I turn, a smile lighting me up from tip to toe.
I push myself up against the pillows. Finn hands me the mug and I cup my hands around the ceramic, feeling its heat and its solidity.
Then, to my shock and his, I burst into tears.
FOURTEEN
“What did you tell Finn?” Rodney asks me, when we video-chat two days later.
“The truth,” I say. “Kind of.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Girl.”
“I said that I had a dream and I thought I wasn’t going to wake up.”
“Hm,” Rodney says. “That’s like when you bought a vibrator and said it was for neck massages.”
“First, you bought me the vibrator for my birthday because you’re an asshole. Second, what was I supposed to say when Finn found it? ‘Thought you might like a little help’？”
I watch as Rodney’s adorable little niece, Chiara, toddles up to him with a baby-size plastic cup. “You sit!” she orders, pointing to the floor.
“Okay, baby,” Rodney says, plopping cross-legged onto the carpet. “I swear to Jesus, if I have to have one more tea party I’m gonna lose my shit.”
Chiara starts lining up stuffed animals and dolls around Rodney. “The thing is, I was trying,” I tell him. “I did what Dr. DeSantos said. I started making routines and sticking to them. And since I’m stuck here all day in an apartment, I now clean and cook, too. I have dinner on the table for Finn every time he comes home.”
“Wow, so you single-handedly set back womyn’s rights by like fifty years? You must be so proud.”
“The only thing I did different that day was paint from memory. A little swimming hole that Gabriel and Beatriz took me to. I’ve been out of rehab for a couple of weeks, Rodney, and I haven’t dreamed my way back there until now.” I hesitate. “I tried. I’d lie in bed and hold on to an image in my head and hope I could still hang on to it after I was asleep, but it never worked.”
“Alternative thought,” Rodney suggests. “Gabriel’s been trying this whole time to break through to you. Kind of like the way Finn was, when he sat next to you at the hospital and talked to you while you were unconscious.”
“Then which one’s the real me?” I ask, in a small voice.
From a purely scientific standpoint, it would seem to be this world—the one where I love Finn and am talking to Rodney. Certainly I have been here the longest, and have more memories of it. But I also know that time doesn’t correspond equally, and that what is moments here might be months there.
“Wouldn’t it be weird if I were talking to you in this world and you were trying to convince me I don’t belong here?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Rodney says. “That kind of shit makes my head hurt. It’s like the Upside Down in Stranger Things.”
“Yeah, like with fewer demogorgons and more coconuts.”
“You already talked to a shrink …，” Rodney mulls.
“Yeah. So?”
“Well, I want you to talk to someone else. Rayanne.”
“Your sister?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Rodney says. “She has the sight.”
Before I can respond, the camera tumbles sideways and then rights itself and there is a woman standing next to Rodney who looks like a bigger, more tired version of Chiara. “This her?” Rayanne asks.
“Hi,” I say, feeling ambushed.
“Rodney told me all about what happened to you,” she replies. “This virus sucks. I work in a group home for developmentally disabled folk, and we lost two of our residents to Covid.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, that familiar wash of survivor’s guilt flushing my face.
“When I’m not working there,” Rayanne says matter-of-factly, “I’m a psychic.”
She says this the way you’d say, I’m a redhead or I’m lactose intolerant. A simple and indisputable fact.
“He says you’re salty because you feel caught between two lives.”
I make a mental note to kill Rodney.
“I mean, I don’t know if I’d put it quite like that,” I qualify. “But then again, I did almost die.”
“No almost about it,” Rayanne says. “That’s your problem.”
A laugh bubbles out of me. “I promise you, I’m very much alive.”
“Okay, but what if death wasn’t the ending you’ve been told it is? What if time is like fabric, a bolt that’s so long you can’t see where it starts or it ends?” She pauses. “Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it’s like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.”