Matchbox Girls (9 page)

After a few moments, she realized she’d bunched a towel up against her face because she was sobbing and she didn’t want the twins to know.

Unsteadily, she stood up and ran the faucet to splash water on her face. Then she twisted and began to inspect her injury. It seemed half-healed already, but the blood that had run down her arm was crusted into the edges of the wound. Cleaning the actual injury seemed impossible without assistance and a commitment to potentially re-opening the wound, so she settled for just cleaning the rest of her arm. Then she stuck four strip bandages over the strangely scabbed area, so it didn’t look quite so hideous.

When she was done, she felt a bit better. The state of the injury itself linked to a whole sea of questions. But there’d be time to worry about those later. At least, there would be if she could avoid being shot at again.

The twins were both sitting outside the bathroom door when she opened it, staring up at her with wide, worried eyes. “Hi,” she said, and stepped over them to find some clean clothes.

“Don’t send us away!” burst Kari. “We’ll be really, really good.”

Marley paused in the process of buttoning up her shirt. “Why do you think I’m sending you away?”

“You packed up all our stuff!”

Marley glanced over at the couch. So she had. “All of us are going. Together.” But the expressions on both little faces remained dubious.

Marley sighed and sat down on her bed. “Come here and sit beside me; I want to tell you a little story.” When they were snuggled up next to her, she went on. “When I was a baby, my first mommy decided she didn’t want me. So she left me at a hospital, and I got a new mommy, and a daddy, too. My new mommy loved me very much, but I was always worried she was going to give me away, especially if I misbehaved. But she never ever did. Whenever I was difficult, she just gave me a hug, like this, and told me how lucky she felt that she got to be my mommy. Just like my new mommy wouldn’t send me away, no matter what I did, I’m not going to send you away, or go away from you. We’re going to go find Zachariah together.” She looked between their faces, hoping they had followed at least the essential point.

Kari said, “Where’s your second mommy now?”

“She lives south of here. It’s a bit of a drive, but whenever I want to go home, I can.”

Lissa said, “Why did your first mommy not want you?”

Marley flinched inwardly, but her voice was calm as she said, “Nobody knows. Most likely she couldn’t take care of me very well and wanted me to have a better life.” She ignored the child’s voice raging inside:
She could have done it through proper channels, she didn’t have to just abandon me.

Both twins were quiet, absorbing the story. Marley hugged them again and stood up to pack her own bag. She didn’t know where she was going, but she knew she couldn’t stay in the apartment, waiting for her mysterious enemies to come to her. The pair of women had been moving toward her home from the park.

She stole a glance at the children while she unzipped a backpack. Kari was quietly repeating the story to her doll, changing it so it was the doll who never left her. Lissa was watching Marley with a solemn, thoughtful gaze.

Marley hoped that the kids would never experience as much of the angst-filled side of adoption as she had. When she’d been nine, an unexpected baby brother had joined the family in the traditional way. By the time she was twelve, she and her parents had become aware of all the ways that her brother’s heredity made him like her parents. In comparison, all the ways she was different stood out as they never had before.

Her mother, a screenwriter, and her father, an effects programmer, could share their love of stories with her, but they couldn’t teach her extroversion, or not to worry so much. They taught her to be practical, but they couldn't teach her to be cheerful. They couldn't teach her to be
tall
. She was just so different, and she'd realized it right around the time puberty hit and made things
really
complicated.

She’d always known she was adopted; the evidence of the fostering process was too omnipresent in her very young childhood to just ignore. The story she’d told the twins was one, with some wording changes, that her parents had told her. Her parents had been quicker to assume the best of intentions on her birth mother’s part. But by thirteen, Marley no longer believed them. Heredity clearly influenced a lot, at least as much as upbringing. Her brother was her mother and father mixed together! And she was—what was she?

No matter what anybody told her, teenage eyes could see The Truth. Anybody who gave a baby up for adoption was wicked in the eyes of society. Adopting parents were heroes, but those who gave their children up were poor, which meant lazy, or unready for a child, which meant irresponsible—and they were almost certainly sexually active without being married, which was the most basic definition of a bad girl.

