The Evolution of Mara Dyer

8

NOAH SPOKE TO MY FATHER, BUT HIS WORDS were meant for me.

An unsubtle reminder of what he did for me after what I did to my father, and it stung. Everyone kept talking but I stopped listening, until my mother pulled me aside.

“Mara, can I speak to you for a second?”

I cleared my throat. “Sure.”

“You guys figure out what you want for dinner,” she called out, then led me down the long hallway into my room.

We walked by our own smiling faces on the wall, past the gallery of family pictures. When I passed my grandmother’s portrait, I couldn’t help but look at it with new eyes.

“I want to talk to you about Noah,” my mother said once we were in my room.

Stay cool. “What’s up?” I asked, and slid onto my bed until my back leaned against the navy wall. Despite everything, I felt oddly relaxed in my room. More like myself in the dark.

“He’s been spending a lot of time here, which I know you know, but also after you were—gone.”

Gone. So that’s how we were going to refer to it.

“Noah’s become one of Daniel’s close friends, and he’s great with Joseph, too, actually, but I also know you’re . . . together . . . and I have some concerns.”

She wasn’t the only one. Noah came to the hospital today because he knew about Jude. He knew I was in trouble. He came because I needed him.

But was he there because he wanted to be? I didn’t know yet, and part of me was afraid to find out.

“I’m nervous,” my mother continued. “With all of the pressure you’re already under—I’d like to speak to Noah about your . . . situation.”

My face flushed with color. Couldn’t be helped.

“I wanted to ask your permission.”

A conundrum. If I said no, she might not let me see him. He was the only person on the planet who knew the truth, so being cut off from that—from him—was not an uplifting prospect. And if she didn’t let me see him, and he still wanted to see me after we had the chance to actually talk, sneaking around would be tough.

But my mother talking to Noah? About my precarious mental health? I could almost feel myself shrinking.

My fingers curled into my fluffy white quilt but I don’t think she noticed. “I guess,” I finally said.

My mother nodded. “We all like him, Mara. I just want to set some parameters for you both.”

“Sure . . .” My voice trailed off as my mother left and I waited in near-agony. Words like “schizotypal disorder” and “antipsychotics” would surely come up. Any sane boy would surely run.

But after a few minutes, I realized that I could still hear my mother’s voice—were they talking in Joseph’s room? It was only two rooms away. . . .

I stood, and leaned out of my doorway and into the hall to listen.

“Are you sure about this?”

Not my mother’s voice. My father’s.

“I’d rather them both be here where we can watch them; his parents are in and out all next week, and there’s no supervision there anyway—”

My mother wasn’t talking to Noah—she was talking to my father, about Noah. I edged out farther into the hall and slipped into my brothers’ bathroom—right next door to Joseph’s room—so I could eavesdrop properly.

“What if they break up, Indi?”

“We have bigger problems,” my mother said bitterly.

“I just don’t like thinking about what something like that would do to her. Mara’s really—she scares me sometimes,” Dad finished.

“You think she doesn’t scare me?”

Maybe I didn’t want to hear this conversation after all. In fact, I was becoming rather certain that I didn’t, but I appeared to be rooted to the spot.

My mother raised her voice. “After watching what my mother went through? This scares the hell out of me. I am terrified for her. My mother was mostly functional, thank God, but if we knew then what we know about mental illness now? Maybe I would’ve realized it was more serious before it was too late—”

“Indi—”

“Maybe I could have gotten her the help she needed and she could have had a more fulfilling life—she was so alone, Marcus. I mostly thought she was eccentric, not delusional.”

“You couldn’t know,” my father said softly. “You were just a kid.”

“Not always. I wasn’t always a kid. I—” My mother’s voice cracked. “I was too close to see it—that there was something really wrong. And the one time I said something to her about talking to someone? She just—she just shifted. She was so much more careful around me after that; I wanted to think—I wanted to think she was getting better but I was too preoccupied with my own—in college, sometimes I went months without hearing from her, and I didn’t—”

A long pause. My mom was crying. My insides curled up.

After a minute, she spoke again. “Anyway,” she said, quieter now, “this is about Mara. And it’s scary, yes, but we can’t act like she’s an ordinary teenager anymore. The same rules don’t apply. I didn’t—I didn’t see the Jude thing coming.”

My shoulder was pressed against the bathroom wall and it began to hurt, but I found I couldn’t move.

“She’s a complicated—she’s complicated,” my mother finally said.

She’s a complicated case was what she almost said.

“And you really think Noah being here, you think that’s helpful?”

“I don’t know.” My mother’s voice was stretched and thin. “But I think trying to keep them apart will only create a unit: them versus us. She’ll run in the opposite direction.”

True.

“And if Noah’s here, then Mara will want to be here, and that will make her easier to watch.”

Also true, unfortunately.

“She’s not in school anymore, she doesn’t have any friends here that I’ve met—it’s not normal, Marcus. But it is normal for a teenage girl to want a boyfriend. Which means that right now, Noah’s the most normal thing in her life.”

Little did they know.

“She’s comfortable around him. He pulled her right out of that depression on her birthday—I think he helps keep her in the here and now, and we need her to stay there. My mother was so isolated.” Her voice cracked on the word, and there was another long pause. “I don’t want that for her. It’s good for her to have someone her own age who she can talk to about things.”

“I wish she had someone female,” my father mumbled.

“He won’t take advantage.”

Oh, really?

“I’ve talked to him,” Mom added.

Kill me.

“Come on, he’s a teenage boy. I just don’t see what he’s getting out of this—”

Thanks, Dad.

“Mara isn’t really allowed out, they won’t be together at school—”

My mother interrupted him. “If you expect the worst from people, that’s exactly what you’ll get.”

“I wonder what his family thinks about him spending so much time here.” A diplomatic change of subject. Well played.

Mom made a derisive noise. “I doubt they’ve noticed; they’re a mess. His father is some kind of business mogul and from what Noah’s said, he sounds like a raging asshole. The stepmother is always out because she can’t deal with it. The kids basically raised themselves.”

I’d met Noah’s stepmom—and she seemed nice. Like she cared. Noah’s father, on the other hand . . .

“Wait—a business mogul—not David Shaw?”

“I didn’t ask his name.”

“It must be,” my father said, and let out a low whistle. “I’ll be damned.”

This I wanted to hear.

“You know him?”

“Know of him. There were some federal indictments handed down a year ago for the executives of one of his megacorporation’s subsidiaries—Aurora Biotech? Euphrates International, maybe? There are dozens, I don’t remember which.”

“Maybe he needs a white-collar defense lawyer?”

“Har har.”

“It would be safer.”

“That depends.” Dad’s voice was louder now. He must have opened Joseph’s bedroom door to leave.

“On?”

“Who you’re getting into bed with,” he answered, and left the room.