White Space

by Ilsa J. Bick

  Lizzie’s mouth worked. “I just said that.”

  “But then how come he showed up to give Rima a ride?” Bode said. “That was still her … what? Book-world or something? And she and I met at the rest stop.”

  “That’s because I was starting to pull you guys all together,” Lizzie said. “It’s hard, and I sometimes drop you where I don’t mean to. Things would’ve fallen apart if I hadn’t separated you all again. Right after that, all of you … you know, you think you drove here, but really, I dropped you into this Now.”

  “How do you do that?” Casey asked, as Eric said, “So can you get Tony again?”

  “No, I can’t,” Lizzie said, choosing Eric’s question. “Once you die in this Now, you can’t come back here. You can be in other Nows, just not this one, or any Now where you get killed.”

  “Wait a minute.” Bode frowned. “So let me get this straight. Tony’s alive. So are Chad and Emma’s friend?”

  “Yes, Chad is in his book-world and”—the little girl waved a hand through the air—“other Nows, but only one Chad is allowed in a Now, no matter if it’s a book-world or, like, you know,” Lizzie said, “a regular Now.”

  So this wasn’t like The Matrix. Frowning, Emma worried the inside of her lip. Which would make sense, because the film was about a simulation: a Neo-avatar slotting into a computer program. In a regular Now—call it an alternative timeline—if she died, she was gone from that timeline, period. That didn’t mean there weren’t a lot of other Emmas and Bodes and Erics and on and on, like an infinite number of Xeroxed copies. But which was the original?

  “Why do you call them that?” Bode frowned down at Lizzie. “Nows. I don’t get that.”

  “Gosh, you guys … You’re thinking in straight lines too much. Look. Here’s the difference.” Sweeping up Echo Rats, she cracked open the covers and jabbed a page. “That’s a book-world Now.” She flipped two-thirds of the way through. “Here’s another Now.” She turned the page. “This is another book-world Now,” she said, stabbing the left-hand page and then the facing page, “and that’s another.” She riffled the pages in a fan. “All of these, the pages, they’re all book-world Nows. There’s no yesterday in a book-world. There’s no tomorrow. There is only the page where you start reading, and you can skip around back and forth and start wherever you want. Do you get it? You can read a book from what you think is the beginning to the end—go on, follow all the stupid numbers—and then start all over again, or in the middle; it doesn’t matter. You can decide where the beginning is, because the book-world is the book-world. It never changes. That’s not the same as a Now where there’s Christmas and stuff and people get older and things like that, but there are lots and lots of different Nows and you can visit them by going through the Dark Passages.”

  “To visit different timelines,” Eric said, “or alternative universes.”

  “Fine, whatever.” Sudden tears pooled in Lizzie’s eyes as her lower lip quivered. “What’s so hard about this?” Lizzie hurled Now Done Darkness across the room, the book doing an awkward cartwheel to crash against a wall. “For book-people who are all me, you’re so stupid!”

  After a moment, Bode said, “All me? Say what?”

  EMMA

  Tangled

  1

  THE CRAZY QUILT was a rainbow riot: scraps from every bit of clothing Lizzie had ever worn, decorated not only with the Sign of Sure in its web but very special glass figures and alphabet beads Meredith McDermott had used to spell out Lizzie’s full name:

  ELIZABETH LINDSAY MCDERMOTT

  These same beads had been rearranged to form other names, too, and in various combinations:

  There were more names, too: EARL and ANITA, LILY, even MARIANE. Emma picked out SAL waaaay off in one corner of a sliver of black velvet. There were still many others she didn’t know: BETTE. ZANE. DOYLE. BATTLE. All characters who existed in other book-worlds but had no part in her story.

