Then don’t, thought Marian, but suppressed the reply as unhelpful. “You just need to handle your approach a bit better. Think of it like dating: if you come on too strong, it’s counter-productive. It’s too scary being on the other end of that. You’re asking too much, too soon: trying to shadow my every move, trying to take me back to your world, all in a couple of days. Slow down!”
Della grabbed a tissue and blew her nose with a honking snort. “I know. That’s what the last version of you told me. It’s what I planned to do, but I couldn’t hold back. There’s no time to slow down! You’re already fifteen. If I take it slowly, then by the time we get to know each other properly, you won’t be a child any more. You won’t need me at all.”
“People don’t stop needing family when they turn sixteen, or eighteen, or whatever age you’re worried about. And it’s not like I’ve got a terminal illness—” Marian paused with a sudden anxiety. “Not as far as I know. You haven’t given me any dodgy genetics, have you?” She wondered if Della had aborted her because of a rare genetic defect just waiting to strike . . . thus explaining why Della was in such a rush to befriend her.
“No, not at all. Genes of the highest quality,” said Della, trying to smile.
Marian knew that this was the moment where they were supposed to bond and hug. She had seen enough cheesy films; she could almost hear the soundtrack of syrupy strings soaring to a climax.
Yet she had also seen enough emotional blackmail within her social circle to recognize when she was being manipulated. Whether consciously or subconsciously, Della was trying to sidle into Marian’s affections with the old “poor me” strategy, like a puppy whining about how often it had been kicked. After hearing that, surely no one would be so heartless as to kick it again. . . .
“The way you come on too fast isn’t helping,” Marian said, “but I think there’s a more fundamental reason why your visits keep going wrong. You’re asking for something that we can’t give you . . . or we can, but it’s not what you need. This afternoon, you asked if I could forgive you, and I do—I honestly do—but that hasn’t helped you, has it? You’re still not satisfied, you’re still pushing, you still want more.”
Della tried to interject, but Marian overrode her. “In your heart, you know that any forgiveness from me doesn’t really mean anything. How can it? I’m fifteen years old, so by now there are millions of alternate Marians. I’m just me: I don’t speak for all the others. You can’t possibly beg forgiveness from every single version of me. And you shouldn’t! There’s only one person you really need it from—yourself.” Marian paused and looked Della in the eye. “You need to forgive yourself for what happened.”
Della broke Marian’s gaze, and looked at the floor. She spoke in a soft, worn-out tone. “If I could forgive myself, I wouldn’t be asking you.”
“That hasn’t worked, though, has it? Because you’ve asked and I’ve answered, but you’re still here: you’re still wanting more and more of me, wanting to spend every hour with me, wanting to drag me back to your world—”
“I was trying to be helpful!” exclaimed Della indignantly. “But you won’t accept anything from me. You only said you forgave me because you were trying to get rid of me: you thought that’s what I wanted, so you said it, and now you’re disappointed I’m still here.” Della’s voice became ragged and hoarse. “You don’t need me, you don’t want me.”
“No one needs a self-pitying self-obsessed wreck,” said Marian, knowing it sounded unkind, but figuring it was the only way to get the message across. “You say you want to help, but how can you help anyone when you’re so screwed up? Sort yourself out! Accept what happened. Deal with it! Then maybe you can go traveling across universes, if you still feel the urge. You’ll be a better mother, or para-mother—whatever the word is—when you’ve come to terms with what happened, and when you’re not demanding forgiveness wherever you go.”
“Sort myself out?” Della laughed bitterly. “Get therapy, quit smoking, eat more fruit and veg. . . . Yeah, a real makeover project. You think I haven’t tried all that? You think I haven’t tried to ‘accept what happened’? That’s why I came here!”
“Yes, but you arrive expecting gratitude that you’ve blessed us with your special presence, and you’re too messed up to do a good job of it. You say you want to help, but you’re not helping; you’re just another problem for me to deal with.” Marian stood up, and steeled herself to say what had to be said. “Go home, and call me when you’re out of rehab!”
