Infinite Us

by Eden Butler

  I looked between her and the board, seeing the similarities, the shape of her cheeks, just like Dempsey’s and the sharp point of her chin. They were identical, but that didn’t make sense.

  “How?”

  “I... I don’t know.” She immediately went back to the letter, skimming through the words, her eyes moving down the page until she came to a line that widened her eyes. “…after Sookie and Babette died, Dempsey’s father blamed Joe Andres, telling the police, those not in Simoneaux’s pocket, that it was the fat man that had started the fire. Dempsey did something stupid, I’d say, though it did free us all up to worry less over that rotten family. He told the sheriff that he’d seen his father start the fire, told him he’d testify if he needed to. Knowing his own son was willing to testify against him, the old man didn’t put up a fight and Simoneaux got hauled off to parish prison. Dempsey’s word, it seemed, was enough to put his daddy in jail for murder and destruction of property—but it wasn’t enough to keep himself safe.

  “We took him to Alabama after the trial then on to the Army recruitment station where he signed his name as Eric O’Bryant and O’Bryant is what he remained until the day he died.”

  Will lowered the letter again, stretching a hand out to rest it on my arm, like she needed me to keep her from falling. Her face was open, her features expressive as she blinked and seemed to look inward, as though there were too many thoughts clouding up her mind and she need to sort them out.

  “That means…” she looked at the board, searching for a name, maybe a face, and after a few moments she covered her mouth again, pointing at the string of yarn that ran from her great-grandfather’s picture to a smaller one further down. “Nash, look. It’s Riley. Riley and Isaac.”

  I had to look closely at it, and there was Riley, standing on the steps of a synagogue with an older version of Dempsey at her side, next to an older woman—Riley’s mother I guessed— and a man that looked even more like Will than her great-granddaddy. I nodded to the man and Will smile. “That’s Ryan. That’s my daddy’s daddy, Nash. Riley’s brother Ryan. I’d never put the name together. Riley. They never talked about her. Not ever. I only knew her name because it was in my grandfather’s prayer book. I saw it when I was ten and asked him who she was.” She stared at the image again, stretching a finger toward it. “He said Riley was his sister who’d gone off to heaven a long time ago. Then he made me promise never to mention her to Gramps. He said it would hurt him too bad to talk about her.”

  Next to Riley was a tall, broad black man. There was a small grin on his face and he held Riley close to his side, but he stood ramrod straight, like a soldier, and I wondered how long Isaac went on that way, being on guard, once Riley was gone. I wondered if when he was alone with Riley he smiled the way I did when Willow looked at me.

  “Isaac,” I said, pointing to the picture, then frowning when I fingered the string that ran from his wedding picture, then across the board to the second family tree. “Holy shit.”

  “Nash…”

  I pointed at another picture, this one with Isaac too, but Riley was missing. He looked younger in that picture and there was nothing resembling a grin on his face as he stood next to a face I knew. I’d seen it in a handful of pictures in the family album my mother kept in the front room of our small apartment. It had been next to her family Bible, and the envelopes she said were for important papers. Nat and my birth certificates, my parents’ wedding license, the number to the detective who always called to check on my father if he’d gone too long falling asleep on the front porch.

  Next to the Bible she’d stacked a thick photo album. There were baby pictures of me and Natalie, things that only a first-time parent would keep—locks from our first haircuts, pictures we’d drawn in pre-school and dozens of photos from her family in California. In the back of that album was a handful of images, not as well kept as my mother’s, all of our father’s people. His parents, who had died one night, just like my mother had, exactly for the same reason. My grandfather Lenny had gotten drunk. We’d heard rumors from the family, things that got passed along like how many husbands a certain cousin had or how many times someone had been in jail. Lenny had been a drunk, and had passed that habit down to my father. There had been whispers told behind our backs, when the gossips thought Nat and I slept: Lenny and his wife Clara had never gotten over the loss of her brother. They’d been close at some point but had fallen out when her brother married a woman Clara didn’t like.

