31

“How is that possible?” I ask.

She flashes a sad smile again. “How is any of it possible?” It’s what Beau said when he told me he saw the two Unions too.

“What do you want?” I say, feeling desperate. “I couldn’t save Matt. You didn’t tell me it was him, and I couldn’t save him. He’s on life support.”

Her dark eyes—my dark eyes—fall to the floor. “I know,” she says. “But I didn’t come to save Matt.”

“Then who?”

“What do you really want to know, Natalie? Ask me the question that’s been weighing on you.”

The answer surges to my lips, though I’m less and less sure I want the answer. “Why are there two worlds—why Beau and me?”

“There aren’t two worlds,” she says simply.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re slipping in time, Natalie, seeing other moments in your physical space. Hypnopompic reach forward, and hypnagogic reach back.”

“Alice already figured out the time slips,” I say, impatient. “What I don’t understand is . . .” I hesitate, gathering the courage to say it aloud. “. . . why there’s a cross with Beau’s name on it in the same place there’s a memorial for me.”

Grandmother takes a deep breath. “Oh, sweet girl. I know you better than anyone. I know when you’re lying. You do understand. You just don’t want to.”

“There’s no way I’m this annoying in the future.”

“Young people always think old people are annoying,” she says. “But we don’t care, because we think they’re annoying.”

“Stop,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Beau died, Natalie. That’s truth. If you look at time in a straight line—no detours, no do-overs or rewrites or wormholes—Beau’s father made a left turn into oncoming traffic. He was drunk, and our mother had fallen asleep at the wheel. He saw her coming and sped up to miss her. She woke up and yanked the wheel left, but neither of them was fast enough. The passenger sides of the cars collided. You survived, and a five-year-old boy named Beau Wilkes died.”

Full plump tears roll over my cheeks. “You’re lying,” I squeal between my fingers. “He has a future. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there.” To the house. Our house. Our wisteria. A crib.

“I’m not,” she says softly.

“Why can I touch him then?” I shout. “Why is my name written at the memorial too?”

“Because it’s not the whole truth,” she says, looking down at the floor again. “With time, sometimes there are do-overs. There are wormholes. I believe Beau’s world exists to you because you have the power to change things.”

“What things? What are you talking about?”

“Beau’s death is in the past,” she explains. “It happened. But when you tore loose from your position in time, time tore in the process, triggering the slips. And when I was your age, I met Beau Wilkes, despite the fact that he had died years before. I discovered what I thought to be another world. I fell in love with the boy who lived in it, and my whole life changed. I wanted to spend every day with him more than I wanted to hide or to run from what was happening. Loving him changed me. And then I found . . .” She pauses, mouth tight. “Well, the same thing you found: a cross with his name on it, marked with the date of our accident. I kept pushing against the barrier between our worlds and against time, trying to see through it for some explanation. Getting to Beau’s world had been getting harder for me all summer, but I stayed there, kneeling in the mud until I could slip through time again. When I got traction, I was staring at my own name, not Beau’s. No date, but that didn’t matter. I knew right then, just like you knew, somehow we both must’ve died on that night. I looked it up, found a news story about that night, the accident that ended Beau’s presence in our world. The same accident that, in his world, left our mother crying at the kitchen table, sent our whole broken family moving out of that house and its darkness.

“And just like you, I thought there must have been some kind of fork in time, Beau surviving on one side, I on the other. I planned to tell him, but I never got the chance. That night I woke up with a black orb over my face, and his world closed to me, permanently. Like I’d been locked back into linear time, no slips, no alternate realities. Or more like the split between our worlds was sewn shut.

“I went away to college, devastated. Every time I came back, I tried to get back to him, but I couldn’t make time budge. I couldn’t find his world. After school, I moved back to Union and started working with a professor at Northern Kentucky University who studied experiences like mine. With all of her subjects we found the same thing: a cataclysmic event preceding their time slips, some hint of an alternate world—a world in which that event had been changed or prevented—and a black orb marking the end of it all. I think that’s how it always is for people like us, who can move time. There’s a reason, some thing we could fix or change, if we only knew how.

