The Love That Split the World (29 page)

30

I lurch off the bed and grab my shirt off the floor, pulling it back down over my head and turning to search for my boots. Beau grabs my arm, but I break away.

“Where are you going?” he asks as I step into my shoes.

My voice quavers as I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand. “I have to find Grandmother.”

“Right
now
?”

I nod and rub at the tears on my cheeks as I turn back toward the door. Beau gets off the bed and snatches up his shirt too. “I’ll go with you.”

“No,”
I say more harshly than I mean to. “I don’t—I don’t know if she’ll come if you’re there. Stay here. Please stay here,” I beg. “Don’t leave, okay? Just stay here and wait for me.”

He holds my eyes for a long moment. “Okay.”

I cross back to him and stretch up to kiss him one last time before I leave. When I pull back, I walk to the door, slide it open, and look at Beau one more time. “I love you,” I say.

“I love you too, Natalie Cleary,” he says quietly, and then I dart out into the rain.

I know where I have to go—the only place where I stand a chance at finding her, the truth, at understanding Beau’s and my entwined fates—but first I have to make one last detour.

I get into the Jeep and speed back toward the intersection adorned in teddy bears and flowers and notes. I leave the car running, the windshield wipers dancing spastically, as I run through the rain to the memorial sign. It’s so hard to tear through the worlds, but when I do I find the same haunting words as before:
REST IN PEACE, NATALIE LAY
NE.

I let go of that world and it snaps away from me
immediately, dropping the
PRAY FOR MATT KI
NCAID #4
sign back in its place as my stomach slings back to my center. I feel for other worlds, but, despite my oncoming panic attack, the walls holding me here are more solid than ever. I scream in frustration as I mentally try to push at the curtain around me, and suddenly time starts ticking backward again. I’m sailing backward in time, the sun rising and falling, the cars speeding past backward, so fast that I almost miss the moment the sign in front of me changes.

Almost.

But I don’t.

Matt’s sign disappears, but there in its place is another: a wooden cross pounded into the damp earth and ruined by time. Burned into it is a date—fourteen years ago—and two
words:
BEAU WILKES.

I back away, horrified, fingers clamped over my open mouth as I wheeze and wail. Then it’s gone. Both night and rain have descended on me again, and Matt’s poster is where it should be, but still I’m gasping for breath, half-screaming my sobs as I run back to my car and jump in.

I race toward home, mind reeling. I reach the stone sign guarding the neighborhood’s entrance and turn down my cul-de-sac and park in front of my house.

The basketball hoop’s there. The shutters are green. This is still my world. I get out of the car and walk slowly up the yard to stand under the cover of the tree, staring up at the window of my closet.

I try to grab hold of time, to pull it upward around me and let myself fall through it into the past.

It gives in. Unlike trying to breach that ever-strengthening wall between Beau’s world and mine, it feels easier than ever before to draw the sun around the Earth, watch it splash over the far side of my childhood home over and over again until finally there’s a rental van sitting with its back open. The light hangs bright in the sky, and my family speeds from the house and garage to the van on a half-dozen different trips.

I keep going. Falling, falling, falling through time.

The van is gone. Rain shoots back up into the sky, clouds dissipate, the sun rises and falls. The cars in the driveway move backward and forward, disappearing at the mouth of the cul-de-sac and reappearing. I see Beau’s truck for an instant. I see him and me walk backward toward the truck and lie down inside it together. I see him right himself again, pulling me with
him until my back is pressed against the side of the car. I see us argue. I watch myself stomp backward toward the porch and scramble back up it and into my window.

I keep going.

It’s so simple, what I have to do to find Grandmother. It’s been so simple all along, and I didn’t see it.

Time still whisking past me, I finish crossing the lawn and pull myself up onto the porch roof, sunlight then moonlight then sunlight splashing my back as I go. I hop down into the closet and see myself speeding backward between there and the bedroom, undressing in the morning and climbing backward into bed as it becomes night again.

I walk into the bedroom, my heart almost in my mouth, and everything keeps moving as I go to stand beside the rocking chair. Time keeps passing through me, the world rewinding until I see an earlier version of me kneeling in front of the rocking chair, and my mouth goes dry.

