He’s concentrating so hard he doesn’t notice the awful taste in his mouth until there’s a movement behind his son—
A shape passes across the light…a person. No! The Other Mark emerges from the forest, only feet from Noah. His shoulders are hunched in his filthy jacket, his hair matted and wild. The lever jerks in Mark’s hand; the beam wobbles, starts to go crooked. He tries to straighten it with the controls but he overcorrects and it swings away from him.
There’s a sound—a thump. He’s hit something. Oh fuck, he’s hit Noah. His son is bent in half, screaming. He’s hurt. He’s hurt. How bad, how bad?
Mark jumps from the machine, trips, rights himself, and runs. The task light has fallen to the ground, casting a glare over the dirt. He picks it up and swings it wildly, over the bunker, over the trees. He can’t see the Other Mark anywhere. He points the light at his son’s slumped form. Maybe it’s not so bad. There’s no blood. “It’s okay,” he breathes. “You’re okay.” He feels his son’s head, his face. Nothing. Then he gasps. Broken bone juts out from Noah’s right shoulder. An actual bone, punched right through his skin. Mark’s vision narrows. He can’t look, he can’t look. He has to look.
Noah screams again and little balls of tears spring from his eyes. He screams and Mark feels the sound as pain in his own body; it seems to vibrate inside his skin.
* * *
—
Ginny runs toward the elevator. Inside she jabs at the button for the fifth floor, and when the doors open, she looks right and left. The tails of her residents’ white coats flap down the hallway behind a rattling gurney, and she hurries after them.
She blinks at the tiny shape on the gurney. “Mrs. Carlyle?” There is a sheen of sweat on the woman’s thin face. Her fists ball up the white sheet.
“She’s got a subhepatic biloma.” Dr. Harper thrusts some films at Ginny. “That’s what was causing the jaundice.”
It’s difficult to meet her intern’s eye, but she does it. “Does the OR know we’re coming?”
“They’re setting up for an ERCP,” Dr. Dawson says.
Her residents swing Mrs. Carlyle around a corner and through the doors to OR 3. Another surgeon stands at the scrub sink, his hands orange and foamy with Betadine soap. “Am I taking this case or what?”
The gurney’s halfway through the swinging doors. “It’s my case,” Ginny says.
“Well, hell.” He throws the scrub brush into the sink and stalks away.
“What’s happening?” Mrs. Carlyle asks in a terrified whisper.
“We think you have an obstruction of your hepatic duct,” Dr. Dawson says, speaking over the beeping machines. “We need to take you to the OR to figure out what’s causing the blockage.”
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Harper says firmly. “We’ll be able to fix it.”
* * *
—
Mark struggles with the seatbelt, breathing fast and hard. Noah’s lips have turned a horrible shade of gray. He’s stopped crying, but it’s almost worse to watch his silent, bloodless face. Where should he put the shoulder belt? The towel he’s pressed over his son’s shoulder slips, exposing blood and bone. Mark gags, grabs the towel, pushes it back in place with both hands. Noah howls in pain, and hot tears fill Mark’s eyes. “It’s going to be okay. We’re okay.” He takes Noah’s other hand and presses it to the towel. He loops the shoulder belt behind his back.
He runs around the car to the driver’s seat and looks into the dark forest, but the Other Mark is gone. He dials Ginny’s number again. No answer. He curses her for being absent, for never picking up her phone. He repeats “we’re okay, we’re okay” under his breath as he starts the car, his hand shaking hard. He skids out into the cul-de-sac, knocks over his neighbors’ trash cans, and speeds down the hill.
TWENTY-NINE
GINNY PULLS THE overhead light close to Mrs. Carlyle’s face and threads the endoscope down her throat, watching its progress on the video monitor. It passes through the pink, furrowed stomach, past the pylorus and into the grooved tunnel of the small intestine. When the scope reaches the common bile duct Dr. Dawson injects the contrast dye.
Tricia pushes into the room. “Dr. McDonnell. Your son—” She looks at the scope sticking out of Mrs. Carlyle’s mouth, and back at Ginny.
“What about him?”
“He’s being prepped for emergency surgery.”
“What?”
“I just saw his name on the ER patient board—”
The EKG monitor beeps, and the pulse oximeter pings. Ginny counts the steps that need to happen to complete the ERCP. She visualizes the actions, and then she pictures her residents performing them without her help.
She hands the scope to Dr. Dawson and turns the monitor toward Dr. Harper. “Watch the small bowel.” Their faces are astonished. “Don’t fuck up.” Then she runs out the door.
She tears her gloves from her hands and throws them into the scrub sink, pulls her gown from her body and lets it fall to the floor. Outside the OR doors Mark stands in the hallway, covered in mud.
“What happened?”
“Noah was hurt. They just took him to the operating room—”
“Hurt how?” She tugs off her mask. “Hurt how, Mark?”
“His shoulder. He hurt his shoulder.”
“It must have been bad if they’re taking him to the OR—”
Mark looks like he might be sick. “His bone was…It was sticking out of—” He gestures to his own shoulder.
“A compound fracture. Jesus, Mark. How did this happen?” But she doesn’t wait for him to answer. “Which doctor?”
