal Psychology was one of my favorite subjects in college. Follow me.”

  The librarian led her to an aisle in the middle of the nonfiction stacks. There were four and a half shelves full of titles like An Idiot’s Guide to Personality Disorders and Case Studies in Mental Illness. A lot of the books looked outdated and moldy.

  Ms. Rigby surveyed the shelves for a moment, then found what she was looking for. “The Devil’s Playground,” she said cheerfully. “It’s about criminal insanity. It’s a good read, and it should give you a good place to start your research if you’re interested in that sort of thing.”

  Emma liked Ms. Rigby, but it was a little chilling to hear her talk about violent insanity as if it was a source of entertainment. “Um, great.”

  “The school board obviously doesn’t let us keep anything too disturbing in the library, so you might also check the university. They’ll have tons of stuff.”

  The librarian returned to her desk, and Emma looked back at the shelves. She grabbed a few more books and went to a table hidden behind the science fiction section, a little out of sight of the front desk.

  She started to leaf through the first book. It contained lots of pictures, from woodcuts of the Salem witch trials to before-and-after pictures of lobotomies in the 1960s. She flipped to the index and ran her finger down the list of entries, unsure what she was even really looking for. Then she remembered something the nurse had said in the hospital: It looks like a total psychotic break.

  She found the entry for psychotic break and flipped to the page indicated. Psychosis is marked by a complete removal of the patient from reality, it said. Delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking or behavior, and poor impulse control are all indicators of a psychotic break. Then the book went on to describe a bunch of serial killers with names like the Night Slasher and the Dallas Axe Killer who had received instructions from the voices in their heads to kill and kill again. They murdered people they loved. Parents. Sisters. Children. All because a voice told them to.

  Emma’s stomach turned. Becky had been taken to the hospital because she’d pulled a knife on someone. Had a voice commanded her to do that? What might she have done if the security guards hadn’t intervened?

  “Good reading?”

  Thayer stood over her, his dark hair falling shaggily into his hazel eyes. Emma slapped the book shut and placed it at her side, face down. A book on criminal psychosis didn’t seem like typical Sutton Mercer reading material.

  Thayer flopped down across from her, and suddenly a package of Twizzlers manifested itself in front of her nose. The sweet strawberry smell made her mouth water. “For you!”

  “These are my favorite!” Emma exclaimed, taking a large bite of the sticky, sugary candy. Emma had always kept a package of the candy in her purse back in Nevada, hiding it from foster siblings with personal-space-and-property issues. “How did you know?”

  His brow crinkled. “Because I used to bring them to you every day?”

  Emma smiled at the thought that she and Sutton had the same favorite candy. So much about their lifestyles seemed so different, but maybe there had been some tastes they’d shared after all.

  “What are you reading, anyway?” Thayer asked. He grabbed at the book and let out a low whistle of surprise. “Whoa. You have a dark side I didn’t know about.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To find out about my dark side?” Emma asked.

  Thayer nodded. “Obviously. I’m stalking you.”

  Emma felt her cheeks getting warm under Thayer’s gaze. He thinks he’s looking at Sutton, not me, she reminded herself. A tickle of curiosity stirred in the back of her mind. Thayer had seemed so unhappy and brittle when she first met him, and it still surprised her to see this friendly, sweet side of him. Then she remembered something and cleared her throat.

  “Do you remember that day at the fair when you won me the big Scooby-Doo?” she asked.

  His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “How could I forget? I only threw rings at bowling pins for three hours to get the stupid thing.”

  “Laurel reminded me about it the other day,” Emma said softly. “It was really … sweet.”

  Thayer frowned. “You said it was stupid. You said carnival animals were full of lice.”

  “Oh please, I loved it,” Emma murmured. For a moment she imagined herself as Sutton, receiving the stuffed animal, rolling her eyes to keep her diva reputation intact but later laying her cheek against the cheap plush toy and smiling at the thought of Thayer. She felt sure that her sister had secretly swooned over the gesture.

