by M. R. Carey
Liz had very mixed feelings about that. The thought of talking on the record about everything that had passed between her and Marc in the course of their mess of a marriage was daunting, but she really wanted to get that restraining order. She was tired of sleeping with one eye open.
“It’s this way,” Naylor said, leading the way up the broad stone steps to the upper level.
Everything was a lot more crowded and noisy up here, with clusters of people in front of the courtroom doors waiting to go inside. Liz made to keep on going, but Naylor put a hand on her arm to make her hold back. “Your husband is going to be there already,” he said. “I saw him and Quaid heading up a few minutes ago. And we’ve still got ten minutes to go even if Giffen is running on time. That’s fine if you’re fine with it, but there’s no reason at all why you’ve got to see him. We’ll both be cooling our heels outside until we’re called, after all.”
Liz was tempted, but she shook her head. “I’ll be okay,” she said. Thinking that if she couldn’t look Marc in the eye out here then how was she supposed to face him down in court and tell the truth about the things he’d done to her? Let him hide from her if he wanted to. She couldn’t—mustn’t—hide from him.
So they walked along to the judges’ chambers, which were at the far end of the corridor. And there he was, sitting with Jamie Langdon on one of the benches right opposite the door. He gave Liz a sulfurous stare as she came into view. She met his gaze levelly. Yeah, she thought, maybe you can do me some damage with your hands, honey, but I’m not flinching from your naked eyeballs. Not anymore. She chose a spot a little way away and leaned against the wall in full sight of him.
Jamie looked back and forth between them, frankly curious. Liz wondered whether it had dented her feelings for Marc to see him up on an assault charge. Surely at the very least you’d be thinking there but for the grace of God. Unless standing by your man meant not believing a single word anyone said against him.
“You want a cup of water?” Naylor asked.
Liz shook her head. “I’m good. Thanks.”
“Well, I’ll take a little. I never drink any when I’m in front of the judge. Don’t like to break eye contact in case it looks like I’m being evasive.”
He walked back the way they’d come.
Liz found her gaze being drawn back repeatedly to Marc. He seemed to know it too. Every time she looked, he was being physically attentive to Jamie: stroking the back of her neck, putting his hand on her shoulder or his arm around her waist. Maybe it was meant to remind Liz of what she was missing, but it did the exact opposite. He thinks he owns her, she thought, disgusted. Just like he thought he owned me. Like he thinks he still owns me, even though we’re not even married anymore.
A rage rose in her, one slow inch at a time. It wasn’t a blinding rage at first, but when it reached her eyes they filled with unbidden visions. It wasn’t just moments of violence she was remembering; it was other things too. She saw Marc belittling and demeaning and blaming her, sniping and questioning and undermining, picking away at her self-esteem with every tool he could get his hands on as though demolishing her was a long-term craft project.
The fury was like bile in her throat now, like a bitter taste, something she had to spit out before it poisoned her. Her mind reeled and retreated, seeming to travel backward without moving. The world was dropping away.
In its place, and in force, came her designated hitter. Her other self. But Liz saw it coming, and braced for the impact.
They met right behind her eyes, which didn’t blink. The other tried a straightforward takeover like before: slipped its limbs into Liz’s limbs and tugged, trying to shrug her on like a garment.
Liz stood her ground. The moment passed, and she was still herself.
The other made a second attempt, but Liz had the measure of it now and it never even got over the threshold. The trick, Liz realized, was to let her mind go blank. Her own thoughts were the carrier wave that her alter ego rode in on. It was hard at first, but it got easier each time.
The silent invasion came and went, came and went, receded and was over within the space of a minute. The designated hitter was gone as suddenly as it had arrived. Liz had beaten it back.
Amazed, incredulous, she braced herself at first for a renewed attack. Then when it didn’t come she examined the corners of her mind, alert for some sense of a residual presence. There was none. She’d won. She had actually won. She was alone on the field. She had to fight to keep from laughing aloud in triumph and relief.
“You’re on,” Naylor said at her elbow. She hadn’t heard him approach.
She followed him into Judge Giffen’s chambers, where she talked—calmly, clearly—about what she had been through at Marc’s hands. The things she had just recalled in a near-frenzy of rage and resentment she reviewed now with cold dispassion. Defeating her other self had drawn all that fury out of her like snake venom from a wound.
Had Marc verbally abused her? Yes, he had. Liz provided examples.
“Would this be in the course of an argument, Ms. Kendall?”
“Sometimes. Not always. Not often, even. I was afraid of arguing with him, because he never argued just with words.”
“You mean he was violent with you?”
“Aggressive, first. Then violent.”
“Can you explain the distinction?”
“Whenever we argued, he felt like he had to touch me to get his point across. Like he’d grab me by the arm if he was explaining something to me, or if he thought I didn’t hear him. He hated having to repeat himself. Or he’d jab me in the chest for emphasis, or just press his hands against my shoulders. Pin me up against a wall so I couldn’t walk away until he was done with me.”
And so on, moving in a natural progression to the application of fists, and feet, and ambient objects. Something about the whole process reminded Liz of the earnest overexplicitness of pornography. Zoom in on the details; don’t leave anything to the imagination. But she did what she had to do, and she did it with a self-possession she didn’t know she had in her.
