Marked Read online

  “I was too preoccupied with what I was doing,” I said, which wasn’t really a lie.

  * * *

  —

  THE gun went into evidence, so the lab guys could lift fingerprints and do ballistics tests to tie it to the murder. I spent the rest of the day thinking of “Roscoe Kendal” and how I had just completely screwed the case against him. I had planted evidence, however inadvertently. All because my emotions ran away with me, and I didn’t give myself the time . . . in the many varied senses of the term.

  It was a joke. I was a joke.

  I got hit with just one case that struck too close to home, and I had pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a cop. Dad must be real proud of me right now.

  Worse, I had allowed Jacob to book the gun into evidence. I had been given a chance to own up to everything, and I hadn’t been able to say anything. Not that I could admit to it in a way that didn’t make me sound insane. If we caught up with Kendal now, and with him the real murder weapon, there’d be no sane way to explain it. No possible explanation I could come up with would adequately account for the two guns.

  By keeping quiet, I was just delaying the inevitable. No one might realize it yet, but my secret was blown. Things would fall apart as soon as they found Kendal.

  I’m sorry, Dad . . . I fucked up.

  I sat at my desk, the day’s report barely started on the monitor. I took out my badge and stared at it.

  Ever since Mom’s funeral, I had been interrogating myself, asking why I never told her about the Mark. As guilty as I was about failing Dad that way, I had just been just a teenager then. When he had been shot, I’d had only two months to mentally process what the Mark had done to me. I had been still questioning my sanity at the time.

  At first, I hadn’t told Mom because I didn’t want to admit to that guilt—that I’d kept the nature of the Mark from Dad. And mixed in with the secrecy was the awful suspicion that I could have prevented his death. If I had just gone to a possible future to see what might have happened . . .

  Over time, those adolescent fears gave way to a more mature guilt. I continued to hide this thing, not because of the thing itself, but because I didn’t want to admit that I’d been hiding anything.

  And since I’d become a cop, there was another reason I didn’t tell Mom, or anyone else. I was a fraud. I was playacting at being a cop. For all my stellar conviction rate, when I was confronting suspects away from any possible consequences, I was no better than a vigilante. I had cut so many corners off my job, there was nothing left.

  There had been no reason to go after Kendal when I did. I’d only jumped when I did because I’d become too emotionally involved. I hadn’t thought about what I was doing. I hadn’t acted like a cop.

  Not Dirty Harry, more Death Wish.

  I couldn’t help thinking that both my parents would be appalled at what I was doing. I could see this all confirming some secret fear they must have had, that there was something not quite right about their adopted daughter.

  Staring at my badge, I muttered, “Why?”

  “Why what?” Jacob’s voice interrupted my thoughts, and his hand came into view placing a Styrofoam cup of steaming black coffee on my desk, next to the keyboard where I wasn’t typing my report. I turned around, and it felt surreal seeing his face unmoved by the tide of emotion I felt. It was silly, but my own angst felt so deep I almost expected people to join in simply due to my proximity.

  I looked up and smiled because it was a relief to think maybe he was having a good day. “Why am I a cop?” I said.

  A bit of a cloud crossed his face. It was obviously not an answer he expected. I froze, because it wasn’t quite the answer I had expected. I didn’t realize how close my thoughts were to the surface.

  Not only did I not have a clear answer for my own question, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted from Jacob. Did I want him to validate what I was doing? Condemn it? I forced myself to pick up the coffee and take a sip, tasting the bitter dregs of a pot that had been bubbling away since morning. It fit my mood perfectly.

  Jacob hadn’t lost his puzzled expression. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked as he slid into the chair next to my desk. The concern in his voice tugged at something inside me.

  While we were effectively peers on the force, I had always looked up to him, admired him. He was a good cop without the benefit of the crutch I used. And any time he expressed concern for me, I became uncomfortably aware of how handsome he was—which, of course, made everything worse.

  I looked down into the black depths of my coffee and saw a tiny lost version of myself staring back up at me. Tell him!

  The thought was so sudden and violent that it made me wince. There was no reason left not to tell him. We’d find Kendal soon enough, if not from the prints on the gun, then simply because the kid was too dim to avoid being arrested for something.

  “Dana?”

  I’d never even discussed my family with him. No personal details had ever crossed my lips. I never even talked about music I liked. I just didn’t let people get that close.

  I couldn’t.

  I looked back up at him. I should be able to tell him if I could have told anyone. We’d been partners for three years.

  “I should tell you something,” the words left my mouth, and my heart raced.

  “What?”

  The Styrofoam cup began to slide in my suddenly damp palms. I set the cup on the desk and tried to force down the panic. My brain was hammered, not just with the thoughts of my carefully-structured life crumbling around me but with the thought of how Jacob would react to my fraud. What I was trying to tell him, it would give him every reason to hate me.

  I couldn’t deal with that, not on top of everything else.

  “I—” I realized I was starting to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked me, reaching out across the desk to touch my hand. His touch moved me inside, almost as if the Mark was trying to push me. I felt weak and realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t admit I’d been lying to him ever since we’d met.

