by J. Q. Coyle
“Really?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“No, but…”
“You’re different, you know. The other you.”
“How?”
“Hard to explain.” And then he smiles. He tries to rein it in, but that only makes his smile even brighter.
“What is it?”
“You’re great,” he says softly.
“The other me?”
“I’m kind of…”
“You’re kind of what?”
“I hope it’s okay, but…” He pounds the wheel a few times with the heel of his hand. “I’m kind of crazy about the other you!”
I’m not sure what to say. He’s not telling me that he likes me, but I still blush. “Good,” I say. “I’m happy for you.” And the other me too. I mean, maybe I’ve wondered if one day Hafeez and I could turn into something else. But I never wanted it, because if we broke up, we wouldn’t get to be friends anymore. But now it’s happened and there’s no turning back.
“You said kissing me made you feel like your heart was some flower, blooming, but in distress. Plath, right?”
“I said that? Me?”
“You whispered it. I don’t even know if I was supposed to hear it.”
“A red-bell,” I tell him now. “It’s in one of her poems—‘a red bell-bloom,’ yes.”
“That kind of got me.” He curls his fist lightly and knocks on his heart, three little taps, like it’s a secret sign between the two of them. Then he smiles, suddenly shy. “You sure it’s okay? It’s weird, I know, but—”
“But good,” I say. And then I feel incredibly lonely. Some other version of myself falls for someone without me, almost immediately. And what about me? But then I imagine the two of them together. I can see them in Hafeez’s garage. They’re both leaning against the Volvo’s passenger door in the dark, holding hands, staring at each other, laughing a little, talking. She kisses him. He kisses her back. I feel like I shouldn’t be able to see this. It’s not my memory, not my world, but I do, for just a second, and then it’s gone. They’re right for each other. Not Hafeez and me, but Hafeez and her. I’m someone else. It’s getting clearer and clearer to me. Like that crack in the frozen lake has splintered in all directions, with one deep crack that divides it completely. I’m someone who set out, who took a risk. This is who I am and I just keep taking more risks.
I feel my right hand buzz and, like Jax taught me, I just squeeze the spot on my left.
“So what happened in the other branch?” Hafeez asks.
I try to bring him up to speed as quickly as I can, but when I get to Alex and my father strung up in a hotel room, I stop short. “I just need the atlas. That’s all.”
It dawns on me I haven’t asked why we’re headed to Jane’s office. We can’t really be looking for the atlas here. I’m sure she doesn’t know where it is. “What are we looking for at Jane’s?”
“We’ve been combing your memories,” Hafeez says. “You tell me as many details as possible, looking for any kinds of clues we can find.”
I know that this is how the other Alicia and Hafeez got closer. It was all the confiding, the way Hafeez listens. That’s what makes him different from other people. That Alicia existed more when she was with him—him seeing her for who she really was. Maybe if perception really does create reality, then it was his perception of her—really paying attention—that made her feel more alive.
“And when we went over the moment that Jane asked you to tell her about the boy in the other world, you remembered she’d opened her desk drawer. She was looking at something.”
“So that’s what we’re going to try to find? That one thing?”
“We don’t have much, Alicia. We have to do everything we can with anything we have.”
I nod. He’s right.
I give him a few more directions, and now we’re so close my stomach flips.
“Nice neighborhood,” Hafeez says. Two gray-haired women are power walking in puffy ankle-length coats down a sidewalk, lit only by streetlamps. “Where the hell am I?”
“Turn right here,” I say. “Take the next left. Her house is the second on the right.”
Hafeez shakes his head, still smiling, and lifts his hand. “Still shaking! My mom’s going to shit about the bumper.”
“Her American dream has a dent.”
“Worth it. Worth every second! What’s an undented American dream anyway? Huh?”
“Slow down,” I say. “It’s right up here.”
Jane’s upstairs lights are on. Her office is dark. “Pull around the corner.”
