Parallel

by Lauren Miller

  “You want to talk.” He says this like it’s a joke, his words laced with irony.

  “Yes. Please?”

  He eyes me, unblinking. I blush under the weight of his stare. “Okay,” he says finally. His shoulders rise and fall in a dismissive shrug. “Let’s talk.”

  “Should I go upstairs?” Tyler asks, a deviled egg in each cheek.

  I look at Josh. “Are you up for a walk?” He doesn’t respond but reaches for the maroon fleece slung over the arm of the couch. There’s an oar and the words USC CREW stitched in golden thread on the lapel.

  “You kids have fun,” Tyler says, plopping down on the couch. “I may be in a food coma when you get back. Don’t wake me.”

  Josh follows me upstairs and out the front door. No particular route in mind, I just set off down the street, which is still wet from last night’s rain.

  Josh falls into step beside me. When I look over at him, he’s staring straight ahead, his expression blank. Totally unreadable. Is he always like this? I wish I knew him well enough to know. All I have are a couple of months’ worth of year-old memories that aren’t even mine.

  We’re halfway down the block before I realize I left my sweater inside. I wasn’t cold until I realized it, but now I’m freezing. Josh sees me shivering and unzips his fleece.

  “Here,” he says, handing it to me. It’s the first word spoken since we left the basement. I shake my head in protest.

  “Keep it,” I insist. “I don’t want you to be cold.” He ignores me, draping the fleece around my shoulders. “But I’m the bad guy here,” I point out. “The bad guy doesn’t deserve to be warm.”

  “This is true.” There’s the slightest hint of humor in his voice. I run with it. It’s risky, but it’s all I’ve got.

  “I mean, come on,” I joke, “the girl who shows up at your house on Thanksgiving to pick up your brother certainly doesn’t deserve to wear your jacket.”

  His face hardens. Okay, so we’re not quite to the we-can-laugh-about-this stage yet.

  “So he’s the reason you just disappeared?” he asks. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”

  “I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.” He doesn’t respond. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but it’d be really great if you would.”

  Josh just looks at me. “That’s it? That’s your apology?”

  I nod weakly, nearly buckling under the weight of how much more he deserves. This kind, well-meaning guy has become collateral damage. His heart was broken, and he has no idea why. He’s telling himself that his ex-girlfriend simply fell for someone else, but that can’t be a satisfying explanation because that’s not the person he understood his ex-girlfriend to be. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I say softly. Even as I’m saying it, I know how lame it sounds.

  “Which part?” he asks evenly. “The part where you acted like I didn’t exist? Or the part where I found out why?”

  “I didn’t know,” I whisper, stung by his tone.

  Josh stops walking. “You ‘didn’t know’ what, Abby? That Michael and I were related?” His voice is angry now. “Maybe not. But you sure as hell knew how you were treating me. Never mind that I was ready to transfer to be nearer to you. And you couldn’t even be bothered to pick up the freaking phone?”

  I shake my head slowly, my eyes never leaving his. “No.” My voice is barely audible. “I didn’t know that, either.”

  Confusion flashes across Josh’s face. “Okay, now I’m lost.”

  I shouldn’t have said anything. I should’ve just let him hate me. Now he’s expecting an explanation, and I can’t give him one. He’ll think I’m crazy if I try.

  I look away. A man in a stiff flannel shirt and work pants is listening to a football game on his front porch, smoking a cigarette. Somebody’s grandfather. I suddenly miss mine. I haven’t seen him since last Christmas, three days after I found out I’d booked the movie. He was so proud. “Gonna be a star,” he told me, not an ounce of doubt in his voice. I laughed when he said it, but he hadn’t meant it as a joke.

  “Abby.” Josh’s voice cuts through the silence.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I reply, my voice small. I watch as the old man puts out his cigarette and lights another one.

  “Try me.”

  Tell him.

  I turn my head, meeting Josh’s gaze. Something in his eyes makes me think he might get it. But what if he doesn’t? What if he thinks I’m crazy, or worse, making it up?

