The whole thing was over so fast. Her favorite song was longer than that. Just a few minutes, start to finish. Finished. It was over now. It would always be over.
It didn’t quite feel that way, though. Carly couldn’t stop fiddling with it in her mind. How could everything fly around in less time than it took your favorite song to play and then land in a different order?
What Carly remembered most, once the guy was inside the house with her, was an overriding, all-caps, red-font chant: NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
No. No in some animal way that wasn’t a word. It wasn’t even a thought, really, just an overwhelming refusal in every scrap of matter and energy that made up Carly Liddell.
No was her skin, and her eyes gone hot in her head. No was an itch in her teeth to sink into any warm thing that came close enough to bite. No to him. No to the terror rising up in her throat to choke her. No to the thought slashing through her mind like lightning—He’s too strong. I can’t stop him.
Any recollection of what she’d actually done in those few not-song moments was far away. Like on another planet far away. (And how long had it really taken, anyway—how many real minutes and seconds? It felt like infinity, as if in some way it was still happening, as if maybe it would always be happening. But no.)
In a memory that should have been fresh, almost every image and sound of the struggle in the foyer was vague and skippy. She’d kicked him or something and he’d fallen down hard. The wet thud of his head hitting the tile, that was kind of clear. But she wasn’t very big and she didn’t know how to fight, so it didn’t make much sense. She really did not know exactly how she’d gotten away.
The first clear impression, after he was down, was an electric giddiness that blazed up her every nerve. The doorknob in her hand, cool and solid, reeled her in from overload and let her catch the scream that was rushing up into her mouth. She wrapped it up tightly, that scream. She strangled it in her throat like her fist squeezing down on the brass. The only sound was the gasps of air sawing over her dry tongue.
The guy was silent. Carly strained to hear any movement behind her. He was—(NO!) The scream in her throat wriggled to be free at her instinct to turn around, to check to see if he was getting up.
She didn’t look. She cranked open the door. She still didn’t scream.
She ran, her boots sinking into the spongy grass of the lawn—three strides, four, five, six—and she shoved down the crazy laugh that tried to bubble up into the floaty space that not-screaming had stretched into her throat. No was fading. Carly was coming back online. For her to laugh about this was just nuts, and that would make her cry. She kind of thought she should be crying.
Where her head had been full of nothing but No! now the swerve and dance of random thoughts, the weaving hum of thinking, came back to her. She was aware of being aware.
A stop-and-start afternoon rain raised a warm haze off the street. She breathed up the smell of oil, metallic dirt, and the ghost of spent tires. Her elbows hurt. She wanted things. To be far away. A milkshake. Her mother. To not have left school yet.
Ada flared brightly into Carly’s mind. She wanted to talk to her best friend, to tell her what had happened. They were usually together after school, but Ada had to get new glasses today. That’s why Carly had come straight home.
Ada played the ukulele. Carly drew. Carly had stacks of sketchbooks filled with cartoon characters and portraits of her friends and family. Ada wanted Carly to teach her to draw, so Carly had bargained for lessons on the ukulele. She’d never gotten past messing with the tuner the day before. Just yesterday? Really?
When Carly plucked a string, the tuner caught the vibrations out of the air. It measured what she’d done and delivered a little electronic verdict, a pixel needle wagging through the red toward the green zone, the sweet spot. Turn the peg, get closer to the green. Turn too far, and overshoot it back into red. It was like a game. More fun than the little guitar.
Carly did look back just once as she ran, when she was flying across her side yard into Mrs. Carmichael’s. He’d never catch her, even if he was back on his feet now.
But she ran faster anyway. Concrete to grass. Grass back to concrete. The pavement disappeared under her long, sprinting legs and it rose up into two short stairs and a stoop. She pounded on the green door of the neighbor’s house. The silk-flowered wreath jumped off its hook and rolled away.
That’s when things had gotten frustrating.
Trying to explain what had happened—to Mrs. Carmichael, and later to the police and to her mother—was like trying to tell a dream as a story right after you’d woken up. She kept stammering through backtracks to fill in the details of what came before to make it all make sense.
