The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

  The blood drained from my face.

  “I recognized your voice on your first day at school. I was giddy at the impossibility of it. I thought I was going insane, imagining sick and dying people and feeling it, feeling an echo of what they must have felt. And then you showed up, with the voice from my nightmare, and you called me an ass,” Noah said, smiling faintly.

  “I asked Daniel about you, and he told me, vaguely, what had happened before you moved here. I assumed that’s what I saw. Or dreamed. But I thought if—I don’t know. I thought if I knew you, I might be able to understand what was happening to me. That was before Joseph, obviously.”

  My mouth felt like it was filled with sand. “Joseph?” That wasn’t real.

  “A couple of weeks ago, in the restaurant, I had a—a vision, I suppose,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “Of a document, a deed from the Collier County archives.” Noah shook his head slowly. “Someone—a man wearing a Rolex—was pulling files, photocopying, and he lingered on that document. I saw it like I was the one looking straight at it,” he said, inhaling deeply. “It had a property address, a location. And when I saw it, I got a screaming headache, which is typical. I just couldn’t stand all the sounds. So I left you until it passed.” Noah raked his fingers through his hair. “A couple of days later, when I got home from school, I passed out. For hours—I was just gone. When I woke up, I felt high. And I saw Joseph asleep on the cement, before someone closed a door. And whoever it was wore the same watch.”

  I sat still, my feet tucked underneath me, growing numb as Noah went on.

  “I didn’t know if it was real or if I’d dreamed it, but after what happened to you, I thought it might actually be happening. In real time. Looking back, with the others, I’d always seen some indication of where they were—which hospital, which road. But I never realized it was real.” Noah’s eyes fell to the floor. Then he closed them. He sounded so tired. “And so with Joseph, I took you with me—just in case I passed out again, or something else.” His jaw tightened. “When it turned out that he was there, how could I explain that to you? I thought I was mad.” He paused. “I thought I took him.”

  I heard an echo of Noah’s voice from that night. “Do whatever you have to do to wake Joseph.”

  He said that before we even saw him.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  “I wanted to tell you the truth—about me, about this—before he was even taken. But then when he was, I didn’t know what to say. I honestly I thought I was responsible somehow. That maybe I was the one hurting everyone I’d seen, and repressed the memories … or something. But then whose headlights were those in the Everglades? And why would they pull into the drive by the shed?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. It made no sense. I’d thought I was crazy, but realized I wasn’t. I thought Joseph’s kidnapping wasn’t real, but it was.

  “I didn’t take him,” Noah said. His voice was clear. Strong. But his intense stare was still fixed on the wall. Not on me.

  I believed him, but asked, “So who did?”

  For the first time since Noah started speaking, he turned to me.

  “We’ll find out,” he said.

  I tried to assemble all of this information into something that made sense. “So Joseph never texted you,” I said. My heart beat faster.

  Noah shook his head, but flashed the barest suggestion of a smile at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I can hear that,” Noah said.

  I stared at him, bewildered.

  “You,” he said quietly. “Your heartbeat. Your pulse. Your breath. All of you.”

  My pulse rioted, and Noah’s smile broadened.

  “You have your own sound. Everything does; animals, people. I can hear all of it. When something, or someone’s hurt, or exhausted, or whatever—I can tell. And I think— fuck.” Noah lowered his head and tugged on his hair. “So, this is going to sound mad. But I think maybe I can fix them,” he said, without looking up. But then he did, and his eyes fell on my arm. On my shoulder.

  Impossible.

  “When you asked why I smoke, I told you I’ve never been ill. It’s true—and when I’ve gotten into rows, I hurt for a while and then—nothing. No pain. It’s over.”

  I looked at him, disbelieving. “Are you saying that you can—”

  “How’s your shoulder, Mara?”

  I had no words.

  “You’d be in quite a lot of pain right now, even once it was back in its socket. And your arm?” Noah said, taking my hand and extending it. He traced his finger down from the indent of my elbow to my wrist. “You’d still be blistering, and probably starting to scar,” he said, his eyes roaming over my unbroken skin. Then they met mine.

