AS I LIE HERE IN A DIMENSION NOT MY OWN, ON A STARK white bed more forbidding than comforting, I try to paint pictures of home in my mind. I want every face, every corner, every shadow, every beam. I want my reality painted over this one until I can’t see the blinding white any longer.
My home—my real home—is in California.
Our house isn’t on the beach; it’s nestled at the foot of the hills in the shade of tall trees. It’s always clean but never neat. Books are piled two deep on the shelves that line nearly every room, Mom’s houseplants thrive in every corner and nook, and years ago my parents covered the entire hallway with that chalkboard paint that’s meant for little kids’ rooms but works perfectly well for physics equations.
When I was little, my friends would get so excited when I told them that my parents did most of their scientific work at home, and they’d come in for the first time looking around for bubbling beakers or dynamos or whatever devices sci-fi shows had taught them to expect. What it mostly means is papers piled on every flat surface. Sure, lately we’ve had a few gadgets, but only a few. Nobody wants to hear that theoretical physics has less to do with shiny lasery stuff and more to do with numbers.
In the center of the great room is our dinner table, an enormous round wooden one Mom and Dad bought for cheap at a Goodwill back when Josie and I were little. They let us paint it in a rainbow of colors, just goop it on with our hands, because they loved hearing us laugh and also because no two human beings on earth ever cared less about how their furniture looked. Josie thought it was funny to smear swirls on with her fingers. For me, though—that was the first time I noticed how different colors looked when you blended them together, contrasted one next to another. It might have been the moment I fell in love with painting.
“I guess you think painting isn’t as important as physics,” I said to Paul as I sat at my easel, that one day he watched me work.
“Depends on what you mean by important,” he replied.
I could have thrown him out right then. Why didn’t I?
My memories become dreams as I fall asleep without knowing it. All night I see Paul’s face in front of mine, staring at me, questioning me, planning something I can’t guess. The next morning, when I wake up in this cold, foreign bed, I can’t remember the dreams. I only know that I tried to go after Paul but never could move.
Surprisingly, there’s no disorientation. From the first moment I open my eyes, I know where I am, who I am, and who I’m supposed to be. I remember what Paul did to my father, that I’ll never see Dad again. As I lie there amid the rumpled white sheets, I realize how little I want to move. My grief feels like ropes tying me down.
“Come along, sweetie!” Aunt Susannah calls. “Time to make yourself pretty!”
Not unless the technology in this dimension borders on the miraculous. I sit up, catch a glimpse of my crazy bedhead curls reflected in the window, and groan.
Apparently we’re going to a “charity luncheon,” though my aunt doesn’t remotely care about whatever charity it’s for; she doesn’t even remember what it is. It’s a society event—a place to see and be seen—and that’s all that matters to Aunt Susannah.
Still, I know I have to stay put and wait for Theo. If I’m going to stop Paul, I’ll need all the help I can get—and Theo is the only one who can help me. So, for one whole day, I have to lead this Marguerite’s life.
From what I can tell, it’s not much fun.
“Come on, dear.” Aunt Susannah trips along the cobblestone street in her high-heeled shoes, as nimble as a mountain goat. “We can’t be late.”
“Can’t we?” The idea of navigating a whole social event as another version of myself—it’s pretty intimidating.
She gives me a confused glance over her shoulder. “But I wanted you to get to know the duchess. Her niece Romola is at Chanel, you know. If you want to be a fashion designer someday, you’ve got to make some connections now.”
In this reality, I want to be a fashion designer? Well, at least that’s creative. “Right. Sure.”
“Don’t pretend you’re too sophisticated to be impressed by a title,” Aunt Susannah says. She gets like this—brisk and slightly contemptuous—whenever she’s challenged. “You’re an even bigger snob than I am, and you know it. Just like your mother.”
“What did you say?”
“I know, I know, to you your parents are saints, and they should be. I’m not saying they weren’t absolutely lovely people. But how your mother used to go on about being descended from Russian nobility! You’d think she personally fled the Red Army with the Romanov jewels in her arms.”
“Her family was from the nobility. They did flee the Revolution. They were expats in Paris for the next four generations, before her parents finally moved to America. She’d never lie about being something she’s not.” Then I remember that I’m not supposed to have known my mother very well in this dimension, and that here, she’s as lost to me as my father. “I mean, she wouldn’t have.”
