by Jen Brooks
“I hope someday to discuss the broader and finer points of my religious beliefs with you, dear, but the truth is, we don’t have that much time.”
“Why, because my uncle signed the papers?”
“Tomorrow morning at eight the real world will say good-bye to Jonathan Aubrey.”
We take a moment to look at him, tubes, curled hands, and all. The piano lullaby fills the silence.
“If he’s my creator, what will happen to me when he dies?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Jonathan, I think you know why I’ve brought you here.”
It’s hard to think it, but I do know. “I have questions first.”
“And I promised you answers.”
“Okay, then.” I settle in my seat and fire off the first thing that comes to mind. “For starters, who are you?”
Her blue eyes sharpen, ready to deal plainly at last. I get this shiver of excitement and total dread. “My name is Rosemary. I’m a world-maker, same as you.”
Okay. A fair start. “How’d you, you know, get to be a world-maker?”
“Let’s just say I married a pair of angry, whiskey-lovin’ fists. They landed me in much the same state your airplane landed you.”
“Oh.” Suddenly my hands demand for me to look down at them. “I’m sorry.”
“No worries. That part of my life, thankfully, is well past.”
“So why are you here? What’s your interest in me?”
“You needed help. And you deserved to be helped.” She shrugs like the answer is obvious.
“Why would I deserve to be helped?”
“Think about it, honey.”
“The two seconds with the seat belt?”
“Yes.”
“That makes no sense. I would have left those people behind if I hadn’t been able to get the belt undone.”
“You had a generous heart in those two seconds. More generous than most people have over a lifetime.”
I didn’t mean to be generous. It seems silly to make such a fuss over reaching across and giving a click. “Things wouldn’t have ended any different for me if I’d passed those people by.”
“Oh, but they would have.”
How could she possibly know that? I can only believe what she says, since there’s no way to disprove her. None of that matters now anyway.
“Plus,” she adds, “even if there were never any seat belts, you’ve suffered enough. I believe in mercy.”
The room’s doorknob turns. We hear voices on the other side, indistinct words, and brace for the speakers to enter. The window beside the door fills with the back of someone’s white lab coat. The coat shifts. Dark hands flip the pages of a clipboard, and the voices move away.
I let out a breath I didn’t mean to be holding. “So who is Tess?”
The old woman nods. An expected question. “Another world-maker. Her true name is Whitney. She thought it would be easier for you if she put on the appearance of being your sister.”
“Is she normally so . . .”
“Abrasive?”
“Yeah.”
“Risqué?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Her heart’s in the right place.” She leans back on the footstool, forgetting it’s not a chair, and flails for balance. I stand to catch her, but she rights herself quickly enough and shoos me back down into my chair. “Here’s the basics, honey. There aren’t many world-makers walking the earth, so we make a point of knowing one another. There’s some who prefer not to get involved much beyond that. There’s some, like me, like Whitney, who meet on a regular basis. A support group, of sorts. That doesn’t mean we all agree or even like one another. Whitney, for example, doesn’t believe in the Creator. She’s as scientifically, non-spiritually oriented as they come, and not a big fan of this world. For her, people become world-makers because some trauma they’ve experienced changes their brain or some such—all chemistry and biology. She thinks world-making is a personal escape you should keep secret and enjoy. She doesn’t understand why you don’t want to live happily ever after in the world you made with Kylie.”
“How could I live happily ever after if the Jonathan who created us dies? Wouldn’t our world explode or something?”
“A world once made survives the death of its creator.”
“Then maybe I do want to live happily ever after.”
Rosemary shrugs. “That’s your right.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“I believe in God. And I believe world-makers exist as part of His plan. Jonathan there”—she gestures to the bed—“can’t be part of God’s plan if they pull the plug on him. You can change that.”
“How did you even know I— How did you know Jonathan was a world-maker? It’s not obvious from looking at him.”
She draws a deep breath and blows it out, preparation for an explanation. “It was Whitney who found you first. You’ve seen the worldscape when you change worlds, haven’t you? All the spheres and corridors connected? Whitney’s made a practice of lingering in the worldscape watching other world-makers cross back and forth. Last week she noticed two worlds moving toward each other—your world and the world you made with Kylie—something none of us had ever seen before. By the time she told me about it, she had already identified both you and Jonathan, had researched the crash, and had found Jonathan here.
“I don’t know why you mattered so much to her. She’s never taken an interest in anything beyond hunkering down in her made-up world and watching others do the same. Maybe she simply felt sorry for you, but my guess is that she was plain old lonely, which I know you understand. Loneliness drives a person to do anything for another soul to talk to. Whitney probably picked you because you’re young. I don’t know of any other world-makers in their teens. Whatever the reason, she came to the hospital and partially merged with Jonathan to see what he still had inside. It turned out he had a lot, but there was a big jumble where the plane crash should have been.” At that she reaches behind her chair, and like magic—world-maker magic—she retrieves something.
