by Jodi Picoult
I pull my shirt over my head.
Brian kisses me and takes over, tugging down my shorts. He catalogs every inch of me that he uncovers. Then he lifts me onto the kitchen counter and stands between my legs. I fumble with his belt, shove down his pants. His hands are parentheses on my hips, holding together a tumble of utterances: this, please, now. In one swift move he drags me forward, wrapping my legs around his waist as he pushes into me. His teeth scrape my neck; my nails brand him. He begins to move, but I won’t let him put any space between us, and we rise together like a chimera. He lets go at the same moment that I tighten around him, and when I remember where I am a moment later, it is because I can still feel the jump of his heartbeat inside me.
I find Brian staring down at me with a smug grin. “Well,” he says.
I laugh.
We have what I assume is an ordinary married sex life—a couple of times a week, motions we have mastered for an economy of time, a guarantee of pleasure, and a solid night’s sleep. Whoever comes first makes sure that the other gets there, too. It is always good, and it is occasionally great. Like just now. When sex isn’t the right word, anymore. It’s more like spilling over the boundaries of your own body to fill someone else’s, and having them do the same to you.
In many ways, this is a microcosm of marriage. There is a lot of Did you use up all the creamer? and Are you going by the post office today? but every now and then, there are moments of transcendence: when you rise in tandem the moment your daughter crosses the stage at fifth-grade graduation; when you glance across the table at a dinner party and have an entire conversation in silence; when you catch yourself looking around at your home and your family and think: This. We did all this.
Brian had fallen for me fast. He once told me that when he was with me, he didn’t fade into the background. Food tasted better. The air was crisper. He said I hadn’t just changed his world. I’d changed the world.
Brian reaches for a dish towel and hands it to me, the messy business of love that no one ever has to deal with in Hollywood. What do they do? he has whispered to me at movies. Sleep in the wet spot? He kisses me lightly and pats the marble counter. “Promise me you’ll scrub this before you cook on it,” he says, and starts to withdraw.
I hook my ankles together and trap him, looking into his eyes. It’s something you don’t do a lot, when you’ve been with the same person as long as I have. You glance, you skim, you catch his gaze, but you don’t really drink in his features as if they are an oasis in the desert. But now, I stare and stare until Brian fidgets, and gives me a sheepish smile. “What?” he asks. “Is there something on my face?”
“No,” I say. But I see it, finally—the wonder. The belief that he might wake up and all of this will be a dream. Oh, there you are, I think. The man I fell in love with.
* * *
—
I MET BRIAN at the communal kitchen in the hospice where my mother was dying. We crossed paths at the coffee machine. I knew, after a few days, that he liked flavored coffee—hazelnut or French vanilla—and that he was a lefty. There was always a residue of graphite on the comma of his hand, as if he’d spent the day writing in pencil.
I brought a lunch snack most of the days I was sitting with my mother, and sometimes I would eat it at the scarred little table in that communal kitchen. Brian was there, too, making mathematical notations that were so tiny I had to squint to see the numbers. They were figures I didn’t understand; factorials and exponents and equations way beyond my AP Calculus memories.
“Good day or bad day?” I asked him. This was the hospice equivalent of How are you doing? which, in hospice, was always: dying.
“Bad day,” Brian said. “My grandmother has Alzheimer’s.”
I nodded. I was grateful, at that point, for my mother’s lucidity.
“She thinks I’m a Nazi, so I figured it would be better if I left the room.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “It kind of sucks, you know. To have your body survive the Holocaust and your brain be the part of you that quits.”
“You’re a really good grandson, to be here all this time.”
He shrugged. “She raised me. My parents died in a car crash when I was eight.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” Brian watched me open a bag of Goldfish. “Is that all you’re eating?”
“I didn’t have time to go food shopping—”
He pushed half of his turkey sandwich toward me. “It’s your mom, right?”
It wouldn’t be hard to figure that out, and it still hurt, knowing that someone else had asked questions, had made judgments, had pitied me. “It’s not rocket science.”
“No. Quantum mechanics.”
I glanced up, confused, and found him hunched over his papers again, scribbling.
“You don’t look like a physicist.” I glanced at the sea glass of his eyes, and the hair that kept falling into his face because it was too long.
“How am I supposed to look?”
I felt my face heat up. “I don’t know. A little more…”
“Greasy? Frayed?” He raised an eyebrow. “How about you? What do you do, when someone isn’t dying?”
The way he said it, so frankly and honestly, was the first thing I liked about Brian. No euphemisms, no subtlety. At the time, I found that directness refreshing. But I also couldn’t say the words out loud—that I was an Egyptologist who’d been ripped out of Egypt and who couldn’t see a path back to completing my Ph.D. That, unlike with numerical equations on paper, there wasn’t an easy way to solve my problem.
“I’ve never understood quantum mechanics,” I said, steering the conversation away from me. “Teach me something.”
He turned to a fresh page and drew a tiny circle. “You ever hear of an electron?”
