27

“We’re running out of time,” I tell Alice. I finished explaining everything that’s happened at least two minutes ago, but she hasn’t said a word. I’ve seen Beau for a couple of hours the last two days, but both of those visits ended with him disappearing from me—Sunday evening as we sat on the bleachers of the football stadium watching the sun fall, and Monday morning as we lay together in his bed, fingers twirled through one another’s hair. “What happened when you ran out the other day?” I ask. “Did you figure something out?”

She sighs. “Not exactly. I thought I had something when you mentioned Grandmother hiding in another time, so I went down a rabbit hole on time-travel philosophies.”

“And came up with nothing?”

“A little bit more than nothing. Albert Einstein thought time was an illusion, a sort of fourth coordinate to show where you are, relative to how fast you’re moving. So maybe that’s what’s happening when you and Beau see the future and the past—you’re rapidly moving forward or backward, but not along length or height or width. That could be why, when you’re slipping through time, nothing around you interacts with you as if you’re solid. You might be traveling so fast you could walk through the cells of a wall.”

“But we’re solid to each other,” I point out.

“Yes, and you also said Beau couldn’t get back to his world the night you met. I believe he used the word grounded. Perhaps when you’re together, you’re tethered to each other. And since neither of you appears to be fixed in the space-time continuum, theoretically one of you could pull the other along at the same speed. And perhaps there’s a looser form of tethering that occurs with animals. Thus Beau’s hamster’s epic journey and your flip-out with your dog. It’s as if the animals are somehow trying to decide where in time they belong and thus bouncing back and forth.” She opens her desk drawer and digs out a Slinky, flipping its metal spirals back and forth between her palms as she thinks.

I raise an eyebrow. “Any particular reason you, an adult research psychologist, keep that in your desk?”

“It helps me think,” she says matter-of-factly. “A physical action to busy the hands. Anyway, I was high while doing aforementioned research, which meant I was messing with this thing, and it sort of struck me.” She flattens the Slinky between her two hands. “What if this Slinky is all of time, and it all already exists—past, present, future—but the human or animal experience is, essentially, moving along a series of moments in just one direction? We can’t see, hear, touch any moment but the one we’re currently experiencing, but they all exist simultaneously.

“That’s why you saw an earlier version of yourself when Beau first showed you how to move time. That Natalie continuously exists just as the You of two minutes ago and two minutes from now continuously exist. But technically human perception should only allow you to see one of them at a time, rather than the million Natalies leading from the parking lot to this office, or the billions of Natalies and Beaus stretched across the highway from Union to here. It’s like you’re moving forward through a flip-book, but there are always other versions of you who are further behind or ahead of you.”

“I think you broke my brain. I don’t get it.”

Alice stretches the Slinky apart, pulling the metal coils taut, then points toward one near the middle with her pinky. “Each of these rings is a moment, and right now we’re both experiencing this one. But then, say you start slipping backward along the Slinky. You’re flipping through every moment that occurs in your current physical space: moving through the Slinky. When the time slip passes, you snap back into place right after the last moment you experienced chronologically, even if by then the You that didn’t experience the time slip has moved to a different physical space.”

“I’m moving through a time Slinky,” I say flatly.

“To be more exact, you are moving through a wormhole that runs through the time Slinky, that lets the version of you in this precise moment move to another moment.”

“And that’s possible.”

Alice’s head wobbles. “Oppenheimer—you know, the atom bomb guy—proved black holes were physically possible.”

“Wait—the ‘I am become Death’ guy?”

“The very same, though he was actually quoting from the Bhagavad Gita. Anyway, Einstein seemed to think wormholes were another logical step. But he also posited that a wormhole wouldn’t last long before collapsing.”

I sit forward. “You think there’s a wormhole in Union, Kentucky?”

“Of course not,” she says. “If there were, we’d all be experiencing time slips. I think there’s a wormhole . . . in you.”

I must be gawking. The idea that an eighteen-year-old girl who’s afraid of the dark might actually encompass a hole in time is almost funny. In an I-want-to-sob-in-the-shower kind of way.