“Maybe someone, in some time, has managed to do it. But if anyone were to actually change or fix that thing, their whole past would be rewritten, leaving them with no memory or evidence of how things used to be. It’s possible Alice and I helped someone make that different choice, but that probably would have erased our memories of ever having known that person. We do, however, remember those patients whose mysteries we tried and failed to help solve before their time ran out. Either way, it became obvious that we only have a certain span of time in which we can access and change the past: None of the subjects were successful in moving time or breaching alternate realities after their Closing. As if tears in time are self-healing, allowing those ripped from its natural course to traverse freely until they are locked back into a linear track.

“I knew all of this meant there was no getting to Beau. But even when I went away to graduate school, I couldn’t get him out of my head, what had happened to him and whether there was some way to undo it. He’d been losing track of time before my Closing happened, as if the resealing of time was making him less and less real. That was the first hint for Alice and me that Beau’s world had collapsed alongside the wormhole within me—that the Opening was, in effect, the beginning of an alternate timeline, and the Closing was its end. All of our later subjects found that, leading up to their Closings, the same thing happened to those they’d met in their alternate realities. They lost time, like Beau. More and more of it, until there was no more to lose. It may be conjecture, but it’s conjecture in which even Alice Chan was confident: We are the door to Beau and his world, Natalie. When that door closes, he’s gone. When it closed inside me, he was gone.

“I did my best to move on. I married my grad-school boyfriend, did work that I cared about, poured myself into meaningful friendships. Still, I didn’t want to accept that Beau was gone, so I kept searching for a way to get to him. Eventually Alice realized I’d been going about it all wrong. Unable to move time anymore, I was never going to find Beau. My only hope was to be found in time. So I bought my parents’ old house and fixed it up, returned my childhood room to its original state to the best of my ability—so it wouldn’t scare you if you showed up here—and waited.”

“Waited?” I hear myself whisper.

“For you,” she says. “To find me. In the meantime, I started teaching at the University of Cincinnati. I commuted so I could keep working with Alice and her new subjects, who revealed another piece of the puzzle: the physical sensations of time travel. When moving forward in time, subjects felt a pull in their abdomens, like they were rising upward. When moving backward, they felt as though they were falling. Pretty obvious, really, but what we hadn’t documented before was that the physical sensation of entering the Other World always matched that of moving forward, while the feeling returning to your own world matched that of moving backward.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand. What does it mean?”

“Time is an illusion, Natalie, relative to the person experiencing it. There’s the overall timeline of the world—dinosaurs, Ice Age, Middle Ages, Elizabethan Era, et cetera—but then each person experiences their own unique time stream as well. For most people that’s just a tiny section of time within that overall timeline. For people like us, it’s different. Our time streams can include excerpts from outside our linear lives. Think of arriving at our Senior Parade. Five minutes into our future, we were going to see buffalo where the school should be. That was our future, a moment occurring decades, if not centuries, in the past.

“Sometimes, you move through time and see everything changing before your eyes. Other times you lurch, or slip. That’s what used to happen to us as a little girl. Our body would wake up in the middle of the night, but our dreaming consciousness would lurch to a different time: a hypnopompic hallucination. You didn’t see yourself passing through every moment. You simply arrived, in my present, like you were locking on to me. That’s what you do when you go to Beau’s world. You jerk forward, as if you’re stepping over ripples in time to a point in the future.”

“Forward?” I say.

“You feel it, don’t you? The same sensation as passing into the future?”

“Beau’s in the same year as me, same day even—how can that be a future?”

She exhales. “We’ll get to that. Anyway, shortly after we made the discovery, Alice passed away. I was alone by then, my husband gone, and I almost gave up on you ever coming. Then one night, while I was sitting in my rocking chair, you found your way to my present. I knew from looking at you that you were around eighteen, probably already in the summer we met Beau. You only held time there for a minute before you lost your grip again—your Closing was close, after all. I was so caught off guard. I tried to comfort you, but I didn’t even know if you could hear me.”

