The Evolution of Mara Dyer Read online

  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

  MY 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

  HIS 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 despe
rate 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.”

  It would have been a relief to believe that I was that crazy, to swallow that lie and their pills and shake off the guilt that had hounded me since I finally remembered what I was capable of.

  But I tried that before. It didn’t work.

  I took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m not crazy.”

  Daniel closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, his expression was . . . decided. “I’m not supposed to tell you this—”

  “Tell me what?”

  “The psychologists are calling it a perceptual distortion,” my older brother said. “A delusion, basically. That—that Jude’s alive, that you have the power to collapse buildings and kill people—they’re saying you’re losing the ability to rationally evaluate reality.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They’re throwing around words like ‘psychotic’ and ‘schizotypal,’ Mara.”

  I ordered myself not to cry.

  “Mom is hoping that, worst case scenario, this is maybe something called Brief Psychotic Disorder brought on by the PTSD and the shooting and all of the trauma—but from what I think I’m hearing, the main differences between that, schizophrenia, and a bunch of other disorders in between is basically duration.” He swallowed hard. “Meaning, the longer the delusions last, the worse the prognosis.”

  I clenched my teeth and forced myself to stay quiet while my brother continued to speak.

  “That’s why Mom thinks you should stay here for a while so they can adjust your meds. Then they can move you to a place, a residential treatment facility—”

  “No,” I said. As badly as I had wanted to leave my family to keep them safe before, I knew now I needed to stay with them. I could not be locked up while Jude was free.

  “It’s like a boarding school,” he went on, “except there’s a gourmet chef and Zen gardens and art therapy—just to take a break.”

  “We’re not talking about Fiji, Daniel. She wants to send me to a mental hospital. A mental hospital!”

  “It isn’t a mental hospital, it’s a residential—”

  “Treatment facility, yeah,” I said, just as the tears began to well. I blinked them back furiously. “So you’re on their side?”

  “I’m on your side. And it’s just for a little while, so they can teach you to cope. You’ve been through—there’s no way I could deal with school and what you’ve been through.”

  I tried to swallow back the sourness in my throat. “What does Dad say?” I managed to ask.

  “He feels like part of this is his fault,” he said.

  The wrongness of that idea sliced me open.

  “That he shouldn’t have taken on the case,” my brother went on. “He trusts Mom.”

  “Daniel,” I pleaded. “I swear, I swear I’m telling the truth.”

  “That’s part of it,” he said, and his voice nearly cracked. “That you believe it. Hallucinations—that fits with the PTSD. But you knew when you had them that it was all in your head. Now that you believe it’s real,” Daniel said, his voice tight, “everything you told them yesterday is consistent with—psychosis.” He blinked fiercely and swiped one of his eyes with the back of his hand.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. “So that’s it, then.” My voice sounded dead. “Do I even get to go home first?”

  “Well, once they admit you they have to keep you for seventy-two hours, and then they reevaluate you before they make a final recommendation to Mom and Dad. So I guess that’ll happen tomorrow?”

  “Wait—just seventy-two hours?” And another evaluation . . .

  “Well, yeah, but they’re pushing for longer.”

  But right now, it was temporary. Not permanent. Not yet.

  If I could persuade them that I didn’t believe Jude was alive—that I didn’t believe I killed Rachel and Claire and the others—that none of this was real, that it was all in my head—if I could lie, and convincingly, then they might think my episode at the police station was temporary. That was what my mother wanted to believe. She just needed a push.

  If I played this right, I might get to go home again.

  I might get to see Noah again.

  An image of him flickered in my mind, his face hard and determined at the courthouse, certain that I wouldn’t do what I did. We hadn’t spoken since.

  What if I had changed to him, like he said I would?

  What if he didn’t want to see me?

  The thought tightened my throat, but I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t lose it. From here on out, I had to be the poster child for mental health. I couldn’t afford to be sent away anymore. I had to figure out what the hell was going on.

  Even if I had to figure it out by myself.

  A knock on the door startled me, but it was just Mom. She looked like she’d been crying. Daniel stood up, smoothing his wrinkled blue dress shirt.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked her.

  “Still in the hospital. He gets discharged tomorrow.”