And Mom wouldn’t. She only cares about two things: science and the people she loves. The one who wears her crazy-curly hair twisted back with whatever pencil or pen she finds lying around. The one who let me finger paint the table. Nobody on earth is less of a snob than Mom.
We’re standing in the middle of the street now, still a block short of the hotel where the duchess and a hundred and forty of her closest friends are taking tea. Aunt Susannah puts one hand to her chest like an actress in a cheesy old movie, and yet I know she’s sincere—as sincere as she knows how to be, at least. “I wasn’t putting your mum down. You realize that, don’t you?”
From Aunt Susannah, “snob” is practically a merit badge. I sigh. “Yeah. I know.”
“Now, I’d hate for us to be cross with each other.” My aunt comes close and puts her arm around me. “It’s always been just us. You and me against the world, hmm?”
I could almost believe we had a good life together, if I hadn’t been in that impersonal apartment. Or if I didn’t see through the translucent lenses of Aunt Susannah’s sunglasses to her bored, impatient gaze.
It’s taken me less than a day to discover that Aunt Susannah resents having to play surrogate parent to this dimension’s Marguerite. What must it have been like for her to live a whole lifetime knowing that? To feel so rejected by the only family she had left in the world?
“You and me,” I repeat, and Aunt Susannah smiles like that’s a reason to be happy.
In my real home, it’s never been “just us.”
As long as I can remember, Mom and Dad’s research assistants have spent nearly as much time at my house as I do. When I was very young, I thought they were as much my siblings as Josie was; I cried so hard the day Swathi gently explained that she was going back to live in New Delhi because she had a job and a family there. Who were these people? How could they be her family when we were her family?
My parents started being clearer about their assistants after that, but the fact is, most of them have wound up being more or less informally adopted. Mom and Dad always wanted tons of children, but pregnancy turned out to be difficult for her, so after me they stopped. I guess the grad students have had to fill the empty places where my brothers and sisters should’ve been. They sleep on our sofas, write their theses on the rainbow table, cry about their love lives, drink our milk straight from the carton. We keep up with every one, and some of them are important people in my life. Diego taught me how to ride a bike. Louis helped me bury my pet goldfish in the backyard even though rain poured down through the entire “funeral.” Xiaoting was the only one at home when I started my period for the first time, and she handled it perfectly—explaining how to use everything from our friends at Tampax, then taking me to Cold Stone Creamery.
Still, from the beginning, Paul and Theo were different. Closer to us than any of the others. Special.
And Paul was the most special of all.
Mom joked that she liked him because they were both Russian, that only fellow Russians could ever understand each other’s dark humor. Dad made a standing appointment for them to have lunch on campus together, and, once, let Paul borrow his car. He usually didn’t even let me borrow the car. Even though Paul was so quiet, so aloof, so apparently invulnerable to laughter—to my parents, he could do no wrong.
(“He’s weird,” I protested to them shortly after his arrival. “He’s like some kind of caveman from back before people could even talk.”
“That’s not very kind,” Dad said as he poured milk into his tea. “Marguerite, remember—Paul graduated from high school at age thirteen. He began his PhD studies at seventeen. He never had much of a childhood. Hasn’t really had a chance to make friends his own age, and Lord knows he doesn’t get a lot of support from home. It makes him a little . . . awkward, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a good person.”
“Besides,” Mom interjected, “whether by ‘caveman’ you mean Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals, there’s no reason to assume they lacked human speech.”)
Paul was their research assistant for only a year and a half—but they loved him more than any of the others. He practically lived at our house or in their classes, 24/7. They loaned him books, fussed when he didn’t have a jacket in winter, even baked him a birthday cake—chocolate with caramel icing, his favorite.
Theo Beck worked just as hard for them. They were never unkind to Theo; I’ve always felt like he belonged, and he’s definitely more fun than strange, watchful Paul. Theo’s black hair is always a little bit wild, everything is a joke to him, and okay, he flirts with me some, but I don’t think Mom and Dad ever minded. I’m not even sure they noticed. So Theo should have been equally beloved.
