The Possible

by Tara Altebrando

  The final episodes hadn’t aired yet but Liana’s work was done. Together with the prison administration in the days since the parole board meeting, she had gotten the guard to tell all—like how Crystal had threatened him after luring him into a compromising position with her. How she’d believed that the podcast was going to make her rich, but only if people still believed she had powers.

  “Well, I almost named the podcast Listen Like Thieves,” Liana said. “I thought it was cool sounding. But the powers that be didn’t love it. Anyway, there’s a line in the song, ‘You are all you need.’” She repeated, “You are all you need.”

  I raised my eyebrows, like what are you talking about?

  “You don’t need her.” Liana shook her head. “Crystal. A mother, even. Not if you play your cards right in life and have good friends and do good work and maybe marry a good guy—or girl—if you want to. You’re a highly capable young woman is all I’m saying. And I know you know what I mean by that. And what I don’t mean.” She elbowed me and smiled. “You are all you need.”

  “You think your daughters don’t need you?” I shook my head, thinking about how in spite of herself my mother had come through for me in the end.

  “My wish for them is that they will—either sooner or later—learn to not need me, the way you’ve learned that, with your mothers, whether you realize it or not.”

  “Well, first of all you’re going to be fine,” I said.

  Liana had three more weeks of radiation left and was tired but holding up okay. She nodded and said, “Of course I am.”

  “Mom! Mom!” the older girl screamed, and when Liana looked over, she bounced a beanbag off her sneaker heel and then caught it.

  “Awesome!” Liana said.

  “Second of all, it’s not just about what you need. Like to get by. It’s also about what you want. What we all want.”

  “Which is . . . what? Are we talking about control again?”

  “No.”

  Aiden was high-fiving Liana’s daughter.

  I said, “I’m talking about love,” just as my phone buzzed.

  •••

  •••

  Liana said, “Kaylee Novell, have you gone soft on me? Lost your edge?”

  “Maybe,” I said, smiling.

  “You’re in love with him?” She nodded toward Aiden.

  I nodded but then shook my head. “I’m not talking about that, though. I’m saying that if you teach your daughters how to recognize love and receive it, that’s the key.”

  Liana’s jaw tightened, like maybe she was fighting tears. Then she said, “You ever babysit?”

  “Not my thing,” I said.

  She nodded toward Aiden again. “What about him? Does he?”

  •••

  “There’s been something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said to Will Hannity when I saw him at the food table.

  “What’s that?”

  “In that biography about Crystal, you’re quoted as referring to Crystal as jailbait. Which is kind of funny now, considering who ended up in jail. It’s just. Isn’t that a weird way to describe a girl?”

  “I said that?” He was putting a pickle on his burger. “I’m not sure I ever read that book.”

  “I can refresh your memory, if you want—” I got my phone out. “I have the full quote right here.”

  “Like I said.” Will took a bite of his burger. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Well, if it was so long ago, how can you be sure she didn’t play you? How can you be sure it wasn’t a hoax? Because now she’s admitted that it wasn’t real.”

  “If it wasn’t real, how did I snap that photo?”

  “Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it?”

  He chewed, like that burger was leather.

  “I have a theory,” I said, putting down my soda. “I think Crystal, who famously wanted reporters to ‘get the story and get out,’ had an idea for how to do that, and I think she picked you. And maybe, I don’t know, like with her and this guard at the prison; maybe there was some kind of impropriety there? You guys flirted, you said so yourself. Maybe she had you in a tricky position? Young newspaper guy? Wants the story. Maybe needs it to get his career going. Maybe she wanted a photo to prove it and was holding something over your head. Or maybe you didn’t have to do anything because she could lie about something you did? And so you go along with it and you don’t realize the photo is going to get picked up and the story is going to go national and then you’re so dug in after so long that you’re practically buried.”

  “You have an active imagination,” he said, finally swallowing, his Adam’s apple shifting and then resettling.

  “You said being around me made you nervous,” I said, stepping closer to him. “Are you afraid you’ll do something you’re not supposed to?”

  “My father was a marine,” he said, holding his ground. “And he used to talk about interrogation techniques, stuff he’d learned. And he said they were told that if they were ever captured, they should just deny, deny, deny. Deny anything and everything. Unless confronted with actual one hundred percent proof. Even when my mother had train tickets and hotel charges that proved that he was having an affair, he kept on denying it.”

  “He sounds like a real charmer,” I said.

  Liana appeared and said, “What are you two talking about so intently?”