I nodded. “It’s a particle, right? Like, an atom?”
“Subatomic, actually. But for our purposes, you only have to know it behaves like a sphere. And one thing we know about spheres is that they can spin, right? Either clockwise or counterclockwise.” He drew a second circle on the page. “The thing is, electrons are supercool because they can spin clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time.”
“I call BS.”
“I don’t blame you. But, actually, there have been tons of experiments that can only be explained with this phenomenon. For example—imagine taking an opaque screen that blocks out all light. Now cut two little holes in that screen—let’s call them slit 1 and slit 2. If you shine a laser beam onto the slits, and you block slit 1, you’d expect to see a little blotch of light on the wall in the distance aligned with slit 2. If you block slit 2, you’d expect to see a little blotch of light on the wall in the distance aligned with slit 1. What happens when we open both slits at the same time?”
“You see two blotches?”
His eyes lit up. “You’d think so, right? But no. You get a whole row of blotches of light uniformly spaced out in various intensities. It’s called an interference pattern. The only way physicists can explain it is that the light that comes out of slit 1 must be interacting with the light that comes out of slit 2, because we know that when only one slit is open you get a single blotch on the wall…when the other slit is open you get a single blotch on the wall…and when they’re both open, you get something you’ve never seen before. Then Einstein came along and told us light isn’t a jet stream, it’s all individual particles, so maybe the pattern comes from individual particles from different slits hitting each other. Scientists slowed the laser to a point where only one photon was going through a slit at a time, figuring that the weird pattern would disappear. But it didn’t. And physicists were left with the explanation that the one photon actually does go through both slits simultaneously, interfering with itself. Even though every evolutionary instinct bred into us revolts against the idea.” He glanced at me. “Th
at interference phenomenon is what makes your laptop work, in case you still think I’m bullshitting.”
“What does this have to do with the electrons?” I asked.
“We know they spin both clockwise and counterclockwise,” Brian said. “So let’s say you put an electron in a box. There’s a little trigger next to the electron that will activate if the electron spins clockwise, but it won’t activate if the electron spins counterclockwise. If the trigger activates, it will send a signal to a gun, which will fire, and kill a cat.”
“That’s a big box.”
“Work with me,” Brian said. “So if the electron goes clockwise…”
“The trigger activates, the gun goes off, the cat dies.”
“And if the electron goes counterclockwise?”
“Nothing happens.”
“Exactly.” He looked up at me. “But what happens if that electron spins both clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time—as we know it can?”
“Either the cat is dead or it isn’t?”
“Actually,” Brian corrected, “the cat is both alive and dead.”
“How postapocalyptic,” I murmured. “Nice story, but I’ve never seen a zombie cat.”
“That’s pretty much what Niels Bohr said, too. He knew that the math said this was happening, but he had never seen a live-dead cat either. So he figured that there had to be something special about the act of observation that made the cat stop being both alive and dead, and instead become just alive or dead.”
“Like human consciousness?”
“That’s what John von Neumann suggested. But what makes humans so special that they can determine the outcome of a quantum system to collapse into a single defined state? What if it’s not a human…what if a ferret is watching? Or what about the cat in the box? You know it has a vested interest in the outcome. So does it have the power to collapse the state of the electron, or trigger, or gun?” Brian said. “The collapse theory was the one the cool kids believed until the 1950s, when Hugh Everett III came up with another reason why we don’t see zombie cats walking the earth. He said that just like the electron and the trigger and the gun and the cat are quantum objects, so is whoever or whatever is observing what’s in that box.” He drew a little stick figure wearing a skirt, waving. “At first, she is standing outside the box, and doesn’t know what she’s going to see when she looks inside. But the minute she lifts the lid…she is split into two distinct copies of herself. In one version she sees a cat with its brains exploded all over the box. In another, she hears a meow. If you asked her what she saw, one version is going to say the cat is dead, and the other will say the cat is alive. The observer only ever sees one outcome, but never both, even though the laws of quantum mechanics tell us that both versions of that poor damn cat exist. And the reason she sees only one outcome is because she’s trapped in one of the timelines and is unable to see the other one.” He grinned at me. “That’s Everett’s whole deal. The reason we don’t see zombie cats or electrons spinning both ways at the same time is because the minute we look at them, we become part of that mathematical equation and we ourselves get split into multiple timelines, where different versions of us see different, concrete outcomes.”
“Like a parallel universe,” I said.
“Exactly. I’ve been using the word timeline but you could easily say universe. And the reason this matters isn’t because there are cats in boxes, but because we’re all made up of molecules, like those electrons. If you zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, everything we do is explained by quantum mechanics.”
“What happens to those two different timelines?”
“They get farther and farther apart. For example, the observer who sees the dead cat might be so bummed out she drops out of grad school and becomes a meth addict and never invents the technology that would help us develop a cure for cancer. Meanwhile, the observer who sees the live cat thinks she is onto something and becomes the dean of physics at Oxford.” He ran a thumb over the stack of papers he had been working on. “That’s what I’m doing. Slowly destroying my career by insisting that the multiverse is constantly branching off, creating a new timeline whenever we make a decision or have an interaction.”
