The woman whimpered again.
“Okay?” Liz prompted, squeezing just a little bit harder.
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh God, please! Let me go!”
There was a moment when it could have gone either way. The thing inside Liz, the puppeteer, was seriously considering breaking the woman’s thumb. It was reluctant to let her—to let the both of them—just walk away with no real souvenir of the occasion.
No! Liz found some purchase at last. The ruthless, sadistic calculation gave her something to push off from. She flailed inside her own flesh, uselessly truncated, unable to find the point where her nerve endings connected to her floating, futile point of view.
But futile or not, it had an effect. The feeling of disconnection strobed quickly, off and on, her fingers twitching as they responded intermittently to her will. Liz fought to maintain that control, to push it further as the other part of her, the puppetmaster part, retreated. Its triumphant self-assurance was shot through now with doubt and anger. It hadn’t expected this counterattack.
Liz flexed her fingers, surprised and overjoyed when they responded. She went for broke, dropping her arms to her sides so that the woman’s hand slid out of her grip. Eileen Garaldi found her feet and scrambled away, her eyes full of tears and her cheeks red. “I’m calling the police,” she yelled. “I’ll sue you.”
The puppetmaster wanted to lunge at her but Liz was pulling in the opposite direction. Caught between the two impulses, her body swayed a little on the spot.
“I seriously doubt it,” Liz said. Liz’s mouth said. “But go ahead if you want to. I’ll see you in court. And in some other places that aren’t so well lit.”
The woman broke and fled for the passenger side of the SUV, which drove away with a melodramatic squeal of stressed rubber.
Liz staggered back to her own car, so weak at the knees she felt as though she was about to go sprawling full length on the asphalt. She got inside and just sat there for a while, eyes closed, until the last frigid remnants of that alien presence melted out of her.
I’m going mad, she thought. Or already there maybe, her will and consciousness broken into separate pieces that were at war with each other, that took turns to come out and play.
As before, she came back to herself by tiny increments. She didn’t try to drive for around half an hour. There was no dizziness this time, no loss of balance, but the sense of dislocation was if anything even stronger than before. She needed to be absolutely sure her body would do what she told it to. She tried it out, one muscle at a time, putting it through its paces. Fortunately, there was nobody left in the parking lot to watch her. The school bell had rung long before and the other parents had all departed.
By the time Liz finally started up the car and eased it out into the street, there was no sign of the SUV. No sign of the police either, to her huge relief. For all she knew, though, there could be a general alert out for her by this time. She might get pulled over at any moment. She might get tasered and cuffed right there in front of her daughter’s school.
Under the circumstances, she didn’t feel up to driving around the block to the SuperFresh and getting in the week’s groceries. She went home instead, and sat in the parked car for a while longer wondering what the hell she should do next.
She couldn’t live like this. Nobody could.
Maybe hitting back against Marc and coming out of it in one piece was a gift horse she didn’t want to examine too closely. But she had just picked a fight with two complete strangers. Assaulted them. Turned a pointless wrangle about a parking space into an armed standoff.
And even now, some small part of her—or maybe it wasn’t small at all, but only (for the moment) far away—was thinking that she should have taken it further. Should have done some real damage to make absolutely sure those two impeccably shiny ladies got the point.
No, no, no. It had to stop. Had to. That voice had to be not just silenced but dug out of her brain and safely disposed of.
Liz went into the house at last and called the Carroll Way Medical Center. She gave her name and her policy number and asked if she was covered for a psychiatric evaluation.
“Has it been recommended by a medical professional?” the receptionist asked.
“Not exactly,” Liz admitted. “But I had … kind of … an accident last month. I went to West Penn. They probably sent along a summary of treatment or something?”
“They sure did, Ms. Kendall. It’s right here on your file. But it’s just a note, not an actual referral.”
“So I’m not covered?”
“Well, let me talk to West Penn and have them clarify. I’ll get back to you shortly.”
After Liz put the phone down, she took stock. Her body was doing what it was told to again, but there was a kind of static fizzing along her nerves, as though they were still thrumming from that alien touch.
She locked herself in the bathroom and took a bath. The water was hot enough to be uncomfortable, but she deliberately topped it off every time it threatened to cool. She wanted to feel something, and to have the reassurance that it was her—really, undeniably her—that was feeling it. On an impulse, she dropped in a scented bath bomb that Zac had bought her for her last birthday. It turned out to smell of pretty much everything in the world in about equal quantities, but the sensory overload was exactly what she needed.
Half an hour later she emerged, dried and dressed and trailing clouds of intense floral fragrance. She went through into the kitchen to see what she had in the fridge and the cupboards that could conceivably lie on a slice of bread and pass for a sandwich. The food court was an expense she didn’t need right now. While she was debating between peanut butter and Cheez Whiz, the phone rang again.
It was the receptionist at Carroll Way. “West Penn confirmed a case for treatment, Ms. Kendall,” she said. “They just faxed over the paperwork and it all seems to be in order. You can see Dr. Southern. All of our psychiatric referrals go to him. He comes in on Wednesdays and Fridays, and I think I can fit you in on Wednesday.”
“Great,” Liz said. “Thank you. Um … I hate to be a broken record, but what’s the situation with my policy?”
“As this is arising out of a physical trauma that was covered, you get six sessions covered too. If you carry on after that you have to pay.”
Thank you, nonexistent God! “That’s great,” Liz said. “Yes, please. Sign me up.” She ran through her week’s schedule in her mind. She had been intending to do a shift at Serve the Homeless on Wednesday, the only day when she finished early at the Cineplex, but she hadn’t been back there long enough yet for Father Connor to build her into the duty roster. She wouldn’t be letting anyone down. “You think I could get an appointment at the middle of the afternoon?”
There were a few seconds of silence, apart from the tap of an occasional key. “6:20 p.m. is the only slot I’ve got left.”
Liz didn’t hesitate. “6:20 p.m. it is, then. Thank you.”
She finished making up her lunch and headed out for the Cineplex. Wednesday afternoon seemed like it was a long way away. The best thing to do until then was to put aside all thoughts of this and bury herself in the ordinary and the everyday. She felt a certain amount of trepidation—even dread—at the thought of describing what had just happened to a stranger. But mostly it would come as a relief. Saying it out loud would turn it into someone else’s problem. Dr. Southern would tell her how to make it go away.