“Her things, Dad. Where are they?”
“I donated them.”
“To where?”
“The Sustainability Coalition Thrift Shop.”
She starts moving toward her car.
“She didn’t want you burdened by all of it,” he calls after her.
“We don’t have to do what she says,” she calls back angrily. “She’s not even here.”
* * *
—
Cass waits at the bus stop a few blocks from the cul-de-sac. The fog has cleared. The mountain is a dark green shadow, its jagged peak hovering on the horizon. Leah snuggles against her in the wrap, with Cass’s jacket over it. This morning she developed a sudden dislike of her car seat, and screeched when Cass tried to strap her in. So they take the bus to the hospital. Cass chooses a seat near the driver, and they watch trees and houses and cars pass by. The hanging flower baskets downtown are full of asters now, instead of marigolds; and pumpkins, shiny with rain, sit on people’s front porches. By the time they get there Leah has fallen deeply asleep, her warm cheek pressed against Cass’s chest and her hand curled on top of her breast.
Cass gets off the bus and pauses just inside the hospital’s sliding glass doors. She hasn’t been back here since she had Leah. She and Amar stood in this same spot the morning after her birth. A nurse had helped them strap the baby into her car seat, and they took the elevator from Labor and Delivery to the lobby, looking at each other nervously the whole ride. It didn’t feel right, taking this new human being out into the world. Leah was so little, her pink face dwarfed by the padding in her car seat. She still had hospital bracelets on her tiny wrists. They hesitated in the doorway. The sun was shining and Cass blinked in its light. The cool air felt strange against her hands and her face, like her skin was brand new.
Cass moves through the lobby and her sneakers squeak on the waxed floors. She finds the elevator. The fifth-floor hallway is bright with fluorescent light. Leah sleeps on in the wrap.
She knocks when she gets to Robby’s room, and two men stand up from chairs in front of the hospital bed. His sons. She’s only seen pictures. They are tall, like Robby. They have his broad shoulders and thick hair.
“Hi.” She hugs Leah close in the wrap. The room is small, with one narrow window and a blue curtain half-closed around the bed. “I’m Cass. I’m here to see Robby.”
“It’s only supposed to be family—”
“Greg, this is Cass. Remember?”
“Right.” Greg frowns. “Brilliant Cass.”
The other man reaches out to shake her hand. “I’m Ben.”
Greg extends his hand too, although his face is reluctant.
“I can’t believe I’ve never met either of you,” she says, and immediately knows this is the wrong thing to say.
“He talks about you a lot,” she adds, quickly, even though this isn’t really true. “And your mom—”
“He’s really sick,” Greg interrupts. “He’s not speaking.”
“He’s doing much better than he was,” Ben says. “They’re going to move him out of the ICU today.”
“Maybe,” Greg says.
“Come in,” Ben says. “Hopefully he’ll wake up.”
Ben and Greg go to the cafeteria and Cass sits next to the bed. It’s strange to see Robby this way, pale and prostrate, eyes closed. The sheet is pulled up, almost to his chin, as if he’s a little boy who’s just been tucked in.
Ben said he was doing better. But he looks awful. Old and drawn. Even his typically wild hair is flat, subdued. Tubes come out from under the sheet. A machine at the top of the bed hums and blips. But he is breathing on his own, slow and shallow. She watches his broad chest rise and fall.
The room smells like bleach and something else, like soap and cedar. She leans closer. Shaving cream. She can see a little on the side of his clean-shaven face. “Robby?” she says softly. But there’s no change from the bed. The machine whirs and beeps. Out the window tall cedars encircle a wide expanse of wet green lawn. But the outside world feels far away, the room sealed in and still.
“I’ve come to talk to you. I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I didn’t know you were sick. I feel terrible about that.” She pauses. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for months. I had my baby—Leah. She’s here. If you open your eyes you can see her.”
Robby’s breathing stays the same. His eyes stay closed.
She takes the red folder out of the diaper bag, and pages to the note he wrote. “I know it’s not the most important thing right now. But why did you keep this old paper of mine?”
His eyelids flutter. She can’t tell for sure, but maybe he’s listening.
Leah shifts in the wrap, whimpers. Cass pulls her out, lays her across her shoulder, and rubs her back. She presses her nose to Leah’s warm, patchy head.
Then, in a hoarse whisper, Robby says, “It showed promise.”
“What?”
He cracks open his eyes. “I kept it because it showed promise.”
She feels the prickle of tears. “I shouldn’t have said those things, that day in your office. You lost your wife—”
He holds up his hand, but she keeps going. “I can’t imagine how I would feel if I lost Amar or Leah.”
“I don’t want you to be me.” He coughs, clears his throat. “You can do more than I ever did. And do it better. I know you can—”
She shakes her head. “I let you down.” She leans closer to the bed, holding the baby’s head in her hands. “I’m sorry.”
Robby reaches out, slowly. He squeezes Leah’s little hand. “Make it up to me.”
“How?”
He points to the paper. His voice is even hoarser now. “Start here.”
