Dead Ringers (27 page)

Go,
he thought.
Run
.

He glanced at the clock and saw that it was just after two in the afternoon. Since he could not remember what day it might be, he could not be sure when his captor would return, but he could not leave the house half-naked and without shoes. He needed clothes … and not just clothes.

Staggering into the bathroom, he got a closer look at himself in the mirror. He turned the faucet and fresh water spilled out, turned quickly hot, and began to steam. With his hands under the hot, clear flow, he let emotion overwhelm him again. Staring into his own eyes, he turned off the sink, reached out to open the medicine cabinet, and took out shaving cream and a razor. The razor felt comfortable in his hand, but he put it down.

A shave would come after a shower.

He opened the shower door and turned the water on. Stripping off his filthy T-shirt and underpants, he gagged from his own stink. He waited for the steam to rise before stepping beneath the spray. Only then did he look closely at his left hand, turning it over and pressing it against the shower tiles. He bent to investigate his legs, thin but solid.

As he soaped his body under the hot spray, the scent of Irish Spring triggered a memory of his father. Suddenly he knew his own name, and that he had been on the verge of vanishing from the world. Of forgetting himself forever.

It all came back to him, then, and he knew he wasn't the only one in danger. Once he had climbed from the shower and dried off, he went to the closet in his parents' old bedroom, hoping but doubtful that his double had continued to store his father's SIG Sauer in the same place. To put it back in the same shoe box every morning when he left the house. But when he pulled the box down from its shelf, he felt its familiar weight and he smiled.

After that, he hurried. For the first time in a very long time, there were people who were depending on him.

They just didn't know it yet.

 

FOUR

Driving to pick Maddie up from school, Tess felt her strength ebb. At first she thought it was just the stress and exhaustion of recent days catching up with her. Her eyelids fluttered and she sat up straighter, clutched the streering wheel a bit tighter, and opened the window to let the chilly air flow in. When she felt a twinge of emptiness in her gut, she tried to remember what she'd eaten that day. But as she turned into the street that ran alongside the schoolyard, she slumped forward against the wheel like someone had just hit a cosmic switch and powered her body down.

The car horn blared. She couldn't lift her head from the wheel, her cheek pressed against its ridges. From the corner of her eye she saw the chain-link fence surrounding the playground and the after-school children chasing one another across the grass. The teacher tasked with overseeing them began to turn in response to the sound of the horn. The front-end alignment had been slightly off for a while—she'd been meaning to take it into the shop—and the car drifted to the right, toward the fence. All the strength gone from her, Tess had let her foot slip off the accelerator, but even as the car slowed it had enough momentum to take a section of fence down. The bodies of small children would fare no better than the chain-link.

One breath. Teeth gritted, she slid her foot back onto the brake. The teacher minding the kids in the playground shouted something, but the kids hadn't had time to really understand, or to scream. Tess mustered up all that remained of herself and pushed down on the brake. The car slowed, but only when she put her hands back on the wheel and pushed herself back against the seat was she able to overcome her weakness. The car rolled to a stop inches from the fence.

She breathed. Put it into park. Lay her head back against the seat and let the chilly breeze blow through the windows. Her shoulder and spine throbbed with the old pain, strangely distant now. The teacher shouted at her, striding angrily toward the fence as autumn leaves skittered around her ankles and children gawked at the car that had just come to a stop kitty-corner with the fence.

“What do you think you're doing?” the teacher barked at her. Then she must have gotten a clear look at Tess through the windshield, because her anger turned to worry. “Oh, my God, are you all right?”

Thinks I had a seizure or something,
Tess thought. And then,
well, didn't you?

Her injuries throbbed, but that was good in a way, because it meant she could feel again. She wasn't herself, but she could move. The empty hollow in her chest and her gut seemed to shrink, but as she put the car in gear and drove slowly around to the front of the school, carefully joining the pickup line, fear screamed into a crescendo within her. What had her doppelgänger done now? How she felt reminded her of the night she had seen the woman holding Maddie. It had drained away some of what made her who she was, and this felt the same way, as if her essence had grown somehow thinner, the way the air thinned at high elevation. There just wasn't as much of her to breathe.

