by Jenn Gott
* * *
Mrs. Maxwell approached Jane about twenty minutes later.
“Can we talk?” she asked. She was standing just behind Jane’s chair, out of sight. Jane motioned at the empty chair beside her, but Mrs. Maxwell hesitated. “Alone?”
Jane stood up. By the time she was fully to her feet, Mrs. Maxwell had already turned and was heading out of the visitors lounge. Jane followed at a distance. She didn’t know why. It was perfectly safe to walk beside this woman that both was and wasn’t her mother, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She stalked her through the familiar routes of the hospital, and even when she was forced to get into the elevator with her, Jane kept her distance, always behind and to the right.
If Mrs. Maxwell was offended, she did not show it. But then, she wouldn’t.
They reached the parking garage. The clack of Mrs. Maxwell’s heels was especially pronounced against the cement, echoing from floor to wall to ceiling and back again. They had barely started to approach a sleek black town car when a driver stepped out, ready to open her door. Mrs. Maxwell held up her hand.
“It’s all right, Tom. Why don’t you go have a smoke break? Or here”—she reached into her purse, drawing out a twenty—“get yourself some coffee. My treat.”
Tom was either used to this, or too well-trained to bat an eye at this request. He accepted the tip with a practiced bow. “Ma’am,” he said, nodding at both Mrs. Maxwell and Jane as he set off.
Mrs. Maxwell opened the back door of the car. She motioned inside. “Have a seat.”
A moment later, they were both settled on the leather seats. Side by side, but as far from each other as they could get without it being obvious that this is what they were trying to do.
Neither of them said anything. Jane stared sideways at the face of what her mother could have been, if fates were different. Mrs. Maxwell crossed her legs. She uncrossed them. She crossed them again. She smoothed out her skirt, picked at a piece of imaginary lint, brushed her fingers off on each other.
Finally, she cleared her throat. “First, I just want to know if my Jane is okay.”
“I don’t know,” Jane said. There was no point in lying. “She’s missing. We’re looking for her.”
Mrs. Maxwell nodded, accepting this. She folded her hands on her lap. She was studying a ring on her finger, a fat onyx oval set in silver and pearl.
Jane sensed the emotional hit before Mrs. Maxwell said a word. She closed her eyes, retreating inside of herself. Forget the car. Forget the parking garage. Forget this woman who wasn’t Jane’s mother. Forget the hospital, her friends waiting anxiously several floors above, the same stale faces of doctors and nurses bustling from one room to the next to the next. Forget, if she could, about Amy, somewhere up there in surgery. Jane floundered, searching the depths of her mind for a place where she could handle this, a place where she could weather the storm.
“I have to tell you a story, Jane.”
Jane nodded, suddenly ready. She could do stories.
* * *
I have to tell you a story, Jane.
About . . . a year and a half ago, my daughter came to my door. Bloodied, streaked with dirt. Now, I’ve seen her battle worn before, but this was something else. It wasn’t just that she was in civilian clothes. There was something—something haunted about her eyes.
A battered finger pressing the doorbell. Dark strokes, the lines loose and careless. Muted colors indicating road rash, scratches, bruising. A streak of drying blood worn into the grooves of her knuckle. The background is bright and cheerful, soft pastels indicating a perfect day, a perfect porch.
The door opens. Just a slice of Mrs. Maxwell’s face, not even fully in view before the lines of worry begin to wrinkle her brow and draw her lips together. A small, tentative speech bubble: “Jane?”
A wide shot. Jane, her designer clothes torn and stained with gray. Blood cuts a harsh angle down her legs, another across her shoulder. Again, the world behind her is bright and carefree, while her face tells another story. Slack jaw, hollow cheeks. A spark is missing from her eyes as she regards her mother with detachment.
I brought her in. Tried to get her to take a shower, change out of her awful clothes, but she just collapsed on her bed and began sobbing. No explanation. Nothing I did could pull it out of her. I thought about calling for a doctor, or Cal, but it seemed . . . I don’t know, wrong somehow. Her grief was so pure . . . almost sacred.
