by Emily Henry
“Every great story has sacrifice,” Grandmother says.
“Don’t you think saying that goes against your ‘we can’t apply Anglo-Saxon context and standards to Native stories’ mantra?”
“Yes,” she says. “But I never said that. You did.”
Someone’s saying my name. A low voice that lilts and drawls. Hands squeeze my shoulders, push my hair from my face. “Natalie, wake up.”
I blink against sleep to see full lips, dark hair, and hazel eyes, all shaded by darkness, hovering over me. My head is inexplicably throbbing, and the hoots of owls and rustle of nightlife surround me. “Beau?”
He helps me sit up. “Where am I?” I ask before I can register that I’m lying on the cool cement of Megan’s back patio.
“I’ve been calling you for hours,” Beau says, gently cradling the back of my neck. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“My phone,” I say, fighting back the lingering confusion. “I threw it in the woods.”
His eyebrows flick up in surprise, but his usual soft, heavy smile is missing, his shoulders hunched and tense.
“What’s wrong?” I say, touching his lips.
His eyelids dip. “Kincaid’s awake.”
“Both of them?” It’s little more than a whisper.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve been losing track of time more and more. No one else seems to notice, but it’s like I’m missing for hours at a time. I woke up standing in my room with my phone in my hand and a voice mail from Rachel.”
“Have you seen him yet?”
He shakes his head. “I wanted to find you first.”
What happened to me? Where have I been for hours? I wrap my arms around Beau and press my forehead against his heart. “What’s happening to us?”
He strokes the back of my head. “I don’t know.”
Maybe our Closings are happening, but there’s more to it than that. All these things are connected—Grandmother’s stories, her warning, our two worlds, and our missing time. “I’m scared,” I tell Beau, and he kisses me, his way of both comforting me and admitting he feels my fear too.
He lets out a long exhale. “There’s something else.” I pull away from him so I can see his eyes while he tells me. “I don’t know what it means,” he says, shaking his head. “But I saw your family.”
“What? When? They’re not here. They’re—”
“I know.” He nods. “They must’ve been my version. At a gas station, lots of stuff in the backseat, like maybe they were just passing through. Your brother was wearing a St. Paul’s sweatshirt. Think maybe he goes there, or went there, or—I don’t know.”
“I don’t understand—I wasn’t with them?”
He shakes his head again. “Waited until they left, just to make sure you weren’t in the bathroom or something.” I feel nauseous and dizzy again, like my body’s spinning but my brain’s stationary. Beau touches my shoulder to steady me. “Natalie.”
“It’s okay,” I tell myself. It doesn’t feel okay. It feels bad; it feels like the very sort of thing the word bad should be reserved for. “It’s okay. We can figure this out later. We should just get to Matt.” He doesn’t budge until I start staggering to my feet, and then he helps me up and leads me around the house. “Beau?”
He stops in front of the truck.
I force the knot in my throat down. “How’d they look?”
Beau pulls me forward so his lips rest against my forehead. “Happy,” he says. “Your family looked happy.”
I close my eyes tight. “Good.”
We ride together to the hospital, though we don’t know which worlds we’ll be able to find when we get there. I take his hand as we cross the parking lot. “Which world is this?”
He closes his eyes for a second then looks at me. “I can’t tell. It’s getting harder.”
What could that mean? What could it mean that two distinct versions of the same place are no longer so distinct? What could it mean that Beau’s losing hours at a time? What could it mean that in his world, I’m not with my family, but I’m also not with him?
We go inside anyway, and when Rachel, dark hair and puffy eyes, springs toward me in the waiting room, I know which world we’re in.
I also know that something’s wrong.
Rachel grabs me tightly and immediately starts to shake and sob against me. “Rachel,” I say, my voice broken, almost angry. Her weeping doesn’t let up, and I push her back harder than I mean to. “Rachel, what happened?”
She looks at me, her mouth agape and twisted, her forehead wrinkled and cheeks wet.
