The Love That Split the World(91)

“You’re here.”

He turns me around so my back presses against the half-open door and his fingers rest on the waistline of my shorts. “I’m here.” He stares at me hard through the dark, and everywhere his eyes touch me, I feel heat.

“Do you think if we had more time, it’d stop feeling like this?”

“That depends,” he murmurs.

“On?”

“On how this feels.”

Before I can reply, the lamp beside the bed winks out, and the empty layers of sheets surge upward around a body that wasn’t there before. “Oh my God,” I gasp, then clap my hand over my own mouth.

Beau glances over his shoulder toward the softly snoring person in the bed: the Other Megan. “Come on,” he mouths, pulling me outside and sliding the door shut.

We move off down the patio to the wooden lounge chairs and little table where Megan and I used to sit on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee and eating sugary cereal to stifle mild hangovers. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask Beau. “Even if she disappears, I could go back in there, fall asleep, and wake up spooning a version of her who’s only met me for, like, five minutes.”

Beau rubs the pinched spot between his eyebrows. “This is getting a little crazy.”

“No kidding. We really can’t go to your house?”

He stares at the ground and runs his teeth over his bottom lip. “It’s not good there.”

I touch the side of his face, his skin warm and sleek with sweat. “Okay.”

We sit down in the dewy lounge chairs, heads leaned against the side of the house. “I wish we could find out,” Beau says.

“Huh?”

“How it would feel later,” he says, “if we had more time.”

I sigh and pull his arm around my shoulder. “Probably you’d get sick of me shouting out what I think’s going to happen in every movie, and I’d get sick of you drinking and leaving your clothes wherever you took them off. I’d hate how messy you keep your room, and it’d drive you crazy how I can’t do anything without planning every detail first.”

Beau laughs.

“What, you think I’m wrong?”

He looks over at me. “I think that’s a lie and you know it.”

“Okay, fine. You tell me what would happen.”

“We’d get married,” he says.

“Oh? In my world or yours?”

“Both,” he says. “Then someday, ten or fifteen years from now, you’d have a baby.”

“What would we name him?” I say, playing along.

“Her,” he says.

“What would we name her?” I say softly.

“I don’t know. Maybe Natalie Junior,” he says. “She’d look just like you.”

“But she’d throw like you.”

“And she’d be smart like you. You two would talk about all the things I don’t get, and that way you’d never get bored with me.”

I laugh into his neck. “And you’d coach football so you wouldn’t get bored with me.” His face lights up. It makes me want to say the sentence over and over again. “Beau Junior will be on the team, obviously.”

“We can’t name our kid Beau Junior. He’d get called BJ. You want our son’s nickname to be Blow Job, Natalie?”

“Oof, good point. So what would we name him?”

“I don’t know.” He smooths my hair and kisses my head. “Probably just name him Natalie, too.”

“You’re just saying all this because you know I can’t hold you to it.”

“No,” he says. “I’m sayin’ it because I might not get another chance.”

I twist my fingers through his hair, press my lips to his cheek. The words tangle in my throat, being born and dying a thousand times. I love you.



On Thursday I climb out of the haze of hypnosis, and the first thing I see is Dr. Wolfgang’s smirk. My immediate thought is that I’ve just divulged something humiliating, but then I find Alice wringing her hands, eyes wide.

“You guys find something?”

“I always find something,” Wolfgang croaks. “This is the point of using a map.”

That last bit comes off snidely, and his eyes flick to Alice, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She swallows and says. “Thank you, Frederick, we can handle it from here.”

He mumbles something to himself in German but packs up and clears out all the same. When we’re alone, Alice goes to close the door and sits down in her chair, staring at me.

“Well?” I say, uncomfortable and anxious. “Are you going to tell me?”

She grabs the voice recorder off the desk and passes it to me. “Go on.”

It takes me a minute to gather myself. Whatever’s in this recording, once I hear it, there’s no forgetting it. But if it’s the key to getting Grandmother back, I really have no choice. I take a deep breath and press PLAY.

At first, all I hear is my own even breathing, how I imagine I must sound when I’m asleep.

A sharp gasp interrupts the rhythm, as if I’ve been startled awake.

“Mommy?” I hear myself say, only my voice is higher and smaller, somehow younger. “MOMMY!”