The Evolution of Mara Dyer (2 page)

I whispered so I wouldn’t scream. “What are you saying?”

“I’m sorry, but you’ve been involuntarily committed.”

2

W
E HOPE THAT YOU’LL ALLOW A DOCTOR TO DO
a physical examination,” she said kindly. “And that you’ll consent to our treatment plan.”

“What if I don’t?” I asked.

“Well, your parents still have time to file the appropriate papers with the court while you’re here—but it would be really wonderful for you, and for them, if you cooperated with us. We’re here to help you.”

I couldn’t quite remember ever feeling so lost.

“Mara,” Dr. West said, drawing my eyes to hers, “do you understand what this means?”

It means that Jude is alive and no one believes it but me.

It means that there
is
something wrong with me, but it isn’t what they think.

It means that I’m alone.

But then my racing thoughts trailed an image in their wake. A memory.

The beige walls of the psychiatric unit evaporated and became glass. I saw myself in the passenger seat of a car—Noah’s car—and saw my cheeks stained with tears. Noah was next to me, his hair messy and perfect and his eyes defiant as they held mine.

“There is something seriously wrong with me, and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it,”
I said to him then.

“Let me try,”
he said back.

That was before he knew just how deeply screwed up I was, but even when the last piece of my armor cracked on marble courthouse steps, revealing the ugliness beneath it, Noah wasn’t the one who left.

I was.

Because I killed four people—five, if my dad’s client never woke up—with nothing more than a thought. And the number could have been higher—
would
have been higher, if Noah hadn’t saved my father’s life. I never meant to hurt the people I loved, but Rachel was still dead and my father was still shot. Less than forty-eight hours ago, I thought the best way to keep them safe was to keep myself away.

But things were different, now. Jude made them different.

No one knew the truth about me. No one but Noah. Which meant he was the only one who could possibly fix this. I had to talk to him.

“Mara?”

I forced myself to focus on Dr. West.

“Will you let us help you?”

Help me?
I wanted to ask.
By giving me more drugs when I’m not sick, not with anything worse than PTSD? I’m not psychotic,
I wanted to say.

I’m not.

But I didn’t appear to have much of a choice, so I forced myself to say yes. “But I want to talk to my mother first,” I added.

“I’ll give her a call after your physical—okay?”

It wasn’t. Not at all. But I nodded and Dr. West grinned, deepening the folds in her face, looking for all the world like a warm, kindly grandmother. Maybe she was.

When she left, it was all I could do not to fall apart; but I didn’t have time. She was immediately replaced by a penlight-wielding doctor who asked me questions about my appetite and other wildly mundane details, which I answered calmly with a careful tongue. And then he left, and I was offered some food, and one of the staff—a counselor? A nurse?—showed me the unit. It was quieter than I imagined a psych ward would be, and with fewer obvious
psychos. A couple of kids were quietly reading. One watched TV. Another talked with a friend. They looked up at me when I passed by, but otherwise, I went unacknowledged.

When I was eventually led back to the bedroom, I was shocked to find my mother in it.

Anyone else wouldn’t have noticed what a mess she was. Her clothes were unwrinkled. Her skin was still flawless. Not a single hair was out of place. But hopelessness trampled her posture and fear dulled her eyes. She was holding it together, but just barely.

She was holding it together for me.

I wanted to hug her and shake her at the same time. But I just stood there, cemented to the floor.

She rushed up to hug me. I let her, but my arms were chained to my sides and I couldn’t hug her back.

She pulled back and smoothed the hair from my face. Studied my eyes. “I am so sorry, Mara.”

“Really.” My voice was flat.

I couldn’t have hurt her more if I had smacked her. “How could you say that?” she asked.

“Because I woke up in a psychiatric unit today.” The words were bitter in my mouth.

She backed up and sat on the bed, which had been freshly made since I was last in it. She shook her head, and her lacquer-black hair swung with the movement. “When you left the hospital yesterday, I thought you were tired and going home. So when the police called?” Her voice cracked, and she held her
hand up to her throat. “Your father was shot, and then to pick up the phone and hear the police say, ‘Mrs. Dyer, we’re calling about your daughter?’” A tear fell from one of her eyes and she quickly wiped it away. “I thought you’d been in a car accident. I thought you were
dead
.”