“Rachel,” I demand. Beau’s standing a few feet behind me, stock-still and expectant. “What happened?”
“He . . .” She closes her hands around the hem of her tank top and squeals throatily, “He’s gone.”
“Gone?” I breathe.
She folds over, racked with sobs. “He’s gone,” she chokes out. “The doctors said there’s no brain activity. He’s on life support now, but they’re going to . . .” She can’t finish. She sinks to the floor and reaches a hand up to me as she sobs, but I can’t take it.
I can’t move.
I can’t.
I can’t anything.
Behind me, Beau turns and storms back toward the automatic doors, pounding a hand flat against them and kicking them as they open too slowly, then stalking out into the night.
Still I remain frozen.
This is how it feels when the world ends.
When you know, for certain, that there’s nothing left for you to do, that you could stand there until it all disappears.
I failed. I didn’t save him. My best friend. My broken best friend. The person who has hurt me most, who I have loved deeply, from whom I always expected an apology and I meant to forgive. All that’s over now.
It’s all over.
I don’t know how long it takes me to move. I know Rachel is still on the floor crying. I know Matt’s parents are still back beyond those doors I’m not allowed to pass through.
I know Matt is still lying in bed hooked up to machines, some keeping his lungs moving, others documenting his absence of thought.
The world is still over.
When I’m sure of all that, that’s when I finally leave. Because there’s nothing else to do aside from standing in this one spot until I’m fossilized.
Beau is sitting in his truck, and when I get in beside him, he lifts his phone from his lap. “I talked to Rachel,” he murmurs. “The other Rachel.” His eyes slowly trail over to me. “The other Matt’s fine. He’s awake, talking. Doesn’t remember much.”
“That’s good,” I say, voice trembling. I wish I meant it, but I don’t. It’s not good. I wish I didn’t hate that Other Matt for living when mine will die, but I do. I wish I didn’t hate everyone in that world for having him when everyone in mine can’t. Or feel angry that we’d never make things right between us. Those things shouldn’t matter after a person’s dead. Should they?
“It’s me,” Beau says. “Destroyer of worlds.”
It’s not true, but I can’t make myself say it. “I want to go somewhere safe.” Somewhere the pain in my chest can’t follow.
“Okay, Natalie Cleary,” he says quietly. “I’ll take you somewhere safe.”
We drive away from the hospital, away from Union, deeper into the country, out toward the salt-lick-turned-state-park where they found woolly mammoth fossils in the 1700s. We drive away from life and streetlights until the narrow road corkscrews back and forth through the moonlit hills and Beau pulls off at a dilapidated redbrick house with a half-collapsed front porch and big rectangular windows framed in crumbling white paint. We get out of the truck silently, the floorboards of the porch whining as we cross them into the dark house.
We walk from the hallway into an old living room where squares o
f silver light shine from the windows toward the old brick fireplace. The floor, though old, is smooth, polished, the wallpaper mostly scraped off.
“Doesn’t look like much,” Beau says quietly, like he’s afraid to disrupt the dust. “But the foundation’s solid.”
I look back to where he hesitates in the doorway. “What is this place?”
He ambles toward me and takes my hand in his. Slowly we begin to move through time, as though being towed upward through calm water. Reds and golds then blues and greens pop and flicker against the windows as Beau carries us into the future. I watch another version of him travel full tilt through the room, replacing bricks in the fireplace and baseboards and wainscoting, patching holes in the drywall, painting the room a soft peach, and shoving a beat-up piano up against the wall as the sun and stars take turns splashing us. Wildflowers sprawl out from the window across the yard and die beneath frost, only to regrow. Wisteria clumps up around the windowsills, blossoms opening and closing like heartbeats.
Tears rise in my chest. I’m flooding with them as the house becomes brighter, fresher, more and more a home. Time-slipping feels different this time, though, less substantial and more like a dream—the shadow of a future. “Beau, where are we?”
