by Kate Norris
“No. Winnie wouldn’t do that.”
“She didn’t have a choice.” Winnie reached up to rub her throbbing temple. Now that the panic and adrenaline that had fueled her double’s burial was gone, she felt completely drained. “What I said to Hawthorn at the morgue—it gave me away. He showed up here and tricked Winnie into telling him the truth. It was only a matter of time.”
Winnie noticed there was blood on her hand. When she fell and knocked her head on the ground, it must have reopened the cut on her forehead.
“I just don’t—I don’t understand,” Scott said, voice thick with grief.
For now, confusion buffered his pain, but it was still torture for Winnie to witness. How much worse would it be once his shock wore off? How would he look at her once he felt the full weight of what she’d done?
The pain in Winnie’s head was becoming increasingly insistent. First her injuries during the experiment at school, now this.
I’m about to faint, Winnie realized with relief—unconsciousness would be a delicious vacation.
The world tilted, then began to pass slowly before her eyes.
Pegboard . . . workbench . . . stool . . . lovely ground.
Winnie had space for one last thought before her vision tunneled in. She remembered what her stern paternal grandmother used to say, back in Germany, when someone endured misfortune after misfortune: They must be living wrong.
Then the world went dark.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
When Winnie woke up, she was snug in her double’s bed, head pounding terribly, but safe—whatever safety meant now that Hawthorn knew about her.
Hawthorn.
Had he shown up while she’d been unconscious?
She looked around. Everything was a bit blurry, but there was no sign of him. She recognized Dr. Gilbert, her pediatrician—in both worlds, apparently—with Father right beside him.
There was a stranger there too, sitting in the corner, hands knotted tight in her lap—a beautiful woman. Winnie’s eyes stopped on the woman’s face. She felt some mix of love and dread that she couldn’t understand at first. She didn’t know this woman. Why would looking at a stranger give her nose the telltale itch that meant she was about to cry?
The woman jumped up from her chair and rushed over once she saw that Winnie had regained consciousness, pushing past the doctor.
“Oh Winnie, Liebling, how are you? Can you tell us what happened?”
The woman’s features came into focus, and the truth sifted its way into her concussed brain.
“Mama?”
The woman was eight years older than her own mother had ever aged. She was dressed fashionably in a sharp gray wool gabardine suit that couldn’t be more different from the plain cotton shirtdresses she’d worn as a young housewife in Germany, and her flax-colored hair was bobbed and curled instead of tucked into two braids and wrapped around her head—but she was still unmistakably Mama, and even more beautiful at thirty-four than she had been when Winnie was a little girl.
Her double’s haircut—and therefore, Winnie’s—was the brunette twin of Mama’s own, she noticed with consternation.
But none of this made sense. What was going on?
Then Winnie realized—it must have happened again.
She had fainted and woken up in a new world, this one with Mama in it. She met this revelation with fierce determination.
She wouldn’t ruin it this time.
She’d done an awful thing—she flinched at the pain of the thought; hopefully it looked like pain from her injuries on the outside—but this?
Mama, alive?
Winnie would be perfect until the end of time to deserve being there with her.
“Scott, she’s awake,” Father called. “Would you bring her some water?”
Scott was at the bedroom door in a moment. One glance said it all. His expression was steely, and he refused to meet her eyes. This was no new Scott.
She was in the same world, with its same problems.
The same Hawthorn was after her.
The same body was out there in the shed.
The body of a girl who had lied to Winnie about her own mother being dead. After all that had happened, she supposed she shouldn’t be all that surprised by that.
But Scott had lied too, by omission at least. She’d poured her heart out about the pain of losing her mother. He’d said nothing about Mama being alive in their world.
Winnie stared at this woman. She was a stranger. And she was her mom.
Winnie had been without her mother for so long. She’d yearned to have even a picture of her—and now here she was in the flesh! All Winnie wanted to do was embrace her.
But how could she?
How could she hug the woman whose daughter she had just accidentally killed?
“What are you doing here?” Winnie whispered, half-afraid the woman was a hallucination brought on by her guilt.
“Silly girl,” Mama said, smiling gently. “I came home from Boston as soon as Papa phoned to say you’d been hurt. Of course I did! My presentation can wait.” Her hand reached out as if she was going to stroke Winnie’s hair, then pulled back, like she didn’t want to risk hurting her. “What happened? Scott said something about an accident, but I still don’t understand.”
“I . . .” Winnie trailed off. She had no explanation. Awful enough, telling Scott what happened. But to tell Mama?
Why hadn’t Scott said anything, she wondered?
Perhaps he wanted her conscious when he outed her as a changeling. It wasn’t like Scott to relish anyone’s suffering, but grief changed a person.
Rather than revealing who she was, Scott filled the lengthening silence with a convenient explanation.
“You don’t remember the accident?” Scott said woodenly. “Being hit by a car?”
She hadn’t expected him to turn her over to Hawthorn, but was he letting her pass for her double?