I left her there. Let her work it out. I went down to the kitchen, and I was so restless, so worried, I just started making banana bread. I don’t know, it was something to do. I used to make it for Jane when she was little, before the move, before her father started running for office, and it always used to cheer her up.
It was just coming out of the oven when Jane reappeared. I guess she had taken a shower after all, because she was in fresh pajamas now, and her hair was damp. She didn’t say anything at first, just came into the kitchen and sat down at the island by the stove. I . . . I tried to offer her a slice. But she wouldn’t eat it.
Speech bubbles overlapping each other:
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I made it just for you. Do you remember, how I used to—?”
“Yes. But no. No.”
Smaller text: “All right.”
Mrs. Maxwell’s face, chastised and downcast. The banana bread, steaming, untouched, on the counter. Folded hands, flawlessly manicured, rest next to it as Mrs. Maxwell waits to see what Jane is going to do next.
She told me that Amy was dead.
At first, I couldn’t believe it. I actually had to sit down. The two of them were so close as children—inseparable—and even though they’d lost touch after we moved, I was so thrilled when they found each other again in Grand City. I mean, I knew things were different between them now. They had their whole group of friends back, and what with the Heroes, their work . . . I knew they weren’t as close as they once were. But it was so good to see them working together. It was almost like having a lost daughter back. I don’t think that I’d realized, until Jane said that Amy was dead, exactly how much the girl had meant to me.
This might sound arrogant, but I think that it was my own grief that finally snapped a little bit of life back into Jane. She narrowed her eyes, and it’s like a part of her came back to herself, realized what she’d said. “No, not our Amy,” she told me, but of course I didn’t understand what that meant.
So Jane explained it. How she’d found a way to travel into a kind of alternate reality. Another Earth, another Grand City. I didn’t understand it at first, but Jane said that we were all there. Her and Amy, Cal and the rest of the team. Me. Her father. All the same, but different in a number of little ways. Like a kind of what-if story, or one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books that Jane’s uncle used to send her on her birthdays.
She didn’t say it, but I think that Jane had become kind of . . . obsessed. There was something manic in her voice as she described it.
The spark of life was back in Jane’s eyes. Sitting up straighter on the bar stool by the kitchen island. Jane’s shoulders pulled back, her hands spread as if in the middle of gesturing widely. “We’re all there! But it’s not really us, it’s like . . . we’re different, like we’d made other choices. Gone down other paths.”
Mrs. Maxwell, getting herself a cup of coffee. Glancing sideways at her daughter, her lips pinched tightly as she listens. The curtain of her hair provides contrast to the angled line of her face as she turns back.
“Other paths?” Mrs. Maxwell’s speech bubble says next. Turned back now, coffee in hand. She’s brought her shoulders in, her whole body tense. Poised.
She said that this other Jane was married—to Amy. That Jane was some kind of artist. Jane had been visiting them for months now, I don’t know, maybe longer. Watching from street corners. Logging into this other Jane’s social media accounts with the passwords that she would have picked for herself.
/> The scene cuts. The familiar streets of Grand City, stacked on top of each other. The corner bookstore, the one that used to be a bank back in the thirties, where Jane and Clair liked to meet after Clair got out of work. The two of them, browsing the stacks. The front doors of QZero, Jane pushing open the glass, a large drawing portfolio tucked under her arm. Clair giving a lecture at the museum, a darkened hall dotted with spectators. Their apartment, seen from outside: Jane and Clair singing as they cooked dinner, a spoon extended from Jane’s hand for Clair to use as a fake microphone.
Always, in the foreground, a dark figure looming. Black baseball cap. Short black jacket. Black sunglasses.
I tried to ask her if she knew what she was doing—it all sounded a little . . . concerning, to me—but Jane wouldn’t let me get a word in. She was talking so fast, it was hard to keep up with what she was saying. There was something she wanted to discuss with Amy. She said something about going to meet her, and then . . . then Jane went quiet.
