Life at the Speed of Us

by Heather Sappenfield

Mom’s gaze tore from me to her.

  “I’m here!” I called.

  They all looked. Mom’s hand fell to her stomach. Vision-me squinted, assessing. Dad stepped toward me, his mouth set.

  “Briggs!” Mom grabbed his arm.

  Moments ago, they’d been so happy. What had I done? I pulled my palm from the spruce.

  Knife cold. Winter light.

  Crystal Creek muted by ice.

  Woozy, I hunched over, hands on my knees. I stared at my palm in wonder. I looked up at that porcupine and shouted, “How?”

  I hugged myself to feel my solidness. I’d seen two different visions now. Two different Moms. Two different Soverns. Was I insane? My mind ricocheted through options. Maybe I was hallucinating from nicotine withdrawal. Maybe I was hallucinating from grief. Or maybe … there had to be a logical explanation. Patterns surrounded me every minute of every day. In a thousand different aspects of life. Patterns explained by math. Math applied to how the world worked was physics.

  Suddenly, I knew who might have an answer.

  10

  I made it back to school just as sixth period ended. Dr. Bell stood outside the main office saying bye to the stream of students flowing out the doors. I moved toward Kenowitz’s room against a current of weird looks and judgments. He was there, talking baseball with Handler. The guy lived for the Rockies and the Red Sox and was a walking baseball statistic. George Polinsky waited.

  “Sovern?” Kenowitz said as I marched toward him.

  I eyed George. His Calculus text was open to page 530. Handler studied me.

  “Physics. You taught it?” I said to Kenowitz.

  “It’s been a while.”

  “What kind of physics deals with reality?” I blurted.

  “Reality?” Kenowitz cocked his head.

  “Like what’s here and now. What we see.” I glanced at Handler. “Maybe what we don’t.”

  “Quantum physics?” Kenowitz said.

  “That’s the one that deals with dimensions and stuff?”

  He and Handler looked at one another, no doubt shocked by my flood of words.

  “Is it?” I said.

  “Yes,” Kenowitz said. “I just taught standard physics, though. You could ask Ms. Willins. I believe she does a unit on quantum physics.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t stand harpy-faced Willins, the physics teacher. “What do you know about it?”

  Kenowitz shifted his weight. “Well, not a lot. I do know that when things get that tiny, they get weird.” He glanced at Handler. “That’s the only way they can describe many of the findings, because they’re unexplainable.”

  “Do other worlds exist?”

  “Universes, you mean?” Kenowitz eyed me warily and then glanced at Handler again. “They’re certainly possible,” he said carefully. “Mathematically probable. Current theory holds there are nine to eleven dimensions, and there may be a multiverse of infinite universes. It’s mind-boggling stuff. Why do you ask?”

  “Those universes. Past? Present? Future?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone is. It’s all theoretical.”

  I tried to slow down my words, but failed. “Where could I learn about this?”

  “YouTube has many videos. The work of Stephen Hawking makes quantum stuff easy to understand.” He looked at Handler. “Audio versions of his books exist, I believe.”

  My dyslexia: legend.

  “Will you write his name?”

  “Sure.” Kenowitz printed STEPHEN HAWKING on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.

  “Thanks.” I headed for the door.

  “Sovern.” Handler practically walked on my heels. “I was in here to check on your attendance. Seems you missed fifth and sixth periods.”

  I lifted my arm in its sling, got a shot of rib pain, and winced theatrically. “Tired. Dad knows.”

  He eyed me. “Other dimensions?”

  Obviously I looked like I’d sailed off the crazy cliff, hurtling headlong for Mom. Maybe I had. I shrugged. His lavender shirt said Hawk Ranch Golf Club below a logo of a soaring bird.

  “Don’t tell Dad,” I said. “He’ll worry I’m just trying to find a way to hang on to Mom.”

  “Are you?”

  My eyes were knives.

  “I won’t tell him.” Handler smiled slyly. “If you’ll be in my office at the start of fifth period each day.”

  Fifth was when I usually ditched.

