She’d never known how exhausting all that failure was.
How discouraging.
And, really, Edison had tried so hard just because he wanted to beat other inventors, and be more famous. It wasn’t his mother’s life on the line.
I don’t know that my mother’s life is on the line, either, Emma reminded herself. Even exhausted and discouraged and scared, she wasn’t going to start treating something like a fact if she wasn’t sure.
But this felt like a life-and-death issue.
Mom loves us so much, she wouldn’t go off and leave us like this if it weren’t incredibly, terribly important, Emma told herself.
If this wasn’t life and death, it was really, really close.
That was why Emma had been working on her mother’s code as close to around the clock as she could. She’d carried notebooks full of notations to school with her, and worked on the code every time the teacher looked away. She’d worked through recess and lunch.
“New project, Emma?” her math teacher, Mrs. Gunderson, had asked fondly as Emma walked to gym class scratching off letters and symbols in her notebook. “Is this going to be the one that wins the Nobel Prize?”
Emma liked Mrs. Gunderson—she liked anyone who liked math. But it was amazing how close Emma had come to breaking down into tears at that moment. She wanted to shout back at Mrs. G.: This isn’t some cutesy little-kid-pretending-to-be-a-mathematician project! This isn’t the kind of thing I used to do! This is REAL!
Would Mrs. G. have used that tone with Katherine Johnson at NASA when Katherine Johnson was calculating how to get John Glenn up into space and back down again without crashing?
Would Mrs. G. have smiled so patronizingly at the Enigma codebreakers during World War II who were trying to figure out how to stop Nazi subs from sinking Allied ships?
Even way back in the 1940s, those codebreakers had had early versions of computers to help them. Emma was pretty sure there was a way to set up a secret computer program to test various keys to Mom’s code, but it seemed like it would take too long to figure that out.
Or to make completely sure it was private and secure. Mom always made a big deal about that.
“‘Anytime you put something online, you have to ask yourself if you want the whole world to see it,’” Emma said aloud, quoting Mom. “That’s another saying we should test.”
“Are you sure it isn’t, ‘Whenever you put something online . . .’?” Chess asked.
And that was the problem with Mom’s sayings. They weren’t exact. Sometimes Mom had said “Anytime,” and sometimes she’d said “Whenever.” That meant Emma needed to try both versions, writing out the complete phrase, and then listing, a, b, c, d, e . . . etc. above each letter.
And what if the key to the code was actually “Every time you put something online . . . ”?
Maybe Emma was wrong about everything. Maybe Chess was, too, and they weren’t even trying the right approach.
Emma’s pencil snapped against her paper, sending the tip spinning into the air.
“Maybe you should take a break,” Natalie said from across the room, where she had twin earbud cords snaking out of her hair down to her laptop. She also had Finn curled up beside her, with his head drooping against her arm—he’d fallen asleep an hour ago.
“No,” Emma said stubbornly. “We have to solve this.”
“Well then, at least take some time to look at the books I brought from your mom’s office,” Natalie tried again. “Maybe that will help.”
“No, thanks,” Chess said, and Emma was glad that he spoke for both of them. She would have left off the thanks.
It bugged Emma that Natalie had been at the Greystones’ house without Chess, Emma, and Finn. Ms. Morales had had Natalie take care of Rocket because, Ms. Morales said, that gave them more time to have fun with their special Friday- night treat: a trip to Dave & Buster’s.
Emma hadn’t had fun at Dave & Buster’s. Ms. Morales had insisted she leave her notebooks in the car, so Emma had been reduced to writing potential code keys on napkins and awards tickets, and stuffing them in her pocket.
Surprisingly, this had also proved that she was better at Skee-Ball when she didn’t look while throwing the ball than when she did.
But all afternoon, anytime Ms. Morales was out of earshot, Natalie had made a big deal about how she’d smuggled out the two books from the Boring Room bookshelves: the dictionary and the old computer manual. It was like Natalie thought she had to be the one who provided a way to solve Mom’s code.
