by M. R. Carey
Either way, she was afraid. Even in the absence of any direct threat from her alter ego, the space in which they faced each other was unsettling. Its drab uniformity and silence seemed somehow aggressive, or at least projective. As if it swallowed light and shouted silence. Liz wondered how far it extended. The answer might be forever, and she found that thought terrifying.
It’s you, you idiot, the other told her coldly. The inside of your brain. There’s nowhere else we can talk, unfortunately. I would love to meet you out in the real world and smack some sense into you, but that’s not a practical proposition.
Liz tried to speak again, with no more success than the first time.
Yeah, you’ve got nothing to say here, the other said—somehow conveying a sneer even in a voice that had no tone. Just listen. I’m trying to tell you something. Something you need to know.
Liz raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. She had come here because she wanted to put her fractured mind back together. That wasn’t going to happen if she suppressed the other piece of her, or ran away from it. She had to start by understanding it.
Well, isn’t that big of you? the other said with a sour smile. Okay, then let’s keep it simple, so you’ve got a sporting chance. My name is Elizabeth Healey. Healey, not Kendall. I married a man named Marc Kendall, the same way you did, but I didn’t take his name. Because, you know, not a doormat. No offense. I don’t go by Liz, either. Not since high school. My friends call me Beth. The other’s hands twitched—a movement of quick irritation. Called me. Called me Beth, back when they called me anything. Doesn’t matter. The point is I’m you. A different you. I was going to say better, but we’re not in a competition. Are you getting any of this? Is it going in? Shit, don’t try to talk. Life’s too short. Just nod.
Liz nodded. Nothing that she was hearing made any sense just yet, but she reminded herself that she was listening to her own subconscious. Its logic and perspective were unlikely to coincide with hers.
The other’s face twisted into a snarl. Jesus! I said to listen. Don’t try to fucking explain me. You don’t have the equipment.
Or maybe you do. Make an effort, at least. My life equals your life, okay? Give or take. I hooked up with Marc, and we raised a family. Two great kids. I don’t need to tell you what their names were, do I? Zac was like his dad, strong but never much for thinking things through. Molly took after me more. Heart on her sleeve, head up in outer space somewhere. Didn’t make any difference, though. Marc didn’t play favorites. When he was in the mood, he beat the shit out of whichever of us was within range.
Liz felt a chill of shock at the words, but they gave her a handle on what she was hearing. Her other self was articulating her own fears—the ones she had tried to suppress when she and Marc had been together, even while she tutored Zac in how to avoid antagonizing him and made sure to be right in between them whenever his mood seemed to have an edge to it.
She’s my Cassandra, Liz thought. My canary in the coal mine. The thought filled her both with sadness and with queasy disgust. Marc had been every kind of bastard except for that one. He had never once harmed their children, and she didn’t need to concoct horror movie fantasies to justify her fear of him. It was grounded in solid fact.
Facts aren’t solid, Liz Kendall. They’re just smoke blown in your face, is all. So your Marc didn’t start in on the kids yet. Lucky you. But he will, sooner or later. Trust me, I speak from experience. More experience than you can possibly imagine.
I like to think I didn’t ask for it the way you seem to. But I took it when it came, and I kept him away from the kids as far as I could. Only he got worse, in that regard, as time went on. I think maybe that’s just the way that particular sickness works. It’s not that a violent man isn’t capable of love; it’s more like his love turns inside out sometimes, so everything he loves most he just suddenly hates and wants to hurt.
I never did get the truth of how Molly died.
Liz’s mouth opened. No sound came out. Somewhere far off, a shudder of horror ran through her physical body. Here in this colorless nowhere, she felt that tremor the way you might feel the aftershock from a distant earthquake.
Stop it, she thought, and she was talking to herself. Her real self, not this funhouse mirror self. Stop doing this. Find some way to turn it off.