  Maybe, if I could put on a good enough performance, I might get discharged with him. “Joseph’s there?”

  Mom nodded. So my twelve-year-old brother now had a father with a gunshot wound and a sister in the psychiatric ward. I clenched my teeth even harder. Do not cry.

  My mom looked at Daniel then, and he cleared his throat. “Love you, sister,” he said to me. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

  I nodded, dry-eyed. My mother sat down.

  “It’s going to be okay, Mara. I know that sounds stupid right now, but it’s true. It will get better.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say yet, except, “I want to go home.”

  My mother looked pained—and why shouldn’t she? Her family was falling apart. “I want you home so badly, sweetheart. I just—there’s no schedule for you at home if you’re not in school, and I think that might be too much pressure right now. I love you, Mara. So much. I couldn’t stand it if you—I was throwing up when I first heard about the asylum. . . . I was sick over it. I couldn’t leave you, not for a second. You’re my baby. I know you’re not a baby but you’re my baby and I want you to be okay. More than anything I want you to be okay.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and smiled at me. “This isn’t your fault. No one blames you, and you’re not being punished.”

  “I know,” I said gravely, doing my best impression of a calm, sane adult.

  She went on. “You’ve been through so much, and I know we don’t understand. And I want you to know that this”—she indicated the room—“isn’t you. It might be chemical or behavioral or even genetic—”

  An image rose up out of the dark water of my mind. A picture. Black. White. Blurry. “What?” I asked quickly.

  “The way you’re feeling. Everything that’s been going on with you. It isn’t your fault. With the PTSD and everything that’s happened—”

  “No, I know,” I said, stopping her. “But you said—”

  Genetic.

  “What do you mean, genetic?” I asked.

  My mother looked at the floor and her voice turned professional. “What you’re going through,” she said, clearly avoiding the words mental illness, “can be caused by biological and genetic factors.”

  “But who in our family has had any kind of—”

  “My mother,” she said quietly. “Your grandmother.”

  Her words hung in the air. The picture in my mind sharpened into a portrait of a young woman with a mysterious smile, sitting with hennaed hands folded above her lap. Her dark hair was parted in the center and her bindi sparkled between her eyebrows. It was the picture of my grandmother on her wedding day.

  And then my mind replaced her face with mine.

  I blinked the image away and shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “She killed herself, Mara.”

  I sat there, moment
arily stunned. Not only had I never known, but . . . “I thought—I thought she died in a car accident?”

  “No. That’s just what we said.”

  “But I thought you grew up with her?”

  “I did. She died when I was an adult.”

  My throat was suddenly dry. “How old were you?”

  My mother’s voice was suddenly thin. “Twenty-six.”

  The next few seconds felt like forever. “You had me when you were twenty-six.”

  “She killed herself when you were three days old.”

  5

  WHY DIDN’T I KNOW THIS?

  Why wasn’t I told?

  Why would she do it?

  Why then?

  I must have looked as shocked as I felt, because my mother rushed to apologize. “I never meant to tell you like this.”

  She never meant to tell me at all.

  “Dr. West and Dr. Kells thought it was the right thing, since your grandmother had so many of the same preoccupations,” my mother said. “She was paranoid. Suspicious—”

  “I’m not—” I was about to say that I wasn’t suspicious or paranoid, but I was. With good reason, though.

  “She didn’t have any friends,” she went on.

  “I have friends,” I said. Then I realized that the more appropriate words were “had” and “friend,” singular. Rachel was my best friend and, really, my only friend until we moved.

  Then there was Jamie Roth, my first (and only) friend at Croyden—but I hadn’t seen or heard from him since he was expelled for something he didn’t do. My mother probably didn’t even know he existed, and since I wasn’t going back to school anytime soon, she probably never would.

  Then there was Noah. Did he count?

  My mom interrupted my thoughts. “When I was little, my mother would sometimes ask me if I could do magic.” A sad smile appeared on her lips. “I thought she was just playing. But as I grew older, she would ask every now and then if I could do anything ‘special.’ Especially once I was a teenager. I had no idea what she meant, of course, and when I asked her, she would tell me that I would know, and to tell her if anything changed.” My mother clenched her jaw and looked up at the ceiling.