We Are Here (43 page)

“Get out of here,” she said as firmly as she could, not liking the cracking sound in her voice.

“This was a mistake, wasn’t it?” Lizzie said forlornly. “I should have been happy with what we’d had. Or what I thought we’d had.”

“You’re not real,” Catherine shouted. “You’ve
never
been real.”

“I was real from the moment you first saw me,” Lizzie shouted, clenching her fists. “I
am
real, and
I was your friend
. I’ve stayed your friend, keeping an eye, keeping you safe when you walk home at night. I never forgot you. You forgot
me
. You
threw me away
.”

“You can’t throw away something that doesn’t exist.”

“I
do
exist.”

“You don’t. You’re
nothing
.”

“No—I
have
nothing. While you’ve got
everything
. The house, husband, the daughters. That’s you and that’s
always
been you. Pretty Cathy’s got to have whatever she wants, even if she has to make her friend steal it for her.”

Catherine was trying to retreat, drawing the girls with her. Ella seemed to be slipping into a catatonic state, eyes wide, chest rising and falling in silent sobs. Isa was staring at the pretty lady who kept disappearing and coming back, who was saying all these interesting things and advancing toward them.

“
That’s
what your lovely mama is like underneath, girls. A thief and a liar and a cheat—and not even brave enough to do it on her own.”

Catherine abruptly pushed the kids to one side and swung her hand toward the woman in front of her.

Isa saw the pretty lady’s hand whip up and grab her mother’s wrist, however, far too fast. Lizzie held on to it with all her might, moving her face closer and closer to Catherine’s.

“Remember me,” she said. “
Remember how much you loved me
.”

“I never loved you.”

“Yes, you did. You
did
.”

Catherine shoved her own face forward until they were nose to nose. “You were
nothing
to me. Ever. You were just me talking to myself, the make-believe of a little girl who didn’t have a
real
friend when she needed one and made up a pathetic excuse for one instead.”

“You
needed
me.”

“No. You were just a game.”

“You made me do things.”

“And how pathetic is
that
? You were just the bits of me I didn’t want festering in my own head. You followed me here to the city and wouldn’t let go,
long
after you should have been forgotten.
You
kept stealing on your own because that’s
all you knew how to do
.”

Lizzie tried to grip Catherine’s wrist harder, tried to hurt her, tried to grind the bones together until they broke—but she couldn’t get enough purchase.

Meanwhile the children screamed and cried.

“If you didn’t get the message back then,” Catherine said, “then get it now. I
don’t
remember you, I
don’t
want you, and I have to look after my children now—something you’ll never have. Why? Oh yeah, that’s right—
because you’re not real
.”

Catherine shoved out, but the other woman didn’t let go and so she found herself off balance. Lizzie discovered she did have further strength of purpose after all, a strength that came out of a mist of outraged hurt and black fury.

She lashed her arm, throwing Catherine sideways to smack into the wall next to the television. Catherine crumpled to the ground.

“Oh, I’ll go,” Lizzie said. “And I know just the way to make that happen. You ever hear of the Bloom, Cathy? It involves you, I’m afraid. And involves you
giving
, for once. Giving your perfect life.”

She started toward Catherine, who was dazedly trying to push herself upright against the wall. She saw a very heavy glass vase on the bookcase above Catherine’s head. She knew she had the will left to knock it over, and gravity would do the rest, gravity and time, bringing an end to this prison.

Catherine looked up and saw what Lizzie had seen.

“Mama,” Isa said.

Ella was screaming, off in another world. But Isa had stopped and was crawling toward her mother.

Lizzie hesitated, seeing the girl reach her hand out toward Catherine, toward her mother, the shining star at the center of her world. She saw Catherine, who knew Lizzie was coming for her and what might happen if she got to her, decide that it was more important that she reach back and take her daughter’s hand.

Lizzie realized that
this
was love, not what she’d thought she’d had from Catherine all the long years ago.

Catherine was right. Lizzie had never been loved.

