And? “That’s not all of it, is it though?”
She pauses. Then, “What?”
“Come on. You don’t expect me to believe she just killed someone for using the bathroom.”
I hear, see, the blood rush to her cheeks. “He tried to—he was waiting for me.”
There it is. “In the women’s bathroom. At the rest stop.”
Silence expands like a bubble around her.
“He raped you?” I ask.
A small shake of Stella’s head, and I know. I wasn’t there to witness it, but I know.
Mara’s been through—hell. It’s the only way to describe it, how this all started.
The boy, if he can be called that, barely human as he was, started out as her boyfriend before he became her tormentor. A night out with him and her friends had ended up with her trapped in an abandoned insane asylum, after he tried to force her, nearly raped her himself—that’s how her ability first manifested. That’s how the woman who raised him, a doctor bought and paid for by my father, forced it out of her. Mara thought she’d killed him and her friends that night, but he made it clear to her—and only her—that he was still alive, tormenting her with his existence, and no one believed her but me. I was there for that bit. Every second he lived tortured her. He took her freedom and crushed it, and then Kells did the same. Mara was violated, in every way, by people she was supposed to trust—her boyfriend. Her doctor. And she was committed for it—not even her family believed her, the people she trusted more than anyone in the world.
Her parents don’t know. They thought they were helping, genuinely, and her mother would fall on her sword if she knew the truth. Mara knows that. She knows it’s not their fault. And yet.
Mara also knows she didn’t deserve what’d been done to her. But in Horizons, I saw this tiny cell of guilt—the thought that she accidentally killed her best friend—turn into shame when she believed she killed her friend to save herself. It grew every day, cancerous, threatening to eat her alive.
Maybe it finally did. I may not know everything about Mara—it seems I know less than I thought, but I know this—she would never let anyone be violated the way she’d been again. Stella might not get it, but I do.
“Mara came in. She killed him, and you got out.”
“Yes, but—”
“She saved you.”
“You weren’t there!” Her words tear at the trees, sear the air. “You didn’t see her face when she walked back to the truck. You didn’t see her expression when she decided to kill these two dumb college kids for practically nothing—”
What?
Tears begin to fall. “You don’t know about the subway. The train tracks. Jamie and Mara haven’t told you.”
“Look, Stella—”
“It wouldn’t matter to you that Jamie forced these two assholes onto the subway tracks to punish them for urinating on a homeless woman and calling him a—” She stops, and the word she doesn’t say hangs there, sick and poisonous.
“They were racist, and horrible,” Stella says, sniffs. “But they didn’t deserve to die.”
“Did they?”
“Did they what?”
“Die?”
Another head shake. “Jamie just wanted to scare them. But Mara”—she breaks into another laugh, chilled—“she was going to kill them. She kept them there, I don’t know how—their noses began to bleed and—”
The droplet of blood from Sam’s nose that ran over his lip, fell into the puddle beneath his swaying body.
A slight smear of blood on Beth’s first knuckle . . . as if she’d wiped her nose just before jumping.
The weight of everything I realise I don’t know about Mara, didn’t want to know, is suddenly too much.
“They didn’t die,” Stella says, letting out the anger she has left. “But they would have. Jamie stopped her from killing them. Otherwise—” She stops, breathing hard, wipes her eye with her wrist. “You weren’t there.”
And there it is. That bruise that won’t heal, the fracture still splintered. And she’s pressing on it. Bending it. Waiting for me to break.
I’m so tired, suddenly. A wave of exhaustion crests, pulls me down with it. I want nothing more than to leave Stella there in the park and sleep. Forever.
“You’re right, Stella,” I say casually. “I wasn’t there. And you weren’t there when she sacrificed her own life for her brother’s.” Both brothers, in fact, but I leave that bit out. “So what are you trying to say, exactly? That she’s a monster? Bringing death and destruction in her wake, wherever she goes?” The minute I say it is the minute I realise that that’s what my father had been saying about her. How he tried to persuade me to kill her.
Stella lets out a shivery breath. Her eyes flutter closed. “What I’m saying is that she’s not who you think she is. She’s changed.”
My head feels numb. I can’t do this much longer. “And you haven’t?”
“Of course, I changed too.”
I nod. “You left Mara and Jamie—”
“And Daniel,” she adds.
“But now here you are, fetched up in Brooklyn after abandoning them—”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“But you’re lecturing me about Mara, who’s given more of herself for the people she loves than you will ever know.”
The transformation is instant. Her face hardens, and she takes a step back, crunching dead leaves. “How much, Noah?”
“What?”
“How much of herself has Mara given up?”
When I don’t answer, Stella says, “You don’t know what she’s given up either.” She’s the one to turn around first, to start walking away. But she tosses one look, one sentence, at me as she leaves.
“But you will.”
23
TENDER MERCIES
WHEN SOMEONE IS HIDING A secret in a house, something changes in the air. Unspoken words, half-finished smiles, eggshell steps—they distort reality, they muffle truth.