My silver shoebox. She holds it out to me, and I take it into my lap, but not before checking that my shoes are still inside. She says, “Whitney stole this from you because it had survived the crash. One thing you’ll learn if you stick around is how to recreate a world from an object that was in it. She wanted to experience your plane going down.”
“Why in heaven would she want to do that?”
“Because she wanted to understand the trauma that made you a world-maker, before she got involved. Again, all of this happened before she told me. She had discovered from Jonathan that he knew your uncle was preparing to sign his life support termination papers. The colliding worlds were his reaction to learning that all hope was lost. Can you guess what day that was?”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out: the night I snuck into my girlfriend’s room feeling like there had been some cosmic shift, the night before I almost kissed the real Kylie. “So I didn’t mix up my worlds after all.”
“I don’t know what really happened that day, but if you mixed them, there was something else going on to share the blame.”
“Where is she—Whitney—then? Why hasn’t she shown herself tonight?”
“I’ve already spoken too much on her behalf, but . . .” She hesitates. She takes another deep breath and sighs it out. “I think she finally told me what was happening because I followed her. She’d been even more secretive than usual, so one day I watched her travel to a world that wasn’t hers. Turns out it was your Kylie world, and she was spying on you at the mall, still trying to decide what to do. She asked for my advice. I told her if she didn’t want to help you, I would do it.”
“If she wanted to help so much, why did she leave me that horrible note?”
“Whitney can be . . . spiteful. Life hasn’t treated her any more fairly than it has treated you, and she’s got a bit of a hardness in her. An inability to forgive. It was only right that you should know about the real world, for your sake and Jonathan’s. She said she’d tell you, and she knew if she didn’t, I’d do it myself. When you dismissed her after she helped you merge Kylie, she took her revenge by breaking the news in the worst way possible.”
I knew at the time that I’d gone too far with my anger. It was a very hard day, but that’s no excuse. Now I feel supremely awful. Whitney took a lot of pains to help me. I remember the strange memory echoes of our partial merging and realize she was feeding me memories she must have taken from Jonathan.
Since I thought she was Tess, I assumed the plane crash had made her a world-maker. Now I wonder what other trauma gave her the power while making her so angry and eager to shun the real world. After all, her made-up world was a sunny vacation on a tropical beach. With zero people. Whitney gambled on me when she got involved. Maybe I could have saved her right back, restored to her a little faith, but I was too focused on myself.
The hospital-ness of the room is starting to get to me. Like life is vanquished here instead of rescued. Like sickness is normal.
“If you were supposed to break all this news to me,” I say, “why didn’t you do it as soon as you found out? Why let me go through all that?”
Rosemary smiles. On any other face I’d say that smile was condescending, but on her it looks only kind. “Sitting here, now,” she says, “having gone ‘through all that,’ I hope you agree I did you a good turn by waiting. You learned some things, Jonathan. About your family, about having friends, about how to make a life, not just a world. Things you can apply to whatever world you live in.”
I look at my double in the bed. I don’t want to be in that curled, pale body. I don’t even understand why it’s so important for him to wake up. Would it be so bad if they ended his suffering tomorrow by pulling the plug?
“Whatever world I live in,” I repeat. “Why would I give up my world with Kylie, to be here? I won’t have Kylie, and I still won’t have my family.” I feel awful about Uncle Joey as I say this, since it’s obvious he’s given up a lot for me. “Everything will be different. I won’t even have gone to school for ten years.”
“The difference between this Creation and your creation is, to use an art metaphor, the difference between Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel and an eight-year-old trying to copy it. I believe the Creator made this world. An eight-year-old made yours.”
“That eight-year-old did a pretty good job.” But is that true? I wonder if this is the source of my yearning for what’s real. For ten years I’ve been anything but happy in the world he made for me. I had to make my own happiness in other worlds.
But he gave me the ability to make that happiness, and I don’t mean because he made me a world-maker like him. He gave me choices about how to live life in the world he made, and I mostly made the wrong ones.
“What happens tonight is entirely for you to decide,” Rosemary says. “You can go back to your world and have great happiness with Kylie. If you merge with your creator, however, you will have a different kind of chance to make life good. The Kylie in this world hasn’t known you these ten years, and she’ll have little opportunity to know you. But other opportunities will appear to replace the ones you’ve lost. You will be a miracle, and the world will put a claim on you.”
That’s not exactly the best argument to get me to stay here, but I see her point. “I need some time to think about this.”
“You have until morning, but it would be best not to wait until the last minute. There will be too many doctors and nurses busy on the floor.” Who might witness the spectacle, she leaves out.
“I understand.” She gathers herself off the footstool. It looks like her old bones don’t cooperate as much as she’d like. I realize that for her this looks like the conclusion to ten years of waiting, even though to me it’s only hours since I got my news.
All in all, Kylie handled things much better than I did.
Rosemary doesn’t blink out of the room. She uses the door, closing it gently behind her without any parting words of wisdom. This really is up to me. She passes by the window and is gone.
