When the World was Flat (and we were in love) (20 page)

The front door opened again. “Lillie?” It was Dawn. “Your mother wants you to come inside. Now.”

I separated myself from Tom reluctantly.

“Sweet dreams,” he whispered, brushing my cheek again.

I closed my eyes, soaking in his touch.

“You know,” he said, as I turned towards the house. “Robert Frost was the guy who wrote that poem about the two roads. And in it, he says he wishes he could have traveled both.”

He remained on the sidewalk, his arms folded against the cold, as I walked into the house, worlds apart from the girl who had walked out of it seven hours earlier.

 

22

 

I lay awake until the early hours of the morning, watching the shadows creep across my ceiling. Without Tom the questions had piled up again and I was beginning to feel like a pinprick of dust on a table, waiting for Evacuee Lillie to come along with a damp cloth.

I thought of the hundreds of empty film canisters under my bed, but it was Tom who now held the ball of twine, who told me where I had been and where I was going.

The headlights of a car passed through my bedroom for the fifth time, sweeping across my wall like a beam of light from a lighthouse. I listened to the hum of its engine, wondering if it was Tom. Maybe he was on patrol, doing laps, looking for the other Lillie.

The thought warmed me like a hot water bottle and I snuggled under the covers, mulling over what he had told me at the sandhills. There were questions I had managed to answer on my own, like piecing together the corner and edge pieces of a puzzle.

I remembered my hallucination in the darkroom last month, where he had disappeared into thin air, leaving me wondering if I was high from the chemicals. I now knew it had been a vision of another dimension where Tom had decided to pay me a visit, coming down to the darkroom where he knew we would be on our own. Maybe he had decided to clear it up from the get go, before he even gave me the lift in the rain or punched Jackson at the railroad crossing. I wondered if the Lillie from that dimension was miles ahead of me, packing overnight bags for Rose Hill.

And then there was my conversation with Tom where he had claimed his rudeness was unlike him. In the memories I had from other dimensions Tom had been a gentleman through and through.

I reached into my mind and saw myself sitting in the lounge at Rose Hill, one hand on my swollen stomach. I had been complaining about my constant cravings for peanut butter and pineapple. Ten minutes later I had a serving platter of what Tom called pineapple butter – slices of pineapple with peanut butter spread on them – which had made me laugh and Rose kick with glee, her foot stretching my skin.

I lay the palm of my hand on my flat stomach and sighed, reminding myself again that these were not my memories. They were from another Lillie from another dimension – Lillie from the Seventh Dimension. I wondered when the two of us had split and who was the original.

Neither, I thought. We were both clones of a Lillie who had long been lost in the infinite dimensions, splitting whenever two doors opened and she walked through both. I saw her as an onion being peeled layer by layer with each split and hugged myself, as if I could hold my own layers together.

 

My eyes were hanging out of my head when Deb woke me the next morning for a shift at Tree of Life. My dark circles made me look like I had been sucker punched twice.

I stood for twenty minutes with a customer who was tossing up between a poncho and a woolen sweater, daydreaming of the dimension where Deb had decided to let me sleep in and wondering if that Lillie was dreaming about me too.

“What do you think?” the woman asked, pulling the garments down over her short, frizzy hair one at a time.

I plastered on a smile and told her the poncho suited her body shape, like it mattered. She went with the sweater; I knew she had gone with the poncho in another dimension.

 

I took my lunch break early and headed for the bakery.

I scanned the tables for Tom, knowing this was where we had hung out in other dimensions. My heart sank when I saw he was a no-show. I stood in line behind a college guy who used to date Melissa and his new girlfriend, who I recognized from the Duck-In Diner.

“Hungry?” a voice asked as I scanned the menu.

I turned and saw Tom. He was looking picture-perfect as usual in a gray coat that made his pale blue eyes look wintry. He grinned down at me and I threw my arms around his neck, nuzzling into his collar until I found the warmth of his skin.

“I kind of have a craving for pineapple butter,” I joked.

“You remember,” he murmured, his arms squeezing me until I was breathless.