  An image came to me of the Scooby-Doo sitting on my bedspread. Thayer and I had loved each other so intensely, but we’d only been together a short time. It just wasn’t fair.

  Thayer reached across the table for Emma’s hand. For a split second she let him curl his fingers around hers—but then she pulled quickly away.

  He flushed. “Sorry,” he said. “Old habits die hard.”

  She was spared having to say anything else when Celeste, idly shuffling a deck of cards, emerged from behind a bookshelf. She was wearing a green lace jacket over a short, shapeless gray dress, and a large purple stone on a lanyard hung around her neck. The rings on her fingers glittered as she played with the cards. She stopped when she saw Sutton and Thayer. “Helloooo,” she said, drawing out the word.

  “What do you want?” Emma asked, frowning. She wasn’t in the mood to hear more about her damaged aura today.

  Celeste smiled at Thayer, her expression looking like it was somehow filtered through a soft-focus camera lens. “I don’t know if I’ve met you. Are you Sutton’s boyfriend?”

  Thayer coughed and glanced at Emma awkwardly. “I’m Thayer,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Celeste didn’t shake it. She slid next to Thayer and looked at Emma unblinkingly. “Sutton,” she said finally, “I think I’ve been sent here to give you a message.”

  Thayer widened his eyes, clearly enjoying this. Emma remembered he’d said that Celeste had a celestial body. Typical guy. “A message?” she challenged. “Really? Who from?”

  “From the universe.” Celeste’s gaze was distant. “I was heading toward the Student Center to meet Garrett when I felt an undeniable urge to come in here. I don’t know why—I wasn’t planning to visit the library. But something guided my steps, straight to you.” She leaned even closer. “I think I should read your cards, if you don’t mind.”

  Emma stopped. She’d had her tarot read once before, when she and Alex had snuck into a New Age convention at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. The psychic had been a slender woman with long dark hair and an accent that seemed to waver between Jamaican and Southern. She’d told Emma that she saw family difficulties on the horizon—secrets and lies exposed, a death—but that in the end Emma would gain financially. She and Alex had laughed about it. At the time it’d seemed like a good joke, since Emma didn’t have a family.

  But she did now. And that family had difficulties in spades.

  Emma chewed on her lip. She wasn’t sure she believed in fortune-telling. But she was out of ideas. And maybe, just maybe, the cards could tell her something. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  Celeste said nothing, just started shuffling the cards. Emma couldn’t help noticing that, in spite of the faraway expression on her face, her hands moved with the speed and confide
nce of a seasoned cardsharp.

  Celeste laid out the first card, which pictured a woman blindfolded and tied up in front of a row of swords. The drawing was simple and colorful, the woman’s face mostly obscured by the scarf around her eyes—but Emma’s skin crawled just looking at it. The woman was trapped, surrounded by blades.

  “The Eight of Swords,” Celeste said carefully. “It indicates that you are incapacitated. That your options are limited and you cannot see a way out.”

  Emma’s hands started to tremble, and she hid them under the table. Celeste drew another card. Two dogs stared up at the man in the moon. The face in the moon looked strange and unfriendly.

  “The Moon.” Celeste turned her gaze up to meet Emma’s, her face serious and sad. “There’s madness around you, Sutton Mercer.”

  The words sent a shaft of ice through Emma’s heart. The way she’d said it made it sound like it was Emma’s fault, like she’d generated insanity. She shook her head almost imperceptibly as Celeste turned over the third card. She didn’t need to have that one explained to her. The dark, skeletal rider carrying a black banner. That one was obvious.

  “Death,” Celeste whispered.

  Emma realized she’d squeezed her fists tight against her thighs, and she concentrated on releasing them. She willed herself to open her mouth and say something cutting, to sneer at the whole process. But her entire life seemed laid out before her in cardboard. She couldn’t bring herself to move.

  The hint of a smile played across Celeste’s lips. “The cards don’t lie,” she whispered. With that, she gathered up her deck and swept away.

