by Jen Brooks
There are not enough papers to throw onto the kitchen floor, but I throw them. Not enough countertops to slam with my fists, but I pound them anyway. I open the refrigerator door just so I can slam it shut. The bottles inside clink and crash. “TESS!”
She’s abandoned me to slam around the kitchen alone. Terrified and alone.
The lower cabinets make a satisfying sound as I kick them in, one by one. They’re sturdy cabinets, so I damage only one door, which slips off its hinge.
The frustration of a hundred thousand attempts to be happy all obliterated in an instant wells up through my core. Tess is LYING. Tess is NOT lying.
I pick up the form from the floor and sit with it at the table in the breakfast nook. I read it again. Every single word. Healey House has been holding Jonathan M. Aubrey for long-term care. Joseph C. Welch, aka Uncle Joey, is Jonathan’s health care proxy.
Are these papers recent? If not, they could be from this world, unsigned because I woke up ten years ago just like I thought I did. I find no date to indicate when Uncle Joey received them or dates telling how long Jonathan has been in long-term care.
If they’re not from this world, it’s reasonable to assume that the world where Jonathan is/was in this long-term care facility is the same world where Tess lives. Right? Maybe she’s actually nice to this other Jonathan as she sits at his bedside. Or if these papers are old, maybe she visits his grave. I suddenly remember that the first time I saw Tess, she led me on a chase that ended at Pine Street Cemetery.
Tess can’t have abandoned me completely. She will come. She has to come. In the meantime I’m supposed to be at Kylie’s house in twenty minutes. Time still ticks the same measure it always has.
Yet I feel that the number of ticks is coming to an end. This afternoon, life with Kylie stretched infinitely into the future, but now I listen. Tick. Tick. Tick. Each second passes like a countdown. What scares the hell out of me is that I don’t know to what end.
I take the life support termination paper up to my room. Tess gave it to me, and I don’t want it lying around for Uncle Joey to see.
With the paper tucked safely away in my desk along with my dead father’s student-athlete speech, I check myself in the bathroom mirror to make sure I don’t look like a wild man. I don’t. I look perfectly sane. I look like me. A real, live person, but I’m nostalgic for the person I was in this mirror ten minutes ago.
Am I not real? Can it be true? I don’t want to believe it, but my stupid, know-it-all inner voice whispers, This world has always been too miserable to be true.
I leave my room, stand in the hallway, and am seized with the need to open doors. I start with the room at the end, where all the memento boxes sit stacked, full of family moments that possibly weren’t lived. I flick on the light, remembering how important all those things have been to me. I don’t need to touch them now. I leave the door open and the light on and move to the next room.
I open my second door on emptiness. This room may never have been entered since Uncle Joey and Auntie Carrie bought the house. No curtains hang from the windows, no furniture stands against the walls, not even a stack of bins. A neutral cream paint covers the wall, and a neutral beige carpet covers the floor. A room for everyone and no one. I leave the door open and the light on.
The last room up here, I’ve seen only twice. The first time it was empty because Uncle Joey and Auntie Carrie were just moving in. The second time was the day I came to live here. I open the door.
The walls are painted pink. White curtains with pink ribbons decorate the windows. The carpet is the same beige as everywhere else, but there is a rolled-up pink area rug off to the side. Auntie Carrie hadn’t been close to delivering her baby when she died, but they had known it would be a girl. In the corner sits a rocking chair, and against the wall rest three giant boxes containing a crib, a dresser, and a changing table. I hesitate before leaving this light on, because the room feels more like a tomb than the other two. Although the baby never lived here, this was the only space on earth that was dedicated just to her. She is, of course, buried in my aunt’s coffin in the womb she never left.
I decide to leave the light on.
When I get back downstairs, I pick up the papers I threw and prop up the crooked cabinet door. I find the same sticky-note pad Tess used to write her lovely message on, and I jot off a quick note. Hi, Uncle Joey. Gone on my first date. Be back at a reasonable hour. Jonathan. I almost write Love, Jonathan, but that, combined with leaving a note, which I’ve never done before, might actually alarm him. I push the stack of college applications back into position at the side of the counter and stick my note right in the center of the empty space I’ve cleared. Kylie’s probably waiting on me by now. I wonder how I’ll make it through a dinner date this way.
As I pull out of the driveway, I look back at Uncle Joey’s house. The upstairs rooms are aflame with light, and I wince a little to think of my uncle going up there and turning everything off when he gets home. But I like the look. For the first time ever the house shines like life is welcome inside, even though most of those rooms are dedicated to death.
The ride to Kylie’s house is so familiar and normal, I feel a little better by the time I arrive. Just seeing her bounce out the door, happy to see me, boosts my spirits as well. She glides into the passenger seat and puts on her seat belt with a neat click. “Where are we going?”
“Do you have a preference?”
“Not so much.”
“How ‘bout Bella Luna?” I haven’t been out for Italian in so long, and Bella Luna prides itself on its romantic little booths for two that will give us some privacy.
“Wow. Sounds great.” The wow is because Bella Luna is expensive, but I’m willing to blow some savings on a big date like this.
