Their eyes met over the crystal bottle before Maria placed a gentle hand on her father’s back. “I never broke into your liquor cabinet, Dad. I was never that kind of teenager.”
Her father nodded absently beside her, his features more pained than she felt able to bear witness to. She carried misery with her everywhere she went these days, doling it out to everyone she loved, bit by bit breaking down those whose resilience had once stood unfaltering. She’d never really known her father in her youth. He wasn’t the sort of man who doted on babies, and his discomfort with children was more evident to her when he became a grandfather. The scarcity of pictures she had of him with her daughters was not because he didn’t love them. He just didn’t know what to do with them. Tom Bethe was an academic man. A professor of literature at a local liberal arts college who could spend hours dissecting the literary conventions of various poets and playwrights and novelists, all the while sipping on whiskey. She imagined he’d have partaken in pipe smoking, too, if her mother had allowed it. He was an interesting man, just not to a child, which was why Maria didn’t really get to know him until she was an adult.
“I need your help with something, Dad.” She sank down into the plushness of the leather sofa nearest the door while she watched her father pour a skosh of whiskey into one of his tumblers. He eased onto the sofa across from her, crossed his legs, and rested his glass on the armrest beside him. It was a well-rehearsed position for him, and Maria was comforted by the familiarity of it. “I have a decision to make. An impossible decision, really, and I don’t know what to do.”
“There are no impossible decisions, Maria. Difficult ones, yes. And perhaps even agonizing ones, but none that are impossible.”
When he sipped the whiskey, she could almost feel it sliding down her throat, the warmth spreading through her chest before landing in her belly.
“This would definitely be categorized as agonizing then.”
Her father simply nodded, expecting her to continue. But how could she continue? How could she explain the unexplainable and then ask him to help her make a choice between life and death when one of the deaths could be her own?
“I can’t tell you the specifics,” she continued. “You wouldn’t believe me, anyway.”
He didn’t respond immediately. He waited to see whether Maria might continue. When she didn’t, he turned his attention to the tumbler in his hand, which he twirled softly against the worn armrest of the leather sofa. She could almost believe he was listening to it, the way his concentration didn’t falter as he watched the remnants of his drink finally still at the bottom of the glass.
“Well then,” he said, startling her with the suddenness of his words. “The first thing I do when I have an important decision to make is to list my options. And remember, of course, that not doing anything is also an option. It must constitute one of your potential choices.”
Maria nodded, acutely aware of the choices that were looming in front of her as they spun through her mind, but not so confident that she could peel them apart, layer by layer, and present them in a tidy list. “It’s complicated,” she said, drawing in a deep breath before exhaling and holding up one finger. “But I’ll try.”
One: let Beth die and go back to her family through Dr. Johnstone’s hypnosis. She held up another finger. Two: let Beth die and try to relive her previous life. Three: save Beth and try to relive her previous life. Four: save Beth and lose her family.
By the time she’d weeded out her options, she sat with four fingers raised but was no closer to a decision. When her father asked her if she was done, she simply nodded.
“Now,” he said. “Would you consider any of your choices less moral than the others?” She nodded as she thought about the choices that involved letting a little girl die, and left two of her fingers up. “Then take those two off your list.”
“I can’t do that. It’s complicated.”
“Of course it’s complicated. What you’re going through is a moral dilemma of sorts, but you can take those two options off your list, and you should, since you’ll have to live with the consequences of whatever decision you make.”
“But what if it makes no difference? I could argue that, on some level, all of these choices are immoral. And what if these choices aren’t really even mine? What if everything’s already predestined to happen the way it’s going to happen? In fact, one of those immoral choices that I could pick is to do nothing. And if I do nothing, aren’t I just leaving everything up to fate? To God’s will?”
“God is a cop out, Maria.”
He gulped down the remainder of the whiskey in the tumbler before he stood up for a refill, hesitating at the bar as if he wanted to offer her a drink. She waited for him to get repositioned on the couch before proceeding, noticing that his glass was filled a bit higher this time. They’d had this conversation before, but her father didn’t know that and was therefore ill-prepared for her next words.
“It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
Tom Bethe watched his daughter as she recited the last stanza to one of his favorite poems, and Maria couldn’t help but feel a tinge of guilt for the deception. She already knew why he had left the church all those years ago. He’d already explained to her his struggles with the idea of a predestined life, the idea that God would ask us to seek Him out in prayer for wisdom when He already knew the choices we would make; that if we prayed hard enough, and begged for forgiveness, our depravities would go unpunished; that the consequences of our choices didn’t fall upon our own shoulders because the outcome was always God’s will.
“I didn’t know you were familiar with Henley,” he said, coughing into his fist when his voice got caught in his throat. “‘Invictus’ is one of my favorite poems.”
“I know. You told me once.”