Her adolescence had been a battlefield. She was so intent on proving that she'd been born unlovable that if it had just been her versus her parents, she probably would have succeeded in wrecking her life. But fortunately, she'd had Branwyn, and later Penny, to help stabilize her. They’d proved, over and over again, that some people thought she was worth caring about, even people who hadn’t invested as much as her parents.

As she’d grown up and failed to convince her parents to reject her, the battlefield had faded away. Didn’t they all? And as the tempers of adolescence cooled, she realized and accepted that nothing could convince the woman who had raised her to stop being her mother. But that didn’t heal the wounds inside, scraped raw by constant teenage worrying at the question of her birth, and worrying at the truth of what she’d inherited from her genetic parents. It simply made her adopted parents saints.

Guilt twisted inside her. She didn’t visit them enough. When her parents came to visit her, she had a good time, able to appreciate her family as she couldn’t ten years ago. But the old house was the site of too many fights, and too many tantrums she hadn’t yet forgiven herself for. They laughed about the new kitchen in the old house, which replaced the one she'd set on fire. But she couldn't laugh. Maybe if she'd been theirs biologically...

She shook her head, shook away the bad habits that clustered around her like flies. As she’d told the twins, she could go home anytime she wanted. But that wouldn’t be today, especially not with who-knew-what after her.

Lissa suddenly asked, “Are we taking the kitty?”

Marley blinked. “Absolutely,” she said. “Thank you for reminding me.” Between the threatened evacuations from the wildfires, and the bad guys, she had no idea when or if she’d be able to get back. She wasn't leaving
anybody
behind.

She looked around her apartment, searching out the cardboard cat carrier, and realized that, as Lissa had inadvertently pointed out, there was more to leaving than just responding to an initial instinct. She thought it was dangerous to remain at the apartment, and she wasn’t the only one who lived there.

She’d have to talk to Branwyn. She thought about it a bit more. At least it gave her a short-term plan more focused than “running away.”

It took longer than she liked to load the children and the cat, along with supplies for a few days, into the car. The girls were obedient, but too helpful, and the cat... a small cat can get places one would rather not stick one’s arm. Marley did her best not to think about it.

After the kids were strapped in, she moved around the outside of the car, studying the tires and wondering how to tell if the vehicle had been sabotaged somehow. She felt the old familiar anxiety rise up, and hard on its heels came a realization: the medication had burned out of her system.

Her thoughts were sharper and more focused than they’d been for a year or more. How had that happened?

But she had no time to worry about it, because the kaleidoscope sight fractured her vision again. Neighbors walking through the parking lot rippled with a half-dozen variations on themselves, all wounded or scarred. But the twins, looking out the back window at her, were unchanged, without refractions.

The sight calmed her. The anxiety vanished before it could become a full panic attack, and the kaleidoscope vision vanished with it.

Marley let out her breath. Then she got into the car and started it up, quickly, before the anxiety could resurface. Without medication, the world seemed like it was sustained by madness. Ordinary people got through life by believing in an illusion: that life was safe; that
it
, whatever
it
was, couldn’t happen to them. But to someone, somewhere, it did. It
could
be her or her loved ones. And there was nothing she could do about it. Oh, there were sensible precautions that anyone might take. But anybody who really thought about the randomness of the world would build a bunker, or else eventually go insane. And nobody seemed to want to hide in a bunker.

They’d shot at her.

And then they’d gone away.

Marley shifted in her seat as she nudged the car into the beginnings of rush hour traffic. The kids were playing quietly with their dolls in the back seat, while Neath curled up tight in the cat carrier in the passenger seat footwell.

Her gaze went back to the kids. She didn’t want to think about what else had happened at the park, but it kept intruding on her thoughts. That light, and the terrible expression on Lissa’s face. The voice, and the empty clothes after the light faded. Where had the women gone?