She’d never been anything at all.

It began to rain and traffic was crazy all the way through the Village and within minutes of getting in a cab I wished we’d stuck to going on foot. Kristina got on the driver’s case about taking some other route, but I knew it wouldn’t make any difference and tried to ease her back into the seat. She fought me hard but eventually saw the guy just wasn’t paying attention anyway. As soon as we started making head-way I called ahead to Jeffers. It rang and rang and I was about to give up when he came on the line, sounding distracted. I told him we were headed in his direction and to be out on the street waiting for us.

“Is it Reinhart?”

“No,” I said. “It’s Lizzie.”

Now I had him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I hope. We’re in a cab. Just be outside.”

Kristina rocked in the seat next to me, her body rigid, willing the traffic to part.

Five minutes later it’d become clear that it wasn’t going to and so we got the guy to let us out on the corner of 14th Street and Seventh Avenue. As we started to run up the avenue, I called Jeffers again.

“I’m here,” he said. He sounded freaked out. “I’m standing outside. Where
are
you?”

“Change of plan. We’re on foot. Come to the corner of Eighth.”

The sidewalks were black and wet, clogged with bad-tempered people with umbrellas and apparently no desire to
get the hell out of other people’s way,
and soon I gave up trying to be dignified or polite and simply ran straight at anyone who was in my path.

Kristina was just behind as we reached the end of the stretch of 16th that intersected with Eighth, and I saw Jeffers on the other side looking all around. The street was wall-to-wall traffic, but here it was moving fast.

“Is that Maj with him?”

“Oh thank God,” Kristina said. “He’ll be able to talk to her.”

She shouted across, telling them to run up toward 18th. Jeffers looked confused, but Maj got it right away—he evidently knew where Catherine lived. They started running up the street, and rather than confront the traffic and cross over, we ran up the side we were on. It wasn’t as busy as Seventh, but there were plenty of people hurrying home or heading to bars and restaurants or trying to get somewhere out of the rain.

Jeffers was having a hard time trying to follow Maj. Maj was running
fast
, weaving through people far more quickly than I could have done, than anyone should even be able to. He’d seen something up ahead, too.

“No,” he shouted. “No!”

He ran faster, shouting Lizzie’s name over and over. He went straight past 18th, sprinting now, arms pistoning forward and back. At first I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t turned in there, gone toward Catherine’s house.

Then I realized what he was running toward.

Lizzie was half a block ahead, staggering along the middle of the road, cars flashing past her on either side. Her head was down, hair loose and straggled and wet. Her shoulders were bent.

I don’t know why she was heading back toward us. Perhaps she’d gone up the other way first, lost track, found herself coming back down the road by accident.

She was flicker-lit by car headlights and signs, red, white, and yellow. She didn’t look like she had any destination in mind. She looked wholly lost. She looked like a child slipping beneath the surface of a lake.

Maj was closer now, still shouting her name. Nobody saw him running past. Nobody cared. They did see Jeffers come up behind and jumped out of the way, but they didn’t care about anything except the inconvenience.

Kristina lunged across the next street, nearly getting taken out by a car. I got caught trying to follow her and was forced diagonally against the traffic until I was trapped in the middle of the avenue.

“Lizzie,” I shouted. “
Stay where you are
.”

She raised her head, but I don’t think it was because she’d heard me. Her face was glowing white and dripping wet and it was not from the rain.

Kristina called her name over and over.

Maj ran into the traffic toward her, shouting too. I don’t think she heard them either. I don’t think she knew where she was, and I don’t believe she cared.

She tilted her head back and howled.

Nobody heard. Nobody in the cars streaming past her on either side, no one on the sidewalks. No one but us, and we were too slow, though I don’t believe it would have made any difference if we’d been quicker.

At the last moment she did see us, saw Maj at least, and Kristina too. She saw them, but she remained alone. I saw her eyes narrow, saw her summon all the concentration and substance she could muster, using pure force of will to make herself as concrete as possible.