  I’d only heard the story once, but knew it well enough that seeing my grandfather and Isaac wasn’t a much of a surprise as it should have been.

  “It’s Lenny,” I told Willow, nodding toward the picture.

  “Isaac’s friend?”

  “And my father’s father, Will.”

  “What?”

  We traced the string, how it moved up, linking Clara to Sylv, Sookie’s brother. I glanced over at the O’Bryant tree, moving my fingertips along it and saw the timelines were nearly even. For every Lanoix family member that married and had children, so went an O’Bryant. Nearly every year since Sookie’s death, there had been a birth, a marriage on Willow’s side of the family.

  “It’s the same,” I said, glancing at Will, noticing that her eyes had gone wide again as she quickly scanned Roan’s letter.

  She moved her fingernail over the pages, stopping when she came to Isaac’s name. She looked up at me. “He almost…” Will shook her head and I caught the glint of tears between her lashes. “Isaac might have had a good life,” she read, “with Winston, his son and maybe that would have been enough. But for Winston’s birthday, he wanted the boy to meet his family, to bring him to his sister and hope that his son would be the one to bring them back together.” Will’s throat worked, as though she had to swallow the large knot that blocked her voice. “The plane they were on crashed somewhere off the South Carolina coast and Isaac and Winston went on to be with Riley before the boy had turned five.”

  “That was why…” I closed my eyes, wondering for a second if things would have been different. If my life would have changed if Isaac hadn’t crashed with his son, if his sister and Lenny had never been forced into the sorrow that took over their lives. “My father said once his folks were sad people. There had been so much loss. Too much, it seemed. He said they never laughed. They never…”

  Willow came to my side, curling an arm around me and I hugged her close, looking at the pictures, the endless strings that weaved in and out, that touched and moved and connected all these lives.

  “What else does it say?” I asked her and she lifted her hand, passing over the letter for me to read.

  “There is a force at work that cannot be explained,” Roan had written. “Something that moves through the ages. The same thing that made it possible for me to be an uncle in New Orleans, that brought me to Riley and Isaac in a D.C. library, and also to a young woman who wanted to learn, so she could show her young daughter, Willow, that a woman was a force to be reckoned with. It led me to you to me as well, Nash when you were scared, when you needed a father because yours had not been one at all.

  “This force, this power directs, guides us, plants within us the memory of generations, things that should have been and weren’t, things that could have been yet failed. And sometimes, as you probably are realizing by now, those should-have things will try again and again, searching for a fitting end, searching for a finality that will lead not to sorry, not to loss, not to failure, but to joy. I cannot name it, this ancient, sacred thing. I can only follow it, obey it and hope that one day it ends with love. In my bones, my friend, I believe that it will, and that you will be one of those happy endings. For you, Nash, have found everything you need in the woman at your side.”

  Later, Willow lay on my chest, our bodies sweaty and slick, our heartbeats slowing as we lay naked, sated in my bed. There were boxes and bags all over my floors. Her toothbrush had been unpacked and we shared a pillow. I thought the jasmine scent would never leave
my sheets, in the same thought I realized I didn’t want it to.

  “A hundred lifetimes, I bet,” Willow said, staring up at the ceiling with her fingers moving over my arm.

  “What?”

  “A hundred. All those people, moving together. All the lifetimes spent searching, wanting to come together. We can’t be the first, Nash.” She lifted on her elbow, resting her palm against my chest as she watched me. “How sad would it be if after all those lifetimes it’s you and me who get our happy ending and no one else.” She laid back down, turning to rest her chin on my chest. “Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “No,” I said, pulling her closer. “I don’t think it’s fair at all.”

  “Why us, do you think? After all this time…why is it us?”

  I’d thought of nothing else on the taxi ride home. We’d splurged, celebrating Roan’s departure with a cab ride back to Brooklyn and a pizza delivered ten minutes after we’d lugged Willow’s suitcases back into the building.