Whitewashed slats appear in a pile on the floor. The blur of a bear-sized person hammers and fastens and screws the beams together. They become a rectangle, a box. They become a crib.
“You wanna hear a story, Natalie Cleary?” I nod, and he folds his arms around me. “We live in the same world,” he says softly, slowly. “After school, you get a job teaching over at NKU. I coach a high school team, or maybe middle school. We live in an old house with a big yard, and one day, I talk you into marrying me.” He rests his chin on top of my head. “You wear flowers in your hair at our wedding, and Mason gets so wasted he throws up during his speech, but we’re so happy, we just laugh.”
“You finish my song,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I finished that weeks ago,” he says. “Pick something else.”
I tighten my eyes against the tears, my arms against Beau’s back. “The porch,” I say. “Every night, you and I sit outside until the sun goes down. And a piano. I surprise you with a piano.”
“And you dance whenever I play it.”
“Where?” I ask, laughing.
“In the sunroom, of course,” he whispers.
“Oh, of course. And does time move when you play and I dance?”
His hands enfold my jaw, and he kisses my forehead. “No, Natalie,” he says. “Time doesn’t move. It stands still.”
“We never run out of it,” I say.
Beau looks down at me, thumbs swiping away twin trails of tears on my cheeks. “And it’s enough for you?”
I swallow the painful knot in my throat. “It’s more than enough.”
And for a moment, I let myself believe it’s real. Beau restores this house for me. I come home to him every night, fall asleep, and wake up with my legs tangled with his. I go to all the games he coaches, and watch him kiss our kids goodnight, and someday notice his hand is wrinkly in mine. I’m the one who gets to see every part of him and who watches his softness cover the hard world. Still, we move forward, forward, forward, and for two beats of my heart, I’m sure I see an old, bent woman standing on the porch, looking through the window. Dark hair falls down around her hunched shoulders, and the pink light of early morning splays its fingers out around the crown of her head, silhouetting her face, but I still think I see her barely smile as her hand lifts up and presses against the dew-splotched windowpane. Before I can say a word, Grandmother disappears again, so thoroughly I can’t be sure she was ever there.
“You asked me what I want,” Beau says. I turn back to look up into his face, and into him. His hand comes up to cradle the side of my jaw.
Time slips back into place, and it all goes away. I want it too. I want it so much it hurts.
“You’re wrong, Beau,” I say. “You’re not the atom bomb. You made all this. You made the world.”
The nightmares plague me endlessly. In these, I’m the one driving and Matt’s beside me, where my toddler-sized car seat should be strapped in. Bright headlights flash up over the windshield, making the heavy rain glitter like diamonds for that silent instant before the car goes off the road.
My ears are ringing so much I can’t hear my own screams, and Matt is silent, eyes glazed, yards of tubing coiled in the backseat and stretching into his nostrils. “Matt,” I shriek. “Matty.”
I wake panting, my heart thundering, and when my eyes snap open, my whole body clenches painfully as I see the black orb floating overhead. “No,” I hiss, scooting backward away from it. “No, no. No.”
It’s starting: the end.
The orb drifts toward me, and I tumble out of bed, running to the dresser where my car keys sit. I don’t know what I’m thinking; all I know is I have to get away from that orb. I have to outrun this. I stuff my feet into the boots by the door and flee from the room, circle the house at a sprint, and jump into the Jeep.
“Grandmother,” I’m whispering under my breath. “Don’t let this happen. Don’t let this happen.”
I start the car and back down the long driveway haphazardly, jerking onto the country road beyond.
How do I stop this?
At first I head toward Beau’s, like if I can see him, tangle my fists in his hair and shirt, he can’t be taken from me. The Other Matt can’t be taken from me. Life as I know it can’t be pried from my grip.
But as I near the turnoff for the Presbyterian church, sweat breaks out along my hairline, my hands start shaking against the steering wheel, and I know exactly where I’m going, where I’ve been going this whole time. I pass the church and the high school, and still I keep driving, my mouth dry and heart speeding.
