by J. Q. Coyle
Part of me knows what happened in there. We kissed, and Hafeez wanted to know what it meant. I can almost remember it like it happened to me. Maybe I have had a crush on Hafeez, too, but not now. I don’t even know who I am anymore. But the other me? The one who put the gun back? “Ask her again,” I say. “Whatever it was.”
“You think I should?” he says, and now it’s like he’s asking the best friend of the girl he likes. It’s all shifting.
“Yeah,” I say, “I’ve got to go.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Take the advice of another you and experiment.” I reach around my back and push on my ribs and hold my breath, trying to get back to that moment. It worked before. Maybe it will work again, take me back to myself—in the alley. I want to understand this. I need to have some kind of control.
A dog’s barking in the distance; a siren is tapering off down another street. I keep holding my breath and pushing on the ribs in my lower back.
“Alicia,” Hafeez says. “What are you doing?”
I hear a dull ringing in my ears. The noises fade. The snow doesn’t snag or pull anything.
Still, my vision bleeds to black.
I start to stagger.
When I come to, I’m lying flat on my back in my driveway. I can see the curled toes of Hafeez’s socks.
“What the hell?” Hafeez is saying, tugging on my arm and petting my shoulder. “You’re bleeding!” He’s trying to help me sit up.
The thin layer of snow on the ground around me is tinged pink. My chin aches. I touch it, and my fingers come away wet with blood. I didn’t need blood to get into this world, the one I created, but it got me into all of those other worlds with my father. And pressure on my ribs got me here, but maybe it’s not pressure in my ribs that will take me back.
“You’re going to need stitches for that,” Hafeez says. “I’ll drive you.”
“No, this is what I need.” I hear the dog, still barking. A car passes by. A neighbor’s light across the street goes dark.
“What are you talking about? Come inside.”
In the glow of the streetlight, I see the fine delicate laciness of the snow, the light steam coming off the blood and my breath.
“Come on!” Hafeez says. “Let’s get a compress on it. It’s wicked cold out here. Aren’t you freezing?”
I shake my head and it feels heavy. The pain zeros in on my upper arm, a fiery pain shooting through it. I grab it and press hard. The snowflakes become moving points of light. Everything shifts, even Hafeez—his face clouded with confusion. I’m fading and the cold burrows deep.…
* * *
… My ribs are vibrating, pressed against the metal interior of a delivery truck of some sort of—midsize moving van? It’s packed with people and their suitcases, dark except for a few flashlights.
The old man is beside me, the bulldog on his lap, and I’m holding a different beat-up copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems. The cover is cracked and torn so that I can only see half of the black-and-white photograph of her face. I love her poems in every world, I guess.
“Gemmy,” I whisper. I don’t waste any time. “I talked to my dad. I’m here from another branch. Do you know what I’m saying? Who am I in this world?”
Gemmy dips closer to my face. His eyes fill with tears. He tries to say something but his throat tightens. He coughs and tries again. “Jesus, Alicia. It’s me.” He grips my hands.
“How do I know you?”
“I’m your old man’s old man,” he whispers, smoothing his fine gray hairs.
Gemmy—I remember: it’s how I pronounced “Grandpa” as a toddler. “But you’re dead.”
He smiles wide. “Not in this branch. Some cats have nine lives, some have even more.” He looks down the row of people—sleeping or dazed and staring off. A few kids are curled on their parents’ laps. “We’re like family. There’s all kinds of ways to be family. You and I got more than one.”
He wraps his arm around me. I give in to it and hug him tight. This is Gemmy, my grandfather. He was dead but he’s somehow alive. I smell his talc and the faint scent of liquor. This is what grandfathers smell like, I think. Everybody deserves a grandfather. My eyes sting with tears.
“You’re my kiddo. We’ve had a lot of good times, you and me. We’re buddies, you know.”