It was important to them, in a different way than it was important to her, that she set the links in the chain in the right order. The story had to go smoothly from then until now, for everyone’s sake. Carly needed to be able to see it correctly in her mind to sort it out. They only needed to know how to catch him.
In Mrs. Carmichael’s house, Carly finally fought the tingle of tears, but more from not being able to get the story out than from shock, although the shock was certainly there. Her body was shaking with spent adrenaline. Her teeth chattered as she tried to talk. The aftertaste was metal and ashes.
Something turned and tightened in Carly as she watched Mrs. Carmichael react to her story. Carly didn’t know Mrs. Carmichael well. She was the nice neighbor, the woman who carved half a dozen amazing jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween and lit her porch with them for three nights running. She was the lady with the little white dog and always a smile and a wave. Now she was the first person to pull Carly into a fierce hug after what had happened. But there was a message in the embrace.
Mrs. Carmichael’s hug felt charged with more understanding than Carly felt for her own idea of the last few minutes. No! But yes. Something had happened to Mrs. Carmichael, something that made her know what Carly had just been through. But Mrs. Carmichael knew more, knew worse. In the tremor of her arms, Carly could tell.
Instantly they were part of the same set, even though Carly was only almost fifteen and Mrs. Carmichael was way older than even her mother. Carly wanted to know, but was sure that she would never ask. She could feel the woman’s fingers trembling, holding Carly’s face in her hands the way Carly imagined a grandmother would. The wary sadness in the woman’s eyes. The way she pulled her mouth into a lipless line, hemming in her own story behind a tight sadness, Carly knew that this was as close as they would ever get to talking about it. It felt both right and wrong.
She thought of the ukulele. The peg turned.
Carly told her story, over and over. First, to the EMTs from the fire truck that got there while Carly and Mrs. Carmichael were still calling it in. She’d told Mrs. Carmichael that she wasn’t hurt, but the word attacked had been part of the 911 report, and that’s all it had taken. Carly told the story to the police as they arrived next, two sets of two, minutes apart. Then to another man in regular clothes. They said he was a lieutenant, who seemed like the boss. Everyone said the detectives were on the way. That sounded like a big deal, so she tried to get the story better, get it ready.
She couldn’t talk at all, at first, when her mother came rushing through Mrs. Carmichael’s front door.
There is no proper term, no single word, for the tidal wave of emotion on the far side of a near miss. It’s made of a fear that’s completely after-the-fact. There’s nothing to fix. Everything is fine except the trembling and the terror spiked with fury at the carelessness of the universe. It’s resentment shot through with bright pangs of superstitious gratitude toward whatever Power intervened to make it a horribly lucky day. It’s love concentrated to a strength that’s nearly poisonous.
The worst of it, though, is the gift of preview—that cold ghost of grief that whispers that it is still out there for you, simply waiting for some other day.
Carly and her mother shared all of it in an unbroken look as they scrambled past the small crowd of policemen and Mrs. Carmichael’s barking dog to get to each other. Her mother grabbed her up, trying to hold her, stroke her, and look into her eyes all at once. Carly couldn’t breathe, pinned by the desperation on her mother’s face to be sure, all the way through, that she was okay. They told each other in sobs and nods. She was fine. They would all be fine.
But the clutching quickly lost its practical power. Muscles relented. Breath slowed. Mrs. Carmichael’s grandfather clock clucked its second hand at them, and everyone else ran out of places to look to give them the privacy of their reunion.
Carly turned back to the police.
The story was her job right now. Their expectant looks gently reminded her of it, so she went back to work. They seemed happy enough with what she told them, fired up even. They always smiled at the part where she knocked him down, however it had happened.
But her recollections became more frustrating to her as what happened became a script instead of an actual memory. The whole narrative took on the order of recitation, and she lost the reality of where she’d stood, what he’d said, why she had bolted inside the house instead of out into the street for help, what he’d done, what she’d done, how she’d made it back to the door and beyond. The details of it receded as the tale of it bloomed. She was the foremost authority on the subject, and she wasn’t sure she believed any of it.
