by J. Q. Coyle
She looks at me and then out the dark window to the backyard. “Alex was furious. The way he sees it, your father stole me away from him. And he never got over it. He said I was all he ever wanted.”
I lean on the doorjamb. My father stole my mother from Alex. It makes much more sense now—the way Alex talks about my mother like he knows her more than he has a right to. It’s why he said he introduced them.
She puts the pots on a towel to dry. “Your father took me with him to another branch once. I couldn’t live the way he needed to, on the run, jumping.” Her voice trails off for a moment. She crosses her arms as if she’s remembering cold winters. “When we got back, we fell apart. I had this feeling that our lives were fractured. I felt it inside of him and myself.” She grips the front of her blouse with her still-damp hands. “I begged your father to get it cut out, to be free of it. It was the only way. That’s what he refused to do—for us.”
“You gave him an ultimatum,” I say, “to either give up who he is or lose us. Is that it?”
“Yes. So that we could have a shot.”
“A shot at what?”
“Living normal lives—here, together.”
The answer this time is different, but it means the same thing, really. Healthy, to my mother, means normal. I feel like I can’t breathe. “Is that the ultimatum you were planning to give me one day?”
“No!” She’s red-faced, her eyes wide. “You don’t understand. They haven’t really told you how deep this goes, have they? How far back … I told your father he could work out partial custody in those other branches if he wanted, but I needed sole custody of you in the prime because this is what counts. You, here,” she says.
And I’m flooded with memories of her—yes, she was in those other worlds, different versions of her. She was often scared. She worried about me. I was handed off between them at designated meeting places—parks, indoor McDonald’s playgrounds; sometimes I was escorted on planes, flying cross-country. Those lives were different. She’s right. My life has been fractured, too—and not just one life, but many.
And then it hits her. She spins quickly around, looking out the window over the sink and then back at me. “This isn’t the prime.” She quickly shakes her head and raises a finger. She doesn’t want me to confirm it. She knows. She grabs my wrist, as if making sure I’m still really there. “I thought I could save you,” she whispers.
“I never asked to be saved.”
She starts crying, but she’s angry too. “It’s not the same, you know. It’s never the same. It’s not good to have all those lives to choose from. There’s such a thing as a soul. When it comes to your father, I know which soul I fell in love with. How can you ever trust the person you love when sometimes they’re there and sometimes they’re not?”
How can you trust the person who doesn’t tell you the truth about who you are? “No,” I say. “No. You trust the person you love because you do.”
She whispers, “I’ve lost you.”
Maybe she’s right, I think. Maybe I’m already gone. But I say, “No, you haven’t lost me. I’m still here.”
I hug her. She wraps her arms around me, holding on tight. I feel the shudder of a sob she’s trying to hold down.
I whisper, “Don’t tell Uncle Alex that I’ve created my own world. You can’t trust him. In another world, he’s captured Dad and is trying to get him to confess something, beating him. Alex could kill him.”
She draws back and looks at me for a moment. “How dangerous is it for you now? Is someone after you?”
I can’t tell my mother anything. It’s now my job to protect her, not the other way around. “I’ll be okay,” I say. “Don’t worry.”
She smiles a tiny bit, as if she’s trying to believe me.
“I need to know one thing,” I say. “Did Dad ever mention an atlas? A specific one that he needed to hide?”
“He’d never tell me anything like that,” she says. “It’d only make me a target. One reason he left is because he knew we’d be safer.”
“What if he’s still in love with you? What if he left but his heart—”
My mother reaches up and touches my cheek. “I still love his heart.” And with a fierceness that surprises me, she says, “You can trust him with your life.”
Though it seems to take all of her strength, she steps away from me. “Go on. I know you have to.”
I stand there for just a second longer. I want to remember her like this—her hair loose around her face, her mascara smudged with tears. My mom. The two of us for so long, surviving.
“I’ll check in on you in a bit if you want,” she says. She means the other Alicia, the one of this world. The one who will maybe have ice cream with her later after I’m gone.
“Okay,” I say.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MY ROOM looks exactly the same but somehow feels different.
The frosted window, the ancient wallpaper with small winding roses, yellowed at the seams. I feel a pang of homesickness even though I’m home.
There’s a Plath poem about not being a mother, no more than a cloud could be a mother. I can’t remember it exactly. Plath had two children; she sealed the door to their bedroom before she turned on the gas stove to kill herself. She was beautiful, her children were still very young. What did she think about as the small kitchen filled with gas? She had to believe what she was doing was the only option—the only ending she was allowed. And she had to think her kids would be better off without her. How else could she follow through with it?
I reach under the pillow on my bed and pull out my copy of Plath’s poems. I stare at her picture for a moment; her face in dusty black and white, trapped in a small circle, forever. I touch the photograph. Every time I read one of Plath’s poems, I want to say, “Don’t do it. Don’t kill yourself. Stay.”
But maybe that’s just what the poems are whispering to themselves.
Are mothers clouds that can blow away? I know my mother loves me, but how could she even think about letting Alex put me through some surgery that would take away part of who I am?
