Another icy smile. “Yeah. She killed him. But not before cutting out his eye. While he was still alive.”
Got me there. I try not to show it, not to betray that her words cut me off midbreath.
“And she didn’t just murder Dr. Kells. She butchered her.”
“All of you were prisoners, test subjects. Mara got you out of there.”
“She did, but not before locking herself in a room with Kells and cutting her into a thousand pieces.”
“A bit dramatic—”
“With a scalpel. That she still has.”
That’s . . . indisputably disturbing.
She throws me a knowing look. “Oh, she left that part out?”
“Are you actually saying that you think Mara’s responsible for people she doesn’t even know committing suicide?”
Stella says nothing.
“What’ve you told Leo about her? Your friends?”
She lets out a puff of laughter. “That’s what you’re worried about? What I’ve told them about her?”
I’m feeling ill, light-headed, and not remotely about to admit that Stella is right about anything, any of this. Mara had no reason to want strangers dead—she wanted to find out about Sam as much, if not more, than I did. I stop playing defence, start playing offence.
“If Mara hadn’t killed Kells, and Wayne, you’d probably still be there, or dead. And,” I add, as Stella opens her mouth to speak, “despite all this, you still escaped with her and Jamie. And stayed with them for quite a while.
“I did stay. Until I couldn’t anymore.”
I already know I don’t want to hear why. “You were fucked with, abused, tortured. Whatever any of you did or didn’t after, you’re not responsible for it.”
She turns on me then, the force of her almost knocks me back. “We’re responsible for everything we do. We always have a choice.”
My words, once.
“And Mara chose wrong. Every time. There was this trucker—”
“Stop.”
“A trucker picked us up. I had to go to the bathroom, so we stopped and got out and Mara came into the bathroom and I left and she came out covered—soaked—in blood and he was dead.”
And? “That’s not all of it, is it though?”
She pauses. Then, “What?”
“Come on. You don’t expect me to believe she just killed someone for using the bathroom.”
I hear, see, the blood rush to her cheeks. “He tried to—he was waiting for me.”
There it is. “In the women’s bathroom. At the rest stop.”
Silence expands like a bubble around her.
“He raped you?” I ask.
A small shake of Stella’s head, and I know. I wasn’t there to witness it, but I know.
Mara’s been through—hell. It’s the only way to describe it, how this all started.
The boy, if he can be called that, barely human as he was, started out as her boyfriend before he became her tormentor. A night out with him and her friends had ended up with her trapped in an abandoned insane asylum, after he tried to force her, nearly raped her himself—that’s how her ability first manifested. That’s how the woman who raised him, a doctor bought and paid for by my father, forced it out of her. Mara thought she’d killed him and her friends that night, but he made it clear to her—and only her—that he was still alive, tormenting her with his existence, and no one believed her but me. I was there for that bit. Every second he lived tortured her. He took her freedom and crushed it, and then Kells did the same. Mara was violated, in every way, by people she was supposed to trust—her boyfriend. Her doctor. And she was committed for it—not even her family believed her, the people she trusted more than anyone in the world.
Her parents don’t know. They thought they were helping, genuinely, and her mother would fall on her sword if she knew the truth. Mara knows that. She knows it’s not their fault. And yet.
Mara also knows she didn’t deserve what’d been done to her. But in Horizons, I saw this tiny cell of guilt—the thought that she accidentally killed her best friend—turn into shame when she believed she killed her friend to save herself. It grew every day, cancerous, threatening to eat her alive.
Maybe it finally did. I may not know everything about Mara—it seems I know less than I thought, but I know this—she would never let anyone be violated the way she’d been again. Stella might not get it, but I do.
“Mara came in. She killed him, and you got out.”
“Yes, but—”
“She saved you.”
“You weren’t there!” Her words tear at the trees, sear the air. “You didn’t see her face when she walked back to the truck. You didn’t see her expression when she decided to kill these two dumb college kids for practically nothing—”
What?
Tears begin to fall. “You don’t know about the subway. The train tracks. Jamie and Mara haven’t told you.”
“Look, Stella—”
“It wouldn’t matter to you that Jamie forced these two assholes onto the subway tracks to punish them for urinating on a homeless woman and calling him a—” She stops, and the word she doesn’t say hangs there, sick and poisonous.
“They were racist, and horrible,” Stella says, sniffs. “But they didn’t deserve to die.”
“Did they?”
“Did they what?”
“Die?”
Another head shake. “Jamie just wanted to scare them. But Mara”—she breaks into another laugh, chilled—“she was going to kill them. She kept them there, I don’t know how—their noses began to bleed and—”
The droplet of blood from Sam’s nose that ran over his lip, fell into the puddle beneath his swaying body.
A slight smear of blood on Beth’s first knuckle . . . as if she’d wiped her nose just before jumping.
The weight of everything I realise I don’t know about Mara, didn’t want to know, is suddenly too much.
“They didn’t die,” Stella says, letting out the anger she has left. “But they would have. Jamie stopped her from killing them. Otherwise—” She stops, breathing hard, wipes her eye with her wrist. “You weren’t there.”
And there it is. That bruise that won’t heal, the fracture still splintered. And she’s pressing on it. Bending it. Waiting for me to break.
I’m so tired, suddenly. A wave of exhaustion crests, pulls me down with it. I want nothing more than to leave Stella there in the park and sleep. Forever.
“You’re right, Stella,” I say casually. “I wasn’t there. And you weren’t there when she sacrificed her own life for her brother’s.” Both brothers, in fact, but I leave that bit out. “So what are you trying to say, exactly? That she’s a monster? Bringing death and destruction in her wake, wherever she goes?” The minute I say it is the minute I realise that that’s what my father had been saying about her. How he tried to persuade me to kill her.
Stella lets out a shivery breath. Her eyes flutter closed. “What I’m saying is that she’s not who you think she is. She’s changed.”
My head feels numb. I can’t do this much longer. “And you haven’t?”
“Of course, I changed too.”
I nod. “You left Mara and Jamie—”
“And Daniel,” she adds.
“But now here you are, fetched up in Brooklyn after abandoning them—”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“But you’re lecturing me about Mara, who’s given more of herself for the people she loves than you will ever know.”
The transformation is instant. Her face hardens, and she takes a step back, crunching dead leaves. “How much, Noah?”
“What?”
“How much of herself has Mara given up?”
When I don’t answer, Stella says, “You don’t know what she’s given up either.” She’s the one to turn around first, to start walking away. But she tosses one look, one sentence, at me as she leaves.
“But you will.”
23
TENDER MERCIES
WHEN SOMEONE IS HIDING A secret in a house, something changes in the air. Unspoken words, half-finished smiles, eggshell steps—they distort reality, they muffle truth.