I was eight years old the first time I saw something I shouldn’t have. My mom was hanging out the laundry. It was a balmy summer afternoon, and the tang of brine was lingering on the air—an imagined hint of the ocean, seeing as the real thing was miles away.
I was playing in the long grass off the field at the back of the house when I noticed the ripples of heat shimmering in the air. Behind the snapping white sheets on the line, all I could make out was my mom’s silhouette, moving from basket to line and back again. Even at eight I knew a shadow shouldn’t look like that. Twisted fingers of something bad were wreathed around my mom’s form, licking towards the sky, ravenous and hungry.
When I screamed, my mom appeared in a second, terrified something had happened to me. The sight still haunted me: my mother, ablaze, hair nothing more than blackened stubble against her head, small scraps of her blue and white striped dress swirling above her into the air. An acrid smoke twisting upward from her scorched limbs.
And none of it had been real.
Doctor Reynolds became a regular fixture after that. He suspected the brightness of the sun had affected my vision and diagnosed me as suffering from migraine with aura. That meant my sight might go haywire if I got a headache. No one seemed to listen to me when I told them that my sight hadn’t just gone weird, though—that my mom had actually been on fire.
They hadn’t listened afterwards, either, when I told them about the explosions I saw in the sky from time to time, or when the neighbor’s cat turned up without its skin. Which was often. Eventually I learned to keep my mouth shut. It was easier to lock myself away in my room and pretend that they were right than face the possibility that I might actually be losing my mind. Sometimes, I liked to think my episodes were totally normal, a hereditary defect passed down by my father. It was a convenient lie I told myself, given that my father had died in a car crash before I was born and wasn’t around to deny it.
It had been that way for the last ten years, and now, at eighteen, I was still no closer to understanding what was wrong with me. Still no less scared.
The echo of that emotion resounded through me as Tess pulled into my driveway. This was different. Imagining my mother on fire was one thing, but having people, real people, coming after me for no apparent reason, left me on edge and feeling significantly out of my depth.
“Here we are. Home, safe and sound,” Tess said in a singsong voice.
Home was a white Colonial with sunshine-yellow shutters framing the windows, traditional, and perhaps a little more run-down than the neighbors would have liked. Completely different from their white stucco Spanish villas with heated pools out back. I turned from staring numbly out of the window and gave Tess a doubtful look.
“I don’t know about safe. That Dodge was parked on the corner this morning.”
It did feel better being back in Monterey Hills, though, and Figueroa was far, far away. All the same, I knew it was a false sense of security, like running to hide in your bed when your house is being robbed.
I opened the front door, for once not feeling my stomach knot as I waited for my mother to call out. I should have been used to coming home to an empty house by now, but it was still hard. Things might have been different, of course; I could have been taken into foster care. Social services hadn’t exactly been pleased with the idea of me living alone after all, but I’d made it perfectly clear I would make my foster parents’ lives hell if I had to. There was no way I was going to leave the house I’d grown up in, and my eighteenth birthday had been on the horizon anyway, so they’d agreed to let me live alone so long as I kept up with school.
Once inside the house, I triple-checked that the door was locked and paused at the window, peering anxiously up and down the street.
“Come on, there’s no one there. You want coffee?” Tess asked.
“Yeah, sure, why not? I’m only on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I can’t imagine why caffeine wouldn’t help this situation.”
We walked through to the kitchen. I sank down onto a stool at the breakfast bar where me and my mom had completed the New York Times crossword every Sunday as a ritual.
The rain had finally stopped, and the late afternoon sunlight slanted through the kitchen blinds, stacking long, thin strips of cool yellow over the linoleum floor and up the opposite wall. It barcoded Tess as she shifted around the open kitchen, preparing the coffee.
“You’ve got messages,” she said, gesturing to the answering machine at my elbow. It was true. The red light blipped malevolently at me. Getting voicemail was usually exciting; there was always a glimmer of hope that it might be from my mom. Not today, though. There was only one person who would be leaving me messages today. I braced myself and hit the play button.