They took a break to move the whole circus back to the Liddell house. From the porch Mrs. Carmichael watched them leave. Carly looked back and tried to let her know with the right-temperature smile and steady eyes that she understood what had passed between them.
The parade of cops and their pair of guarded civilians crossed the two front yards, properly on the sidewalks this time, not in the grass. (That’s the square where he called to me and I stopped. I should have kept walking. Or started running. Infinity.) Carly was steered across the stoop with her mother’s shoulder set against her own, her mother’s arm around Carly’s waist. The door was unlocked, so the police went in first. Each of them stepped over the lump of her backpack, but Carly picked it up and put it on the bench as she would have done if it had been a regular day.
And just like that, everything looked normal. As if it—whatever it really was—had never happened.
Carly excused herself to the bathroom and stared into the mirror. The only difference she could make out was in the urge she felt to pull a face. She bared her teeth at her reflection. But that was the wrong kind of different. She flushed the toilet and ran the water in the sink to buy more time.
The beep of the sensor on the opening front door zapped her heart back into her throat. But that was stupid. It wasn’t like the guy would come back. And it wasn’t like she was all alone this time.
Still, the best she could manage was to lean her ear to the door, listening, her heart kicking in her chest. Someone rushed past the bathroom. Then she heard her mother’s muffled cry: “John!”
Carly flung open the door.
They’d been a family of two since Carly was a toddler. Her father had left them, divorced them, and evaporated before she’d ever known him. Her mother, though, was a hard, unstoppable, high-speed engine of shake-it-off. Carly sometimes wondered if part of the reason her father was so thoroughly gone was that her mother was so thoroughly fine with it.
But it only took two to live a good life. Carly didn’t remember being anything but happy enough with just the two of them. It was still her default setting: me and Mom.
But Carly was better than halfway to genuinely loving her stepfather. He was fun. He hadn’t made her mother different as Carly had feared he would. He’d blended into the background of Donna’s bustle, as if he were happy enough to be a nice nothing. Everything was almost the same except where they lived—their regular life plus one, with barely a ripple. He made them three, but Carly had not yet thought about him as part of this insane day.
John looked up from the crook of her mother’s neck and gently maneuvered out of her arms. He took a deep breath, came to Carly, and wrapped her up.
“Holy shit, Carlzee.”
She liked the nickname and liked the softball curses he sent her way sometimes, even if her mother didn’t. He was there with them. It was nice. She smiled into his hug.
He pulled her away by the shoulders and fixed her in a hard stare. “You okay?”
She nodded, but had to hold her bottom lip with her teeth to keep her from crumpling into ugly cry face.
John shifted his gaze beyond her, to the cops milling around the living room. He pulled in a deep breath and sucked his teeth, sizing them up like bad weather.
Carly felt forgotten in his grip, and John’s scowl made her look back over her shoulder, too, to double-check that the same nice men she’d been talking to were what he was laser beaming.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
But when his eyes met hers again, the question cranked in her head to a loud, looping Whatswrong whatswrong-ohno-whatswrong?
They both tracked for what they could read in each other’s thoughts. She saw . . . what exactly? And he saw that she did . . . something (NO!). The corners of John’s mouth turned down and he shook his head, just a little. Did he want her not to worry? Was he saying sorry? Sorry for what? The questions hummed in the air between them.
“Mr. Cooper?” The taller detective walked up, hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you. Glad my guys found you. Thanks for your help.”
“Sure,” John said.
“I just got a message that the video clips are up on the website. Do you have somewhere where we can all look at this together? We’ll see if maybe you guys recognize him.”
The security cameras. Carly had forgotten about them. “Oh, wow! You can see him? You saw him—”
Her mother talked over her, grabbing at John’s arm. “Did you get a good look at him? Are the pictures clear enough? Can they use it to . . .”
John chewed at the corner of his lip and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh.”
They filed into the study, Carly, her mother, John, and the five cops left in the house, to see what the local police had posted to their Alerts web page.