“I’m detecting a slight aura of frostiness,” said Della. “I can take a hint.” She unfolded her limbs and picked her way across the carpet to the doorway. “If you want to get in touch”—she left a long pause, which Marian didn’t fill—“you can ping me through this.” She tossed a small black gadget onto the bed.
Marian’s eyes tracked the gadget, but she didn’t pick it up.
“One last thing,” Della said. “I will leave, but can I stay here tonight and leave tomorrow morning? It’s just. . . .” She sounded tired and old. “It’s too early in the evening—it’s not even dark yet. If I leave now, then I’ll end up going to some party somewhere. There’s always a party on some world or other, always a party where you can find the illusion of company. And there’s always some drug or other that gets handed around, something to fill the emptiness, some new way to scramble the brain and pretend you’re having fun. . . . No, I can’t go now. If I leave in the morning, there won’t be any party to crash, and I’ll have a few hours to find something better. . . .”
Seeing the despair etched into Della’s face, Marian didn’t have the heart to refuse. It was only one night, after all. And it couldn’t become permanent, because her grandparents would return tomorrow. “All right, all right. You can stay in the spare room. But give me some space, okay? I really do need to get this work done.”
“I understand. Tell you what, I’ll go and see what I can rustle up for dinner, yeah?”
Marian forced a smile. “You do that.”
Della headed downstairs. Marian slumped in her chair, emotionally exhausted by the confrontation. She remembered Mom singing along to the radio in the kitchen at the old house, baking simple things like flapjacks and cookies. Mom had never got the hang of pastry; she couldn’t manage pies, so she made crumbles instead: gooseberry in summer, then apple and blackberry in autumn. Marian hadn’t eaten one of those in years, and she had a sudden longing for an apple crumble with custard. The sound of Della clattering in the kitchen brought back memories of good times, memories that Marian had long suppressed as too painful. It made her wish for Mom back, and it made Marian wonder whether she’d been too harsh with Della.
Damn you. It affected her because it was uncalculated—one of the few times Della had been spontaneous rather than manipulative. Just “I’ll see what I can rustle up.”
Marian had to listen to three Lester Todd songs before she was calm enough to even attempt any homework.
The evening meal, when Della finally served it, proved to be curry with brown rice. Not the sort of meal that Mom would have prepared, but it wasn’t bad. Marian had an instinctive prejudice against brown rice as being part of the whole New Age organic hippie bullshit regime, but she sampled a few forkfuls and had to admit that there was nothing wrong with brown rice itself, only the people who usually ate it. After strawberry meringues for dessert, Marian could honestly say, “That was good. Thanks.”
“Glad you approve,” said Della, but she looked abstracted, staring out of the window into the twilight.
Marian retreated to her room, where she alternated between homework and Net-surfing and phoning friends. Downstairs she heard Della watching old comedy shows on TV.
“Can I have a goodnight kiss?” said Della, as bedtime approached.
Marian was sufficiently grateful for a histrionics-free evening that she submitted to being kissed and hugged. It felt good, like something she’d missed for so long that she’d stopped noticing the lack. “See yo
u tomorrow,” she said, and was surprised to find that she meant it.
In the morning, Marian saw no sign of Della downstairs. She’d subconsciously hoped that Della would have got up early and laid out breakfast, made sandwiches for a lunchbox, and so forth. Her cynical side accused herself: You didn’t want to engage with her as a mother, but you quite liked being cooked for and waited on, didn’t you?
Well, a big breakfast was too many calories anyway. Marian ate an orange, packed her schoolbag, and finally cracked open the door of the spare room to look in on Della. She was still in bed. Della had missed the opportunity to make one final appeal for a maternal relationship, but Marian was relieved not to have to go through all that again.
