20

When we get to the hospital waiting room, everything happens at once. Joyce Kincaid grabs me in a hug and cries into my hair. Raymond shakes Dad’s hand but can’t say a word. But the worst thing, the hardest thing, is the drop in my stomach, the flicker in the blue chair in the corner, under the mounted TV.

The flicker during which, for a split second, I see Beau, sitting hunched over his knees, his hands pressed together and resting against his mouth, his eyes on the gray speckled floor. Sitting a few seats away from him are different versions of Joyce and Raymond, both silent. Joyce looks over at Beau, and I swear her lip curls hatefully in blame.

They don’t see me, but I see them over my Joyce’s shoulder as she death-grips me and sobs beside my ear.

I see them, and I know what it means. Both Matts are here.

Oh my God.

The doctor comes through the swinging gray doors. He’s a young, skinny blond guy with wire-frame glasses and a too-big white jacket.

“Mr. and Mrs. Kincaid, would you come with me?” he says. His expression is grave, devastating, and he barely looks away from the wall he’s chosen to focus on. Joyce breaks down further, and Mom gently rubs her back.

“Come on, Joyce,” Raymond whispers as he tries to free his wife from my arms. He leads her closer to those gray doors, toward bad news, and I take a few steps after them.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” the doctor says to me. “Family only.”

“She can come,” Joyce says. “She’s Matty’s girlfriend. She can come.”

I don’t correct her, but my whole body pinches at the mistake. The doctor nods and takes us inside. I don’t catch most of his words over the noise in my brain, the two sides of me screaming two different versions of the same story.

He was drunk. He wouldn’t listen. There was nothing you could do. He’ll be fine.

You let him drive away. You could’ve called the cops. He’s going to die. He’s going to die twice over, and you ruined his life.

Suddenly I become aware of Joyce’s escalated whimpers beside me, and I return to the sound of the doctor’s falsely calm voice. “. . . induced a coma,” he’s saying. “We’ll need to operate, and then we’ll have to let the swelling go down. It’s possible he’ll suffer from brain damage, but we can’t say how severe.”

“Possible,” Raymond repeats as he rubs Joyce’s shoulders. “Possible, Joyce, not absolute.”

She’s shaking her head, her eyes closed tight against her tears, her ears closed off from his words, and I can’t feel my legs.

Can’t feel my legs, or my heart, only the hollow in my stomach.

I’m backing away, but it’s like someone else is controlling my body with a remote. I don’t mean to leave them, but I do. I turn. I run.

I am running away.

I’m running through the horrible gray doors back into the horrible blue-gray waiting room, where everything’s different—the Other Joyce and Raymond sitting somberly in their chairs, far away from Beau, my own parents gone. I keep running.

I run out of the hospital, and then the hospital’s gone. The busy intersection of two highways gone. The Steak ’n Shake, the Christmas Tree Shop, the Check-into-Cash, gone. Everything gone but the trees and rolling blue-green hills, which crash like waves under my feet, threatening to pull me under.

But they can’t, I think.

As long as I keep moving, they can’t pull me under.

And I run. I run hard, feeling flecks of moisture—not-quite rain—dampen my skin.

Grandmother, where are you?

I’m afraid.

Help me.

Help me.

“Please.” The word tears out of me, wrenched sideways and tattered to shreds by my gasping lungs. “PLEASE!” I scream.

A bright white light explodes in front of me and, for a split second, I think, she’s coming for me. She’ll pull me out of this. I’ll leave it all behind.

In the next instant, my feet make sense of an abrupt change in the earth’s texture, from soft and malleable to stiff and flat. The sounds of hooting howls and singing crickets morph into a car laying on its horn, and the aroma of dewy night is now the stench of burning rubber. I’m in the middle of the road. There’s a car just yards away from me, barreling toward me too fast to stop.

For some reason, in that moment, the only thing that occurs to me to do is to cover my eyes. I throw my forearm up to block the screaming headlights when something collides with me, throws me sideways, and the car goes speeding past.