Carly discovered, while watching the video, that there were actually two of her in the room, not counting her image on the screen. There was the Carly who could feel her body. She was standing just to the right of her stepfather, who was sitting at his desk manning the mouse and the keyboard.
That particular Carly’s hands were cold and her eyes burned from lack of blinking. That Carly trembled. That Carly felt a little sick watching the video and making a new memory of what had happened. And of what had almost happened.
The second Carly, Carly 2.0, was born where she stood, and she was made of both no and yes. She’d been on her way all afternoon. Carly had felt her stirring with the doorknob in her grip, on her feet, breathing, booming, growing brand-new into her skin. This Carly knew that breath and movement and chance were the parts of the physical fight she was watching on the screen. But she saw an entire machine inside her, a system of Other Carlys that would try things and do things and figure things out at a speed and ferocity that regular Carly didn’t direct.
She was breathless in the hold of discovery. It burned. Tingled. It sang. She was watching with her own eyes something that would never, could never, have been in her memory. That terrible minute was hers again, but from the one viewpoint that she alone on planet Earth was barred from seeing. Outside herself.
A whole silent, hidden life was inside her body waiting, vigilant, to be called on. There were worlds within worlds. The layers between them broke away like sugar glass when they needed to. When they had to. She couldn’t look away from her other self doing the unimaginable.
On the screen, she watched Other Carly give Carly the aim, the strength, and the break from thinking. Other Carly made her try and took away the idea that it wouldn’t work.
If all that, then what else? Then there was more everywhere. Something was working away underneath it all. Everyone, without knowing it, was getting ready. Constantly. Making things. Having ideas they wouldn’t have time to ask permission for. Everyone was inventing fast plans to plug into problems, ways to cope that stayed hidden until, suddenly, they didn’t anymore. Everyone thought they weren’t ready. But that wasn’t all the way true.
The peg turned.
Then Carly felt what was wrong in the room.
The cheerful line of cops behind them were laughing it up, commenting on the looping video. One man slapped his hands together with glee when on-screen Carly’s boot connected with the guy’s head again, and he crashed into a nerveless heap on the tiles.
But the heat of trouble came not from the strangers behind them, but from the left. Her stepfather absorbed most of it, stiff and grim at the computer’s controls. Carly’s mother glowed like the sun, mouth agape.
In a moment of discovery and wonder, Carly had sped right past the obvious thing. Since when are there cameras in the house?
• • •
Carly, in the last year or so, was only beginning to appreciate that her mother might be beautiful. In that final hour, after the entire group watched and rewatched the video together, the hard set to her mother’s jaw, her flush, and the careful mask of composure managed to light her face and posture like a work of art on display. The image of her, incandescent and restrained, convinced Carly to look at her mother in the way the other people, all men at the moment, must see her. Donna Liddell was lovely. And she was furious, but you’d have to be well versed in her usual expression to notice.
As the police finished getting what they needed for all that came next, Carly watched their eyes—helpless, not predatory—drawn over and again to her mother’s face, her glittering eyes and tight, full-lipped smile. And Carly saw they didn’t get it, but her stepfather did.
She noted the chain of appraisal: John, when he wasn’t casting measuring glances at Donna’s pointed avoidance of him, was watching the other men watch his wife. He didn’t look jealous, though, which surprised Carly. He seemed worried, but more in the way of a juggler. As if one too many bowling pins were flying around, and maybe someone just tossed in a carving knife. He looked as if he were doing hard math.
John saw the last cop to the door. He closed it behind the lieutenant, whom he watched through the side window all the way down the driveway. Carly stood next to her mother at the back of the foyer. The room was oriented around the two of them as they faced John nearly to the angle of how it appeared in the video. Carly looked over her shoulder for the camera.
At the turn of the wall was a motion sensor tucked into the corner, pointing toward the front door and the hall table with the painting over it, where they all stopped on the way in and out of the house for their keys and sunglasses. He’d put in a system that turned on the lights when you walked through the house. That’s what he’d explained to them. The camera had to be somewhere near it, or even in it, maybe. Her eyes roamed the smooth span of wall, crown molding, and baseboard. None of it hinted at anywhere else it might be. Carly moved to her mother’s right side, more out of its path.
