The Infinity of You & Me

by J. Q. Coyle

  It happens fast.

  The world peels back, rolls in on itself, and is gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I’M RUNNING up a set of stairs toward a fire door, my heart rocketing in my chest. I’m alive. I’m in the Liberty Hotel. And I’m running to find my father. I don’t know if Olsson or Jane have held up their end of the bargain. I don’t know where Hafeez is. Everything is a blur, and the only thing in my mind is that my uncle is dead. I whisper, “He’s dead. He’s gone,” to no one, a light echo in the stairwell. It’s just starting to sink in. I feel guilty but I tell myself not to. “He was going to kill Jax. It’s not my fault.” I remember Jax’s eyes fluttering open, the warmth of his lips on mine. It’s all so much to take in. It happened so fast, I’m reeling.

  But I can’t think of those things now. I’m taking the next flight, pounding up the stairs as fast as I can.

  The door at the top of the stairs swings open.

  There’s Olsson, holding up my father, who’s dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, barefoot. He looks like hell—eyes swollen to slits, lips so puffed they’re split and blood crusted.

  And now, as if they’ve just sprung loose, memories rush at me—warm washcloths, lunch boxes, Christmas mornings, piñatas, loud sing-alongs in the car, sledding, swimming, first days of school, picture-day dresses, bad haircuts, recitals, a clarinet. My father is there in all of them, hand on my shoulder, bending down to explain something. My father loves me; he always has. My father never jumped from world to world just to avoid living. He jumped in order to live more fully. He didn’t destroy worlds. He tried to protect the ones he’d created.

  “I’m here,” I say, and I run up the last few steps to my father. I slip under his free arm and help prop him up.

  “Okay, let’s take it easy on the stairs. Jane’s pulling the car around,” Olsson says.

  “Is that the plan?” I ask. “I mean, I’m here. It’s me. I’m really here.”

  My father’s silent. He squeezes my shoulder. It feels good—reassuring, a comfort.

  “The atlas?” Olsson asks.

  “It’s safe—in another world. For now at least. Jax has the vaccine. They’re going to try to save that branch.”

  My father can hardly hold his head up, but he smiles.

  “And there’s something else I have to tell you,” I say. “Alex is dead. The one from the prime.”

  “Dead?” Olsson says.

  “Sprowitz killed him.”

  Olsson and my father exchange looks.

  “Iosif is going to try to take over,” Olsson says. “He’ll sense a vacuum of power and he’ll move in.”

  “Iosif?” I say. “He’s the guy who killed me. This isn’t good.”

  “It’s okay, Alicia,” my father says. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Don’t lie to her,” Olsson says.

  We get to the bottom of the stairs, and my father takes me by the shoulders. “You did good,” he says. “Real good.”

  Olsson pulls open the door leading to a parking garage.

  There’s the Maserati. Jane steps out of the driver’s door, runs to us. “Is Jax safe?”

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “He’s fine.”

  Jane tightens her lips and then smiles. Her eyes tear up. “Thank you.”

  “I have a favor to ask,” I say to Jane.

  “Anything.”

  “You have to tell my mother I’m fine. I promise I’ll call her, but I have to go figure out who I really am, and I can’t do that in my old life.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  Olsson eases my father into the passenger seat. “Okay, you should head to New Bedford. There’s a little airport there. The pilot will take you to a safe house. We’ll have medical folks there who can help. Eventually, we’ll get a world secured for you. Somewhere safe.”

  Jane hands me a set of keys.

  “For this car?” I ask. “I’m driving? I’m only fifteen.”

  “Well, your father’s in no shape to drive,” Olsson says. “So—”

  “No,” Jane says, interrupting. “I found a driver.”

  From the cramped backseat, Hafeez emerges. He steps out of the car and I rush him, giving him a huge hug.

  “He showed up at my house,” Jane says. “He demanded to help.”

  “Where else could I go?” Hafeez says.

  I introduce him to my father. My father’s hands are too beaten to shake. Hafeez says, “I’ve heard a lot about you. Nice to meet you in person.”

  My father smiles. “Any friend of Alicia’s is a friend of mine.”

  I hand Hafeez the keys and climb in the back.

  “Good luck,” Olsson says.

  “We’ll see you again soon,” Jane says.

  “Thank you,” my father says to them.

  Olsson and Jane nod and walk away, down the row of parked cars. I expect them to look back but they don’t. Shoulders hunched to the cold, they just keep going, moving fast. At the end of the row, they split away from each other.

  “You two ready?” Hafeez asks, gripping the wheel.

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  He steps on the gas and the car pops forward and then takes off. “It’s like flying,” Hafeez says.

  “Sure is,” my father says.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A FEW weeks later, I’m in my father’s bedroom in an old farmhouse surrounded by fields of tall wheat. I spend a lot of time sitting in this chair pulled to his bed. He’s still wrapped in bandages, casts, but he’s on the mend.

  This is home for now. It’s where we landed that night when my father was set free, on a rough strip of grass. A doctor and a nurse were waiting for him and tend to him, here, off the grid. Where is here exactly? Where’s anywhere, really?

  The house belongs to spandrels from the old family lines, ones that date back to the earliest known civilizations. On the bedside table are an old rotary phone, a comb, and a tool, the one my father gave me for my birthday.

