The Love That Split the World (28 page)

“It’s me,” Beau says. “Destroyer of worlds.”

It’s not true, but I can’t make myself say it. “I want to go somewhere safe.” Somewhere the pain in my chest can’t follow.

“Okay, Natalie Cleary,” he says quietly. “I’ll take you somewhere safe.”

We drive away from the hospital, away from Union, deeper into the country, out toward the salt-lick-turned-state-park where they found woolly mammoth fossils in the 1700s. We drive away from life and streetlights until the narrow road corkscrews back and forth through the moonlit hills and Beau pulls off at a dilapidated redbrick house with a half-collapsed front porch and big rectangular windows framed in crumbling
white paint. We get out of the truck silently, the floorboards of the porch whining as we cross them into the dark house.

We walk from the hallway into an old living room where squares of silver light shine from the windows toward the old brick fireplace. The floor, though old, is smooth, polished, the wallpaper mostly scraped off.

“Doesn’t look like much,” Beau says quietly, like he’s afraid to disrupt the dust. “But the foundation’s solid.”

I look back to where he hesitates in the doorway. “What is this place?”

He ambles toward me and takes my hand in his. Slowly we begin to move through time, as though being towed upward through calm water. Reds and golds then blues and greens pop and flicker against the windows as Beau carries us into the future. I watch another version of him travel full tilt through the room, replacing bricks in the fireplace and baseboards and wainscoting, patching holes in the drywall, painting the room a soft peach, and shoving a beat-up piano up against the wall as the sun and stars take turns splashing us. Wildflowers sprawl out from the window across the yard and die beneath frost, only to regrow. Wisteria clumps up around the windowsills, blossoms opening and closing like heartbeats.

Tears rise in my chest. I’m flooding with them as the house becomes brighter, fresher, more and more a home. Time-slipping feels different this time, though, less substantial and more like a dream—the
shadow
of a future. “Beau, where are we?”

Whitewashed slats appear in a pile on the floor. The blur of a bear-sized person hammers and fastens and screws the beams together. They become a rectangle, a box. They become a crib.

“You wanna hear a story, Natalie Cleary?” I nod, and he folds his arms around me. “We live in the same world,” he says softly, slowly. “After school, you get a job teaching over at NKU. I coach a high school team, or maybe middle school. We live in an old house with a big yard, and one day, I talk you into marrying me.” He rests his chin on top of my head. “You wear flowers in your hair at our wedding, and Mason gets so wasted he throws up during his speech, but we’re so happy, we just laugh.”

“You finish my song,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I finished that weeks ago,” he says. “Pick something else.”

I tighten my eyes against the tears, my arms against Beau’s back. “The porch,” I say. “Every night, you and I sit outside until the sun goes down. And a piano. I surprise you with a piano.”

“And you dance whenever I play it.”

“Where?” I ask, laughing.

“In the sunroom, of course,” he whispers.

“Oh, of course. And does time move when you play and I dance?”

His hands enfold my jaw, and he kisses my forehead. “No, Natalie,” he says. “Time doesn’t move. It stands still.”

“We never run out of it,” I say.

Beau looks down at me, thumbs swiping away twin trails of tears on my cheeks. “And it’s enough for you?”

I swallow the painful knot in my throat. “It’s more than enough.”

And for a moment, I let myself believe it’s real. Beau restores this house for me. I come home to him every night, fall asleep, and wake up with my legs tangled with his. I go to all
the games he coaches, and watch him kiss our kids goodnight, and someday notice his hand is wrinkly in mine. I’m the one who gets to see every part of him and who watches his softness cover the hard world. Still, we move forward, forward, forward, and for two beats of my heart, I’m sure I see an old, bent woman standing on the porch, looking through the window. Dark hair falls down around her hunched shoulders, and the pink light of early morning splays its fingers out around the crown of her head, silhouetting her face, but I still think I see her barely smile as her hand lifts up and presses against the dew-splotched windowpane. Before I can say a word, Grandmother disappears again, so thoroughly I can’t be sure she was ever there.

“You asked me what I want,” Beau says. I turn back to look up into his face, and into him. His hand comes up to cradle the side of my jaw.

Time slips back into place, and it all goes away. I want it too. I want it so much it hurts.

“You’re wrong, Beau,” I say. “You’re not the atom bomb. You made all this. You made the world.”

The nightmares plague me endlessly. In these, I’m the one driving and Matt’s beside me, where my toddler-sized car seat should be strapped in. Bright headlights flash up over the windshield, making the heavy rain glitter like diamonds for that silent instant before the car goes off the road.