He turns the wheel and then, two houses up, kills the engine. Without the noisy muffler, it’s suddenly very quiet.
I grab the door handle, feeling jittery. “If I’m gone more than fifteen minutes, you should just leave.”
“Ah, no.” He shakes his head. “I’m coming with you.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes, I am. I don’t want to be some stupid accomplice. I want in. Seriously. You owe me—for the shit I’m going to catch.”
“You’ll catch more shit if you’re caught breaking and entering.”
“I’m well aware of the risks.”
We glare at each other. He doesn’t blink.
“Fine,” I say.
We get out of the car, walk past Jane’s tall hedges and into the darkened side yard, where a narrow stone path leads to her office door.
“The room gets stuffy sometimes,” I whisper. “There’s one window that she cracks open during sessions when it’s warmer outside. There’s a chance she never locked it.”
The yard is mostly blocked by trees. I nudge the window and it doesn’t budge.
“Let me try,” Hafeez whispers. He pushes hard. Nothing.
“Okay then.”
“Okay then what?” he says.
I cover my hand with the sleeve of my jacket, a little afraid of my own confidence, and punch in the window. It’s harder to do than I thought, but, muffled by my jacket, not too loud. A few shards fall to the floor, which is carpeted. “Okay then that,” I say.
We wait to hear if the noise alerted Jane, but the house is quiet.
I slide my hand in, unlock the latch on the inside, and push the window open.
“That was kind of badass,” Hafeez admits. “I’m seeing a whole new side of you.”
“A whole new me, even.” Hafeez laughs and I shush him.
I climb in, the cold air following me into the warm room. Hafeez then hoists himself up over the sill. I keep the pressure up on my left hand, a steady hold. I feel like I shouldn’t be here. I’m invading her privacy, but then again, nothing I ever said in this room—where I thought I was safe—was ever kept private. She betrayed me.
Hafeez heads to her filing cabinet while I move quickly to her desk and pull open the thin drawer. Pens roll forward.
I see a faded picture. This is what she was looking at. A photograph of blanched dirt, big blue sky with an old oil pump tilted toward the earth.
And in the foreground, two people.
A little boy.
But not just any boy.
He’s only eight or so, but I’d recognize him anywhere. In a flash, I know exactly where his hand last touched mine, his face lit by the pickup truck’s dashboard.
Jax.
Here he is, standing next to a woman who is tan and lean and smiling.
A happy version of Jane Larkin.
I’m frozen.
“What is it?” Hafeez asks.
“Jax,” I whisper, and maybe because I’m staring at his face, I feel a sharp shooting pain in my collarbone. His world is calling me to it. I grab the bone on the other side, push hard.
Hafeez has opened a drawer to Jane’s filing cabinet and he’s holding a file. “They’re all blank files with blank pages,” he says. “She’s not a therapist at all.”
Overhead, a cell phone chirps.
A muffled voice.
A loud bump
.
I tuck the picture into my jacket pocket. “Let’s go.”
* * *
As Hafeez drives out of Jane’s neighborhood, he doesn’t say a word. I stare at the photograph. “When I told Jane about my first hallucination of Jax, she sat forward on her seat,” I explain to Hafeez. “Now I know why. She knows about him, about that world. How? What do they mean to each other? There’s a faint resemblance—the coloring, the nose. Do you think Jane is Jax’s mother?”
“Anything’s possible.”
I put the picture back in my jacket pocket and look in the mirror to see if any cars are following us. It seems clear.
“I’ve got to go over some stuff with you,” Hafeez says. “I need to talk to you while you’re still you.”
“What is it?”
“Open the glove compartment.”
I turn the knob. “What am I looking for?”
“My stash of Pixy Stix. I do my best thinking with blue.”
“So that’s the secret.” I pull out a blue Pixy Stix and hand it to him.
He pulls out his phone, hands it to me, and tells me how to pull up a certain screen—a scan of the photo of my dad and me, as a little kid, in the snow together.
