by Jen Brooks
In one night I can’t make sense of all this and come to a decision about what will make me happy. About what will be the right thing. If I choose to merge with Jonathan, it can’t be undone. If I choose not to, he will die, and that can’t be undone.
Piece by piece, tear by dropped tear, I replace the contents of the bin and secure the top. My nose runs everywhere, and I swipe it with my shirt. As I slide the bin back under the bed, Uncle Joey stirs. I freeze.
He rolls to his side but doesn’t wake. I use my shirt again and wipe my eyes. Out of tragedy, a miracle.
I can’t go through with a merging if my world is still open and Kylie exists, but since I wasn’t the one who created it, I don’t know if I can close it. I test, like dipping a toe into the ocean, to see if I might be able to transport myself back there, and the world peeks open. Kylie, my ever-patient Kylie, still sits at our table in Bella Luna eating pasta without me. She is so lovely. A beautiful person inside and out. The fork rises to her lips.
I love running beside her, mile after mile on the trail, through the trees, under the sun, breathing the glory of creation. Her hand is perfectly fit to mine. Her body graceful sprinting around a turn, walking through the halls, holding me. I wish I had brought my creative writing notebook, because in it I’ve kept all her poetry. Every beautiful word she’s ever written in the world.
I think I’d better just close things now. Then not merging won’t be a choice anymore. Without that world, I’ll have to move forward with life as a resurrected Jonathan.
Still, I hesitate. I closed Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend under Tess’s guidance, and now that I know who Tess is, closing that world seems like a worse choice than it did at the time. So what if taking girlfriend Kylie out of that world would have been a tragedy for the people she left behind? They were still people. Like me. Real. Real enough. I created a bigger tragedy by blinking them out of existence as though they’d never lived. I brought the apocalypse on those people. My creation.
I can’t let Kylie, my Kylie, die for good.
I don’t have to do this.
I could go right back to Bella Luna and finish my meal.
No. I can’t. I need to close my world.
I fill myself with destructive imagery, which at this moment is picture upon picture of me losing Kylie. The images rise up, and I am a conductor gathering my arms for a crescendo of destruction. Music fills me, but it is softer than it should be. Tiny piano notes traveling up and down a scale. Lullabies from the radio by comatose Jonathan’s bed.
The music changes everything. A lullaby is love—a baby boy in his mother’s arms, an uncle crying night after night in a hospital room. My just-begun imagery of colliding worlds and crippling loss combine with flash after flash of all my ways of knowing life, springing from every corner of me. Grief, bliss, pain, health, fear, love, childhood, family, breath. A glance at a scar in a mirror. A high five at the finish of a race. The pine scent of a forest trail. The roar of my shiny red car. All the lights ablaze in the house. My father’s speech. Lips touching, arms enfolding, hearts racing.
Death and life merge in a white-hot world-making . . . No, world-destroying . . . No. The images grip me so hard, I’m not sure anymore. All I can do is watch them and hear them and smell them and feel them. I don’t want to destroy the life I’ve lived. I don’t want to destroy the only love I’ve ever known.
Kylie deserves more than a last meal at Bella Luna. What she did for me deserves as much sacrifice on my part in return.
Once the idea comes, it’s impossible to deny. I can change parameters. I can manipulate things. Kylie sips on her lemonade, the last one I will ever see her drink, and I focus my raging life-and-death power into her world, my world, the world in which I became me.
She puts down her glass and looks up. Smiles. A great, big sunshine of a smile. It seems egotistical to give her me, but that’s what I do. If only I had thought of that for Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend. If only I’d given those left behind a Kylie identical to the one I took.
Another version of me takes the seat across from Kylie as if he’s been gone to the restroom. At least that’s where he thinks he’s just been, and that’s the direction I’ve made him come from. He smiles back at her, and I identify his emotion. The thrill of being with Kylie is like soaring in a sky made of joy.
Good-bye, Kylie. Oh God, Kylie, good-bye.