The other shook her head, slowly, sternly. Oh, pace yourself, Liz Kendall, we’ve got a long way to go yet.
It was a Saturday and I was at work, pulling overtime over at the zoo shop because Marc was working on one of his stupid fucking schemes and I was the only one bringing money into the house.
Anyway, I wasn’t there when it happened. Marc said Molly was riding her bike out on the street in front of the house, and then he heard this big crash and he came running. He saw Molly on the ground and a car, a big electric blue Hummer, pulling away.
He called an ambulance. They declared Molly dead at the scene. The coroner accepted Marc’s version and said it was death by misadventure. An accident, more or less, even if the hit-and-run turned it into a crime.
They put out an APB on the car, but without much hope because Marc’s whole description was just those two words: electric blue. Nothing about the driver, the condition, the number plate or any damn thing else.
I sat there and listened to this bullshit and I felt like my heart had turned to stone. There was never any car, never any accident. You know anyone in Larimer who drives a Hummer? I don’t. And if Molly died out there on the street, why was there a smear of her blood on the living room carpet? Tracked in on his shoes, Marc said, when he came inside to call 911. Sure.
He is a plausible bastard, my husband, I’ll give him that. The kind of bastard that will have you wracking your brains, after he hits you, about what awful thing you might have done to bring that on.
I was stupid with grief for a while. I couldn’t think of anything to do or say. I let my job go, because how can you work with kids at a petting zoo when the very sight of a kid makes you go into hysterics?
Marc didn’t like that I wasn’t working. That I wasn’t making meals, or keeping the house up. He wanted me to heal up around Molly’s absence as easily as he did. What he didn’t realize was that I was only holding myself together at all for Zac’s sake. Zac was close to a breakdown too. He couldn’t believe his little sister was gone, couldn’t cope with it, and Marc was as impatient with Zac’s grieving as he was with mine. What was wrong with the two of us? People get run down all the time, and life goes on.
That’s easy for you to say, I snapped back at him one night. You fucking killed her.
And that was the end of me.
Not right then. I don’t mean he jumped up and stove my head in. You’d have to be lost to the world to do that, and he wasn’t.
That was the worst of it, when I think back. He killed my kid, but he wasn’t so crazy-rabid out of his mind that he couldn’t think things through. Like when he scraped up a half-assed story that Molly was killed by a car, and made it work. Like that. Yes.
It probably didn’t feel like a decision: I’d be lying if I said I ever got to the bottom of how his mind worked. But I think I died right then, when I accused him, and it was only a question of how and when I was going to get the follow-through.
Oh, and where.
It was in the lounge, turns out. This lounge you’ve got here, or my version of it. The lounge of the new apartment, anyway. You came here just with the kids; I still had his high and mightiness in tow. Lucky me. I told you I wasn’t a doormat, and I don’t think I was. The only reason I was staying with him was because of Zac, like I said. Because I couldn’t think of a way to get him out of there and I wasn’t going to leave him alone with his father. Stupid. There were lots of ways if I’d only had the balls and the imagination.
Anyway. Sunday. Real quiet. Zac out at the movies with his friends; Marc and me alone in the place and—you would think—nothing much to hang a quarrel on. But I’m skittish around him and he sees this. He se
es it, and he dislikes it very much. What, is a man going to be judged in his own house? Is he going to walk on tiptoe to the fridge to get himself a beer so he can have something to sip on while he watches the game? Has he always got to be watching out of the corner of his eye in case something he does somehow fails to come up to scratch?
Motherfucker.
Motherfucker, I shouted in his face, you killed your own fucking kid. My kid. MY kid. You killed her and you took her tiny little body in your hands and you faked a fucking crime scene with her so I didn’t even get to say goodbye. So the police got to her before I did, you
fucking
motherfucking
waste of
I died with my own blood in my mouth, but only because I didn’t get a chance to spit it out at him. It wasn’t a good way to go, but I think I’d been waiting for it.