It doesn’t make any sense. Grandmother should be here. I know she should: This is the night three months ago when she came to me to warn me. When she cried, I went to her and knelt there, just like the girl in front of me is doing, only Grandmother’s not here. The chair is empty.

I take another step forward and time slips through me again, this time moving forward in one abrupt jolt, as though I were just dragged upward through a mile of water in the blink of an eye, and the room changes: every detail, but only very subtly.

A bed like mine sits right where mine should, a similar quilt draped over it. The orange and black walls shine in the moonlight, but the shades aren’t quite right, and the rocking chair in
the corner has tiny roses carved into it. It’s my room, but
different
.

And there she is: Grandmother, sitting in the slightly off rocking chair, Earlier Me crouched at her feet.

I stop time’s movement to appear in my own bedroom, behind my own kneeling self, staring at the ancient woman I’ve always thought was God.

Her eyes, dark brown hazed by milky film, shift up from the Earlier Me, and her mouth drops open.
“You,”
she breathes,
“
already—
you’re already here.”

I watch as Earlier Me starts to turn over her shoulder—just as I did months ago.

“Don’t be afraid, Natalie. Alice will help you,” Grandmother tells her. “Find Alice Chan. She can help you.”

Before her eyes can process me, the earlier version of myself vanishes, leaving me alone with Grandmother. She stands from the rocking chair, her raspy breath the only sound.

“Who are you?” I demand.

Her cracked lips break into a sad smile. “Natalie,” she says slowly. “I’m
you
.”

31

“How is that possible?” I ask.

She flashes a sad smile again. “How is any of it possible?” It’s what Beau said when he told me he saw the two Unions too.

“What do you want?” I say, feeling desperate. “I couldn’t save Matt. You didn’t tell me it was him, and I couldn’t save him. He’s on life support.”

Her dark eyes—
my
dark eyes—fall to the floor. “I know,” she says. “But I didn’t come to save Matt.”

“Then who?”

“What do you really want to know, Natalie? Ask me the question that’s been weighing on you.”

The answer surges to my lips, though I’m less and less sure I want the answer. “Why are there two worlds—why Beau and me?”

“There aren’t two worlds,” she says simply.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re slipping in time, Natalie, seeing other moments in your physical space. Hypnopompic reach forward, and hypnagogic reach back.”

“Alice already figured out the time slips,” I say, impatient. “What I don’t understand is . . .” I hesitate, gathering the courage to say it aloud. “. . . why there’s a cross with Beau’s name on it in the same place there’s a memorial for me.”

Grandmother takes a deep breath. “Oh, sweet girl. I know you better than anyone. I know when you’re lying. You do understand. You just don’t want to.”

“There’s no way I’m this annoying in the future.”

“Young people always think old people are annoying,” she says. “But we don’t care, because we think
they’re
annoying.”

“Stop,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Beau died, Natalie. That’s truth. If you look at time in a straight line—no detours, no do-overs or rewrites or wormholes—Beau’s father made a left turn into oncoming traffic. He was drunk, and our mother had fallen asleep at the wheel. He saw her coming and sped up to miss her. She woke up and yanked the wheel left, but neither of them was fast enough. The passenger sides of the cars collided. You survived, and a five-year-old boy named Beau Wilkes died.”

Full plump tears roll over my cheeks. “You’re lying,” I squeal between my fingers. “He has a future. I’ve seen it. I’ve
been
there.” To the house. Our house. Our wisteria. A crib.

“I’m not,” she says softly.

“Why can I touch him then?” I shout. “Why is
my name
written at the memorial too?”

“Because it’s not the
whole
truth,” she says, looking down at the floor again. “With time, sometimes there
are
do-overs. There are wormholes. I believe Beau’s world exists to
you
because you have the power to change things.”

“
What
things? What are you talking about?”

“Beau’s death is in the past,” she explains. “It happened. But when you tore loose from your position in time, time tore in the process, triggering the slips. And when I was your age, I met Beau Wilkes, despite the fact that he had died years before. I discovered what I thought to be another world. I fell in love with the boy who lived in it, and my whole life changed. I wanted to spend every day with him more than I wanted to hide or to run from what was happening. Loving him changed me. And then I found . . .” She pauses, mouth tight. “Well, the same thing
you
found: a cross with his name on it, marked with the date of our accident. I kept pushing against the barrier between our worlds and against time, trying to see through it for some explanation. Getting to Beau’s world had been getting harder for me all summer, but I stayed there, kneeling in the mud until I could slip through time again. When I got traction, I was staring at my own name, not Beau’s. No date, but that didn’t matter. I knew right then, just like you knew, somehow we both must’ve died on that night. I looked it up, found a news story about that night, the accident that ended Beau’s presence in our world. The same accident that, in his world, left our mother crying at the kitchen table, sent our whole broken family moving out of that house and its darkness.