Marian left a spare key on the kitchen table, and wrote a note. “Please lock up and post the key back through the letterbox. Thanks for coming to see me and making the effort.” She thought for a long minute before adding the final sentence. “I’ll ping you on the wotsit.” It wasn’t a complete lie—she might decide she wanted to keep in touch. Yet it wasn’t a definite commitment. It was like when a boy said, “I’ll text you.” Marian, who’d found it so frustrating when boys said that and didn’t call, now empathized with their position. It was something that you felt you had to say, that you might even decide to do.
But probably not.
Marian grabbed her bag and headed out. For perhaps the first time ever, she looked forward to school on a Monday morning. The weekend had been an emotional roller coaster; she needed some time to recover her balance. Schoolwork and lunchtime gossip would be a welcome distraction. And when she came home, Della would be gone and everything would be back to normal.
She lingered after school, chatting with friends. Yet she knew she couldn’t delay too long—she had to be home when her grandparents returned, if only to explain why the house stank of cigarettes.
When Marian opened the back door, she saw that the duplicate key lay on the table where she’d left it that morning, along with her scribbled note. Was Della still here? Silence filled the house. Marian hurried upstairs to the spare room.
The bed was occupied. A sour smell hung in the air, along with an aura of stillness that made Marian’s throat tighten in foreboding. A red light flashed on the bedside table.
Unwillingly, Marian approached the bed. She wanted to shout, “Wake up!” but she knew it was useless. Della’s head lolled on the pillow, her eyes open and staring nowhere. No movement. No sound of breathing. The smell was stronger, a stink of piss and something Marian didn’t recognize. Some drug or other, her instinct said.
Marian had done a first-aid course—just a few hours, covering the basics. She knew she ought to do something, but it had all leaked out of her head, and she couldn’t bring herself to touch the body. The body. Already she thought of it as a corpse. Della was dead.
The flashing red light drew Marian’s eye, demanding her attention. It was the gadget that Della had given her last night. When she touched it, the display lit up, showing one voice message. Get it over with. Marian tapped her fingernail on the Play icon.
“I’m sorry, darling. I’m sorry to leave you like this. When I asked about staying here last night, I thought things might look better in the morning. But they don’t, and they won’t ever. There’s only emptiness ahead of me now. I used to be a party girl, and when the party ends, what’s left but to clear up the mess and throw out the dregs?
“They say that everything happens in all possible worlds. So I guess this had to happen, and you’re just unlucky it happened here. Maybe in another universe there’s a version of me who carries on and finds the daughter she never had; or who doesn’t find her, but manages to keep going anyway.
“It was my fault it didn’t work out with us. I only wish . . . well, there’s no time for me to tell all the things I wish had happened, or hadn’t. There’s a lifetime of them. I hate to think it’s all been for nothing, but if I’ve only been an Awful Warning, then at least. . . . Oh, what am I saying? Should’ve planned this better, as always. . . .
“I’ve left you my comp with all the accounts and passwords open—you can spend the money, you can hop across worlds, you can do anything. I just hope you can find something worthwhile. . . .”
There followed a long pause, punctuated by choked sobs. “There’s nothing more to say, nothing more to do. How can it end like this? But it has to end somewhere, and I can’t go any further. Goodbye, Marian. Love you, God bless.”
The recording ended, and the red light winked out.
Marian stumbled downstairs and phoned for an ambulance. Her voice was thick, and she had to speak several times before the operator could understand her. When she got off the phone, she rushed outside. She didn’t want to be in the house with the body; it made her skin crawl. When Mom died, it had been so sudden that Marian only saw the body when laid out in the coffin, carefully covered to hide the worst of the injuries. She’d had time to brace herself; she’d had other family there to support her.
Now, she was alone. Again. Her emotions churned, all jumbled up together. She felt grief for Della’s death, horror at the appalling waste of it. Yet she was relieved that Della was gone . . . and ashamed for feeling relieved. A heavy burden of guilt accompanied the thought that her rejection of Della must have contributed to the tragic outcome, even though Della had been palpably unbalanced anyway.
