The Other Life (10 page)

Quinn smiled and gave her brother’s wrist an affectionate squeeze. She had heard this kind of thing before. These big jobs just never seemed to materialize. Besides, she wasn’t sure Cordell was the type to settle down, even if he did have a steady job.

“I’ll cross my fingers he gets it,” Quinn said, “and that it makes you both happy.”

“Diplomatically spoken,” Hayden said. His sister’s feelings about Cordell weren’t exactly a secret.

“You know where I’m coming from,” she said. “I love you. I want you to have what Lewis and I have.”

“No offense,” Hayden said. “You two are my favorite breeders. But I don’t want what you have.”

They’d had conversations like this before, and Quinn just couldn’t accept it. Hayden insisted the kind of over-the-top security Quinn needed in a relationship would make him feel smothered. She thought he was trying to justify the volatility of his life with Cordell. Hayden’s response was that she was projecting her neediness onto him. It was a conversation that never got anywhere.

The waitress handed them menus and said she’d be back soon to take their orders. Hayden leaned in and asked Quinn what her big news was. She closed her eyes for a moment and pictured the heavy black telephone in the bedroom of the Manhattan high-rise she shared with Eugene. The memory of her mother’s voice was so vivid she shuddered.

“Maybe you need a drink first,” she said.

“Just spit it out.”

On the drive over, Quinn had decided the best way to tell Hayden was to be direct. Now that she was actually face-to-face with him, it was hard to find the words. She took a deep breath and licked her lips. Hayden stared, waiting.

“I spoke to Mom.” She said it loud and clear, letting him know she was serious.

“I don’t suppose she answered back,” he said.

He thought it was a joke. Quinn didn’t smile. She brought her face closer to her brother’s and laid her hand on his arm.
“I spoke to Mom,”
she repeated, enunciating each word as if it were a single sentence. “I had a conversation with her.”

Hayden blinked.

“A
real
conversation,” she added.

“What are you talking about? Mom died over—” He stopped and stared straight into Quinn’s eyes, a realization taking hold. When she saw it, she nodded, letting him know that what he was thinking was exactly right. It took him a few seconds to find his voice.

“A portal?”

She nodded again. Hayden’s hand covered his mouth while he took it in. His eyes began to water and his face turned red as his blood pressure rose.

“You okay?” she asked.

He put up his hand to let her know he needed a minute before he could speak. Quinn sat back and let him process.

Hayden was there the first and only time Quinn got close enough to actually touch the other side, to feel the physical reality of her other life. In fact, if it weren’t for him, she would have doubted the whole thing had actually happened. They were kids, playing where they shouldn’t. It was during the construction on their house, when the art studio was being added to the back. The contractors had dug out a foundation and laid the concrete. Next to it was the big mound of earth they had excavated but not yet carted away. Quinn and Hayden were forbidden from going into the backyard during all this, so of course it was the first thing they did when their mother, who was in a depression at the time, went into her bedroom and locked the door.

Quinn and her younger brother ran up and down the mound of dirt, laughing as they skidded down the side. They were careful not to get too close to the side adjacent to the hole, but at one point Quinn climbed to the peak and looked down into the concrete foundation. Hayden joined her.

“I think I can jump,” she said.

“You’ll get hurt.”

Looking back, Quinn couldn’t remember what she was thinking. Maybe she wanted to get hurt. Maybe it was the only way to get her mother’s attention. Or perhaps she sensed something extraordinary at the bottom of the pit, beckoning her. She recalled only that as she was falling, time seemed suspended for a moment, and she had the feeling that it wasn’t too late to change her mind, that she could slip back just a millisecond and have made the other decision. Then she hit the ground hard, and heard her leg crack before she crumpled and thumped her head.

As she lay there, hurt and bleeding, Quinn became aware of something strange beneath her fingers that distracted her from the pain. It seemed like a small hole the exact same size as her hand. She moved her arm away, and the opening transformed into a simple fissure in the concrete. She remembered sensing as a small child that another Quinn existed somewhere very close but hidden. There was something down here, some kind of opening to the other Quinn. Had it drawn her toward it? She reached out again to feel the crack, and the solid matter gave way beneath her touch. She stuck her arm all the way down into it and knew she was touching another version of her own life—the version in which she had made the decision not to jump. Quinn was aware of Hayden at the top of the mound of earth, screaming and then running into the house, but she didn’t pay attention. She was thinking about what it would be like to let herself go right through the crack. Would she be back up at the top of the mountain with Hayden, the unbearable pain in her leg nonexistent?

She must have passed out at that point, because the next thing she remembered was being laid carefully in the backseat of the car by her mother.

“I touched the other side, Mom,” Quinn said.

“Shh,” Nan said. “You’re okay. I’m here.”

“I didn’t go in,” she said, thinking her mother might be angry. “I just touched it.”

Nan’s expression dropped in a way that was unfamiliar to Quinn. It wasn’t sadness or anger. Her mother looked . . . scared. But then she took a breath and pursed her lips, an expression Quinn recognized as a summoning of strength.

“You hit your head, cookie,” her mother said, and then her tone changed as she addressed Hayden. “Didn’t I tell you two not to play out there? She could have broken her neck.”

Quinn’s father joined them at the hospital, but she didn’t get to talk to him until after they got home and she was resting in bed with her fractured ankle elevated on a pillow. The side of her head was bandaged, hiding the spot where they had shaved a patch of hair to give her more than twenty stitches.

“How are you feeling?” her father asked, sitting carefully on the side of her bed.

“I found something down there,” she said.