I spin back and see Beau, standing and staring at me as he gasps for breath. The rest of the world has already vanished again, leaving us alone in a clearing in the woods. For a while, we both just stand there, breathing hard.

Finally, reality overtakes me, makes me lose my balance. “They put him in a coma,” I say, my voice throttled. “He might have brain damage.”

Beau doesn’t budge, doesn’t blink. My knees give out. I’m falling to the ground, sobbing, and Beau catches me around the middle as a wail passes through me. He roughly brushes my hair out of my face over and over again, but it doesn’t matter. I can’t see anything. I can’t even force my eyes open.

“It’s my fault,” I sob, and Beau holds me tighter, pushing his forehead against mine, his hands pulling at the hair against my neck. “It’s my fault.”

“No,” he says. “No.” His mouth finds mine, hot and wet with tears, and with every kiss, it’s like my pain is flooding through me to him, and there’s an endless supply waiting to fill up the space.

I take a breath and open my eyes. “Why did it happen in both worlds?”

Beau shakes his head and pulls me close again.

“I can’t do this.” It hurts to say. It hurts to look at Beau, to want him and know I’ll never look at him again without remembering what happened to Matt. “I can’t do this.”

Beau stares into my eyes, deep lines creasing his brows.

“I need to find Grandmother,” I say. “I need your help.” I need you.

“We’ll find her.”

She can fix this.

She’ll tell me what to do.

I’ll save him.

Two weeks until I leave.

Six weeks until the end.

She can fix this.

The nightmare plagues me all night, only this time Matt’s there instead of Mom. And we aren’t laughing; we’re arguing, fighting, screaming at one another when the car jerks sideways, dives down into the creek. It starts to fill with blood, and I turn to find a deep gash down the center of his head. I press my hands to the wound, but the blood spills through my fingers and it burns my skin where it touches until my whole body is on fire, burning with the heat of his blood.

It’s my fault.

A boom of thunder wakes me up. I sit up, sheets soaked through with sweat, and see Gus’s snout hovering at eye level. His front paws are on the bed beside me, back legs on the floor, and he’s whining anxiously, shaking with each ferocious crack in the sky. I bury my face in the thick fur of his neck and try to soothe him, though I myself feel terrified.

“Sorry, Gus,” I whisper, pushing him aside and getting out of bed. I dig through my drawers for some gym clothes and grab my running shoes from the closet. I dress quickly and sneak downstairs to the key dish in the kitchen, sorting through the coins and buttons and other junk for Mom’s car keys. I scribble a note for her and leave it on the island then silently let myself out onto the porch. The rain and thunder have moved off by now, leaving behind a greenish tint to the sky.

I drive Mom’s car to the school, parking behind the field house and staring at my phone in the cup holder for a long moment. There’s something I’ve needed to do, and after last night, I know I can’t put it off any longer. I grab my phone, scroll to Dr. Langdon’s name, and press SEND before I can chicken out.

“Hello?” she answers groggily on the second ring, and I almost hang up. Despite her success, I never particularly liked Dr. Langdon. Quiet and stony faced, she never betrayed the slightest emotional reaction to anything I said, nothing like Alice.

“Hello?” she says again, and I clear my throat loudly, but not on purpose. “Who’s there?”

She sighs, and I know she’s about to hang up, so I blurt out, “Have you been checking the oven?”

There’s a beat of silence before she coolly says, “Natalie?”

“She was right,” I stammer. “Grandmother came back and she told me something was going to happen, and it did, and you really need to be careful.”

Again, silence fills the line. Dr. Langdon never speaks without thinking, never reacts, always plans. “Where are you, Natalie? Are you safe? You’ve made so much progress, and you musn’t—”

“I’m fine,” I interrupt. “You’re the one who’s in trouble, and she’s right. I swear she’s right. So think I’m crazy if you want, but you need to check your oven and your stove and anything else hot in your house, okay?”