But Paul is smarter. More unique. He’s one step over the line that separates “extraordinarily intelligent” from “genius.” I could also tell that Mom and Dad thought Paul needed them more. Theo is cocky; Paul is shy. Theo cracks jokes; Paul seems melancholy. So Paul brought out their protective side in a way Theo never could. Sometimes, I knew, when Theo saw how my parents devoted themselves to Paul, he was jealous.
Maybe sometimes I felt jealous myself.
Within twenty minutes of arriving at the luncheon, I’ve been introduced to the duchess’s niece Romola, the one at Chanel. She’s not a designer there, merely a publicist, but as Aunt Susannah says, “Every connection helps, right?”
Surprisingly, Romola doesn’t treat me like a leech; instead she latches on to me. “We’re going to have fun,” she whispers. “About time someone interesting showed up.”
Ten minutes after that, I’m in the bathroom watching Romola do a line of coke. She offers me some, and I decline, but I suspect this dimension’s Marguerite would say yes without a second thought.
So fifteen minutes later, when Romola offers me champagne—at two in the afternoon—I say yes. If I’m going to be convincing as this Marguerite I need to play the part.
Aunt Susannah watches me start drinking, and she doesn’t say a word. I guess she’s used to it.
This party is the weirdest thing, simultaneously upper-crust and tacky. Cosmetic surgery has warped the faces of every woman over thirty; they don’t look younger, just not quite human in a way society has decided to pretend not to see. Half of the people are talking more to the holograms from their rings or badges than they are to the people around them. What conversation I can hear is mostly gossip: who’s shagging who, who’s making money, who’s losing it, who’s not invited to the next party like this.
Maybe the technology is different, but the shallowness of the scene is probably universal. So this is the life my father escaped when he chose to go into science, to leave Great Britain and join Mom in California. He was even smarter than I knew.
Here’s to you, Dad, I think as I grab another glass of champagne.
Seven hours after the luncheon, I’m behind the wheel of Romola’s car—a shiny silver teardrop that actually drives itself, which is good, considering how tipsy I already am. Romola herself is telling me about the amazing clubs we’re going to hit tonight. We’ve hung out all day. She acts like we’re friends now, like she’s going to get me an internship at Chanel. I know and she knows that we’re both just using this as an excuse to get wasted. I don’t think she’d let me ditch her if I tried.
I hate this. I’d rather go home, throw up, and pass out, preferably in that order.
But every time I look out at the dark, jagged, futuristic London in front of me, I remember that Paul is here. I remember that we have to meet again, and what I have to do when that happens. There’s no way out—not for him, and not for me.
Paul would say it was our destiny.
“What are you trying to do?” Theo said one time, glaring across the table at Paul. The pieces that would become the very first Firebird prototype were strewn between them, across the rainbow table. “The minute Sophia gets vindicated, you want to turn her into a laughingstock again?”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. I’d come in from piano lessons, and I quickly ditched my sheet music so I’d look less like a kid. Theo is only three and a half years older than me, Paul only two; they were the first of the grad students I’d ever thought of as being more like me than like my parents. I wanted them to think of me the same way. “Why would people be laughing at Mom?”
Paul’s gray eyes glanced up to meet mine for only one second before he went back to his work. “It’s not her theory. It’s mine. I take responsibility.”
Theo leaned back in his chair as he gestured toward Paul with his thumb. “This one is ready to risk his scientific credibility—and his adviser’s, no matter what he says—by arguing that destiny is real.”
“Destiny?” That sounded weirdly . . . romantic from a guy like Paul.
“There are patterns within the dimensions,” Paul insisted, never looking up again. “Mathematical parallels. It’s plausible to hypothesize that these patterns will be reflected in events and people in each dimension. That people who have met in one quantum reality will be likely to meet in another. Certain things that happen will happen over and over, in different ways, but more often than you could explain by chance alone.”
“In other words,” I said, “you’re trying to prove the existence of fate.”
I was joking, but Paul nodded slowly, like I’d said something intelligent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”
“You should come to Paris with me next week,” Romola shouts over the dance music in the club. I think it’s the same one I was standing outside last night, when I arrived in this dimension.
“Sure!” Why not accept? She’ll never actually take me; I’ll never actually go; and we both know it. “That would be amazing!”