Tom ordered two salad sandwiches with chips and freshly squeezed juice.

“Pineapple?” I asked with a laugh when they delivered the tall glasses of bright yellow liquid to our table.

“With a hint of peanut butter,” he responded with a wink.

I smiled at his joke as I picked up half of my sandwich. “I have a thousand questions, but only twenty minutes for my lunch break.”

He looked around and grimaced. “This is kind of public, Lillie,” he said, even though there was no one at the surrounding tables, except the college guy and the girl from the Duck-In Diner, who were in the middle of their own loved-up conversation.

“You are such a scaredy-cat,” I teased. “A scaredy Tom-cat.”

He looked at me with recognition and I knew it was a nickname he had been called by another Lillie. My mind went to the eight year-old Tom who had held her hand as they skated on the lake, going faster and faster until he called out for her to slow down.

In the memory, I closed my eyes against the icy wind. “You are such a scaredy-cat,” I had taunted, in return for him calling me a chicken. “A scaredy Tom-cat.” My voice had echoed across the lake and suddenly there was a crack, as the ice broke beneath my skates.

“You saved my life,” I whispered and then shook my head. “You saved her life,” I corrected, reaching across the table to touch his hand. I traced the deep lines on his palm, as I remembered those hands grabbing me as I fell through the ice; the coldness had been like a clamp around my chest as I hit the water.

The blade of one of my skates had clipped his chin, splashing blood across the ice, but he had held me tight and pulled me out, warming me with his body as we walked to Rose Hill. No, I corrected myself again. He had been warming Evacuee Lillie.

“I should have let her drown,” he said bitterly.

A stab of pain went through my chest and I withdrew my hand.

How could he have made the decision to let her drown? How could he have known that they would both be evacuated from their dimension years later and that she would draw the short straw and slide from dimension to dimension on her own? That she would decide to merge with her other selves rather than go it alone? It would be like looking at a baby and knowing it was going to become the next Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson.

Lillie from the Seventh Dimension, on the other hand, had drawn the long straw and landed in the lap of luxury, i.e. Tom. I was surprised when another pang of jealousy went through me as I thought of her climbing under the covers and into his arms each night. His bare chest was smooth and muscular under her hands and his breath was soft in her ear as he whispered goodnight. I closed my eyes, torn between blocking out the memories and watching them like old home movies.

When I opened my eyes, Tom was poking his sandwich and shifting the chips around on his plate. A strange sensation settled in my stomach as I watched him, like–

“Déjà vu,” I whispered.

He looked up and a twinkle came into his eyes, like shards of glass sparkling in his pale blue irises. “Do you know want to know what causes déjà vu?” he asked.

“They say it happens when one eye records a scene faster than the other,” I said. Told you I liked trivia.

He shook his head. “It happens when you have the same experience in two dimensions,” he said.

I guess I could understand how in a recently split dimension we could both be sitting at this table in another universe, like if I had ordered a ham sandwich instead of a salad sandwich. And how I could pick up my glass and take a sip of my juice at the same moment in both dimensions. I thought back to one of my last sensations of déjà vu in the quad. It seemed Sylv did flash her underwear too much if she was doing it in multiple dimensions.

“Want more trivia?” Tom asked in a low voice.

“Do I want more trivia?” I asked, as if it were a trick question. There were a thousand blank pages in my inner encyclopedia that needed to be filled.

“OK,” Tom conceded with a smile. “What about ghosts?”

“What about them?”

“Do you know what they are?”

I gave him a blank look.

“Go on. Guess.”

“Um.” I flicked through the pages of my mind. E… F… G… Ghetto… Gherkin… Ghosts… “Cats,” I announced.

He gave me an amused smile. “Cats?”

“Yep. Their eyes glow in the dark and they say when cats get up in the rafters or in the crawl space, they howl like banshees.”

“Sorry, Lillie,” he said with a low chuckle, “but ghosts are not cats.”

I pouted.