  “Maybe it’s because no one learned.” I felt her move her head, her hair rustling against my shoulder. “It’s like this country and all the people who are still clueless. We kill each other, we fight and fuss and we forget that there was a time, not that long ago, where we were even more divided. It’s two hundred years and we’re still divided. Maybe all those people in our families, maybe they were divided too. Maybe because the world was, they couldn’t get past that to someplace where they could be happy.”

  “And we can?”

  I nodded, a non-answer that gave her pause. She was warm against me, a solid weight that was soft, and sweet and so new and exciting. Her life and mine were moving together, real and honestly, closing the gap on the distance that seemed to have always divided our families.

  “Sometime, next year, I need to go to California.”

  “To see your sister?” She was curious, and I tugged her further up my chest. I’d been thinking about Nat since we read Roan’s letter. How family and blood cross tides of time. How there had been so much anger, so much loss and nothing ever got settled from holding onto it. I didn’t want that for me. I didn’t want it for Natalie, either.

  “Yes,” I told her, swallowing as the words came. “To see Nat and…to see my father. It’s been a long time.” I exhaled when Willow relaxed against me. “I’ve hated him for a long time, Will. But... I don’t want to anymore. It’s time to start healing.” She nodded, I felt the movement of her chin. “Will you go with me?”

  “Of course,” she said, kissing my chest. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  She hummed when I kissed her, holding her face between my hands, feeling our bodies twining together. “We can have our happy, Will," I whispered to her, “the two of us. I know we can. I know it with everything I am.”

  Roan

  The Nation farm was a sprawling place well appointed with a small cottage off to the side of the main property and a larger woodframe home in the center. I watched it all, leaning on a tree that years before, lifetimes before, Sookie and Dempsey had hid beneath, holed up in the tree house that had long since fallen to shreads and ruin.

  They could not see me, watching, the children running around, their laughter loud and sweet against the slow wind that blew the scent of honeysuckle and the tease of sugarcane into the air.

  “Riley, you want to bring the baby inside?” Willow called and I watched her, the slim waist only marginally rounder than it had been when she was young. There were small strands of gray coloring her chestnut hair, but she wore hardly any wrinkles at all, despite her years. Those years, it seemed, had been very kind to her.

  Around the end of the porch, Nash manned the grill, a beer in one hand and his grandson at his hip, nodding toward the surface that sizzled and burned with steaks and burgers. “No,” he told the boy, “not yet. You have to wait til just before they’re ready to add the sauce.”

  Nash, too, had grown a little rounded about his middle, his hair still full, but duller, his eyes now covered with glasses that he rarely took off.

  The farmhouse had once been a tiny, two room shack built by hands who’d seen too much work and not much care. The years came fast and with them the broken walls that were mended and the structure that grew wide, larger to accomodate children and grandchildren and then cousins when they came, when old granny Bastien had seen her children scatter to the wind, to death and travel, and her granddaughter fall to her reward, taken much too soon by smoke and fire.

  The home was now a large place with a wrap around porch and double wooden entry doors, finely crafted with inlays, the craftsmanship something to boast and crow about. But that was not the way of Mr. Nation or his wife of twenty-five years.

  They had seen fit to return to Manchac when their four young children became too wild for the confines of their Brooklyn brownstone. And so it was that Nash brought his family back to the swamp, to the place where it had all began. There the children grew up, the boys— Winston, Roan and Isaac—and a girl with wild audburn hair and skin tawny dark. Her they called Riley.

  They had been here for fifteen years now. Fifteen years since Bastie’s place had been extended, since the Simoneaux kin were all too happy to take Nash up on his offer to buy their land. It was nothing at all to a man of his means, a man who had become succesful, and content with the things he had built, more so by the life he was leading. And so Bastie’s old farm reached out, extended beyond the hidden trails that led to the old fishing shack, right to the sugar cane fields that Nash had torn down. It was a project of immense effort, as was the deconstruction of the Simoneaux mansion that had not been touched in some forty years, falling in to unreclaimable disrepair. The shelters and rehab stores got the woodwork from the foyer and the fine trim and millwork that had not rotted in the years of neglect. The rest of the mansion went to ground, became ash and dirt—a hard but very satisfying project. Nash and Willow set tracks and built cottages that could one day house their children and their families, if they so desired.