I’m burning out with the passionate effort of changing parameters and leaving that world forever. My hold slips, and the doorway closes. The last thing I see is Kylie laughing. Somehow the other me has already done something to make her happy, but it makes me cry.
I’ve fallen to my knees, gasping for air as quietly as I can between sobs. I think of Kylie and I think on this: world-making comes with a greater responsibility than an eight-year-old child can understand. It is an awesome power. A world-maker made me real enough to feel love so deeply that I suspect these tears that fall are less for loss than for the magnitude of what I have done. What I can do.
All this power came from somewhere. Maybe, as Rosemary says Whitney believes, it is something unlocked by a traumatized brain. A body can discover all kinds of strength it never knew it had, when the strength is needed. Like at the end of a long race, when you’re tired and sore and can’t suck the air fast enough, but you have to pass one competitor in the final stretch—then your legs and lungs and heart find something that wasn’t there before, and that extra strength is victory.
Anything is possible, but I’m tempted to believe it’s something else—God, fate, love—watching over me.
I see a lighthouse on the shore.
I’ve never seen it lit before.
Today, however, it is bright
With guiding, misty lighthouse light.
The boats go by it one by one,
The fisherpeople having fun.
They leave on time like floating clocks
But do not dash upon the rocks
Because they have the lighthouse lit.
They’re safe because they pass by it.
If I could change one thing about my life, it would be this: how long it’s taken to understand just how much light has been in my life, and by extension in Jonathan’s life since he gave me mine. Dad, Mom, Tess, Uncle Joey, Kylie, Luis, Kaitlyn, Mr. Eckhart, Mr. Diamond, Coach Pereira, Whitney, Rosemary, doctors, nurses, my rescuers in the harbor, and whatever mercy in the universe gave Jonathan, and therefore me, our power. All of them have been beams crossing the darkness, giving us just enough guidance to find our way home.
Terrible things have happened to me, and that is life, but I have never been utterly alone.
I breathe and sob for a few minutes more. Hunched over, I can’t help but trace the lines of the floor tiles while I slowly calm down. When the last of the fit is over and I’ve used every last dry spot on my shirt to wipe my face clean, I’m finally ready. My feet drag like cement blocks as I labor back to the bed. The clock on the wall says it’s almost eleven p.m. A very quiet hour. One of Jonathan’s tubes twitches. He has suffered long enough.
I don’t bother taking off my shoes. I place one knee on the bed, taking a last look and seeing with a shock what I can’t believe I missed before. Real Jonathan, for all his sickly, hollow appearance, is entirely without a scar. His face is smooth and perfect from his brow to his cheek. I touch my own scar, wondering why he put it there, wondering how it will be to ask this of myself when I awake.
“Jonathan?”
I didn’t hear him stir, transfixed as I was by the missing scar. Of course I’ve made enough noise to disturb his sleep. I turn to my uncle. His eyes are wide with wonder, and I want to run to him. All this time he has loved me and cared for me in a way no person should have to endure. I want him to know how grateful I am before I’m no longer myself, or become more than myself.
I don’t move, though, because blue-eyed Ro
semary in her Grand Canyon sweatshirt and jeans has appeared behind him. Her hands hover over his shoulders, ready, as Tess’s once were for me. I truly hope her touch is better than Tess’s. I think it will be.
I can’t do this without saying something, so I blurt out exactly what I’m thinking. “I wish so much Auntie Carrie had lived. And the baby. I’m sorry I made things harder, but I love you so much for watching over me. All these years.”
His shoulders move when Rosemary’s hands descend on them, and I hesitate only long enough to make sure I’ll fall without spilling over the bed rail. Kylie was right. It’s like sinking into a warm pool. The water seeps inside. Almost pleasant. Divine.
Kylie . . .