I saw her smile fiercely as she did this, and maybe she
did
see me then, because she was looking at someone—or perhaps she saw through me to some other and better place and time.

There was a beat, and then she became much brighter. That’s the wrong word. She became more
there
.

An instant later a cab ran straight into her.

Nothing happened. Nothing flew up into the air. The driver slammed on the brakes and skidded thirty feet, tires fighting the wet surface. Other cars barked and honked and swerved.

The cab came to a juddering halt as I sprinted toward it. A skinny man leapt out. He stared all around, whirling on the spot, terrified, knowing he’d just hit someone—but wherever he looked, he saw exactly the same as I did. Nothing.

When he’d spun around five times he seemed to realize I was ten feet away, doing the same thing. “What the fuck?” he said. “Did you
see
her?”

People honked. People shouted at him, at me.

“There was no one there,” I said.

“
Bullshit
, man!”

“Just a trick of the light.”

“No fucking way. No
way
. There was a woman. I saw her. There was no one there, and
then there was
. I fucking ran straight into her, man.”

“You didn’t hit anyone,” I said.

Maj stood in the middle of the traffic, frozen, staring at the spot where Lizzie had last been. Kristina had reeled off up the sidewalk, head in hands. Jeffers was motionless, mouth open, face blank.

“I was right here,” I told the driver. “I saw everything. You did nothing wrong.”

“What the fuck?” he kept saying. “What the
fuck
?”

As I walked back over to the sidewalk, wanting to go to Kristina, I saw something on the side of the road.

A twist of red velvet cloth, something that could once have been a dress. Not recently—it was faded and filthy from years of rain and dirt—but once. It was screwed up into the side of the gutter, and looked like it had been trodden on and rained on and ignored ten thousand times.

When I reached down for it, it had gone.

And when I looked up and tried to find Kristina, she’d gone too.

Dawn was closing out the day. The last of her kids had just left—Eddie Moscone, who always hung around the school grounds for at least an hour, playing on the climbing frame with focus and concentration while his mother piggy-backed school Wi-Fi to send e-mails or update her status or whatever the heck it was people did with their phones the whole damned day. Dawn had a phone, sure. She used it for phone calls, old-school. The rest of the time she preferred to spend with people who were
there
.

Dawn had a guilty secret. She hated the Internet. Sure it was useful for shopping, but the rest of the time she watched family and friends putting it out there—updating constantly, being passionate and sincere, putting up heartfelt blogs when someone died. And what came back? Nothing. Nobody cared. Your follower count—a more critical indicator of your worth than anything you did in real life—would stay the same, or maybe even dip because you were being too serious, not hip or smart or ironic enough. Followers are not friends. Friends are different and do not come cheap. So why not
forget
the constant attention seeking … and just be?

That was one of the things Dawn liked about her kids—their ability to exist. Most of them, anyway. She paused in tidying books in her classroom’s library of battered classics and watched Eddie on the bars. Eddie was a decent kid, intelligent, polite and responsive most of the time. At other times he retreated. Sometimes it took two or three nudges to bring him back to the world. God knows Dawn saw David doing the same thing often enough—and it could take more than two or three prods to recenter her husband if he’d really got his vague on—but when you watched Eddie you realized how much of his universe came out of his own head and how very real it was to him.

Eventually Eddie’s mother got serious about hauling her kid away, and they left. A few older children would be wandering about the campus, engaged in projects, some teachers too, but otherwise it had the calm you find only during downtime in places that take hard usage during the day. Dawn worked her way around the classroom, putting everything in order. She privately believed this was her key role in the children’s lives, whatever the job description might say. Yes, she had to teach them a bunch of stuff, but providing a predictable environment in which to grow a little older—while absorbing all the weird crap the world threw at them—was just as important. And someday in the not so distant future, another woman (or man, possibly, though the lower grades tend to attract the feminine touch) would be doing this for her child, too. Child
ren
, of course—part of her still hadn’t gotten around that twist.