When the World was Flat (and we were in love)

by Ingrid Jonach

  I put the photos in my desk drawer, feeling like I had found a ball of twine that could lead me through the maze that was my mother.

  I ended up sticking with my own brown mascara, but I did let Sylv put a bit of blush on my cheekbones and a dash of gold eye shadow on my lids.

  “To draw attention away from those dark circles,” she explained.

  I slipped on my gold-colored flats. “Do I look like an Oscar?” I asked, as I studied my reflection.

  “You look like a model,” Sylv said, stepping back and surveying me like a proud mother.

  Unlike Deb, I thought as I climbed out of the window, my legs like rigor mortis in my too tight jeans. I was letting her down left, right and center at the moment.

  I snuck along the side of the house and climbed over the fence with a final wave to Sylv, who had agreed to watch a stack of Marilyn Monroe flicks after my search for non-musical DVDs turned up an instructional yoga video and a few PETA documentaries.

  When I reached the park I scanned the dustbowl for Tom, my eyes skimming a handful of kids tossing a baseball in the diamond, their voices like the shriek of birds. I turned and surveyed the street, beginning to feel sick to my stomach as I wondered if he had decided to ditch our date.

  It was like a shot of morphine when I saw the SUV glide down the street and perform a U-turn. I opened the door and climbed in within a second of it pulling into the curb, as if Evacuee Lillie was on my tail.

  “Are you OK?” Tom asked, his blue eyes wide. Worried.

  I lowered my gaze to his lips, which were slightly parted as he waited for my answer.

  “Fine,” I breathed, letting my eyes go to the clock on the dashboard and feeling foolish when I saw it was noon on the dot. “Except I just broke out of Alcatraz. Deb must be a prison warden in another dimension.”

  Tom smiled an easy smile. “You should meet my grandmother.” He waited for a delivery van to pass before pulling out onto the street. “She reminds me of the Red Queen. You know, from Alice in Wonderland.” He frowned. “Maybe she was the Red Queen in whatever dimension Lewis Carroll was channeling.” But then he shook his head. “The timing would be wrong. It was published in the 1800s I think.”

  “1865,” I confirmed, surprising myself with this literary knowledge. “And his name was Charles Dodgson. Lewis Carroll was his pen name.”

  Tom raised his eyebrows and then shrugged. “Well, Red Queen or no Red Queen, I could wrap my grandmother around my little finger by the time I could talk.”

  “What a surprise,” I said sarcastically, wondering if anyone was immune to his charm.

  Tom shrugged. “What can I say? You can get away with anything when you know how.”

  “Murder,” I concurred, without thinking.

  His hands tightened around the steering wheel and I knew he was thinking of his first love – Lillie from the Seventh Dimension. There was a pang in my chest as I thought about her too.

  I looked out of the window and saw we were heading towards the railroad crossing; the houses were fewer and farther between here with trees filling the gaps. My spirits soared. I was looking forward to seeing Rose Hill with my new memories, wandering through rooms that had belonged to me in another place and another time.

  When I saw the skid marks on the road I glanced over at Tom, recalling the look on his face as he had belted Jackson.

  It suddenly made sense. Tom had chased Evacuee Lillie from this dimension, but then Jackson had come close to killing me himself. I closed my eyes, remembering my dream of being hit by the train and the coldness that had spread through my body. I shuddered, realizing that in another dimension Jackson had slammed on the brakes at the last minute and the dimension had split, leaving me alive and another Lillie dead.

  I could see the funeral in my mind, my mother laying a Lily of the Valley on the wooden casket with a shaking hand. Tom was there too, standing in the background as I was lowered into the ground, his hands balled into fists at the side of his body, raging at the loss of another Lillie.

  “Why were you at the railroad crossing?” I asked, remembering that he had said he had been off track.

  His lips tightened and I guessed it was a question he would rather not answer. “I wanted a break,” he admitted. “I thought I could be a teenager again for one dimension.” He stared through the windshield, as if boring holes through the glass.

