The Love That Split the World

by Emily Henry

  Rachel turns around to see what I’m staring at then looks back to me, clueless. Completely unaware that I just watched a platinum-blond version of her wandering around the carnival alone. The other world is there again, within reach. Just like at the hospital, when I saw both Joyces. It’s like the two are colliding, then bouncing off one another, sometimes overlapping and other times separated by an impassable amount of space.

  “I have to go somewhere,” I tell Rachel. “Can you get a ride home?”

  “I mean, everyone’s treating me like a leper since Matt and I hooked up, but sure, I guess I can suck it up and get in a car with someone who smiles to my face and trash-talks behind my back.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s important.”

  She sighs. “Fine, Brown. But you’ll owe me one.”

  “Oh? For driving out to your house and bringing you here, I’ll owe you one?”

  “Basically.”

  I grab her in a hug, and she stiffens for a second before reciprocating. “Thanks,” I tell her. “For everything.”

  “Whatever.”

  I drive along the stretch of gravel past the Kincaids’ barn all the way to Beau’s house, rain nearly blinding me despite the rapid-fire swishing of the windshield wipers. I step out of the car amid a clap of thunder and scan the little house and yard in front of me.

  It’s the unused rental property with cracked windows and an unshorn lawn, not Beau’s. I let myself in and meander down the damp and humid hallways to the empty room that should be his. I sit down in the corner where his bed should be and focus all my energy on trying to reach him, calling his name and imagining my stomach rising and falling as though I’m floating over immense waves.

  I don’t feel him. He’s not here, not even in a different here.

  I leave the house again, the screen door swinging closed behind me, and bend my head against the rain as I dash toward my car and click the key into the lock.

  “Hey,” says a voice muffled by distance, and I look up, turning in place. I feel him seconds before I see him, standing at the far end of the driveway and cornfield, his hair and clothes soaked through along with the paper bag he’s holding down at his side.

  Despite all that, Beau looks happy. Quiet, content.

  “Hey.”

  He lifts the bag up. “Been lookin’ for you.”

  Tears of relief form in the corners of my eyes as I start slowly toward him. He ambles toward me too, and when I break into a jog, he tosses the bagged bottle aside and starts running to me through the rain.

  I am so relieved.

  I am so near to happy, so close to feeling safe.

  I throw myself against him, and he lifts me up, arms enfolding me, mouth on mine as rain slides between and around us. “You’re shaking,” he says, looking into my eyes.

  I shake my head. I can’t speak without crying. I can’t tell him that I know everything—that it wasn’t his fault Matt had a problem, even if the Kincaids blamed him. All I can say is “I thought I lost you.”

  “No.” His hands glide up through my sopping hair to grasp the sides of my face, and he kisses me roughly before shaking his head. “No.”

  The rain’s falling hard, slapping the corn and the grass and the gravel mercilessly, and I can barely hear his voice. “Matt’s an alcoholic,” I say.

  Beau’s eyes drop. “I know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  His gaze barely lifts, a pained smile tightening one corner of his mouth. “Where do you think a golden boy like Matt Kincaid learns to drink, Natalie? You think he just stumbles on a bottle of whiskey in the woods one day? Surely not from the loser kid of the alcoholics next door.”

  “You drink to help pass between worlds,” I say. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  He shakes his head, still avoiding my eyes. “Natalie, you and I both know I drink for all kinds of reasons,” he says. “And you know what’s messed up? I can stop when I want, right in the middle of a drink, with a shot glass against my mouth—doesn’t matter. I’ve lived with enough addicts to know that’s not how it works for them. I never thought—I expected it to be easy for Kincaid, like it was for me. Easier, even. I thought, hell, we lose a game, he’s mad at his parents, he needs to blow off some steam, whatever—we can drink it off. It’s what I’ve done whenever I’ve had a problem since I was fourteen and my mom left us the first time. I didn’t know what it would do to him—what I was doing to him.”

  He tips his chin down and scrunches his eyes shut, shaking his head to draw back emotion. “I didn’t know.”

  “Beau.” I take the sides of his face between my palms. “Matt’s an alcoholic in my world too. And it’s not because his best friend is Beau Wilkes. You don’t even exist to him. It’s because he has a certain personality type. It’s because we all took it too lightly. None of us knew.”

  I tip his face upward, but his focus stays low, avoiding me.

  “What happened—it wasn’t our fault in either world. And Matt’s problems . . . you’re not the reason he has them. They were always going to come out eventually.”

  Finally he raises his gaze to mine, brow furrowed. “I told you. It wouldn’t matter. My fault or not, I wasn’t trying to stay away from you, Natalie. It’s getting harder to find my way back to you, and I’m losing track of time. Big chunks of it.”

  My heart stalls in my chest. I thought I’d found the key, unlocked the answer. I thought I could make Beau stop blaming himself and then he’d stop disappearing, and all along, it was out of our control. I swallow a fist-sized knot in my throat. “What do you think it means?”

  He slides his hands around my hips and glances down before meeting my eyes. “We’re running out of time.”

  I fight back more tears. I’ve been crying too much lately. I’m so tired of crying. I push up on tiptoes and kiss the space between Beau’s eyes, as if to smooth out the furrow there. “Don’t let go.”

  And he doesn’t.

  Not as we make our way inside the abandoned house, creaking with the swell of humidity and the drop in air temperature. Not as we lie down on the floor where his bed should be. Not all night as we entwine around one another.

  He holds on to me with every part of him all night, hardly blinking, until suddenly, he disappears from my arms.

  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.<
br />
  “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.”