Paranoia crackled inside her, kept her moving. She needed to call Lili, not to mention Nick. The certainty that they ought to stay together had just become concrete in her mind. None of them was safe until this was over.

The car engine idled as she waited in the line, moving up one vehicle at a time as parents picked up their kids. Three cars back from the pickup point, she could see the vice principal and two teachers who were herding the kids, ducking their heads to greet the parents through car windows. When the Ford in front of her pulled away and Tess hit the gas, advancing to the designated point at the curb, she rolled down the passenger window. Mrs. Kenner, who taught third grade, knitted her brows in confusion as Tess drew to a stop.

Tess didn't see Maddie in the string of children waiting to be retrieved.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Devlin,” Mrs. Kenner said, bending to peer through the open passenger window. “Maybe you and Mr. Devlin got your wires crossed today?”

Perhaps sixty, Mrs. Kenner had been negotiating the politics of broken families for decades. Tess could hear the kindness in the phrasing and the way the woman turned the words into a question. But panic would not allow her to be diplomatic.

“Where's my daughter?” she demanded.

The kindness vanished from Mrs. Kenner's face. Icy and stern, she leaned a bit nearer and put her hand on the door.

“Your husband was in school earlier. I saw him in the corridor. I assume that Maddie left with him. She's not my student, of course, but if there's a problem—”

The vice principal, Leonard Moss, appeared over Mrs. Kenner's shoulder. “Please pull ahead a bit, Mrs. Devlin,” Moss said. “So Mrs. Kenner can continue with pickup.”

“But Maddie—”

“I'll explain as soon as you pull ahead,” Mr. Moss said.

Numb and hollow, Tess drove another twenty feet, keeping her car by the curb. Mr. Moss walked alongside and then took up a position at the passenger window, leaning on the car the way Mrs. Kenner had.

“Mr. Moss—”

“It had slipped my mind,” the man interrupted, “but your husband—”

“Ex-husband.”

“Mr. Devlin said he couldn't reach you and that you might have forgotten that Maddie had a doctor's appointment today. He thought you must be busy, but he asked that if you had forgotten, and came to collect her, that I tell you he would wait with Maddie at your house until you came home.”

The arrogant little man gave her a condescending smile, peering through the open window. “I find in talking to them that most of our parents check their cell phones often, just in case of emergency.”

Tess trembled with fear and rage. Moss's tone only stoked that blaze higher.

“Go fuck yourself,” she muttered.

She hit the gas, skidding in a patch of sand. When Mr. Moss shouted, she remembered that the vice principal had been leaning against the window, but she didn't slow down. The world blurred around her and she felt as if she floated outside of herself. The other cars on the road were just moving colors. Only out of habit did she manage to stop at traffic signals and stop signs. More than ever, her body felt like a husk, and she saw herself as a ghost holding on to herself by some invisible tether. Only love and fear gave her strength to drive, to turn the corner at the DiMarino's Ristorante and drive past the little Catholic middle school whose patron saint she could never remember.

Just a hair shy of four miles later, she sped around a corner and turned into her street, struggling to hold on to the wheel. The engine roared as she accelerated. A skinny, elderly man raking leaves shouted at her to slow down as she drove by. The front windows on both sides of the car were still open—she had not even noticed. As she blew through the stop sign at an intersection, a dervish of multicolored leaves spinning up in her wake, she gripped the wheel—felt it anchor her a little—and slipped back into her body. The scar on her chest and left shoulder felt stretched too thin.

A gleaming Lexus sat at the curb in front of her house. In the driveway, a red Mercedes waited as if it belonged there. Either car might have belonged to guests of her upstairs neighbors, but she knew that wasn't true. It was the middle of a workday afternoon. Nobody would be home in the second- or third-floor apartments in the old Victorian.