I don’t know, but I can feel it. “I’m so glad you’re alive,” I say. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Good Lord,” Gemmy says, bright-eyed and breathless. “The time has really come. Been a long wait. I’ll have to get the families together. You’re the next generation, Alicia.” He claps me on the shoulder. “You’ll be the one to fix this mess. I can feel it.”
“Fix what? I can’t fix anything. I don’t even understand—” I want to say more, but the pains zing throughout my body and land on my clavicle. I grab my collarbone. The truck engine growls louder and louder. He’s talking to me, but I can’t hear anything but the roaring engine. Bodies bobble and then break apart.…
* * *
… I’m find myself paused on a set of stairs, gripping a glossy wooden banister. A man’s voice upstairs shouts instructions to find a certain pill bottle on the coffee table in the living room.
“Okay!” I call back to him.
My mother is dying.
Jax exists here. His mother is already dead. When he handed me the weeds by the chain-link fence surrounding the quarantine camp, he said to tell my father that he needed to be looking into those seeds disappearing into thin air, that this is all going to go away. Everything. This whole splintering, cracked, disintegrating world.
Is my father even in this branch? I’ve always known if he was nearby. But I have no feeling for him at all. Nothing.
And there before me is a marble mantel, fireplace, and, above it all, a painting of a family—a mother, a father, a girl about eight years old or so.
The mother is my mother.
The girl is me.
But the father isn’t my father.
The father is Uncle Alex.
My mother’s hair is swept up in a loose bun. She’s wearing a gauzy blouse. Someone’s put me in a dress with a lace collar, and my bangs look freshly trimmed. Alex wears a blue blazer. We’re all stiff-backed and smiling just enough to make our cheeks rise but not enough to show our teeth. And there’s a yellow Labrador retriever with us—but that was so long ago, he must be gone.
In this world, Alex is my father?
How is that possible? I feel sick.
I see the pill bottles on the coffee table. I grab all of them. But I also see a pen and pick it up. My soul or my mind or something moves between these places, but my body stays. I don’t know if it will work, but I wonder what would happen if I write myself a note. Hoping that the other Alicia, the one who finds herself in this body, will get it, I write as fast as I can on my arm: Find Jax. Tell him there’s another world and I’m in it and I’m real.
Will this only confuse her? Will this mean anything at all? I have no idea. The back of my neck burns. I turn and head back up the steps. I run but then trip. I scramble to my feet, but the pain is so sharp that I fall to my knees … and the floor turns brittle. My vision is cracking.…
* * *
… My mouth is filled with blood. It’s hard to breathe, like a few of my ribs are cracked. I’m on the ground. I see a pair of scuffed boots—heavy-duty, steel toed. Someone muttering above me, not in English but I understand: “What are you going to do now, you piece of shit?”
Am I back in Russia?
Like an answer, I feel the spiraling pain in my shoulder blade—the gunshot wound.
Someone’s calling to him. “Iosif!” He’s the one who shot me. He and his thugs kidnapped us off of the cruise ship.
I can barely move from the pain. My right hand buzzes. I grab it and hold on tight, hoping this will send me back.
Iosif leans into my face. An old scar runs jaggedly across one cheek. “What?” he asks, grinni
ng. “You want more?”
I’m shaking my head. I hurt too much to speak. But he points a gun at my face anyway. I see his finger move, the kick of the gun, but there’s no sound.
The ground falls away.…
* * *
… I’m wearing the clothes I had on when I took the gun. I check my pockets: the gun’s there, the cash I took, the tool my father gave me—all of it. I’m sitting with my back against the brick wall. My jeans are dusted with snow.
I see Hafeez standing at the end of the alley in the light thrown by the streetlamp, keeping a lookout.
“How long have I been here like this?” I ask him.
“Hey,” he says, jogging to me. “Not too long.”
I touch my chin. “I’m not bleeding.” It was never cut.
“Why would you be bleeding?”
“My ribs are fine too—not broken.”
“So, I take it things aren’t perfect in other worlds?” he asks.
“Nope, not perfect.”
“Did you get to the world where you were asking me for help? Did I show up?”