Mark’s face is confused.
“Which doctor took him back?”
“It was Henry. Dr. Hoag—”
“Okay.” She takes a breath. “Okay.”
“Can you find out what’s happening?”
She shakes her head. “No—we need to stay out of their way.”
“I tried to call you.” He rubs the stubble on his cheeks. “You didn’t answer—”
“Noah was out in the backyard when this happened, wasn’t he—”
“I must have called you ten times. Where were you?”
“I was in the OR.”
“Of course you were.”
“If I had known Noah was hurt, I would have come straight away—”
“You didn’t when he had croup.”
She stares at him. “That was ten years ago.”
“He couldn’t breathe. He could have died.”
She crushes her mask into a tight ball.
“I was scared.” Mark’s voice wavers. “And you were just—not there.”
She’s not sure if he’s talking about then, or now.
“I wish I could have been there with you,” she says. Mark had sat holding Noah all night on the floor of their bathroom with a hot shower running. He’d ridden in the ambulance with him when his honking cough got worse, when he struggled to take a breath. “I really do.”
“Good.” He paces toward the OR doors, and then back again. “That’s something at least.”
She watches him, his hunched shoulders, his worried green eyes. She wants to say something. “I feel alone a lot too.”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t understand.
“I don’t have anyone I can talk to about work—”
“You can talk to me.”
She’s quiet for a minute. “I’ve tried. But it stresses you out—”
“It does not.”
“You can’t handle it, Mark.”
“I handle a lot.” He paces again. “You don’t know half the things I do for you—”
“I work hard for our family too.”
“Noah’s a pretty great kid, isn’t he? That’s because of me. The time I’ve spent.” His voice gets louder. “The
things I’ve given up to be with him.”
“Noah’s hurt!” She points to the OR doors. Other people in the hallway turn to stare at them, but she doesn’t care. “And it’s your fault.”
His hands make two fists. “It wasn’t my fault. It was his.”
“Whose? Noah’s? You can’t be serious—”
“Not Noah’s.” His mouth clenches. “His.”
“You’re not making any sense—” She hears footsteps on the other side of the OR doors. Tricia pokes her head out. “Ginny.” She uses her first name. “Henry’s closing him up now. He had to put in two pins, but he’s going to be okay.”
Ginny doesn’t cover her eyes; she lets tears drip down her face. “Thank you.” She grabs Mark’s jacket and presses her face into his chest. The waterproof fabric is warm and rough against her wet cheek, and it smells of earth and cement. Her anger drains away. “Something has to change.” She pulls him down to her level. “We have to change.” But her own relief isn’t reflected back in his face.
“I have to go.” His voice is strange. “I have to do something.”
“You can’t leave.”
He loosens her hands from his jacket and pulls up his hood.
“He hasn’t woken up yet—”
Again he pushes her hands away. “I have to do something I should have done before.”
* * *
—
Mark drives up the mountain, through thick, hovering fog, through sideways rain that hits the windshield in waves. When he reaches the trailhead he pulls a heavy-duty flashlight from his trunk and starts walking. The rain pelts him in the face; it seeps into the collar of his jacket and through the seams of his pants. He moves the flashlight back and forth across the drenched trail. Everything is black and slippery wet. There’s no moon, no stars—no light of any kind outside his sweeping narrow beam.
He ignores the normal forest sounds: the rapping of the rain against leaves, the scuttle of a small animal, a marten or a skunk, the groaning of toads. His body’s alive to any vibration, in the ground, in the air. He waits for the taste of metal in his mouth. He waits for the earth to tremble. He can’t find the Other Mark until it does.
When he reaches Pond F he nearly walks into the water it’s so dark, but his flashlight catches the pond’s inky shine, and he stops and listens. He hears the slup of a frog leg against water, but nothing more. Standing at the edge of the pond he feels…exposed, like all the forest’s creatures are watching him. He shivers in his wet clothes. Maybe the Other Mark is watching too.
He pushes into the brush. His flashlight illuminates the bulge of a wet, furrowed tree trunk, the tip of a curled bramble, the top half of a shallow rock, a flash of water in its hollow. He steps onto the old logging road, where he first saw the Other Mark, but the earth under his feet is solid and still. He wills the shaking to come, but it doesn’t.
He moves deeper into the dripping forest. The air is heavy with the smell of pinesap and decomposing leaves. He hikes farther up the mountain, and then circles back. Hikes farther, circles back. Hours pass. He keeps going until his legs ache, until dawn’s faint, chalky gloom appears between the trees. He’s walked so far he’s nearly reached the curve of the road on the other side of the mountain. Up ahead is a campsite encircled by ponderosa pines, at its center an old A-frame cabin with peeling yellow paint and birds’ nests in its eaves. He recognizes where he is now. He’s not far from Harry’s property. This is where he ran at the Other Mark, where he yelled at him to go away.
But the campsite is deserted. It feels like it’s been empty for a long, long time. The ground is dense with pine needles, the fire pit full of disintegrated leaves. He sits down on a rock and watches the gray light grow. He rests his head in his hands.
Then he tastes metal. The ground jolts. He stands, and where there was nothing but dirt and twigs a second ago—
A blue tent.