EPILOGUE
IT’S ONE OF THOSE EARLY may days when the grass IS greened from spring rain and sunshine. The colors of the world blossom in pink and white tree buds, yellow daffodils, and the yellow-green of new maple leaves. Pastels. Like a painting everywhere you look.
I sit under a tree facing Dartmouth Hall, a classic white college structure full of classrooms and professors’ offices, flanked by similar old, white buildings. Baker library stretches to my left, the Hanover Inn to my right. All around the Green stand the beautiful brick halls of Ivy League academia. The bells of Baker Tower chime the noon hour, and I’m people watching instead of studying. Dartmouth students have a million places to go.
My phone vibrates with a text notification. I texted Whitney with the info on a world-maker meeting that’s just been announced. I wondered if she was coming. That’s for me to know and you to find out! j/k We’ll both be there. She’s spending a year in the Caribbean with Rosemary, who’s helping her rediscover the importance of peopled beaches. I’ve seen her only twice since I woke up. The first time was awkward since we had to bandage the hurts we’d caused each other, but the second time, we went hiking in the Grand Canyon while Rosemary took pictures from the rim. Our frequent texts keep us up-to-date on how we’re dealing with all the choices we’re making in our new lives.
In truth I don’t feel much different. My childhood memories are stronger. I remember ten years of life I gave myself in another world. I also remember being in the coma and a strange series of semiconscious moments spread over ten years. With perfect clarity I heard the decision finally being made to terminate my life support. It’s hard to scream when you’re locked in a coma, so I did the only thing I could and tried to combine worlds. I don’t know how I expected that to save me, and I’m not sure it wasn’t just some primal instinct to do something, anything, for my buried voice to be heard. Thank God Whitney noticed and found the other Jonathan. Found me.
All my worlds are closed to me. I haven’t made a new one in the time that’s passed, but I now have this: Jonathan-goes-to-college-in-the-absolutely-positively-for-real-this-time-real-world. I got here by waking up a miracle and proving myself on the SAT I and SAT II. That plus the year I spent earning an equivalency diploma. One year behind for ten years lost. All in all not too bad.
The biggest obstacle to my attending college wasn’t my health, because I could run almost as soon as I woke up. It wasn’t my brain, because I could read the day I opened my eyes. Just like with Kylie, my merging took the best of each Jonathan. It wasn’t the newspapers, or the crowds of the faithful, or the nonstop appointments with political and religious officials. It wasn’t Dartmouth itself, which opened its arms to me as soon as I proved I was more than capable of doing the work. It wasn’t the doctors’ tests upon tests upon tests on every element of my being.
The biggest obstacle was me. Deciding what to do with myself.
Some members of the track team meet for lunch at the Hop after class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I like Hop fries, so I make a trip there on Tuesdays and Thursdays too. I slide the book I was reading, The Origins of Religion, into my backpack. There’s much I have to learn if I’m ever going to understand the gift I’ve been given. Someday I hope to use it again.
The New Hampshire air is almost warm when the wind pauses and the sun shines down. As I cross the Green, most people succeed at not staring, but because I’m the famous miracle coma-boy, I can never go anywhere without someone’s glance lingering a bit too long. Since waking up, I have been anything but invisible.
At the mailboxes, as usual, I meet up with my friends—Lyle, Julia, Marcus, who are all philosophy and religion majors. We pass into the café area and put our stuff down to claim a table before getting in line. The track people are already eating, a clique unto themselves, full of their own camaraderie.
When my friends and I finish eating, we clear our table and go our separate ways. I have a poetry writers’ meeting to go to when I say good-bye.
I walk toward the track table, nervous, as always. She sees me coming and rises, says good-bye to her friends. We meet at the recycling station, where she sorts her lunch debris into appropriate containers.
We walk and talk together all the way down to the River Cluster dorms and into the common room of French Hall for our poetry writers’ meeting. We don’t hold hands. We’ve never kissed. We’ve never written a poem to or about each other.