“Down where?”

“In the new basement. There was a hole that led to the other Quinn, the one who didn’t jump. I stuck my arm through.”

He touched her face. His hand smelled like soap. “That was a dream,” he said. “There’s no other Quinn. Only you, sweetheart.”

Hayden appeared at the door with a pack of colored markers, asking if he could draw on her cast. Quinn’s father kissed her gently on the cheek and left. Hayden took his place on Quinn’s bed.

“It wasn’t a dream,” her brother said, pulling the cap off a black marker.

Quinn propped herself up on her elbows and watched as he outlined a butterfly. “How do you know?”

“I saw,” he said. “I saw your arm disappear. I thought . . . I thought maybe it fell off. I was so scared I ran around the hill looking for it.” He paused to give his butterfly two careful antennae, the exact same length. He put the cap back on the marker and stared into his sister’s face. “Then I looked again and saw you pull it right out of the cement. I was screaming my head off but you didn’t look up. How did you do that? How did you make your arm disappear?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said, feeling almost guilty, as if she’d betrayed his trust by not having an answer.

Hayden opened a yellow marker and began to color in the wings of his drawing. “Was there really another world down there?” he asked as he worked. “Another Quinn?”

She picked up the black marker he had used and pulled off the cap to sniff it. It was licorice scented. She put the cap back on.

“Yes,” she said.

“How come I don’t have another life? How come it’s only you?”

She fluffed her pillow and dropped her head onto it, staring straight up at the ceiling. It was exactly what she herself wondered.

A few months later Hayden came across the word
portal
in a chapter book and brought it to Quinn. It was a silly science fiction story, but just knowing that such a word existed gave Quinn a way to think about what had happened. She had found a portal.

The waitress came to take Quinn’s and Hayden’s orders, and they scanned their menus quickly, making fast decisions so that they could resume their conversation.

Quinn told her brother everything that had happened—from the journey through to how it felt to have a whole other life suddenly, and how much harder it was to get back than to slip through. Throughout the account, she barely paused to take a breath, but when she finally finished and waited for Hayden’s reaction, he was busy studying his place setting.

The wind carried a dry leaf to their table and it alighted in front of Hayden. He turned it over to examine the veiny underside, and Quinn could tell that he was trying to compose himself so that he could speak without crying.

“What about Mom?” he finally said, looking straight at her eyes. “Tell me about Mom.”

Quinn took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. This was hard. It was as if she were given the ability to bring their dead mother back to life for them both.

“That’s the weirdest part of the whole thing,” she said. “Mom sounded so . . . normal.” Quinn closed her eyes and remembered her mother’s funeral. She remembered putting her hand on her father’s shoulder when he wept, and how that made him sob even louder. She remembered the unyielding resistance she’d felt when she tried to take his hand at the end of the service. It wasn’t that he didn’t
want
to leave. He simply couldn’t. He belonged with her.

Both memories were real—Quinn’s mother’s voice on the phone yesterday and her funeral seven years ago. She glanced down the street, wondering what it would be like if she had never received that terrible phone call that her mother was dead. She tried to imagine Nan meeting them here today for lunch. Her mother might be walking down the street right now, unconscious of her loping gait as her artist’s eyes roamed the surroundings, taking in shapes and light. Then she would see her two adult children sitting together and her face would transform.

“I don’t feel like she’s gone,” Quinn said. “When I think about that phone call from Dad . . . about shoveling earth on her coffin . . . it almost seems like a dream.” She picked up the dry brown leaf and closed her fist around it until it crackled. “I spoke to her on the phone yesterday, Hayden. How do I find a way to deal with this?”

He reached out and touched her closed fist. “Poor Quinn. You’re going to have to start grieving all over again.”

She shook her head. “I want to think of her as alive.”

“But she’s dead.”

“I heard her voice.”

“You’ve seen her tombstone.”

“I have her back, Hayd. How can I let go of that?”

He frowned. “This isn’t healthy.”

“Do you know what she asked me? She asked if I wanted to go out for dinner for my birthday.” Quinn felt herself lightening and smiled. She wanted her brother to understand how wonderful this was. “I can celebrate another birthday with her!”

“You’re not thinking of going back, are you?”

“I have to.”

“Don’t do it, Quinn,” he said.

“Why not?”

“You think you’re going to get something out of this and you’re not. You mourned for her once and it was nearly unbearable. Do you want to go through that again? Do you want to lose her twice?”

“I miss her so much.”

“I do, too,” he said.

“It’s different for me.”

“Quinn . . .”

She opened her fist. The leaf was now a handful of tiny brown flakes. She blew them away. “I need to understand why she did it,” Quinn said, wiping her hands.

“You know why she did it,” Hayden said. “She did it because she was sick. Trust me on this.”

Hayden spoke with authority. Quinn was the one who had gotten their mother’s dark hair and green eyes, but it was her brother who had inherited Nan’s bipolar disorder—a fact that had been discovered in college when a manic episode of staggering achievement was followed by a period of tortured confusion that left him unable to read or study. As far as Quinn knew, Hayden neither cursed nor resented his illness. Rather, he saw himself as one of the fortunate few who grew up with such a close view of the disease that he never forgot the importance of staying on his medication.

The waitress arrived with their meals. When she left, Quinn picked up her fork and mixed her salad. “There’s more to it than that,” she said softly.

“No, there isn’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” her brother insisted. “Mom didn’t kill herself because you had some stupid fight at Thanksgiving.”

No, she thought. She killed herself because I married Lewis.

 

QUINN DECONSTRUCTED, NO. 3