I’m wearing a dress she loaned me: dull pewter leather, skin-tight even on my rail-thin frame. It couldn’t be more obvious that my breasts are practically nonexistent, but I’m also showing off a whole lot of leg, and in the opinion of the guys in this club, that makes up for the lack of cleavage. They’re all over me, buying me drinks—more drinks I don’t need.
And I hate the way they look at me, admiring but appraising, the same kind of hard, greedy assessment they’d give an expensive sports car. Not one of them sees me.
“Probably you think it’s impractical at least,” I said to Paul, that one night he watched me paint. “Art.”
“I don’t know that practicality is the most important thing.”
Which sounded almost like a compliment, for a moment, until I realized that he basically had admitted that he thought it was impractical of me to study painting at college. I was going to take classes in art restoration so I wouldn’t wind up living in Mom and Dad’s basement when I was thirty, but I didn’t feel like defending myself to him. I felt like going on the attack.
It was late November, just after Thanksgiving—only a week and a half ago, and yet already it seems like another lifetime. The evening was surprisingly warm, the last glow of Indian summer—or “Old Ladies’ Summer,” the Russian phrase my mother prefers. I wore an old camisole smeared with a hundred shades of paint from past evenings of work, and blue jean shorts that I’d cut off myself. Paul stood in the doorway of my bedroom, the only time he’d ever come so close to intruding on my space.
I was so aware of him. He’s bigger than your average guy, and way bigger than your average physics grad student: tall, broad-shouldered, and extremely muscular—from the rock climbing, I guess. Paul’s frame seemed to fill the entire door. Although I kept working, rarely looking away from my brush and canvas, it was as if I could sense him behind me. It was like feeling the warmth of a fire even when you’re not looking directly at the flame.
“Okay, maybe portraits don’t rule the art world anymore,” I said. Other students at art shows did collages and mobiles with “found objects,” Photoshopped 1960s ads to make postmodern comments on today’s society, stuff like that. Sometimes I felt out of step, because all I had to offer were my oil paintings of people’s faces. “But plenty of artists earn good money painting portraits. Ten thousand bucks apiece, sometimes, once you have a reputation. I could do that.”
“No,” Paul said. “I don’t think you could.”
I turned to him then. My parents might worship the guy, but that didn’t mean he could wander into my room and be insulting. “Excuse me?”
“I meant—” He hesitated. Obviously he knew he’d said the wrong thing; just as obviously, he didn’t understand why. “The people who get their portraits painted—rich people—they want to look good.”
“If you’re trying to dig yourself out of a hole, you’re doing a crappy job of it. Just FYI.”
Paul jammed his hands into the pockets of his threadbare jeans, but his gray eyes met mine evenly. “They want to look perfect. They only want their best side to show. They think a portrait should be—like plastic surgery, but on their image instead of their face. Too beautiful to be real. Your paintings—sometimes they’re beautiful, but they’re always real.”
I couldn’t look him in the face any longer. Instead I turned my head toward the gallery of paintings currently hung on my bedroom walls, where my friends and family looked back at me.
“Like your mother,” Paul said. His voice was softer. I stared at her portrait as he spoke. I’d tried to make Mom look her best, because I love her, but I didn’t only re-create her dark, almond-shaped eyes or her broad smile; I also showed the way her hair always frizzes out wildly in a hundred directions, and how sharply her cheekbones stand out from her thin face. If I hadn’t put those things in the painting too, it wouldn’t have been her. “When I look at that, I see her as she is late at night, when we’ve been working for ten, fourteen hours. I see her genius. I see her impatience. Her exhaustion. Her kindness. And I’d see all that even if I didn’t know her.”
“Really?” I glanced back at Paul then, and he nodded, obviously relieved I understood.
“Look at them all. Josie’s impatient for her next adventure. Your father is distracted, off on one of his tangents, and there’s no telling whether he’s wasting time or about to be brilliant. Theo—” He paused as I took in the portrait I was finishing of Theo, complete with black hair gelled into spikiness, brown eyes beneath arched eyebrows, and full lips that would have suited a Renaissance cupid. “Theo’s up to no good, as usual.”
I started laughing. Paul grinned.