  Some nights, after my father has fallen asleep, like he has now, I call Hafeez when I know his mother’s going to be out playing Bunco.

  Some nights, I call my mother and we talk. Sometimes we talk about real things, the truth.

  Some nights, I find myself writing down the Sylvia Plath lines that I love and have memorized. I doodle around and through the words with sketches of trees with branches and roots curling and spiraling out in all directions. I think of Sylvia as a spandrel, and how maybe, when she made the decision to kill herself, her world ripped in two. In one of them, she got up off the kitchen floor, struggled to her feet, closed the oven door, and turned off the gas. Covering her mouth with both hands, she walked up the stairs to her children’s bedroom door. She peeled off the masking tape, pulled away the towels she’d put in place to protect them. In the small room, there was the milk and bread she’d left, the window yawning open for airing. The way I listen to my father breathing, she listened to the soft purring of her children’s breaths, and she fell asleep, knowing that the next day, she’d keep going.

  Some nights, I think about how we all just keep going—for ourselves and for each other, in universe after universe. In branch after branch. In the infinite forest. It makes me feel small but also as if each moment of each of our lives is vast, so full of unknowable things.

  Outside, there’s the rise and fall of cricket noise. Occasionally a pair of headlights will glide along the distant road.

  I look out at the moon, a harvest moon—full and blushing.

  A red moon.

  A blood moon, some people call it.

  I pick up the tool. It feels good and right in my hand, a relief.

  I stare at the moon. The pain doesn’t feel like pain anymore. It feels known, predictable. I press the tip of the tool on a specific spot on my arm first.

  The crickets roar in my ears. The room spins so quickly that it feels like I’m inside of a tornado. The wallpaper, covered in flowers, seems to bloom and burst with color and then …r />
  * * *

  I’m up late, sitting on the porch of the cabin in a rocking chair. I’m looking out at the lake with the little girl with the bright green eyes—her name is Helen—asleep on my lap. Inside, I hear Gemmy laughing and talking. “Ticky-hi,” I sing to her: “Ticky hi, ticky ho. Ticky hi-dy hi-dy ho.…”

  I push back as I rock so that my lower ribs hit the slats of the rocker. The glinting off the lake looks like stars. I hear a coyote, and it howls, loud and sharp, in my ears.…

  * * *

  I’m sitting on a rooftop. Hafeez has his arm around me. Pixie Stix wrappers are lying on the shingles. Through the window, I see our backpacks, side by side on the floor. There’s a little chill in the air. We’re far from home. We left, together. I wouldn’t get cut. I had to run. Hafeez didn’t let me go alone.

  I’m happy. And although I can’t really exactly place where we’re living, I can tell that in this world I’m exactly where I need to be.

  “Big dipper,” Hafeez says, pointing to the constellation.

  We both are looking up now, and he taps his chest three times. The sign—the heart like in the Plath poem about the “red bell-bloom, in distress.” I glance at him and then tap my own chest, right over my heart. He smiles.

  I push my knuckle against my collarbone. I don’t want to hang around. I just wanted to check in.

  I look up at the stars, and they start to tremble and then bounce. The chill turns into a sharp wind.…

  * * *

  A vast dark blue sky. Far off, there’s a line of people under the glow of lanterns, waiting in front of a medical tent. Sprowitz and Pynch are there, handing out supplies.

  And Jax is beside me.

  I hear a strange soft scratching. It seems to be coming from the ground itself.

  I kneel down and put my palm flat on the dirt.

  Jax turns and looks at me. “You?” he says.

  I nod, and then I start to feel it, a needling sensation like my hand was asleep but is tingling with blood and nerves—the earth stitching itself together. “You have to feel this,” I say to Jax.

  He puts his hand on the ground, too. He looks up at me. “It’s starting. It’s because we all have a new way of perceiving the future.”

  “With a little hope.”

  He covers my hand with his. “What now?” he says.

  But he must know the answer.

  Everything.

  Dear Reader,

  J. Q. Coyle is the joint pen name of two authors, Quinn Dalton and Julianna Baggott. We met in graduate school, both aspiring fiction writers. Over the years, we’ve published many books. Quinn is an acclaimed writer who has published two short-story collections and two novels, most recently Midnight Bowling. Julianna has published more than twenty books, including Pure, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2012). Julianna came up with the concept behind the lives of spandrels, but really wanted to put two minds to the limitless possibilities of the idea itself. She reached out to Quinn and, together, they wrote the novel, back and forth, over many years. The result of those two minds cross-pollinating is now in your hands.

  Sincerely,

  J & Q

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Growing up, J. Q. COYLE was a fan of stories. But more than that, a fan of possibilities. So, it seemed only natural to write a story in which the possibilities are limitless. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  Part I: Seed

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part II: Split

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part III: Unfurl

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Authors’ Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE INFINITY OF YOU & ME. Copyright © 2016 by Julianna Baggott. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Coyle, J. Q., author.

  Title: The infinity of you & me / J. Q. Coyle.

  Other titles: Infinity of you and me

  Description: New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016012740|ISBN 9781250099228 (hardcover)|ISBN 9781250099235 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Teenage girls—Fiction.|GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.A339 I54 2016|DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012740

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  First Edition: November 2016