The Love That Split the World(102)

That was the night of Matt’s accident, the last time I saw Grandmother. Though for her it was the first. The fear of that night, of tonight, crushes against me even as I remember.

“I spent years waiting for you to find me again. I thought if I could just see you one more time, I could at least steer you to Alice sooner. When I saw you next, though, we were further back in your own time stream. You were so little, and I didn’t want to scare you—I didn’t want to push it, so I just told you a story, one of the hundreds I’ve spent my life studying and teaching. It was the most natural thing in the world to tell you those stories, because I knew what they meant to me already and what they would mean to you someday. That night you listened, and then, after forty minutes, you were gone again.

“But a moment later you reappeared, and you held time there while we talked. It started skipping, like a scratched disc. I’d tell you a story, and then you’d lose traction. Those visits were far apart for you—six months or a year each. But for me, only minutes passed between them, as if your dreaming mind kept bringing you straight back to my time whenever it could, picking up where we’d left off. I watched you grow up in a matter of days.

“And as I said, I knew by then I’d never get to Beau again—has Alice explained the many-worlds interpretation to you yet?”

“I . . . I think.” My voice comes out as little more than a squeak. “She drew time with a bunch of branches. Each was a different world, I think; I mean, we’re talking about Alice, and she was in a science trance, so I’m not sure.”

Grandmother cracks a sad smile and nods. “We believe that those branches are wormholes. As such, they have an expiration date. An alternate future may be initiated, but unless the person with access to the wormhole chooses that future, it will collapse. Imagine an envelope that’s been sealed shut. You run your finger across the top of the envelope, and that’s time: one straight path. Then you take a letter opener, and you slice open an inch across the top.

“Now, when you run your finger over the envelope, there’s a portion where there are two separate paths, forming an ellipse. That’s the time between your Opening and your Closing. Say you run your finger partway up one—the current version of the world—and then decide you want the other one instead. You jump back to that initial split and change the course of events to take the other path. When we arrived at the Senior Parade, the venture into the past was a part of our future, just as Beau’s world—his alternate version of the present—is a part of your future. It’s the present when you look at days and years, but it’s your future because his version of events hasn’t truly happened yet, not for anyone but you.”

“I’m still lost,” I flare. “None of this makes sense.”

“That split in the envelope—those fourteen years between our Opening and Closing—that’s the time during which we can choose a different timeline, Natalie. You can choose for things to continue as they did for me, with Beau’s world collapsing. Or you can go back to the moment when time was first torn, and change things. You can choose Beau’s course of events. After your Closing, whether through action or inaction, you’ve chosen which path will survive. For me, that means Beau died. He died when I was four, and in a way he died all over again when I was eighteen and his world, his possibility of a future, collapsed.

“But you . . . you can still see it. A future where . . .” She meets my eyes, shaking her head as tears bloom along her lashes. “Where you go back and you choose him.”

My mind reels with questions and mental diagrams and so much panic as I try to make sense of what Grandmother is saying. Again and again, my body replays the sensation of passing into Beau’s world, and every time I feel the same thing: the upward motion, the feeling of being lifted quickly, the same when I swim forward through time. What does it mean that Beau’s present is my future? What does it mean that his version of the last fourteen years hasn’t truly happened yet, but that it will?

Grandmother’s shoulders are shaking from the effort of holding tears in, or maybe it just looks that way because time is pulling against me even now, trying to drag me back into my present. It settles in me then, the thing Grandmother can’t bear to say aloud, at least not as plainly as it hits me. “You think seeing his world like that means that I’m going to go back,” I murmur, “that I’m going to change what happened the night of the accident, and that will create Beau’s world.”

But we’re not both in Beau’s world.

He saw my family in his world. All of them except me. Happy, he said, they looked happy.

And I saw my name on a piece of stone there too.

“You think he survives instead of me,” I whisper.

Grandmother buries her face in her hands as she starts to cry. “I can’t get back,” she says. “I can’t go back, or I would. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried. I thought maybe I could stop the accident altogether, but, Natalie—the tug and pull, the physical evidence of time travel—when we saw that headstone with our name on it, we were in the future—not the natural one but the chosen one. We felt the pull. I don’t think you can stop the accident completely, but you can change it.”

“You think I choose—” My voice breaks, and a sob wrenches my words. “To die.”