My ears are ringing so much I can’t hear my own screams, and Matt is silent, eyes glazed, yards of tubing coiled in the backseat and stretching into his nostrils. “Matt,” I shriek.
“Matty
.
”

I wake panting, my heart thundering, and when my eyes snap open, my whole body clenches painfully as I see the black orb floating overhead. “No,” I hiss, scooting backward away from it. “No, no.
No
.”

It’s starting: the end.

The orb drifts toward me, and I tumble out of bed, running to the dresser where my car keys sit. I don’t know what I’m thinking; all I know is I have to get away from that orb. I have to outrun this. I stuff my feet into the boots by the door and flee from the room, circle the house at a sprint, and jump into the Jeep.

“Grandmother,” I’m whispering under my breath. “Don’t let this happen. Don’t let this happen.”

I start the car and back down the long driveway haphazardly, jerking onto the country road beyond.

How do I stop this?

At first I head toward Beau’s, like if I can see him, tangle my fists in his hair and shirt, he can’t be taken from me. The Other Matt can’t be taken from me. Life as I know it can’t be pried from my grip.

But as I near the turnoff for the Presbyterian church, sweat breaks out along my hairline, my hands start shaking against the steering wheel, and I know exactly where I’m going, where I’ve been going this whole time. I pass the church and the high school, and still I keep driving, my mouth dry and heart speeding.

I try to think about nothing. I try to think about anything but my destination and the dread coiling in the lowest part of my stomach or the creeping sensation along my neck. I see it up
ahead, and a burst of adrenaline shoots across the back of my tongue, metallic and cold.

Don’t think about it. Don’t go there. Don’t remember it
.

I pull off to the shoulder, the headlights lancing over Matt’s memorial, startling me anew. I leave the lights on as I step out of the car, the only illumination besides the red glow of the stoplights strung across the road. It’s an intersection of two narrow country lanes with poor visibility due to the wall of trees on both sides of both streets. It used to be a two-way stop, but they changed it to a four-way and later added the stoplights after one too many accidents happened there.

My accident.

I run to the memorial, feeling all the way as if I’m being chased, hungrily pursued by the black orb, by a closing door trying to shut me out of Beau’s world, and Grandmother’s too.

But this is where it all started. Somehow I know that. Somehow I believe I can stop this.

I drop to my knees in front of the poster, my eyes pushing against the dark. I think about Beau’s hands sweeping over the piano and visualize my movement, but I can’t make the veil inside me drop so I can pass through.

“PLEASE,”
I scream into the night. My eyes bounce down the bank to the mostly dry creek bed, my ears tuning in to the trickle of water over stones and the buzz of mosquitoes skating across the surface.

It’s like I’m back in the car, flipping endlessly, stomach lurching, tiny voice screaming as we careen into the water and the windows explode in a fine mist of glass. I find myself gasping for breath, reaching for something to steady myself as there are
several sharp tugs at my stomach. When my hand touches the poster but instead finds cool stone, I realize I’ve finally broken through.

I don’t know to which world—Beau’s or Grandmother’s or some other entirely. A world in which purple and yellow wildflowers grow thickly around the telephone pole and beyond.

All I know is it isn’t my world. It can’t be mine.

Because below
REST IN PE
ACE
, the name engraved on the stone is
NATALIE LAYNE.

29

I’m dead.

Somewhere, sometime, I’m dead.

There’s an epitaph too, but the letters jumble in my mind, unread. Rain clouds break apart overhead, and I feel myself gagging in front of the poster and run a few feet before the bile shoots up my throat and hits the slick, muddy grass between my boots. I shouldn’t drive, but I can’t stay here. All I know is I can’t stay here. I stumble back to the Jeep and turn around to drive back toward the high school, Beau’s house, my house, Megan’s house.

I find myself on the stormy gravel road, crossing the little bridge that leads to the Kincaids’. Next thing I know I’m outside Beau’s house—and it
is
Beau’s house, and the lights are on, but his truck isn’t there.

Still I don’t leave. Where will I go? Where will I be safe when I know that somewhere I’m dead, my body rotting beneath the ground, and that maybe tomorrow morning I’ll awake and that orb will have descended around me, cutting me off from the two people who can understand all this.

I turn off the car and that’s when I hear the screaming. Two hardly familiar voices shouting furiously at one another: Beau’s mom, Darlene, and her new husband, Bill.

Their words are impossible to decipher, muddled by the linoleum siding and drywall between them and me, but I can tell it’s serious, brutal, angry, and I don’t know what to do.

I start the car and drive away, backsliding again into my thoughts and my terror, until I find myself parked outside Megan’s house, my whole body trembling like a sapling in a tornado and my face striped with tears and snot. I wipe my nose
across my arm as I get out and circle around the white, columned mansion to the basement patio and let myself inside, out of the rain.

The orb is gone, but I know it will be back. The second I fall asleep it will engulf me. I sense it. This is the end, and I won’t have any answers. I’ll have no peace.