Mark breathes as the sky brightens. He might only have minutes, seconds even. He creeps close; he reaches for the tent’s zipper. He pulls it down, rrrrpp. There’s someone asleep inside. A filthy man curled in a sleeping bag. Mark leans in. He has to do it. This has to end. There can’t be two Marks. There can only be one.
But he hesitates. The Other Mark’s breathing is slow and deep. From underneath the sleeping bag there’s the faint squeak of a snore.
He can’t do it. He can’t. He pulls back.
But the ground quakes again, and there’s a snort and a start. Mud-streaked hands lunge at Mark. They grab for his throat.
He’s knocked to the ground, and now the Other Mark’s face is inches from his, twisted and strange. Mark presses his hands against it, this terrible face that’s his own and not his own.
“Who are you?” the Other Mark pants. “Who?”
The ground shudders again. The Other Mark’s hands tighten around Mark’s throat. Mark struggles; he jabs his fingers into the Other Mark’s eyes and finally the hands loosen their grip. Mark scrambles away. He gets to his feet.
Again the Other Mark lunges, and Mark does too, kicking, punching. But the Other Mark is stronger, crazier. He gets his hands around Mark’s throat again and squeezes. Mark’s legs slip and jerk. The ground buckles. There’s no air. The pressure in his head builds. No…air…He falls to the ground. He feels cold earth pulsing against his cheek. His vision darkens. He reaches out, blindly; his hand finds a rock. He swings it and—crack.
The Other Mark’s hands loosen and fall away. His body falls away too. Or, no. Mark opens his eyes. The shaking ceases. He waves his hands through empty air. The Other Mark is gone.
THIRTY
CASS STANDS AT the sink in her bathroom with a pink box in her hands, just like she did last December in her old student apartment across town. That time Amar was sleeping in the other room, his feet sticking out from under her comforter, and Bear was breathing outside the door. The test was a white stick with a bright pink cap and a little window that revealed a paper strip within. She stared into that window for two minutes, her body tense, the tile cold beneath her bare feet, before two rosy threads appeared.
This time Amar isn’t just outside the room. He’s out in the middle of the ocean, probably hunched over his microscope inside the small lab on the ship. Like last time, Leah’s in the bathroom with Cass. Only she’s not a collection of cells lodged in the wall of her uterus, but a ten-week-old baby lying on the bath mat, happily kicking her feet toward the ceiling.
Cass doesn’t feel pregnant. But what she saw…She shakes her head at the memory of the woman in Leah’s nursery. The woman who looked just like her, who sang the same off-tune song to her belly that her dad used to sing.
Leah gurgles and smiles. She has more hair now. There’s a tuft right in the center of her forehead. “Ahya, ahya,” she says. “Ahya, ahya.”
Cass loves her, fiercely. She would love another child the same way, wouldn’t she? But it’s hard to imagine that kind of love doubled. What would it be like with two babies under two to love and protect and tend to and want things for? What would happen to her book—her theory of the multiverse—in the face of two sets of diapers, twice as much laundry, and bottles for two instead of just one?
She pulls her underwear down and takes the cap off one of the two tests in the box. She pees on it and counts.
one one thousand
two one thousand
three one thousand
four one thousand
five one thousand
After she pulls up her underwear, she sets the test on the back of the toilet atop her marked-up copy of Discourse on Metaphysics.
She scoops Leah up, her small body warm and heavy in her arms. She sees herself in her daughter’s bright, dark eyes and Amar in the shape of her pointed chin. What would another child—hers, and Amar’s—look like? Who would that tiny person be? Cass feels a thrill at this que
stion. Some piece of her wants to be pregnant again. But another part of her, the part she finds when she bends over her laptop and loses herself in big ideas, resolutely does not.
There’s a minute left on the test, but she changes her mind. She’s not ready to know. She grabs the pink-and-white stick, drops it into the toilet, and flushes. She watches it circle the bowl and disappear.
She takes Leah downstairs and opens the dishwasher; she stares at the clean cups and glasses and bowls inside. The Mehtas wave to her from the backyard. They’re weeding the overgrown garden beds and their hands are full of yellow leaves. The kitchen feels warm and close. Too close. She grabs the diaper bag and an extra baby blanket. She writes them a note and carries Leah to the car.
Once they’re moving, she turns toward the highway and soon Leah’s eyes begin to droop in the mirror attached to the backseat. The mountain rises up ahead, its snowy broken top sharp against the gray-blue sky. She lets the monotone of the road’s vibration soothe her. She’s accomplished a lot in just a few days. But she’s still at the beginning. She needs time and silence to coax and prod the pages she’s written, to form and reform them. To compel them to become solid, imposing, sound. She needs months, maybe years, of time and silence.
Up ahead is the exit Mark took the night she followed him up Broken Mountain, and she turns on her signal. She has a strange desire to see it again, the spot where she watched him pitch his tent. The road is different in the daylight. The sun filters through the trees and makes triangles of light and dark on the road. Things that were hazy outlines are now distinct forms: moss-covered tree limbs, logs full of loamy, white-speckled earth, blackberry brambles.
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