The Evolution of Mara Dyer (23 page)

“But you’re not reading it. You’re sleeping on it. I’ll put it in my room—you can get it whenever you want. Oh, and ask Mom about Jung, she’ll like that.”

“Daniel—”

“THERE IS AN ALLIGATOR IN MAX’S POOL!” Joseph shouted from the foyer. He came running into the living room, his face lit with excitement.

“How big?” Daniel asked, and shifted the giant book behind his back.

“Big,” Joseph said, eyes wide. “Really big.”

My turn. “Did you see it?”

Joseph shook his head. “He e-mailed. They’re calling that guy to come over and get it out.”

“What guy?” Daniel asked.

“Wait, that guy from Animal Planet?” I asked.

Joseph nodded furiously. “He invited me over to watch. His mom is freaking out because they have an outdoor cat and they haven’t found her yet.”

Ice slid through my veins as I remembered—

The still body of a gray cat lay inches from where I’d been standing, its flesh torn open, its fur streaked with red.

My mother appeared in the kitchen. “Max’s cat is missing too?”

Daniel arched an eyebrow. “Too?”

I had to stay calm. Had to keep up the show.

“The Delaneys just asked me if any of us have seen
their
cat.” Their house bordered ours in the back. “She’s been missing since Sunday.”

Since I came home.

Joseph’s eyebrows lowered. “That’s when Jenny’s dog ran away.”

Who’s Jenny?
I mouthed to Daniel.

“Angelo,” Daniel said. “Across the street and to the left.”

Joseph looked back at Mom. “Mom, will you take me to Max’s?”

“I’m kind of tired, honey.”

Joseph looked at Daniel and then at me. We simultaneously said, “Not it.”

Joseph clasped his hands together in mock prayer. “PLEASE take me! I will never ever ask for anything ever again, I swear.”

“Mara has to stay and help me with dinner,” my mom said.

My turn to make a face, even though I was spectacularly relieved. “I do?”

“Daniel, take him please?” she asked. Daniel was already reaching for her keys.

“Thanks.”

Joseph fist-pumped, but turned to me before he left. “You’re coming to the carnival tonight, right?”

I raised an eyebrow. “What carnival?”

“There’s a fair out in Davie,” Mom said. “I thought it would be fun if we all went.”

“Be back soon,” Daniel said as he left the kitchen and left
New Theories
on the counter. Then popped his head back in for one final
you owe me
look.

I did owe him. Remembering the cat unsettled me, even though I knew John was outside, watching our house. Jude hadn’t appeared since John had been here and the missing animals could be a coincidence, but they made me nervous and—

And my mother was looking at me.

I smiled at her. Widely. “What can I do?” I asked, all enthusiasm and cheer.

“Would you mind setting the table?”

“Sure!” I began unloading the dishwasher while my mother started rummaging in the pantry.

“How’s everything going at Horizons?” she asked.

So
this
is why I was granted a reprieve. “It’s great!”

“What kinds of things are you doing there?”

Aside from making new enemies? “Um, in drama therapy yesterday we chose monologues from old books and then performed them.”

“Did you like it?”

I nodded seriously. “I did.”

“Really?”

“It’s fun pretending to be someone else.”

“What book did you pick?”

“Um,
Jekyll and Hyde
.”

“What part did you play?”

Hyde. “Jekyll.”

She put something in the oven, hiding her face. “How are things with Noah?”

Ah. That was what she
really
wanted to talk about. “They’re good.” I think. “The same, you know?”

“What do you guys do together?”

Aside from evading my stalker and burning dolls? “We talk.”

“About what?”

Genetic memory. “Books.” Possession. “Movies.” Jude. “People we don’t like.”

“Do you talk about what’s going on with you?”

I tried to remember the conversation I overheard between my parents, right after my psych ward stint. Mom said it was good for me to have someone who listened—

“He’s a good listener,” I said.

“Do you talk about what’s going on with him?”

What? “What do you mean?”

She turned to face me, her features neutral and her stare direct. She searched for something in my eyes, but whatever it was, she didn’t find it because she went on. “Noah’s parents are going out of town this weekend and they sent his sister to a friend’s house, so I said he could stay here.”