  “Just tell me the truth,” he says softly. “That’s all I want.”

  I take a breath and exhale slowly. The truth.

  “Something happened on my eighteenth birthday,” I begin, because it feels like the right place to start. “Something I still don’t completely understand. It has to do with the earthquake last year.”

  “Your unfortunate twist of fate,” Josh says. His eyes dance a little, remembering the words he thinks I spoke. “The day we met.”

  “Yes. Only . . .” I take another breath. “It wasn’t me you remember meeting that day.”

  “It wasn’t you,” Josh repeats. He looks at me for a moment, then shakes his head, getting angry again. “What, you’re going to tell me you weren’t yourself that day? That the girl I fell in love with isn’t who you really are? That’s bullcrap, Abby.” His voices rises but stays steady. “Don’t tell me I don’t know you. I know you, and you know me.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” I reply, feeling my own voice shake. “I’m saying that the girl you remember meeting literally wasn’t me.”

  Josh stops walking. “What?”

  I force myself to keep talking. “Do you remember Dr. Mann from astronomy?”

  “Do I remember him? Of course I remember him, Abby.”

  “Okay, well, he has this theory . . . about parallel worlds.”

  “Cosmic entanglement,” Josh says. “I know.”

  I stare at him. “You know about the theory.”

  “Sure. The basics, anyway. I read Dr. Mann’s book when I signed up for his class. I mean, I’m not sure I believe it, but—”

  “Believe it.” Without thinking, I grab his hand. “It happened. On my birthday.”

  “What happened?”

  “Our world collided with a parallel world. Became entangled with one. Everyone’s memories were erased, and our parallel selves started rewriting our pasts, but no one knows it. No one but me, anyway.” I hear myself, how utterly insane this all sounds, and I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. I back up a little, not wanting to leave anything out. “The parallel world is a year behind ours,” I explain. “Well, a year and a day, actually. The earthquake—well, that’s just it, it wasn’t an earthquake, it was a collision. And it didn’t happen here on September 8, 2008, it happened there. In the parallel world. We just remember it as though it happened here. It’s called—”

  “Shared reality.” Josh is staring at me in wonder, but not disbelief. Hope bubbles up inside me. He doesn’t think I’m crazy.

  “Right! But the thing is, it didn’t work like it was supposed to for me. I kept all my real memories, and I didn’t get a full set of new ones. My memories from the parallel world stop where my parallel’s stop, so I have a yearlong gap where everything from her version is just a blank. That’s why I didn’t know you and I were together. Why I—”

  “Stop.”

  I don’t hear him at first. “What?”

  “I said stop.” He looks down at his hand, which I’m still holding. I start to let go, but he grabs it back. “Just so I’m clear, your explanation for your behavior for the past month is that there was a freaking cosmic collision? That altered the way we interact in time and space? And that you’re the only one who knows it happened? Abby . . .”

  “I know. I know how crazy it sounds. But think about it, Josh.” I grip his hand, wanting so desperately to make him understand, to give him the peace he deserves. “Think about Abby,” I say softly. “The Abby you know. The Abby you love, and
who loves you back. The Abby who stopped answering your calls out of the blue. The Abby who didn’t respond to a single email or text. Would she ever have done that to you?” My heart aches at the thought of what it must’ve been like for him, all that inexplicable silence. No explanation. No good-bye.

  Subtly, almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.

  “She would never have done it, Josh. If I had known what was going on, I would never have done it. But it happened, and neither of us had any control over it, and you’re the innocent victim, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” My voice breaks and I gasp for breath, my hand clutching his so tightly my fingers have started to cramp.

  He looks down at the hand I’m holding. “You’re saying that everything I remember about our relationship is fiction?”

  “Not fiction,” I reply. “Just not . . . what happened to us.” We both know there’s no distinction, not really.

  He lets go of my hand. “No.” He shakes his head firmly. “No.”

  The hope inside me recedes, like a wave at low tide.

