by J. Q. Coyle
The door swings open onto a desert, sand in all directions.
And off to one side, there’s a cliff.
At its edge, a house sits, sand pushed up against it like a snowdrift. There’s nothing else but sky—gray but lit up with diffuse sunlight, a bright fog.
“That’s where they live,” Jax says. The sand is applying so much pressure that the house seems to be tilting over the cliff.
“Who?”
“Your parents,” he says.
I look around at the barren landscape and back at the museum, which now looks small and shrunken against the expanse of sky.
We head across the sand. The wind whips it up in small, quick whirlwinds. “How was this world made?”
“When your father decided between the prime where he stayed with your mother and the branch where she went back to Alex, there was a third subconscious choice. That’s what the roots are for—what gets deeply buried, almost forgotten.”
“And in this choice?” I say.
“Your father wanted everything to stay the same. No past, no future. Just the present. And this is how it showed up.”
“My parents are in that house? The same age that they were on the day he made that decision?” I think of “Suicide off Egg Rock,” when the man walks into the water at the end, how the surf is riding up on the ledges. “Yes.”
I start to sprint across the sand to the house.
“Wait!” Jax shouts, following me.
The front door faces the cliff.
There’s no way in.
The sand drift is deep. I start to climb it. I struggle to keep my footing. Finally I get to a window that’s covered in sand. I dig so that I can see through the panes.
And there they are, asleep on a single mattress, my father’s arm cradling my mother, his hand on her stomach, which is where I am—a collection of small cells.
They’re so young—not that many years older than I am. It’s crazy they were ever this young, much less in love and about to have a baby.
My father is shirtless. His tattoo isn’t the complex tree that it is now. It doesn’t even work its way down his arms or up his neck, just over his shoulder and down his back. My mother wears a T-shirt. The sheet is a tangle at their feet.
A television is on but only airs static. There’s a broom by the door, but still the floor is sandy, with small piles swept into the corners of the room.
I raise my fist to knock on the window, but my mother’s eyes open as if she senses something. She kisses my father’s cheek. He smiles before he’s even awake. They start talking, hushed whispers. I want to stay here and just watch what it would have been like—my parents, in love.
“Remember,” Jax says. “They won’t know you.”
I’d forgotten this. Of course they won’t know me. I haven’t been born. “How will I get the atlas from them?”
“The atlas shouldn’t mean much to them here. The past is a museum. I think the tide represents the future. Hard to say. It’s not my subconscious. But I know it’s hard to ignore the future. It keeps coming at you.”
“What tide? You keep talking about a tide!”
He looks back over his shoulder. And now I see waves rippling up around the museum’s sides, coming from some unseen ocean beyond it.
“Is it coming all the way here?” I ask.
“How do you think the sand gets pushed against the house?”
A wave crashes against the back of the museum, which seems small now, like a dollhouse from here.
I dig some more until I can grip the cross of the windowpane. I pull it up. Some sand trickles into the house, ticking against the floor like the inside of an hourglass.
I look back at the ocean. It pushes all the way around the museum meeting in front of it and rushing toward us before receding again.
The Plath poem is a whisper in my head, the part about the waves pulsing like hearts.
It’s coming in fast.
I climb in the window. There’s no place to hide an atlas in here. It’s too bare.
I look at my father.
“Dad,” I say, pushing on his shoulder.
My father’s eyes open and he jolts up—as if he’s used to waking to emergencies. He stares at me. He turns to my mother. “Francesca! Someone’s here.” But he hears the waves, not far off, and he starts to restack sandbags along the interior wall facing the tide.
My mother sits upright. “Who are you?”
“I’m your daughter,” I say, quietly.
My father whips around, holding a sandbag in his arms about the size of a bundled baby.
My mother says, “I don’t have—” But then she stops. “You’re here from another…”
“I’m here for the atlas. I think you know what I mean.” I look at my father. “Another you came down here and hid it.”
If what I’m saying surprises my father, he doesn’t react to it. He’s too overwhelmed with me, my presence in this shack. He says, “Look at you.” His voice is hushed and awed.
A wave splashes up against the window and pours in over the sill. It streams down the sandbags.
My mother stands up. The T-shirt is long. Her legs are bare. “You’re beautiful,” she says, smiling and suddenly crying at the same time. She puts a hand on her stomach. “We’re waiting,” she says.
“Are you waiting forever?” I ask. “Shouldn’t you get out of here?” I turn to my father. “I could help get you out. I’m from the prime. I can—”
My father shakes his head. “This is our house. This is the world we live in. We chose it. It didn’t lay claim on us.”
He walks to the small table with two chairs and pulls one to the middle of the room. He climbs it, reaching up into the rafters.
Another wave hits. The house shivers.
I run to the window. “Jax! Are you okay?”
“I’m on the roof. I’m fine. But hurry!”
When I turn back, my father is holding something wrapped in tarp and knotted with twine. “This is it.” He hands it to me. “Take it.”
“Do you have any advice? About Alex, your brother?”
My father shakes his head, but my mother says, “He’s a human being. Deep down, he wants the same thing as everyone else.”