  “Who told you about my arm?” I asked. My voice sounded far away.

  “No one told me. No one needed to. Mabel was dying when you brought her to me. She was so far gone, my mother didn’t think she’d survive the night. I stayed at the hospital with her and I don’t know, I held her. And heard her heal.”

  “It makes no sense,” I said, staring at him.

  “I know.”

  “You are telling me that somehow, you’ve seen a handful of people who were about to die. You could feel an echo of what they felt. And that whenever my heart—or anyone else’s— races, you can hear that.”

  “I know.”

  “And somehow, you can hear what’s broken in people, or what’s wrong, and fix it.”

  “I know.”

  “While the only thing I’m capable of is—” Murder. I could barely think it.

  “You had visions as well, no? Saw things?” Noah’s eyes studied mine.

  I shook my head. “Hallucinations. Nothing was real except the nightmares, the memories.”

  Noah paused for a beat. “How do you know?”

  I thought back to every hallucination I had. The classroom walls. Jude and Claire in the mirror. The earrings in the bathtub. None of them had actually happened. And the events I thought didn’t happen—the way I’d excused Morales’s death and the death of Mabel’s owner—did.

  I did have PTSD. That was real. But what had happened, what I did, what I could do, was also real.

  “I just know,” I said, and left it at that.

  We stared at each other, not laughing, not smiling. Just looking; Noah serious, myself incredulous, until I was seized by a thought so potent and so urgent that I wanted to scream it.

  “Fix me,” I commanded him. “This thing, what I’ve done— there’s something wrong with me, Noah. Fix it.”

  Noah’s expression broke my heart as he brushed my hair from my face, and skimmed the line of my neck. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” I asked, my voice threatening to crack.

  Noah lifted both of his hands to my face, and held it. “Because,” he said, “you aren’t broken.”

  I sat perfectly still, breathing slowly through my nose. Any sound would shatter me. I closed my eyes to stop myself from crying, but the tears welled anyway.

  “So,” I said as my throat constricted.

  “So.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Seems that way,” Noah said. A tear trickled onto his thumb, but he didn’t move his hands.

  “What are the odds of—”

  “Highly unfavorable,” Noah cut me off.

  I smiled under his fingers. They were painfully real. I was so aware of him, of us, lost and confused and with no new understanding of what was happening or why.

  But we weren’t alone.

  Noah moved closer and kissed my forehead. His expression was calm. No, more than that. It was peaceful.

  “You must be starving. Let me get you something from the kitchen.”

  I nodded, and Noah stood to leave. When he opened my bedroom door, I spoke.

  “Noah?”

  He turned.

  “When you heard me before—before I moved here. What did I say?”

  Noah’s face grew somber.” ‘
Get them out.’ “

  52

  I MUST SAY, I THINK I RATHER LIKE THIS SLEEPING arrangement.”

  I didn’t think I would ever tire of hearing Noah’s voice in the nether darkness of my bedroom. The weight of him in my bed was unfamiliar and thrilling. He leaned against two of my pillows and had me curled into his side, sharing my blanket. My head rested on his shoulder, my cheek on his chest. His heartbeat was steady. Mine was insane. I think I knew that it wasn’t safe for him here. With me. But I couldn’t bring myself to pull away.

  “How did you work this out, anyway?” I still hadn’t left my room or seen my mother since she’d been in to check on me earlier that afternoon, before Noah’s confession. Before my confession. I wondered how we were getting away with this.

  “Well, technically, I’m sleeping in Daniel’s room right now.”

  “Right now?”

  “As we speak,” Noah said, curving his arm around my back. It rested just below the hem of my shirt. “Your mother didn’t want me driving home so late.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  I leaned up to see his face. It was thoughtful, serious, as he stared at my ceiling. “Whether you’ll be here tomorrow?” I kept my voice even. I knew by now that Noah didn’t play games. That if he was going to leave, he would leave, and be honest about it. But I hoped that wasn’t what he was going to say.

