The Love That Split the World(103)

She looks up at me. Despite her thick wrinkles and age spots and cataracts, she looks young, tiny. Like Little Me in home videos, a puny frame in too-big clothes. “I think you do what I couldn’t,” she whispers.

I open my mouth but can’t make any sound come out except a high-pitched groan. “The orb,” I finally say. “I saw it tonight.”

She nods but can’t look at me anymore. She slumps to the ground and curls her thin arms around herself. “It’s tonight. It feels exactly like the first time. Like it’s all being sewn up. The tear in time is closing tonight.”

The first time.

Today I got in the first real fight I’ve ever had with my mother. I fainted for the first time. I lost a friend for the first time, my first boyfriend. I thought about my own death for the first time when I saw my name written somewhere it shouldn’t be. And I told Beau I loved him for the first time.

And the second.

And the third.

I had meant to make love with him for the first time.

Now, he’s waiting back in Megan’s bedroom as his world crumbles. I feel the imminent fall in my stomach. Something’s trying to cement me back where I belong, and when it does—if it does—Beau will be trapped under the rubble of a world that never happened. “I haven’t lived yet,” I say because I’m helpless. Because all I have to protect me now is words. Because it’s an impossible choice to bear, but I don’t feel there’s a choice to make, and I think saying that I don’t want to do this is the closest I can get to not doing it.

Grandmother reaches a hand up toward me. I take it as I lower myself to the floor in front of her. “It should be me,” she says. “I could do it and have no regrets. It’s what I would choose, but that doesn’t mean it has to be what you choose. I can’t ask that of you. I know you haven’t lived yet. I know the life you can have, and how full it will be even without Beau, all the people you’ll affect, and those who will change your life forever.

“I know all the stories you should know someday. I know both of your mothers, and how much they both love you. I know secrets about Coco that would make your toes curl in delight, and I know Jack’s kids and how much they love him. I have all the answers, and you have none.”

She squeezes my hand. “All you have are the stories I was able to tell you and the love in your heart for Beau right now. I know all that, Natalie, and I’m still here, asking you to do something I should never ask of someone your age, especially not someone I love, whose every heartbreak and joy I’ve also known. I’m asking because it’s what I wanted to do, and you have the choice now.”

“I don’t have a choice,” I lash out. “You know I don’t. You practically raised me for this. You spent years drilling it into my head. You taught me that to love was to die.”

“Oh, honey. You misunderstand. I didn’t tell you those stories just to change your mind. I told them because I remember how badly it hurt, not being able to see the truth, feeling like I was going to be swallowed up by the dark. What is love,” she says, “other than putting someone else before you? Our birth mother gave us away because she hoped we could have a better life away from her. Our parents kept the car accident from us because Mom suffered from PTSD for years. She worked so hard to make the pain manageable for herself, but she also protected us from that pain. Love is nothing but putting someone else first. I didn’t teach you that so you’d save Beau. I told you so you’d see how this whole world was made for you, how it warms when you smile and aches when you hurt. I told you so you could stop being afraid.”

“If that’s true, then there has to be another way,” I snap. “How can you tell me the whole world loves me and in the same breath tell me I have to die? I want to know. I want this secret knowledge you have that has you so confident that this is it, that you’re willing to ask me to go to the past and lie down in the road in front of my own car to kill my child self. Because I don’t buy it. There has to be another way.”

“Why?” Grandmother challenges. “You’ve seen evidence of exactly two presents. I’ve seen evidence that Beau died that night in our world. Beau’s seen evidence that you don’t exist in his. You’ve looked at your own memorial in the same place as his. So why does there have to be another way?”

“Because this is happening,” I shout. “This doesn’t happen every day, Grandmother, or at least not to everyone. There has to be a better reason for why I can change things. Why Beau and me out of everyone in the world? Why do we get a second chance? What makes us special?”

“Maybe nothing,” Grandmother says. “Maybe chance. Or maybe someone thinks the choice is just the kind of gift you would appreciate.”

“Or maybe it’s because the world would be better with both of us in it,” I counter, “or because things are broken and when we’re together, they’re less broken. Maybe it’s because we’re connected or we fit or we’re right together, and if time is really flat, then maybe it saw all of that. Maybe, even though Beau died, time itself saw every possible world where we could love each other and that was as good as us having loved one another. Because we could’ve loved each other anywhere, in any world, and maybe the reason we can change things is because the thing between us is big enough to reach through every branch in time. Maybe our love couldn’t die, even when we did. Something’s pulling us together, Grandmother. Something brought him back from the dead to me. Even if I go back to the night of that accident and die, why would death and time be any stronger this time? It has to mean something. It has to mean a future.”