  Emma kept staring down at the table as if the cards were still there. Had something … supernatural just happened?

  Thayer touched her elbow. “Don’t tell me you believe in that crap.”

  Emma swallowed. “She was right, Thayer. About my mom.”

  He rolled his eyes. “She just saw what you were reading and made some guesses. She’s trying to mess with your head.”

  Emma blinked hard. Of course. The books scattered around her were titled things like Clinical Insanity and A Guide to Psychosis. Celeste had played her. She breathed out, relieved. “Now I feel even stupider.”

  “You’re not stupid,” he murmured. “You’re scared. But it’s all going to be okay.”

  If I crowded as close to my twin as possible, I could almost believe he was speaking to me. That it was my face he looked at like that.

  Emma shoved the books away from her and gritted her teeth.

  We both knew what she needed to do: find out more about Becky, one way or another, and discover what our mad mother was capable of.

  18

  MOM, INTERRUPTED

  As soon as tennis practice ended, Emma drove straight to the hospital and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. The pungent smell of air freshener stung her nostrils, along with a harsher, antiseptic odor. The hallway was eerily silent, as if the whole ward was bowed under the pressure of its own secrets and delusions. She tightened her jaw and strode to the nurses’ station, her heart beating like a drumroll in her chest.

  The young male nurse, bespectacled and prematurely balding, looked up from his computer screen. The reflection from his monitor made twin glowing squares in the lenses of his glasses. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  She clenched her fist around the strap of her messenger bag. “I’m here to visit Becky—I mean, Rebecca Mercer.”

  He gestured to a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. “Sign in.”

  The page was depressingly blank. Emma printed Sutton’s name neatly. The nurse stepped out from behind the desk and read the inscription with a raised eyebrow. “You’re the daughter, right?”

  What was the right answer? Sort of. Used to be. Just genetically. Instead she just nodded.

  “She’s been asking for you,” he said, jerking his head to indicate she should follow. Emma trailed behind him. “That’s all any of us can get out of her. ‘I want my daughter.’”

  Which one? Emma wondered.

  There was a large social room on their left, a half dozen people visible through the windows. Their eyes were trained on a TV tuned to Dancing with the Stars. A bathrobe-clad girl only a little older than Emma stood swaying in time to the music. A middle-aged woman sat by the window, her head in her hands. One of the patients in front of the TV, a man with gray, greasy hair curling down over his neck, looked into the hall and gave Emma a wink. His grin was missing several teeth. Emma hurried after the nurse, swallowing her almost palpable fear. For a moment, she wanted to run back to the elevator, back to Sutton’s car, back home. But she had to do this. She had to talk to Becky.

  I drifted behind Emma, wishing I could warn her to be careful. This was not a good place. Maybe I was more sensitive now that I was dead, or maybe I was just feeding off of Emma’s anxiety, but all around me I could feel sadness and rage and fear. It was even stronger now than the first time we’d come here—emotions buffeted me from all sides. I felt like a raw nerve.

  “Sutton?”

  A hand curled around Emma’s bicep. A scream caught in Emma’s throat. For a split second she was sure it was the gray-haired man from the social room, and a shudder of revulsion swept through her. But then her eyes refocused.

  “N-nisha?” she asked.

  Nisha’s red-and-white striped uniform was immaculate, and her thick hair had been pinned up in a French twist. A few feet away rested a cart loaded with outdated magazines and beat-up paperbacks. Her lips parted in surprise. “What’re you doing here?”

  Emma swallowed hard. She hadn’t planned on being seen by anyone she knew. How could she have forgotten that Nisha volunteered here? Ahead of her she could see the balding nurse waiting impatiently for her outside Becky’s room. She leaned toward Nisha’s ear.

  “I’m … visiting a friend. But this has to be a secret. Please don’t tell anyone you saw me here. I’ll explain later.”

  Nisha nodded. She opened her mouth as if to say something else, then seemed to change her mind. Emma turned back toward the male nurse, acutely aware of Nisha’s eyes on her as she walked away.