In the kitchen, she said, It’s not good to have all those lives to choose from. She meant my father’s worlds, but everyone has choices—endless choices. It’s how lives are built.
She said, How can you ever trust the person you love when sometimes they’re there and sometimes they’re not?
That has nothing to do with universes. That’s about trust, faith, the blind leap of falling in love.
Maybe my mother lived her life afraid of just being in love. It’s unknowable, even without all those other worlds. Uncontrollable.
I apply pressure to my left hand. I have to find my father. I would be grateful to have any version of him.
I sit on the edge of my bed and grip my knees. My parents were really in love, and it seems like it was an immediate falling—and maybe a lasting love, despite the fact that they’re no longer together. I’ve wanted to know this forever. Now I do and it feels like … what? It feels like hope. Not so much hope that they will get back together—no. I’m not that delusional. It’s more that two people can fall in love at all. That’s a hopeful thought, right? Love, it exists, and not just for people in books and movies or for poets doomed by it. Except my mother had been afraid to live with the reality of who my father was—is. My father, in the prime, fighting for his life.
Not a brute.
A good man who’s had to make some hard choices.
I have infinite regrets, he said. I keep one version of myself hidden away—the good one who’s tried to do the right thing.
The right thing.
The world where he didn’t take my mother from Alex. The world where Alex and my mother are married; the world that’s disintegrating.
In that world, did my father convince my mother to go back to Alex, to hide that she was pregnant with me, and let Alex believe I was his?
Alex must not know the way his life turned out in that world. If he knew there w
as a world where he did get to be with my mother, he wouldn’t want that branch to die.
I sit up, wide-eyed.
Alex’s perfect world exists and he doesn’t know it. If he did, he would try to save it. I don’t have the atlas but I do have something that he wants.
I have to tell Alex what he’s destroying. He said there was another drug that they wanted to try on another branch. Wouldn’t he try it on the dying branch if he knew the truth?
I remember my father’s body fishhooked midair, beaten and bruised.
Who else even knows about the atlas?
I get up and stare at the dark window. Gemmy. So he must have chosen to give it to my father, not Alex. Gemmy’s held it in his own hands. The buzzing rises again all over me: I’m lit up from the inside.
I open my top desk drawer and find my compass. But then I remember I promised Hafeez I’d write my other self a note.
I write on the back of my hand. Hi, it’s me. Call Hafeez. And then I add: Be good to Mom.
Then I push the sharp tip of the compass into the flesh of my palm and blood rises. The times I’ve landed in Gemmy’s world with the ancient bulldog, I’ve felt it in my upper arm, so I ignore the buzz in my right hand and grab my upper arm instead.
I close my eyes and remember what it was like when Gemmy grabbed me and hugged me—to have a grandfather, a real one, in a way I can really remember. For so long it’s just been me and my mom, but now it’s like my family is being brought back to me, one at a time.
I stare at the blood and think of the bulldog’s crooked row of bottom teeth, Gemmy’s boozy sweet smell, and then my arm starts to hurt. I grip it tightly, and the room jerks around me, as if popping loose piece by piece.
But just before it’s gone, I reach into my pocket and grab the photo of Jane and Jax as a little boy. I pinch it between my thumb and knuckle, wondering if it can travel with me. Can I piggyback this one small thing?
The room dissolves … tiny pinpricks of light.
* * *
A pair of wide green eyes staring at me.
A girl’s pale face and dark hair.
Behind her, wood-paneled walls, a rocking chair, windows full of night, the smell of cigars.
I’ve been staring into dark trees. That’s my job here—to keep watch.
I’m holding something. I look down and there’s the photograph of Jax and Jane. It came with me. So maybe Alex is right and I do have my father’s ability to piggyback.
The girl, who’s seven or so, starts whisper-singing: “Ticky hi, ticky ho. Ticky hi-dy hi-dy ho.…” She clicks one of her small nails against the glass of a hurricane lamp.
We’re in a cabin. The bulldog is asleep on the floor, its back legs kicked out behind it.
I know we’re safe, unless people appear in the woods or drive up the logging road.
I hear voices coming from a back room in the cabin.
“Where’s Gemmy?” I ask the girl.
She startles and stares up at me. The hurricane lamp is under her chin, casting strange shadows on her face.
“Gemmy,” I say. “Is he here? My grandfather?”
She backs away from me and drops the lamp. It falls, snuffing the wick. The room darkens, and she runs toward the voices and the distant light in a back room. “She’s here! She’s here!” she shouts.
I hear the scrape of chairs, heavy boots.
Gemmy, holding a flashlight, barrels into the room first. His thin white wisps of hair stick up on his head. “Is it you?”
I nod.
Three men and two women—all about Gemmy’s age—file into the room after him. The women both wear their hair dyed dark and teased. One of the men has scoliosis that curves his back to one side. Another is bulbously fat, and the third is lean and tall, a black man with high cheekbones—I’ve seen his face before, but I can’t place him. They all look at me expectantly.
“From the prime?” one of the women asks.
“Yes, yes, of course. Can’t you tell?” Gemmy says.
“Who are all these people?” I ask Gemmy quietly. The bulldog is up and sniffing my boots.