That was the night of Matt’s accident, the last time I saw Grandmother. Though for her it was the first. The fear of that night, of tonight, crushes against me even as I remember.

“I spent years waiting for you to find me again. I thought if I could just see you one more time, I could at least steer you to Alice sooner. When I saw you next, though, we were further back in your own time stream. You were so little, and I didn’t want to scare you—I didn’t want to push it, so I just told you a story, one of the hundreds I’ve spent my life studying and teaching. It was the most natural thing in the world to tell you those stories, because I knew what they meant to me already and what they would mean to you someday. That night you listened, and then, after forty minutes, you were gone again.

“But a moment later you reappeared, and you held time there while we talked. It started skipping, like a scratched disc. I’d tell you a story, and then you’d lose traction. Those visits were far apart for you—six months or a year each. But for me, only minutes passed between them, as if your dreaming mind kept bringing you straight back to my time whenever it could, picking up where we’d left off. I watched you grow up in a matter of days.

“And as I said, I knew by then I’d never get to Beau again—has Alice explained the many-worlds interpretation to you yet?”

“I . . . I think.” My voice comes out as little more than a squeak. “She drew time with a bunch of branches. Each was a different world, I think; I mean, we’re talking about Alice, and she was in a science trance, so I’m not sure.”

Grandmother cracks a sad smile and nods. “We believe that those branches are wormholes. As such, they have an expiration date. An alternate future may be initiated, but unless the person with access to the wormhole chooses that future, it will collapse. Imagine an envelope that’s been sealed shut. You run your finger across the top of the envelope, and that’s time: one straight path. Then you take a letter opener, and you slice open an inch across the top.

“Now, when you run your finger over the envelope, there’s a portion where there are two separate paths, forming an ellipse. That’s the time between your Opening and your Closing. Say you run your finger partway up one—the current version of the world—and then decide you want the other one instead. You jump back to that initial split and change the course of events to take the other path. When we arrived at the Senior Parade, the venture into the past was a part of our future, just as Beau’s world—his alternate version of the present—is a part of your future. It’s the present when you look at days and years, but it’s your future because his version of events hasn’t truly happened yet, not for anyone but you.”

“I’m still lost,” I flare. “None of this makes sense.”

“That split in the envelope—those fourteen years between our Opening and Closing—that’s the time during which we can choose a different timeline, Natalie. You can choose for things to continue as they did for me, with Beau’s world collapsing. Or you can go back to the moment when time was first torn, and change things. You can choose Beau’s course of events. After your Closing, whether through action or inaction, you’ve chosen which path will survive. For me, that means Beau died. He died when I was four, and in a way he died all over again when I was eighteen and his world, his possibility of a future, collapsed.

“But you . . . you can still see it. A future where . . .” She meets my eyes, shaking her head as tears bloom along her lashes. “Where you go back and you choose him.”

My mind reels with questions and mental diagrams and so much panic as I try to make sense of what Grandmother is saying. Again and again, my body replays the sensation of passing into Beau’s world, and every time I feel the same thing: the upward motion, the feeling of being lifted quickly, the same when I swim forward through time. What does it mean that Beau’s present is my future? What does it mean that his version of the last fourteen years hasn’t truly happened yet, but that it will?

Grandmother’s shoulders are shaking from the effort of holding tears in, or maybe it just looks that way because time is pulling against me even now, trying to drag me back into my present. It settles in me then, the thing Grandmother can’t bear to say aloud, at least not as plainly as it hits me. “You think seeing his world like that means that I’m going to go back,” I murmur, “that I’m going to change what happened the night of the accident, and that will create Beau’s world.”

But we’re not both in Beau’s world.

He saw my family in his world. All of them except me. Happy, he said, they looked happy.

And I saw my name on a piece of stone there too.

“You think he survives instead of me,” I whisper.

Grandmother buries her face in her hands as she starts to cry. “I can’t get back,” she says. “I can’t go back, or I would. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried. I thought maybe I could stop the accident altogether, but, Natalie—the tug and pull, the physical evidence of time travel—when we saw that headstone with our name on it, we were in the future—not the natural one but the chosen one. We felt the pull. I don’t think you can stop the accident completely, but you can change it.”