Back in the kitchen, a moment without speech bubbles. The room from the doorway, wide angled. Jane and her mother look so small, standing in the middle of all that open space. The yellow of the walls is too cheerful for the evening. The sun has fallen outside, blackness pressing thickly against the windowpanes.
She didn’t get the chance to talk with Amy. Before she could meet with her, Amy had already gotten into her car. Jane followed her. Amy went into the tunnel . . . but . . . the car—
* * *
“Stop!” Jane said. She wrenched her eyes open, trying to ground herself in the present. Her heart was pounding, her head was pounding. She did not need to hear this part, did not need to see this part. She had already imagined it, a thousand different times, a thousand different ways. She felt herself slipping back to it. The sickly yellow lights of the tunnel, the constant feeling of lurking danger. Clair hated tunnels, and always held her breath while driving through them. “What if something happens while you’re in there?” she used to ask. “You’d be trapped inside.”
Those words had haunted Jane, for months after the accident. The images ran roughshod through her mind, then and now: the blinding flare of headlights, the swerve of cars; the shriek of brakes, like Valkyries heralding doom. An SUV, slamming into Clair’s bumper. Nowhere to go, nowhere to run. Clair’s car swerving, tires running up the wall as it began to flip. The moment of impact. Glass catching the lights, a thousand tiny prisms exploding all around her.
“Jane? Jane!”
Jane snapped back. A different car, a car at rest. An expensive car, the smell of leather and perfume. Her mother’s hand on her shoulder—no, not her mother. Close enough to her mother.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Maxwell said. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
Jane held up her hand. She took deep breaths, in through her nose, out through her mouth. The metallic taste of blood and fear stained her tongue.
A story, Mrs. Maxwell had said. It was worse than a story, though—it was the truth. No unexpected reversals to soften the blow, no happy endings to make everything all right. Clair was dead. It was never going to be okay.
Mrs. Maxwell rubbed Jane’s shoulder. Motherly and comforting. “I’m not trying to upset you. It’s just . . . when I realized that it was you, and not her . . . I thought that you should know. I tried to tell Jane to go back, to talk to you. She was feeling so guilty, and . . . and you deserved to know. That Amy didn’t die alone. That someone was there for her, that in a way you were there for her.”
Jane’s phone buzzed. She dug it out of her pocket as Mrs. Maxwell withdrew her hand. It was just as well—Jane didn’t know what she was supposed to say to Mrs. Maxwell right now. Not after . . . well, everything. She was still trying to process the idea that her double had been there, that she’d seen it. She couldn’t deal with it right now. It was a relief, then, to swipe her phone awake, read the brief text that had come in.
Two words: She’s out.
“I have to go,” Jane said. She was already scrambling for the door latch when Mrs. Maxwell grabbed her arm.
“Jane . . . I know that I’m not really your mother, but can I give you a piece of advice?”
Jane shrugged. “Sure.” She didn’t care, either way. The door was open, and she already had one foot literally out the door.
“Please just try to remember: the woman upstairs right now . . . she’s not your wife.”
Not your wife. Jane flinched. “I know,” she said. She peeled Mrs. Maxwell’s grip off of her elbow, and slipped out of the car. She ducked her head, looking back in as she prepared to close the door. “But she’s the only thing I have left anymore.”
Mrs. Maxwell frowned. Jane pulled back, shutting the car door. Her own reflection replaced the view of her mother. Jane watched herself turn away.
It wasn’t until she was punching the floor button that something Mrs. Maxwell said came back to her: that Amy didn’t die alone. Jane frowned as the elevator lurched underneath her, yanking at the pit of her stomach. No, Jane thought, she didn’t. She died a week later, with me by her side.
Jane brushed it off. Squared her shoulders, adjusted her glasses. It didn’t matter, she told herself. A story of a story. There were bound to be mistakes. She looked at her phone, tapping out a quick reply. I’m on my way. That was all that mattered anymore.
Amy was waiting for her.
Day turned to night. Night trudged ever onward. Jane was parked in a chair beside Amy’s bed—a familiar post, a familiar feeling. Dread coated the back of her throat as memories assaulted her, but Jane fought against them. Not this time, she told herself firmly. Never again.