I kick off my boots and pace. My legs and back ache, so I sit on the edge of the bed, trying to empty my mind but stay awake, to not think and not sleep. Hours pass and I’ve managed to conjure a mindless numb, but when I hear the knocking on the glass door, “Thank God” escapes me, and I realize I’ve been holding my breath, waiting.

I hurry to open the door, but Beau hesitates, swaying in the doorway with his face turned down. Something’s wrong:
he’s sopping wet, his hair dripping along the outside of his downturned face. I take his hand, and he squeezes mine in his, almost painfully. “Beau?” I whisper.

I touch his face, and he flinches under my fingers. I tilt his chin up to me.

“Oh my God,” I breathe. His lip is split and, though no longer bleeding, still smeared in red. His left eye socket is garishly bruised, the top of his high cheekbone starting to swell.
“Beau.”

He finally looks at me, and I feel my heart breaking in my chest.

“Why are you all wet?” He half turns away, face hanging again. “Beau, what happened?”

“Bill sold my truck,” he says.

“What?”
I ask. “How? It’s not his.”

“He’s an addict. They’re all goddamn addicts,” he says. “It was in my mom’s name, but she didn’t know he was doing it. Someone just came and took it. Then Bill came home high. My mom was mad, and they started to fight.”

He stops talking for a second, his bottom lip trembling. I don’t say anything; I’m waiting on the edge of a precipice, afraid any motion will shut him up, shut him down. Finally he goes on. “He started hitting her, and I pulled him off her, but . . .”

I press my fingers to Beau’s split bottom lip, and his eyes find mine. “She told me to leave.”

“I’m sorry.” I stretch my arms up around his neck. “I’m so sorry, Beau.”

I pull him closer, and he’s tense and stiff in my arms for a second before his eyes close and he starts to shake, his face pressing into my neck, my chest, his hands gripping my hips as he silently
cries. “I’m so sorry,” I say again, cradling his face as I kiss his forehead, his cheeks, his black eye, and neck. “I’m so sorry.”

I pull Beau inside the rest of the way, and clumsily close the door behind him as he kisses me roughly, ignoring the slice through the side of his lip and his soaking clothes between us.

Cool rain and hot tears, mine and his, slip down our faces, catching between our mouths as we wind ourselves together. He lifts me and carries me to the bed, and I hear myself say,
“Don’t let go.”

He shakes his head against me. “No.”

I want to tell him I love him. If I don’t get to tell him about the headstone with my name on it or the black orb floating over my head or the panic attacks or the end looming over us—it will be okay. But if I don’t tell him I love him, I’ll regret it far past the end.

I need him to
know
he’s loved.

I need him to feel safe, like he makes me feel safe. I need to wrap my love around him and leave it there, even after I’m pulled away from him forever.

“I love you.”

He lifts his face away from me, and his rough hands push the hair back from both sides of my face before he presses his wet nose and mouth against my cheek. “I love you, Natalie Cleary.” It’s no more than a whisper. It takes no longer than a heartbeat.

“I love you,” I tell him again.

“I love you,” he breathes, lifting me against him and holding me there, the muscles of his body and mine both tense against one another. I skim my hands up the back of his soaked shirt and along his damp skin. He sits back, letting me sit up
too as he peels the thin gray shirt off and tosses it on the floor.

My heart is pounding, but I don’t feel nervous. I feel only the crushing heaviness of a future without Beau, where I’m not there to pull him inside and protect him from all the darkness and pour light into him through kisses and touches and whispered words.

His fingers graze the hem of the tank top I’d planned to sleep in, the front already cold and damp from the water squeezed out of his shirt between us. His hands are so careful, his eyes heavy, as he lifts the shirt from around my waist, up over my shoulders. For a minute, we sit there looking at one another, his hands soft on my bare waist, and then he slides me closer to him and folds his arms around my bare back, placing his lips against the space between my neck and shoulder as our chests connect. His skin is softer than I would’ve expected, unevenly tanned by the sun and etched in muscle.

He takes my chin in his hand and brings my mouth back to his, a deep yet delicate kiss as his rain and sweat scents curl around me. I slide my hands around his back, feeling every new inch of him. I pull back as my fingers graze something rough and raised up along his spine, between his shoulder blades. “What’s that?” I whisper.

“Just a scar,” he says.

“What happened?” I ask, gingerly touching the raised streak again.

“Car accident,” he says. “I was five. My dad was drunk. Nearly died.”

My heart stops in my chest. I feel all the blood drain from my face and my hands. I swallow the lump rising in my throat
as the weight of the whole night crashes down around me.

“Where?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

“Where?” he repeats, clearly confused.

“Beau,
where
?” I choke out.

He shrugs. “Same place Matt wrecked, actually.”