“Why would that ruin your career?”
“Let’s just say the physicists who believe it are outliers. But one day—”
“One day they’ll be calling you a genius.” I hesitated. “Or maybe that’s already happening in some other timeline.”
“Exactly. Everything that can happen does happen—in another life.”
I tilted my head, staring at him. “So in another universe, my mother isn’t dying.”
There was a pause. “No,” he said. “She’s not.”
“And in another universe, we never met.”
Brian shook his head, and a blush rushed over his skin like the tide. “But in this universe,” he said, “I’d really like to take you out to dinner.”
* * *
—
WHEN I COME out of the shower, Brian’s overnight bag is sitting on the bed. I hear the water start again in the bathroom and stare at it. With a groan I turn away and pull on underwear, a pair of shorts, a tank top.
I run a comb through my hair and twist it into a braid and there’s no reason anymore for me to be in the bedroom, except that I can’t leave.
The shower is still running.
I move toward the duffel and tug the zipper open. Brian’s Dopp kit and shoes are on top. I set them aside and pull out a cotton sweater and sniff it. There’s something floral there—is it roses, again? Or am I imagining it?
“Dawn?”
He stands behind me, a towel wrapped around his waist. My hands go numb, body freezes. Caught in the act. I am a thief, a spy. I am Daisy, wallowing in Gatsby’s clothing.
“I thought…we were okay,” Brian says.
“Because we had sex?” I reply. “I’m pretty sure you were the one who told me that doesn’t mean anything.”
“I didn’t have sex with her.” Brian sits on the bed and pulls the sweater out of my arms.
“No. You just thought about it.”
I am being spiteful and nasty and unforgiving. I am licking my wounds with poison. Brian has apologized; I should forgive him. Shouldn’t I?
But he was with her the day of Meret’s birthday. He missed dinner. He came home wrapped in the scent of roses—on his clothes, in his hair, strewn across our marriage.
“Do you like her?” I force myself to ask. The words feel like knives in my throat.
“Well…I mean,” Brian stumbles. “I hired her.”
“Wrong answer,” I snap, and I get off the bed. I am halfway out the door when he grabs my wrist and spins me around.
“I have never loved anyone but you.”
Once, there was an earthquake in Boston. I was driving Meret home from preschool and along the route, a few trees had fallen. It was a tiny earthquake compared to the ones on the San Andreas Fault, but for people who are not used to having the ground shudder beneath their feet, it was shocking.
I went about the day, making mac and cheese for Meret for lunch, taking her to the park to push her on the swings, turning her over to the babysitter so that I could check in on a hospice patient. The woman was wide-eyed, chattering about how the bed had shimmied across the floor with her in it; how her pill bottles had tumbled from the shelf like they had been pushed by the hand of a ghost. Did you feel it? she asked me, but I shook my head. Because I had been in the car, the tires rumbling just as the earth did, I didn’t even know something had happened until she told me. A catastrophe had subtly changed the world, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Brian will not let go of my hand. He traces my knuckles with his thumb. “Please, Dawn. I know I can’t undo it. But it will never happen again.”
I believe him. I just don’t trust h
im.
“I fucking hate roses,” I say, and I walk out of the bedroom.
* * *
—
HERE’S THE INSANE thing about resuming your old life when it’s nearly ended: it is business as usual. Your heart may be broken, your nerves may be shattered, but the trash needs to be taken out. Groceries must be bought. You have to fill your car with gas. People still depend on you.
On the way to the home of a new potential client, I call my brother. As a neurosurgery resident, he rarely picks up, so it’s startling when I get him instead of voicemail.
“Kieran?”
“Dawn?”
“I didn’t expect you to be there.”
I can hear the amusement in his voice. “Sorry to disappoint you. I just got out of surgery. What’s up? Wait, let me guess. You have a weird rash.”
Granted, I tend to call him when I have a medical question, like if the flu has hit Boston yet, or what to do for plantar fasciitis, or any of a dozen other things that he tells me he can’t answer because they’re not his specialty. “I’m not sick. I just really wanted to hear your voice. I…missed you.”
“Shit, forget the rash, you’re sicker than I thought. Maybe you should come straight to the ER.”
“Shut up,” I reply, but I’m smiling.
“So what’s really going on?” my brother asks.
I hesitate. “I was trying to remember if Mom and Dad ever fought.”
“Can’t help you. On account of I was only a zygote when Dad was still alive.”
“I know,” I say.
“Is this about you and Brian?” Kieran asks. “You never fight.”
“There’s a first time for everything, I guess.”
He waits, expecting me to expound, but I am reluctant to say more.
“Look, Dawn, you have nothing to worry about. You and Brian, you’re like the rule. The standard. You’re the marital equivalent of the sun coming up every morning and the sky being blue when you open your eyes. You’ll be together until the end of time. That’s what you want, right?”