Most of all, she was angry at Della for being so selfish, so manipulative. All that talk about “there’s a version of me who carries on,” “I’ve left you the accounts and passwords,” “you can hop across worlds”—it transparently meant that Della wanted Marian to go and find some other alternate of Della, and make up with her. She hoped that Marian would feel guilty at rebuffing Della and driving her to suicide. She expected Marian to atone for it by becoming a daughter to another version of her. Just as Della had repented of her past actions and hopped across worlds in search of forgiveness, she wanted Marian to do the same. See how it feels! See what you’ve driven me to! That was the message, and Marian hated Della for it.
What a futile, histrionic gesture. As if suicide even meant anything. . . . In an infinite array of alternate Dellas, one suicide wouldn’t make much of a dent. Marian wasn’t big on math, but surely infinity minus one was still infinity. Della knew there’d be alternates of her who decided against it, or who didn’t quite overdose. Everything happens in all possible worlds. There were alternates who survived. And so suicide wasn’t the grand gesture of ending all existence; it was merely a tiny scratch in the overall Della. It was a version of self-harming, like those girls who cut themselves or starved themselves—Marian knew a couple of them at school. It was their only way of expressing their pain.
And with that thought, Marian’s sympathies swung abruptly, and she found herself pitying Della for getting into such a state that suicide was her only way out. How terrible it must feel to have messed up your life so badly that killing yourself felt like the only possible action. Where did it all go wrong for Della? Was it the abortion? No, surely it wasn’t that one single thing in itself. It was all the years before and afterward, the years of drugs and partying and sleeping around. The trouble with living for the moment is that you’ve nothing to look forward to but more of the same. And when you can’t stand that any more—you have nothing else.
The ambulance arrived, its siren a funeral knell. Two paramedics ran to the house, carrying first-aid equipment and a stretcher.
“Upstairs,” said Marian. She stood aside to let the men go by. Their boots pounded up the stairs, rattling the old house.
She didn’t follow them. There was nothing she could do, yet it still felt cowardly not to go up there. I’d only be in the way, she rationalized to herself.
Very soon they came out, carrying Della on the stretcher, moving more slowly because they had to be careful with the burden; but Marian sensed they knew it was too late to save her. She walked with them to the ambulance.
“Do you know what she took?” one of th
em asked.
“I’m sorry, I don’t. There might be something in her handbag—”
“Yeah, we got that. We’ll look at it.”
They stowed Della inside the ambulance, where delicate expensive machinery began its futile checklist of survival.
“You can come with us if you like, but you don’t have to.”
Marian shook her head.
“Do you have someone you can call? Or would you like one of us to stay with you?”
“My grandparents are coming home soon. They’ll be here any minute. I’ll be all right.” It was just a rote phrase, but it sounded callous as soon as it came out of Marian’s mouth. She’s dead, but I’ll be all right. She wasn’t my mother anyway.
“If you’re sure. . . .”
After a pause just long enough for any change of mind, they drove away. When the ambulance had turned a corner and disappeared in the maze of narrow streets, Marian raised a hand in farewell. It felt like a ludicrous gesture, waving goodbye to an ambulance carrying a corpse, but she had an urge to do something, to make some meaningful movement. She couldn’t just stand there like a stuffed cabbage. Goodbye, Della.
She paced round the garden once, twice, then sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands. The tears leaked through her fingers. Goodbye, Mom.
It was like being bereaved all over again. How dare Della put her through this? The selfishness of it! It brought home the terrible finality of death. Mom was never coming back.
But in some other universe, her mother had survived the accident. Of course, there’d also be a parallel Marian in that reality. Yet everything must happen, so a similar universe must exist in which the local Marian had just died. In that world, Mom was bereaved and would surely welcome a visit from her daughter. . . .
Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11 Page 6