“You think I choose—” My voice breaks, and a sob wrenches my words. “To die.”

She looks up at me. Despite her thick wrinkles and age spots and cataracts, she looks young, tiny. Like Little Me in home videos, a puny frame in too-big clothes. “I think you do what I couldn’t,” she whispers.

I open my mouth but can’t make any sound come out except a high-pitched groan. “The orb,” I finally say. “I saw it tonight.”

She nods but can’t look at me anymore. She slumps to the ground and curls her thin arms around herself. “It’s tonight. It feels exactly like the first time. Like it’s all being sewn up. The tear in time is closing tonight.”

The first time.

Today I got in the first real fight I’ve ever had with my mother. I fainted for the first time. I lost a friend for the first time, my first boyfriend. I thought about my own death for the first time when I saw my name written somewhere it shouldn’t be. And I told Beau I loved him for the first time.

And the second.

And the third.

I had meant to make love with him for the first time.

Now, he’s waiting back in Megan’s bedroom as his world crumbles. I feel the imminent fall in my stomach. Something’s trying to cement me back where I belong, and when it does—if it does—Beau will be trapped under the rubble of a world that never happened. “I haven’t lived yet,” I say because I’m helpless. Because all I have to protect me now is words. Because it’s an impossible choice to bear, but I don’t feel there’s a choice to make, and I think saying that I don’t want to do this is the closest I can get to not doing it.

Grandmother reaches a hand up toward me. I take it as I lower myself to the floor in front of her. “It should be me,” she says. “I could do it and have no regrets. It’s what I would choose, but that doesn’t mean it has to be what you choose. I can’t ask that of you. I know you haven’t lived yet. I know the life you can have, and how full it will be even without Beau, all the people you’ll affect, and those who will change your life forever.

“I know all the stories you should know someday. I know both of your mothers, and how much they both love you. I know secrets about Coco that would make your toes curl in delight, and I know Jack’s kids and how much they love him. I have all the answers, and you have none.”

She squeezes my hand. “All you have are the stories I was able to tell you and the love in your heart for Beau right now. I know all that, Natalie, and I’m still here, asking you to do something I should never ask of someone your age, especially not someone I love, whose every heartbreak and joy I’ve also known. I’m asking because it’s what I wanted to do, and you have the choice now.”

“I don’t have a choice,” I lash out. “You know I don’t. You practically raised me for this. You spent years drilling it into my head. You taught me that to love was to die.”

“Oh, honey. You misunderstand. I didn’t tell you those stories just to change your mind. I told them because I remember how badly it hurt, not being able to see the truth, feeling like I was going to be swallowed up by the dark. What is love,” she says, “other than putting someone else before you? Our birth mother gave us away because she hoped we could have a better life away from her. Our parents kept the car accident from us because Mom suffered from PTSD for years. She worked so hard to make the pain manageable for herself, but she also protected us from that pain. Love is nothing but putting someone else first. I didn’t teach you that so you’d save Beau. I told you so you’d see how this whole world was made for you, how it warms when you smile and aches when you hurt. I told you so you could stop being afraid.”

“If that’s true, then there has to be another way,” I snap. “How can you tell me the whole world loves me and in the same breath tell me I have to die? I want to know. I want this secret knowledge you have that has you so confident that this is it, that you’re willing to ask me to go to the past and lie down in the road in front of my own car to kill my child self. Because I don’t buy it. There has to be another way.”

“Why?” Grandmother challenges. “You’ve seen evidence of exactly two presents. I’ve seen evidence that Beau died that night in our world. Beau’s seen evidence that you don’t exist in his. You’ve looked at your own memorial in the same place as his. So why does there have to be another way?”

“Because this is happening,” I shout. “This doesn’t happen every day, Grandmother, or at least not to everyone. There has to be a better reason for why I can change things. Why Beau and me out of everyone in the world? Why do we get a second chance? What makes us special?”

“Maybe nothing,” Grandmother says. “Maybe chance. Or maybe someone thinks the choice is just the kind of gift you would appreciate.”