  “I was asking Will about his famous photo,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” Liana picked up a hot dog. “Turns out you once got drunk and told some girl you were sleeping with that the whole thing was staged.”

  “What girl?” he said. “Where is she?”

  Liana said, “Next time, on The Possible.”

  •••

  “It’s good to be back,” Aiden said, when he and Chiara and David and I all walked into the granny pod to listen to the last episode when it aired a few weeks later. “But it does still sort of smell like old lady.”

  “The popcorn will help,” I said.

  But it didn’t.

  It didn’t matter.

  We listened like thieves.

  •••

  LIANA: I received a few calls along the way this season that I have to share before we warp things up. One was from a woman who says Will Hannity admitted the photograph of Crystal and the phone had been faked. Will’s an okay guy, I think? He made a youthful mistake, maybe? I don’t know. Anyway, we all sort of suspected that something was off with that photo, didn’t we? That something funny was going on there? That people who wanted to see proof of TK would see it; that the rest of us would see that she’d thrown the phone and they’d staged it. We’re done with that. We’re moving on.

  More interestingly, I got a call from a woman who says she is the person Crystal had that huge friendship rift with right before the alleged telekinesis started. She wouldn’t tell me her name and she called me from a burner phone. Her voice has been modified for the podcast.

  Now, we already know that Crystal was faking things—that it was not some force conjured by her rage—but the call, I think, helps with motive, which has always been a sort of lingering question for me. Why would Crystal fake such an outrageous thing?

  WOMAN: Crystal was the one who dropped me, in terms of the friendship.

  LIANA: Why did she do that?

  WOMAN: Well, she was messed up and she did some weird thing that week before—there were so many that I can’t even be sure which one it was—but something like jumping off the roof of a house at a party, could’ve been that. Anyway, I told her she needed help. And she said no one cared enough about her to help her and I said I did, but only if she cared enough about herself to go talk to a counselor or teacher or someone. And she said she would but then she obviously never did and she just stopped talking to me and I let her.

  LIANA: And that’s when the stuff started to happen?”

  WOMAN: Yes, and that’s why I think it’s just that Crystal wanted
someone to pay attention to her. She wanted someone to realize that she was messed up and needed help. But she didn’t want to have to ask for it. I told her the only way she was ever going to get out of there was to change things, and she was like “Why would I want to get out of here?” like she didn’t understand we were living in this awful place. Anyway, a long time later she reached out to me about something, and when we were talking it through, she indicated that yes, she’d faked it and she’d had help. I always figured it was the photographer or the reporter because she refused to get specific, but she said something about how she had him over a barrel.

  •••

  What if everything you thought you knew . . . ?

  •••

  My mother.

  •••

  You still think you’re better than me after all this . . .

  •••

  “Kay,” Aiden said. “What’s wrong?”

  •••

  I ran into the house and screamed, “Mom?!”

  Then again, louder: “Mom!”

  “I’m here,” she called out from the top of the stairs. “What’s wrong?”

  “The podcast,” I said. “You.”

  She heaved a sigh of relief and said, “I thought something awful had happened.”

  •••

  What if a kid named Scott Mendelson had thrown that Frisbee? What if he’d hidden when it hit the water aerobics lady on the nose? What if his mother had seen the whole thing but had been too embarrassed to come forward and only punished him privately?

  •••

  What if the contractor had dropped the box with the light fixture in it that day but had been so fed up with the job dragging on that he didn’t check the glass’s integrity and put the damn bulb in anyway? Maybe screwed it in way too tight?

  •••

  What if repeated rides on the Kali River Rapids would show that the cars always turn the same rotation on that first big drop?

  •••

  What if the stroke victim simply . . . died?

  •••

  What if Crystal had done one thing right twelve years ago and made a phone call to her childhood best friend, and had asked for the help that had been offered so long ago?

  What if she had said, “You’re the best friend I ever had, so I’m asking if you’ll adopt my baby girl so she doesn’t turn out to be a piece of shit like me”?

  What if her friend had said yes, provided they never speak of it again?

  •••

  What if there was a possible explanation for everything?

  •••

  “What would you do,” I asked Aiden after the others had left, “if you actually had powers?”

  “You know I don’t believe—”

  “Just if,” I said. “If.”

  “I’d go to work for the FBI.”

  “What?” I laughed.

  “Yeah, I’d be some kind of anti-terror mastermind and weapon. I’d, like, defuse bombs and whatnot.”

  “Whatnot?”

  “I am all about the whatnot.” He giggled. “What about you?”