She forced her thoughts away. Stuck in traffic wasn’t the time to try to understand what had happened, or ponder her brain’s health. Instead, she turned up the radio and listened for news of the wildfire, and for the traffic report.

She listened to the list of road closures as the traffic crept forward. Then, as the DJ went on to talk about some celebrity news in much more detail than he'd given to the natural disaster, Marley noticed a white minivan two lanes over.

Panic exploded through her. She couldn’t see the driver or the plates but it didn’t matter. It
could
be them, and here she was, trapped in traffic. She couldn’t go forward or backward; she couldn’t even change lanes.

It took every bit of willpower she had to not unbuckle her seatbelt and fling herself out of the car.

She hunched over her steering wheel as her breathing got faster and the traffic crept forward. She let the car coast forward a few yards. Her breath rasped and the panic slipped out of control again. What was she doing in a car? She was stuck in a tin can on an assembly line of death. They all were, and nobody could get out.

The kaleidoscope vision returned. Instantly, the clogged freeway became a panorama of catastrophe. Every car she could see was wreathed in a dozen possible disasters of flame and twisted metal and half-glimpsed body parts. Even the loud radio seemed to merge into the hallucination, with guitars screaming like tortured souls.

Marley sobbed, pressing her head against the steering wheel. Even with her eyes closed, the image of the worst pile-up imaginable wouldn’t leave her. So many people, so many possible bad choices. How did anybody survive?

The blast of horns around her cut through her misery and she realized space had opened up before her. Squinting through her eyelashes, as if that could drive away the kaleidoscope vision, she let the car creep forward again. She stared at the road. She couldn’t get out, or go back, or get off the highway. All she could do was go forward. The kaleidoscope vision flickered off and on erratically. What was wrong with her?

She was at the heart of the traffic jam now. A patrol car was on the shoulder, behind a long, sleek black sports car. The officer and the sports car driver were both standing between the two vehicles.

And it was all wrong. The officer was rigid, while the other man was relaxed and confident. He had one hand on the officer’s shoulder, in a friendly sort of way, and he was speaking. There was a maelstrom of disaster wreathing the officer, but it wasn’t nearly as awful as his expression. The twisted horror on the officer's face was so vivid that it shocked Marley out of her panic.

Then she saw the other man through her kaleidoscope vision, and a jolt of terror brought the panic back again. Instead of a rotation of variations, there was only a vortex, a spiral of oblivion. A gaunt framework of bone wings sprouted from his back, reaching forward to enclose the officer lovingly. The form of the man himself seemed like a paper mask pinned over something all the worse because she couldn’t see it. Whatever its appearance, it was a monster.

Her knuckles turned white on the wheel. Like an animal scenting prey, the monster turned his head toward her car, pausing in his speech. He met her eyes. And he smiled, showing lots of teeth.

Her hands dropped into her lap, boneless.
Poor mad thing
, said a voice that was brother to the voice at the park.
If you come to me, I’ll make it all go away.

Marley couldn’t help herself. For a moment, she imagined peace. Then, in the rearview mirror, she realized the twins were staring at her.

Something white-hot blazed through her. She would not allow anything to happen to them! She had to protect them; nobody else could. It was a rock-hard certainty, backed up by her visions of destruction and death. Only with her were they safe. If that was madness, she couldn’t fight it. She could only go forward.

She forced the kaleidoscope—the catastrophe vision, as she was starting to think of it—away through sheer willpower. The highway went back to normal, and once again, the driver on the side of the road seemed like an ordinary man. Except that he was still looking at her, a faint smile on his face.

Traffic moved again as the people ahead stopped gawking. She raised her middle finger at the monster as she drove by. He winked back at her.

Ahead of her, the freeway opened up.

-eleven-

B
ranwyn worked at a large garage, fulfilling the paint and body shop jobs. When Marley pulled into the parking lot, she noticed that the place wasn't as busy as it'd been on previous visits. The promise of ash pouring from the sky did not encourage new paint jobs. All the same, she parked on the far side of the main building, out of sight of the street. Then she grabbed the cat carrier and shepherded the children into the office.