She came away with an injunction, to be renewed by a fresh application every two weeks between now and the date of her trial.
“Which is October 13,” Naylor told her as they walked away. “Nice job in there, by the way. You were articulate, convincing and sympathetic, which is three lemons in a row. I can’t wait to get you in front of a jury.”
Evening. Then night. Liz had the talk with Molly, and Molly listened with fidgety impatience. It was awkward stuff, and Moll didn’t do awkward.
“So we’re not going to see Daddy for a long while. He can write to you but he won’t be able to see you.”
“He’ll see me on my birthday.”
“No, Moll,” Liz said. “Probably not even then.”
“He’ll take me to the Pizza Wheel and we’ll get ice cream with refills.”
“I can take you there.”
“And Daddy will come and be with us later.”
Liz considered a lot of possible answers. In the end, she decided that later was open-ended enough that it could mean almost anything—like, for example, Molly choosing to seek Marc out when she was an adult and making her own decisions. “Later,” she repeated. “Maybe, sweetheart. We’ll see.”
There was no point in pushing it. Molly had been in one of her hyper-hyper moods for most of the evening. Now she was freefalling toward sleep so fast you could measure the droop of her eyelids in real time. Her bedtime story was three sentences.
Zac was wide awake though, and eager to share the moment now that Molly was tucked up in bed and it was safe to talk. They split a bottle of beer. He was almost seventeen and Liz was sure, without having asked him, that he must have experimented with alcohol. She didn’t feel like she was tarnishing his innocence.
“We’re almost free, Mom,” he said, raising the bottle in a solemn toast. “We’re going to be free of him. And then we can just be us.”
He took a swig, and pa
ssed her the bottle. Liz drank too, accepting the toast. “There’s still a long way to go,” she said. “This was the first battle; it wasn’t the whole war.”
She interrogated that metaphor while the beer was still going down. “It’s not that, though,” she told Zac. “A war. It’s just … you know what it is. It’s something that’s happening now, it’s not for ever. There’s going to come a time when he wants to see you again. Be in your life again, and Molly’s life. You’ll make up your own mind then, and … it’s fine. It’s fine with me, whatever you decide. You don’t have to shut him out because he hurt me one time.”
“He hurt you lots of times,” Zac said forcefully. “And he can go to hell for all I care. I never want to see him again.”
“What about Jamie?” Liz hadn’t meant to say it, but it slipped out anyway. The woman’s stare had stayed with her. The way she had kept looking from Liz to Marc and back again, as if she was trying to reconcile Liz’s version of Marc with the man she knew.
“What about her?” Zac asked. He didn’t say it belligerently. He just seemed surprised to hear her name mentioned at all.
“You’ve gotten to know her pretty well over the last year or so. And she’s been good to you both.”
Zac stroked the side of the bottle with his thumb, making patterns in its foggy sheath of condensation. “Yeah,” he said. “She has. I guess Moll might want to see her again. I just … I can’t help thinking of her as the other half of Dad. It would be weird.”
“But if she wanted to?” Liz pressed.
Zac looked up and met her gaze, absolutely candid. Liz thought: he doesn’t have it in him to be cruel. To be his father. It was only then she realized that was what she had been scared of.
“If she wanted to, then I’d see her,” Zac said. “Obviously. I’m not going to shut her out because of him.”
“No. Of course you won’t.”
They talked about other things. School, and the part-time job he’d just applied for at Game On in Bakery Square. If he got it, they’d be able to walk to work together sometimes—and Zac could start saving for the second-hand dirt bike he wanted to buy. Liz asked after Fran Watts, and Zac said he’d been hanging out with her a lot. Currently she was teaching him chess.
“Wow!” Liz marveled. “This girl has superpowers. I could never even get you to play checkers!”
“Because checkers is lame. Chess is … strangely awesome. There are a million different ways you can play. Strategies that people have worked out. Like battle plans. Fran likes the Hedgehog Open.”
“Which is what?” Liz asked, taking another swig of Dos Equis.
“You build up a wall of pawns and keep your big pieces behind it.”
“And that’s a hedgehog because …?”
“Because it’s like you’ve got spikes. The other player attacks, they get skewered on your pawns and they don’t hurt you at all.”
Liz thought of some valid reasons why Fran Watts might take that approach to life in general, but quickly decided not to go there. She gave Zac the bottle and told him to finish it. Which he did in one appreciative swallow.
“Does this mean it’s okay for me to have a beer with dinner now?” he asked Liz.
“What do you think?”
“I think I’ll have to wait until we beat the crap out of Dad in court.”
“And then I’ll introduce you to champagne,” Liz promised.
She kissed him goodnight and got a big, open-hearted hug in return. “I’m so happy for you, Mom. Happy for all three of us.”
She went into her room. The mindfulness book was lying on the bedside table, the headphones right beside it. It was in the corner of her eye as she got ready for bed, but very much front and center in her mind.
Her rogue personality had tried to come out at the courthouse, and Liz had faced it down. She was almost certain the meditations had helped with that. They had given her a keener sense of her other self, which meant both that she could see it coming and that she wasn’t completely helpless when it arrived. The balance of power had shifted.
