Infinite(6)

She was a wisp of a thing, a five-foot-nothing dynamo in high heels. Her black hair was very long and straight and parted in the middle. Her dark eyes twinkled below wicked eyebrows, and her lips were always bright red. Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled, which was often.

If I were posting about our relationship on Facebook, I would say it was complicated. I liked mentoring her. I liked that she flattered me by telling me how good I was at my job. I liked the snarky little jokes she whispered about couples getting married in the ballroom. To me, she was a younger sister, and as an older brother, I tended to confide my secrets to her. Most recently, I’d told her about Karly’s one-night affair, and like any good sister, Tai was quick to assure me that I was right and Karly was wrong.

All of this seemed safe to me because I had no romantic interest in her. Karly didn’t see it that way. From the moment they met, she didn’t like Tai at all. Karly had a habit of making up words to suit what she wanted to say, and she invented one for Tai. Manipulatrix. In Karly’s dictionary, that was a dominant, controlling woman who got what she wanted by pretending to be submissive. To Karly, who was strong in her own right, that was the worst kind of sin.

“So what can I do for you, Dylan?” Tai asked when she put away her radio. She took my chin with her long fingers and turned my face so I was looking at her. “I want to help with anything you need.”

“I don’t even know yet,” I replied, which was true. “Just hold down the fort here, okay?”

“Absolutely.”

“I thought I could go back to work, but I don’t think I can. Not yet.”

“No one would expect you to be ready so soon,” Tai said.

I checked the time on my watch. “I need to go. I’ve got to meet Edgar at the Art Institute in an hour. It drives him crazy if I’m late.”

“Does Edgar know? I mean, about Karly?”

“I called to tell him, but I don’t know whether he really understood what I was saying. Plus, his short-term memory is shot.”

“Sure.”

I stood up from the chair. So did Tai, and she wrapped me up in another embrace that went on too long.

“Are you staying in the hotel again tonight?” she asked.

“Probably. I can’t go back to the apartment yet.”

“I’ll call you before I head home.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

She squeezed my shoulder, and I gave her an empty smile of thanks. I turned away, but then, as an afterthought, I remembered what I wanted to know.

“By the way, who’s Eve Brier?”

“What?”

I gestured at the poster near the ballroom door. “She’s the speaker at the event tonight.”

“Don’t you know her?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s strange,” Tai replied.

“Why?”

“She told me she picked the hotel on your recommendation.”

“On my recommendation? She said she knew me?”

“Definitely.”

I took another look at the photograph of Dr. Eve Brier and felt the same sensation that her eyes were sending me an invitation. Come closer. Get to know me. Yes, she looked familiar, but I had no recollection of meeting her.

“Maybe I ran into her somewhere and gave her my sales pitch,” I speculated, although I didn’t think that was true. “Who is she?”

“She’s some kind of new age self-help guru,” Tai explained. “She left me a copy of her book, but I haven’t looked at it. Whoever she is, she’s very popular. We’re planning on a big crowd for her talk.”

“‘Many Worlds, Many Minds,’” I said. “What does that mean?”

“Apparently, she applies a theory from quantum mechanics in physics to her psychotherapy practice. It’s about how we’re all part of an infinite number of parallel worlds. Every time we make a choice, a carbon copy of ourselves makes the opposite choice in a different universe.”

“Parallel worlds?” I said skeptically.

I couldn’t wrap my brain around the concept. Maybe that’s because I was focused on the other two words she’d used.

Carbon copy. Like a double. A twin. A man in a storm.

“That’s what she says,” Tai replied. “When Eve was signing the contract for the ballroom space, she told me that an entirely separate universe had already been created in which she didn’t sign it.”

“What did you say to that?”

Tai winked. “I said to make sure that she lived in the universe where she paid the bill.”





CHAPTER 3

On my way to meet Edgar at the Art Institute, I stopped in the museum’s south garden, near the Fountain of the Great Lakes, where the water flowed from clamshells over the bodies of five beautiful bronze women.

This place was flush with memories for me.

I’d sat with Karly here once on a spring afternoon, holding hands among the honey locust trees and listening to the bubble of water. We were still in our early days then, when we knew we were in love but before we’d shared all our stories. Karly wore a long-sleeve green sweater and a plaid skirt that made her look, to me, like some kind of Irish rebel. A woman for all seasons. Her skin was ivory pale, with a few freckles. Her eyes had a way of changing color with the light, and that day, in the cool April shadows, they were a sad country-song kind of blue. A single brass stud adorned the top of her left ear. Her blond hair, jaggedly chopped off at the shoulders as if she’d done it herself to show the world she could, smelled like a fresh sprig of rosemary.