“I thought they might be important,” Natalie had said. “I looked up codes online, and there’s one type where you can use a dictionary or some other book.”
“Right—if the person who made the code gives you a page number and another number that tells you how far down on the page the key word is,” Emma retorted, almost as if they were arguing. “Mom didn’t leave us any numbers!”
Now Emma did at least reach across the desk and absent-mindedly rifle her finger across the pages of the dictionary. Just because it was Mom’s. Then she moved her hand to trace the crooked-heart picture on the back of Mom’s phone.
“What you should have brought us was the heart picture from inside Mom’s desk,” Emma told Natalie. “That might have been a clue.”
“You said it was just a copy of the picture on Mom’s phone,” Chess reminded her. “Do you think the original picture is a clue? Finn drew it on Mom’s phone case three years ago! How could it be a clue?”
“I don’t know!” Emma snapped back at him. “Doesn’t it feel like we don’t know anything?”
Chess stared back at Emma. His eyes looked watery, as if he might be on the verge of crying.
Or maybe it was just that Emma was seeing him through watery eyes.
“We’re all tired,” Natalie said, in a surprisingly gentle tone. “I don’t think we’re going to figure out anything else tonight. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Why don’t we all just go to bed, and then tomorrow morning—”
“No!” Emma and Chess said together, both of them shouting at Natalie.
Natalie jerked her head back at the force of their words. That must have yanked her earbud cord out of her laptop, because suddenly Mom’s voice surrounded them: “—I’m sure they’re taking care of each other. Ever since they were born, I’ve told my kids, ‘You’ll always have each other.’ I’m an only child myself, so—”
Natalie scrambled to plug the metal tip of her earbud cord back into its port, and the Mom voice went silent.
“Sorry!” she cried. “I’m so sorry! There’s a new interview with the Gustano parents out tonight, and I was listening to that, and . . . I guess this destroys our theory about your mother and Mrs. Gustano being twins, right? I mean, if she was telling the truth about being an only child, and—”
“Play it again,” Emma said.
“Emma, we don’t have to torture ourselves,” Chess said. “We can let Natalie—”
“Play it again!” Emma insisted.
Natalie fumbled with the laptop.
“I’m not sure I’m rewinding to the right place, but—”
Mom’s voice sounded again: “—since they were born I’ve told my kids, ‘You’ll always have each other . . .’”
Emma flipped over Mom’s phone and, fingers flying, punched in the code and opened the texting app.
“Mom told us the code key from the very beginning!” Emma cried. “We’ve had it all along!”
“What are you talking about?” Natalie asked.
Emma pointed at a clump of words on the screen of Mom’s phone. Natalie was too far away to see, but Chess leaned in close, then away.
“Emma, it hurts to look at that text message, Mom saying she’ll never see us again, ever,” he began, choking on his own words. “Do you really think . . .”
Emma tapped the sentence that began Tell them . . . , and Chess went silent. Meanwhile, Emma was counting.
“. . . twenty-four, twenty-five, TWENTY-SIX! It’s
perfect! With the apostrophe and the period, ‘You’ll always have each other” has exactly twenty-six characters, just like the alphabet, and that is something Mom says all the time, and if she’d only wanted to remind us of that, she would have said, ‘Tell them they’ll always have each other,’ so this has to be it! It has to!”
“Try it,” Chess said.
Dimly, Emma was aware that Natalie eased Finn’s head onto the arm of the couch and left him behind to come over and watch Emma writing down letters. Dimly, Emma heard Natalie ask Chess as he stood up and leaned in to watch, too, “Do you think this will explain the Gustano kidnappings, too, or just your mother going away?”
Dimly, Emma heard Chess mutter, “Let’s see if it works at all, first.”
It will work, Emma told herself. This time I know it!