“And just like you, I thought there must have been some kind of fork in time, Beau surviving on one side, I on the other.
I planned to tell him, but I never got the chance. That night I woke up with a black orb over my face, and his world closed to me, permanently. Like I’d been locked back into linear time, no slips, no alternate realities. Or more like the split between our worlds was sewn shut.

“I went away to college, devastated. Every time I came back, I tried to get back to him, but I couldn’t make time budge. I couldn’t find his world. After school, I moved back to Union and started working with a professor at Northern Kentucky University who studied experiences like mine. With all of her subjects we found the same thing: a cataclysmic event preceding their time slips, some hint of an alternate world—a world in which that event had been changed or prevented—and a black orb marking the end of it all. I think that’s how it always is for people like us, who can move time. There’s a reason, some
thing
we could fix or change, if we only knew how.

“Maybe someone, in some time, has managed to do it. But if anyone were to actually change or fix that thing, their whole past would be rewritten, leaving them with no memory or evidence of how things used to be. It’s possible Alice and I helped someone make that different choice, but that probably would have erased our memories of ever having known that person. We do, however, remember those patients whose mysteries we tried and failed to help solve before their time ran out. Either way, it became obvious that we only have a certain span of time in which we can access and change the past: None of the subjects were successful in moving time or breaching alternate realities after their Closing. As if tears in time are self-healing, allowing those ripped from its natural course to
traverse freely until they are locked back into a linear track.

“I knew all of this meant there was no getting to Beau. But even when I went away to graduate school, I couldn’t get him out of my head, what had happened to him and whether there was some way to undo it. He’d been losing track of time before my Closing happened, as if the resealing of time was making him less and less real. That was the first hint for Alice and me that Beau’s world had collapsed alongside the wormhole within me—that the Opening was, in effect, the beginning of an alternate timeline, and the Closing was its end. All of our later subjects found that, leading up to their Closings, the same thing happened to those they’d met in their alternate realities. They lost time, like Beau. More and more of it, until there was no more to lose. It may be conjecture, but it’s conjecture in which even Alice Chan was confident:
We
are the door to Beau and his world, Natalie. When that door closes, he’s gone. When it closed inside me, he was gone.

“I did my best to move on. I married my grad-school boyfriend, did work that I cared about, poured myself into meaningful friendships. Still, I didn’t want to accept that Beau was gone, so I kept searching for a way to get to him. Eventually Alice realized I’d been going about it all wrong. Unable to move time anymore, I was never going to find Beau. My only hope was to
be found
in time. So I bought my parents’ old house and fixed it up, returned my childhood room to its original state to the best of my ability—so it wouldn’t scare you if you showed up here—and waited.”

“Waited?” I hear myself whisper.

“For you,” she says. “To find
me
. In the meantime, I
started teaching at the University of Cincinnati. I commuted so I could keep working with Alice and her new subjects, who revealed another piece of the puzzle: the physical sensations of time travel. When moving forward in time, subjects felt a pull in their abdomens, like they were rising upward. When moving backward, they felt as though they were falling. Pretty obvious, really, but what we hadn’t documented before was that the physical sensation of entering the Other World
always
matched that of moving forward, while the feeling returning to your own world matched that of moving backward.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand. What does it mean?”

“Time is an illusion, Natalie, relative to the person experiencing it. There’s the overall timeline of the world—dinosaurs, Ice Age, Middle Ages, Elizabethan Era, et cetera—but then each person experiences their own unique time stream as well. For most people that’s just a tiny section of time within that overall timeline. For people like us, it’s different. Our time streams can include excerpts from outside our linear lives. Think of arriving at our Senior Parade. Five minutes into our future, we were going to see buffalo where the school should be.
That
was our future, a moment occurring decades, if not centuries, in the past.

