I think, Is this what you wanted, Paul? Did you hate them so much that you ran to a world where they were already dead? So your work would be done for you?
Once again I remember Paul’s unsmiling face, his gray eyes that seemed to stare through me. I remember the day he watched me painting, his gaze following every stroke my brush made on the canvas. It sickens me now to think that for a little while I almost—
Theo speaks again, his voice firmer this time. “That accident was a long time ago, and a lifetime away. You’ve gotta think of it like that. All right?”
His words break through my melancholy, bring me back to the now. “All right. Yes. It was just a shock. I won’t let it get to me again.”
He does me the courtesy of pretending to believe me. “Until tomorrow, hang in there and stay safe. And if you see Paul . . . don’t let him see you.”
The hologram blinks out. Though I stare down at my ring, hoping against hope that he’ll call back, it remains dull metal, silent and dark.
So I go home.
My blinky ring also has a GPS system, and when I ask it to guide me home, it does. I follow its directions without any idea of where I’ll end up.
Turns out home is in a particularly posh building—less garish than most of those around, but no less cold. The elevator is one of those glass ones on the outside, which I think are designed specifically to terrify the acrophobic. I expect to feel a little comforted when I walk inside, because her apartment must be, in part, my apartment too. But the minute I see it, I think that I’ve never seen any place that looked less like home.
It feels like an art gallery, but one of the ones that only shows weird, pop-kitsch art like rhinestone-studded cow skulls. Or maybe it’s like a hospital where they do plastic surgery on celebrities. Stark white and brushed metal, no soft seats, nothing comfortable or cozy, and so brightly lit you could see a single speck of dust—which I guess is the idea. I stand there, dripping wet from the rain, aware of myself as grubby, awkward, and misplaced.
Never could I have felt like I belonged here.
“Marguerite?” Aunt Susannah steps out from the hallway in a dressing gown as pristinely white as the decor. I guess I was put into the custody of my Aunt Susannah, of all people.
Her hair is loose, ready for bed, but still falls neatly to her shoulders as if it didn’t dare put one wisp astray. She doesn’t seem to be that different in this dimension. As she rubs some expensive cream into her face, she says, “You’re back awfully early tonight.”
It’s after one a.m. What time do I normally come home? “I was tired.”
“Are you feeling well?”
I shrug.
Aunt Susannah lets that go. “Best get to bed, then. You don’t want to make yourself ill.”
“Okay. Good night, Aunt Susannah.”
She pauses. Do I not say that to her often? I don’t sense maternal warmth from her; she’s not the maternal type. It’s not that I don’t love her—I do. And she loves me, too. But I’m guessing parenting didn’t come easily to her. Aunt Susannah says simply, “All right. Good night, dear.”
As she pads down the hall to her room, I go to the other door, to the room that must be mine.
It’s so—blank. Not as fancy as the rest of the apartment, but there’s nothing about this space that makes me feel like it belongs to me. It might as easily be a room in a luxury hotel.
But that, I realize, must be the point.
The Marguerite who lost her family so young is one who has spent the rest of her life trying not to love anyone or anything that much again.
I haven’t decorated a bulletin board with postcards and prints of images I find inspiring. No easel stands in the corner with my latest canvas; do I paint in this dimension at all? No bookshelves. No books. Although I try to hope this dimension’s Marguerite has some kind of technologically advanced e-reader in her earrings or something, that’s beginning to seem unlikely. She doesn’t appear to be the bookish type.
The clothes in my closet include a lot of designer labels I recognize, and some I don’t, but I’d wager they’re high-end too. None of them are the kinds of things I’d wear at home—instead they’re all metallic or leather or plastic, anything hard and shiny. Maybe I ought to be enthused that the Caine family money apparently held out a couple of generations longer in this dimension, but all I can think about is how cold this life is.
Now I have to live in it.
My hand closes around the Firebird locket. I could take it off now if I wanted, since I don’t seem to need the reminders. But even the thought of being separated from it terrifies me. Instead I close my eyes and imagine that it could help me fly away to a new place, not this life or my old life, but some newer, shinier reality where everything is okay and nothing can hurt me ever again.
My legs seem to give out, and I flop down on the immaculately made bed. For a long time I lie there, curled in a ball, wishing to be home—my real home—more desperately than I’d known I could ever wish for anything.
4
AS I LIE HERE IN A DIMENSION NOT MY OWN, ON A STARK white bed more forbidding than comforting, I try to paint pictures of home in my mind. I want every face, every corner, every shadow, every beam. I want my reality painted over this one until I can’t see the blinding white any longer.
My home—my real home—is in California.
Our house isn’t on the beach; it’s nestled at the foot of the hills in the shade of tall trees. It’s always clean but never neat. Books are piled two deep on the shelves that line nearly every room, Mom’s houseplants thrive in every corner and nook, and years ago my parents covered the entire hallway with that chalkboard paint that’s meant for little kids’ rooms but works perfectly well for physics equations.
When I was little, my friends would get so excited when I told them that my parents did most of their scientific work at home, and they’d come in for the first time looking around for bubbling beakers or dynamos or whatever devices sci-fi shows had taught them to expect. What it mostly means is papers piled on every flat surface. Sure, lately we’ve had a few gadgets, but only a few. Nobody wants to hear that theoretical physics has less to do with shiny lasery stuff and more to do with numbers.
In the center of the great room is our dinner table, an enormous round wooden one Mom and Dad bought for cheap at a Goodwill back when Josie and I were little. They let us paint it in a rainbow of colors, just goop it on with our hands, because they loved hearing us laugh and also because no two human beings on earth ever cared less about how their furniture looked. Josie thought it was funny to smear swirls on with her fingers. For me, though—that was the first time I noticed how different colors looked when you blended them together, contrasted one next to another. It might have been the moment I fell in love with painting.