I have no idea if I’m still invisible. I’m not so much worried about Jonathan on the bed knowing I’m here, but Uncle Joey could wake and see me. He’s not snoring or anything, so it’s hard to tell if he’s in a deep sleep.
It can’t be deeper than the one real Jonathan is in. I go to his bedside, careful not to touch him, and watch the slight rise and fall of his chest under the sheet. It’s not a robust breathing, but apparently it’s enough.
Is Kylie still at the restaurant, sitting at our table, wondering when I’ll be back? I want to ask her what she would do if she were me, but given how easily she agreed to her own merging, I can guess her answer. Then again, I’m working under the theory that she did it because I made her love and trust me. The new Kylie might have a different answer.
Still, favorite seasons and college majors aside, Kylie wasn’t being asked to give up as much as I am. Her life isn’t that changed. It’s my role in that life that was always the question mark. I would be giving her up for a future I can’t even begin to picture. Is my body strong enough to pull this Jonathan’s out of a ten-year coma? Assuming so, what will it mean to be a miracle?
I explore Jonathan’s life a little by taking in the room. I start with the stack of books topped by Le Morte d’Arthur. Underneath sit some Harry Potters, a mystery novel, some books I read in middle school and elementary school, like the Hardy Boys. All books I’ve enjoyed, and I wonder if the reason why is because my creator heard the words read to him night after night by Uncle Joey.
I find it strange that real Jonathan would give my world the books my uncle reads but not Uncle Joey himself. How many nights did I wish my uncle were home, and in the real world he was here? I’m sure of it. In this hospital room. Did real Jonathan want to keep him all to himself?
If real Jonathan—a merged me and real Jonathan—wakes up, how will that change my uncle’s life? I mean beyond the obvious time he’ll get to spend not in this sad room. He is a father needing a son, and I am a son needing a father.
The tears that have been reluctant all night let me know they’re there if I need them, gently pressing against my eyes.
If what Rosemary said is true, merging will not mean I lose my world-making ability. I turn over her words about God having a plan. It’s hard to think that putting me through all of this could be for a purpose. It really doesn’t seem fair or benevolent. Although I can’t quite get myself to embrace or deny the idea that God exists, that doesn’t stop me from wanting to make my own plan. How could I put my world-making powers to good use? Could I be like Whitney and find another coma victim to bring back to life? Could I help people who aren’t world-makers?
Of course, I learned only recently what I can truly do, from closing worlds to changing parameters to moving things from world to world. I’m not sure how any of that could help someone else, but a very needy part of me is attracted to the idea of trying. I have wondered for so long what I should do with my life. Maybe my failure to receive a diploma and my obscure college plans are all because I have a rather nontraditional destiny. If I choose to merge, my first concern on waking up probably won’t be what college to attend.
It will be how to live without Kylie.
The thought of it is an ache in my soul, if I even have a soul. Can I have one if I was created by an eight-year-old coma victim? If I merge with him, will we get to keep his soul?
Now I’m getting too deep. It’s too much to comprehend.
From this side of the room I notice something I didn’t notice before. A bin. It’s shaped exactly like the ones in Uncle Joey’s house in the room at the end of the hallw
ay, and it’s hiding under the hospital bed. A piece of duct tape slapped on the front says “Jonathan.” I slide the bin out as quietly as I can so as not to wake Uncle Joey. The lid peels off easily.
The same things in the bin back home fill this one. Toys, games, clothes. I paw through it all, removing stuff that makes too much noise to sift through. At the bottom is a pile of papers I don’t recognize. I work them free.
On top is a series of newspaper articles, yellowed and thin, about the crash. Of course I never collected these, so I suppose my uncle did. The pictures are horrific—all the emergency vehicles in the water, the body bags lined up on the shore. I start to read one account and stop after a couple of paragraphs. It’s too painful. I skim through the rest until I find mention of an eight-year-old survivor flown to Mass General along with two other people. Arlene and Philip Pearson of a large and happy family in a little house with a porch.
Beneath the clippings lie hospital papers dated and signed by Uncle Joey detailing some of the care I received. Beneath those are some papers I did in third grade. A times table with a perfect score. A report about the dissection of a cow’s eye. Beneath that is a manila envelope.
I flip the top and reach inside. I draw out a piece of yellow construction paper folded in half. A Crayola rainbow spans the sky over a building with the word “hospitel” printed above it. The inside of the card has a drawing that looks like a tree with flowers. Get well soon your frend Kylie.
My tears are streaming before I can stop them. I try to cry quietly, but it’s not easy when I’m this upset. This part was real. Kylie reaching out to me in third grade was 100 percent real. Jonathan never made it back to school, so they never had an indoor recess with crayons, never had anything at all after the crash, yet he made me to love her. Did he do that because, before the crash, he was already in love? I picture Uncle Joey reading him Kylie’s card, even posting it on the wall. If he didn’t already love her—and can one be in love in third grade?—was this get-well card, this unlooked-for kindness, the motivation for his making my world with her in it? All this time has my love been as compelled for Kylie as I made hers for me? What is the true story of Jonathan and Kylie’s love?