  He nodded. “Whatever it takes.”

  I watched lifties load the freight car with our belongings onto the gondola cable. The car rode out of the lifthouse and started its ascent up the mountain. I carried my suitcase into a normal passenger car. Dad carried his in and sat beside me. Our glass-walled car moved slowly around the giant bullwheel, caught the fast-moving cable, and accelerated out into the night.

  Crystal Creek passed below us, half swirling ice and half inky, slow-moving water. Slope-side mansions lined the ski run. Empty or not, they glowed with warm light. I forced my gaze away from Gage’s mansion too late and glimpsed him, ankles and arms crossed as he leaned against the frame of his floor-to-ceiling bedroom window. It still felt like he’d stuffed my heart in his pocket, and I salivated for nicotine. I could barely discern his face, but his profile tugged at something inside me. Across the expanse of carpet behind him stretched his bed, and the whole back of my body remembered the softness of its comforter.

  I blushed, glad for the gondola car’s darkness, and I thanked the little voice that had kept me from giving up my virginity. Was Gage thinking of me? As distance shrank him, I marveled at how situations could invert just like that. I looked to where my sled had sailed off Pride. Dad looked there too.

  Town turned miniature and glowy. Car lights streaked past on the interstate. We got high enough that I could see the spot on the path where I’d had the visions. They’d seemed so real. Even now. Mom had been breathing, and she was able to turn pale. Her skin, if I could have touched her, would have been warm. Her wrist would have had a firm pulse. And the vision-me? I wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress. How or why were they all even there on the path? The tinier Crystal Village grew, the weirder I felt.

  Dad’s hand rested on his knee, and I covered it with mine. He smiled, but worry laced his face. I thought of my promise to Handler and swallowed.

  We reached the gondola’s top at Emerald West, and the lift stopped as workers shunted off our freight car and replaced it with a passenger car. The lift started again, cable inching around the big bullwheel before heading back down. When the doors for our car opened, we stepped out to find Tara waiting with a passenger snowcat. A sled-trailer was connected to it, and she’d backed it right to the lifthouse doors. The gondola had been the most efficient way to ferry our stuff this far, but Tara’s cat would haul it and us the last mile or so up to City Center.

  Two lifties maneuvered our freight car into the trailer. They shut the gate, a snug fit, and Tara pulled forward. Tourists milled around us, headed to dinner, tubing, or the view. Dad thanked the lifties.

  We climbed into the snowcat’s cushy backseat. These passenger cats were meant for hauling high-dollar guests to high-dollar restaurants, so they were all about comfort. Tara climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door. The heater blew loud, muffling the new-age music.

  “Heading to the high life, eh?” Tara rarely wore a hat over her pageboy blond hair. Canadian, she ended lots of her sentences with eh? She’d raced mountain bikes with Mom years back, and that’s how they’d become friends. I figured I’d end up just like Tara, driving a snowcat into dark’s solitary quiet.

  “Glad to see you, Sovern,” she said.

  I looked down.

  “It’ll be good to be back up here,” Dad said.

  “Maybe I can take Sov for a ride some night?” she said.

 
Dad just grunted.

  “Why not?” I said.

  Tara looked at us in the rearview mirror. “They give you a gun?”

  Dad stiffened. “Don’t want one.”

  The cat tilted up Sunset Ridge’s initial incline to City Center. The trailer behind us clunked as our freight settled. I’d planned to peer out the windows, reveling in this starry view of my favorite world.

  “What about Sov?”

  “What about her?” Dad said.

  I looked closer at Tara’s reflection. In the light from the cat’s dash, a dark smudge hung below her right eye, and a stitched cut marked her forehead. Was this why she wasn’t on her usual route into Crystal Mountain’s farthest reaches? Why she was driving this passenger cat, ferrying tourists to and from dinner?

  “Hey!” I said. “I’m right here!”

  Tara’s and Dad’s eyes met in the mirror, and his flashed warning. The snowcat leveled a little into the steady climb up the rest of the ridge. Three deer bounded across the lit circumference of its headlights.

