In Some Other Life: A Novel

by Jessica Brody

  It always looked like a sunflower.

  Dad started out small. A few photos here and there, mostly of Mom. He didn’t start getting really serious about the project until after he converted the basement into his studio. That’s when he started taking pictures of anyone he could persuade to sit for him. Neighbors, friends, the gardener, and every delivery man who was unfortunate enough to have our house on his route.

  I fall back onto my butt, clutching the small stack of yellowing photographs in my hand, trying to make sense of my rambling, chaotic thoughts. Trying to rein in the wild questions that are galloping through my mind.

  What happened down here?

  Where are the rest of Dad’s photos?

  Why is his studio suddenly gone?

  And most important, if Dad hasn’t been down here this whole time like I thought, then where is he?

  Then a Baby Cries

  My phone is still lying on the ground. I grab it and click on Dad’s name. It rings and rings and then goes to voice mail. “Hi. This is Daniel Rhodes. I’m unable to answer the phone right now. Please leave your message and either I or my assistant will call you back as soon as possible. Thank you.”

  I quickly hang up. That message gives me the creeps.

  It is a joke, isn’t it?

  I jump when, a second later, my phone vibrates in my hand and I see my father’s name on the caller ID.

  “Dad?” I ask, my voice shaky.

  “I only have a few minutes between setups, but I saw you called twice. What’s up?”

  I pull the phone away from my ear and check the caller ID again, just to be sure it didn’t display another name. Because, let’s be honest, the man on the other end of the phone is not my dad. He sounds way too frazzled and stressed and serious. Like this whole talking-on-the-phone thing is just a big inconvenience.

  “Everything okay?” I hear him ask through the speaker.

  I quickly return the phone to my ear. “Yeah. Everything’s fine. I just haven’t seen you in a while. I went down to the basement and—”

  But I’m suddenly cut off by a loud wailing in the background. It sounds like a baby crying. And then Dad shouts, “No! No! We’re not shooting him until eight! Right now it’s only the mother! Can someone quiet that kid down? I’m on the phone!” There’s a muffled noise and then my father says, “I’m sorry, honey. What were you saying about the basement?”

  A chill starts at the top of my spine and travels all the way down to my toes. “Dad,” I begin warily. “Where are you?”

  He sighs. “Still in New York, unfortunately. The Cuddles Diaper gig is taking longer than we expected, which means we had to push back the cat food job in Boston until next week. Tell your mother I’m sorry.”

  New York?

  Boston?

  Diapers?

  CAT FOOD?

  “I-I,” I splutter, trying to find the words to form a question I don’t even understand. “I’m confused. Why are you in New York?”

  He laughs. “I ask myself the same question every day. But I just go where the big bosses tell me to go.”

  Big bosses? What big bosses?

  Dad has never had a boss. He always loves to brag about how he’s his own boss. Then he makes stupid jokes like “Who’s the boss?” and “Bam! I just photographed that thing like a boss!”

  Is he making another one of his lame jokes?

  I’m about to ask this very question but then I hear a loud crash on the other end of the phone.

  “Crap,” Dad swears. “Sorry, honey. I gotta go. An incompetent PA just knocked over a ten-foot wall of diapers. Give Frankie a hug for me. Bye.” I hear another muffled noise, followed by my dad shouting, “What is going—”

  Then the call is ended.

  I sit in the dimly lit basement, staring at my darkened phone screen as I attempt to run back through that bizarre conversation in my head. But each time I replay it, it becomes more puzzling.

  Why is Dad in New York with screaming babies?

  Why isn’t he here in this basement surrounded by the watchful eyes of a hundred family, friends, and strangers?

  With sudden determination, I launch to my feet and bound up the two flights of stairs until I’m bursting through Frankie’s bedroom door. He’s seated at his desk, shuffling the deck of Cosmic cards from his What’s the Matter? board game.

  “Frankie!” I say breathlessly. “I need to ask you something.”