I try to think about nothing. I try to think about anything but my destination and the dread coiling in the lowest part of my stomach or the creeping sensation along my neck. I see it up ahead, and a burst of adrenaline shoots across the back of my tongue, metallic and cold.
Don’t think about it. Don’t go there. Don’t remember it.
I pull off to the shoulder, the headlights lancing over Matt’s memorial, startling me anew. I leave the lights on as I step out of the car, the only illumination besides the red glow of the stoplights strung across the road. It’s an intersection of two narrow country lanes with poor visibility due to the wall of trees on both sides of both streets. It used to be a two-way stop, but they changed it to a four-way and later added the stoplights after one too many accidents happened there.
My accident.
I run to the memorial, feeling all the way as if I’m being chased, hungrily pursued by the black orb, by a closing door trying to shut me out of Beau’s world, and Grandmother’s too.
But this is where it all started. Somehow I know that. Somehow I believe I can stop this.
I drop to my knees in front of the poster, my eyes pushing against the dark. I think about Beau’s hands sweeping over the piano and visualize my movement, but I can’t make the veil inside me drop so I can pass through.
“PLEASE,” I scream into the night. My eyes bounce down the bank to the mostly dry creek bed, my ears tuning in to the trickle of water over stones and the buzz of mosquitoes skating across the surface.
It’s like I’m back in the car, flipping endlessly, stomach lurching, tiny voice screaming as we careen into the water and the windows explode in a fine mist of glass. I find myself gasping for breath, reaching for something to steady myself as there are several sharp tugs at my stomach. When my hand touches the poster but instead finds cool stone, I realize I’ve finally broken through.
I don’t know to which world—Beau’s or Grandmother’s or some other entirely. A world in which purple and yellow wildflowers grow thickly around the telephone pole and beyond.
All I know is it isn’t my world. It can’t be mine.
Because below REST IN PEACE, the name engraved on the stone is NATALIE LAYNE.
29
I’m dead.
Somewhere, sometime, I’m dead.
There’s an epitaph too, but the letters jumble in my mind, unread. Rain clouds break apart overhead, and I feel myself gagging in front of the poster and run a few feet before the bile shoots up my throat and hits the slick, muddy grass between my boots. I shouldn’t drive, but I can’t stay here. All I know is I can’t stay here. I stumble back to the Jeep and turn around to drive back toward the high school, Beau’s house, my house, Megan’s house.
I find myself on the stormy gravel road, crossing the little bridge that leads to the Kincaids’. Next thing I know I’m outside Beau’s house—and it is Beau’s house, and the lights are on, but his truck isn’t there.
Still I don’t leave. Where will I go? Where will I be safe when I know that somewhere I’m dead, my body rotting beneath the ground, and that maybe tomorrow morning I’ll awake and that orb will have descended around me, cutting me off from the two people who can understand all this.
I turn off the car and that’s when I hear the screaming. Two hardly familiar voices shouting furiously at one another: Beau’s mom, Darlene, and her new husband, Bill.
Their words are impossible to decipher, muddled by the linoleum siding and drywall between them and me, but I can tell it’s serious, brutal, angry, and I don’t know what to do.
I start the car and drive away, backsliding again into my thoughts and my terror, until I find myself parked outside Megan’s house, my whole body trembling like a sapling in a tornado and my face striped with tears and snot. I wipe my nose across my arm as I get out and circle around the white, columned mansion to the basement patio and let myself inside, out of the rain.
The orb is gone, but I know it will be back. The second I fall asleep it will engulf me. I sense it. This is the end, and I won’t have any answers. I’ll have no peace.
I kick off my boots and pace. My legs and back ache, so I sit on the edge of the bed, trying to empty my mind but stay awake, to not think and not sleep. Hours pass and I’ve managed to conjure a mindless numb, but when I hear the knocking on the glass door, “Thank God” escapes me, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath, waiting.