“Jane, are you, like, tripping, or something? I told you yes. Definitely. Same tattoo. And . . . I don’t know how close you are with Chloe or anything, but if you are, maybe back off? I think she and that dude are together. At least they seemed to be the last time I saw them.”
“That’s not why I’m asking!” Jane snaps.
Now she seems even more rattled than I am. “When’s the last time you saw them?” she asks Tyler.
“I don’t know . . . maybe a few weeks ago? They were paddling out when I was coming in.”
The date of the full moon. The last time I saw him alive. Or not alive.
Alive. Had to be. Otherwise, Tyler is hallucinating too.
Jane and I have forgotten that we still have him on the line. His voice makes both of us jump.
“Yo, do you have me on speaker?”
As a person who believes only in science, my knowing Kai — surfing with Kai, kissing Kai, maybe even falling in love with Kai — is something that I can’t explain. At least not in terms of any established, agreed-upon theory about how the universe works. This is what I turn over and over in my head as I sit in the sand and watch the waves.
It’s Wednesday afternoon. The onshore wind hits me square in the face. I should have checked the weather before I left the house. There are a couple of surfers in the water, but the waves are no good. Crumbling into foam before they rise high enough to carry a board. “Nothing but closeouts,” Kai would say. For a minute, I forget that he is not coming. That he’s not about to emerge out of the dunes any second now, his board under his arm.
The guys out there now must be beginners. They don’t yet know how to read the wind and the waves. They bob up and down in the choppy water, like buoys, not realizing that they probably aren’t going to catch anything today.
Studying them, I think about how I’ve spent so much time this summer on the surface of the water without really knowing much about what’s underneath. An entire world beneath me, one that is almost as foreign as another planet. Sea lions weaving their way through kelp forests. Fish darting in and out of coral reefs. What must it be like to live down in the deep, in the spaces where the light hardly reaches, where weird, alien-like sea creatures glow like carnival rides in the dark? If I miss so much of my own planet, perhaps my understanding of the universe is much smaller than I thought.
The wind blows sand sideways and I zip up my jacket. Pull my hood over my head.
“Not going to play in the waves today, mermaid?”
I’m jolted from my brooding by the old swimmer man. He stands next to me holding his goggles, a towel around his neck. It’s almost as if he appeared out of nowhere.
“No, not today,” I say. “They’re no good.”
“The waves do what they do,” he says. “There’s no good or bad.”
I almost want to say, Thanks, Yoda, but I know he’s just being kind, in his way. I nod toward the water. “Looks pretty cold for a swim.”
“Oh, I don’t mind the cold,” he says. “Gets the blood flowing.”
“Actually,” I say, “hypothermia does the opposite. Just a word of warning.”
He chuckles. “Such a smart one. Don’t you worry. I’ve been swimming here since before you were born.”
“Well, be careful anyway,” I say. “I’m not that confident in my CPR skills.”
He laughs. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
He pulls his swim goggles down over his eyes and holds on to the ends of the towel with both hands.
“I’ll leave you to wait for your boy.”
My chest squeezes tight.
“He’s not coming,” I say, clawing my fingers through the damp sand.
“Not coming!” he says. “Hmm. That’s a shame.”
I nod in agreement. “It is.”
He smiles. “Ah, to be young and in love again . . . I bet he’ll change his mind. You two had the look.”
I stare up at his weathered face. “The look?”
“The look of people who belong together. Even if he doesn’t show up today, he will eventually.”
Then he continues on toward the water, dropping his towel in the sand just behind the high-tide line. I watch him dive into the surf, my eyes filling with tears.
The look of people who belong together.
Somewhere deep down, there’s a part of me that still hopes, despite all recent evidence to the contrary, that the old man is right. That Kai will show up eventually. Because that’s why I’m sitting on this beach, if I’m honest with myself. Maybe if I wait here long enough, he’ll appear.
But that’s not possible, right? People can’t be dead and then alive. They don’t exist and not exist at the same time. Time moves forward. It can’t move back. Not possible, yet it was. He was alive. Here, on this very beach, he existed, even when he didn’t. Tyler saw him. The old man saw him too. But how? It still makes no sense.
Unless . . . I think.
What if?
What if time splits?
Multiple probabilities.
Multiple universes.
Multiple realities.
I recall that poem from freshman English: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . . In one universe, you take the road less traveled, and in the other you get eaten by a bear. Or rescue Little Red Riding Hood. Or find a magic ring.
Suppose we do live in a multiverse, where multiple probabilities spawn multiple realities.
If this is possible, maybe there’s one, or two, or twenty universes where Kai never did die in that tunnel.
Where he reconciled with his dad.
Where he still paddles out into the ocean most afternoons and launches himself off racing waves.
Where he teaches beginners to surf.
Could one of those universes somehow, in some way, have intersected with mine?
Like for most significant events in my life, he doesn’t show. So why am I surprised? This is how it’s always been. Birthdays. Parent-teacher conferences. The time I broke my arm falling out of a banyan tree. But this? This sort of takes the selfish, irresponsible, deadbeat-dad shit to a whole new level.
Because I could use just a little help burying my mom.
The one who raised his only child.