  “It sounds impossible,” I say. “It should be impossible. But it’s the truth, Josh. I promise you, it is.”

  He’s quiet, his body angled away from me, and for a moment, I think he might walk away.

  “Please,” I whisper. “Don’t go.”

  “You don’t remember any of it?” he asks then, his voice incredulous and sad. “Our relationship, I mean. Nothing at all?”

  “I remember some of it,” I say. “Our first date. The Georgia Fair. Everything that happened before November twenty-seventh of last year. That’s where my parallel’s memories stop.”

  He’s still not looking at me, but I can see his tears spill over. He doesn’t even attempt to wipe them away. “What I feel . . . these aren’t someone else’s feelings, Abby. They can’t be. The way I love you . . .” His voice breaks. “Don’t tell me that’s not real.”

  My insides squeeze and contract. “I don’t know what to say,” I say softly. “Other than I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” The tears that have clogged my throat and shaken my voice since this conversation began are flowing freely now. I choke back a sob.

  “I am too,” he says sadly. He hesitates for a moment, then pulls me into a hug. “I believe you,” he whispers. I exhale and lean into him, letting the weight of my upper body fall against his chest. His neck, soapy and sweet, is warm on my forehead. The scent is both new and powerfully familiar, triggering the dozen or so memories I have of being this close to him. Sitting next to him on that swing in his neighborhood, the night before our first date. Holding hands at the planetarium two days later. His arm around me on the Ferris wheel. And my most recent one: leaning against a tree on the bank of the Chattahoochee, my head resting on his shoulder, watching the sunset after the Brookside crew picnic. I inhale deeply, allowing myself to imagine what those moments would have been like to live, since the memories of them, while specific and precise, are void of emotion and thus strikingly incomplete. My arms tighten around his neck. I don’t want to let go.

  “Cosmic entanglement,” Josh says after a minute, his voice muffled against my hair. “Definitely not where I expected this conversation to go.” I smile, resting my ear against his chest. “Who else knows about it?” he asks.

  “Only Caitlin,” I reply, distracted by the faint thump of his heartbeat, wondering what it would feel like beneath my palm. “Dr. Mann suspects, but we haven’t told him for sure.”

  Josh pulls back and looks at me. “You haven’t told Michael?” I shake my head. “Why not?”

  “I wasn’t sure he’d believe me if I did.”

  “Do you . . .” His eyes drop to the pavement. “Love him?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. Josh turns and starts walking again. His brown eyes are heavy with hurt.

  “It shouldn’t have happened like this,” I say lamely. “If I’d known about you . . . about us . . . if I’d had any idea that we were—” The words “in love” are stuck in my throat. We were in love. I shake my head, unable to finish. Josh takes my hand and squeezes it.

  “So I should blame Thanksgiving, then,” he says.

  I look at him. “What?”

  “Last year,” he explains. “If you’d come over like you were supposed to, you and Michael would’ve met. Maybe things would’ve been different if you had.”

  My rib cage contracts. There’s no “maybe” about it. If Michael had known who I was when we met at Yale, he would’ve expected me to remember him, and I would’ve played along, the way I did with everyone else that day. At the very least, he would’ve asked me about Josh. There’s no way we’d be dating right now if we’d met under those circumstances.

  Thank God she didn’t go.

  I think back, trying to remember what my parallel did instead, but can’t. My breath catches in my throat as I realize.

  “Thanksgiving hasn’t happened yet,” I whisper.

  It doesn’t register at first. Josh just looks at me. Then realization flashes in his eyes and he gets it. “It’s still possible,” he says. “She could still come by. For dessert, maybe.” His eyes are shining with hope and possibility. But there’s something else there, too.

  Love.

  Even now, after all that’s happened. It’s written so plainly on his face. It doesn’t matter to him that his memories aren’t real. His feelings haven’t changed.

  He loves me.

  “Fate could intervene,” he says then. His lips, chapped from the cold, curl in a tentative smile. “We could end up together after all.”