“Scott told us you called the lab and said you’d been hit by a car,” Dr. Schulde said. “He should have told me straightaway,” he added, giving Scott a dark glance, “but I was in the middle of a lecture, and you said you weren’t hurt, just shaken up, so he came to check on you himself first. But then you were unconscious when he got here, so I called your mother and rushed over myself. You don’t remember the accident?”
Winnie made the mistake of shaking her head and was immediately punished by a lightning bolt of pain pulsing temple to temple.
“It’s not surprising,” Dr. Gilbert said. “Memory can be quite jumbled after a head injury. More often than not, it comes back in time, though.”
“Should she be in the hospital?” Mama asked.
“No!” Winnie said. She was probably in just as much danger from Hawthorn now no matter where she was—but home, even her double’s home, felt safer.
“Shh,” Father murmured. “Let’s let Dr. Gilbert have a look at you. He’ll know best. Now let’s give her some privacy for the exam.”
“I’m staying,” Mama said.
Winnie closed her eyes and shook her head no, more carefully this time. She couldn’t think, with Mama standing right there.
A look of confusion and hurt flashed across her mother’s face, but she said “All right, little Mausi. We’ll be right outside,” and filed out of the room with Scott and Father, closing the door behind them.
“There, now let’s have a look at you,” Dr. Gilbert said, smiling at Winnie kindly.
He shone a bright light in her eyes, then had her clench his hands as tight as she could. He made her push his hands up, then press them down—testing for a brain injury, he explained. He gently probed her limbs, working up and down each arm and leg, then examined her trunk for any bruising.
The doctor finished his examination and gave Winnie an avuncular pat on the knee. “A concussion�
�but no fracture of the skull, as far as I can tell, and no other injury or blunt force trauma. It might not feel like it right now, but really you’re quite lucky to make it out of a collision with a car without any more serious injury.”
Was there something questioning in his expression? Winnie doubted the impact from a fall or the reopened cut on her forehead looked much like the injury that would result from being hit by a car, but at least he was keeping his suspicions to himself, if he had any.
Dr. Gilbert called her parents back into the room.
“What can I do for her?” Mama asked.
“She needs rest, rest, and more rest. She’ll have a nasty headache, I’m afraid, and you’ll want to keep her cut clean. Give her some aspirin for the pain. If she begins having any vision trouble, ring me immediately, and if there isn’t decided improvement by tomorrow, let me know.”
Mama thanked him and went downstairs to let him out, but she returned immediately.
“Do you need anything, Liebling?”
There was such concern, naked on her double’s mother’s face—such love. It made Winnie ache to see it.
She must be looking at the root of all the differences between their worlds. This world had splintered from her own when Mama survived the car accident. From her double’s popularity to small things like the different elevator operator in Dora’s building. Somehow, it all cascaded from that one dark day on a wet road in Germany.
No wonder her double’s father seemed so different from her own. She and Father had been set down a bad path when Mama died. But Winnie had already known that. She didn’t need to see just how good her life could have been if Mama had survived. She didn’t need to see it, just to lose her again—if not when she found out the truth, then when Winnie went back home.
After Mama died, Winnie had dreamt about her all the time. Winnie would go to sleep early each night, hoping to see her. It was so wonderful to see her and speak to her—at first. But when she dreamt about Mama, there was always that awful moment when she woke up and realized none of it was real. Mama was gone.
Over time, the thought of sleep became more painful than restful. It hurt Winnie too badly to see Mama in dreams, knowing she would just have to give her up again when she awoke.
The woman put a hand to her cheek just then, and Winnie leaned into the cool touch and closed her eyes for a long moment. Then she sighed, and opened them.
What on earth was she going to do?
“Could you send Scott in, please? I need to talk to him.”
* * *
• • •
“Tell me what happened.”
Winnie eyed Scott nervously. She’d never seen him wound so tight. This was different from it had been with James, when something in him had just—unraveled. It made her frightened for him now. What would he do if he felt like he had nothing more to lose?
He would want to go after Hawthorn.
“I told you what happened,” she said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“You said it was an accident.”
“Of course it was an accident!”
“I know. I know you wouldn’t hurt Winnie on purpose.” He sighed. “But I also know that Winnie would never agree to hand you over to Hawthorn. Especially considering what he did to James. It just—why?”
“Hawthorn threatened to frame you for James’s death.”
Even as she said it, she didn’t know if being honest was the right thing to do.
It would help Scott make sense of her double’s actions, but a terrible sort of sense. Did Scott really need to know that Winnie trying to save him was what had gotten her killed?
A complex combination of guilt and anger flashed across his face.
“But why wouldn’t she come to us first? Why wouldn’t she come to me?”
“She knew you would risk yourself to help me.”
“Well—I mean, of course I would.”
“She didn’t want that.”