My mother wrapped her arms around her waist and hunched forward. “I was so terrified I dropped the phone. Daniel picked it up. He explained what was happening—that you were at the police station, hysterical. He stayed with your father and I rushed there to get you but you were
wild
, Mara,” she said, and looked at me. “Wild. I never thought . . .” Her voice trailed off and she seemed to be staring right through me. “You were screaming that Jude is alive.”

I did something brave, then. Or stupid. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

I decided to trust her. I looked my mother in the eye and said, without any trace of doubt in my expression or voice, “He
is
.”

“How would that be possible, Mara?” My mother’s voice was toneless.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, because I didn’t have a clue. “But I saw him.” I sat down next to her on the bed, but not close.

My mom pushed her hair away from her face. “Could it have been a hallucination?” She avoided my eyes. “Like the other times? Like the earrings?”

I had asked myself that same question. I’d seen things before—my grandmother’s earrings at the bottom of my bathtub, even though they were still in my ears. Classroom walls collapsing around me, maggots squirming in my food.

And I had seen Claire. I saw her in mirrors. I heard her voice.

“You two kids have fun.”

I saw Jude in mirrors. I heard his voice, too.

“You need to take your mind off this place.”

But now I knew that I had heard them say those same words twice. Not just in mirrors at home. In the asylum.

I didn’t imagine those words. I
remembered
them. From the night of the collapse.

But at the precinct it was different. Jude spoke to an officer. I strained to remember what he said.

“Can you tell me where I can report a missing person? I think I’m lost.”

I never heard him say those words before. They were new. And he said them before he touched me.

He
touched
me. I
felt
him.

That was not a hallucination. He was real. He was alive, and he was here.

3

M
Y MOTHER WAS STILL WAITING FOR AN
answer to her question, so I gave her one. I shook my head fiercely. “No.” Jude was alive. He wasn’t a hallucination. I was sure.

She sat there immobile for just a beat too long. Then, finally, she smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Daniel’s here to see you,” she said and stood. She bent to kiss the crown of my head just as the door opened, revealing my older brother. The two of them shared a glance, but as Daniel entered the room he expertly masked his concern.

His thick black hair was uncharacteristically messy and dark circles ringed his dark eyes. He smiled at me—it was too easy, too
quick—and leaned down to wrap me in a hug. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he said as he squeezed. I couldn’t quite hug him back either.

Then he let go and added too lightly, “And I can’t believe you took my keys. Where’s my house key, by the way?”

My forehead creased. “What?”

“My house key. It’s missing from my key ring. Which you took before driving my car to the police station.”

“Oh.” I had no memory of taking it, and no memory of what I did with it. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Not like you were getting into any trouble or anything,” he said, squinting at me.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving you the side-eye.”

“Well, it looks like you’re having a stroke,” I said, unable to help my smile. Daniel flashed one of his own—a real one, this time.

“I almost had a heart attack when Mom almost had a heart attack,” he said, his voice quiet. Serious. “I’m—I’m happy you’re okay.”

I looked around the room. “Okay is a relative term, I think.”

“Touché.”

“I’m surprised they’re letting you see me,” I said. “The way the psychiatrist was acting, I was starting to think I was on lockdown or something.”

Daniel shrugged his shoulders and shifted his weight, obviously uncomfortable.

Which made me cautious. “What?”

He sucked in his lips.

“Out with it, Daniel.”

“I’m supposed to try to convince you to stay.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “For how long?”

He didn’t say.

“How long?”

“Indefinitely.”

My face grew hot. “Mom didn’t have the guts to tell me herself?”

“That’s not it,” he said, sitting down in the chair beside the bed. “She thinks you don’t trust her.”