  But if I’m writing my own, and part of me is tangled up with Lizzie … Emma’s eyes crept back to the glass beads that spelled out ERIC. I can only imagine so far, and no further? No, no, wait a second, wait just a minute … that couldn’t be true. Her gaze swept across the quilt, and then she felt the air ease from her throat. Okay, no KRAMER. No JASPER either, not that she could see right away. The quilt was about half the size and length of a twin bed, and it would take time to pick over and parse out everything. But she knew on a deep, gut level: Jasper just wouldn’t be there.

  There’s no J in Lizzie’s name, and she said I made Kramer myself. So, did I also make Jasper? That thought promoted another, something that had bothered her but which, at the time, she couldn’t afford to dwell on because she’d been running for her life: In that insane asylum, Kramer called him John, like that was Jasper’s first … She felt her heart kick start in her throat. No, no, that can’t be right.

  At her sudden intake of breath, Eric threw her a small frown, but she only shook her head, not trusting in her voice. And I don’t even want to know what this means. Because she had finally put something together, a puzzle over which her mind must’ve been working, like a computer laboring, quietly, toward a solution at once inescapable and irrefutable.

  2

  IT WENT LIKE this.

  Jasper was obsessed with a lot of things: the Dark Passages and horrific nightmarish creatures and Nows—and Dickens. So Emma knew a fair amount about the writer, including this: sometime in the mid-1860s, Dickens, along with his mistress and her mother, was in a catastrophic train accident that should’ve killed him. Of the train’s seven first-class carriages, Dickens’ car was the only one not to plunge from a viaduct and into a river at Staplehurst in Kent. For hours after the accident, Dickens tended the injured. Some died before his eyes.

  The accident was something academics like Kramer loved to point to as the metaphor for Dickens himself: imperious, selfish, bombastic, a bit of the egomaniac whose life was going off the rails. At the time of the crash, the writer had been in the middle of Our Mutual Friend, which might have been lost if Dickens hadn’t remembered to retrieve the manuscript from his overcoat, which he’d left in the railway carriage, before boarding an emergency train to London.

  Badly shaken and already in poor health, Dickens actually lost his voice for several weeks. His kids and friends said he never fully recovered, would get the shakes on any but the slowest of trains. Worse, Dickens struggled to finish Our Mutual Friend. Never at a loss, his next installment was several pages short. Either he was used up or traumatized—probably a bit of both; the guy was pretty manic to begin with—but his best writing days were behind him, the crash the beginning of the end. Our Mutual Friend bombed, and Dickens didn’t attempt another book for five long years. But when he did, he decided to try something that, for him, was pretty radical: a murder mystery. He decided on The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

  But he never finished. Exhausted from grueling reading tours in the intervening years, Dickens keeled over from a stroke at his Gad’s Hill estate after a day’s work on Drood, and that was that.

  She and Jasper used to try to work out the rest of the story, figure out whodunit, just for fun. So did a lot of people; several authors had taken stabs. Some literary groups and fan clubs still held Drood competitions as part of Dickens festivals.

  And way, way back—early 1900s, she thought—there was even a mock trial, where a bunch of famous people, like George Bernard Shaw, got together and heard evidence about the character that Dickens hinted in a letter to his biographer, Forster, was the murderer.

  She might be writing her life, yet one thing was now dead certain: if Jasper was a creation, he wasn’t hers. In fact, she now wondered why she’d never noticed this before.

  Because Edwin Drood’s killer was John Jasper.

  3

  OKAY. HER HEART was galloping in her chest. Calm down. Think this through.

  Say, for argument’s sake, that Eric was right. In this universe, she was like Jasper, a character crea
ted under very special circumstances with weird tools and constructed of a bizarre sort of energy that had gotten loose to write her own life. She—and maybe Jasper, too—was unique because certain, very special machines recognized her: the cynosure, for example, and whatever lurked in Jasper’s cellar. The Dickens Mirror might have responded to her as well, if Lizzie’s mom hadn’t destroyed it.