  “There’s some folks damaging stuff on the mountain right now,” she said.

  Dad blew out his breath and glared out the window.

  “Stuff?” I said.

  “Breaking out windows on lodges. Stealing food mostly. Weirdly,” Tara said.

  Stealing food was weird, because whoever stole it would have to pack it off the mountain. I remembered Kenowitz saying “weird,” and my mind started searching for a pattern.

  “What happened to your eye?” I said.

  “I saw broken windows at Sapphire East and went to investigate, eh? Climbed out of my cat and never even saw what hit me. I was wearing a hat, for once. Good thing, or I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

  “Bear?” I said.

  “It’d have to be one smart, non-hibernating bear,” she said. “With fingerprints.”

  “They’ll catch the guy in a few days,” Dad said.

  “Seems the prints don’t have a match. Maybe a bear after all, eh?” Tara raised her eyebrows at me in the mirror.

  I peered out the window, beyond the initial pines into the dark beyond, scanning for danger. Couldn’t things have been easy, just once?

  City Center’s lodge—a simple coffee house and bathrooms—appeared on the left. Ski patrol’s headquarters filled the bottom level. Tara steered away from the lodge and the two chairlifts that rose to this spot from front-side and Gold Bowl. She navigated around the cupped hand of pines, and the cabin appeared, lights on, smoke rising from the chimney like a fairy tale.

  Wash, Big John, Tucker, Sarge, and Crispy strode out on the deck, ready to move in our stuff. Wash, grinning, raised his arms, and I thought Me + Dad + my ski-patrol family + the cabin = happily ever after.

  Tara parked the snowcat and left it idling. The guys bounded off the deck to the snowcat’s trailer. Dad and I climbed out, and when I got to the back, they already had the trailer’s gate down and were unlatching the crate, preparing to carry furniture.

  I stood back a little and took it all in. Them + me = 8. Infinity upright.

  Crispy grinned at me over his shoulder. Both he and Sarge were shorter than I was, but powerfully built. Sarge, seeing him, grinned at me too, and then they sandwiched me in a hug. It was awkward, me being taller and all, and Crispy smelled like burning sugar, but I laughed.

  A smile glowed on Dad’s face. “Welcome home, Sov.”

  11

  I slept in one of the twin beds in the cabin’s bedroom. One for me. One for Dad. A nightstand stood in-between, a window above it. A window was over Dad’s bed too, filled now with soft, early-morning light. He ran his hand down my hair and whispered, “See you at lunch.”

  I smiled through grogginess and knew Wash would leave with him. Weekends on Crystal Mountain were hectic.

  Later, beaming sun woke me to Saturday in heaven. I walked onto the deck in flannel pajama pants and a T-shirt, and I raised my one liftable arm like Wash had last night. Despite the sun, February’s cold at 11,000 feet gnawed hard. I forced myself to spin once, then shuffled in and shut the door. The thermometer out the kitchen window read 5°F. The clock on the nightstand between our beds read 9:48 am.

  I boiled water and stirred a cup of instant cocoa, little marshmallows swirling. Crispy had left a plate of lemon bars. I put one on a napkin and settled onto the green velvet couch. I took a bite, looked at the bar’s black underside, and set it back on the napkin. I lifted the cocoa, let the steam rise into my face, and scanned around the cabin in the morning’s fresh light.

  The matching leather chairs were crammed like guards on either side of the fireplace. The white curtains Mom had hung over the windows before I was born were still there, time-clashing with the Condo’s furniture. The table and chairs seemed tangled between past and present. The space against the far wall where my crib had been—the sides removed to make it a bed as I’d gotten bigger—was a loud empty space. The cabin felt warped. Surely Dad noticed this.

  I closed my eyes, and there was that path vision. Mom paled + Mom shivered = Mom saw me. They all had.

  I rubbed my forehead, willing it calm. No luck. I set my cocoa on the coffee table and got the wooden box Dad had made for my sixth birthday from under my bed. I’d forgotten about it till I’d packed the stuff shoved into the back of my closet at the Condo. Dad had crafted love into it, hoping to curb my devastation at leaving the cabin.