  I swallowed hard. “You wanted a break?” I asked. The words rotated through my mind, each syllable stabbing at my heart. A break. A break. A break. A break from Lillie in the Thirty-Fifth Dimension. I stared at him wide-eyed, wondering why he had chased Evacuee Lillie out of my dimension if he wanted a normal life. For one dimension. My dimension.

  “And being a teenager means hanging out with Melissa and the Mutts?” I asked coldly, thinking again of Lillie from the Seventh Dimension and how he would have hung out with her in an instant.

  He shook his head. “It means letting go of my past. Of my Lillie.” He winced and his voice dropped to a whisper. “And I did.”

  “You think you let her go? Your Lillie?” I asked incredulously. “Look at me, Tom. Do I remind you of someone?” I glared at him. “Do I?” I grabbed his arm, my fingers wrapping around the thick material of his jacket as I gave him a shake. “Look at me!”

  He did as he was told, his irises shining like silver mirrors.

  “If you could slide into your seventh dimension again you would in a heartbeat, but you said it yourself – once you slide out, you slide out.” I knew I was hurting him, but I could care less. I wanted to hurt him, like he was hurting me.

  Tom pulled the wheel to the right and we skidded to a stop in the dirt, pebbles pinging on the undercarriage. We sat in silence, as if at the crossroads again, and I wondered if I should bail. I guess in another dimension I did, because I thought I could see the other Lillie in the side mirror, her gold sweater shimmering in the sunlight as she walked towards town with a heavy heart.

  “Lillie,” Tom said, reminding me I was in the SUV, in this dimension at least. “I let go when I fell in love with you.” He turned to look at me and I felt myself being sucked into his orbit, like a satellite.

  “Like every other Lillie,” I said. “You call that letting go? Trading in one Lillie for another?”

  Tom shook his head. “The Lillie I married was my first love – my only love – until now.” He closed his eyes and his words hung between us, waiting for me to pick them up. My heart swelled as I realized I was his second love. Not his twenty-fourth or thirty-first, or thirty-fifth as I had thought.

  He reached across and popped open the glove compartment. It fell open and out rolled my cardigan, the one I had been wearing when he had rescued me in the rain. I must have left it in his SUV.

  “You know, in this dimension they call that stalking,” I said with a growing smile.

  “Lillie, I thought I would never fall in love again. I–”

  I leaned forward and kissed him, my hands on the back of his neck, pulling him towards me, until it seemed like we would merge.

  When we drove up the avenue at Rose Hill I surveyed the grounds with nostalgia. It was like every tree, every blade of grass held a memory.

  We passed an older couple as we walked into the foyer – a man wearing beige trousers and a navy sweater, and a woman dripping with jewelry. I returned their smiles, feeling at home with the swanky guests.

  “Welcome back, Lillie,” Lorraine said, beaming at me with red-lipsticked lips. Of course, she was referring to my last visit with Jackson, but her words resounded, warming me from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. She held a hand to her chest as we passed and I wondered whether she was thinking of the broken heart she thought I had given Tom.

  Tom led me through the hotel, down the hallway and past the ballroom. The doors were open and I caught a glimpse of its chandeliers glistening as they caught the light. I paused, thinking I could see us in the crystals, dancing our bridal waltz, before Tom led me through another set o
f double doors and into the grounds.

  “I should have brought my camera,” I said. The two rolls of film I had finished on my last visit had been just a nibble of what was a multi-tiered cake. I now knew that a hundred yards to our left was a hedge maze that had been established in the early 1900s. I also knew that where the rose garden was planted there had been an old oak in the Seventh Dimension with a tire swing hanging from one of its sturdy branches.

  “Next time,” Tom said as we walked along a path lined with golden-rod, our feet crunching on the gravel.

  When we reached the “Keep Out” sign, Tom unclipped the chain that blocked the flagstone path.

  I hesitated, before taking his hand again, holding it tight as we walked along the uneven stones from my nightmares. My flats slipped on the moss and I had to cling to Tom with my other hand, like we were ice skating again.