  He smiled softly. “What happens to us tomorrow. Now that we know we’re not insane.”

  It was the ultimate question, one that haunted me since last week, since I remembered. What was next? Was I supposed to do something with it? Try to ignore it? Try to stop it? Did I even have a choice? It was too much to deal with. My heart beat wildly in my chest.

  “What are you thinking?” Noah shifted on to his side and tightened his grip on my back, pressing me into him, aligning us perfectly.

  “What?” I whispered as my thoughts dissolved.

  Noah shifted closer and tilted his head as if he was going to whisper something to me. His nose skimmed my jaw instead, until his lips found the hollow beneath my ear.

  “Your heart started racing,” he said, tracing the line of my neck to my collarbone with his lips.

  “I don’t remember,” I said, consumed now with the feel of Noah’s hand through the thin fabric of my pants. He slid his hand up behind my knee. My thigh. He tilted his face up to look at me, a wicked smile on his lips.

  “Mara, if you’re tired, I can hear it. If you’re hurt, I can feel it. And if you lie, I will know it.”

  I closed my eyes, just now beginning to fully realize what Noah’s ability meant. Every reaction I had—every reaction I had to him—he would know. And not just mine— everyone’s.

  “I love not having to hide it from you,” Noah said, hooking his finger under the collar of my shirt. He pulled the fabric to the side and kissed the bare skin of my shoulder.

  I pushed him back slightly so I could see his face. “How do you deal with it?”

  He looked confused.

  “Hearing and feeling everyone’s physical reactions around you constantly. Don’t you go crazy?”

  If he didn’t, I certainly would, knowing that as long as I was near him, I had no secrets.

  Noah’s eyebrows drew together. “It just becomes background noise, mostly. Until I focus on one person in particular.” His finger grazed my knee, and he drew it up the side of my leg, over my hip, and my pulse raced in response.

  I smiled. “Stop it,” I said, and pushed his hand away. He grinned broadly. “You were saying?”

  “I can hear everything—everyone—but I can’t feel them. Only the four I told you about, and only when they—you— were injured. You were the first one I met, actually, then Joseph. I saw you, where you were, and felt a reflection, I think, of what you both were feeling.”

  “But there are a lot of injured people out there.” I stared at him. “Why us?

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  A smile turned up the corner of Noah’s mouth as he traced mine with his thumb. “I can think of a few things.”

  I grinned. “That won’t help me,” I said. And as I said it, a wave of déjà vu rolled through me. I saw myself clenching a glass bottle in a dusty shop in Little Havana.

  “I’m confused,” I said to Mr. Lukumi. “I need help.”

  “That won’t help you,” he said, looking at my fist.

  But he had helped me remember then.

  Maybe he could help me now.

  I was on my feet in an instant. “We have to go back to the botanica,” I said, darting to my dresser.

  Noah gave me a sideways glance. “It’s well after midnight. There won’t be anyone there now.” His eyes studied mine. “And anyway, are you even sure you want to go back? That priest wasn’t particularly pleasant the first time around.”

  I remembered Mr. Lukumi’s face, the way he seemed to know me, and grew frantic.

  “Noah,” I said, rounding on him. “He knows. That man— the priest—he knows about me. He knows. That’s why what he did worked.”

  Noah raised an eyebrow. “But you said it didn’t work.”

  “I was wrong.” My voice sounded strange, and the quiet room swallowed my words. “We have to go back there.” Gooseflesh pebbled my arms.

  Noah came over to where I stood, pulled me close, and stroked my hair until my breathing slowed, watching my eyes as I calmed down. My arms hung limp at my sides.

  “Isn’t it possible that you would have remembered that night anyway?” he asked quietly.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you have a better idea, let’s hear it.”

  Noah took my hand and laced his fingers in mine. “All right,” he said, as he led me back to bed. “You win.”

  But it felt, somehow, like I had already lost.