Mom must have known he wouldn’t step up and do the responsible thing. That’s why, as I found out in these last few weeks, she basically planned her own funeral. She made all the arrangements. She wrote me instructions. There’s a list with numbers for me to call, including one for the eco-friendly burial provider, which is something I wouldn’t have thought of, but is completely her. Also, the life insurance agent and the caterer “who will make sure that everyone is fed after the service.”
“You are going to be okay,” she’d whispered, pressing the list into my hands. “You are thoughtful and kind and brave. Stay that way, for me. I love you always, sweet boy.”
She was hardly recognizable at the end. Dying does some pretty messed-up things to a person’s body. There were more than a few times in the ICU when I wanted to run out, to run away, because I could hardly deal with how horrible it was, and it took all the strength I had to not let it show on my face.
Instead, I cracked jokes about our Berkeley-on-steroids neighbor, who gave tarot card readings to half-drunk college students in her velvet-draped garage and was always adopting stray cats. I played Mom’s favorite music. Velvet Underground. David Bowie. Radiohead. I read a bunch of books aloud, even if I wasn’t sure that she was still able to follow along.
After she was gone, I had to call my grandma to tell her the news. She lives in an assisted care place in Southern California and hadn’t been able to come here to say goodbye. When I told her that Mom had passed, she sobbed so uncontrollably it was hard to understand a word she said. And then I called my dad. No answer. Left voice mails. No response.
There are other people I have to call. So many. Mom’s work colleagues. Jake and Tom, our friends from across the street who are dog-sitting Ruby. Our landlord
. I did reach Jill, Mom’s closest friend, who was on her way to the hospital but got stuck in evening rush-hour traffic when it happened. She’d been coming by on and off all week, bringing me more food than a whole houseful of people could eat. I could tell she felt terrible about not being with me today, but it wasn’t her fault. It’s hard to know when . . . to predict the timing of it. I told her she should turn around. There wasn’t anything left for her to do at the hospital.
“Stay with us tonight, Kai,” Jill said. “She wouldn’t want you to be home alone. And tomorrow, we’ll stop by your place and pick up some clothes and things. You are staying with us as long as you need.”
“Thank you,” I said. “There are a few things I need to do here first, and then I’ll come by.”
“I’ll come help,” she said.
“No, it won’t take long. I promise I’ll come over after.”
I felt bad lying, but I knew she wouldn’t take no for an answer. I just can’t sit around tonight in someone else’s house. Right now, I need motion. Velocity. Speed. Enough movement to shake off the weight of the last few days. The last weeks. And to shake off the guilt that I am also relieved that I don’t have to spend another day in that hospital room. That it’s over.
I check my phone one more time before I start up the bike. There are no messages from my dad.
I feel like an idiot for reaching out to him in the first place. Maybe I was temporarily deluded. I’d been thinking back on the times when I was really young and he and Mom were still together. When he sometimes took me out in the ocean in the mornings. When he taught me how to navigate the impact zone and how to hold my own in bigger and bigger surf. When he sometimes, for a little while, acted like a real dad.
But in the end, competing always came first. More often than not, he was far more interested in doing his own thing, leaving it to Mom to cover the rent and juggle work, parenting, and all the other stuff that keeps a family going. Eventually, she got tired of moving from place to place — Hawaii, Australia, South Africa — tired of him being gone for days without calling, tired of playing the disapproving grown-up, constantly ruining his endless summer. She wanted to finish her degree. To settle down in one place. To plan more than just a few weeks or months ahead. So we left. And he was free of responsibility. Free of us. I don’t know why she stayed as long as she did. Love doesn’t always make sense, I guess.
I pull out of the parking garage and head north. I need to get out of the city. I need to get away from the traffic and the stoplights and the noise. I ride across the bridge and race up 101, thinking that I’ll switch to Highway 1 in Mill Valley and follow it along the coast.
Motion is good. You have to focus on what you are doing. Can’t think of anything else.
But tonight it’s not working.
I can’t stop thinking.
Thinking about Mom.
And my dad.
It occurs to me that he could be traveling. Maybe I just assumed he hasn’t been picking up when he’s actually somewhere remote, out of reach. With him, this is always possible. I know he’s been staying temporarily at the rental house that used to belong to my grandparents in Bolinas. I could go there right now. To be sure.
I keep riding north. I pass through Stinson Beach, sweep around the lagoon, and make the left into Bolinas. Ride by the farm stand, through town, and up onto the mesa. I slow, but don’t stop, when I get to the house.
The lights are on.
His truck is parked out front.
He’s there.
I guess my dad decided, again, that we didn’t need him.
So fuck him. From now on, I won’t need him. Not ever. And if karma exists, someday he, unlike my mom, will die alone.
I make a U-turn at the end of the road and head back toward San Francisco.
The fog is pouring through the Golden Gate in great billowing heaps as I descend toward the bridge. Only the upper cables are visible, and the tops of the towers, each studded with a bright red light. It looks and feels like a ghost bridge, suspended over nothing, unmoored to land. The amber streetlamps barely penetrate the thick fog. Headlights appear out of nowhere. The San Francisco skyline is hidden. It’s almost as if the city itself has disappeared.
