The Love That Split the World(96)

“It’s me,” Beau says. “Destroyer of worlds.”

It’s not true, but I can’t make myself say it. “I want to go somewhere safe.” Somewhere the pain in my chest can’t follow.

“Okay, Natalie Cleary,” he says quietly. “I’ll take you somewhere safe.”

We drive away from the hospital, away from Union, deeper into the country, out toward the salt-lick-turned-state-park where they found woolly mammoth fossils in the 1700s. We drive away from life and streetlights until the narrow road corkscrews back and forth through the moonlit hills and Beau pulls off at a dilapidated redbrick house with a half-collapsed front porch and big rectangular windows framed in crumbling white paint. We get out of the truck silently, the floorboards of the porch whining as we cross them into the dark house.

We walk from the hallway into an old living room where squares of silver light shine from the windows toward the old brick fireplace. The floor, though old, is smooth, polished, the wallpaper mostly scraped off.

“Doesn’t look like much,” Beau says quietly, like he’s afraid to disrupt the dust. “But the foundation’s solid.”

I look back to where he hesitates in the doorway. “What is this place?”

He ambles toward me and takes my hand in his. Slowly we begin to move through time, as though being towed upward through calm water. Reds and golds then blues and greens pop and flicker against the windows as Beau carries us into the future. I watch another version of him travel full tilt through the room, replacing bricks in the fireplace and baseboards and wainscoting, patching holes in the drywall, painting the room a soft peach, and shoving a beat-up piano up against the wall as the sun and stars take turns splashing us. Wildflowers sprawl out from the window across the yard and die beneath frost, only to regrow. Wisteria clumps up around the windowsills, blossoms opening and closing like heartbeats.

Tears rise in my chest. I’m flooding with them as the house becomes brighter, fresher, more and more a home. Time-slipping feels different this time, though, less substantial and more like a dream—the shadow of a future. “Beau, where are we?”

Whitewashed slats appear in a pile on the floor. The blur of a bear-sized person hammers and fastens and screws the beams together. They become a rectangle, a box. They become a crib.

“You wanna hear a story, Natalie Cleary?” I nod, and he folds his arms around me. “We live in the same world,” he says softly, slowly. “After school, you get a job teaching over at NKU. I coach a high school team, or maybe middle school. We live in an old house with a big yard, and one day, I talk you into marrying me.” He rests his chin on top of my head. “You wear flowers in your hair at our wedding, and Mason gets so wasted he throws up during his speech, but we’re so happy, we just laugh.”

“You finish my song,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I finished that weeks ago,” he says. “Pick something else.”

I tighten my eyes against the tears, my arms against Beau’s back. “The porch,” I say. “Every night, you and I sit outside until the sun goes down. And a piano. I surprise you with a piano.”

“And you dance whenever I play it.”

“Where?” I ask, laughing.

“In the sunroom, of course,” he whispers.

“Oh, of course. And does time move when you play and I dance?”

His hands enfold my jaw, and he kisses my forehead. “No, Natalie,” he says. “Time doesn’t move. It stands still.”

“We never run out of it,” I say.

Beau looks down at me, thumbs swiping away twin trails of tears on my cheeks. “And it’s enough for you?”

I swallow the painful knot in my throat. “It’s more than enough.”

And for a moment, I let myself believe it’s real. Beau restores this house for me. I come home to him every night, fall asleep, and wake up with my legs tangled with his. I go to all the games he coaches, and watch him kiss our kids goodnight, and someday notice his hand is wrinkly in mine. I’m the one who gets to see every part of him and who watches his softness cover the hard world. Still, we move forward, forward, forward, and for two beats of my heart, I’m sure I see an old, bent woman standing on the porch, looking through the window. Dark hair falls down around her hunched shoulders, and the pink light of early morning splays its fingers out around the crown of her head, silhouetting her face, but I still think I see her barely smile as her hand lifts up and presses against the dew-splotched windowpane. Before I can say a word, Grandmother disappears again, so thoroughly I can’t be sure she was ever there.

“You asked me what I want,” Beau says. I turn back to look up into his face, and into him. His hand comes up to cradle the side of my jaw.

Time slips back into place, and it all goes away. I want it too. I want it so much it hurts.

“You’re wrong, Beau,” I say. “You’re not the atom bomb. You made all this. You made the world.”



The nightmares plague me endlessly. In these, I’m the one driving and Matt’s beside me, where my toddler-sized car seat should be strapped in. Bright headlights flash up over the windshield, making the heavy rain glitter like diamonds for that silent instant before the car goes off the road.

My ears are ringing so much I can’t hear my own screams, and Matt is silent, eyes glazed, yards of tubing coiled in the backseat and stretching into his nostrils. “Matt,” I shriek. “Matty.”