Scott sat with this for a moment. She could see him turning this truth over and over in his mind, looking for the cracks—as if poking holes in the logic behind what had happened could bring Winnie back.
“We could have come up with a plan that kept us all safe,” he said finally.
“Really? You think so? You know, so far our plans haven’t gone great.”
He couldn’t possibly argue with that.
Scott pulled off his glasses and cradled his head in his hands. “What you’re saying makes sense, but—” He let out a shaky sigh, and for a moment looked so forlorn that Winnie took a fistful of coverlet in her hand to stop herself from reaching out to touch him. “But then I just think of Winnie, dead, and think—how in the world did we get here?”
The pain Scott felt wasn’t something Winnie had intended, but she was its author all the same. Would it ever stop? Winnie thought she had good intentions, but she just destroyed everything around her. Things had gone from bad to worse ever since the night of Hawthorn’s party. Because Winnie ruined everything.
“I saw a splinter. Before I—this morning. I saw her dead.”
“What! Why didn’t you—”
“Because I thought it was me.”
Scott just stared at her in silence for a moment.
Finally, he said, “Why didn’t you do something? Tell someone? You were really just going to die?”
Winnie was quiet for a long time.
“It’s like I didn’t really believe what I saw. And the small part of me that did felt helpless to really change it. I wasn’t even sure if I was seeing into this reality or some other one. I’ve been wrong so many times now. I didn’t want to put anyone else in more danger.”
Winnie paused. This was a harder thing to say, even to herself.
“And another little part of me thought . . . if I was gone gone, maybe it would be a way out—for all of us. You’ve heard of Typhoid Mary, right?”
Scott narrowed his eyes in confusion. “Of course.”
“She never got sick herself, but the people around her”—Winnie shrugged her shoulders helplessly—“they all died. I think that’s your real answer. I think that’s your ‘why.’”
“You can’t possibly—”
She cut him off with a shake of her head, determined for him to understand.
“My mother. Scott. Now Winnie. All accidents. But we’re scientists, right? How many ‘accidents’ have to happen before we start looking for a common cause?”
“Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to get us out of this mess.”
Winnie jerked back like she had been slapped.
Was that really what he thought—that she was being melodramatic? Self-pitying?
Winnie sat up a bit straighter, indignantly rearranging the pillows propped behind her back.
“I’m sorry I’m not handling all this with as much grace as you’d like,” she said acidly. “I’m a bit . . . hmm, out of sorts?” Winnie glared at him. Yes, he had many things to resent her for. But he wasn’t blameless himself. “And to think you said you were bad at keeping secrets.”
Scott sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose, leaving his glasses slightly askew.
“Winnie made me promise not to tell,” he said. “She was afraid that if you knew your mother was alive here, you wouldn’t want to leave.”
“She was right.”
Scott raised his eyebrows and shook his head as if to say “See?”
“That doesn’t mean you were,” Winnie said. “I had a right to know. You should have told me. How could you sit there and let me talk about growing up, about losing her—”
“It was torture! I wanted to tell you, but what good could that do? Make you feel like you had to choose between saving your Scott and staying with your mother? Especially when it wasn’t like staying here was a real option!”
/> The desire had been rumbling through her unconscious mind, not daring to articulate itself—till now.
“Not then it wasn’t.” Winnie said. “But now . . .”
“Now that you’ve killed her, you mean?”
Winnie flinched, but she didn’t back down.
“Yes. Now that Winnie is dead, I could actually stay. The two of us both being here, it was causing more interference than we even knew.”
Winnie wondered if the only reason she’d been able to see the splinter that morning was because as soon as her double had made the choice to turn her over to Hawthorn, in a way, she was already dead.
“With her gone,” Winnie continued, “I think the other . . . disruptions . . . might stop.”
“Even if they do—you think I could look at you? Every day? Knowing what you did? You think we could be together?” Scott closed his eyes a moment and took a shaky breath. “Winnie, could you really live with her mother and father and never tell them what happened?”
“But she’s gone. She’s not coming back. Wouldn’t it be kinder to them—”
“If you do this, you’re doing it for yourself. Not them,” Scott said icily. “And what about the people you left behind?”
Winnie thought about it for a moment. That had been part of the pain of leaving her own world: contemplating just how small a hole she left there.
“I don’t think I’m missed there like she would be here.”
“You can’t really—”
“You still don’t understand! Will Dora miss me? Will Brunhilde be sad? Sure. But all that’s like—like a ripple. Their lives will close up around my loss like water around a thrown stone. Winnie’s death will leave a wound here, and it won’t heal. I know because I’ve lived with a hurt like that all my life.”
Winnie began to cry. It terrified her. Now that she’d started, would she ever be able to stop?
“Oh, Scott, I could have met her. I could have met her and been—not her daughter, but I could have at least known her as me. Instead I’m meeting her as—as an imposter. As the person who led to her daughter’s death! And I can barely look at her! I was so close, and I didn’t even know it. Now I’ve lost everything.”