“Farley, this is Detective Miller. Just calling to check in, make sure everything’s okay. Oh, also…do you have any thoughts as to why the charred carcass of your Toyota Tacoma might have been abandoned downtown this afternoon? If you could call me when you get this message, that would be great.”
The red light flashed, indicating that there were more messages to follow, but I hit the delete button anyway. They would all be from Miller, and I hadn’t come up with anything good to tell him yet. Spontaneous combustion probably wasn’t going to cut it. In truth, what I really wanted to say was that the truck had been stolen and deny being there at all. But there had been far too many people out on the street, not to mention that sour-looking old bat who had gotten a good look at me. She had probably already given a statement confirming that I was the root cause of the afternoon’s breakdown in civilization, and yes, I had last been spotted fleeing the scene like a criminal. So what was I supposed to say to Miller? Even explaining it to Tess, who was normally so good at accepting all the weird, hallucination-related crazy that often invaded my life, was proving difficult.
“Start over,” she demanded, pouring hot coffee into mugs for the both of us. “I still don’t get it. The guy who saved you was hot?”
Typical. She would get stuck on that point. “Yeah, but—”
“Did you get his number?”
“Tess! This is serious.” I accepted the mug she offered out to me. “I have to think of something to tell Miller.”
“I only have one suggestion. You’re probably not going to like it, though.”
Tess’ suggestions were rarely likeable. They usually involved trawling the local malls for cute guys to stare at, or purchasing fake IDs from scary weed dealers. “Just hit me.” Even a bad suggestion was a suggestion, after all, and at this stage I was willing to consider anything.
“Tell the truth.”
Anything but that. I placed the coffee mug down slowly and gave my friend a dry stare. “No. Way.”
Tess rolled her eyes. “Look. You were driving down Figueroa, for crying out loud. It was packed with people. And those big trucks? Y’know, the big fire-engine-red ones? Well, I hate to break this to you but they were, indeed, fire engines. Half of LA’s emergency services probably saw you down there. It’s better that you tell him the truth than make up something even more unbelievable.”
Tess did have a point, but there was just no way Detective Miller was going to buy that I was attacked by three guys in an SUV, that I was saved by another stranger (who had also been following me, as far as I could tell), and that he had some sort of freakish power that turned his hands into burning white light. He was more likely to believe disgruntled aliens incinerated the truck. I collapsed face first on the counter. “Can’t you think of something else?”
“Nope.”
I groaned, but the outlandish truth-telling concept was prevented from taking any real shape when Tess’ phone rang. She shot me a furtive look. “Sorry. I have to take this.” She slipped out of the back door to stand in the yard with her coffee mug steaming in the brisk air.
My own coffee was making my stomach churn. I got up and poured myself a glass of water. I paced the kitchen for a moment and then stalked to the hallway, pausing to study th
e jigsaw puzzle of photo frames that hung on the wall by the front door. There were at least thirty, ranging in size from the tiny heart-shaped frames that used to hang off the Christmas tree when I was a kid, to the largest—a square, silver frame, easily the length of my arms stretched wide. It was a black and white picture of my mom cradling me in her arms, just a few days old. My mom wore a dazed expression on her face, that mixture of astonishment and confusion that you saw on most new mothers.
I stood with the glass sweating in my hand, studying the pictures from our annual summer trips up the coast, to Disneyland, New York, Knott’s Berry Farm, elementary and high school, realizing that in every single picture my mom bore some degree of that same expression, mixed with a quiet pride.
At that moment my fragile grasp on my emotions began to waver. Even on a good day, the panic constantly roiling away just below the surface was difficult to contain. On bad days, it broke through in bursts that threatened to smash my resolve into dust. Today was a bad day. My mother was gone. Not just disappeared on an unplanned vacation kind of gone, or Off to the store, be back in five kind of gone. She had just left work one day in the middle of the afternoon and had never come back. No note. No phone call. Not even an email.
The worry was exhausting. And after the events of today, looking at those photos was enough to tip the scales between coping and crashing. All my fears came rushing down in an unexpected wave of alarm that made my head spin.
Where was my mom?
Was she safe?
Was she hurt?
Had someone taken her?