Visibility improves once I drop into the underpass at the base of the bridge and loop around onto Lombard Street. Traffic is busy. It’s holiday rush, with taillights blinking all the way up to Van Ness. I slowly navigate between the cars until the traffic lets up. It feels good to move again.
The Broadway Tunnel is up ahead. I have always loved speeding through it. Dark and tubelike, it gives me the sense that I’m slipping through a wormhole into another universe. Another life. I am a space warrior. A Time Lord.
The entrance sucks me in like a great black hole and I drop down into its vortex, lights blurring together to form a single bright line. December air mixed with car exhaust seeps through the seams of my face shield.
I lean into the curve and just as I’m pulling out of it, I see something in the middle of the lane, directly ahead of me. A Christmas tree . . .
Fuuuck.
I swerve, barely missing the tree, but feel the bike sliding under me. It seems like it simultaneously takes an instant and forever for me to skid into the guardrail.
The impact is hard. Around me, car tires shriek as they lock up on the pavement, the sound echoing off the tunnel walls.
I smell burning rubber. My head is ringing. My leg feels like it’s on fire.
And then . . . nothing.
I open my eyes. There is a woman leaning over me, frantically yelling into my face.
Mom?
Brown eyes. Reddish hair. She is not Mom. This woman is younger and, I note dimly, dressed up for a party.
It takes me a moment to register that I am lying on the floor of the tunnel. I am under my bike. There are cars stopped at odd angles everywhere. I hear the sound of sirens in the distance.
“Don’t move!” the woman is yelling. “Don’t move! The ambulance is almost here!”
She seems pretty upset.
My leg is pinned. I try to free it and pain rises from it like a rocket, setting off fireworks in my brain. The woman has a hand on my shoulder. She’s trying to keep me from sitting up.
Horns are blaring. Red lights are flashing. I see paramedics running toward me with a stretcher. I shift my weight just a bit and another explosion of pain shoots through my leg.
I pass out again.
When I wake up, I’m in a hospital bed. Is this the same hospital I left just hours before? My head hurts. My leg hurts. It’s in a cast. And there, over in the chair in the corner, looking terrible and desperate: my dad.
I stare at him. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a hundred years.
“Kai,” he says, his voice a mix of relief and sorrow. “Kai.” He puts his head in his hands. In a whisper, he says, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t. I couldn’t see her. Forgive me.”
“She’s gone,” I tell him, even though he already knows.
And then I do the thing I’ve been trying not to do for months, that I especially didn’t want to do in front of him. I start to cry. Not a holding-back cry. Not a trying-to-be-brave one, but a real one. Like a kid who’s more lost than he’s ever been.
My bike is totaled. My leg is broken. I have a concussion. But I am not permanently damaged. I will live. The driver behind me — the one on her way to a Christmas party — acted fast. She stopped in time.
My dad is still there in the morning, when the doctor comes in with an update. “Your CT scan looks good,” she says. “No swelling in the brain. We can discharge you in a few days once we’re sure you can move around with the leg. It’s going to require some rehab.”
She hesitates for a second, gives my dad a pointed look, then continues. “Maybe think about getting a car. You were lucky. Know what we usually call motorcycle riders here in the ER?”
“What?” I ask.
“Organ donors.”
What happens
in the universe where Kai gets to live?
Maybe I die because I don’t get a heart in time. It’s a scene that’s all too easy to conjure up: Hospital room. Oxygen mask. Nurses rushing toward me with a crash cart. My soul aching for everyone and everything I’m leaving behind. And for everything I’ll miss. Trips I’ll never take. Books I’ll never read. Crushes I’ll never kiss. The last thing I see are the shock paddles poised above me, and then there’s nothing. A nothing so complete and empty, I know without a doubt that I am dead.
Or maybe I live but don’t even know he exists. I never do walk into that surf shop, never find his number pinned to the wall in there, never know the thrill of racing across a wave like a sea goddess and feeling, for a few brief moments, like I’m invincible.
Maybe I never have a heart defect to begin with. I don’t collapse on my high school’s track and miss the final semester of my senior year. I graduate on time. There’s no summer school, no helping Jane with her trigonometry homework or getting a heart tattoo. Instead I end up on some other path, in some other story, with its own mysteries, twists, and turns.
Maybe we all still come together somehow, and in some way that I don’t even imagine yet. There are so many possibilities, so many forks in so many roads. Enough to fill up a multitude of universes.
How far away is a parallel universe? Light-years? An eternity? What if other realities aren’t far away at all, but instead so close to our own that if we only knew they were there, we could reach out and touch them? Some physicists believe that parallel universes are all around us — reality upon reality stacked up against one another like pages in a book.
If this is indeed true, is it possible for two separate realities to merge? A couple of pebbles are tossed into a pond, sending ripples outward. If the ripples extending from each pebble reach each other, their trajectory is changed, and the pattern on the water morphs into something else. Something less recognizable, less predictable. Kai and Chloe. Chloe and Kai. Could something that mixed up our matter, our cells — something like a heart transplant — have shifted our trajectories? Caused our separate realities to overlap?
Everything I Thought I Knew Page 20