All Our Wrong Todays(51)

But around the dinner table—while I sop up the remains of the ratatouille with crusty spelt bread and my mom takes the dessert she baked out of the oven and my sister opens another bottle of pinot noir and Penny listens to my dad with guileless interest while her foot occasionally presses down on mine under the table—he can speak openly without fear of any ridicule more acrid than the exasperated sighs Greta doesn’t bother to conceal as she accidentally splits half the cork into the bottle because her fine motor skills decrease exponentially with each glass of wine. I watch, amused, as Greta pours herself a glass flecked with bobbing cork bits and picks them out with her thumb. She looks at me and shrugs and I feel blown through with love for her.

I catch my mom’s eye as she glances over from the kitchen, sprinkling powdered sugar on the dessert. She gives a little nod of approval in Penny’s vicinity.

This is what I’m talking about. This is the happiness I don’t deserve. Not after what I did. This pleasant family moment is a piece of cork floating in a sea of blood.





84


My mom comes out of the kitchen with an antique porcelain platter that belonged to her grandmother, the border an azure geometric pattern laced with gold filigree.

On it are a dozen lemon tarts.

“I made your favorite,” my mom says.

My internal organs clench, a cold, sick sweat worming from my pores. I must look visibly stricken, because my mom hesitates before placing them on the table.

“Wow,” says Greta. “The fancy platter.”

“What’s wrong?” says my mom.

“Nothing,” I say.

“They look delicious,” says Penny.

“It’s my grandmother’s recipe,” my mom says. “I make them every year for John’s birthday. Right before he turned five he announced he hated birthday cake . . .”

“At which point you should’ve used corporal punishment till he came to his senses,” says Greta. “How can a human being not like birthday cake?”

“So, I started making him lemon tarts,” my mom says. “One for every year.”

“Which was an adorable tradition when he was five,” says Greta, “but less so at age thirty-two. He probably eats one and throws the rest away.”

“He does not,” says my mom. “You don’t throw them away, do you?”

“John, are you feeling okay?” my dad says. “You look pale.”

My mother was dead, torn in half by a flying car, and now she’s alive, looking exactly the same except her posture is better, holding a platter of the lemon tarts I was never going to taste again.

“I’m great,” I say. “Thanks for making them.”

I pick up a lemon tart. It tastes the same as the ones from my world. Collapsing the sensory boundary between realities is too much for any pastry to bear. I reach for the wine bottle. And I drink.

I drink because of course I like perfect avocados and waking up into my own dreams and jet packs being a completely reasonable teenage birthday gift and clean air and global peace but I am in no way selfless—I’m happier here with my mom and dad and Greta and Penny than I ever was back there, a place that’s already getting gauzy and frail in my memory. Except there’s Deisha. And Xiao and Asher. And Hester and Megan and Tabitha. And the chrononauts and understudies from my father’s lab and my coworkers and classmates and Robin Swelter and her parents and her brother who punched me and the kids who helped me that time I ran away and the girls who hooked up with me when I came back to school and the billions of unborn strangers I never even met and if I ever forgive myself for taking their lives away from them it’ll be the exact moment they’re all lost forever.





85


My dad’s opening gambit is to explain why most time-travel models in popular culture don’t work: because the Earth moves.

I already summed this up in chapter 4, but if you skipped that part, okay, the Earth spins on its axis—we call that a day—while also rotating around the Sun—we call that a year—which is also moving through the solar system, which is also moving through the galaxy, which is also moving through the universe, which may well be moving through the multiverse. We have no words for those movements because the patterns are too vast to calculate with our current tools. It’s immanently probable there’s a clockwork charm to the whole mess but all we can see is the lonely tip of the smallest hand on the infinite watch face of reality.

The Earth travels through space, really fast, nonstop, every day. In the three and a half seconds it takes you to read this sentence, the planet spun a mile on its axis. Time travel isn’t just going back in time—it’s also leaping vast distances of space and landing in a hyperspecific location so you don’t materialize inside something. Either the time traveler must be immaterial or the location must be empty at a molecular level, because one stray particle in your brain could kill you.

Penny delights my dad by knowing way more about this stuff than anyone could reasonably expect. They spend dessert discussing the merits of creating a vacuum-sealable pod, powered by a nuclear engine that emits a trackable half-life frequency, so if time travel is ever mastered in the future there would be a safe place for time travelers to arrive and a direct path for them to follow. Theoretically, it could prove time travel is possible because if such a pod were built presumably someone from the future would immediately appear as soon as it’s activated—the ultimate if you build it, they will come according to my dad.