John turned around from the door like someone who didn’t want to.
He didn’t try to hide that he was drawing in a big preparatory breath. “Okay. There’s a lot to talk about, but let’s try to keep things in perspective.”
“Really?” said Donna. “That’s where you want to start? You sure about that?”
“Donna, listen—”
“Wow. No. Stop. Do not make the word listen or my name sound like you think I’m being unreasonable.”
“Come on, I’m sorry. It’s not like I put a camera in the bedroom or near the bathroom or anything. Nobody’s naked in the foyer.”
“Obviously I have no idea where there might be a camera in my house. So where they’re not is hardly the point.”
John’s hand came up, defensive, placating. “I know. I know.”
“I don’t think you do.”
John let his hands fall back to his sides, his shoulders loose under the weight of defeat. Or at least to look defeated, Carly thought, and cocked her head in concentration.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “Where do you want me to start?”
Surprise, like a little pinch, startled Carly. She looked at her mother and saw that Donna hadn’t heard him all the way. Her mother didn’t realize it wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was bait. John wanted her to tell him what would fix this. But no. Filling in the blanks would be less like explaining himself and a lot more like scratching where her mother said it itched.
Carly’s focus went wide and she looked into the thousand-yard distance, listening to the two of them. The match struck and went into the tinder. The argument burst into flames while Carly sorted out how different her mother’s unfiltered, uncalculated upset sounded from her stepfather’s precision in answering her.
• • •
The call came in the middle of their fight. The police had caught the young man who had pushed his way into the house. Carly wasn’t supposed to hear that the boy had a knife in his pocket when they’d found him, but her mother, putting the phone on speaker, the angry conversation with John on pause, had hit the button too late.
Carly couldn’t decide how to feel. The fact of his knife bumped up against the fact of her win. More danger made her mother sag with breathy talk of “so incredibly fortunate.” Carly didn’t want luck to make it seem like she cheated. It didn’t change anything. The freak never got to his pocket.
Carly could tell by how fast and scattershot her mother was yelling at John that it was more convenient for her to be furious than to think about what other night they could all be having right now. They’d all be doing something different—in a police station or in a hospital or someplace worse—if it had gone another way. Carly understood because she didn’t want to think about any of that stuff either.
But she found it hard to be mad at John, even though he was wrong and being somehow really weird about it. He should have told them. That was true. He should have asked.
If there hadn’t been a camera in the foyer, though, or if he’d asked beforehand and her mother had said no, the video wouldn’t exist. Carly would never have known what really happened. That guy pushing her, grabbing her, trying to—Come on, NO, don’t think about that. Her taking him down and getting away. Everything was always going to be different after what had happened. Carly thought of Mrs. Carmichael.
But without seeing it, without really knowing, it might not have been a good change in her.
While John and her mother were arguing, Carly had replayed the video over and over on her phone from the police website. Without John and his bad decision, she wouldn’t have had that jolt, the radioactive spider bite that made her feel so electric tonight. Everything was sharp. Everything glowed. Everything sounded so clear.
It wasn’t right, what John had done and how he was acting. Was a lie of omission as bad as a regular lie? She didn’t know. And she also didn’t know for sure that there weren’t other kinds of lies in the story as well. Hearing and listening had become slightly different tools in the last few hours.
John said there was a man who’d stalked him when he lived in San Diego. But he said “San Diego” as if the words were unfamiliar in his mouth. He said that the man was a nut, a pitiful loser, but that he didn’t want to ruin the poor guy’s life if it was something John could handle on his own. So he’d put in the cameras and monitored them closely.
John said the man wasn’t a danger to Carly or her mother, but Carly heard a wrong note. The peg turned. He didn’t believe it when he said it. Of that, she was sure.
Carly’s phone lit up with two notifications, and another as she read the screen. Her friends were starting to check in: Is that YOU?!?!
The video had jumped into the social media stream.