I bump over the curb as I back out of her driveway. My hands have absorbed all the shaking I’m trying to keep out of my voice. Kylie looks at me like she’s assessing if I’m okay. I just put the car in drive and go as steadily as I can to the restaurant.
The wait isn’t very long for a Friday, and we get a decent table against a wall, with a crystal sconce to light our dinner. Another crystal fixture dangles above the table. Kylie says, “I don’t know if I dressed nice enough.”
She’s wearing a soft, white sweater and black pants. She’s dressed better than I am. “You look perfect,” I say.
It takes Kylie longer than me to figure out what she wants to order. While she searches the menu, I find myself scanning the tables and booths around us. Nearly every table is taken, mostly by couples, but there are a few families with younger kids and a few groups of older adults, their tables scattered with half-empty wineglasses. The couples seem intent on each other, the families on keeping the kids in line, and the groups on drinking and laughing.
We go through the motions of ordering, and when the server brings us lemonades, it’s time.
Kylie begins. “So I guess I should start with last night.”
“Only if you’re absolutely sure you’re ready to talk about it.”
“Now’s as good a time as any.”
She is so pretty with her hair drawn up in some kind of half-bun, half-ponytail. Long strands frame her face and sway under her chin. I can’t tell if the color on her cheeks is natural or a touch of makeup.
Mostly, though, it’s the way she moves, the easiness of her shoulders, the bob of her head as she speaks. The expressiveness of her eyes and eyebrows. She’s familiar and unfamiliar at once because she’s on the other side of an experience I can’t begin to understand.
“There’s not really so much to tell. I remember falling asleep crying, and I remember seeing myself asleep while standing in the room with you and your sister. I think I sat on the bed. After that I don’t remember much. It felt like . . .” Her eyes shift upward, searching her brain for the right descriptive word. “It felt like sinking into a warm bath, bu
t the water didn’t just stay on the outside. It seeped in. Everything went dim and wavery like when you look up at the sky from underwater, except it was warm. It felt kind of good, actually. Calm. Is that what it looked like?”
As if I will ever tell her what it actually looked like. “Something like that.”
“The next thing I remember is you standing over me. Were you checking to see if I was breathing?”
“You were very still. You made me nervous.”
“I couldn’t move at all, and that was scary, but you were there, and I still felt warm, so I drifted back to sleep. I probably drifted in and out a dozen times. Then my alarm went off.”
“What was the first thing you thought when you woke up?”
“Honestly? I thought I had missed breakfast, because I was starving. Then I remembered you had been there all night, so I called for you, and the rest you know.”
“And how did you—” My eye wanders for a split second to a table behind Kylie. Seated there is a party old enough to be retired, and one of them looks back at me. She has bright blue eyes and an aura of wisdom as visible as the features of her face, and she doesn’t fit in. It’s a good thing I’m not eating yet, because I think I would choke.
It’s the woman from the mall and the crosswalk at Uncle Joey’s church.
She must be here because of Tess’s note. Not the fact that she wrote a note, but whatever the note means. I don’t even get this one last dinner with Kylie. The woman is here for me.
“Are you okay?” Kylie looks over her shoulder to see what has stopped me midsentence. The woman picks up her wineglass and raises it in a toast led by another in the group. She is no longer the woman I fear but a happy, brown-eyed wine-drinker whose flush gives away that she’s drunk too many glasses.
I shake it off as best I can. “How did you feel in school?”
At this her face turns grim. “It was hard at first. I miss certain things about the world that’s gone. Little differences, like a picture of you and me that used to be taped in my locker. I’ve barely seen my family to know what’s changed. And so many things have double meanings. I tried to remember which things I said to which people yesterday, and I couldn’t quite separate what was said in this world from what was said in the other one. I’ll figure it out, though.”
She’s not going to confide how much she suffered, and I’ve just decided I’m not going to tell her about Tess’s note. If Tess is telling the truth, Kylie has sacrificed everything for nothing, and until I know for sure what is real and what is not, until I see proof that no matter what is true, Kylie is happier now than she would have been otherwise, my lips are sealed.
“Thank you for the poem today,” I say.
A shy smile grows on her lips. “I was so afraid you’d be mad that I read it out loud.”
“That part killed me, to be honest. What did Zach and Emily think?”
She shrugs. “They teased me, mostly. Emily especially thinks it’s funny I should like someone I didn’t tell her about first.”
“Does she disapprove?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Not that it should matter. Emily was the one who was happiest for me when we started going out in tenth grade.”
We both look down at our hands on the table. We started going out in tenth grade, but Emily is teasing her now because our relationship is just beginning. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Not so bad.”
“You keep talking about things two different people did. Do you feel . . . like two people?”
“I feel perfectly myself. Just a little . . . confused sometimes. It’s exactly what Tess said would happen.”
We grow quiet. The buzz of other people enjoying their night out sounds perfectly normal, but when I glance over, a woman with wise, blue eyes—I swear she was a girl seconds ago—stares back at me. In a blink she is a girl passing the bread to her mother.