  But why would it? Because she had too much of whatever McDermott had pulled from the Dark Passages? Meredith McDermott always sealed extra energy away in a Peculiar, a Bose-Einstein condensate that rendered the energy inert, unable to … well, get free, do damage, whatever. So the machines recognized her, one of their own, because she was unbound, unfinished, filled with just enough juice? And if the energy to make her came from the Dark Passages, did that mean these devices originally belonged to whatever lived there?

  Lizzie says tangled a lot. If she followed Rima’s reasoning—that the versions of Rima and Tony and Bode she was seeing now were set because they’d come from a book-world—then Lizzie’s finding and hanging on to her, a character who was unbound, ought to be a lot harder. Unless this version of me, the one McDermott was writing, is tangled up with all the other book-worlds, as well as Lizzie, her dad, and the whisper-man. Following Lizzie’s loopy logic, that meant she had McDermott in her, too.

  Just as Jasper had some of Dickens in him?

  What did that mean? Could McDermott have actually known Dickens in that other London? And what about the fact that there was no KRAMER on Lizzie’s quilt? She supposed not every single character in every single McDermott novel could be modeled on or incorporate bits of Lizzie. But if you believed the academics, writers always slotted in portions of their lives into their work, whether they knew it or not. So could Kramer be a piece of—or stand-in for—something or someone else? McDermott, perhaps? His first name was Frank … no, Franklin. So that would work; all the letters you needed to make KRAMER were right there.

  Following that reasoning, she ought to have pieces of all of them: Bode, Tony, Rima, Chad, and on and on. So would that same tangled-ness make it easier for the machines to recognize her? It might even explain these weird echoes—how they all tended to use the same phrases, for example.

  Whoa, wait. What if she was the one making up all of them? What if she had dreamed up Lizzie? But why would she do that?

  Well, Jesus, all she had to do was think about her so-called life. She’d taken that psych course. Why did any little kid dream up imaginary friends? Because she’s lonely. No one wants her. She fit the bill: cast-off, ugly, traumatized, all-around weird. Sure, Jasper pulled a save, got her fixed up, made her … well, into a normal-looking person, a girl someone might even think was halfway decent-looking. Maybe.

  But had she made herself a protector—because she’d desperately needed one? John Jasper was Edwin Drood’s uncle, and his guardian. So had she heard or read the story and then somehow brought John Jasper, unbound and unfinished, to her? Conjured up these people and this situation because she wanted friends? It fit. Wasn’t she the one lusting after an imaginary guy whose story she couldn’t finish?

  Wait, wait. Slow down. She could feel the heat in her cheeks. Yes, Eric was nice; he was perfect, exactly what she’d always imagined. She felt the connection, this pull. Look how he’d risked his neck to come after her and Lily. The way he looked at her made her feel … special.

  But there’s Casey; don’t forget that. She gave herself a mental shake. Eric knows him. Casey’s his brother. So that clinches it right there, you nut: you can’t possibly be causing this. Stop freaking yourself out. For God’s sake, you didn’t dream up Frank McDermott or purple panops or a cynosure or a Dickens Mirror.

  Had she?

  4

  “SEE?” LIZZIE SAID to Bode. “That’s what I mean. You’re all me, some of you more and some of you less. It’s the way Dad wrote you. Emma’s just got more of me in her than the rest of you do.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Bode said. “Putting aside the fact that, you know, I’m a guy and in the Army, and you’re just this little kid … so you filch a couple letters and spell my name. So what? Those are beads. They’re glass.”

  “No. They’re Mom’s thought-magic.” Sniffing, Lizzie smoothed the quilt over the hardwood floor. “It’s like Daddy said: look hard enough and all the pieces of me—and all of you—are tangled up, right here, forever and ever.”

  “No.” Bode folded his arms over his chest. “It’s bullshit. I don’t buy it. I don’t see that this proves anything. You could make my name out of … Beauregard.”

  “Sorry, dude,” Eric said. “No O.”

  Bode flushed an angry plum. “You know what I’m saying. C’mon, Devil Dog, why are you so ready to believe all this?”