I nodded. “I know. . . .” I waited for the other shoe.

“I just want to make sure I don’t have to worry about you two.”

I shook my head emphatically. “Nope. No worries.”

She mixed something together in a bowl and then set it down on the counter. “How serious are you?”

“Not serious enough for you to worry,” I said with a light smile, scrambling for a way to distract her before the conversation got seriously awkward. “Hey, Mom,” I started, remembering my conversation with Daniel. “What do you know about Jungian archetypes?” Best segue ever.

She looked appropriately surprised. “Wow, I haven’t thought about that since college. . . . I could tell you more about Jacques Lacan than Carl Jung—he was more my speed, but let’s see,” she said, drawing out the word as her eyes flicked to the ceiling. “There’s the Self, I remember, and the Shadow,” she ticked them off on her fingers, “the Persona . . . I’m blanking on the other two main ones . . . There are other archetypal
figures
, though—the Great Mother, the Devil, the Hero . . .” Her voice trailed off for a second before her face lit up. “Oh! And the Sage and the Trickster, too—and I’m remembering something about Oedipus, but he could be creeping in from Freud? And Apollo, maybe—” she said before being interrupted by a knock on the door.

I was already on my way out of the kitchen when she asked me to see who it was.

I opened the door to find Noah standing there in a long-sleeve plaid shirt and dark jeans, with sunglasses on that masked his eyes. He looked perfectly disheveled and perfectly blank.

He only ever shows you what he wants you to see.

“Where is everyone?” he asked evenly.

I pushed Stephanie’s words away. “Mom’s in the kitchen,” I said. “And Daniel and Joseph went to go watch someone remove an alligator from a pool.”

Noah’s brows rose above the dark lenses.

“I know.”

He sighed. “I suppose I’m going to have to wait.”

“For?”

Noah glanced at the kitchen. Not a peep from my mother. He shook his head. “Fuck it.” He reached into his back pocket and handed me a piece of paper.

No. Not a piece of paper. A picture. A faded color photograph of two girls; one blond and vibrant, wearing Noah’s half-smile, and the other—

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

The other was my grandmother.

36

N
OAH,” MY MOTHER SAID, EMERGING FROM THE
kitchen and wiping her hands on a towel. “We missed you.”

I stuffed the picture in my back pocket as furtively as I could.

“Thank you for having me,” Noah said. “I have something for you, from my parents—”

Mom smiled and shook her head. “Totally unnecessary.”

“It’s just in the car, I’ll go get it,” Noah said. He left and I ran to my bedroom and hid the picture before my mother saw it or I spilled water on it or it spontaneously burst into flame.

When I came back, Noah and my mom were talking in the kitchen.

“So where in London did you used to visit?” he asked her as he stirred what I thought might be salad dressing.

“Oh, you know, the usual.” She shrugged from the sink. “Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, that sort of thing.”

“Your mother grew up there?”

A hundred points for Noah Shaw. I almost mimed a high five.

Mom nodded.

“What did she do?”

“She was a student,” she said, her voice clipped.

“That’s so interesting—what university?”

My mother set the salad bowl in front of Noah. “Cambridge.”

Our eyes locked.

“Darwin College,” she went on. “She was in school for her PhD, but she never finished. I think that always bothered her. All right, you two,” she said, grinning at us. “Thanks for helping, you’re free to go.”

This was the one time ever in my life that I would rather be talking to my mother than taking my boyfriend to my room.

“It’s no trouble,” Noah said. He apparently felt the same way.

My mother dusted her hands off. “I’m finished. There’s nothing more to do. Go on,” she said, waving us away and
shutting the conversation down. It
would
happen that she’d extend a grand gesture of trust when what I really wanted was more answers from her. But Noah and I had been dismissed and if we didn’t leave, she might get suspicious.

Once we were alone in my room, I closed the door almost all the way, turned to Noah and said, “Holy shit.”

“Well put.”

I was completely overwhelmed, and backed up onto my bed. “Where’d you find it?”

“A random box of my mother’s things.”

I rubbed my forehead. “So they knew each other.”