“Or maybe it’s because the world would be better with both of us in it,” I counter, “or because things are broken and when we’re together, they’re less broken. Maybe it’s because we’re connected or we fit or we’re right together, and if time is really flat, then maybe it saw all of that. Maybe, even though Beau died, time itself saw every possible world where we could love each other and that was as good as us having loved one another. Because we could’ve loved each other anywhere, in any world, and maybe the reason we can change things is because the thing between us is big enough to reach through every branch in time. Maybe our love couldn’t die, even when we did. Something’s pulling us together, Grandmother. Something brought him back from the dead to me. Even if I go back to the night of that accident and die, why would death and time be any stronger this time? It has to mean something. It has to mean a future.”

“Maybe there is another way, Natalie. But I’m not going to promise you something I can’t give you.” Her words are stretched taut and shivering with tears, her voice wild and round, a meniscus about to flood the lip of a glass. “I’m not going to tell you that you get a future with Beau because I don’t know that. I won’t be the one to tell you that you can have it all, no matter how badly I want Beau to have a chance to live. I want to believe in that future, Natalie, but I don’t. You say you saw it? Well, I never did. Even if you can make a future, who’s to say it’s really you in it? I mean, look at us. We’re the same person, but we’re living different lives. If you can create a world with you and Beau in it, it’s still not quite you, just like you’re not quite me.”

It feels like she’s dropped a weight on my chest. “Then lie to me,” I beg. “Because I’m doing this, and I need you to tell me it’s going to be okay. I need you to lie to me.”

When her mouth shifts into a smile, tears break and slip down her cheeks. “It’s not a lie,” she whispers. “It will be okay.”

I shut my eyes against the tears, and Grandmother’s stories flash through my mind, a warm current of electricity woven throughout my life, like Grandmother Spider’s web and Alice’s trails of light, guiding me and teaching me everything I know about love. But that whole web hurts, like it’s growing through my veins, all the life I want to live pulsing alongside the one I want to give Beau. The things I want to lay out in front of his eyes and place in his hands and sing into his ears and the places I want him to be carried, the thousands of golden sunsets on that day-warmed porch.

“I saw it,” I rasp. “I saw how all of it would be.” How we would fit, what would be built between us. “I was there. What do I do with that?”

“Sweet kid.” Grandmother reaches out and swipes a piece of tear-dampened hair away from my eyes. “I may have never seen it, but it never left my heart, this whole time. You take your hope with you to the end, just like I’m doing.”

I look up into her face, searching for her meaning, and she presses her finger to her lips, eyes dipping toward the ground. When she speaks again, her voice is hoarse and rough. “I’m dying.” Her confirmation is little more than a squeak, and she takes a long second to build her voice back up. “This isn’t about me anymore. It’s about you, and what you want.”

“Dying?” I whisper. “How?”

She closes her eyes. “I won’t tell you that. I don’t want to ruin any surprises, or give you any fears. Everyone dies, honey, and you already know that now, at eighteen.”

“And even Jesus was scared to die,” I remind her.

“He was.”

“You can’t tell me anything? Give me any hint?”

She folds her hands together to steady her trembling. “I can tell you that the pain of living is worth it. That if you live, your life will be as full of love as it is darkness, and for every moment of pain, you’ll have one of joy too. The one thing you won’t feel is what you feel now with Beau, and that doesn’t make your life any less worthy of being lived. But then again, worthiness isn’t a factor in whether we’re alive or loved.

“You have the choice to either appreciate the impossible and unwarranted gift of being alive or to give it to someone else. To use your love to remake the world. Whether you give it to Beau or keep it, Natalie, the world’s going to keep right on being terrible and beautiful all at once.”

I’ve been so afraid of those terrible things, of everything falling apart and of never knowing who I am or finding the place I belong. But here I am, looking at myself at the end of time, and she was never alone, not really. God, it’s a painful sort of relief, seeing that some version of me has already lived and that all those fears eventually fell away, unrealized. I still want the whole picture all to myself, to get to the end of my world and slip quietly from there, but there’s no real choice to make. I don’t know for sure what will happen when I go back to the night of the accident, but I know I’ll go. Not because Beau’s future is so big or because mine is so small, but because love is giving the world away, and being loved is having the whole world to give.