EIGHTEEN
SAMARA SEARCHES THE aisles of the thrift store, a brightly lit, oblong shop empty except for a tall woman who sorts linens behind the cash register, and two older women who stand in the Household Items section, picking up teacups and bowls, turning them over, and setting them back down. Samara’s eyes dart this way and that. She sees the ugly crocheted blanket that used to hang over the chair in her parents’ bedroom, and a pile of brightly patterned pillows from the living room couch. She throws the blanket over her shoulder, scoops up an armful of pillows. The blanket is musty and the pillows smell faintly of crackers. She brings them to the cashier.
“Can I put these here? I’m going to buy them.”
The woman looks up, surprised. “Of course. Take your time.”
Samara hears her mother’s voice in her head, louder than it’s been in days, as she gathers the rest of the pillows, squishy and floral-printed and woven with multicolored thread. Didn’t you hear what your father said? I didn’t want you to keep all my junk.
But Samara doesn’t listen. She grabs a shopping cart from the front of the store and stuffs the pillows inside. She wheels it to the Kitchen section, where she finds the bread maker and the Tupperware, and Women’s Clothing, where she spies her mother’s gardening clogs and a tangled heap of her socks.
She pushes the cart up and down the aisles, filling it three times. The mountain of stuff at the cash register grows. Back in Household Items she spies her mother’s glaringly orange Fiesta ware pitcher, but before she can reach it, another customer picks it up. “Two-fifty,” the woman says. “This is real Fiesta ware.”
Samara pushes past a rack of men’s shirts and taps the woman on the shoulder. “Excuse me, are you going to buy that?”
“I was actually.”
“Because it was my mother’s. And I’d like it back.”
The woman stares.
“Did it get donated by mistake?” her companion asks. “That’s awful.” She turns to her friend. “You should let her have it. It has sentimental value.”
“All right,” the woman says, reluctantly, and hands her t
he pitcher.
In her head her mother says, You don’t want that old thing, Sammy. There’s a chip on the bottom. But Samara does want that old thing. It’s not an old thing. It’s a portal to another moment in time. To a summer day on her parents’ back deck. To the sound of ice cubes clinking in a pitcher of lemonade, and the heat of the sun against the backs of her hands and the tops of her thighs. To the taste of sour and sweet, and the pressure of her mother’s cool fingers on her shoulder as she leaned over the table to pour her another glass.
She puts the pitcher in the cart, pushes toward the Books and Music section, and begins pulling CDs from a shelf. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons; Bach’s violin concertos; Mozart, The Magic Flute, with a sticky note on the back that says call Claire in her mom’s looping writing. She drops them all into the cart, and something falls out of an old sweater of her mother’s, cable-knit, with deep pockets that sag open. She picks it up. It’s a photograph of a young woman standing on an airport tarmac, in front of a plane with the letters TWA on its side. She’s wearing a purple sari and the wind has blown a piece of her hair across her face. She’s very young, and she squints at the camera in an uncertain way.
Samara knows the story of her mother’s trip to the United States to join her father—the second half of the story anyway. Her parents have told it dozens of times. There was turbulence on the last leg of her mom’s flight, and she was sick on the plane. Once she landed at JFK she went into the first shop she saw to buy something to change into. So when she marched up to Samara’s father in baggage claim she wore a huge sweatshirt printed with the words I LOVE NY.
Samara squints at the face in the photograph. The girl in the picture doesn’t look like the main character in her mom’s story. She doesn’t appear confident and capable, able to laugh at herself. She looks like she’s not ready. She looks like she might not get on that plane. Her mother was twenty-four when she took that trip, exactly the same age Samara is now. It was probably her own mother who took the picture. She wonders what Nanni said to persuade her? To convince her to go?
Samara pushes the cart to the counter, still staring at the photograph.
“Ready?” the cashier asks. The mound of miscellaneous things has grown almost as tall as she is. It looks heavy and dark and sad. You don’t really want all that stuff, her mother’s voice says. It was mine, and I didn’t even want it.
The rain runs down the store windows in little streams. When her mom got on that plane, she changed her life. And she was planning to do it again, to get on another plane, with Samara’s dad this time, and change it all over again. Samara looks at the picture once more and then puts it in her pocket. She takes the orange pitcher from the cart. “I think, after all, I’ll just take this.”
* * *
—
Cass leaves the hospital with the baby in her arms. She walks past the bus stop and keeps going. It starts to rain, and she pulls her hood up, wraps her jacket around Leah.
The baby’s breath is warm against her skin as she flips to the first page of her old paper and starts reading. She winces at the typos and awkward writing style. She’s mixed up their and there and used the word century when she meant decade. But the exposition of Leibnitz’s On the Ultimate Origination of Things demonstrates real mastery of the material, and there’s an almost relentless precision in the comparison of his views with those of Spinoza’s, on the nature of possibility and its expression in the world. Hidden inside the paper’s long expository paragraphs are sparks of original thought, circled or starred by Robby’s black pen.
She remembers what it felt like when she first met Robby and they would talk for hours in his office—about the mind-body problem, the concept of utility, the idea of the good life. She would show up with a list of questions, and he would answer them, one by one. She would try to poke holes in his answers, and he would argue with her like she was a colleague, rather than a sophomore student. It was thrilling. Their discussions were expansive and open-ended; one topic led to the next, and the next. They would go on like that until late, until everyone else in the building had gone home, and the sky grew dark outside his office window.