I think, in some ways, it was a relief to get it over with.
Beth bowed her head, eyes closed, and shook herself like a dog. She was done, that shake said. She had got it all out of her, and having nothing left to say she took her leave.
It happened quickly. Between one heartbeat and the next she receded, not like someone backing away of their own accord but like someone falling headlong into a chasm. The direction wasn’t down exactly, but she was falling just the same.
The recoil hit a moment later. Liz fell too, in the opposite direction.
Through nothing.
And more nothing.
And still more nothing.
Out of the colorless void and back into her flesh, her bed, her right mind.
Her chest was heaving, not just for breath but for the unutterable sadness of it. The loss and the longing, as though they were hers; as though that whole wasted life had been hers.
As though it had been real.
Oh God, it had felt real. Less like a hallucination than like a memento mori. Liz had imagined an entire life, both like and unlike her own, and another version of herself to live it. It was almost as though she had wished that whole hideous chain of events into existence.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Beth, for all that she knew there was no Beth, and never—never!—had been. “I’m so, so sorry.”
When the tears came, they came in a violent flood. Afterward she felt as though she had purged herself of something. She must have been incubating this nightmare for years, since before her divorce even, and one way or another it had had to come out into the world.
Then when Marc had put his hands around her throat and she needed someone to save her from the terminal mess she had made of her life, she had dreamed up Beth and thrown her right into the line of fire. Her savior and her fall guy all rolled into one.
But it must be over now, surely. Now that she knew. Now that she had looked in the mirror and seen that twisted caricature staring back. Beth had passed through her the way a fever does, and now she was gone. Recognizing the nightmare, naming it … that was how you robbed it of its power to hurt you.
Please, Liz thought. Please let her be gone. Let me never go to that place again. She couldn’t pray to God because she didn’t believe. She could only release the prayer into the void inside her and then wait, in hushed fear, for the echo.
When Fran asked her dad—midway through breakfast—if she could bring a school friend home, and when further conversation obliged her to use male pronouns for the friend in question, she knew very well that Gil would make a real performance out of it. He didn’t disappoint her.
“Wow, they grow up so fast!” he marveled, shaking his head. “I mean, in front of your very eyes. One minute you’re saying boys have cooties …”
“He’s not my boyfriend, Dad. It’s a study date.”
“… the next you’re going steady, wearing some guy’s letter …”
“That hasn’t been a thing since we got ourselves a new millennium.”
“… changing your Facebook status to ‘he totally noticed me.’”
Fran embedded her spoon in her cooling oatmeal and folded her arms in a mock-truculent display, joining in the game by seeming not to. “Okay, I’ll tell him no.”
“What,” Gil said, “I don’t even get to meet your fiancé? He can’t marry you without my permission, you know.”
“Gross! He’s just a friend. You’ll stop joking when you see him.”
“Why, is he a hunchback?”
“No! And why would that matter?”
“A Republican?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Oh God, just tell me he’s not a Ravens fan.”
Fran looked at her watch. “Oh look,” she said. “Sarcasm hour is over.”
“Yeah, but we’re still right in the middle of wise-ass month. I’m running with this.”
“Then I’m going to school.”
“Flying to the arms of your beloved. That’s really romantic, Frog.”
“Uck! I hate you.”
Fran pushed the bowl away and flounced into the hall to collect her jacket and school bag. She looked over her shoulder. Gil had followed her and was leaning against the kitchen door frame, grinning broadly.
“I look forward to meeting him,” he said. “How about if I make spaghetti?”
“That’d be cool, Dad. Thanks.”
“But the Ravens thing … that’s a deal-breaker. He needs to know.”
“It’s okay. I don’t think Zac knows what a football looks like.”
“So long as he doesn’t think Alex Lewis looks like a football player.”
Fran texted Zac from the bus, riding in to school. IT’S ON, SHERLOCK.
A few moments later he responded. A GAME IS THE FOOT.