“How much time do I have?” I ask.

“Hours,” she says. “Minutes. I don’t know, Natalie. Not much.”

“I’m so scared.”

She pulls me into a hug and smooths my hair away from my face, exactly as Mom has a billion times. Mom. The last thing I said to her was I don’t have a mother. There are so many things I need to do. See my parents, Jack, Coco. Tell my mom to stop carrying around her guilt and promise her it’ll be made right. Say goodbye to Megan, tell her how much I love her. Comfort the Kincaids, who will have their son back, if this works. Thank Rachel for loving me brutally, enough to hate me for leaving her behind.

And I need to be held by Beau. To make sure he understands how deeply I really do love him. How kind and gentle and soft he is. How safe and cared for he makes people feel, and how much brighter the world is for all he does and gives. How good he is, and what kind of life he deserves despite the one he’s been given.

But there may not be time to say these last words. I can’t risk it. This is my only chance. I’ll never get to tell him how I think that if it were an option, I could love him well until I died.

I guess I will love him well until I die. I have to believe the world will pick up where I leave off. I have to believe that, whether I’m there at the end of the world with Beau or not, love is bigger than death.

“I’m scared too,” Grandmother whispers in my ear. “But we’re so brave, girl.”

I give a phlegmy laugh. I’m minutes from death and nonexistence, and I’m laughing. Suddenly, I’m laughing hysterically, and Grandmother’s laughing too, and we’re both rocking on the floor of our bedroom, tears of laughter streaming down our faces, snot dripping from our noses.

She regains composure first, gritting her teeth, smiling forcefully, and nodding at me. “You can do this. I should know. I was a surrogate mom twice for Jack and his husband.” She responds to my surprise with a dramatic wink. “We can do anything.”

I nod because I can’t speak. Harsh sobriety has set in, and yet my head and breastbone feel as light as balloons, like all the weight of anxiety is gone now that the choice has been made, and I’m full of something bright and warm, a gift for the boy I love. I stand up, and Grandmother stands too, then pulls me into a bone-crunching hug. She steps back but grips my upper arms with surprising strength. “Because of you,” she says, “a whole new world’s about to get born.”

She lets me go, and I walk toward the closet door, catching its frame in my hands and pausing. I look back to where she stands, back straight, hands clasped in front of her stomach and chin tipped up. “Grandmother,” I say.

“Yeah, honey,” she says.

“Do you think . . . I mean, is it possible . . . that there is a God?”

She smiles that same smile I recognize from childhood, the mysterious one that makes our eyes sparkle. “Girl,” she says, “how do you think any of this is possible if something didn’t want it to be? Something tore a hole in time just over our bed all so you, lucky bitch, could know what it is to love. Someone tore up a tree and let us look through and decide to fall.”

“You think God loves me like you do?”

“I think He or She or It loves us like we love Beau. I think God loves us fucking well, Natalie Cleary.”

Tears flood my vision. I nod once then turn, walk into my closet for the last time, slip through my window, hop down into my beautiful, blue-green swamp of a yard, and get into my car. Before I pull away, I see Grandmother standing in the closet, silhouetted by light. She leans forward over the windowsill and shouts to me, loud and clear, “Her name was Bridget. Our ishki’s name was Bridget, and she never stopped caring.”

Bridget. I whisper her name to myself twice, and then I fold it in my chest with everyone else who’s a part of me, all the people some version of me has already known and those who—I have to believe—some version of me will meet someday. Then I drive back to the intersection and pull onto the shoulder one last time, chills alive over every centimeter of my skin. But I’m not panicking, despite my fear. I’m not dizzy, despite the swelling lightness in my chest and head. I’m staying, I think, I’m staying until the end and for whatever comes after.

I want you to understand something, Natalie. No matter how hard it feels, you don’t need to be afraid to move on. There’s always more to see and feel.