“I put it under magnifying glass, just for kicks. Flip to the next image.”
I swipe the screen, a close-up.
“Notice the inch of bare skin, exposed by the gap between his glove and jacket sleeve?”
There’s the smallest dark tendril of ink from my father’s tattoo. “I’ve seen parts of it in all of the worlds I’ve seen him in,” I tell Hafeez, remembering my father’s body strung up in that hotel room—that tattoo spanning his chest and back and arms.
“The way the other you explained the feelings you have just before you disappear and how a certain pain will flare up before you head into a certain world, plus the poem and the tattoos, we decided to look into acupressure. We went to this place called Yang’s.”
“Yang’s?”
“It’s a Chinese market where people buy squid ink and whatever. The old man in the back—the owner’s grandfather or something—talked to us about acupressure, the mind-body connections. Go to the next screen.”
I swipe again, and there’s a human form, broken into a chart with different spots on the body labeled with combinations of letters and numbers.
“Acupressure points. I thought that the tattoo might follow all these points. Swipe again.”
The next picture is one I recognize, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a man with outstretched arms and legs in a circle with a hand-drawn three over his chest and arms, following the dots that mark pressure points.
“Nice work,” I say.
“Thanks,” Hafeez says. “It’s that art elective, and you helped some—the other you.” It’s still strange to hear about things I’ve done with only a dim echo of memory. “We showed him the gift your dad gave you, the tool.” He reaches over and pops open the glove compartment. He pulls out bulky manila envelope and hands it to me. I open it to find the tool. “He told us it’s used in reflexology, which mainly focuses on the hands and feet, but your father must use it all over his body.”
I hold it in my right hand, and it feels exactly right again, like I’m meant to hold it. “To move faster between worlds.”
“Right. You told me that there was this sensation, a really specific spot, that you felt like if you could just get at it, you’d be able to fade out faster.”
“So, his tattoos aren’t just tattoos,” I say.
“They’re a map of universes. His universes,” Hafeez says, throwing back some more Pixy Stix.
“To move from one world to the next, I have to know both the trigger in my mind for that world and a trigger—a pressure point—inside of my own body, somewhere.”
“And to get back again?”
“It’s usually just in my hand. That’s where I feel it. It’s the whole mind-body connection, I think.”
“Acupressure talks a lot about mind-body connections. Ancient medicine.”
We find ourselves back in my neighborhood, with its pinched houses and rusted chain-link fences. Hafeez turns onto my street. The stupid plastic reindeer is still knocked over in the neighbor’s yard. I’ve changed so much, but nothing else has changed at all. When we pull up to my house, my mother’s car is in the drive, but the house is dark. “My mom,” I say.
“What about her?”
“I have to ask her about the atlas. You never know…” I glance up at my house. “Thanks, Hafeez. For everything.”
“No problem. Do me a favor. Write a note on your hand telling the other you to call me,” he says. “When she gets in.”
“Right. I will. Take care of her for me, okay?” I say.
Hafeez smiles. “I will.”
I start to put the tool back in the glove compartment, but he stops me. “What are you doing? It’s yours. Use it.”
“Thanks.”
I run up to the front door, unlock it, then turn back to Hafeez. He gives a wave, and I wave back.
As he drives off, I glance at Brian Sprowitz’s bedroom window. He’s not there.
I step inside, locking the door fast behind me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A LIGHT is on in the kitchen but I only hear a strange clicking noise.
I follow the sound, walking through the living and the dining rooms. And then I see my mother, tapping on the dark glass of the sliding door with her nails, staring out at nothing.
“Mom?”
She turns with a small gasp. “You scared me.”
I look out at the backyard, crusted with patches of snow. It’s where my father showed up. Is some part of her hoping to find him there again?
“Are you okay?” I ask, gripping my left hand with my right.
“Of course,” she says, and then she changes gears. “Where were you?”
