The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer - Hodkin Michelle - Страница 58

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Noah’s face was drawn and pale. He leaned his head into his hand and rubbed it, then ran his fingers back through his hair, making it stand on end. Then he looked up at me. “And then in December, I heard you.”

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.’ “

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