But the most terrifying of all, the one question I was usually too scared to even form in my mind:
Was she dead?
The sound of the back door snicking closed brought the hallway back into focus, a little too sharp and too bright. I clenched my jaw and dug deep into my reserves, putting my I’m okay face back on like a tired, worn coat.
Back in the kitchen, Tess had returned to her chair and was beaming from ear to ear. She took the glass out of my hand and drained it in one.
“Whew! Thanks. How did you know I needed that?”
“Just considerate, I guess. What’s up with your face? It’s doing something weird.”
Tess shot me a look that would curdle milk and poked her tongue out. “I’m just happy, that’s all.”
“You’re happy?” That meant trouble. That meant a guy. It always did. I gave her The Look. “Who is he?”
“His name’s Oliver. We’ve been on four dates. He’s perfect.” A dreamy look settled on her face, and she stared off into the distance as though imagining the rest of her life arranged around the perfection that was this new Oliver. I elbowed her.
“Four dates and you haven’t mentioned him once?”
“I just wanted to make sure he was really interested. He’s from Whiteacre.”
“Oh.” That explained a lot. Guys from Whiteacre were always ‘slumming it’ with girls from St. Jude’s on the school breaks. They thought they were so much better than everyone else just because their annual fees alone were enough to purchase an above average home in Monterey Hills. Usually they got bored of their holiday conquests just before school picked up again. You didn’t see them for dust once the primped and preened girls at their own school returned from seasoning in Europe or wherever else Daddy’s yacht was anchored that year.
“Are you sure—”
The sentence remained unfinished. The phone on the kitchen counter began to trill. Tess picked up the handset and thrust it at me before I could object. “Tell the truth.”
“Okay, fine,” I hissed. The phone reached its eighth ring before I answered it, holding it gingerly to the side of my head like it might explode. “Hello?”
“Farley.” Any hope that the person on the other end of the line might be a telemarketer disappeared at the sound of that voice—sandpaper on rough stone. “You haven’t returned my calls.”
“I’m sorry, Detective Miller, I just got home.”
“That’s not what officers Mayhew and Angelis tell me. They tell me you’ve been home for a while now, and you’ve got Miss Kennedy with you.”
“You’ve got cops watching the house?” Why the hell hadn’t I seen them? If they were out there, then who knew who else was too. I screwed my face up at the phone. “Yeah, okay. I just got home. I’ve been sitting here trying to calm down. I think I might be in shock.”
It was worth a shot. Detective Miller was a spare man with even sparer feelings, but maybe there was some part of him, some deep, buried part, that might be capable of sympathy.
“Don’t pull that crap, kid.”
Or maybe not.
He cleared his throat, his twenty-a-day smoking habit making itself known. “Start from the beginning. Don’t spare the details.”
My account of the afternoon took seven whole minutes to explain, and Miller sat so silent at the other end of the line I thought he might have hung up on me. The low rasp of his breathing confirmed his presence, however, and I pushed on, wondering if his uncharacteristic lack of questions meant that he was beyond words.
“And so I ran off, and that’s when I found Tess. She drove me home.”
Silence.
I paused, waiting for Miller to start shouting. When he didn’t say anything, I asked, “You want me to come down to the station and give a statement?” It definitely seemed like something he would say. In fact, on any other day Miller would have said that approximately seven and a half minutes ago. After another long pause, the detective broke the silence.
“No. You should stay home. Don’t leave your house.”
“What?”
“They’ll be coming for you. Just stay home.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, but the line had gone dead. I was left with the staccato dial tone in my ear and the creeping sensation that something very strange had just happened.
“Well? What did he say?” Tess was perched on the very edge of her stool, kicking at the footrest and tapping her fingernails.
“He said I should stay home. He said, ‘They’ll be coming for you.’”
Tess lost a little of the color from her face. “The men in the big coats with the knives?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would he tell you to stay home if he thinks they might come here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wow. If he does mean the guys with the big knives, then he’s definitely throwing you to the wolves,” she said. “Maybe you should have told him you weren’t there.”
My eyebrow kinked to form a perfect black arch. “What happened to telling the truth?!”