“What?” asks the man with scoliosis. “You don’t recognize us?”
“We been here all along,” the other woman says in a rough, deep smoker’s voice.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Search your memories, Alicia,” Gemmy says. “We’re your aunts and uncles. This here’s Olsson, your godfather.” He claps the tall, thin man on the back.
“You’re Olsson. You were in the room with me and Jane,” I say. “You were the one who gave the order to put me under again.”
“Sorry about that. I play both sides. I work for Alex to keep a closer eye on him.”
“What about Jane?”
“She does what she can,” Olsson says, and then he takes a step toward me. “Don’t you see us in those memories?”
I have seen him. I know he’s been there. But I’m not sure if I can trust my memories.
“I’m your godfather, in every world your father’s ever made,” Olsson says.
“I’m not here for a reunion,” I say. I still don’t know if I should trust all of these people. “I’m here for the atlas.”
“You can’t hand it over to Alex,” Gemmy says. “You know that.”
The little girl sneaks back into the room, rounding the door frame.
“If I don’t hand it over, Alex will kill my father,” I tell him.
“The atlas is all that we are,” Gemmy says. “Our history, our worlds. We’re the living links. Each of us represents one of the old family lines, or what’s left. We’re the old guard, still fighting people like Alex, those who want to exploit branches, denying our collective humanity.”
“Goddamned imperialists,” the man with the bowed back mutters.
“We’re the protectors of those worlds,” Gemmy says.
“We’ve been called thugs, mobsters, rebels,” Gemmy says. “We don’t care what anyone calls us. We all got together here, waiting for you, Alicia.”
“Why me?”
“You’re one of us now.”
A few smile and nod. The little girl leans against the wall, slides down, and sits there, staring at me.
“I need to know where the atlas is.”
“We gave it to your father to hide—so none of us would know,” Olsson says.
“Well, he doesn’t know either,” I say.
“If she ain’t got her dad’s gift, then none of it matters,” says the man with the bowed back.
“What gift?”
“Piggybacking,” Gemmy says.
“I’ve got the gift.” I pull out the picture of Jax and Jane. “At least enough to bring this with me.”
I hand the picture to Gemmy and the others gather around.
“My daughter,” the heavy man says. “Jane and my grandson, Jaxy. I didn’t make it in that branch. Died in the first wave of the epidemic.” He holds the picture so tightly his hand trembles. Jane is Jax’s mother, and this is his grandfather. Does Jax even know this man is alive, here?
“I told you she’d have the gift!” Gemmy says to the others. “That atlas was the last of its kind—or, well, the last that anyone seems to know of, and not many do. We destroyed all but one.”
“If Alex gets it, he’ll destroy all those branches,” I say. “Right?”
“And these branches date way back,” Olsson says. “We’ve got worlds where people who were assassinated in the prime got to live it out.”
“You know how some researcher will come up with some cure for a disease almost by accident?” the woman with the smoker’s voice says. “That’s no accident. Someone in a branch who was never born in the prime figures it out. We transport the information, make it look like an accident. See?”
“Someone dies in the prime, someone like me,” Gemmy says, “—well, sometimes they’re alive somewhere else. See what that might mean to someone?”
“We can’t predict the future any more than you can,�
�� Olsson says. “And we can’t change the past. But being able to see how things play out in a world with just one tiny change is amazing. And sometimes horrifying.”
Hafeez and I were right. I try to imagine all these other worlds at once—a world where Lincoln wasn’t shot. Or Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. If spandrels lose someone they love, they have a chance at finding them again? All those cures …
I feel buzzing in my right hand. I grab hold of my left to stop it like Jax taught me.
“Your father locked the atlas away where no one would think to look,” Olsson says. “He’d have been smart about it.”
“Like where?” I ask, frustrated.
“The roots are ‘lovely, dark and deep,’” says the man holding the picture.
Gemmy looks out the windows into the trees. “I’ve only been a few times, myself. Lost worlds where anything can happen. Worlds can swallow themselves whole. If he hid the atlas there, he had to have help. Our line can’t navigate the roots.”
The man holding the picture says, “Mine can.” Does this mean Jane once could? And can Jax?
“Why are you all here holed up in a cabin?” I’m angry with all of them suddenly. “Why aren’t you trying to save my father in the prime?”
“We’d get him out if we could, but we don’t know where he is,” Olsson says. “Alex is all over his security. We can’t get anything from our sources.”
“Alex showed me a glimpse of my father; he has a camera on him.” I remember my father kicking the camera—the parting of the curtain. “He’s in a hotel room. It had strange windows, like some of the panes were circular.”
“Circular windows?” Olsson says.
“Only one hotel I know of like that,” Gemmy says. “It was a prison a long time ago in Boston. Oculus. That’s the name of the kind of circular window it’s known for. It’s got a few like that. The hotel is called The Liberty now.”
“He’s being tortured in one of the rooms in that hotel,” I say. “He’ll die there if we don’t save him.”
Gemmy shoves his hands into his pockets and stares at the floor. This is his son. I know he must feel as desperate as I do.