  No! All the fears and anxieties I’ve been ignoring come rushing to the surface. If my parallel wants to be with Josh, she should be. If she decides to give their relationship another shot next fall when he tells her he’s willing to transfer, then great. I wish them the best. But here, in this world, I should get to decide who I end up with. And I choose Michael. He’s the one I’m supposed to be with. What I’m feeling in this moment doesn’t matter. In my head I know what’s true.

  Then again, it’s not my head that’s the problem.

  Unable to meet Josh’s gaze, I look past him to the wooden gazebo up ahead. My eyes wander down the hill to the swing at the lake’s edge, swaying in the afternoon breeze. Our swing. I blink, pushing the image of us on it from my mind. It’s not our swing. It’s theirs.

  Memories are tricky little bastards.

  “Come on,” Josh says, stepping onto the dirt.

  “So how do you remember it?” I ask as we settle into the swing. “Last Thanksgiving, I mean. The last memory I have is from the night before.”

  Josh’s expression darkens. “Michael acted like Michael.” He glances over at me. “However he is with you, he’s different with us. Ever since our dad died.” Josh looks out at the water. “Last Thanksgiving was a new low. He said some really awful things to Martin at the table, and my mom just let him.” What kind of things? I want to ask, but can’t. “That was it for me,” he says. “I didn’t want anything to do with him after that.” Josh looks over at me, his eyes sad. “In the driveway yesterday, with you . . . that was the first time I’d seen him in a year.”

  “Some reunion,” is all I can muster.

  We’re quiet for a long time, letting the wind, even colder coming off the water, rock us back and forth. I lean my head back against the cool wood, examining the muted gray of the sky. “I was in L.A. when the collision happened,” I say after a while. “Shooting a movie, actually.” I look over at Josh. “In the real version, I didn’t take that astronomy class with you. I took drama and ended up in L.A.” I look back up at the sky. “It seems so crazy to me now, my life out there. So far away.”

  “I wonder if we would’ve met,” Josh says thoughtfully, pushing off the ground hard with his feet. “If you hadn’t been in my class last year. Maybe we would’ve run into each other at some coffee shop in Hollywood.”

  I smile. “Maybe so.”

  We’re swinging in earnest now, the old rusty chain clank
ing on its hook above our heads. “Aren’t you freezing?” I ask him, zipping his fleece up to my neck.

  “Nope,” he says, pumping his legs to get us going higher.

  “I don’t think this is the kind of swing you’re supposed to do that with,” I say, eyes on the clanging hook.

  “I’m pretty sure you’re right,” he replies, pumping harder, his cheeks pink from the cold.

  I giggle, pulling my knees up to my chest. A few seconds later, he does the same. We’re moving so fast that the swing jerks at each end, nearly knocking me off each time. I reach for the armrest.

  “Wimp!” Josh shouts. “Where’s the Abby I know?”

  We look at each other, and wonder.

  Michael calls as I’m pulling into the garage.

  “Hey,” I say, answering it. “How’s Boston?” From all the commotion in the background, I can tell he’s at a bar.

  “Awesome!” he bellows. I wince and pull the phone away from my ear, noticing that my battery is almost dead. “We’re pre-partying at Sullivan’s Tap!”

  “Tell Sullivan I said hi.”

  “No, no!” he yells. “Sullivan isn’t a person. Sullivan’s Tap is the name of a bar near the Garden.”

  “Yeah, I figured that. It was a joke.”

  “Oh! Right.” Michael laughs. “So how are things down there?”

  “Things are fine. I just miss you.” It’s only been seven hours since I dropped him off at the airport, but it feels like seven days. Hanging out with Josh was fun, but being with him has left me unsettled. All my parallel has to do is stop by his house tomorrow and my relationship with Michael will be over.

  “I miss you, too.” Michael says. “I wish you were here.”

  “Me, too,” I say, my throat suddenly tight.

  “Carpenter!” I hear a male voice shout. “Car bombs. Pronto!”