Bile rose in the back of her throat as she hit the brakes and pulled up across the street. She only barely remembered to put the car into park before she popped the door, leaving it open and the engine running as she stumbled out. Her thoughts felt as if they were floating again, but her body—what little remained of her physical shell—seemed weighed down. She staggered across the street.

The front door opened the moment she reached the front lawn and she saw herself emerge. Her eyes burned with tears she could not shed. Numbness reached all the way to her bones and she could only stare as the new Tess gazed at her with horrifying pity and came down the steps and across the grass toward her.

The new Tess
. That's what she was.

Her replacement wore jeans and cuffed boots and a belted leather jacket with a teal blue scarf, a casual ensemble that somehow looked elegant on her. Everything about the new Tess seemed to gleam in the fading afternoon light, her skin clearer and her eyes brighter and her spine straighter as she approached.

The original Tess fell to her knees on the lawn, hooks anchored deep inside her, dragging more of the essence from her. She barely had the strength to lift her head and stare at her doppelgänger. The new Tess knelt by her, put a hand on her shoulder.

“Don't fight it,” New Tess said. “Really, it's only going to make you fade faster.”

The original glanced at the doorway, wanting to scream for Maddie but lacking the strength. Even her love for her daughter felt thinner somehow. She lifted a hand and reached toward the door, but her arm dropped when she spotted Nick standing in the doorway with Maddie in his arms. He looked so handsome, so thin and young with his hair freshly cut, wearing a beautifully tailored suit and a red tie. This Nick and Tess looked as if they had just stepped off a movie screen.

In New Nick's arms, Maddie cried out for her mother.

New Tess turned toward the house. “I'll be right in, darling.”

“N-no…” Tess managed to mutter, but her breath would barely come. She felt thin. Faded. Not unraveling so much as drifting, like fog burning off at sunrise.

“But who is that?” Maddie asked, frightened and pleading for understanding. “Who
is
that?”

New Tess bent to whisper to the original, hand still firmly on her shoulder. Her eyes glinted with ice, sharp enough to cut. “You're nothing now, understand? You're not welcome here. We … my
husband
and I … we're moving in. Maddie will have both parents again, the family together. You can't give her that, but we can. She'll be happier if you just stop resisting and let go. Run away, now, nothingness. Stay away.
Fade
away.”

Maddie had begun to cry, but the sound became muffled and the original Tess glanced up to see that Nick had taken her back inside. The door still hung wide open.

“Go,” New Tess whispered.

“Nnnhh,” was the closest she could come to
No
.

The grass felt strange to her touch. She'd gone down on all fours and her palms itched where the grass touched it, passed through it. So little remained of her now that she imagined herself made of glass, just a thin pane of transparency, awareness slipping away. The poisonous fury faded in her and she looked up at the beautiful face of a woman she might once have been, pleading with her eyes.

New Tess might have smiled kindly, seen her off gently. Instead, she sneered. “There wasn't much to you to begin with, was there?”

She felt her eyelids flutter. Darkness swept in around her, long before evening would have brought it on, and she felt a sorrow unlike any she had ever known. She had very little feeling left, but the weight of New Tess's hand remained on her shoulder. This woman had no scars, no old pains, none of the heartache of the original. Surely that made her more worthy of the name and the life? She was
pure
Tess, a new beginning. Would it be so bad to fade out, to make way for an unbroken version of herself?

A car horn blared, three long, rattling sounds, as if an alarm had gone off. She blinked and glanced up at New Tess, saw the irritation on her face … and then saw worry there. The original blinked, a frisson of awareness passing through her, and she managed to pick her head up at the same time that two car doors slammed, one after the other.

“Tess, get up!” a voice shouted. “Come over here!”

For a few seconds, she thought the voice had spoken to New Tess. Then she mustered the strength to sit back on her haunches and turn toward that voice. For a few seconds, she did not know the two women running up the driveway toward them.