“Ghosts,” he said, leaning in as if we were telling scary stories around a campfire, “are visions of other dimensions. They can seem like hallucinations.”

Like Tom in the darkroom, I thought.

He leaned back in his chair. “It can be a trip to get a glimpse of someone who lives in your house in another dimension or someone walking through a wall that exists in your dimension, but not in theirs. You can imagine too what people think when they see someone who is dead in their dimension, but alive in another.”

I remembered Deb telling me how she was visited by her mother – my grandmother – a week after her death. Deb had walked into the kitchen and there was Gran, washing the dishes. I wondered if she would have been scrubbing dried vegetable lasagna from plates if she had known she had died in our dimension or if she would have been out spending the last of her social security. Of course, her only hint would have been a dream about dying or a cold shiver down her spine.

I sipped my juice thoughtfully, wondering what Jo would give to see her mom, even if it was in another dimension. I could remember her once saying she could imagine watching musicals with her mom, which told me she had survived in at least one dimension. But my Jo was gone. She is an evacuee, I reminded myself.

“Another piece of trivia,” I begged Tom, as a waitress cleared my plate.

Tom thought for a moment, his eyes following the waitress until she was out of earshot. “Soulmates.”

I looked at him and his eyes drew me in.

“Soulmates,” he continued, “are two people who have loved each other in another dimension.”

“Us,” I whispered.

“Lillie.”

I looked up at the sound of my name and saw Mr Green standing a couple of feet from our table, looking between the two of us with a bemused smile. He was nowhere near as thin as he had been the last time I had seen him and his cheeks had a healthy flush.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Good. And you?”

“Great,” he said, his eyes returning to Tom.

“This is Tom,” I explained. “Tom, this is Mr Green.”

I thought he would remind me to call him Dave again, but his attention was elsewhere. “Nice to meet you, Tom,” he said, sticking out his hand.

“Likewise,” Tom said, standing up and greeting him.

“Have you been in town long?” Mr Green asked, holding onto the handshake.

“A while.”

The older man nodded and then dropped his hand. There was an awkward silence before Mr Green said, “See you around, Lillie. Tom.”

I frowned, thinking it had been years since Mr Green had called me Lillie, instead of Pipsqueak. I lowered my voice and explained to Tom how Mr Green had months, maybe weeks to live.

Tom shook his head. “That man will live a lot longer than a few months.”

“But the doctors said it had spread…” I started, and then my mouth fell open as I realized Mr Green had merged, like his daughter. “How do you know?” I asked, not wanting to believe the last member of the Green family had become an evacuee.

Tom turned his head and pointed to the tattoo behind his ear. I reached out and touched the black markings. “Ouch.”

“Hot?” he asked with a grimace. “It can be a pain, literally. It heats up when evacuees are around, but it can be a bit hit and miss. I think the technology is breaking down.”

“Maybe those two are the evacuees,” I said, nodding at the college guy and the Duck-In Diner girl, who were playing footsies under the table. I knew I was grasping at straws, but Mr Green was my last link to my Jo.

Tom shook his head. “I saw your Mr Green on the street earlier. The tattoo heated up then as well.”

I slumped in my seat, wondering why the evacuees were sliding into my dimension instead of the infinite other dimensions in the universe – Evacuee Lillie, Evacuee Tom, Evacuee Jo, and Evacuee Mr Green.

“Entanglement,” Tom said when I asked. He told me the story of a girl who had saved the life of a boy by stemming the flow of blood after he was hit by a school bus. Ten years later the same boy saved the same girl from choking in a restaurant. They later married and had children. “It is quantum physics,” he explained.

“Spooky,” I said.

He smiled. “Einstein actually called it ‘spooky action at a distance.'”

I wondered whether I was also entangled with Evacuee Lillie. “Is she going to kill me? Evacuee Lillie?” I whispered, not wanting to be her fifth victim. It was like walking around with a bull's-eye on my back.

Tom put his hand on mine, his thumb stroking my skin. “No,” he said with a small smile. “You are safe, Lillie. She is gone. Thank God,” he added.

“Where?” I asked.