“Think about it,” Alice hurries to add. Her sudden giddiness is in direct contrast to the desolation I feel in my abdomen. I imagine a tumbleweed rolling through my rib cage, then getting caught by the pull of my inner black hole and soaring off into darkness. “If all time is actually simultaneous—and the passage of it is an illusion—then maybe people like us have wormholes in our very consciousness. The other moments always exist, and an anomaly in our perception allows us to interact with them—which makes sense since this all started with a dream state. As soon as your consciousness stops traveling, it tries to snap back to where it should be on your time stream.

“It’s trying to wake up and perceive time as the human brain is meant to—in a linear fashion. Even if you could find the right time where Grandmother’s hiding, I doubt you’d be able to keep yourself there. I’m guessing the Closing is the point at which your perception gets locked back into place and starts moving along your moments as it should—exclusively forward, at a steady pace.”

“There has to be a way, though. If Grandmother can do it—”

“Theoretically, there is,” Alice says. “I don’t know that I’m on the money with all this. But assuming I am, I’m still convinced that hypnotherapy’s the key. Pinpointing that trauma, and using it to stimulate the brain activity that creates the visions—time slips—is our best bet.”

“What about Beau?” I say. “How does he fit into all of this? Is he a wormhole too?”

“Well, that’s the thing that doesn’t add up.” Alice stands and picks her way over to the whiteboard that’s wedged between the bookshelves. She draws a line on the board then starts scribbling branches stemming out from it until it looks like a sideways tree. “This is a totally different theory of time—what I call the ‘many worlds interpretation.’ In it, every decision or action has alternate possibilities. Parallel realities. This is the theory that allows for our Union to coexist with Beau’s, with the division having at some point been created by a decision or series of decisions.” She circles the last two branches she drew. “Hypothetically, even the smallest decision could create two different outcomes.”

My stomach contracts and my shoulders tighten. “Like maybe my parents didn’t decide to adopt me.”

Alice jams her mouth shut. “Or maybe your birth mother decided to keep you. Or maybe someone offered your mom a different job and in Beau’s world, you live in Timbuktu. Natalie, it could be anything—there’s no way to know that hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock one extra time couldn’t have been the point at which these two worlds split. The point is—the two theories don’t strike me as altogether compatible. We’re still missing something important.”

“Couldn’t both theories be true? I mean, what if it’s just one enormous, windy time Slinky with a zillion arms?”

“I have no idea. Believe it or not, I haven’t spent a ton of time studying time travel. I’ve made some calls to supposed experts, but if we’re being realistic, we probably know more than them at this point. They’re operating on math-based theories, with no experiential element.”

“And we’re following trails of silver light and your gut.” I drop my face into my hands and grip my hair near the scalp. “I don’t even care. I don’t need to understand how all this works, or even understand why. I just need to find Grandmother and figure out how to save Matt, or whoever else might be in danger, and we’re no closer to that than we were last week.”

I close my eyes until I’m sure no tears will come, then look up at Alice again. She’s back in her chair, her mouth screwed up and fine lines drawn between her brows. She leans forward and awkwardly covers my hand with hers. A few seconds pass, and she lets go and comes to sit beside me. “We’ll keep trying.”

“Someone’s going to die,” I whisper.

Alice sighs and leans her head back against the couch. “Maybe,” she says softly.

We stay like that for the rest of our time together, and that’s how I know: We’ve both given up.

When I stand to go, she grabs my elbow. “You’ll be here Thursday.” It’s somewhere between question and statement.

“Probably,” I manage.

For the rest of the day and most of Wednesday I call Beau at thirty-minute intervals, but still I can’t get through to his burner phone. I spend my time pacing in Megan’s room, hiking listlessly through the woods, stumbling through painful small talk over the dinner table with Mrs. Phillips, and driving out to Beau’s house to sit in the room that should be his.

Around midnight, I’m lying in bed when my phone starts to vibrate beside my ear. “Hello?” I answer, immediately alert.