“What else did your grandmother say, Natalie? Did she tell you to do something?”

“She’s not my grandmother. Check the oven,” I snap and hang up, tossing my phone hard against the passenger seat. I get out of the car and run to the chain-link fence, pulling myself up it just as Beau and I did on the night of Matt’s party.

I don’t bother stretching. It’s so hot and humid that my muscles are already warm, my skin already slippery with a sheen of sweat. I start at a jog around the asphalt track, and quickly my mind slips into a meditative space I seldom find outside of physical work.

I count my laps—one, two, three, four—until I lose track of distance and time entirely. There’s no end. There’s no point at which I know to stop. It’s an eternal run, with no beginning point for each new lap. Soon it’s as if my whole life has been this run, and I start to feel it through my middle: a quivering veil, like my stomach’s on stage and the curtain’s about to drop.

I keep running, and in my mind, I know I’m breaking right through the veil. The world falls away. For the first time since my Opening, the world falls away, and I know I’m the one who made it happen. The earth is no longer flat and paved under my feet. The damp metal bleachers, the rusty chain-link fence, the orange and black press box and the unlit floodlights and the goalposts are all gone.

They’re still here, but not now. They blip back into view, and I try to move myself backward again, seeking out that roller-coaster sensation in my stomach. But though I have a sense that the veil is trembling, I can’t do it. I can’t move time.

I stop running and bend over, hands resting on my knees, as I try to slow my breathing.

Across the field, someone’s descending the bleachers: a waify blond in shorts and a T-shirt. She steps onto the track and waves but doesn’t say anything. Megan. Not my Megan, but Megan all the same. She begins to make her way around the track at a steady pace, and I start running again too. We jog at opposite ends of the track, falling into sync, never gaining on one another, like two planets in orbit.

I lose track of time again, and it’s only when Megan slows down and heads toward the bottom row of bleachers to sit that I resurface from the depths of my mind. The sun is peeking up, painting the sky a fiery orange.

I finish my lap at a walk and go to sit beside her, wishing she were my best friend. We sit for a while in silence, watching the sunrise. In silence, I can at least pretend I’m with my best friend.

She is my best friend.

“I’m sorry,” I say suddenly. “About Matt.”

She forces a smile but doesn’t look at me. “Yeah, me too.”

“He’ll be okay.”

“How would you know?”

“I guess I don’t know. But I think it.”

She wipes at her tears with the back of her hand. “Me too.” She’s silent for a couple of minutes, and I think she’s done talking and wants to be alone, but then she goes on. “I’ve been in love with him since I was ten.”

“What?” I say, shocked. Is it possible I’d completely missed that in my Megan? When we were ten, I’d hardly given Matt a second thought, but the two of them had been friends for a couple of years already. “Seriously?”

“There’s this kid we went to elementary school with, Cameron,” Megan says. “He was sort of a redneck, kind of poor and usually dirty. We had this glider thing on our playground, and one day Cameron was on it. He fell off and slid across the mulch, and his pants came down. Everyone saw his butt, and no one would walk there for, like, a week. People would scream ‘butt germs’ when they went past it.”

I stare at Megan in disbelief. I have this same memory. Exactly.

“Matt wasn’t friends with Cameron, or anything, but he felt bad,” she continues. “People were being so stupid about it just to make Cameron feel bad, and everyone just sort of went along with it just because. Matt was the first person to use the glider after that—I mean, other than Beau, of course, who was born not caring about what anyone thinks. Beau’s always been popular, but he’s not exactly the person people want to emulate. Not like Matt. Anyway, Derek made a big deal about Matt catching butt germs from the glider, so Matt mooned him.” She breaks into an uneasy laugh and wipes at her eyes again. “It’s the only time he’s gotten detention, I’m pretty sure.”

I remember all that, I want to say. You and I were there too. You and I made fun of Cameron’s butt germs, and felt guilty when Matt finally put a stop to it.

