by Emily Henry
I hurry to open the door, but Beau hesitates, swaying in the doorway with his face turned down. Something’s wrong: he’s sopping wet, his hair dripping along the outside of his downturned face. I take his hand, and he squeezes mine in his, almost painfully. “Beau?” I whisper.
I touch his face, and he flinches under my fingers. I tilt his chin up to me.
“Oh my God,” I breathe. His lip is split and, though no longer bleeding, still smeared in red. His left eye socket is garishly bruised, the top of his high cheekbone starting to swell. “Beau.”
He finally looks at me, and I feel my heart breaking in my chest.
“Why are you all wet?” He half turns away, face hanging again. “Beau, what happened?”
“Bill sold my truck,” he says.
“What?” I ask. “How? It’s not his.”
“He’s an addict. They’re all goddamn addicts,” he says. “It was in my mom’s name, but she didn’t know he was doing it. Someone just came and took it. Then Bill came home high. My mom was mad, and they started to fight.”
He stops talking for a second, his bottom lip trembling. I don’t say anything; I’m waiting on the edge of a precipice, afraid any motion will shut him up, shut him down. Finally he goes on. “He started hitting her, and I pulled him off her, but . . .”
I press my fingers to Beau’s split bottom lip, and his eyes find mine. “She told me to leave.”
“I’m sorry.” I stretch my arms up around his neck. “I’m so sorry, Beau.”
I pull him closer, and he’s tense and stiff in my arms for a second before his eyes close and he starts to shake, his face pressing into my neck, my chest, his hands gripping my hips as he silently cries. “I’m so sorry,” I say again, cradling his face as I kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his black eye, and neck. “I’m so sorry.”
I pull Beau inside the rest of the way, and clumsily close the door behind him as he kisses me roughly, ignoring the slice through the side of his lip and his soaking clothes between us.
Cool rain and hot tears, mine and his, slip down our faces, catching between our mouths as we wind ourselves together. He lifts me and carries me to the bed, and I hear myself say, “Don’t let go.”
He shakes his head against me. “No.”
I want to tell him I love him. If I don’t get to tell him about the headstone with my name on it or the black orb floating over my head or the panic attacks or the end looming over us—it will be okay. But if I don’t tell him I love him, I’ll regret it far past the end.
I need him to know he’s loved.
I need him to feel safe, like he makes me feel safe. I need to wrap my love around him and leave it there, even after I’m pulled away from him forever.
“I love you.”
He lifts his face away from me, and his rough hands push the hair back from both sides of my face before he presses his wet nose and mouth against my cheek. “I love you, Natalie Cleary.” It’s no more than a whisper. It takes no longer than a heartbeat.
“I love you,” I tell him again.
“I love you,” he breathes, lifting me against him and holding me there, the muscles of his body and mine both tense against one another. I skim my hands up the back of his soaked shirt and along his damp skin. He sits back, letting me sit up too as he peels the thin gray shirt off and tosses it on the floor.
My heart is pounding, but I don’t feel nervous. I feel only the crushing heaviness of a future without Beau, where I’m not there to pull him inside and protect him from all the darkness and pour light into him through kisses and touches and whispered words.
His fingers graze the hem of the tank top I’d planned to sleep in, the front already cold and damp from the water squeezed out of his shirt between us. His hands are so careful, his eyes heavy, as he lifts the shirt from around my waist, up over my shoulders. For a minute, we sit there looking at one another, his hands soft on my bare waist, and then he slides me closer to him and folds his arms around my bare back, placing his lips against the space between my neck and shoulder as our chests connect. His skin is softer than I would’ve expected, unevenly tanned by the sun and etched in muscle.
He takes my chin in his hand and brings my mouth back to his, a deep yet delicate kiss as his rain and sweat scents curl around me. I slide my hands around his back, feeling every new inch of him. I pull back as my fingers graze something rough and raised up along his spine, between his shoulder blades. “What’s that?” I whisper.
“Just a scar,” he says.
“What happened?” I ask, gingerly touching the raised streak again.
“Car accident,” he says. “I was five. My dad was drunk. Nearly died.”
My heart stops in my chest. I feel all the blood drain from my face and my hands. I swallow the lump rising in my throat as the weight of the whole night crashes down around me.
“Where?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
“Where?” he repeats, clearly confused.
“Beau, where?” I choke out.
He shrugs. “Same place Matt wrecked, actually.”
30
I lurch off the bed and grab my shirt off the floor, pulling it back down over my head and turning to search for my boots. Beau grabs my arm, but I break away.
“Where are you going?” he asks as I step into my shoes.
My voice quavers as I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand. “I have to find Grandmother.”
“Right now?”
I nod and rub at the tears on my cheeks as I turn back toward the door. Beau gets off the bed and snatches up his shirt too. “I’ll go with you.”
“No,” I say more harshly than I mean to. “I don’t—I don’t know if she’ll come if you’re there. Stay here. Please stay here,” I beg. “Don’t leave, okay? Just stay here and wait for me.”
He holds my eyes for a long moment. “Okay.”
I cross back to him and stretch up to kiss him one last time before I leave. When I pull back, I walk to the door, slide it open, and look at Beau one more time. “I love you,” I say.