“Sometimes, you move through time and see everything changing before your eyes. Other times you lurch, or
slip
. That’s what used to happen to us as a little girl. Our body would wake up in the middle of the night, but our dreaming consciousness would lurch to a different time: a hypnopompic hallucination. You didn’t see yourself passing through every moment. You simply arrived, in
my
present, like you were locking on to me. That’s
what you do when you go to Beau’s world. You jerk
forward
, as if you’re stepping over ripples in time to a point in the future.”

“Forward?” I say.

“You feel it, don’t you? The same sensation as passing into the future?”

“Beau’s in the same
year
as me, same day even—how can that be a future?”

She exhales. “We’ll get to that. Anyway, shortly after we made the discovery, Alice passed away. I was alone by then, my husband gone, and I almost gave up on you ever coming. Then one night, while I was sitting in my rocking chair, you found your way to my present. I knew from looking at you that you were around eighteen, probably already in the summer we met Beau. You only held time there for a minute before you lost your grip again—your Closing was close, after all. I was so caught off guard. I tried to comfort you, but I didn’t even know if you could hear me.”

That was the night of Matt’s accident, the last time I saw Grandmother. Though for her it was the first. The fear of that night, of tonight, crushes against me even as I remember.

“I spent years waiting for you to find me again. I thought if I could just see you one more time, I could at least steer you to Alice sooner. When I saw you next, though, we were further back in your own time stream. You were so little, and I didn’t want to scare you—I didn’t want to
push
it, so I just told you a story, one of the hundreds I’ve spent my life studying and teaching. It was the most natural thing in the world to tell you those stories, because I knew what they meant to me already and what they would mean to you someday. That night you
listened, and then, after forty minutes, you were gone again.

“But a moment later you reappeared, and you held time there while we talked. It started skipping, like a scratched disc. I’d tell you a story, and then you’d lose traction. Those visits were far apart for you—six months or a year each. But for me, only minutes passed between them, as if your dreaming mind kept bringing you straight back to my time whenever it could, picking up where we’d left off. I watched you grow up in a matter of days.

“And as I said, I knew by then I’d never get to Beau again—has Alice explained the many-worlds interpretation to you yet?”

“I . . . I think.” My voice comes out as little more than a squeak. “She drew time with a bunch of branches. Each was a different world, I think; I mean, we’re talking about Alice, and she was in a science trance, so I’m not sure.”

Grandmother cracks a sad smile and nods. “We believe that those branches are wormholes. As such, they have an expiration date. An alternate future may be initiated, but unless the person with access to the wormhole
chooses
that future, it will collapse. Imagine an envelope that’s been sealed shut. You run your finger across the top of the envelope, and that’s time: one straight path. Then you take a letter opener, and you slice open an inch across the top.

“Now, when you run your finger over the envelope, there’s a portion where there are two separate paths, forming an ellipse. That’s the time between your Opening and your Closing. Say you run your finger partway up one—the current version of the world—and then decide you want the other one instead. You jump back to that initial split and change the course of
events to take the other path. When we arrived at the Senior Parade, the venture into the past was a part of our future, just as Beau’s world—his alternate version of the present—is a part of your future. It’s the present when you look at days and years, but it’s
your
future because his version of events hasn’t
truly
happened yet, not for anyone but you.”

“I’m still lost,” I flare. “None of this makes sense.”

“That split in the envelope—those fourteen years between our Opening and Closing—that’s the time during which we can choose a different timeline, Natalie. You can choose for things to continue as they did for me, with Beau’s world collapsing. Or you can go back to the moment when time was first torn, and change things. You can choose Beau’s course of events. After your Closing, whether through action or inaction, you’ve chosen which path will survive. For me, that means Beau died. He died when I was four, and in a way he died all over again when I was eighteen and his world, his possibility of a future, collapsed.

“But you . . . you can still see it. A future where . . .” She meets my eyes, shaking her head as tears bloom along her lashes. “Where you go back and you choose him.”

My mind reels with questions and mental diagrams and so much panic as I try to make sense of what Grandmother is saying. Again and again, my body replays the sensation of passing into Beau’s world, and every time I feel the same thing: the upward motion, the feeling of being lifted quickly, the same when I swim forward through time. What does it mean that Beau’s present is my future? What does it mean that his version of the last fourteen years hasn’t truly happened yet, but that it will?