He took a large gulp of whiskey before he uncrossed his legs and leaned back into the sofa. His face was flushed. “I don’t remember that,” he mumbled.
“It was a while ago.”
She could see so clearly the two of them sitting on the deck of his condo in Clearwater Beach, sharing drinks and stories long into the night, toasting the memory of the wife and mother they both dearly missed. He’d retired to Florida when he became a widower. He couldn’t handle the memories. Or maybe it was the ghosts. Maria had shown up with a bottle of Talisker single malt scotch and two Cuban cigars that had been gifted to her by one of her patients, and when he’d had enough scotch in him to loosen up his tongue, he held out the cigar admiringly and admitted he’d once been audience to a Che Guevara rally. Apparently, he’d been trying to impress a girl but had made an early exit when he realized half the men there were trying to impress that same girl.
She missed that man. She’d never been his equal when it came to knowledge about philosophy or religion or politics, but she missed those frustrating and provoking conversations out on his deck, just like she missed her all-night conversations with Will. Those obstinate traits that ran through her father’s blood were the same ones that had endeared her to her husband. In many ways, they had been polar opposites. Will was social, charismatic, and spiritual. Her father, reclusive, rigid, and devoutly atheistic. But just like her father, Will was stubborn and defensive in his beliefs. Unlike most of the men she’d dated, he never surrendered his morals to impress her. While other men coddled her and tried to impress her with compliments and roses, Will challenged her. It made him interesting.
“You look so much like your mother right now.” Maria looked up to see her father watching her, studying her face. “I met her when she was just a few years older than you are now,” he said, sighing into his drink before tilting it back and finishing it off. “That was a long time ago.”
“Would you do it all over?” Under the glow of lamplight, she watched him contemplate the question. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the truth, but she knew that Tom Bethe would give it to h
er. “If you had a choice, would you choose this life again?”
“Absolutely.”
“What if it meant doing something horrible? Something you never imagined you could do?”
“Under the right circumstances, Maria, we are all capable of committing atrocities. Some of us just refuse to admit it.”
Until that moment, she hadn’t realized that it wasn’t her father’s advice she was seeking. She wasn’t looking for his permission, wasn’t even open to his suggestions. She’d already made up her mind. She just needed to hear that she wasn’t a monster.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“WILL I DIE?”
Dr. Johnstone watched her from the other side of the desk and offered no response. The diplomas and awards that hung on the wall behind him had Dr. Anderson’s name on them, but if not for that, it could have been any psychiatrist’s office. Her mother had reluctantly allowed her to meet with him again, and Maria had been able, with a last-minute phone call, to stop him from returning to Iowa. He looked like a different man. His face was clean-shaven, his shirt wrinkle-free, and his hair freshly trimmed. She almost didn’t recognize him.
“Will I die?” she asked again. “When you send me back home with the hypnosis, will my parents have to bury me?”
“Yes,” he finally replied. “They will.”
“And what will you tell people about the dead girl on the couch? How will you defend yourself after two hypnosis deaths?”
“The coroner will do an autopsy and find a bleed in your brain. And then I’ll write a research paper on it. How schizophrenics with prospective hallucinations have a propensity for brain aneurysms.”
“Is that what happened to the other person you sent home? A brain aneurysm?” He nodded in response. “And you think that will happen to me, too?”
“I think so.”
It seemed like such an important question, something they would have discussed before now. Leaving loved ones to deal with the aftermath certainly raised the stakes, but she couldn’t fault Dr. Johnstone for it entirely. There must have been some part of her that already knew the answer.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
“I just assumed you’d figured it out. I thought you knew that your death here would be your ticket home.”
“So I could die in a car crash and I’d go back home?”
“Or a suicide,” he replied, nodding toward her wrist. “But why would you want to do that when I can send you home so peacefully?”
Death didn’t scare her anymore. It was strange, walking through life without the fear of death, perhaps even welcoming it. It didn’t matter to her how she died, whether it was painful or peaceful or violent. Leaving behind her parents was what haunted her now. If she had to lose her own daughter, how would she want her to go? A car accident? Suicide? Hypnosis?
“What about the other repeaters?” she said. “The ones who died before they came back? Did you ever try to send them back with hypnosis?”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Not yet, anyway. But I’m working on it. And not all of us are meant to go home. Think about some of the repeaters throughout history who have gone on to accomplish extraordinary feats with the gifts they were given. Mozart, Picasso, Bobby Fischer.”
“Then what makes me so special?” she said. “Why are you so interested in sending me back, if I’ll just die here and you’ll never see me again?”
“Because I will see you again. You’ll find me when you go back and convince whatever version of me exists that you were here and that I was the one to send you back. And we’ll start to build a network. People from different lives, all working toward the same goals.”
“How do you know I’ll do that?”
