In Universes, page 6
“Didn’t save him in the end though, did it?”
“Can’t say as I feel too sorry. He was always a dick to my mom.”
“Now she’s got the master bedroom,” Raffi says.
“She sure does.”
Instead of going down to the basement, Kay says, “Let’s make popcorn on the woodstove. There’s only one bag left, but if Buck’s going to take off like this, he deserves to miss out.” The kernels pop and jump, and the smell of movie theater butter is so strong Raffi can almost taste it. Probably this is the last popcorn Raffi will ever eat. She tries to savor it.
“Remember how we used to sneak into double features?” Kay asks, and the question is enough to dislodge the memory: the two of them kneeling between rows, trying not to catch each other’s eyes so they won’t laugh and give themselves away. And alongside that memory, so many others that Raffi locked away after Kay left, because this is the only way she has ever known to deal with loss—quarantine the memories, discipline her thoughts to never look in certain directions—so that now, so many losses later, there is nowhere left to look.
They finish the popcorn. Raffi feels queasy with the unfamiliar richness, but licks her fingers anyway. She waits for Kay to leave, but Kay says, “Let me read some of your aunt’s letters.” They lie on opposite ends of the couch, their feet touching under a blanket.
The windows darken to mirrors. “Can I come and sleep up in the attic?” Kay asks, and Raffi feels a surge of ruthless happiness. It doesn’t care what sacrifices have been made at its altar.
Sometimes Raffi can’t help but wish that she could climb into Kay’s skin with her. Sometimes she wants to press their bodies together, hold Kay so tight that their boundaries dissolve. Sometimes she wants to say, when we die—tomorrow or next month—can you taxidermy all of me inside all of you so that I never have to be alone again?
They lie side by side in Raffi’s little bed, both of them still in jeans and sweaters, touching at the hips and shoulders. “I’m having doubts about the taxidermy garden,” Kay says, and Raffi understands that Kay needs to think about something that is not Buck, that it is her turn to create for Kay a world where Buck is not somewhere in the darkness with golden eyes watching him.
“What kind of doubts?”
“Not doubts so much as nightmares. The bodies keep talking to me.”
“What do they say?”
“They want to tell me everything, all the details of their lives and what it’s like to be dead and how it was when the animals killed them. They talk and talk and talk and when I wake up I’m so tired.” Kay tilts her head so that it rests against Raffi’s, and Raffi leans into the closeness. Fights the urge to pull Kay closer still. “They tell me about the things they miss most: red velvet cake, a favorite song, television on a rainy day. It’s never what you think it’d be.”
Raffi matches her breathing to Kay’s.
“What do you miss most?” Kay asks.
Raffi tries to recall. It is like looking for a word in a language she has mostly forgotten. How long has it been since it all began? Less than a year, Raffi thinks, though she’s lost track. The first attacks, the comprehension that blossomed like a bruise. Before is a dream.
Before Raffi’s aunt got sick—before the aliens were in the animals, before the end of the world—Raffi and Kay were going to leave together. Raffi was the source of this ambition; she’d had to convince Kay, who planned to stay in Montana and find an apprenticeship close to her mom. Kay’s mother had sided with Raffi though, and gradually the plans took on life, became a shared dream. Raffi didn’t want to go back east, so they’d go west, to Oregon or Washington, somewhere they could have the mountains and the ocean both, only a day or two’s drive from Paradise. Kay would go to school for woodworking and Raffi would study physics and philosophy, turn her lifelong obsession with parallel universes into real research.
When Aunt Zlata got sick, and Raffi realized she couldn’t leave, she assumed that without her impetus, Kay’s plans would revert to their earlier shape. Kay wouldn’t leave her, not with her aunt dying, so it didn’t feel dangerous for Raffi to insist Kay should go. Of course she wouldn’t.
Raffi avoided Kay’s calls, after she left. Because she was hurt, but it was more than that. The dream had felt so real that even once it was dead, Raffi could close her eyes and see the little apartment they would have shared. Could almost transport herself to that universe, physics books piled on a table, Kay’s tool bag sitting by the door. Could almost smell the sawdust on Kay’s skin. Each time Raffi talked to Kay, the ghost of that other life faded a little further, color draining out of it until Raffi could hardly see it at all.