“Natalie.” Beau breathes my name out like a sigh of relief.

“Thank Grandmother,” I say.

“I missed you,” he says. “I thought maybe . . .”

He trails off, but I know what he was going to say. “No, not yet.”

We haven’t seen each other for the last time yet.

“Can I come there?” he asks.

“To Megan’s?”

“I can’t be at home right now.”

I debate it in my mind for a minute. I don’t want to be disrespectful to Megan’s family, but so much more than that, I don’t want to lose any time with Beau. “Park down on the street and come to the back door.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Can we stay on the phone?” I ask. “Just in case.”

“Yeah,” he says. “We can do that.”

I don’t hang up until he’s standing in front of me on the other side of the glass door, his phone to his ear and that heavy smile across his face as he raises one hand. I toss the phone into the chair and slide the door open, pulling him against me. He nestles his nose into the side of my face.

“You’re here.”

He turns me around so my back presses against the half-open door and his fingers rest on the waistline of my shorts. “I’m here.” He stares at me hard through the dark, and everywhere his eyes touch me, I feel heat.

“Do you think if we had more time, it’d stop feeling like this?”

“That depends,” he murmurs.

“On?”

“On how this feels.”

Before I can reply, the lamp beside the bed winks out, and the empty layers of sheets surge upward around a body that wasn’t there before. “Oh my God,” I gasp, then clap my hand over my own mouth.

Beau glances over his shoulder toward the softly snoring person in the bed: the Other Megan. “Come on,” he mouths, pulling me outside and sliding the door shut.

We move off down the patio to the wooden lounge chairs and little table where Megan and I used to sit on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee and eating sugary cereal to stifle mild hangovers. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask Beau. “Even if she disappears, I could go back in there, fall asleep, and wake up spooning a version of her who’s only met me for, like, five minutes.”

Beau rubs the pinched spot between his eyebrows. “This is getting a little crazy.”

“No kidding. We really can’t go to your house?”

He stares at the ground and runs his teeth over his bottom lip. “It’s not good there.”

I touch the side of his face, his skin warm and sleek with sweat. “Okay.”

We sit down in the dewy lounge chairs, heads leaned against the side of the house. “I wish we could find out,” Beau says.

“Huh?”

“How it would feel later,” he says, “if we had more time.”

I sigh and pull his arm around my shoulder. “Probably you’d get sick of me shouting out what I think’s going to happen in every movie, and I’d get sick of you drinking and leaving your clothes wherever you took them off. I’d hate how messy you keep your room, and it’d drive you crazy how I can’t do anything without planning every detail first.”

Beau laughs.

“What, you think I’m wrong?”

He looks over at me. “I think that’s a lie and you know it.”

“Okay, fine. You tell me what would happen.”

“We’d get married,” he says.

“Oh? In my world or yours?”

“Both,” he says. “Then someday, ten or fifteen years from now, you’d have a baby.”

“What would we name him?” I say, playing along.

“Her,” he says.

“What would we name her?” I say softly.

“I don’t know. Maybe Natalie Junior,” he says. “She’d look just like you.”

“But she’d throw like you.”

“And she’d be smart like you. You two would talk about all the things I don’t get, and that way you’d never get bored with me.”

I laugh into his neck. “And you’d coach football so you wouldn’t get bored with me.” His face lights up. It makes me want to say the sentence over and over again. “Beau Junior will be on the team, obviously.”

“We can’t name our kid Beau Junior. He’d get called BJ. You want our son’s nickname to be Blow Job, Natalie?”

“Oof, good point. So what would we name him?”

“I don’t know.” He smooths my hair and kisses my head. “Probably just name him Natalie, too.”

“You’re just saying all this because you know I can’t hold you to it.”

“No,” he says. “I’m sayin’ it because I might not get another chance.”

I twist my fingers through his hair, press my lips to his cheek. The words tangle in my throat, being born and dying a thousand times. I love you.