  I drew out my first shoes, long as my palm. My favorite smooth white rock from camping near Marble, Colorado. A conch shell from Puerto Rico, its center the color of twilight. A photo of my three-year-old first glide on skis. Another photo of Christmas-me in Wash’s lap, holding up my leg in footie pajamas. He wore a Santa hat, the ornamented tree on his left. I studied the corner where that tree had stood, imagined myself and Wash while Mom lifted the camera to her eye: Say, Presents!

  I pulled out a little leather bag I’d bought from a gray-haired Navajo woman when we visited Monument Valley on a fifth grade school trip. An “amulet bag,” the woman had called it. I’d just liked its orange, blue, black, and white diamond pattern. I’d worn it for about a month but never found the right thing to fill it and finally stored it in this box, forgotten for years. I ran my thumb over the intricate beads and realized an equation for its beadwork.

  I went to my suitcase and dug out the urine-sample jar holding the quills from my cheek. At the couch, I opened the jar and carefully gathered all eighteen. They just fit into the amulet bag. I folded the flap, sealed it carefully, and slid the beaded strap over my head. A tingling rose in my chest and rolled through my limbs, shimmering last out my cheek. I collapsed back against the couch.

  Another thing different about the cabin was Internet. Wireless coverage from City Center’s lodge stretched here. I logged on and typed into Google’s search bar.

  It responded: Did you mean multiverse?

  I thanked the world for computers. They made my dyslexic life so much easier. I clicked on the sentence, and then on the Wikipedia site. I read the passage three times before I got the words right.

  The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of infinite or finite possible universes (including the Universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them.

  I moved to the window by the dining table and gazed out: space, time, matter, and energy. Physical laws and constants = math. Nicotine would help me think, but living in the clouds made cigarettes hard to come by. A good thing, since I was quitting.

  After I got my head around that Wikipedia passage, I found a BBC video on YouTube titled Parallel Universes. It discussed our world as having not three dimensions, but eleven. In this eleventh dimension, all normal rules of common sense were abandoned. This eleventh dimension was infinitely long, yet
so narrow we couldn’t perceive it. A lady scientist had proved with math equations that at this eleventh dimension’s other end could be a parallel universe, except loaded with gravity. What did that mean exactly? I bookmarked the URL.

  As I studied on, I bookmarked another URL. And another. And another. I can get into what I’m doing and lose track of time. This quantum world took shape in my mind, and math evolved from random equations in Kenowitz’s class to the actual alphabet of the physical world. These scientists and mathematicians were trying with numbers and experiments to lift God’s robe and peek underneath. Their courage sped my pulse and fluttered my innards because I had a bone to pick with God.

  Someone pressed buttons on the door’s keypad. Dad stepped in. I shut my laptop and spun on my chair.

  “You look busy,” he said.

  I forced myself to say, “Math.”

  He sat on a bench near the door, pried off his ski boots, and hung his uniform coat on a hook. I hadn’t seen that coat’s white “+” sign since my sled ride, and I rubbed my cheek at the sensation of quills swaying.

  “Cold day,” he said.

  I turned to watch him in the kitchen.

  “Soup?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  He opened a carton of soup and poured it into a pot.

  “Dad? When we … ” I couldn’t say crashed. “When you lost me, in the sled, what kind of tree was that? That fell, I mean.”

  He turned, still not used to my talking, no doubt. His eyes pulled into themselves, and he shook his head. “Let me see … this crazy wind kicked up just before it fell—”

  “Like a snow whirlwind?”

  “I guess so.”

  I remembered the splintering crack, the blizzard from Dad’s edges, and his grunt. My voice sounded thin as I said, “Was it a spruce?”

  “Does it matter?”

  I nodded.

  “It happened so fast.” He studied me.

  I rested my forehead in my palms.

  “You know,” Dad said, “it was fuller than a pine. And it smelled like a spruce.”