The person with the secret is changed by it—she smiles, but the corners of her mouth don’t quite reach the height they used to. The corners of her eyes don’t crinkle as deeply. The look in her eyes when she tells you she loves you—there’s something behind it. You don’t know what it is—what has she done?
Mara is many things, but a cliché isn’t one of them. If she does have a secret—and she does, I know that now, after that night with Stella, see it in everything she does—her secret isn’t a person. It’s a thing. A thing I can’t know, because it would change us.
What Mara doesn’t know is, it already has.
You can’t keep a secret from the person you love and expect it not to change him, too. She doesn’t trust me with something, which makes me distrust her, and that makes our hands miss each other when we pass something over the table. It makes my mouth just miss hers when I lean to kiss her lips and end up with cheek instead.
When you love someone, you’re saying you trust them. You’re handing them your heart and trusting them to protect it. To keep it safe.
Keeping a secret is like throwing that heart into the air and playing catch with it by yourself. But what you’re really playing with is someone else’s love, someone else’s happiness. I’ve always wondered how people do it. I’m the farthest thing from unfailingly honest—in fact, I’m an extraordinary liar—but it’s strange how different things seem when it’s your own heart that’s being tossed casually into the air. It’s a dangerous game.
When I was a child, I read everything I found, anywhere I found it. The only thing that felt beautiful about my life was the way books let me escape it. I felt surrounded by nothing, and the boredom was thick enough to choke on. When you can choose to do anything, how do you choose? Why?
All my life I’ve heard the phrase Do what makes you happy tossed around—not at me, God knows. But generally, as a principle. But when nothing makes you happy, what do you do then?
This is the essential truth about me: Mara
makes me happy. The problem of Mara makes me happy. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s true. I shouldn’t think it, but I do. She’s this endlessly complex, chaotic person, but there’s a method to her madness, and I want to know it.
Can you ever really know another person? I thought I could. I thought I knew her, but now . . .
People who think they know me imagine me in control. When they see Mara and me together, when they think of us together, they see me as the lion tamer, and Mara the lioness. One crack of my whip, or a whisper, or a magic word, I’ll tame her like all the rest.
I don’t want to, is the thing.
But now, knowing what I don’t know, I want to cage her. But I want to be in that cage with her, no whip, no magic, and lock the door behind us, lock the world out. And then:
I want her to split me open, to dig her fingers in and pry open my ribs, lick my heart and my blood and my bones. Pick open my bones and suck out the marrow. I want to be devoured by her. And she wants to devour me just as badly. It’s in every look, every movement, every smile.
But her world is different now, and I don’t know how, because I missed it. My father took that from me, from us, and I didn’t feel that missingness most of the time, but I feel it now. Mara works hard not to show it. She and Jamie or Daniel or all three will exchange a look, and I’ll feel a kick of surprise in my chest. They were part of something that I hadn’t been, forged something together that I was left out of. Excluded from. When I ask Mara about it, she skirts around it, says it doesn’t matter.
But she’s a liar too. It does.
24
HAVING DISCOVERED FIRE
CURRENT MOOD: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE meets Amy Winehouse.
Mara was sleeping when I got home from meeting with Stella. I could’ve woken her, confronted her that night, and we could’ve fought about the secrets she’s kept and the lies she’s told.
But then, I would have to confess too.
Careful not to wake her, I climbed into bed beside her, but couldn’t close my eyes. When she woke up the next morning, I acted like nothing was different. Though everything was.
How could I have it out with Mara when I’ve been the one avoiding the truth—whatever that is—this whole time? And whatever is or isn’t happening now, with the suicides, I’m certain, positive, that Mara isn’t to blame.
So I’ve defaulted to doing what I do best: nothing. Jamie’s been gaming, and Goose has been going out. Mara’s started drawing again. She’s been writing and drawing. I have no music in me.
Daniel’s rather aggravated by the state of my affairs when he shows up at the loft days later. “We need to talk,” he says. He’s caught Jamie and me mid–Duck Hunt, shooting at the projector with an orange gun lifted out of the ’80s and dropped into our flat. It makes an annoying-yet-satisfying plastic click.
“What about?” I ask as a pixelated bird falls to the pixelated grass. It’s incredibly satisfying—I’ve become rather addicted.
“Your inheritance.”
That turns even Jamie’s head. Mara’s in the shower, and Goose has decided to brave the Gowanus Whole Foods to procure provisions for a grand dinner party that exactly no one has asked him to throw.
“I want to explore the archives,” Daniel says.
“I’m having the building demolished and turned into a community garden,” I say without turning away from the game. “Next topic.”
“Then you’re either an idiot or selfish.”
“That’s a rather strong and unnuanced position,” I say evenly, and aim the gun at the screen.
“Because it’s that important. Can you put down the gun, please?”
“If I must,” I say, laying it on my lap.
“Look, everything David Shaw did and had other people do is in there. All the research and tests and results—”
“Precisely,” I say. “And you managed to break in and start going through it. How long until someone else does? Maybe someone else already has. We’re obviously not the only Carriers in this city.”
But Daniel’s not keen on letting this go. “So what? Maybe there’s something in there that would help create a cure—”
“Isn’t that what Kells was trying to do?” I look at Jamie. “A little help, here?”