On Thursday I climb out of the haze of hypnosis, and the first thing I see is Dr. Wolfgang’s smirk. My immediate thought is that I’ve just divulged something humiliating, but then I find Alice wringing her hands, eyes wide.

“You guys find something?”

“I always find something,” Wolfgang croaks. “This is the point of using a map.”

That last bit comes off snidely, and his eyes flick to Alice, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She swallows and says. “Thank you, Frederick, we can handle it from here.”

He mumbles something to himself in German but packs up and clears out all the same. When we’re alone, Alice goes to close the door and sits down in her chair, staring at me.

“Well?” I say, uncomfortable and anxious. “Are you going to tell me?”

She grabs the voice recorder off the desk and passes it to me. “Go on.”

It takes me a minute to gather myself. Whatever’s in this recording, once I hear it, there’s no forgetting it. But if it’s the key to getting Grandmother back, I really have no choice. I take a deep breath and press PLAY.

At first, all I hear is my own even breathing, how I imagine I must sound when I’m asleep.

A sharp gasp interrupts the rhythm, as if I’ve been startled awake.

“Mommy?” I hear myself say, only my voice is higher and smaller, somehow younger. “MOMMY!”

I start to scream—the me in the recording—bloodcurdling shrieks.

Suddenly, I’m not just hearing the sound anymore. I’m making it. The me in the room. I’m seeing it. I’m feeling it.

All of it.

I’m not in the office. I’m in the car, strapped into my car seat, as we smash headlong into something and spin sideways, flipping, my stomach looping inside me like we’re on a roller coaster. We hit the ground, the windows shattering on impact. Glass everywhere. Pain. The dark of night. Thunder screeches overhead, but I barely hear it. Silence drapes itself over the whole world, muffling my ears, the sound of my own voice, screaming, “Mommy, Mommy!” as the creek water and rain rush into the car.

“STOP IT,” comes another voice.

Not from my memory. It’s Alice’s voice, and I snap back into the office, mind reeling.

“Wake her up,” Alice is saying from the voice recorder. “Right now, Frederick.”

The recorder turns off as it reaches the end. I look up from the hunk of plastic shaking wildly in my hands to Alice, whose face is ghostly. “My dreams.”

She nods. “They’re not dreams,” she says. “It’s a memory.”

“She fell asleep,” I whimper. “She fell asleep at the wheel, and we wrecked.” Alice’s features remain stony as the memory keeps replaying in my mind, fragmented and dark, cold and wet, panic overtaking me. It shouldn’t be so scary—it was a long time ago. I shouldn’t feel this way, like nothing can make me safe. A wave of dizziness hits me, and I can’t remember how to breathe. I keep inhaling but the air won’t make it to my lungs. My chest aches all the way down through my arm.

“Natalie,” Alice says, her voice rough but somehow comforting in its solidity. “Take deep breaths. Focus on your breathing. It’s all going to be okay, I can promise you that. What you’re experiencing right now is temporary.”

I barely hear her. I can’t breathe. I’m going to die. Whatever’s wrapping around me, suffocating me, it’s inescapable.

“Natalie,” Alice says more harshly. She grabs my hand in hers. “Hold on to my hand as tight as you can.”

I’m so dizzy, so lightheaded and empty of breath.

“Grip my hand, Natalie.”

I tighten my fingers around her hand.

“Tighter,” Alice says. “As tight as you can, and inhale. Breathe in.”

I obey, fighting the stuttering of my lungs as I fold my hand over Alice’s.

“Good,” she says. “Now relax and let your breath out. Can you do that?”

I can, and after a few more cycles, the dizziness and pain subside. Alice squeezes my hand lightly and gives me a weak smile. “If it’s too much, we could bring in an EMDR therapist,” she says quietly. “You don’t have to keep feeling this.”

I free my hand from hers. My breath still comes heavy, but the crushing feeling has lightened. “Two more weeks,” I say. “That’s all.”

“If you’re sure,” Alice says, sitting back.