  When he sees me, he immediately brightens and sets the cards down on the desk. “Kennedy! Oh good, you’re home! I’ve made a list!”

  He grabs his notebook from the bedside table and flips it open.

  I squint. “What kind of list?”

  “All of the things I’m positive are different about me in this universe.”

  “Frankie, I—”

  But he quickly shushes me. “Just listen.” He glances down at his notebook. “One, my compulsive need to buy a new toothbrush every six weeks.”

  “That’s the same. Look, I need to ask you something about Dad.”

  “Two, my extreme dislike for fabric softener commercials.”

  “The same! Now, can you focus, please? This is important.”

  He frowns at his notes, discouraged. “The same? How could that be the same?”

  “You don’t like when companies use inanimate-objects-come-to-life to sell domestic products.”

  “That bear is freaky!” he cries defensively.

  “Frankie,” I urge. “What does Dad do for a living?”

  “He’s a photographer,” he replies dismissively, glancing back at his list. “Three, my inability to pronounce the word wor-chest-sure.” He tilts his head. “Wor-chest-shire?”

  I grab the notebook from his hand. “He’s a photographer?” I confirm.

  “Wor-kest-sure?”

  “Frankie!” I shout.

  He finally focuses on me. “What?”

  “You said he was a photographer?”

  “Yes. Dad’s a photographer.”

  “What’s the name of his camera?”

  “Magnum. It’s named after some lame TV show from the eighties.”

  “And he takes pictures of eyes, right?”

  Frankie looks like I’m speaking in code. “Eyes?”

  “Yeah, you know, eyeballs.”

  “Like an ophthalmologist?”

  “No. Like close-up pictures of eyes. You know, where they no longer look like eyes. They look like … other things.”

  He still doesn’t seem to follow me and I feel my heart race.

  “What do they look like?” he asks, suddenly interested.

  I clench my fists to keep from screaming. “What does Dad photograph?”

  Frankie shrugs. “Whatever they tell him to. Diapers. Dog food. Tires. Hamburgers.”

  “Who?” I demand. “Whatever who tells him to?”

  “The company he works for,” Frankie replies as though it’s obvious.

  My breathing grows shallow. I want to curl into a ball and disappear. “What company?” I ask, barely audible, barely even a squeak.

  Don’t say it.

  Don’t say it.

  Don’t say it.

  “Jeffrey and Associates,” Frankie replies.

  The walls start to close in on me. The Stephen Hawking poster glares at me with a smug expression that says, You really didn’t think this would be easy, did you? I collapse onto Frankie’s bed, feeling the weight of the universe cave in around me.

  He said it.

  Then I Count the Stars

  No. He can’t work for them. He turned them down. A hundred times. He always turns them down. He rips up their offer letters and throws them in the trash. I’ve seen him do it countless times!

  “You’re lying.” I fix my gaze accusingly on Frankie. “Dad would never work for those soul-sucking corporate buffoons.”

  He chuckles. “That’s exactly what Dad calls them.”

  I shiver. I know that’s what Dad calls them. That’s where I got
it.

  “If he knows that they’re soul-sucking corporate buffoons, then why does he work for them?”

  Frankie shrugs. “The art thing wasn’t working out. They sent him the offer and he took it.”

  I hold my head in my hands like I’m trying to stop my brains from bursting out of my ears. “No, no, no. The art thing did work out. It did! It just took a little time. I don’t understand why he wouldn’t wait. Why he didn’t have confidence in himself.”

  Frankie shrugs. “There’s no telling what chain reaction causes someone to do something differently in one universe or another. There are an infinite number of possible factors that could have contributed to Dad’s decision to take a job that forces him to be on the road more than half the year.”

  “More than half the year?!” I cry, feeling like something heavy is sitting on my chest, pushing down. “Is that why Mom works from home?”

  “Only in the afternoons when I get home from school. Why? Mom doesn’t work from home in your life?”