“You’ll always have each other” wasn’t a perfect code key, because some letters duplicated—there were four a’s, three l’s, and three e’s, and so that meant anytime Emma encountered one of those in the coded message, she had to write down a variety of choices, and then go back and figure out which was correct from the context. She decided to focus on just one sentence at a time.
“Yes!” she screamed. “It makes sense! It’s real words!”
“Let us see!” Natalie demanded.
Emma kind of wanted to show only Chess first, but she was too excited to care. She slid her arm back, revealing the deciphered words in a sea of cross-outs and false starts.
Only then did the meaning of the sentence before her start to sink in:
How much do you know about alternate worlds?
Thirty-Six
Chess
“Alternate . . . worlds?” Chess repeated numbly.
Natalie was typing on her phone.
“I got the definition,” she said. “They’re parallel universes. Places that could be almost completely identical to our world, or very, very different. And there’s something about how they go along with theories of quantum mechanics, blah, blah, blah . . . an infinite variety of worlds existing alongside ours, but—”
“We know what alternate worlds are!” Emma exploded.
She was breathing hard, her eyes wild, her cheeks flushed, her hair held back only by a pencil she’d stuck behind her ear two hours ago and clearly forgotten about. She looked feverish, or maybe even delirious.
For himself, Chess only felt dizzy and confused. He knew what the word “alternate” meant. He knew what “worlds” were. Together, the two words were harder to grasp.
“Maybe if we . . . translate more of the code . . . ?” he began.
“Good idea,” Natalie said.
Emma opened her mouth, shut it, and picked up her pencil again. She held one finger beside the computer screen, inching the fingernail forward to touch every letter.
“So that becomes a w, then an e, then . . . ,” she muttered.
Chess knew he should offer to help his sister; maybe he should suggest they take turns with alternating words?
Oh, alternating. Alternate . . .
Chess felt dizzy again. His thoughts weren’t making sense. He kept his mouth shut.
Emma dropped her pencil and held up the paper she’d been writing on.
“Mom’s next sentence is ‘We all came from an alternate world, and I had to go back,’” she announced. “Could that be right?”
She sounded like she doubted her own ability to read.
“‘Two parallel universes might start with only one difference separating them,’” Natalie read from her phone. “‘Some scientists theorize that a new universe might split off every time anyone makes a decision, creating a separate world for each possible choice. Then the differences multiply. Or they might be erased. So if you walk into an ice-cream shop, there might be one universe created where you pick chocolate ice cream, one where you choose vanilla, one where you choose strawberry. . . .’”
“Nobody ever chooses vanilla or strawberry!” Emma protested, as if that actually mattered.
Maybe not in this universe, Chess wanted to joke. He was seized by an awful desire to laugh. He wanted Emma to shout out, Ha, ha! This was just a joke! Did you think I was serious? Mom’s coded messages actually says . . .
He couldn’t think what he wanted Mom’s coded message to say. He didn’t even know what was possible.
Were alternate worlds possible?
“Why are we talking about ice cream?” Chess asked. “Mom did not leave us because of ice cream!”
“We don’t know that!” Emma said, waving her hands helplessly at Chess. “Any little decision could change anything!” She blinked, dazed, as if struggling to go back to being her usual, logical self. “Like ice cream . . . This isn’t about Mom, but here’s how it could be a big deal. Say you pick vanilla instead of chocolate, and so the scooper guy has to go back to the walk-in freezer that much sooner to get a new tub of vanilla, and that’s where he is when a robber comes in with a gun, and so he isn’t shot and killed. . . . Or maybe it’s the other way around, and he doesn’t go back for the next tub of chocolate ice cream as quickly, and so he’s still at the counter when a robber comes in, and that’s why he dies . . . just because of ice cream! So now there are two different worlds created from that one little decision, one where the scooper guy is alive, and one where he’s dead. And, I don’t know, maybe he was supposed to become president someday, but because he’s dead in the one world, that means—”
“Can we stop using examples where people die?” Chess asked quietly.
