Rebecca Lim: Mercy

‘We don’t know how to thank you,’ he breathes reverently. ‘For giving her back to us. When you never came home, I knew I’d done that to you, placed you in his way somehow. That I’d got it all horribly wrong.

And when I thought you could be dead, too …’ For a moment he doesn’t speak, and on my hand I feel a warm, salt tear. And in it, all the horror.

‘For me?’ I sigh gustily, making little sense. For I am sinking like a stone, a cut anchor.

‘Is it true?’ he says, wonder in his voice. ‘What Lauren told me?’ I want to nod, but I can’t seem to move my head. It doesn’t feel as if it belongs to me any more, or is even on temporary loan. The bonds between Carmen and me are dissolving, and this time, for the first time, I can feel it.

The two of us no longer a unit, becoming two separate beings, even as Ryan watches over us, oblivious to the seismic shift.

‘The midazolam,’ I say with difficulty, though it is not only that. ‘No time.’ And I know he must bend close to hear my voice for I smell the faint, salt sweat of him for an instant, feel his sweet breath on her forehead.

He clasps my hand harder. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says brightly, ‘we’ll talk tomorrow. They’ll have to throw me out to get me to leave. I want to hear all of it. Everything.

It’s been torture, not knowing. My parents, they don’t know what to say, what to do. Neither do I. There aren’t any words, enough words.’ When I don’t answer, he murmurs, ‘We were right, you know, it was the place, the church. Only heard from the perspective of Stenborg’s place, not Barry’s.

Stenborg’s house backs onto part of the church grounds.’ His grip tightens on mine. ‘He had a prior conviction for stalking,’ he says darkly. ‘Something he conveniently whited out when he applied for the job at Port Marie. No one bothered to run a background police check because his CV was so extraordinary.

The Framlingham School’s partly to blame — they didn’t tell Port Marie he was a psychopath because it would have looked bad for them. She was one of his students with an extraordinary soprano voice. Sound familiar? He sent her thousands of dirty text messages, even climbed in her bedroom window one night. They found him in the girl’s bed, naked. Her mother took out a restraining order, so he left before the school could sack him and started over. Put around the story that it was the girl stalked him, when all along it was the other way around.’ I frown weakly, losing the train of his words.

Something is different this time. Something happened to me, down there, in the monster’s pit. As we unravelled, I almost felt the point where she ended and I began.

Maybe, if I am displaced another time, and a time after that, I will be able to find that space, that fork in the road, again and again, until I find my true self, standing at the end of it.

And there’s something else. I am leaving, and this time I know it.

I have never had warning before, never had certainty.

But this time, I am so sure that I rear up suddenly, like Lazarus, like Frankenstein’s monster, a drowning person grasping at a spar on the ocean.

Ryan pulls back, startled. Still blind, I grab at his shirtfront with what remains of us.

‘Tomorrow,’ I whisper, my voice like something carried back on the wind from the afterlife, ‘Carmen may not remember what’s happened. She may not remember you, or your parents. She may have no recollection of Jennifer, or even of Lauren, or of her time here before today. You must protect her. See her home safe. Maintain the fiction. Keep me secret. Her future turns on it, and her future is bright.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Ryan says confusedly as he braces me against him.

‘Going,’ I murmur. ‘Into someone else, to be someone else. Not here. Not with you.’ I feel that sense of loosening quicken, like sparks flying upward on a cold morning.

‘How do I find you again?’ Ryan says desperately, shaking Carmen, shaking me even further free of my moorings.

I sigh. ‘You can’t. Could be anywhere, anyone. No time.’ I touch his face with Carmen’s cold fingers. Kiss him once, gently.

‘No! Mercy,’ Ryan cries, crushing her closer, not knowing I am already gone. ‘Mercy!’ And I watch from above as Carmen’s breathing evens out in sleep, and find myself falling out of her life, into another …

Rebecca Lim is a writer and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia. She worked as a commercial lawyer for several years before leaving to write full time.

Rebecca is the author of ten other books for children and young adult readers, and her novels have been translated into German, French and Turkish.