19
WHEN I SNAP INTO MY NEW SELF, I’M SITTING IN A CHAIR already, a nice soft one. Well, that’s a nice change, I think, before I open my eyes and see—
My gallery of portraits, in my own bedroom.
I realize I’m sitting in my own corner easy chair, looking up at my painting of Josie: same blue eyes, same merry expression. The walls of my room are painted the same soft cream shade. My patterned curtains blow slightly in the breeze, because I’ve got the window open as usual. I’m even wearing my favorite dress, the red one with yellow birds and cream-colored flowers.
I’m home.
Yet when I glance over at my bed, I realize the bedspread isn’t exactly right. It’s a sari-silk coverlet Josie gave me for Christmas last year, but the colors and patterns are different. I’d been admiring it in a catalog (I’m not shy about hinting, with gifts), and I remember the description saying Each item is unique.
Now that I think of it, Josie’s portrait looks the same, but I’ve got it hanging next to my painting of my friend Angela instead of my painting of Dad. And Mom’s portrait shows her in a white cotton button-down shirt, instead of the gray T-shirt I remember choosing.
This dimension is very, very like my own—but it’s not home.
At first I feel a terrible pang of homesickness, worse for being surrounded by something that’s so like what I remember and yet not mine at all. Then it hits me: If I moved forward to another dimension, and my Firebird was set to follow Paul—does that mean he made it out too?
It must. It has to. He’s alive. My heart swells with hope at the realization that my Paul has survived, that he’s somewhere nearby—
—and I stop short.
Lieutenant Markov of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Infantry Battalion—the Paul who saved me, the one I spent a single perfect night with—he’s dead, gone, forever.
I curl into a ball in the easy chair, arms wrapped around my legs. The man I loved is dead. Nothing changes that.
I remember his body heavy in my arms, bloody and empty, and I know I’ve lost something irreplaceable.It doesn’t feel like my room any longer. I might be back in Russia, kneeling in the snow, screaming out my grief without caring who hears. But right now all I can do is cry brokenly.
The possibilities crash into one another; the emotions tie themselves into Gordian knots. A thousand ways for me to love and doubt and lose Paul Markov, and I feel like I’m only starting to discover them all.
Right now all I can do is focus on the fact that Paul, Theo, and I remain in serious danger—and maybe Mom and Josie, too. I must keep going. I have no other choice.
Get it together, I tell myself. I grab a Kleenex—the box is stashed on the exact same shelf—blow my nose, and try to center myself in the here and now.
As I look around my room, the ordinary has become extraordinary. After a couple of weeks in a world where electric lighting was a newfangled innovation, it’s dazzling to see my cell phone, my music dock, my tablet. Even the low-tech stuff is beautiful in its familiarity. My paint-splotched work jeans and an old T-shirt lie across my chair; the drop cloth is spread on the floor and my easel is set up. Apparently I was about to settle in for some work.
I pick up my box of paints. Just the sight of their shiny silver tubes fills me with relief to see something familiar again.
I walk out into the hallway, which is covered with chalkboard paint and physics equations, exactly like it should be. In the great room I find Mom’s plants, and the rainbow table, and all the piles of paper and books I’d expect. Some of the swirls of paint on the table look a little different, though. I lean down to study its surface—as much of it as is visible under all the paper, anyway—but one of the paperweights catches my eye. It’s this thick, round, metallic disc, lying atop a folder with the Triad Corporation logo on the front . . .
Whoa. My eyes get wide. I’ve never actually seen a Nobel Prize before, but I’m about 95 percent sure that’s what they look like.
As I heft the prize into my hands, marveling at how heavy the solid gold is, I realize that Mom and Dad must have made their breakthrough a couple of years earlier in this dimension. I look down at the Nobel Prize and think, Way to go, Mom.
What about the rest of us? What about Josie? Yes, she’s still studying oceanography at Scripps down in San Diego; she bought us some fridge magnets down there, which are indeed on our refrigerator. In fact, according to the whiteboard calendar in the kitchen, she’s coming home tonight to visit for—holy crap, for New Year’s Eve. That’s today. I sort of lost track of the date while I was in Russia, what with the violent bloody rebellion and everything.
Theo? He’s one of Mom and Dad’s graduate assistants here, too. That, or they have another hipster wannabe who left his thrift shop fedora on the coatrack. Even now, Theo’s probably materializing in this dimension, in his ratty campus apartment. I bet he’ll be here within the hour.
And Paul—
The kitchen door swings open, and I hear Mom say, “If dog cognition is truly closer to human than that of our closest primate relatives, must we then begin to consider dogs our partners in the evolutionary process?”
“Really we ought to have bought that puppy back when the girls wanted one.” Dad walks into the kitchen after her, both of them carrying overstuffed cloth shopping bags. “It would’ve given us a canine subject to observe, and besides, we could’ve named him Ringo.”
Mom and Dad. Both alive, both well, both right here in our kitchen like nothing ever happened—because here, everything is as it should be.