“That’s when I fell in love with Matt Kincaid,” Megan says quietly.

It’s like a dagger in my heart. Not jealousy, at least not toward Megan. If anything, I’m jealous that she loves Matt but doesn’t even know me. And I’m jealous that this Megan would tell me about things mine never has. I wonder when her feelings for him went away, if they even did, and how I didn’t notice them.

Had I been hurting her, hurting both of them, for the last six years over something it turns out I’d never been sure I wanted? Or is a world without me in it really so different that Megan could have feelings for Matt in one reality and not the other?

“He’s going to get through this,” I say. “You guys still have centuries of mooning people together ahead of you.”

She laughs into her hand, but the tears keep sliding down her cheeks. “I’m not sure that’s even what he wants,” she says. “He’s had girlfriends the whole time we’ve been friends. It was just starting to seem like . . . and now . . .”

I grab her hand in mine, my Megan no matter what. “He’ll have time to figure it out,” I say. “And if he gets it wrong, then he’ll have plenty of time to experience crushing regret as he watches you grow old with your hot professional hockey player husband.”

“God, it’s like you’ve been reading my search history,” she jokes, and I feel a rush of pain at realizing how much I miss this.

“I’m super intuitive when it comes to hot guys,” I say. “They’re my love language.”

“Well, you’ve got your hands full with one, that’s for sure.” She shakes her head. “Beau Wilkes staring wistfully at an Ivy League girl. Who would’ve thought? It’s tragic, really.”

“How’d you know about Brown?”

“Oh, please. Beau is our resident disenchanted, uninterested, gorgeous, yet undeniably broken one-night-stander, heavily marked by the scent of Rachel Hanson. You’re news, Natalie.” She sees the look on my face, then hurries to add, “Don’t get me wrong. I love Beau. Everyone does. It’s just, you seem great, and I hope you know what you’re getting into. Poor guy has enough baggage to fill CVG Airport.”

I shake my head. “I’m not getting into anything. I’m leaving for the rest of summer in a few weeks. Beau’s just helping me with something.”

“Right,” she says, nodding. “Helping you make out. There’s probably no better coach in the county.”

I laugh and, for a second, the heaviness in my chest lifts away. “So what kind of baggage are we talking about?” I say, then feel a jab of guilt over my impromptu background check.

“Well, there’s his mom, obviously. She’s a little bit . . . out there. And his dad left and never visits. I don’t think he came to a single game in five years, not even the two times they went to State. Apparently he sends Beau liquor in the mail—I mean, the guy’s a recovering alcoholic, and he’s practically begging Beau to take his place now that he’s sober. Of course all of this is hearsay. Probably just rumors.”

“I’m not so sure,” I say, staring down at my feet, thinking of Senior Night, Beau slipping into the school to get drunk by himself and play the piano.

Megan sighs. “And then there’s everything with Matt.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sure that’s hard on everyone.”

Megan chews on her pinky nail and shrugs. “Yeah, but especially Beau. I mean, the Kincaids totally blame him.”

“For the accident?” I say, stunned.

“For the drinking. They can’t fathom that Matty might make his own mistakes once in a while. Anytime something goes wrong, good old Joyce is quick to point a finger at Beau. The two of them burned the barn down when they were kids, and according to Matt, it was mostly his fault, but Matt was afraid what his parents would do. So Beau took all the blame, and Matt had to convince them not to press charges.”

“Wow,” I say, vaguely thinking that the Kincaids make my parents look like the progeny of flower children and Mother Teresa. I think about the way Joyce and Raymond sat apart from Beau in the hospital the morning of the accident, only sparing glances at him to shoot him daggers. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell Megan. “It’s all going to be okay.”

“I’m glad I ran into you,” Megan says. We both stand up to go, and it’s the same as it’s always been—the two of us, understanding one another without too many words.

“Me too.”

It’s true that nothing has the potential to hurt so much as loving someone, but nothing heals like it either.