  I throw my hands up. “No! She’s always at the office and ever since she made partner, we hardly see her at all.”

  “She made partner?”

  I blink at him with sudden comprehension. “She’s not a partner at the firm?”

  Frankie shakes his head. “She’s a senior associate.”

  “So she never got a promotion and bought the Lexus?”

  Frankie whistles. “Whoa. Mom drives a Lexus in your world?”

  “Yeah,” I whisper, as more pieces fall into place. “She gave me the Honda and I named it Woody. That’s why she was so upset. I really did take her car.”

  I fall onto my back and stare up at the constellations of little plastic stars that Frankie glued to his ceiling. Then he lies down next to me and we stargaze together.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, tears brimming in my eyes. “Why would Dad take that job offer? He promised me he would never sell out. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It makes sense in the grand cosmic scheme of things. That’s where everything has meaning. We just can’t always see what that meaning is.”

  I glance at my brother out of the corner of my eye. I don’t know what I’d do without him. I’d be so lost right now. I mean, I’m lost even with his explanations.

  “For instance,” he goes on, “who knows why in this life I read all the Harry Potter books six times, while in the other life…” He leaves the sentence hanging, prompting me to finish it.

  “That’s a trick question,” I say flatly. “Once you found out there were seven Horcruxes, you had to read the series seven times. You said it had universal significance.”

  “Dang it!” He punches the air with his fist. “There has to be something different about me in this universe! There has to be a variable!”

  I let out an exhausted sigh. “To be honest, I’m kind of glad there isn’t. I’m not sure my heart can take any more radical changes to this family.”

  I don’t understand how my one stupid decision could change so much.

  My dad sold out to a soul-sucking corporation.

  My mom never made partner because she had to stay home in the afternoons to watch Frankie.

  My life has gotten infinitely better while my parents’ lives seem to have gotten worse. How is that possible?

  We lie there in silence for a moment as I try to sort through everything that’s happened since I fell on those stairs. Sequoia and Lucinda and the fund-raising gala and my Columbia application that said “economics” instead of “journalism.”

  “Frankie,” I say after a moment.

  “Mmm?” He sounds distant and pensive. He’s probably still trying to figure out what his “variable” is.

  “What’s my thing?”

  He lets his head loll toward me. “Your thing?”

  “Yeah,” I say, curling onto my side to look at him. “You know, my thing. My passion. The one hobby that I put all my effort into.”

  He shrugs and turns back to the ceiling. “You have lots of things.”

  I think about the Activities tab in my Windsor Achiever app and how I literally had to scroll down the page to see them all. “But there must be one thing that I like better than the others. One thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.”

  He laughs. “The menagerie of animals in your phone is what gets you out of bed in the morning.”

  I swat him with the back of my hand. “You know what I mean. You have your board game and in my old life I had this newspaper. A really amazing, award-winning school newspaper. What do I have in this life?”

  “Hmmm.” His mouth scrunches to one side. “I can’t think of only one thing. You really do everything.”

  I roll onto my back again and stare up at the fake stars, tracing their patterns with my eyes, trying to identify their shapes and meanings. But somehow, they seem misaligned. Out of order. Constellations that have wandered out of their formations, until they’re just chaotic clusters with no rhyme or reason.

  “Do you miss Dad?” I ask Frankie after a while, and then, with a breaking voice I add, “Do I miss Dad?” I clear my throat. “I mean, Other Me.”

  “Sure. Of course. We all miss him. It was bad at first. But then I guess we kind of got used to it.”

  My throat starts to sting. I can’t imagine getting used to Dad not being here every day. Not waking me up with badly sung show tunes in the morning. Not listening to him crack lame jokes while he makes us waffles.

  Not being … well, Dad.

  That word—that title—has always been synonymous with a very clear picture in my mind. A picture of a man who loves what he does, but loves his family more. A man who takes care of us. All of us. Who calms my mother down when she’s stressed about work. Who quizzes me before tests. Who helps Frankie with his eternally unfinished board game. Who cooks dinner and keeps the house clean. Who’s talked me down from so many metaphorical ledges, I’ve lost count.