Literary puns. She had to admit, she did find that pretty hot.
They had a really good evening, all things considered. Fran’s dad did everything he could to make Zac feel welcome, and only mentioned the Steelers once. Primed by Fran, Zac gave the right answer, which was to say that they’d had a strong start to the season, but they really needed to improve their red-zone scoring and round out their receiving corps just a little.
“Do you have any idea what any of that stuff means, son?” Gil asked.
“No, sir,” Zac admitted. “Not the slightest clue.”
“Well, you said it with real conviction. Good job.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Fran made their excuses and hauled Zac off to her room—leaving the door open as part of a pre-arranged deal. Her dad trusted her implicitly, Fran knew, but as always he was trying to protect her, in a generalized and mostly undefined way, from life. The same way, she now knew for certain, Zac was trying to protect his mom. It was funny how something like that could go in either direction and still make perfect sense.
Zac took his books out of his bag, along with a bag of sour worm candies. He opened the bag and solemnly offered Fran first pick. She went for a blue one, and raised the candy in a salute, as though it was a shot glass, before dropping it into her mouth. “The good stuff,” she said, chewing with her mouth open. “Thanks, slick. I never did have much use for tooth enamel.”
“Look,” Zac said. “If you twist two of them together, like this, you get an Ouroboros.”
“You get a what now?”
“Ouroboros. The snake who eats his own tail. It’s a symbol of eternal recurrence. Life ends in death, but then gets reborn.”
“Oh, that Ouroboros. Bad idea, Kendall.”
“How come?”
“If you eat symbols of eternal recurrence, they always repeat on you.”
Zac made the ba dum dum cha noise and its accompanying gesture. Fran bowed to an imaginary audience, accepting the accolade.
She sat on the bed, with Zac taking the desk, and they pretended to work for most of the first half hour. Mostly, though, they showed each other YouTube clips: sketches from The Whitest Kids U’Know and Monty Python, songs by Bo Burnham and the Lonely Island.
And at a certain point, Knights of the Woodland Table.
“Why this?” Zac as
ked, mystified.
“I loved it as a kid,” Fran said. “Especially this episode.”
It was the one where Lady Jinx found her magic sword and got herself knighted by Queen Yuleia. As the two of them watched it, Lady J herself came out from wherever she had been and crept silently up to sit beside Fran. Fran felt a glow of pleasure and relief. Jinx had been sulking with her since she told Zac about the Shadowman, and hadn’t shown her face. It was really good to have her back.
“I don’t think I ever watched this,” Zac confessed. “It felt like girls’ stuff. No offense.”
“None taken. Girls’ stuff is the best stuff, Zachary, and don’t you forget it. I was kind of obsessed. From kindergarten through to …” She tailed off. She had stopped after Picota. Fantasy hadn’t meant much in the face of that terrible reality.
“I was more of a Batman Beyond sort of guy,” Zac said.
“Like,” Fran pursued, “I used to talk to the characters. I played games where I was one of the knights, and our back garden was Fandamir Forest. We had a shed back then. That stood in for the Woodland Keep.”
“Which one were you?” Zac asked. “Lancea, right?”
“No.”
“The badger with the white cape?”
“Pelerin. No.”
He was looking at her with interest, waiting for her to answer. Fran hesitated. It wasn’t something she ever thought about, or talked about, maybe because the game had never really stopped. Jinx was looking at her too, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open a little to reveal her long, pink tongue.
“I was Lady Jinx,” she said.
“The sly little fox!” Zac grinned. “Is that how you see yourself?”
It was hard to read Jinx’s expression, for all its intensity.
“Jinx isn’t sly,” Fran objected. “She hates it when people say that. She never breaks a promise, or tells a lie. She wants to prove that foxes can be honorable too. That’s why her sword is called Oathkeeper.”
Zac laughed. “I stand corrected.”
You pretended to be me? Jinx whispered.