“I was out with Hafeez.” I put my hands in my jacket pockets. In one, I feel the tool and I’m happy to have it, relieved, actually.
“Good.” Does she know the other me is dating him?
I have to bring up my father and the atlas—but I don’t know how. My mother’s taught me not to talk about him.
“I’m sorry I got mad at you about Dad.”
She seems to shudder a bit at my mention of him. “What? No, it was nothing.”
“It was strange to have him here,” I say, trying to sound casual. “I’ve never asked you much about him, you know?”
“You used to and you stopped. Maybe you were being nice to me.” She walks into the kitchen. She doesn’t want to talk about my father now either. I feel an ache in my hand that could send me back to the prime. Part of me wants to run away from the conversation. Is that the lure my father felt? The ability to bail at any turn? Was Alex telling the truth about him—or one truth from many? I pinch my other hand and say, “Let me ask something.”
She starts filling the sink with hot water, slips a dirty pot under the faucet. I’m about to ask her if my dad ever mentioned an atlas, and hiding it, but for some reason I stop and ask what I’ve never had the courage to before: “Why did you and Dad break up?”
She pours in a stream of liquid dish soap. “I wasn’t enough. We weren’t enough, I guess.” Her voice cracks a little. The bubbles start expanding.
I don’t know if I believe her. I have those photos—and memories—from other worlds that prove my father tried to hold on to me. “Or was there something about him you couldn’t accept?”
“He’s good deep down,” she says, starting in with her old familiar lines.
“I don’t want to hear that stuff. I want the truth.”
She turns off the faucet and looks at me—the way you would a stranger. Am I a stranger? She takes in the way I’m applying pressure to my hand by pinching it, and she knows. I can see it in her eyes. She walks over to me and touches my cheek. “It’s not been you, has it? I knew it.” She lets her hand fall. “You’re already gone.”
“You
know about spandrels, then. You’ve known all along.” I’m furious suddenly. “What do you know? Tell me about my father, about moving between branches.”
She slams her fists into her thighs and her eyes tear up. “We were so close. Alex said you were almost ready.”
“Wait. Was I going to get cut? Was that the plan? The cure?”
She seems shocked that I know this. “I want you to have your life to live—your own life! Is that so bad?”
I shake my head. “There is no cure! Cutting isn’t a cure! Alex wouldn’t have done it anyway. He wanted me to be a spandrel, one who worked for him.”
“You don’t even know what that means.” She walks back to the sink and reaches into the steaming water.
I think about telling her that some version of myself is cuffed to a bed under my uncle’s watch and that he’s trying to beat information out of my father, but I stop myself.
“You can be mad at me for trying to save you from it if you want to,” she says, “but I’ll never regret it.”
“But this is who I am. Who I was meant to be.”
“No,” she says. “It’s no life! They’ll draw you in, and you won’t be able to get out.”
“Who will draw me in?”
She raises one hand, wet and slightly trembling, and eyes me searchingly. She turns back to the pots, scrubbing them. “You want to know how it all happened? I’ll tell you. I was only eighteen, kicked out of foster care, no prospects, no family, nothing. And then this college boy fell for me. Alex. He’d had a rough childhood, too, but he had a way out. And we dreamed of getting out together. I’d never been in love. I didn’t know anything about it.”
I have trouble taking it all in. I’m not convinced my mother ever figured out anything about love.
She looks at the wall, her eyes quivering with tears but her expression stony. “So when Alex asked me to marry him, I said yes. I was being smart for once, I thought.”
The picture over the mantel in the world that’s cracking—did she marry him in that world? But then why did I look like me—part of my mother, part of my own father? I can’t wrap my head around it.
My mother goes quiet for a moment, and when she starts to talk again, her voice is softer, sadder. “But then your father showed up, and we fell in love. Real love. The first time in my life.” She glides her wet soapy hand along the counter. “And I got pregnant with you.”