Maybe it was time for the two of them to finally meet for real. Or as real as this inherently surreal situation could get.
She closed the door, and after a moment’s hesitation locked it. Whatever happened next, it felt as though she would need to be alone for it. Okay, the word alone came with provisos too, but she wanted to contain the fallout. She wasn’t scared for Zac and Molly, exactly. The designated hitter only swung at things that were threatening Liz, not at things she loved. Her rage was on Liz’s behalf. What frightened her—deeply—was the thought of her kids, and especially Molly, seeing her when that other version of her was in control.
But if things worked out right that wouldn’t ever happen again. If she could bring the two halves of herself together, and hold them there, wouldn’t they just heal up again into one normal person?
It had to be worth trying.
Liz sat down on the bed and put the headphones on. She selected the same meditation she had used the last time. Know That You’re Here, and This Is Now. This time the title seemed like a warning: the moment of truth.
She pressed PLAY, and lay back. The rich, measured voice started up, telling her to hold the world in her awareness and then to let it go.
She couldn’t at first. She was too tense, and too aware of her immediate agenda. The whole point of the meditation was not to have an agenda—to be in the now without projecting into the future or tunneling into the past. But Liz had had enough practice by this point to be aware of what she was doing wrong. Little by little she let go of her intentions and made her wandering thoughts sit still.
The words flowed over her, and found their level.
The ocean arrived.
Liz waited, not perfectly passive but as close as she could get. The blankness in her mind was like the blankness of a radar screen when no vessels were in range. There was only her, lying on her own bed and yet paradoxically cut loose from everything.
Almost everything.
Her other self was out there, at the limits of her perception. It seemed to be standing still, but it was possible that the two of them were both moving in synchrony through some unresisting space. They were motionless in relation to each other.
Let’s talk, Liz said. Flag of truce. She didn’t speak the words aloud; she just let them form in her mind and held them there. There was no need to shout, even if shouting was an option. The closeness between her and her other self, more intimate than any marriage, was a given. It couldn’t be very hard for this wayward fragment of her own mind to pick up the words from where they lay at the threshold of Liz’s awareness, since that was presumably where it lived.
The other consciousness, the misplaced and metastasized part of her, drew closer. Loomed larger. It came right up beside Liz and then was all around her, leaning in from every direction at once. It was putting on a show of force. See what I could do, if I wanted to.
Please, Liz thought again. Let’s just talk.
The other pushed at her, tentatively at first and then much harder. The strangeness of that disembodied pressure made Liz afraid for her sanity all over again, but there was no denying that she felt it. She let go of her doubts. For now, all they could do was distract her, when she needed all her concentration to resist.
There was nothing for her to anchor herself to here, in the interior void of her own tranced mind, except the certainty that she couldn’t be moved. Liz dug her nonexistent heels into that, and braced. The push and her resistance met in the same plane, and canceled each other out. Waves of pressure spread out from the place where they touched.
Waves of sound, and throbbing vibration, and finally of light, or something enough like light that Liz could see.
She was suspended in a space that seemed to move outward from her in all directions as she stared into its depths. It had happened quite gradually, but her awareness of it was sudden and all at once. She had been nowhere, and now she was somewhere. Som
ewhere that had no color, no scenery, no shape: a huge void dimly lit with a sourceless, hueless glow, like the mildewed underarm of the sun.
The designated hitter floated in front of her: a blanked-out silhouette standing on nothing, human-sized and human-shaped.
We need to talk, Liz thought for the third time. We have to stop fighting each other. We’re just two halves of the same thing.
No, the other spat back. Just that single word, quick and hard and flat.
Liz knew the voice, of course. It was the one she was expecting to hear. And when the other’s outline filled in slowly, the details drawing themselves on the air, she was prepared for what she would see and was not surprised. Except, perhaps, by the implacable hostility on the other Liz’s face, the twist of raw contempt on her lips.
You don’t know me. The words were thick with challenge, with an anger that crackled like electricity. You don’t know me at all.
If there’s a way to say this that doesn’t sound like a big teetering tower of bullshit, I don’t know what it is.
The other spoke without moving her lips. And Liz was aware that what she was hearing wasn’t really sound. It was a voice identical to the voice of her own interior monologue, as though someone was thinking her thoughts for her rather than speaking to her.
But this stranger both was and wasn’t her. She wore Liz’s face and spoke with Liz’s inner voice, but her hair was longer and there was metallic green eyeshadow on the lids of her eyes. She wore a jacket with a snakeskin pattern. She looked the way Liz herself would have looked around now if she had pressed on with her rock star career and made it work.
You think? the other grinned without the slightest trace of amusement. You don’t know a thing. But I’ll tell you, since we’re here. I want you to know. Nobody deserves to be as ignorant as you are.
Liz tried to answer, but she didn’t have the trick of that soundless thought-speech yet. No words came. She felt a twinge of foreboding, almost of panic. She had thought this was a cure, a ballsy therapeutic strategy, but it seemed that all she had done was to fit the meditation CD into the pattern of her delusions.