  “Because.” Eric threw up his hands. “I want to move on already. Enough emo, guys, really. Fussing about this isn’t going to change the fact that we’re stuck here and have to deal, period. The sooner we get past this, the sooner we can figure out why we’re here and then get out.”

  “I can dig that,” Bode said. “But I don’t have to believe this to—”

  No, I think, actually, you do. The rules here were so different, they wouldn’t get far if they couldn’t start thinking outside the box. “Bode,” Emma said, “what’s your last name?”

  “What? Well, it’s …” After another moment, Bode’s face darkened. “What kind of stupid question is that?”

  “Stupid”—Eric hunched a shoulder in an apologetic shrug to Emma—“but she’s right, dude. Your name tape says BODE. Is that your last name, or first?”

  “It’s my name,” Bode said.

  “And you know that because …?”

  “Because I know it, all right?” Bode touched the name tape with a finger. “Says so right there, and it’s … you know … in my head.”

  Casey glanced at Rima. “Can you spell tautology?”

  “Yes.” But she wasn’t smiling. Rima’s hand had crept to her lips, and she looked as if she might be sick. “It’s not funny, Casey.”

  “Yeah,” Bode said, but without a lot of muscle behind it.

  “Okay, so it’s on your uniform,” Eric said. “Then it has to be your last name, right? So, what’s your first name?”

  “It’s … it’s …” Bode shot Eric a thunderous look. “All right, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m Bode, okay? That’s who I am.”

  “Oh God.” Rima’s skin was pale as porcelain. “You know, until Emma asked, I didn’t realize, but … I don’t remember my last name either. I’ll bet if Tony were here, it would be the same for him, and Chad.” She looked at Eric and Casey. “What about you guys?”

  Eric and Casey looked at each other, and then Casey’s mouth dropped open. “No,” he whispered. “Eric?”

  “I’m sorry, Case,” Eric said, “but I don’t know either.”

  Emma kept her mouth shut, grateful that no one asked her. After all, her last name, Lindsay, was right there in a scream of big block capitals. My last name is her middle name. No wonder she says we’re the closest, that I have the most of her. Come to think of it, she didn’t know Sal’s last name, or Mariane’s. Kramer was only Kramer.

  Stop. Eric’s right. I could go around and around forever, but I’ve got to start with a given: I’m real. No matter what Lizzie says, I’m not words on a page. I like cherry sundaes in tulip glasses, and I save the whipped cream for last. I drink mocha Frappuccinos. I remember blue candles on birthday cakes and watching 9/11 in school and …

  Her thoughts hitched up then, because she realized that she didn’t know something else very, very important. “Lizzie, when did your dad die? What year?”

  “I …” Lizzie licked her lips. “I don’t remember.”

  “How can you not know?” Bode asked.

  Lizzie was very pale. “I just don’t, okay?”

  “When’s your birthday?” Emma asked.

  “That’s easy,” Lizzie said, with more than a little relief. “June nin
th.”

  “What?” Bode came out of his slouch. “What?”

  “That’s my birthday,” Rima said, faintly. “Bode?”

  He looked away, but Emma saw the small muscles ripple along his jaw. “Same day,” he said.

  “Mine too.” Eric paused, and then he looked at Casey. His eyebrows folded in a slow frown. “But yours—”

  “I don’t know.” Casey gave Eric a wild look. “I should know my own birthday, but I … I don’t remember!”

  “What about you?” Bode said to Emma.

  “Same.” Jasper and she shared the same birthday, which she’d once thought was just, well, coincidence. But now … Except for Casey, we’ve all got blue eyes, too. Lizzie’s and mine are exact matches. All of us are the same because we’re tangled up together, with Lizzie, and, through her, with her dad. All except …

  “I don’t know when I was born,” Casey said again, and Rima reached for his hand. “I don’t even remember the year. But I know I’m sixteen. So what the hell, why can’t I remember?”

  “What about you?” Emma said to Lizzie. “What year were you born?”