“I love you too, Natalie Cleary,” he says quietly, and then I dart out into the rain.
I know where I have to go—the only place where I stand a chance at finding her, the truth, at understanding Beau’s and my entwined fates—but first I have to make one last detour.
I get into the Jeep and speed back toward the intersection adorned in teddy bears and flowers and notes. I leave the car running, the windshield wipers dancing spastically, as I run through the rain to the memorial sign. It’s so hard to tear through the worlds, but when I do I find the same haunting words as before: REST IN PEACE, NATALIE LAYNE.
I let go of that world and it snaps away from me immediately, dropping the PRAY FOR MATT KINCAID #4 sign back in its place as my stomach slings back to my center. I feel for other worlds, but, despite my oncoming panic attack, the walls holding me here are more solid than ever. I scream in frustration as I mentally try to push at the curtain around me, and suddenly time starts ticking backward again. I’m sailing backward in time, the sun rising and falling, the cars speeding past backward, so fast that I almost miss the moment the sign in front of me changes.
Almost.
But I don’t.
Matt’s sign disappears, but there in its place is another: a wooden cross pounded into the damp earth and ruined by time. Burned into it is a date—fourteen years ago—and two words: BEAU WILKES.
I back away, horrified, fingers clamped over my open mouth as I wheeze and wail. Then it’s gone. Both night and rain have descended on me again, and Matt’s poster is where it should be, but still I’m gasping for breath, half-screaming my sobs as I run back to my car and jump in.
I race toward home, mind reeling. I reach the stone sign guarding the neighborhood’s entrance and turn down my cul-de-sac and park in front of my house.
The basketball hoop’s there. The shutters are green. This is still my world. I get out of the car and walk slowly up the yard to stand under the cover of the tree, staring up at the window of my closet.
I try to grab hold of time, to pull it upward around me and let myself fall through it into the past.
It gives in. Unlike trying to breach that ever-strengthening wall between Beau’s world and mine, it feels easier than ever before to draw the sun around the Earth, watch it splash over the far side of my childhood home over and over again until finally there’s a rental van sitting with its back open. The light hangs bright in the sky, and my family speeds from the house and garage to the van on a half-dozen different trips.
I keep going. Falling, falling, falling through time.
The van is gone. Rain shoots back up into the sky, clouds dissipate, the sun rises and falls. The cars in the driveway move backward and forward, disappearing at the mouth of the cul-de-sac and reappearing. I see Beau’s truck for an instant. I see him and me walk backward toward the truck and lie down inside it together. I see him right himself again, pulling me with him until my back is pressed against the side of the car. I see us argue. I watch myself stomp backward toward the porch and scramble back up it and into my window.
I keep going.
It’s so simple, what I have to do to find Grandmother. It’s been so simple all along, and I didn’t see it.
Time still whisking past me, I finish crossing the lawn and pull myself up onto the porch roof, sunlight then moonlight then sunlight splashing my back as I go. I hop down into the closet and see myself speeding backward between there and the bedroom, undressing in the morning and climbing backward into bed as it becomes night again.
I walk into the bedroom, my heart almost in my mouth, and everything keeps moving as I go to stand beside the rocking chair. Time keeps passing through me, the world rewinding until I see an earlier version of me kneeling in front of the rocking chair, and my mouth goes dry.
It doesn’t make any sense. Grandmother should be here. I know she should: This is the night three months ago when she came to me to warn me. When she cried, I went to her and knelt there, just like the girl in front of me is doing, only Grandmother’s not here. The chair is empty.
I take another step forward and time slips through me again, this time moving forward in one abrupt jolt, as though I were just dragged upward through a mile of water in the blink of an eye, and the room changes: every detail, but only very subtly.
A bed like mine sits right where mine should, a similar quilt draped over it. The orange and black walls shine in the moonlight, but the shades aren’t quite right, and the rocking chair in the corner has tiny roses carved into it. It’s my room, but different.
And there she is: Grandmother, sitting in the slightly off rocking chair, Earlier Me crouched at her feet.
I stop time’s movement to appear in my own bedroom, behind my own kneeling self, staring at the ancient woman I’ve always thought was God.
Her eyes, dark brown hazed by milky film, shift up from the Earlier Me, and her mouth drops open. “You,” she breathes, “already—you’re already here.”
I watch as Earlier Me starts to turn over her shoulder—just as I did months ago.
“Don’t be afraid, Natalie. Alice will help you,” Grandmother tells her. “Find Alice Chan. She can help you.”
Before her eyes can process me, the earlier version of myself vanishes, leaving me alone with Grandmother. She stands from the rocking chair, her raspy breath the only sound.
“Who are you?” I demand.
Her cracked lips break into a sad smile. “Natalie,” she says slowly. “I’m you.”
31
“How is that possible?” I ask.
She flashes a sad smile again. “How is any of it possible?” It’s what Beau said when he told me he saw the two Unions too.
“What do you want?” I say, feeling desperate. “I couldn’t save Matt. You didn’t tell me it was him, and I couldn’t save him. He’s on life support.”