  53

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE UP NEXT TO Noah.

  With my arm draped over his waist, I felt his ribs move under the thin fabric of his T-shirt as he breathed. It was the first time I’d ever seen him like this— the first time I could study him unhindered. The swell of his biceps under his sleeve. The few curls of hair that peeked out from the ripped collar of his abused shirt. The necklace he always wore had slipped out during the night. I looked closely at it for the first time; the pendant was just a slim line of silver— half of it hammered into the shape of a feather, the other half a dagger. It was interesting and beautiful, just like him.

  My eyes continued to wander over the inhumanly perfect boy in my bed. One of his hands was clenched in a fist next to his face. A sliver of soft light illuminated the strands of his dark, tousled hair, making them glow gold. I breathed him in, the scent of his skin mingling with my shampoo.

  I wanted to kiss him.

  I wanted to kiss the small constellation of freckles on his neck, hiding next to his hairline. To feel the sting of his rough jaw under my lips, the petal-soft skin of his eyelids under my fingertips. Then Noah let out a soft sigh.

  I was drunk with happiness, intoxicated by him. I felt a stab of pity for Anna and for all the girls who may or may not have come before, and what they lost. And that birthed the follow-up thought of just how much it would hurt me to lose him, too. His presence blunted the edges of my madness, and it was almost enough to make me forget what I’d done.

  Almost.

  I slid my hand down to Noah’s and squeezed it. “Good morning,” I whispered.

  He stirred. “Mmmm,” he murmured, then half-smiled with his eyes closed. “It is.”

  “We have to go,” I said, wishing we didn’t, “before my mother finds you in here.”

  Noah rolled over and leaned on his forearms above me, not touching for one second, two, three. My heart raced, Noah smiled, then slipped out of my bed and out of my room. We met up in the kitchen, once I was dressed and brushed and generally presentable. Sandwiched between Daniel and Joseph, Noah grinned at me over a cup of coffee. br />
  “Mara!” My mother’s eyes went wide when she saw me standing, and dressed, in the kitchen. She quickly composed herself. “Can I get you anything?”

  Noah gave me a surreptitious nod of his head.

  “Um, sure,” I said. “How about” —my eyes scanned the kitchen counter— “a bagel?”

  My mother grinned and took one from the plate, popping it into the toaster. I sat down at the table across from the three boys. Everyone seemed to be pretending I hadn’t sequestered myself in my bedroom for the past few days, and that was fine with me.

  “So, school today?” my mother asked.

  Noah nodded. “I thought I’d drive Mara,” he said to Daniel. “If that’s all right.”

  My eyebrows knit together, but Noah shot me a look. Under the table, his hand found mine. I stayed quiet.

  Daniel stood and smiled, walking over to the sink with his bowl. “Fine with me. This way, I won’t be late.”

  I rolled my eyes. My mother slid a plate over to me, and I ate quietly next to her and Joseph and Noah, who were talking about going to the zoo this weekend. Their bright moods were palpable in the kitchen that morning, and I felt love and guilt swell in my chest. The love was obvious. The guilt was for what I’d put them through. What I might still put them through, if I didn’t figure out my problem. But I pushed that thought away, kissed my mother on the cheek, and made my way to the front door.

  “Ready?” Noah asked.

  I nodded, even though I wasn’t.

  “Where are we really going?” I asked as Noah drove, knowing full well that it couldn’t be school. It wasn’t safe there for me. Because I wasn’t safe around anyone else.

  “1821 Calle Ocho,” Noah said. “You wanted to go back to the botanica, didn’t you?”

  “Daniel’s going to notice we’re not in school.”

  Noah shrugged. “I’ll tell him you needed a day off. He won’t say anything.”

  I hoped Noah was right.

  Little Havana had somehow become our familiar haunt, but nothing about it was familiar today. Crowds of people surged through the streets, waving flags in time to the drum-beat of the music blaring from an unidentified source. Calle Ocho was closed to traffic, so we had to walk.