  When I saw the courtyard with its fountain, my heart went into my throat and I glanced over my shoulder, even though I knew Evacuee Lillie had been and gone from this dimension.

  “I know this courtyard,” I whispered.

  Tom nodded. We both knew it was where I had been killed, where our – I mean, their – baby had been killed. I touched my stomach, tracing its flat lines. But my melancholy subsided when I remembered it was also where Tom had proposed.

  I closed my eyes and saw him handing me a jewelry box. No – handing Lillie from the Seventh Dimension a jewelry box. She was sitting on the edge of the fountain and as she lifted the lid I heard Tom say, “Marry me, Lillie.” A warmth spread through my chest as if I had heard the words with my own ears.

  “It would have been at least three centuries since I last set foot in this courtyard,” Tom said, moving towards the fountain and running a hand along its brickwork, his fingers finding the grooves. “In the greenhouse too.”

  He returned from his reverie, taking my hand again. “I had the kitchen prepare us a picnic,” he said, and as we rounded the fountain I saw a tartan rug spread out on the flagstones and a wicker basket surrounded by a feast of sandwiches, sliced fruit, cheese and crackers.

  The weather was cool, but the sun was shining, shimmering on the glasses of mineral water. Tom leaned against an oversized cushion propped against the damp bricks of the fountain and I was folded into his arms, popping grapes into my mouth and listening to his heartbeat under his T-shirt, as steady as a march.

  “They say the human heart beats an average of fifty times per minute,” I told him. “Do you want to know the average heart-rate of a mouse? Five hundred beats a minute.”

  “You and your trivia,” he said with a chuckle. “It used to drive me up the wall.”

  I sat up and looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You do know I am my own person. My own Lillie.”

  He nodded. “I know.” He considered me with those pale blue eyes and then reached up to trail his fingers through my hair, combing it from my temple to the nape of my neck.

  I closed my eyes. “What was she like?” I asked. “The Lillie you married?”

  I opened my eyes as he withdrew his hand.

  “As serious as a heart attack,” he said with a sad smile on his lips. “You had to build up a sweat to get her to loosen up. Have a laugh.”

  His words warmed me to the core. I had been worried we were so alike that I would continue to wonder if it was me or her that he was kissing.

  His eyes grew distant, like he was seeing into another dimension. “She was as bound to her notebook as you are to your camera. She wrote poetry. She was even published in a few anthologies.”

  “Wow,” I whispered, leaning up against him again. A published poet. My chest swelled with pride, even though in my own words I was my own Lillie. I decided I could take a little credit, as I realized my newfound knowledge about Lewis Carroll and other literary tidbits had come from Lillie the Poet.

  Tom leaned into my ear and spoke in a low voice. “I call him my love, my soulmate. This boy, now a man, and soon a father. Together a few short years–”

  “–that seem like an eternity in my dreams,” I finished, recalling the words as if I had written the poem myself. I sucked in a sharp breath and whirled on him. “You didn’t tell her? About the theory of everything? About the Evacuation?”

  He shook his head sadly, turning his head to look at the fountain, as if seeing the moment of her death. “I wanted that normal life.” He scowled at himself, at Evacuee Lillie.

  “If you wanted a normal life you could have merged,” I pointed out.

  Tom shook his head. “The first time I saw anyone merge was when Evacuee Lillie merged with my wife in my Seventh Dimension,” he said. “From that moment I realized I was not going to get along with anyone associated with the Circle.”

  We fell silent, and I pulled a throw rug over my legs and watched the red crossbills flit in and out of the hedge until I worked up the courage to ask my next question. “Tell me about the Lillie from your dimension. You said you used to be friends.”

  It took him a while to answer and I glanced up at him, wondering if he had heard.

  “Friends,” he said slowly. “Did I say that? I guess we were friends. It was a long time ago though. Another lifetime.” He stared into space for a while, his irises deepening to a cerulean blue, before he asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “How did you meet?”