  “I honestly have no idea,” I said. “I’ve spent so many years wondering and fantasizing. So now that it’s all over and done with, no more what-ifs for me. Except maybe one.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “What if I told you I loved you?”

  •••

  And so we end our season, having confirmed that Crystal never had telekinetic powers and has not been . . . what’s the word . . . rehabilitated by life in prison. She remains, to this day, a conniving, self-centered person who appears to have no moral compass.

  That’s what we’ve learned about Crystal.

  We’ve learned from Will Hannity that clinging to old lies gets you nowhere. The truth will out, as they say.

  We’ve learned from Kaylee that the way you come into the world and who with doesn’t define you, not if you don’t let it.

  We’ve learned that we very much want to believe in something bigger, something else, something more—so much so that the smartest and most skeptical among us has occasional doubts about absolutes and questions the power of the mind, the brain, and whether its limitations have yet to truly be understood.

  We’ve learned, maybe for the first time or maybe, for some of us, again, that we all really, really wish we could control the physical world—whether it’s cancer cells or other drivers on the road—in ways that we have to accept we simply can’t.

  And we’re reminded that, as humans, we like big questions, even when we don’t have the answers.

  So thank you all for exploring the possible with me.

  And may the Force be with you.

  “WELL, I’M GLAD THAT’S OVER with,” my mother said. She and my father had listened to the last episode together, and the week before we’d all had a Big Talk about how my adoption had really come together and about how we weren’t going to tell Liana until after the whole podcast had aired, if at all.

  I had to hand it to Crystal. If she was going to make one really smart and loving decision in her whole life, she picked the right one. Maybe there were others I’d never know about; I somehow doubted it but people surprised you sometimes, the way I’d eventually surprised myself.

  “Thank you,” I’d said to my mom, when we’d talked about it. “For saying yes.”

  “Oh my gosh, Kaylee, of course. Of course. I mean, honestly maybe at first I just knew you needed someone—anyone,” she’d said. “But then pretty much right away, I knew you needed me.” She’d looked at my dad. “Us.”

  Now she was popping her head into my room to say good night.

  She was about to close the door but I said, “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Dad said something to you, a while ago. I overheard it. He said, ‘You’ve always wondered. Now you’ll know.’ What were you talking about?”

  “It was silly,” she said.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  She came back into the room and sat on the side edge of my bed. “One time, when you were little, you were eating yogurt with a fork and I wanted you to use a spoon and you wouldn’t and you were making this huge mess. So I’d left the room to calm down because I was incredibly irritated. And when I came back, one of the fork tines was bent.”

  “You thought I’d done it?”

  “Well, you must have done it, like with your hands, right, or pressing it against the table or something? But not your mind. But I thought that. We’d only just adopted you, so Crystal still loomed large in my mind. And I was tired and stressed out and adjusting to the whole thing, so yeah, a part of me fixated on that for a while. Now I realize how crazy it was.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” I said, and smiled.

  “I love you, Kay,” she said, and she sounded like her own self again. No more weird, lurking twins.

  “I love you, too,” I said, and she closed the door and I closed my eyes and I was back in that pre-renovated kitchen with a pea-green table.

  The taste of apples on my sticky lips.

  The choco-sweet smell of brownies in my nose.

  The fork in my hand—warm, soft, easy.

  I could do anything I wanted and there was nothing she could do about it.

  I opened my eyes again in the dark.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  These fine people all possess special gifts:

  My amazing editor, Sarah Shumway at Bloomsbury. Thanks for pushing me to write the books I always thought were too crazy to write.

  My incredible agent, David Dunton at Harvey Klinger Agency. I’m so happy to have you along on this crazy ride.

  Everyone else at Bloomsbury, but especially: Cindy Loh, Cat Onder, Cristina Gilbert, Courtney Griffin, Claire Stetzer, Erica Barmash, Emily Ritter, Sally Morgridge, and Melissa Kavonic.

  The design team of Donna Mark, Amanda Bartlett, and Kimi Weart. Thanks for continuing to indulge and inspire me.

  And a big shout-out, of
course, to Nick, Ellie, and Violet, for whom I would literally move mountains if I could.

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney

  First published in Great Britain in June 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  First published in the United States of America in June 2017 by Bloomsbury Children’s Books

  1385 Broadway, New York, New York 10018

  www.bloomsbury.com

  This electronic edition published in 2017 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 2017 by Tara Altebrando

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN: 978-1-4088-8576-5 (PB)

  ISBN: 978-1-4088-8577-2 (eBook)

  Book design by Kimi Weart

  All rights reserved

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