  After a moment, I said, “I don’t know if I have the temperament to keep doing this.” Backing away from the precipice, the panic receded, replaced by a less urgent, but much deeper, shame.

  He squeezed my hand. “Kind of late in the game to have second thoughts about your career choice, isn’t it?”

  Much too late.

  “A woman’s prerogative to change her mind.” I tried to force some lightness into my voice, but even to my ears it sounded insincere and bitchy. I did not want to be having this conversation.

  We sat there in silence for a long time before he said, “You know, talking about it with someone might help.”

  “I know.” I can’t.

  “But you aren’t going to, are you?”

  I took my hand away and turned away from him. Not telling was almost as painful as the attempt to. “I don’t think so.”

  “Your choice.” Something in his voice sounded hurt, but it might have been my imagination. I had never been as good at reading people as he was.

  “Just do me a favor,” he told me. “Don’t quit without giving me a chance to talk you out of it.”

  “Sure.” I didn’t even know if I was lying to him anymore.

  THREE

  I BLASTED THE stereo in my Charger all the way home, letting my iPhone shuffle through every metal/industrial track I owned—as if the heavy guitars and hoarse vocals could drown out my self-destructive train of thought.

  Ever since my nonconversation with Jacob, I’d been fantasizing about running away. I could disappear before Kendal’s inevitable arrest. The Mark had bequeathed me the ability to walk into other times; there was no reason I couldn’t just not come back. I could step a few minutes fore or aft of where I was right now, and I would stand in a place almost identical, except for the a
bsence of myself, somewhere where I had no history of lies to stalk me.

  But my fantasy based itself on a false premise. Whatever life I established somewhere else would inevitably be founded upon another lie. I would still face the same question. Do I tell the people I care for about this Mark? Do I avoid the question by not caring for anyone? And what happens when I care for someone in spite of myself?

  I parked in the garage of my townhouse and killed the engine, cutting off Trent Reznor mid-lyric.

  “Why?” I whispered into the silence.

  I hated it. I hated the secrecy I couldn’t bring myself to end. I hated what the secrecy had done to me. I hated the fact that I was doing this to myself. I hated being alone.

  Through my childhood, I never had a great record connecting with other people. After Dad died, I had stopped trying. Everyone who had shown up at Mom’s calling hours had been her friends, I hadn’t even told my coworkers at the department about the funeral. Jacob was probably the closest thing I had to a friend, and I’d been keeping him at arm’s length for three years. I don’t think he even knew where I lived.

  The fact all of this was self-inflicted didn’t help.

  I walked into the kitchen and threw my keys on the empty counter and stared at the place I called home.

  I prided myself on keeping everything neat and organized: modern furniture, unbroken pastel walls, solid-color curtains, neat bookshelves, and an entertainment center safely hidden behind smoked glass.

  It wasn’t so much that I found the order comforting. Looking at it right now, it seemed as if I had never thought that deeply about it.

  It wasn’t anything like the house where I had grown up, and it was certainly nothing like my mom’s condo. I had spent several days packing up Mom’s life. She’d had pictures everywhere, porcelain figurines, paperbacks scattered on every open surface, plants, and a trio of cats that I had fortunately found homes for. It had always been busy, crowded, cluttered, and had always made me feel a bit claustrophobic.

  The only thing I had saved from her place was a yellowing banker’s box that had my name scrawled on the side. I’d only had the nerve to glance into it once. One look at the pictures of child me and a sheaf of adoption papers made me slam the box shut. It sat in my bedroom closet now. At some point I’d have the stomach to go through the contents.

  Thinking about my mom’s cluttered condo now, my own home seemed askew in comparison—fake, as if the place had been staged for a real-estate showing.

  I felt as if I had already stepped sideways into a universe where I didn’t exist.

  I walked into the living room and sat down on the edge of an oversized armchair. I took out my badge, and after giving it a long glance, I tossed it onto the glass coffee table.

  I didn’t know what to do. For years I had myself convinced that I had found my role in life, a reason for the Mark I was afflicted with, a purpose for myself. Suddenly, it seemed that there wasn’t much of myself in my purpose. I felt that there wasn’t much of myself, period. The rest of my life, my pretense of being a cop, was all as fake as this living room: calculated, staged, empty, soulless.

  Who the hell was I, if I wasn’t the façade I’d built for Jacob and everyone else? If that fell apart, was there anything left? Did it matter? Who was I doing this for?

  I bit my lip and wondered if I had been doing this as much for Mom as I had for Dad. In the hospital, one of the last things she had said to me was how proud she’d been.

  She said that, and I had stayed quiet. . . .

  I couldn’t just quit, could I?

  * * *

  —

  I had been nearly seventeen when I had first inadvertently used the Mark.

  It wasn’t the first time I had felt it. I had become familiar with the phantom fingers that traced the patterns on my back, mostly when I was still and quiet in my bed at night. I kept quiet about it because it was just another weirdness about me when I tried so hard to be normal. The Mark was something I didn’t talk about, even then.