  A man who makes everything seem possible and nothing seem impossible.

  Who chased his dream through the darkest valleys and over the highest mountains, and through the most shadowy woods, until he finally caught it. Until he sold out his very first gallery show.

  Now all of that is gone.

  And somehow I’m responsible, even though I don’t know why.

  I sit up before any more weight can push down on my chest.

  “C’mon,” I say, nudging Frankie. “Mom says I have to make you dinner.”

  He pushes himself up and shoots me a skeptical look. “What are you making?”

  “Only the greatest sandwich in the world. It’s called the Duke. It’s one of Dad’s specialties.”

  Frankie still doesn’t look convinced. “I don’t remember Dad ever making that.”

  I smile. It’s strained at best. “That’s okay. Because I do.”

  Then I Find My Hidden Stash

  I know I should be studying. I know I’ll completely regret it in the morning when my Windsor Achiever app attacks me like a NORAD alarm during an alien invasion. But after stuffing ourselves on Duke sandwiches and toasting Dad with cups of apple juice, Frankie and I zonk out in front of the television and watch bad reality shows. It’s strangely the only programming we can actually agree on.

  By nine o’clock, Mom is still at the office, and I can’t stop yawning.

  “Time for your Dormidrome,” Frankie says, grabbing the remote and flipping to the science channel.

  “There’s that word again. What’s a Dormi—whatever?”

  Frankie squints at me. “A Dormidrome.”

  “Yeah. Sequoia said something about that the other day when she dropped me off after school. What is that?”

  “Oh,” Frankie replies knowingly.

  “What?”

  But he doesn’t respond. He turns off the TV and beckons for me to follow him.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Just come with me.”

  When we get to my bedroom, he yanks open the to
p drawer of my nightstand and I leap back as though a snake has slithered out.

  “What is all that?”

  “Your sleeping pills.”

  I gape in disbelief at the contents of the drawer. There’s no way those are mine. There are like seven different bottles in there. “I take all of those?” I squeak.

  “Well, not at once!” He starts pointing at the various pills. “This one is for when you can’t fall asleep. This one is for when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back asleep. This one is for napping. This one—”

  “Okay. I get it!” I shut the drawer, narrowly missing his finger. I am so not taking any of those. “Does Mom know I have all those pills?”

  Frankie chuckles. “Who do you think got them for you?”

  * * *

  An hour later, I lie in bed, thinking about everything sitting in my task list that I still haven’t checked off yet. There’s a little voice in the back of my head telling me that I should probably do some reading before I go to sleep. Maybe just one AP history chapter. Or a few pages of Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant for AP French. But I’m too tired.

  Tomorrow will be the official catch-up day. Tomorrow I’ll work extra hard and plow through all of those pesky little alerts. Now that my interview is finished and the fund-raising gala is over, I can focus one hundred percent on my schoolwork.

  I curl onto my side, sighing into the pillow. It feels so good to just close my eyes and go to sleep. Just drift off into peaceful dreams.

  Any minute now the sweet, sweet darkness will come and pull me under.

  Any minute now.

  Seriously, what’s taking so long?

  I groan and roll onto my back. My body is so tired. My eyeballs are so strained. Yet I can’t seem to fall asleep.

  You can do this, I tell myself. Deep breaths. In. Out. In. Out.

  Just relax and allow your brain to switch off. Just think of peaceful meadows and chirping birds and … my unfinished AP calculus problem set and my paper on the Civil War and …

  Gah! This isn’t working.

  I sit up, turn on the light, and open the top drawer of my nightstand, staring at the pharmacy of sleep aids. I’ve never taken anything to help me sleep before. What if they’re not safe? What if they chew at my brain like mice gnawing at the wires inside the wall? You don’t even realize you have a problem until the whole house goes dark.