Natalie looked up from her phone. Her gaze felt too sharp, too focused.
“We already know the difference between this world and, um, the other one,” she said, as if that was supposed to make everything better. But then she bit her lip. “Part of it, anyway.”
Chess could only stare at her. Even Emma stopped raving about ice cream.
“It’s your mom,” Natalie said. “Your mom and that woman in Arizona.”
Emma clenched the arms of her chair so tightly that it seemed like she might leave dents.
“Explain,” she whispered.
“Well, I don’t know if this is what split the worlds, or just a, a consequence,” Natalie said. “But . . . what if your mom and that Arizona mom are different versions of the same person?”
Chess recoiled. Mom was not a “version” of anyone. She was fully herself, totally unique. She was Mom.
Chess waited for Emma to start shouting about that—he wanted her to start shouting at Natalie. But Emma just gulped and held on to the chair even tighter. Now the color seemed to have drained from her face.
“Your mom and that Arizona mom look almost exactly alike,” Natalie said. “They sound alike. They use some of the same expressions—‘You’ll always have each other’? And . . . they’re both named Kate.”
Chess hadn’t known that part, but at this point, he didn’t even care.
“So maybe, before the worlds split, your mom and the other woman were totally, one hundred percent the same person,” Natalie said. “But the worlds did split—somehow. I’m a little fuzzy on how that could have happened. Maybe it’s like . . . I don’t know. Copying a picture on your phone, and editing the two versions differently?”
“Maybe the worlds split before Mom or that other woman were even born,” Emma interrupted. Her breathing was more ragged than ever. “So they were always separate. Did you ever think of that? Our mom is not just a copy!”
Chess wanted to cheer Emma on. But he felt too paralyzed to speak.
“Okay, okay,” Natalie said, her hands out as if she were backing away from a dangerous animal. “You’re right. We don’t know when the worlds split. Maybe that’s in the rest of the letter. But we do know there are two worlds, and two Kates. And one world’s Kate marries a man named Arthur Gustano in Arizona. And the other marries a man named . . . what was your dad’s name?”
Neither Emma nor Chess told her it was Andrew. Natalie kept talking anyway.
“Each woman still ends u
p having kids named Rochester, Emma, and Finn, on the exact same dates,” she added. “So . . . is that the only really big difference between the two worlds? Who your mom married? And then did that lead to all the other differences? What state they lived in, and . . . ?”
And the fact that those other kids got kidnapped, and we didn’t, Chess thought. That’s different, too.
He couldn’t quite follow what Natalie was saying. But he couldn’t forget about the kidnappings.
What if that was why Mom wanted them to be in this world, instead of wherever they’d started out?
How could she have known ahead of time that the kidnappings were coming?
Chess sat down, because he was afraid he might fall over instead.
“It isn’t possible to travel between two different alternate worlds!” Emma shouted. “All of this is just . . . hypothetical! Alternate worlds are just hypothetical!”
“Maybe they figured it out in the other world?” Natalie said. “Maybe you three and your mother were the first to make this kind of trip?”
Emma pressed her hands over her ears, like she was trying to shut out Natalie’s words.
“This is not what I expected,” she muttered. “It doesn’t . . . I can’t . . .”
Emma’s brain must have been spinning as badly as Chess’s. His thoughts were completely out of control.
“You have to translate the rest,” Natalie said.
She sounded calm. Or at least, calmer. Natalie mostly just seemed excited to have finally solved the mystery. It wasn’t her mom who was missing, in a completely different world. So of course Natalie could act like this was just a matter of deciphering code.
Natalie seemed to notice that neither Emma nor Chess were reaching for a pencil.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
Chess and Emma both watched dazedly as Natalie tilted the computer screen so she could see the coded message better.
“A’s and e’s and l’s are tricky, because they could be lots of different letters,” Emma explained weakly, pointing to her own scribblings.
“Got it,” Natalie said.
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