  At some point in my adolescence, I realized that, for all their attempts to identify the Mark, find out who had drawn it on my skin, there was nothing my adoptive parents could tell me about it. Without that explanation, I simply wanted to ignore it, pretend that it didn’t exist.

  If I had been more open, they might have noticed another sign that it was no ordinary tattoo, if it was a tattoo at all.

  The Mark grew with me.

  At seventeen, the Mark covered the same portion of my back as it had when I was six, and it was just as ebon dark. It hadn’t distorted, or faded, the way a normal tattoo would have. It had branched and grown in complexity to cover the new space, almost as if it was a living thing.

  And it touched me like a living thing.

  I kept it secret. I hid it under my clothes and tried to push away its touch. I only really felt it when I was in my bed, and my control slipped close to sleep.

  And, in the shower a week before my seventeenth birthday, my control had slipped in a particularly spectacular fashion. I had spent a very late night studying and had gotten up for school without nearly enough sleep. I got in the shower yawning, and the warm water lulled me into the half-sleep that allowed the Mark to touch me without resistance.

  As if annoyed at being ignored, the invisible fingers brushing the edges of the Mark became hands shoving me forward. Startled awake, I took a step. The world around me became hazy, and the feeling of water hitting my skin vanished.

  I stumbled to my hands and knees in a bone-dry shower. I almost cried out, but embarrassment made me hold my tongue.

  I bit my lip and pulled my knees up, so I sat on the floor of the shower, my damp skin breaking into gooseflesh. I didn’t know why the shower had shut off, and it took me a while to collect myself enough to stand up and turn the water back on.

  I was feeling almost normal again when I heard my father’s voice over the shower. “Who’s there?”

  I thought he’d left for work.

  “Just me, Dad,” I called out.

  The door to the bathroom burst open.

  “Dad?” I screamed, backing into the corner of the shower.

  The shower curtain pulled aside, and my dad was standing there with a gun in his hand. His eyes went wide as he stared at me. “Who are you? And what are you doing in my house?”

  I covered myself and tried to shrink into the tile behind me. “Dad? You’re scaring me.”

  He lowered the gun and shook his head. I wanted to think this was all some sort of nasty joke, but looking into his face I only saw surprise . . . and possibly pity.

  This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.

  He holstered his gun and grabbed a towel off the rack as he turned off the shower. Suddenly, I could hear myself sobbing.

  “I know you’re scared,” he said as he handed me the towel. “But you need to tell me who you are.”

  I stared at him. Stop looking at me. It isn’t right. I’m your daughter. . . .

  As if he could read my thoughts, he turned to look out the door, still holding the towel out to me. I grabbed it and wrapped myself. My hands shook, and I was still crying. I was so shaken and upset by my dad’s actions that I didn’t realize that the towel I wrapped myself in was not the soft fuzzy one that I had hung up when I took my shower.

  “Where are your clothes?” he asked me.

  “Over . . .” My voice trailed off because my robe wasn’t hanging where it should have been. My slippers were gone. But what made my breath catch in my throat was the wallpaper. Two years ago we had rented a steamer and I had spent a Sunday afternoon helping my dad strip the wallpaper from the bathroom. By the end of the day, both of us were covered with melted glue and little pieces of lime-green paper.

  “What’s happening?” I asked the lime-green walls. The wall mutely told me t
hat day had never happened.

  Dad sucked in a breath. “You’re confused,” he said. He turned around now that I had covered myself with a towel. “Do you remember what happened before you got into the shower? Did you take anything, drink anything?”

  “You’re scaring me, Dad.”

  When I called him that, it looked as if I had hit him. “Will you come with me?” he said gently, holding out his hand. “I’ll call and get you some help.”

  “Why don’t you know me? Why is the wallpaper still up?”

  “Don’t be frightened. I know things seem strange right now, but we’re going to get you some help and we’ll get things back to normal for you.”

  I took his hand, because as strange as he was acting, I still trusted him. He took me down the hall to my room, but it wasn’t my room. The walls were painted a different color, and the furniture was different, more generic. The bed was made, and a set of towels were folded neatly on an unfamiliar dresser. A small clock radio sat on one end table by the bed. It screamed guest room.

  I stared at the clock. According to it, I had spent five hours in the shower, it was nearly noon.

  No, it says PM. . . .

  It was also dark outside. Not near noon. Near midnight.

  “Here,” he said. “You can stay here. My wife has some old things in the bottom drawer.” He pointed at the dresser. “Something might fit you.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m going to call and get you some help. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe here.”

  He closed the door behind him, and I stood in the room that was no longer mine and began to shake. I heard him make the call to 911 for an ambulance, telling them about a tattooed teenage girl breaking into his house, naked and disoriented.

  He doesn’t know me.

  I was never here.

  The most horrifying feeling I ever had was, right then, being briefly convinced that my entire life up to that point had been some drug-induced hallucination.

  Maybe this is the hallucination.