“
She’s
the one who doesn’t trust
me
. She hasn’t since . . .”
Since the collapse,
I almost said. I didn’t finish my sentence, but judging by Daniel’s expression, I didn’t need to. “She doesn’t believe anything I say,” I finished. I hadn’t meant to sound like such a child, but I couldn’t help it. I half-expected Daniel to call me out but he just gave me the same look he always gave me. He was my brother. My best friend. I hadn’t changed to him.

And that made me want to tell him everything. About the asylum, Rachel, Mabel, my teacher. All of it.

If I told him calmly—not panicked, in a police station, but rationally, after a full night’s sleep—if I explained everything, maybe he would understand.

I needed to be understood.

So I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, like I was preparing to launch myself off a cliff. In a way, I guess, I was. “Jude is here.”

Daniel swallowed and then asked carefully, “In the room?”

I shot him a glare. “No, you ass. In Florida. In Miami.”

His expression didn’t change.

“He was in the police station, Daniel. I saw him. He was
there
.”

My brother just sat there, mirroring our mother’s neutral expression from just a few minutes before. Then he reached for his backpack and pulled something out of it. “It’s the security footage from the precinct,” he explained before I had a chance to ask. “Dr. West thought it would be good for Mom to show you.”

“So why are
you
showing me?”

“Because clearly you
don’t
trust Mom, but she knows you trust me.”

I gave him a narrow look. “What’s on it?”

He stood and popped the disc into the DVD player beneath the ceiling-mounted television, then switched it on. “Tell me when you see him, okay?”

I nodded, and then both of our heads turned toward the screen. Daniel fast-forwarded it and tiny people scurried in and out of the police station. The counter sped forward and I watched myself walk into the frame.

“Stop,” I said to Daniel. He pressed a button and the footage
slowed to a normal speed. There was no audio, but I watched myself speak to the officer at the front desk—I must have been asking where I could find Detective Gadsen.

And then I watched Jude appear in the frame. My heart began to race as my eyes lingered on the image of him, on his baseball cap, on his long sleeves. Something on his wrist caught the light. A watch.

There was a shiver in my mind. I pointed at Jude’s figure on the screen. “There,” I said. My hand trembled annoyingly. “That’s him.”

We watched as Jude spoke to the officer. As he brushed right by me. Touched me. I started to feel sick.

Daniel paused the image before Jude left the frame. He said nothing for a long while.

“What,” I said quietly.

“That could be anyone, Mara.”

My throat tightened. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Mara, it’s a guy in a Patriots cap.”

I studied the screen again. The camera angle only captured the top of Jude’s head. Which was covered by the Patriots cap he always wore. Which was pulled down low, shading his eyes.

You couldn’t see his face at all.

“But I heard his
voice
,” I said. Pleaded, really. My brother opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. “No, listen.” I took a deep breath. Tried to calm down, to be less shrill. “I heard him—he asked that officer something and the officer
answered him back. It was his voice. And
I
saw his face.” I stared at the screen, squinting as I continued to speak. “You can’t see it so well on the tape, maybe, but it’s him. It’s
him
.”

Daniel looked at me for a few silent seconds before he finally spoke. When he did, his voice was distressingly soft. “Mara, it can’t be him.”

My mind rushed through the facts, the ones I knew, the ones I was sure of. “Why not? They couldn’t get to his body to bury it, right?” The building was too unstable, I remembered, and it was too dangerous. “They couldn’t get to him,” I said again.

Daniel pointed at the screen, at Jude’s hands. My eyes followed his finger. “See his hands?”

I nodded.

“Jude wouldn’t have any. His hands were all they found.”

4

H
IS WORDS DRAINED THE BLOOD FROM MY FACE
.

“They didn’t find complete remains for any of the—for Rachel, Claire,
or
Jude. But they did find—they found his hands, Mara. They buried them.” He swallowed like it was painful for him, then pointed at the video screen. “This guy? Two hands.” Daniel’s voice was gentle and sad and desperate but his words refused to make sense. “I know you’re freaked out about what’s been happening. I know. And Dad—we’re all worried about Dad. But that isn’t Jude, Mara. It’s not him.”