Buck doesn’t come back the next day, or the one after that. Raffi tries to feel for the bear’s presence, but all she can feel is worry for Kay, a wailing alarm that drowns out all other sound. Kay hasn’t returned to the basement. She sits on the couch, staring out the window. She doesn’t brush her teeth or change her clothes. Her hair tangles and the shadows under her eyes deepen and she smells of sweat and anxiety. She is so still that Raffi watches for the movement of her chest, waits for her to blink. She is afraid that if she stops willing Kay to be a person, between one breath and the next she will transform into another body. Raffi is afraid she is watching something in Kay break that she will never be able to repair. The sensation pulls her back through time to that night, so many years ago, when Britt knocked on her door, sobbing. The sensation says: this is what you do to the people you love.
Raffi wakes in the watery light of dawn on the fourth day of Buck’s absence, resolute. She climbs out of bed, careful not to wake Kay, and tiptoes down the stairs. She doesn’t let herself turn for a final glance at Kay, doesn’t even let herself think the word final. She pulls on her boots in the mudroom. She has a few strips of jerky in the pocket of her coat, one of Buck’s guns slung over her shoulder.
It’s a bluebird day, the air sharp, the sun bright, and Raffi feels something that is almost joy as she walks away from the house. She will fix what she has done or she will join everyone she’s lost. She’s halfway to the fence when she hears a bang behind her and spins, fumbling for the gun, heart leaping.
Kay is standing outside the house. Raffi gathers the pieces slowly, it was the slamming of a door she heard. Kay is ablaze with morning sun and fury. They stare at each other across the empty space, a silent argument, and it’s Raffi who caves and walks back to the house.
“How could you?” Kay asks, her voice so taut it vibrates. In all the years they’ve known each other, Raffi has never seen Kay like this. “At least Buck told me he was leaving.”
“I’m going to find him for you,” Raffi says. She’s shaking.
“You’re going to die and leave me here waiting for ghosts,” Kay shouts. Raffi wants to tell Kay that she deserves more credit than that, that she’s a good shot, that she has survived many things. She wants to say, you’re the one who left me, you’re not allowed to be mad. She wants to rewind the movie of their lives until they’re sixteen years old, zipped into a sleeping bag cocoon, and pause there. But before she can say anything, Kay slackens, sits hard on the ground, buries her face in her hands, and starts to cry.
Raffi is there, at once, kneeling beside her, saying, “I’m sorry, Kay, I’m so sorry. Don’t cry, I’m here, I’m sorry.” Kay relaxes into Raffi’s arms and Raffi holds her, smoothing her knotted hair, whispering soothing nonsense.
“I was so scared,” Kay whispers.
“I’m sorry,” Raffi says again. “I just wanted to fix it. It’s my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The bear followed me here. I’m the reason Buck’s gone.”
Kay tilts away from Raffi so that she can meet her eyes. “Raffi, the bear was stalking the taxidermy garden for months before you arrived. It’s a house full of dead bodies.”
“What?” Kay’s words bead like condensation on the surface of Raffi’s mind, she can’t absorb their meaning.
“Oh Raffi.” Kay sighs. “You want so badly to be responsible for everything.”
They decide they will go together. Kay tells Raffi she needs to put things in order in the basement, and Raffi doesn’t ask what things. She walks through the taxidermy garden, says her provisional goodbyes. The sun streams in through the windows, reflecting off bits of metal and glass, polished wood and leather so that Kay’s creations gleam. The strangeness of the taxidermy garden settles over Raffi, as though, in preparing to leave, she is able to see it clearly for the first time. But its beauty is more undeniable than ever.
In Graham’s bedroom, she climbs onto the bed, rests her cheek on his shoulder, the same way she fell asleep so many nights. She feels her heartbeat steady. “I miss you so much,” she says to him.