I can’t tell him about the charged air between us. I wouldn’t know how. “Yep. You did.”
“And, what was I like?”
“You’re you,” I say.
“Right. I mean, who else would I be?”
I want to tell him that we’re both already different in that world, that the slight tweak of events unlocked things and changed everything completely. But I’m afraid he’ll ask more questions than I want to answer.
I stand up and brush off the snow. “My body doesn’t go from world to world, so what does? My soul? Some part of my mind?”
“I wish I knew.”
“It worked, you know, without blood. I was looking at the snow. It reminded me of my mother’s lilac powder, which was what I was focusing on when everything ripped in two in her bedroom.”
“So maybe there’s some sort of trigger.”
“Maybe, like my father’s worlds require blood but mine are different. Mine might be powder or dust or something light and spinning, like snow.”
“And then there’s also this trigger in your body too, right?”
“Right. A specific spot of pain.”
“Mind and body triggers,” he says, and I can tell his brain is whirring.
“My grandfather, Gemmy, is alive in another branch, and he’s under the impression I can fix things.”
“Interesting.”
“And in one branch”—I don’t even want to say it aloud, but I have to get it out—“my mother married my uncle. I saw us in a family portrait. But if Alex was my father, I wouldn’t have my own face at all, but I did.”
“Did he adopt you?”
I shrug. Every little tiny piece of information I get only makes things blurrier.
“The main thing is that it worked. You’re getting better at it, right?”
We hear a car door slam at the end of the alley. We both turn.
“Maybe we should go home,” Hafeez says. “We need to start over. Come at everything fresh.”
“But we were going toward something for once.”
“I have a chem test tomorrow and that shit has gotten real. Come on. Come back with me.” He smiles. He knows I’ve been through a lot.
But then we hear a voice shout, “Hey! There you are!”
There’s a figure at the end of the alley, backlit by the streetlamp. Hafeez must have better eyesight than I do, because he says, “Holy shit. How’d Sprowitz find us here?”
Sprowitz starts to run at us. Hafeez and I take off in the opposite direction, but a chain-link fence blocks the end of the alley, and Sprowitz is fast.
I sprint and jump as high as I can, gripping the links, and Hafeez is a second later, but Sprowitz grabs the back of his jacket and pulls him down. Hafeez lands hard, Sprowitz is leaning over him, and I’ve got just one shot at this—one slim moment while Sprowitz’s back is turned—so I push off, still holding the fence, and kick him in the back of the head.
This sends Sprowitz sprawling. Hafeez gets up, but Sprowitz has a wrestler’s quickness and tackles Hafeez, getting him in a stranglehold. “I’m not even here for you, towelhead. What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?” He sounds confused and angry, like if Hafeez weren’t here, he wouldn’t have to hurt him. But it doesn’t stop him.
Hafeez’s face flushes. “Go,” he grunts at me. “Run.”
I can’t leave him. I reach into my pocket, slip my hand around the gun, and jump down off the fence.
“Get off him.”
Sprowitz laughs.
When I pull the gun out, the tool falls from my pocket and skitters across the cement. Sprowitz doesn’t see the gun because he’s distracted by the tool. “Where’d you get that?” He reaches out and picks it up with one hand, still gripping Hafeez.
“I mean it. Let him go.”
Sprowitz looks up and now he sees the gun. His face goes blank for a second. “Hey, no need for violence,” he says.
“Let him go or I’ll shoot you.”
He shoves Hafeez forward. Hafeez staggers, struggling for air.
“Why are you here?” I say.
“I get my orders from your uncle. Really nice guy. He sure likes for you to be looked after.”
“Jane told him where I was?”
“She’s a great therapist, huh? She’s really helped you out.” He smirks.
“Have you been working with them all this time?”
“We go way back, Alicia. Don’t you know that?”
I shake my head. “What? You just moved here.”
He holds the tool up and twists it. “Where’d you get this again?”
“What does Alex want from me?”