I do my best to keep my mind on this crammed office, my eyes on Alice’s face, my heart rate detached from that memory as I ask, “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

“Who, Grandmother?”

“My mom,” I say. “I’ve had this nightmare my entire life. She knows about it. Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

Alice sighs and tilts her head. “Natalie, the one time I ever had sex with a man, when I was nineteen, I got pregnant.”

“I didn’t realize you’re—”

“Definitely gay,” Alice says. “But that’s not the point. The point is, that guy didn’t want to be a dad, and I didn’t want to have him in my life forever, and I was in the middle of undergrad at Stanford, and . . . all signs pointed to abortion. Except that I really wanted to have the baby. I was a lesbian, feminist scientist, but deep down, I knew I’d also always wanted kids. Anyway, I ended up convincing myself I wasn’t ready but by then I was pretty far along. I lined up a family to adopt the baby, and I made excuses not to go home on breaks. When my son was born, I handed him over, and I never told my family he existed.”

I shake my head. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because the reason I kept it from everyone wasn’t that I thought they’d be disappointed in me. It was because my heart was broken. I know now I was suffering from postpartum depression, but that wasn’t all. I regretted my decision. And I can tell myself that my baby was better off with parents who were adults, who had steady income—he probably was—but there’s no way for me to ever know that for sure.”

Alice takes a shuddering breath, and her voice tightens. “I’ve regretted my decision for thirteen years now. Nothing has ever hurt me like the fear that I’d made the wrong choice for my kid. And sometimes, we don’t talk about things because we don’t want to be comforted. We don’t want anyone to tell us it wasn’t our fault, or that they forgive us, or that we did the best we could. We want to hold on to that pain because we think that’s what we deserve. We worry that if we let it go, we’re dishonoring it. And, when I look at you . . .” She presses her fingertips over her mouth, bobbing her head as she fights back tears.

I don’t want to comfort her. I want her to cry. I want her to cry like I’ve cried, like I want my birth mother to cry. It scares me how I feel, now that the anxiety has faded: furious, boiling, explosive.

“You have to understand her,” Alice whispers.

“She could’ve helped me,” I say. “She could’ve helped me, and she didn’t.”

“Hey, honey!” Mom’s voice comes over the phone bubbly and excited, which only upsets me more. “We were just missing you!”

It takes me a second to steady myself as I pace along the patio behind Megan’s room. “I know,” I choke out.

“What?”

“I know about the accident.”

A long exhale follows the silence. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” I’m so frustrated that all I can do is laugh. “You’ve known the whole time. Why I was having the nightmares, why I was afraid of the dark, why I was having panic attacks. At any point in the last fifteen years you could’ve helped me, but you were so worried I’d find out it was your fault that you just let me suffer. You could’ve taken the suffering away, and you didn’t.”

“You don’t understand,” she pleads. “I was trying to protect you from unnecessary pain—”

“Protect me?” I shriek. “Why even bother sticking me in counseling if you weren’t going to tell me what was causing my problems?”

“I didn’t know if the accident had anything to do with it!” she says, voice shaking. “Your counselors were all so sure it was about—”

“God, I’m the only person who’s not entitled to know anything about my life, aren’t I?”

“Natalie, that’s not fair. I’m your mother. It’s my job to—”

“To lie to me? Admit it, Mom, you were protecting yourself. ”

“Baby, please,” she whispers. “You don’t understand. I thought about telling you, a million times, but I didn’t want to make you relive it if it wasn’t going to help you. The EMDR—it worked. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think you needed to know—”

“Stop trying to justify yourself.”

“Natalie, I’m your mother!”

“I don’t have a mother,” I scream.

I can’t do this, can’t finish this conversation. My mind is swimming. My breathing is spastic. The weight pushes down on my chest again. I hang up and throw my phone toward the woods. Almost immediately, it starts ringing from the brush where it lands.

Sheryl Crow’s and Stevie Nicks’s voices slow to a warbling as my mind spins, my lungs heave, and my vision splotches. The moment I realize I can’t feel my legs, the darkness surrounds me.