So many rooms, so many bodies, but eventually Raffi finds herself back in the mudroom. This time, she and Kay lace their boots up together. Kay is calm now, a backpack slung over her shoulders. “I brought a tent and sleeping bags,” she says, and Raffi remembers her earlier wish, can almost imagine this is the universe’s answer. “Plus some portable electric fencing I rigged up a while ago.”
Raffi opens the door, cold and light pouring in. “Ready?” she asks, and Kay nods. They walk away from the taxidermy garden hand in hand. Like children in a fairy tale. Heading into the woods, where the bear waits.
“It feels like we’re going back in time, doesn’t it?” Kay says, echoing Raffi’s thoughts like she always used to. “Like we’re going camping, again.”
Raffi thinks, then, of a different sort of fairy tale: of time as a fourth dimension stretching before them, so that with each step they get younger. She keeps her eyes wide open, she’s looking for a gap in the trees, she’s looking for footprints, paw prints, the gleam of gold eyes. She’s looking for the doorway to another universe, for the ghost of that other life, the one she never got the chance to live. “Here we come,” she says—to the bear, to Buck, to her many dead, to the younger version of herself, who has never stopped hoping.
Chapter Four
The Ghost of That Other Life
Before they found the bodies in the hotel’s cistern, those bodies left submerged so long they’d become something other than the bodies of women, become creatures of the water, too gruesome to print in the newspaper, before the news could reach backward in time and desecrate those days Kay and I spent together—before that, I fell prey to hope. It had been ten years exactly since Kay and I packed her old Corolla to overflowing and left Paradise for college, and though I tried hard to be someone serious, practical, I was, at heart, a romantic and I believed this synchronicity might mean something. I didn’t ask Kay if she remembered the anniversary, only asked if we could spend a weekend away, and when she agreed, I made a reservation at a hotel in Utah, the same one we’d stayed at all those years ago. It was too far, really, for a weekend trip, but as we drove south through Idaho, the windows down and the music up, I felt the ghosts of the girls we’d been in the car with us, I felt filled up with the past and present, the wind on my face and Kay singing off-key next to me. It was close to midnight by the time we arrived at the hotel and still, astonishingly, 110 degrees, and we laughed at the heat, like kids seeing snow for the first time, and stumbled through the sweltering darkness into the bright, cold lobby, and Kay left her arm around my waist. Brimful. That was the word for what I was feeling.
The woman at the front desk didn’t smile at our approach, didn’t greet us, she wasn’t hostile, but she was a shade of polite that was nearly indistinguishable, saying I’ll need your friend to sign this pass for her car, and I said, my girlfriend, though this wasn’t a label Kay and I had ever used—what’s your friend’s license plate?—my girlfriend’s license plate, because I wanted to hear the word said aloud, because I was trying to imagine my way into a new life—your friend—my girlfriend—and so on, until Kay sighed and said would you let it go and so I did. As we walked away from the desk, I apologized but she was frustrated, I could tell, and by the time we got to our room with its two queen beds instead of the king we’d requested all the delight had drained out of the moment and there didn’t seem to be any way to put it back in.
I fell asleep with Kay’s head on my shoulder, but woke to a too-familiar absence, one that had somehow followed us down all those highway miles, Kay’s body a shadow on the other bed that could have belonged to anyone, could have been an axe murderer for all I knew, but I just closed my eyes and willed whatever future was coming to hurry, I was tired of waiting for it. The absence reminded me that Kay was Buck’s girlfriend, not mine, that he was the one she’d chosen to live with, the one she drove home to late at night after slipping out of my apartment, though I’d once overheard him say, his voice tinny through the phone, that he didn’t mind if she spent the night at my place. He’d never been threatened by the intimacy between us, never cared about the two of us having sex, never taken us seriously enough for it to matter.
The next time I woke, the sun had shouldered its way into the room through the crack in the curtains, and Kay was missing from both beds. I flung myself out from under the covers, prey to the panic that had stalked me since childhood, the voice saying, at any moment, anyone you love might disappear. I found her in the bathroom, holding a half-empty glass in one hand, her phone in the other—she must have been texting him—the sink still running. There’s something wrong with the water, she said. What do you mean wrong? But even my voice was wrong now. Sometime in the night the balance of anger had shifted so it belonged to me, I had become the one who needed to be appeased and she had to do the appeasing or be angry in turn, in which case this trip might offer a different clarification than the one I’d been hoping for. But she only gestured her beautiful, haggard face toward the water and said touch it and she sounded tired and afraid and so I did.