  Becky’s room hadn’t changed, except for the addition of a small vase full of irises and yellow roses on the side table. Emma wondered if Mr. Mercer had brought them. A fluorescent light flickered and buzzed overhead, and from the tiny attached bathroom came the erratic plink of a dripping faucet. A tray of mushy food sat untouched on the counter.

  Becky sprawled across the bed, asleep. She was wearing flannel pajama pants and an oversized Arizona Wildcats T-shirt instead of the hospital gown, and her hair had been washed and combed, her fingernails scrubbed. But her complexion was still ashen and marked with deep shadows. Emma noticed that she wasn’t tied to the bed—that had to be a good sign, right?

  I felt a low boil of emotion roiling off Becky’s mind. It was hard to sense what she was feeling—everything was all mixed up in her head. But through the confusion, one burning thought came through louder than anything else, repeated over and over like a chant. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for what I did.

  “You have thirty minutes,” said the nurse. He nodded at Emma and retreated down the hall.

  Emma pulled out Sutton’s iPhone, opened the voice recorder app, and pressed RECORD, then gently nudged the door shut with her foot. Becky’s eyes fluttered open when she heard the snick of the latch falling in place, her gaze darting around like a wild animal’s. She tried to sit up, but she seemed weak and uncoordinated. Then she saw Emma. Her eyes bulged.

  “It’s you,” she croaked. “Emma.”

  “No,” Emma said softly. “No, my name is Sutton.”

  “Oh.” Becky’s eyes went glassy as she laid her head back against the pillows.

  Emma took a step toward the bed. A chemical, medicinal odor came off her mother’s body. She bit her lip. “How long have you been in town?” she asked, keeping her voice low and controlled.

  “A while,” Becky slurred.

  �
�What have you been doing here?”

  A slow, strange smile crept across Becky’s face. “Watching you, of course.”

  I shivered, looking down into that ravaged, slack face. Watching her because she knew she was Emma? Watching her to make sure she played me? Watching her and putting threatening messages under Laurel’s windshield, choking her in the Chamberlains’ kitchen?

  Emma clutched the rail. “When was the last time we talked?” she asked. “When did we see each other last, I mean?”

  Becky’s mouth twisted downward. “When you were five years old, Emma.”

  The fluorescent light flickered again, its electrical hum deafening in the silence. Emma leaned over the bed. “My name is Sutton,” she insisted softly.

  But Becky’s head rolled from side to side on the pile of pillows, her eyes far away. “You used to love doing my scavenger hunts when you were little. Did you like the one I left you at the hotel, Emma?”

  “I’m Sutton,” Emma said again, but Becky ignored her.

  “Remember the princess dress I bought you at Goodwill? You used to dance around the motel room.” Becky raised her hands as if she were directing music only she could hear. “You’d twirl around and around and around … so pretty.”

  Emma focused on breathing slowly, carefully. If she didn’t, she might scream, or burst into tears.

  “You were a good little girl, Emmy, but a bad little girl, too. You were too much to handle.” A single tear rolled down Becky’s sunken cheek.

  Emma gritted her teeth. “I’m Sutton,” she said. “My name is Sutton. So one more time. When was the last time you saw me?”

  Becky edged up on the pillow. “At the canyon,” she said, her voice suddenly steady, the words no longer slurred. “That night at the canyon.”

  Her hand grabbed Emma’s forearm, her nails cutting into Emma’s skin. A scream tore from Emma’s throat as she tried to pull away. Becky’s fingers clenched, her face staring and blank. Bubbles of foam gathered at the corners of her lips and trickled down her chin.

  “Help!” Emma screamed. She fumbled to pry Becky’s fingers away, but it was like a bad dream—Becky’s grip just got tighter and tighter. The door flew open and nurses quickly flocked into the room. The man who’d escorted Emma earlier helped release her wrist. “She’s convulsing,” he shouted at the others as he pushed Emma back toward the doorway. Emma saw one woman deftly preparing a syringe, flicking it with her forefinger.