“Hard pass,” Jamie says, turning back to the game.
Daniel leans his palms on the kitchen counter. “If there’s a chance it’ll help us find out how to keep whatever’s happening to the others from happening to you guys, we can’t afford to ignore it.” I notice the shadows under his eyes, the strain around his mouth.
“You’re worried about Mara,” I say.
“Aren’t you?” His voice is almost accusatory. Almost.
More than you know, friend. “Of course,” I say. “But I don’t think the shit my father did to her—to all of you and Jesus fuck knows whomever else—is going to help.”
“So what’s your plan?” Daniel turns up his hands. “Do you have one?”
“Plans are so formal,” I say dismissively. “And they tend to go to hell where your sister’s involved.”
“You’re just saying that because you don’t have one.”
“I’ve heard from Stella,” I say, surprising myself. And Jamie, who leans closer to the TV to hide the fact that we now officially have his attention.
“My plan is that we should meet up with her and Leo and find out more about the others who lived with them. Work backward from there.”
Daniel pauses for a moment. “Okay. While you’re doing that, why don’t you let me work from the files that might be on them?”
It’s not that Daniel doesn’t have a point. My father tortured, or paid others to torture, people to find out why I am the way I am—I’m sure he learned quite a lot about those of us who carry the gene that makes us “gifted.” But if we use what he learned from that torture, that justifies it. Everything he did—to Mara, to Daniel, even—I won’t. I won’t do it. There has to be another way.
He blows out a sigh. “I don’t get it, Noah. I don’t get why you’d want to get rid of stuff that could help us. Help my sister.”
“There’s no cure,” I say, and Daniel freezes. “I know you want there to be one, but there isn’t.”
“We don’t know that for sure. We hardly know anything. You’re wasting a huge opportunity, and it’s stupid, and I know you’re not stupid, so what is it? What are you afraid we’ll find in there?”
Nerve struck. Never let it show. “Daniel,” I say reasonably. “You’re a vegetarian, yes?”
He shrugs. “Yeah.”
I look down at his feet. “Do you wear leather shoes?”
“No.”
“Is it because you don’t like the taste of meat? You don’t think leather shoes are comfortable?”
He rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. “One, we could end world hunger with the feed used to keep breeding animals for food. And two, the idea of contributing to an animal’s suffering just so I can have a cheeseburger makes me sick.”
“I feel the same way about my father’s research. I don’t want to use the product of so much suffering just so we can maybe, possibly, use the product of that suffering to achieve something else.”
“Your metaphor doesn’t work,” Daniel says, crossing his arms. “But let’s run with it anyway. I’d use medicine tested on animals if Mara was sick and I thought there was even a ten percent chance it would heal her.” He leans back. “What would you do?”
“I’d heal her myself.”
“And what if you were normal, Noah?”
There. There it is, in his voice.
“What if you were just a normal person and Mara was sick, dying, and you couldn’t heal her yourself but thought there might something out there, some way that you could?”
I get it, then. It’s not just curiosity. Daniel is normal, but instead of the blessing that that is, he feels cursed. He feels helpless. Helpless and scared.
He looks to Jamie for backup, which, after Stella’s revela
tions, I’m more certain than ever he won’t get. Jamie was there, after all. And he’s here, now, anyway.
Footsteps on the stairs, bare and uniquely Mara’s. The three of us look up; her hair’s wet and she’s wearing an old faded T-shirt, once orange, now the colour of peach sherbet. Her toes, nails painted black, always, are visible through the glass. Her eyes meet mine, and everything else fades to dullness.
“I’ll think about it,” I say to Daniel, hoping that’ll end the conversation. And that he and Jamie will miraculously leave.
“Think about what?” Mara cocks her head, a wolf catching a scent.
“I want Noah to grant me access to the archives,” Daniel says.
“Wait, he won’t?” Mara turns on me, unfairly tempting as she stands there in mismatched, damp clothes, her hair still wet. “Why not?”
Hope dies. “There’s more paper, more files, more everything than we could sort through in a year,” I say, resigning myself to the fact that this conversation is still happening. “So how will it even help us?”
“Because there’s a system, and I figured it out,” Daniel says, his voice tinted with gotcha, not pride. “Jamie and Mara and Stella—they looked where I told them to look.”
Jamie finally speaks up. “True.”
“So you don’t have to worry about people breaking in and using stuff against us.”
Daniel’s hooked onto this idea and he’s never letting this go. “All right. Listen. I haven’t even had time to look through all of the paperwork my father’s solicitors sent over.” I realise that said paperwork is likely here, in the flat—in the same room as the trunks from the manor house. I could ask for their help going through them . . . but I’m not sure I want that, either. Did I even lock up my mother’s things? Christ.
“I can help look,” Daniel offers.
No going back now, alas. “Actually, I’d rather you didn’t.” That gets everyone’s attention. “There’s . . . family stuff.” Mara’s expression changes, and I need to choose my words more carefully than I have been. “Things of my mother’s I had sent over. I want to be the one who sees it all first, all right?” I’m not above playing the dead mother card.