The water was only water at first, cool against my fingers, exactly the right mix of hot and cold. Kay had a knack for balance—her relationship with Buck sitting easily next to whatever our relationship was, work ceding to leisure at 5:00 P.M. sharp—and I lacked this knack entirely, tending always toward extremes, my ambition an organ whose function I controlled no more than I did my own heart, but then the sensation in the water became impossible to ignore and I forgot about the rest. If you have never existed as a woman in the world you might have been able to wash your hands and feel nothing, not a skittering up your arms, not a clenching in the pit of your stomach, not a crawling on the back of your neck—not a hundred other clichés that are clichéd precisely because of their exhausting relevance, but there it was: that entirely recognizable feeling of being prey.
Strange how a bad thing can make everything else better, so that I met Kay’s eyes and saw my own fear reflected there and it made us the same again, reminded me we didn’t have to keep passing our frustration back and forth, we could set it down and walk out of the bathroom, which we did, the water still running in the background and the sound of it becoming soothing, like an ambulance going to someone else’s home. Between the two queen beds, Kay reached for me. She was shorter than I was, a fact I tended to forget unless we were standing like this, my arms wrapped around her, so that the recollection itself was an intimacy and brought with it the familiar urge to protect her, to make my body into a shield or safe haven or alternate timeline so that I was constantly disappointed when it was only a body. Disappointed too by how frequently Kay turned to Buck for protection, though I understood he was a large man with several guns, and how could I compete with that, particularly when it was the very fact of my presence, of our togetherness, that might incite violence. But Buck wasn’t here. I drank it, Kay said, her voice small, and I kissed her, to let her know that whatever she had done, I would do with her. She returned the kiss, leaned into it, and I let myself forget the water, Buck, all the things I’d come here to say, and instead I thought back to the first time she’d kissed me, at a college party, the two of us drunk, her a little more so, and it had been a performance, or at least it had begun that way, the boys near us whistling and hooting and urging us on, they were all a little in love with Kay, but it had shifted, the kiss hooking something deep in my stomach so that I pulled her toward me and spent the rest of the night wondering if that had been a violation of the rules of the game.
The kiss opened a doorway and I followed Kay through it, as I’d followed Kay to so many places over the years, let her pull me onto the same bed she’d defected to in the night, kissed her and tasted dirty metal and begged my brain to quiet, to let me be here, only here, but it was no use, I felt myself fracture. A part of me was on the bed with Kay, knotting my hand in her hair, digging my nails into her back, all of it a little too hard—did this violence belong to me or to whatever was in the water?—and a part of me was watching from a slight distance, wondering how this compared to the sex she had with Buck, whether I was destined in all areas of my life to live in the shadow of men, and a part of me was thinking how can I possibly leave her, and a part of me was thinking how can I possibly not? It was this feeling of fracture, of superposition, that had led to the research which now, if I let it, would lead me away from Montana, away from Kay. If the universe was multitudinous, infinitely overlaid, a thousand thousand branching possibilities, why was it that we experienced life as singular? This was the question I’d spent my PhD trying to answer, and finally the professors who’d once laughed at me were saying they’d always thought my research had promise, and an offer had come, for a position at a university 2,500 miles away.
Kay’s hand lingered at the waist of the boxers I’d been sleeping in, do you want to? she asked, a question I never knew how to answer, though I understood desire was meant to be audible, legible, mine never was, when I listened for it all I heard was an echo: want to, want to, want to? It was easier, in a way, sleeping with men, who were less likely to ask these sorts of questions, whose desire was often loud enough for the both of us. I wanted Kay’s desire to be like this—implacable, resonant. If I flipped her over, pinned her arms over her head, ran my fingernail down her stomach, could I make her stop caring about what I wanted?