  Those two great lines, divided for so long, had been settled, at least for now. But joy had come at a great price. There is always a price to pay. It had come in smoke and fire. It had come with fret and worry, with blood and tears, with loss, with anger, with pain. Yet joy endured—it came and went, then came again, until the girl with the wild, chaotic hair and the boy who could not be bothered with love or joy at all, had paid the toll, settled the debt so many had left waiting.

  And like before, like lifetimes before, the memory remained, passing into one life, into the next, through bone and blood and cells that made up one life and then another.

  There it stayed.

  The End

  Family Tree

  Discussion Questions

  Because of his upbringing, Nash has never held much of a sense of familial connection, with the exception of his twin sister, Natalie. How different do you think he would have been if he’d grown up with a stable family environment?

  There is a divergence in Willow’s worldview and Nash’s. Would these differences impact how Nash and Willow raised their children? Do you think it impacted their decision to return to the swamp farm?

  The issue of race is central to the motivations of various characters in INFINITE US. In your opinion, is the world much changed from Sookie’s time to Nash’s? How are these two time periods alike?

  What character impacted you the most?

  With what character could you most closely identify?

  How did you feel about the slip between time periods and how they are accessed?

  What did you dislike about the story? What did you like?

  INFINITE US follows characters that are at odds with the world around them (Sookie and Dempsey vs. their families, Isaac and Riley vs. Trent and the Civil Rights-era world they lived in and Nash and Willow and their own personal demons). Do you experience similar issues in your daily life? How do you cope with them?

  The past and present are woven throughout the story. What do you think Nash an
d Willow learned from their family? Do you think they would have had the same connection had it not been for the dreams?

  What’s your guess about Roan and his role in each of these couples’ lives? Would there have been a different outcome for Nash and Willow if he had not intervened?

  Acknowledgments

  This was a beautiful journey to take with Nash and Willow, Isaac and Riley, and Sookie and Dempsey. I can’t remember having this much fun or feeling things so deeply when I wrote as I did during the INFINITE US writing process. I hope you feel a small bit of that when you read it.

  Sharon Browning, my editor, thank you for your insight, your patience and the wonderful way you make me sound like I have any idea what I’m doing. (I so do not). She is always the final touch, the master craftswoman who makes sure what you read is logical and well executed. She’s my Yoda, guys. Always.

  Thank you to my fantastic Sweet Team: Trinity Tate, Veronica Varela Rigby, Lisa Bennett, Jessica D. Hollyfield, Amy Bernstein-Feldman, Kayla Jagneaux, Heather McCorkle, Joy Jagneaux, Jennifer Jagneaux, Tina Jaworski, Naarah Scheiffler, Laura Agra, Betsy Gehring, Allyson Lavigne Wilson, Allison Coburn, Chanpreet Singh, Emily Lamphear, Sammy Jo Lle, Michelle Horstman, Jazmine Ayala, Melanie Brunsch and Joanna Holland for their amazing support and especially to Christopher Ledbetter, Lori Westhaver, Judy Lovely, Carla Castro, Heather Weston-Confer, Jennifer Holt, Trish Finely Leger, Karin Enders, Barbara Blakes and Marie Anderson-Simmons for the impeccable beta read. Thank you, particularly, Marie for schooling me on the important of the Omegas. I’m sure Mark would agree they’d definitely spank those Alpha Phi Alphas every time.

  As always thank you to Chelle Bliss and Penelope Douglas for your constant friendship and support. Thank you, sincerely to Christine Case-lo for the research and explanations of epigenetic memory.