She squeezed Amy’s hand and Amy, still drugged out from surgery and only occasionally brushing against consciousness, squeezed back.
“She’s incredibly lucky,” the doctor had said, as she brought them all up to speed while the rest of the medical staff got Amy settled in her new room. “None of her major organs were affected, and I’m optimistic that she’ll make a full recovery, in time.”
Everyone had made a big show of being relieved, but none of them compared to Jane. She’d collapsed, a sob escaping her chest as she fell to her knees. Only the dimmest awareness of her surroundings kept Jane from kissing the germ-riddled hospital floor. When the nurses had finally let them into the room, Jane had dragged a chair forward and stationed herself in the prime spot beside Amy, and she hadn’t left since.
The two of them were alone now. The others had stayed for a while, waiting for Amy to wake up, but one by one they’d drifted off. Cal was the last to leave, his attention lingering on Jane as he stood in the open doorway. “Are you sure you’ll be okay here?” he asked. He’d been trying to pry her away for over an hour—insisting that Amy would likely sleep all the way until morning.
“I’m not leaving,” Jane had said. Over and over, until finally Cal had no choice but to accept it.
At six in the morning, the timer on Jane’s phone started to chime. Her finger was already poised over the screen, ready and waiting to shut it up as soon as it began.
Amy’s chest rose and fell with a deep, stirring breath. “Sounds like birds,” she said. Actually, what she said was, at best, a half-mumbled version of those words, most of the letters dropped—but Jane knew what she’d meant. A wife knew.
“I suppose it does,” Jane said as she tucked the phone into her back pocket. She stood up and brushed Amy’s bangs aside. Amy still had her eyes shut, but there was a subtle shift in her face, an alertness as sound and smell and touch came back to her. Jane’s chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself; this was the moment that she’d never gotten before. Last time. With Clair. This, right here: the slow process of watching someone come back to themselves. Jane had dreamed about it, wished for it—even broken down and prayed for it, though she’d given up religion years ago.
It had never come.
Amy licked at her lips, found them dry, made a face. “Water?”
“Of course.”
&
nbsp; There was an ugly, salmon-pink pitcher on a table nearby, which Jane had helped herself to at around 2:30. She poured a fresh glass now, into a disposable cup from the stack. Straws lay in a scattered pile beside them, and it took only a moment to unsheathe one and pop it into place. The soft brrrk of the straw cut the room as Jane bent it down, and she held it carefully to Amy’s lips.
“Here you go, m’lady. The bartender made it special, just for you.”
The twitch of Amy’s cheek betrayed the hint of a smile. She took a long drink, during which time Jane relished every sign of life: the tuck of Amy’s cheeks as she sucked in the water, the pulse fluttering in her neck, the twitch of her eyes behind her eyelids, the warmth of Amy’s breath against Jane’s knuckles. This moment: it was nothing like Jane had imagined, all those endless hours at Clair’s bedside. It was so much better than that.
Amy shifted, pressure shoving at the straw as she pushed it away with her tongue. Jane took the water away, leaving it close in case it was needed again. She had to turn away to make sure that she didn’t put it down on the remaining straws, and by the time she turned back, Amy’s eyes were open.
They were trained right on Jane. Perhaps she’d had enough time to take in the rest of the room before Jane had turned back, perhaps not.
Jane forced a smile, newly self-conscious. “Hey,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
Amy grimaced. “Is this where I tell you that it’s not so bad, and you give me a platitude about staying positive?”
“Something like that,” Jane said. “Unless you’d rather just tell me how you feel like shit.”
“I feel like shit.”
“I’m sorry.”
Amy shook her head. Her eyelids were already drooping, and her voice went warm and mellow as she mumbled, “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s sweet of you to lie.”
“I’m not lying,” Amy said. She opened her eyes only enough to narrow them, the way that Clair did whenever she was scolding someone. “I make my own choices, Jane. I followed you to the apartment, and I faced off against UltraViolet. I could have stayed out of it.”