“Seems that way. Where’s the picture?”

I went to my desk and took it out from the drawer, then handed it to Noah. “How did you know it was my grandmother?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, clearly perplexed. “Seriously?”

“Yeah . . .”

“You don’t see the resemblance?”

I glanced over at the picture again. Something bothered me about it, but it wasn’t that.

“When was this taken?”

He flipped the photograph over. “1987.” He paused. “My mother would have been in university,” he said. “At Cambridge.”

“Wait,” I said as an idea dawned. “Your parents went there together, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Noah said slowly.

“Can you ask your dad? Maybe he remembers this.” I indicated the picture.

“He won’t talk about her.” Noah’s voice went flat.

“But—”

“He won’t,” he said again. Then, “I could try Ruth, maybe. She was there also.”

One look at him told me I wouldn’t get any further, not unless I pushed, and I wasn’t sure if I should. Not about his family.

I looked back at the picture in my hands. Then wandered out of my room and into the hallway. Noah followed. I glanced down at the photograph and up at my grandmother’s portrait that hung on the wall and then I realized what was off.

“She looks exactly the same,” I said.

Noah’s eyes followed mine. It was a long time before either of us spoke.

“They couldn’t have been studying there at the same time,” I said, once we were back in my room. I sat back down on my bed. “My grandmother would’ve been living in the States when
your
mother was in school.”

“But she used to go to London every year when your mum was growing up. Maybe they met on one of those trips?”

“I guess, but they seem kind of . . . familiar, don’t they?” I said, staring at the photograph. “Like friends.”

“Everyone seems that way in pictures.”

I rubbed my forehead. “Why take a picture with someone you barely know at all, then? It’s weird.”

Noah’s eyebrows knitted together. “Is it possible she may have gone to London more than your mother knew?”

I sighed. “At this point, anything’s possible,” I said, and paused. “Maybe she was immortal.”

At that, Noah cracked a smile. “I was going to suggest ‘time traveler,’ but, sure.” He stretched his arms casually behind his head, exposing a sliver of stomach above the low waist of his jeans.

Torture. I cleared my throat and looked back at the photograph. “My mom said the portrait is the only picture she has of my grandmother. She’d die if she saw yours.”

Noah’s smile vanished. His expression made me want to talk about something else.

“Do you still have the pendant?” I asked.

“Yes.” The planes of his face were smooth. “Do you want it back?”

I did not. “It’s safer with you,” I said. “I’m afraid I’d lose it.” Or throw it away. “I was just wondering if maybe you found out anything else?”

He gave a single shake of his head before asking, “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

“Sarin, why?”

“I’m going to have Charles look into this,” he said, indicating the picture.

“And Charles would be . . .”

“The private investigator.”

“Did he turn up anything on Jude?”

Noah looked away. “Dead end after dead end. Did you find the answers you were looking for in that book?”

“I haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” I said nonchalantly.

A half-smile tugged at Noah’s mouth. “You fell asleep, didn’t you?”

I lifted my chin. “No.”

“What page?”

“I didn’t fall asleep.”

“What page?”

Busted. “Six,” I said. “But I was really tired.”

“No judgment. I could barely make it through that obscenely pompous introduction.”

“What about the Lukumi situation?” I said, changing the subject. “Any luck?”

Noah’s voice brightened a bit. “I did in fact return to Little Havana while you were at Horizons, and I canvassed the botanicas, just as you asked.”

“Well?”

“Well,” he said slowly. “Imagine for a moment how receptive they were when
I
walked in there and started asking questions.”

“What? Your Spanish is perfect.”

He arched an eyebrow. “One look at me and their jaws
visibly clamped shut. One owner thought I was with the Health Department and started showing me around the place, repeating ‘No goats, no goats.’”

I smirked.

“Glad to amuse you.”

“I get my kicks where I can these days. Speaking of Horizons, I almost had an . . . incident.”

“Of what nature?” Noah asked carefully.

“This girl, Phoebe—she keeps
pushing
me. I almost lost it with her.” Remembering filled me with frustration. “What if someone pisses me off and I tell them to go jump off a bridge?”

Noah shook his head. “You’d never say that.”