Her dark eyes—my dark eyes—fall to the floor. “I know,” she says. “But I didn’t come to save Matt.”
“Then who?”
“What do you really want to know, Natalie? Ask me the question that’s been weighing on you.”
The answer surges to my lips, though I’m less and less sure I want the answer. “Why are there two worlds—why Beau and me?”
“There aren’t two worlds,” she says simply.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re slipping in time, Natalie, seeing other moments in your physical space. Hypnopompic reach forward, and hypnagogic reach back.”
“Alice already figured out the time slips,” I say, impatient. “What I don’t understand is . . .” I hesitate, gathering the courage to say it aloud. “. . . why there’s a cross with Beau’s name on it in the same place there’s a memorial for me.”
Grandmother takes a deep breath. “Oh, sweet girl. I know you better than anyone. I know when you’re lying. You do understand. You just don’t want to.”
“There’s no way I’m this annoying in the future.”
“Young people always think old people are annoying,” she says. “But we don’t care, because we think they’re annoying.”
“Stop,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
“Beau died, Natalie. That’s truth. If you look at time in a straight line—no detours, no do-overs or rewrites or wormholes—Beau’s father made a left turn into oncoming traffic. He was drunk, and our mother had fallen asleep at the wheel. He saw her coming and sped up to miss her. She woke up and yanked the wheel left, but neither of them was fast enough. The passenger sides of the cars collided. You survived, and a five-year-old boy named Beau Wilkes died.”
Full plump tears roll over my cheeks. “You’re lying,” I squeal between my fingers. “He has a future. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there.” To the house. Our house. Our wisteria. A crib.
“I’m not,” she says softly.
“Why can I touch him then?” I shout. “Why is my name written at the memorial too?”
“Because it’s not the whole truth,” she says, looking down at the floor again. “With time, sometimes there are do-overs. There are wormholes. I believe Beau’s world exists to you because you have the power to change things.”
“What things? What are you talking about?”
“Beau’s death is in the past,” she explains. “It happened. But when you tore loose from your position in time, time tore in the process, triggering the slips. And when I was your age, I met Beau Wilkes, despite the fact that he had died years before. I discovered what I thought to be another world. I fell in love with the boy who lived in it, and my whole life changed. I wanted to spend every day with him more than I wanted to hide or to run from what was happening. Loving him changed me. And then I found . . .” She pauses, mouth tight. “Well, the same thing you found: a cross with his name on it, marked with the date of our accident. I kept pushing against the barrier between our worlds and against time, trying to see through it for some explanation. Getting to Beau’s world had been getting harder for me all summer, but I stayed there, kneeling in the mud until I could slip through time again. When I got traction, I was staring at my own name, not Beau’s. No date, but that didn’t matter. I knew right then, just like you knew, somehow we both must’ve died on that night. I looked it up, found a news story about that night, the accident that ended Beau’s presence in our world. The same accident that, in his world, left our mother crying at the kitchen table, sent our whole broken family moving out of that house and its darkness.
“And just like you, I thought there must have been some kind of fork in time, Beau surviving on one side, I on the other. I planned to tell him, but I never got the chance. That night I woke up with a black orb over my face, a
nd his world closed to me, permanently. Like I’d been locked back into linear time, no slips, no alternate realities. Or more like the split between our worlds was sewn shut.
“I went away to college, devastated. Every time I came back, I tried to get back to him, but I couldn’t make time budge. I couldn’t find his world. After school, I moved back to Union and started working with a professor at Northern Kentucky University who studied experiences like mine. With all of her subjects we found the same thing: a cataclysmic event preceding their time slips, some hint of an alternate world—a world in which that event had been changed or prevented—and a black orb marking the end of it all. I think that’s how it always is for people like us, who can move time. There’s a reason, some thing we could fix or change, if we only knew how.
“Maybe someone, in some time, has managed to do it. But if anyone were to actually change or fix that thing, their whole past would be rewritten, leaving them with no memory or evidence of how things used to be. It’s possible Alice and I helped someone make that different choice, but that probably would have erased our memories of ever having known that person. We do, however, remember those patients whose mysteries we tried and failed to help solve before their time ran out. Either way, it became obvious that we only have a certain span of time in which we can access and change the past: None of the subjects were successful in moving time or breaching alternate realities after their Closing. As if tears in time are self-healing, allowing those ripped from its natural course to traverse freely until they are locked back into a linear track.
“I knew all of this meant there was no getting to Beau. But even when I went away to graduate school, I couldn’t get him out of my head, what had happened to him and whether there was some way to undo it. He’d been losing track of time before my Closing happened, as if the resealing of time was making him less and less real. That was the first hint for Alice and me that Beau’s world had collapsed alongside the wormhole within me—that the Opening was, in effect, the beginning of an alternate timeline, and the Closing was its end. All of our later subjects found that, leading up to their Closings, the same thing happened to those they’d met in their alternate realities. They lost time, like Beau. More and more of it, until there was no more to lose. It may be conjecture, but it’s conjecture in which even Alice Chan was confident: We are the door to Beau and his world, Natalie. When that door closes, he’s gone. When it closed inside me, he was gone.