  “My parents used to come back to Green Grove every summer in my dimension, at Christmas as well.” He rubbed his forehead, as if the conversation were hurting his head. “Deb and my father were childhood friends.” He paused. “In this dimension too.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “I guess that was why she freaked out when she heard my name. My father grew up in Green Grove. It was my mother who came from England. From money. My father was a poor budding photographer, living in the sticks.”

  “A photographer?” I asked, thinking about his criticism of my photos and his hatred of photography in general.

  “He got my mom hooked. They traveled around the world taking photos together. You have one of their books. The Geldings?” And then he added as an explanation. “My mother was a Windsor-Smith. My father is a Gelding.”

  My eyes widened as I realized he was talking about my favorite photography book – the one the girls had given me for my eleventh birthday.

  “I was born in Australia,” he said, which explained his accent, “but my parents sent me back to England when I was about five. I barely saw them after that, except for at Rose Hill. My grandmother would bring me out here to meet up with them. She changed my last name to hers when I was eight, given she was my legal guardian and all.”

  “What happened to your parents after the Evacuation?” I asked.

  He tilted his head to stare up into the foliage and from this angle I could see his tattoo: W=VxT…

  “They wanted to photograph the end of the world.”

  I could hear the bitterness in his voice and realized this was where his hatred of photography had come from. His parents had put their photography above everything, their own lives, their own son. I kicked myself for talking about my camera earlier.

  “When I was around seven Deb drove me out to Rose Hill,” I said, before the silence could settle again. “She asked for your father, but no one was home.”

  He looked down at me. “In my dimension we never missed a summer.”

  My mind went to Tom from my dimension and I wondered whether he was dreaming about Evacuee Tom like I was dreaming about Evacuee Lillie.

  My Tom spoke again, breaking into my thoughts. “By the way, it was her that liked trivia.”

  “Who?”

  “The Lillie from my dimension.”

  “Oh.” I had forgotten that I had her memories too, like any other Lillie from any other dimension. I wondered which of us had been the first trivia-buff. I liked to think it was me.

  “She also had a talent for making a mess.” He smiled fondly at the memory. “That girl could clutter an empty room. Sh
e held onto everything, old pens, movie tickets. She even had a shoebox of rocks we had collected in the sand hills.”

  Well, that explained my messy streak. It also told me Evacuee Lillie had crushed on Tom like Sylv crushed on Taylor Blackwood. Movie tickets? A shoebox of rocks? I wondered if Tom realized their relationship had been unbalanced, like a seesaw with him on the ground and her in the sky.

  “How about another treat?” Tom asked, propping me up and reaching for the basket.

  I raised a hand in protest. “My stomach is struggling with the two sandwiches, the slice of cheesecake and the ten thousand grapes.” I had steered clear of the other sliced fruit, the oranges especially. I ate oranges like a zombie ate flesh, juice dripping down my chin like blood.

  “I think you will find room for this treat,” Tom said, pulling a jewelry box out of the basket. I had a flash back – or a flash forward – as he opened the jewelry box and I saw the tiny key on a delicate white gold chain. I reached to my neck and fingered the patch of skin at the base of my throat, knowing I had worn this key in another dimension, the Seventh Dimension.

  “The photo and key are the two things I hold onto when I slide,” Tom explained.

  “You sure travel light for someone with a truckload of baggage,” I joked.

  He smiled and lifted the necklace. Its chain glinted in the sun as it swung in a figure-eight, the symbol of eternity.

  “What does it open?” I asked, as he put it around my neck, his fingers brushing my skin.

  “I will let you work that out for yourself.”

  I frowned, searching those wisps of memories for a clue. There was another box, a wooden box. It had contained the engagement ring. I squinted, trying to bring the memory into focus, but then Tom leaned in and kissed me gently on my neck. He moved up towards my lips, and I pushed away the past and succumbed to the present.

  Tom knew not to come in when he dropped me home, and watched me walk up the path from his SUV.