She keeps walking and reading as Leah snores softly against her chest. Toward the end of the paper, the argument begins to meander. It references Robby’s book Counterfactuals and discusses Leibnitz’s assertion that there are an infinite number of possible worlds inside God’s mind, but only one actual world, which God chose as the most perfect of all possibilities. She doesn’t know what she was trying to get at in these paragraphs. Her thinking is a jumble of false starts and half-formed ideas. Here Robby has circled a paragraph, once in black ink and once in blue.
Every philosopher is looking for the idea that will solve all problems, a Theory of Everything, or TOE: Leibnitz, Spinoza, even you, Professor Kells, in your book. But your book didn’t do it, not fully. Because the infinite possibilities you talk about, that we can understand through counterfactuals—they’re hypothetical. It only truly works if they’re real.
It only works if they’re real.
This is the part of the paper Robby wanted to talk about the day they argued. There’s something there, an idea, half-formed, inchoate. Robby’s book proposed hypothetical alternate worlds as a way to solve problems, to answer certain questions about causality, and about false and idealized theories of nature. It was groundbreaking in that way. Only a handful of contemporary philosophical texts get close to a Theory of Everything. Robby’s was one.
But at twenty years old she had dared to ask if his theory could do more, if he could have pushed it further. Actually, she didn’t ask. She stated. Robby’s philosophy is only a true TOE if the alternate worlds described by counterfactuals are real entities. If parallel worlds actually exist, and our own world is just one of an infinite number of worlds in the multiverse.
And with that a lot of things reorder themselves in her mind—certain passages in Quine and Kripke and Plantinga. Certain unsolved problems, often rehashed in her graduate seminars, and during Robby’s office hours. The shape of something forms. A grand, many-limbed idea. It expands and appropriates other things—thoughts, problems, questions. It gets bigger. It stretches, turns irregular and ugly, and then coheres again, and reshapes itself anew.
“Start here,” Robby told her. He wanted her to go back to the beginning, to the first class they had together, to her old paper, full of typos and run-on sentences. To this paragraph he circled. He wanted her to question, head-on, the theory he so painstakingly laid out in Counterfactuals. But she’s not the girl who wrote those words anymore—fearless and unselfconscious. Inexperienced, unrestrained.
Her life is smaller since she had Leah, and less free. But it’s also much more than it was, all at once, all at the same time. She has to be more than one thing now. She has to be two, three, four. It seemed impossible at first. But now…maybe it’s not.
She pulls her jacket tighter. Leah murmurs and her eyelashes flutter against her chest. The first time she read Robby’s book, it seemed to split open her brain. It changed the way she thought about philosophy, and the world. The girl who wrote this paper couldn’t write something that did that, not really. But could she now?
She turns into her neighborhood. The rain has stopped. She’s nearly reached her door when her phone rings. She’s surprised to see Amar’s number flashing across the screen.
“What’s wrong?” she answers.
“Cass.” His voice is deep and familiar. There’s a strange clicking sound on the line. He raises his voice over the clicks. “I’ve been emailing you all week—”
The clicking grows louder.
“It’s hard to hear you. There’s this clicking.” She lets herself into the house, and Bear runs to greet them. She drops the diaper bag to the floor, sits down on the couch.
“How is Leah? It’s killing me, being away from her. And you.”
“She’s go
od. Hungry.” Leah’s rooting against her chest. She unbuttons her shirt and the baby greedily latches onto her breast.
“You must be—” Clicks drown out his voice.
“I can’t hear you, Amar.”
“My phone barely works here—” In between clicks she hears “off the coast of Alaska” and “had to come to port because—” Then the clicking stops. “I got all your emails at once,” he says. “The last message said you were driving around Broken Mountain in the middle of the night—”
“I didn’t mean to send that one.”
“We’re leaving again in a few minutes,” he says. “Right now I just need to know you’re okay.”
She shakes her head and laughs, but it comes out like a sob. “I wasn’t before. But I am now.”
“Because the messages you sent, Cass—”
“They sounded a little crazy.”
“A lot crazy.”
“I’m all right, I promise.”
“I have to tell you something. When I couldn’t get ahold of you—” He pauses. “I called Mrs. Mehta. She’s going to help you with the baby. Just until I get back.”
“I don’t need help. I’m fine.”
“Please.”
Cass looks around the room, at the unopened boxes lining the hallway, the sink full of dirty dishes, the tufts of dog hair littering the floor. “Okay. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”
NINETEEN
MARK SITS HIGH on the seat of a rented backhoe. The control stick vibrates under his hand as he lifts the yellow boom up, up, and then forward. The machinery was unwieldy at first, but now he’s got the hang of it. Even with earplugs the sound of the engine is tremendous. The noise, and the vibration, drives away every thought that comes into his mind.
He moves the boom forward again, his seat bucking underneath him, and drops its teeth into the wet hill. Then he pulls it back and scrapes away dark earth and looping roots. It’s satisfying to watch the hole grow bigger with each gouge.
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