I’m about to tell her that Alex wants power. That’s what he’s always wanted. But then another wave hits the house. I glance back at the window. “I can get you out of here. This house is going to get pushed right off—”
My father grabs me and hugs me. My mother wraps her arms around both of us. We huddle like that for a moment—a family, a real family.
Then my father and mother let me go and cling to each other.
“Is there a better place out there for us?” she asks. “Is there a world where we stay together?”
I don’t want to tell them the truth, but I have to. I shake my head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“You better go,” my father says.
I want to stay. I want to burn their faces into my memory, but the waves are coming. I know I have to go.
I run to the window and climb out. “Thank you!” I shout.
My parents wave, then my mother lays her head on my father’s chest.
I shut the window and climb up onto the roof just as another wave crashes into the house, like hitting the prow of ship.
Jax reaches out and steadies me, pulling me up. I can see the other side of the cliff. It opens into a dark hole, a gulf of nothingness. The thought of them crashing over the edge almost brings me to my knees. I want to crawl back in the window and drag them out.
“You got the atlas!” Jax shouts above the loud surf.
The wind whips around us. “Yes! Hold on to it and I’ll hold on to you!”
He presses the atlas to his chest, and I wrap my arms around him. It feels good to hold him tight.
I push my fist into my collarbone, and just as I’m about to skin a knuckle against the roof, a wave pounds so hard that we’re caught in a fine spray. The next wave might
push us off the roof.
The water recedes, but I can see the next wave forming, like it’s drawing in a deep breath quickly. It’s like the ocean is speeding up.
Before I can do anything, the next wave pounds the house, slamming the roof. It rolls over us and we’re soaked.
Then, before we can catch our breath, the next wave draws itself up, curling over our heads. Jax holds me as hard as he can, and I know this is the wave. This is the one. It pounds us, ripping us apart, and shoves us off of the roof.
Both of us, falling.
Still gripping the atlas, Jax is reaching for me.
And, as the wind tears all around us, I’m reaching for him.
Our hands touch.
I don’t know what’s below us. I see only white misty fog.
We grab hands. He reels me to his chest. “Just think of it! Use your imagination! See it!” he says.
I close my eyes tight, and as I imagine our bloody deaths, each fleck of water turns as red as blood, a sea of it. The red droplets tear mercifully away from the sky, the fog, the open gulf of air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JAX AND I stare at each other, breathless. With one arm he’s holding the package wrapped in tarp. The sun is hot, as if the atmosphere that holds it in check is being erased. The wall at my back gives a little, and some of it crumbles to the ground.
Now that I’m no longer in the roots, it’s hard to imagine that the world of my father and mother living in a house on a cliff actually exists. If it doesn’t, I’m suddenly scared that the package isn’t an atlas at all. “I have to see it.”
“Me too.” Jax unknots the string, unwraps the tarp, and there it is.
The leather cover is stamped—branded, it seems, with the shape of a tree. Jax runs a finger along the grooves.
He flips open the cover. On the first page, there’s an inscription:
We are one infinite tree in an infinite forest.
We slowly turn the pages. Each one is filled with trees, with names, dates, the word that goes with their triggers, and a pressure point—letter-number combinations I remember from Hafeez’s explanation of acupressure.
Some even have descriptions of the decisions that made the world—life or death, theft, war, love.
The trees remind me of my father’s tattoos. Only magnified. And drawn in meticulous, mesmerizing detail.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“And dangerous,” Jax reminds me.
The pages are a mix of cloth, leather, and paper as thin and soft as silk. The last pages look to be the oldest, written in crowded calligraphy, the ink in a language I can’t understand.
Lodged in the back of the atlas against the leather binding, there are pages of dark, coiling shapes—some spiral in on themselves—covering the pages from edge to edge.
“The roots,” Jax says.
Each page looks like it was added to over time. In some places the detail is hand drawn. In other places it’s hand stitched, a glimmer of gold thread here and there.
The atlas is hypnotic. But I can’t keep gazing at it. I push it back into his hands. “Take good care of it,” I say.
“You want me to keep it?”
“Yes,” I say. “It has to stay here.”
He rewraps it. “If that other Alex really let all these people suffer and die—this whole world—then you can’t give this to him. You can’t. Even if we can save this world, he’d have access to all of these others.…”
“I’m going to use the atlas to lure Alex back with the new vaccine. My mother told me he wants what everybody else wants. I thought she meant power, but what if she really meant something else?”
“Like what?”
I’m too embarrassed to say the word “love,” but then Jax says it for me. “She meant love. Didn’t she?”
“I think so.”
“You do what you have to do. I’ll figure out a way to protect the atlas.”
I have the holiday card and the phone-book page—hopefully enough to convince Alex to see this world for himself—and the photograph of Jane and Jax.
“I have to go,” I say, but I don’t want to. I know that when I jump, the other me will be here with Jax. I’m jealous of her. It’s weird to be jealous of yourself. I can’t leave though. I have to ask: “Jax?”
“What is it?”
“When I showed up, me, with Biddy sleeping in the room, you were going to tell me that you weren’t interested in—”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Alicia. Not this you.”