“And then there’s your self-portrait.”
Although I’ve participated in various art shows, even had an exhibition of my own in a very small gallery, I’ve never displayed my self-portrait anywhere besides my bedroom. It’s personal in a way that no other painting can ever be.
“Your hair . . .” he said, and his voice trailed off, because even Paul possessed enough tact to know that calling a girl’s hair a “disaster zone” was probably unwise. But it is—curlier and thicker and more uncontrollable even than Mom’s—and that’s how I painted it. “I can see all the ways you’re like your mother.”
Sure, I thought. Bony, too tall, too pale.
“And all the ways you’re not like her.”
I tried to turn it into a joke. “You mean, you don’t see the same incredible genius?”
“No.”
It hurt. I wonder if I winced.
Quickly Paul added, “There are perhaps five people born in a century with minds like your mother’s. No, you’re not as smart as she is. Neither am I. Neither is anyone else either of us is likely to meet in our lifetimes.”
That was true. It helped, but my cheeks were still flushed with heat. How could I feel him standing near me?
He has a softer voice than you’d think, from the big frame and the hard eyes. “I see . . . the way you’re always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you’re older than your years, but still . . . playful, like a little girl. How you’re always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It’s all in the eyes.”
How could Paul see any of that? How could he know only from the portrait?
But it wasn’t only from the portrait. I knew that, too.
Although I ought to have said something, I couldn’t have spoken a word. My breath caught in my throat, high and tight. Never once did I look away from my self-portrait and back at Paul.
He said, “You paint the truth, Marguerite. I don’t think you could work any other way.”
And then he was gone.
After that, I started work on a portrait of Paul. His face is a surprisingly difficult one to capture. The wide forehead—strong, straight eyebrows—the firm jawline—light brown hair with a hint of reddish gold to it that kept me mixing paints for hours in an attempt to get the exact shade—the way he ducks his head slightly, as if he’s apologizing for being so tall and so strong—that slightly lost look he has, like he knows he’ll never fit in and doesn’t even see the point of trying—but it was the eyes that threw me.
Deep-set, intense: I knew what Paul’s eyes looked like. But the thing was . . . whenever I painted someone, even myself, I showed them looking slightly away from the viewer. Expressions become more revealing then; it also gives the person in the portrait a hint of mystery—a sense that the real human being inside is beyond anything my work can capture. That’s part of painting the truth, too.
But with Paul I couldn’t do it. Every time I tried to paint his gaze, he wouldn’t look away from the viewer. From the artist.
He looked at me. He was always, always, looking at me.
The day after my father died, the hour after we learned Paul was responsible, I went to my room, took one of my canvas knives, and slashed his portrait to ribbons.
He made me trust him.
He made me think he saw me.
And it was all just part of Paul’s game, one small element of his big plan to destroy us all.
That’s just one more reason he has to pay.
Around midnight, my head is whirling, and I feel like I’m going to be sick, but I never stop dancing. The heavy drumbeat of the music reverberates through me and drowns out even the thump of my own pulse. It’s like I’m not even alive. Merely a puppet on strings with nothing inside.
A guy’s hand closes over my shoulder, and I wonder which one it is. Will he buy me another drink? If he does, I’ll pass out. I think I’d like to pass out around now.
But when I turn and see who it is, I gasp, and just like that—I’m alive again.
“Nice dress, Meg.” Theo smirks as he glances down my body, then up again. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“Theo!” I throw my arms around him, and he hugs me back. For the longest time we’re locked together like that, right on the middle of the dance floor.
“Are you drunk?” he murmurs into the curve of my neck. “Or are they making perfumes that smell like tequila?”
“Get me out of here.” Why is it so hard to get the words out? Only then do I realize I’m sobbing.
I’ve held it together all this time. I’ve held it together because I had to, carrying the grief and the fear even when I thought the weight would crush me. But now Theo’s here, and I can finally let go.
Theo hugs me tighter—so tightly that my feet lift off the ground—and he carries me off the dance floor, away from all the lights. He settles me on one of the long, low couches in the corner. I can’t stop crying, so he just holds me, his hands stroking my hair and my back. He rocks me back and forth as gently as he would a child. All around us, the club lights pulse, and the music and dancing roar on.