“He just wants you on his side. It’s simple. He doesn’t want you to turn out like your father.” Sprowitz says this so genuinely that it seems like he believes he’s doing the right thing by me, like he honestly thinks he’s on my side.
Hafeez is struggling to stand, still wheezing.
“Don’t talk about my father,” I say. “What does Alex really want?”
“He wants me to take you in.”
“In where?”
Sprowitz puts the tool in his jacket pocket and takes a step toward me. “In,” he says.
“Don’t come any closer.”
“In,” he says again, taking another step.
“Don’t do this, please,” Hafeez says.
“In.” Sprowitz keeps walking, until the muzzle of the gun is touching his chest. He grabs my hand and raises the gun so that it digs into the soft flesh under his chin. “Go ahead.” He closes his eyes.
Does Sprowitz want me to kill him? I know what it is to feel that way. How bad is it to be him?
I can’t kill Brian Sprowitz. I’m terrified, my body shocked by a surge of adrenaline. But I don’t feel any ripping sensation inside of myself. There’s no real decision here. I’m not a killer.
And then Sprowitz’s eyes flash open. “Is this the world where you pull the trigger? Or is this the world where things go a different way?”
I try to yank the gun away from him, but he holds it close and so tightly that I know he senses the trembling in my hands. Our eyes are inches apart; we’re locked together in a kind of awful embrace. He keeps the gun jammed into his neck, but his face softens. He looks almost hopeful. “Tell me,” he says. “Which way does it go?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say.
Sprowitz closes his eyes like this pains him, and then I see it—that little kid in the picture of me at the birthday party, the one smiling so hard that I couldn’t place him in my memory. It’s a little Brian Sprowitz. I open my mouth to say something, but then something hardens in his expression, and I know this is going to get ugly.
“No!” Hafeez shouts because he knows it, too.
Then in one swift motion, Sprowitz twists the gun from my hand and cracks it against my head.
PART II
SPLIT
> CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE ACHE comes first—a blunt pang in my skull—then lights, bright ones overhead. A bed with a white sheet, my own legs beneath it. Plastic cinch cuffs on my wrists, locked to shiny metal bedrails on either side.
A narrow, pale face blooms over me. “Alicia?” A woman’s voice.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second. White heat spreads through my head.
Jane—her face is blurry, as if we’re both trapped underwater, a dark lake. I try to lift my head but the sharp pain sends me back down. I feel the tug of wires—small nodes taped on my temples and across my forehead, spiraling to a computer, where they all sync to one thick wire, and the deep throb of an IV in my right arm. The jagged line of my heartbeat blips across one monitor, and on another is a scan of what must be my brain.
“Where am I? What is all this?”
“It’s for your own safety. You had a breakdown,” Jane says.
My vision seems to fade in and out; I have to work hard to keep my focus. “Aren’t you tired of lying to me yet?”
Jane ignores my question. “How are you feeling?”
I don’t want her to cough up sympathy for me, especially since she knows more than she’s let on. Wasn’t she the one who told Sprowitz where I was? “You’re in on it, aren’t you? Whatever this is. Where’s my father?”
“You won’t find him,” she says. “Even if you knew the location, you couldn’t get to him, believe me.”
“So Alex has him locked up, like me?”
Jane’s face looks pale and flat, like a child’s sidewalk chalk drawing. “Alicia, listen. Alex is going to come in here.” She’s so close to me I see her lips moving, but the sound is out of sync. “Don’t tell him about the worlds, no details. Don’t tell him about the one that’s cracking. Don’t tell him about the boy in that world. Okay? Promise me.”
It’s hard to follow her. Other worlds. The boy. I had talked to her about him in therapy after Sprowitz punched Hafeez. I picture Hafeez’s shocked face in the alleyway where Sprowitz found us. “What happened to Hafeez?”
“He’s safe at home now.”
“I don’t believe you.” I see her through a halo, gaudy and shifting.
“You don’t have to. Just do what I’m telling you. Please.”