I force myself to look back at my hands, but I can’t help it. I look up again, and a sea of blue eyes stares back at me out of a hundred versions of the strange woman’s face. Every diner in the restaurant has transformed to create a circus of bizarre clones talking to one another like nothing’s unusual. One by one they glance up at me to make sure I’m watching. I try not to show my surprise, because I don’t want Kylie turning around again. I catch myself scratching at the table with a fingernail, expecting to peel away the finish and expose the real world underneath. The floor begins to rumble, causing the crystal sconces and chandeliers to tinkle and the wine to slosh, but nobody except me seems to notice. The table remains solid and the earth has trembled, and I need to know. I need to know the meaning of Tess’s note.
The restaurant stills. None of the diners is the blue-eyed woman anymore, and the tick, tick, tick of seconds passing, one by one, never to be repeated, rings in my ears like church bells.
“I need to know something, Jonathan,” Kylie says.
It’s hard to concentrate. Her colors sort of fix themselves like paint on a canvas, less real, slightly blurred, an impression of Kylie in dots. “Yes?” I say.
“When did you decide you loved me? Not just had some crush on me. Was it before you made that world? Or was it after?”
I have loved you forever. I will love you always.
The conversations around us intensify, like every person in the restaurant chooses to speak at once and over one another. Not shouting, just voices filling my head as the people themselves slow, their sound deepening. My finger works furiously at the table, a gash visible where I’ve tried to get underneath. I want Kylie to understand how sorry I am, how much I wish I didn’t need her as much as I do, how happy she made me today when she read that poem.
Her hands fall onto mine. Gentle, caring hands that soothe my need. When I look to her face to unburden my guilt, she’s gone. My hands are held by a strange woman with infinite blue eyes.
We are not sitting at a table in Bella Luna.
CHAPTER 25
IT’S DARK. SHE STANDS FIVE or six feet away, separate, her hands far from my hands. I back up a pace, and trip over a massive tree root. I fall to the ground against the tree that spawned it.
Above me looms black sky pitted with stars. I see no moon, so everything is a shadow, even the woman, who I have no faith looks the same as I’ve come to expect. Branches sway in the wind, and I recognize the rustle of leaves. They must be newly sprung from their buds.
I’m scared to death. The tree stands, solid against my back, and I can’t see that there is a path to anywhere. Only canopy above and clearing below. The darkness thins as my sight adjusts from the restaurant’s electric glow to this pitch-dark void of night. As shapes become clearer, my panic rises. Stones stand thrust from the ground at close intervals and in rows. Rows and rows and rows. Gravestones. Oh God, I am in a cemetery. If I’m not already dead, I’m going to die. Of fright if not by the strange woman’s hand.
Where she stands, something burns into a glow. A hand clasped in a fist, lit from the inside. Red light pulses through the separation of her fingers. They unfurl and reveal a palm of light, which focuses in a beam that slides along the ground toward me. It’s not a palm of light. It’s a little flashlight. I think I would have felt better if it were a magic ball in the palm of her hand.
“It’s time, Jonathan.”
Time for what? But I cannot speak to this woman. I choke on the words in my throat.
She steps toward me. In the glow cast by the flashlight, which thankfully she doesn’t shine in my eyes, I see she’s wearing jeans and sneakers, whereas I might have thought the occasion called for flowing white robes and a crown of greenery. Her sweatshirt says something about vacationing at the Grand Canyon.
Her eyes, though, are anything but casual tourist eyes. They reflect the light like mirrors. They flash images of myself back at me, braced against the tree trunk. She hobbles as she approaches, then
creaks as she crouches to bring her face to a height with mine.
“Take my hand,” she says. Her voice sounds grandmotherly, but it resonates against the shadows around her, like maybe she speaks with a couple of extra sets of vocal chords.
My arm is wooden like the tree, stiff with fright. She reaches down to unlock me, takes my hand in hers and draws me up. Her touch reminds me of Tess, warm and piercing. “Tess?” my wooden tongue manages to ask.
She shakes her head. “You need to see something, honey. Come on.”
My hand in hers, we traipse through the graveyard, guided by the flashlight. Corners of granite wink when the beam crosses them. Many of the graves are planted with tiny bushes or laden with mementos of the dead. Some have their own solar landscape lights for comfort. A candle glows, deep in a red glass holder. Christian crosses, Jewish Stars of David, carvings of hearts or flowers or pillars, assorted symbols I don’t understand, all illuminated momentarily by the woman’s light, but the one thing I can’t see are the names. The beam slides by too quickly for me to make them out, until we pull up to one particular stone and she shines it on the final statistics of a family of four.
Mark Aubrey
Christine Aubrey
Jonathan Aubrey
Tess Aubrey
My parents and sister all have birth dates and death dates chiseled into the stone. My name has only one date. I am not dead yet.
A massive shiver runs through me. I have to lean against the stone in weak-kneed relief. Jonathan Aubrey lives.
“Is this the real world?” I ask. But I know it is. Even though it’s night, everything’s sharper, like a blurred photograph resolved into focus or the sound of a crowd separated into distinct voices. I sense the breathing of the Earth, a hum in the air and its resonance through the trees, through me. In all my worlds, including the one I thought was real, I’ve never perceived with such intensity. This world, unlike mine, is full of power. It is full of life, despite the graves all around.