*
The detectives swarmed. They wrenched Ansel from the chair, cuffed his wrists harsh. Standing with his arms twisted behind, Ansel looked weary and puny, vaguely apologetic.
Saffy remembered how it felt to walk up Miss Gemma’s basement steps, with Ansel’s presence close on her heels. His lumbering gait, her own hammering nausea. She had craved that fleeting sense of danger. Love, she had been told, was both thrilling and noxious, an addictive threat that defied all logic—love was footsteps on the bottom stair, a pair of hands at the base of her throat. But love did not have to be tainted with hurt. She thought of Kristen and her kids, splashing in the backyard pool, singing along to some pop song Saffy didn’t know. She thought of Corinne and her wife, hands clasped proudly at the station’s Christmas party. Saffy had spent her life so steeped in this examination of pain, what it meant, why it persisted. She had spent her years chasing pointless violence, if only to prove it could not touch her. What a waste this hunt had been. What a disappointment. She had finally solved this epic mystery—touched the place where Ansel’s hurt had congealed—only to find his pain looked just like everyone else’s. The difference lay in what he chose to do with it.
“Saffy, wait.”
Her own name was like a wound, oozing from his mouth.
“Do you ever wonder about an alternate universe?” Ansel’s voice cracked, desperate, as the officers tugged him forward. “Another world out there, where we both live different lives? Where maybe we’ve made different choices?”
“I wonder all the time,” Saffy said, nearly a whisper. “But there’s only this world, Ansel. Just this one.”
They marched him away.
Alone, the interrogation room was deathly still, the walls frigid and impersonal. A gritty disappointment settled beneath Saffy’s skin—there was no surge of victory. No swell of triumph. It was impossible to think about the lives she could have lived without thinking of those she could have saved. So Saffy decided not to consider them at all. From that moment forward, she would forget that tempting almost-world; there was only this, a brief and imperfect and singular reality. She would have to find a way to live it.
Lavender
2019
The locket was old. Rusty, burnt orange with age. When Lavender reached into the pocket of her sweater, the shape of the charm felt soothing, an enduring ridge across the pad of her thumb. Today, the pooling chain felt less like accusation and more like possibility. Or maybe just a reminder of history.
“Milk and sugar?” the girl asked.
The girl looked, to Lavender, like the best kind of poem. Standing over the table, holding a pot of coffee, her every gesture was a series of letters, melding into one graceful sentence. The fact of her existence still seemed shaky, like the vastness of the universe might swallow her back up again.
Blue, a girl with freckled cheeks. Blue, a name in vivid color. Blue, a feeling not quite sorrow—a blooming like grief, with its petals curled open.
*
The restaurant was special. Lavender knew it the moment she walked in. There was a coziness to the place, a stimulating sort of energy—Harmony had been talking about auras for years, and Lavender had always chalked it up to hippie nonsense. But it felt reasonable now, as she stirred a sugar cube into her coffee, fingers twitching nervous. The Blue House seemed to pulse with a warm, hazy light.
Lavender sipped at the coffee, perfectly bitter, as Blue untied her apron and hung it on the back of the rickety chair. Her heart roared, a rioting beast. Lavender had imagined this scene so many times, it was almost like she’d lived it already—but Blue’s face had been hazy in her abstractions, a combination of the photos she’d seen of Ellis, the photos she’d seen of Blue, now twenty-three years old, and the memory of herself at that age. Vaguely a woman, vaguely a girl. She’d stared openly this morning when Blue met her at the airport in Albany, stolen careful glances as they made small talk through the drive upstate. Blue was both exactly how Lavender had imagined and also completely different. Where Lavender was gaunt and inelegant, Blue was round and inviting. Lips plump, cheekbones high. She wore a pair of jeans, snug on the hips and ripped at the knee, and her hair was braided long over one shoulder. Her knuckles were stacked with silver rings, the kind purchased from street vendors and thrift stores, and she had a small tattoo of a hummingbird cresting the inside of her wrist. Lavender knew from the photos they’d exchanged that Blue’s hair was exactly the color of her own—a shade of strawberry nearly translucent in the sun. The sight in person was like a fist to the gut. As they wound up the mountain road and into Tupper Lake, a lump of amazement had lodged firm in Lavender’s throat.