“Of course you will, Maria. Think about the implications of this. Imagine being able to send people back and forth to different lives they’ve already lived, with all the knowledge they’ve learned along the way. Look at Bobby Fischer. We call him a child prodigy because by fourteen years of age he became the youngest U.S. chess champion, and by fifteen years of age was the youngest international grandmaster in history. But what if he came back with that knowledge? What if seventy years of chess experience and world-class competition followed him back from death and took root in a ten-year-old kid from a broken home in Chicago, who then went on to become a legend?” The flurry of Dr. Johnstone’s excitement was ricocheting off the walls of the office, bringing life to the stale air around them. “And Mozart,” he continued. “He started composing music when he was five and wrote his first symphony when he was just eight years old. Can you imagine?”
“But what makes you so sure they were repeaters? They could have just been really talented kids.”
“That’s an excellent point, Maria. And you’re right. I can’t be sure they were repeaters, since they both had formal training before they became masters at such young ages. But think about the savants. The people with absolutely no training who wake up one morning able to speak a new language, or crack cyber codes, or solve complex algebraic equations. The arts are one thing. Chess and music are beautiful pursuits, of course. But think about all the other ways this could be used.”
George was right. She was a scientist. She was fascinated by the implications of time travel, but she was equally leery of it. She’d seen firsthand the cost of it and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. There was a method to the universe. There were rules. And even though Maria was trying to skirt them, she knew there would be consequences. Dr. Johnstone wasn’t just skirting the rules, though. He was trying to rewrite the rule book.
“You can’t play God,” she said. “That’s not how this works.”
“Sometimes that is how it works. You should know that better than anyone, Maria.” The air stilled as time seemed to pause between them, two doctors arguing about the line between God and science. It was a line that had never before existed for her. There was never a God, or an alternate universe, or a realm of existence that defied knowledge. There was just science. Facts that could be proven and disproven by experimentation. Theories that existed because of research that could be replicated. Illnesses that could be cured with laboratory-produced medicines. “You called me today to ask me to play God,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
“I’m not asking you to play God. I’m asking you to send me back to my family because I’m not dead. It’s different.”
“But didn’t God send you here for a purpose? Aren’t we playing God by sending you back?”
“I don’t even believe in God,” she said, flustered by his questions and frustrated with herself for not having the right answers. She was once the kind of person who had an answer for everything, but lately she’d been finding herself confused and inarticulate. It was so foreign to her. “I don’t know how I got here.”
“Something sent you here,” Dr. Johnstone replied. “God, Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, the universe, the wind. Call it whatever you want, but there’s a reason you’re here, and by asking me to send you back, you’re just as complicit as I am.”
“Maybe I am,” she sighed. “But I’m just one insignificant person trying to go back to her family. What you’re talking about doing is entirely different. It’s the kind of stuff that starts wars.”
“It’s also the kind of stuff that prevents wars,” he said. “It’s all in the way you choose to see it.”
She supposed he was right. Who was she to point out the dangers implicit in taking advantage of a loophole the universe had missed, when she was first in line to use it? And who would she be when she got home? How would this place have changed her? She wanted to believe she’d be a better wife and mother, the kind who spent lunch hours with her husband and cooked healthy breakfasts for her children. A better doctor to her patients. The kind who listened to their stories and didn’t throw diagnoses and labels and drugs at them. But, underneath it all, who would she really be? A wife whose guilt would never allow her to share the awful secret of this journey with her husband. A mother whose
anguish would never allow her to look at her own children without seeing the bruises on the little girl she had helped to bury.
“I have a few good-bye letters to write before I can go,” Maria said, before standing and making her way toward the door. Her parents deserved something from her, some kind of explanation or apology, but she doubted there were any words in the English language that could come close to doing the job she needed them to do. And George deserved something, too, some kind of excuse for her weakness and gratitude for his strength. He’d be disappointed in her; they’d all be. “I’ll be ready tomorrow, if that works for you,” she said, and Dr. Johnstone leaned back into the chair and nodded in her direction.
“Tomorrow it is,” he said, his lips hinting at a smile. He’d gotten what he wanted, he and Maria both, and while she was confident that shame would accompany her throughout her life for the decision she was making, she was also confident that returning to her family would make it all worth it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“I KNEW YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN TO me.”
The air was cool, but the bite that had cut through her skin the last time she found herself on the back patio of her home in Mississippi with a scotch glass in her hand was noticeably absent. Her husband’s voice, as clear as the features on his face, reached her with ease, but Maria could only watch in stunned silence, almost too afraid to breathe. She was home. Will was sitting by her side. Her children were upstairs in their bedrooms. But hope was a thief, and Maria knew how it preyed on its victims with visions of what could be, before ripping it all away.
“You’re not real, are you?” she said, pulling herself to the edge of the chair before glancing down at the ice cubes that clinked against the sides of the glass in her hand. She placed the drink on the table between them and wiped the moisture from her fingers. “And that’s not really scotch in there, is it?”
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