“Oh. Okay. Good.”
“Good?” he says, smiling.
“Yeah, good.”
“Because if it had been you,” he says and then he seems shy suddenly. “It would have been different. So hurry back, okay?”
“Okay.” my pulse is fluttering.
I push on the bones of my hand and think of snow, light and powdery. The world flattens and pulls apart. The snow is blinding.
PART III
UNFURL
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
COLD WIND whipping all around me.
The roar of an engine.
I’m in the passenger seat of a speeding car. The top’s down. I gasp and clutch at the dashboard with my free hand. I’ve got Jax’s photograph, the Houston phone-book page, and the holiday card in my other hand. Quickly, I slip them under my jacket. Jane’s driving. I’m wearing the clothes I had on the night I left the house with the gun. Jane must have busted me out of the hospital, or maybe she was just following orders. “Where the hell are we going?” I ask.
She looks at me sharply. “You’re back then.”
“Yes.”
Jane shouts over the wind, “Where’s the atlas? I thought you were closing in! Olsson said you were.”
I rub my wrists, which are raw from the hospital bed cuffs. “I have a plan,” I say. “Can we put the top up? I’m freezing.”
She pulls over onto the crumbling shoulder, slaps on the flashing lights, and hits a button that makes the convertible top glide almost silently into place. Everything is suddenly quiet and still. The car’s red leather interior and chrome glows. “What about Jax? Why isn’t he with you?”
“He won’t leave.”
“What? Why not?”
“Why does it matter to you?” I say, wanting her to level with me.
She bangs her fist on the steering wheel, then grips it with both hands.
“Is this your car?” I ask. I thought I remembered a Subaru station wagon.
“It’s a Maserati, a belated birthday gift from Alex for your sweet sixteen, assuming you can deliver for him, which I guess you can’t.”
“If he thinks he can buy my loyalty with a car, he’s more of an idiot than I thought.”
“Trust me,” Jane says. “He’s no idiot.”
She pulls back into traffic. I’ve never seen her so agitated, weaving in and out of traffic way too fast. Maybe the news about Jax has shaken her—she looks close to tears.
“Did Olsson tell Alex to have the vaccine ready?”
“Yes. Alex has it. But how are you going to get him to hand it over?”
I hang on to my seat. “I have an offer for Alex,” I tell her.
She changes lanes rapidly, from one to the other and back again. The speedometer quivers around ninety. “I hope, for your sake, it’s a good one.”
“Aren’t you hoping for your sake, too, Jane?” She looks at me and then quickly away. “How’s my dad?”
“He’s still alive.”
I’m so grateful, I almost start to cry. Overhead there’s a dark blue night sky. The beach is off to the right. It reminds me of my parents’ house on the cliff. “Where are you taking me?”
Jane pulls up at a red light. People in other cars stare at this beautiful machine we’re sitting in and at us too: Who could be driving such a piece of art? I’m sure we’re disappointing.
“Alex prefers to work deals away from the facility,” she says.
The light turns gre
en and she guns it.
I look out the window, pretending I feel calm and confident. “You don’t even have a license to be a shrink, do you? All those books on terrible shit that people go through, lined up on your shelves—were they loaners?”
“Why would that even matter now that you know what you know?”
“Because you’re still not telling me the whole truth! Why does that world matter so much to you, Jane?”
She stares ahead, jaw set.
I pull out the photograph. “Maybe because of this?”
Jane recognizes it immediately. “Where did you find that?” Her voice is shaky. “If Alex sees that—”
“Just so we’re clear, we both have a lot at stake here. Jax isn’t leaving that world, because he really wants to save it.”
Her face pinches as if her son’s name, spoken aloud, pains her. For the first time, I really see her as Jax’s mother, and I feel her sorrow.
“He’s the reason you got cut, right? That’s why you told me that being a spandrel is a hard way to live.”
She accelerates up the ramp onto I-93. The car slices the air. All the city is in front of us, lit up like Christmas. She shifts gears, speeding through traffic. Her eyes flood with tears, which then streak her cheeks. We drive on through the Tip O’Neill Tunnel. “I kept seeing all of the glimpses of his life with someone who wasn’t me,” she says. “It was so hard to see the life that you can’t have playing out before your eyes, out of reach.”
“But couldn’t you go into that branch?”
“I’m not as good a spandrel as you and your father. I could only go in if your father piggybacked me, and I only did that once when Jax was little. But it was too disturbing to Jax—two identical mothers—and too dangerous. I couldn’t risk anyone knowing.”
And then we’re out of the tunnel and on the streets of downtown Boston. The buildings tower over us.
“You mean Alex.”
She nods. “I couldn’t risk him being able to use Jax against me in any way. To use Jax at all. I’m sorry. You have to understand.”
I do. She was trapped.
She’s taking Cambridge Street, sliding through traffic, and then we come up to the glass walls of the Charles/MGH T station. She cuts across the intersection into a parking lot that looks like it’s reserved for doctors who work at Mass General. She blows right past the empty guard booth; there’s no one inside it now.
