Page 71 of Made for You
Most people, I imagine, would call my bluff. No Harm coding isn’t exactly a secret. But I’m counting on one thing: that if Deborah thinks I could somehow overcome my coding to kill Josh, which her letters seemed to imply, she’ll think I can kill her, too.
My skin is clammy as I pull the car to a stop in a patch of gravel. The second I kill the engine, her door is already opening—and she has a shotgun. Fuck. I duck on instinct and open the door a crack so I can talk to her.
“Please don’t shoot!” I shout.
She’s wearing a loose housedress and slippers. From the porch ceiling, a mobile hangs, like you might see above a baby’s crib. Its pink balls are unevenly weighted, and it makes an unsteady, bobbling circle in the breeze.
“You’re trespassing!” she barks. Her voice is hoarse, like she doesn’t use it a lot. “Tell me who you are! Now!”
“Julia Walden! Josh’s wife. I just want to talk to you, Deborah! Please put down your gun!” Half of me wants to flee; she’s already tried to kill me once. But speeding away means speeding back into Mitchell’s waiting embrace.
“I—found your letters.” Reaching over to the passenger seat, I grab the stack. Keeping my body mostly protected behind the car door, I reach my left arm up where she can see it, the cards held high. “Josh never read them. But I did. And I want you to know I would never hurt him, or my baby. I just want to talk.”
She still has the gun pointed at me. On the other hand, she hasn’t fired.
“Where is Josh?” she says.
This gives me pause. The story is all over the news. Does she truly have no idea?
“We can talk if you’ll put the gun down!”
She lowers the gun slowly. I come out with both hands lifted, still holding her letters.
“Would you please put the gun all the way down?” I say as a gust of wind tosses my ponytail into my face and spins the mobile around. I think of the gun hidden in the waistband of my jeans, my only hope at the illusion of power.
I used to love my No Harm coding. It was like a seal of goodness—a guarantee to people who otherwise might have feared me that I was a safe presence. It also made Josh want to protect me. Now, it’s a major liability.
Who am I kidding? It always was.
“You stay down there,” Deborah orders. She leans her gun in a corner by a half-broken porch swing before returning to the edge of the porch and bracing her arms against the railing. Her thin carrot-orange hair lifts around her face, then falls, like a momentary halo. “Why are you here?”
To find out if you killed my husband, I want to say. But I can’t start there.
“Why did you think Josh was going to die?”
“Because of you,” she says, as if this was obvious. “Where is he now?”
“I read your cards. I know you think he was in danger from me. But that doesn’t make sense. I love him, Deborah. I have a child with him. I would never hurt him. Or my baby.”
“You’re lying,” she says in an awful, declarative monotone. “You’re a Synth. A weapon. That’s why they made you.”
“I think you already know that Josh is dead,” I say, because I don’t have time to argue against her Bot-hating conspiracy theories. If this statement surprises her, I can’t tell. It’s like she’s made of stone. “They think he was killed Saturday night. I was at home with my baby. Where were you, Deborah?”
The sunlight slips away, casting us in shadow. There’s another gust of air and Deborah turns toward her gun, as if the wind is giving her motion.
“Stop or you die!” I shriek, releasing the wad of cards, yanking out my gun. It scrapes painfully against the small of my back, but it’s in my hands, pointed at the woman on the porch, who has frozen in place. “Don’t move!” I pound up the hollow porch steps and press the gun to her back. She’s shorter than me by a head, and suddenly seems weak. Pitiable. For a second, I really feel like I could shoot her.
My eyes register a shadow of movement and stray upward, to the dangling mobile, twitching and circling. God. The hanging objects aren’t pink balls, after all. It’s four baby doll heads.
“Inside,” I order, clenching my teeth against the sick sight of the heads with their hair shaved short, some of their eyes open, some closed. “No sudden movements or I shoot.”
Deborah obeys. As soon as she opens the door, a smell rolls out, like dead cats and mothballs. I gag. Is Josh’s body in here somewhere? It’s dark, and my eyes take a second to understand the towering shadows that fill the space. Slowly, boxes and bins and piles of books emerge from the darkness. Deborah Reeves is a hoarder.
“To the kitchen,” I say, hoping there’s a chair where I can sit her down. I breathe through my mouth.
Deborah shuffles forward, through the narrow corridor between the ceiling-high stacks. I keep the gun at her back and take in our strange surroundings. Tucked into nooks between stacks, or on the flat roofs of shorter towers, are more dolls, in groups of four, always four. Four dolls sharing a meal at a small table. Four naked dolls stacked against each other in a bathtub. We pass what used to be the living room, where a dusty chandelier hangs like crystalline hair over a pile of books and clothing that looks nearly sentient, curved like someone cocking their hip.
We take a bend. Someone pops into view.