She is beautiful with her long red-brown hair swinging in a ponytail as she walks. She is more familiar to me than the sun, more life-giving. She is not in California at Stanford. She is not at UMass Amherst. She plans a premed English and biology double major, and she is the reason I applied here.
And she doesn’t have a boyfriend.
Yet.
Acknowledgments
I cannot overstate the importance of my experience in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction Program. The SHU WPF community is intelligent, inspirational, and above all, supportive. Thanks to Dr. Albert Wendland, Dr. Lee McClain, Dr. Michael Arnzen, and Dr. Nicole Peeler for their creation of and commitment to a program that taught me so much. Thanks to Anne Harris and Diane Turnshek for their praise and encouragement of my thesis projects. A very special, head-bobbing thank-you to Timons Esaias, who had the patience and persistence to guide me through the first manuscript I ever wrote, and who taught me lessons about how to be a writer as much as how to write.
At SHU I met Rhonda Mason and Diana Botsford, now my critique partners for over ten years, now two of my very best friends. Thanks for being sounding boards sometimes, critics others, and cheerleaders always. You are my favorite authors in the world.
Thanks to Alexandra Machinist for choosing to champion this project in its first stages. Thanks to Stephanie Koven for choosing to champion it through the latter stages and beyond. I am very lucky to have the advocacy that I do.
The person who has had the greatest influence on this project is my editor, Christian Trimmer, at Simon & Schuster BFYR. Christian, for your wisdom, competence, support, very long phone chats, and all-around bright attitude, I thank you. Most importantly, thanks for making the effort to understand my vision and to find all the best ways to support it while shaping this project into the best book it could be.
Thanks also to every hand at Simon & Schuster that touched this book, especially Justin Chanda, Catherine Laudone, Lizzy Bromley, Michael Frost, Bara MacNeill, Hilary Zarycky, Katrina Groover, Michelle Leo and her team, and Audrey Gibbons. Your dedication to the work of publishing has helped to make my dream come true.
My beta readers provided essential feedback through many revisions. Thanks to Amy Huff, Greg Cushing, Jamie Frank, Sally Bosco, Shara White, Michele Korri, Alicia Kleinman, and the guy who stayed up late so many nights to talk things out with me—Chris Vale. Thanks to Jake Smith for sharing the journey, and to Tom Steckert, who, as my very first critique partner, remains one of the most positive influences on my work I’ve ever had.
I’ve been lucky to be part of some wonderful YA debut groups—the Fearless Fifteeners and the Class of 2K15. I want to say a special thank you to the Freshman Fifteens for taking me in at a time when I really needed friends in the same boat. Your wisdom, hu
mor, and support have made this publishing journey so much easier. And so much more fun!
And of course, a great deal of inspiration for this work came from my time teaching at Tewksbury Memorial High School. TMHS is a place full of devoted educators who I loved to work with and miss very much. From my English and creative writing classes, to the cross-country and track teams, to groups I advised, to every other student that I had the privilege of getting to know, thank you for sharing your high school years with me, which helped me to become the person who was able to write a book like this. Bob MacDougall and Steve Levine must be singled out as special mentors. Your influence on my life is immeasurable. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I’ve enjoyed encouragement and support from friends and family all around me, people too numerous to name, but you know who you are. I am deeply grateful for each one of you who has read my book, or asked about my writing, or cheered me along the way.
And finally, to the people who mean the most to me in the world—Marietta and David Brooks; Amy, Connie, Kristi, and their families; Chris and Lucas. If I could make a thousand worlds, you’d be the first people I would put in each. Your love for me is everything, and I love you so very, very much.
About the Author
Photograph by Joanne Smith
Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth College, Jen Brooks started teaching English to high school students. She did so for fourteen years and then received an MA and MFA in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University. A competitive hurdler and jumper in high school and college, Jen now enjoys running, hiking and gardening. In a World Just Right is her first novel. She lives with her husband and son in Massachusetts. Learn more at JenBrooksWriter.com.
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