I feel my heart start to pound harder.
“That new reality, it takes place for you at a normal pace, but within that giant fabric of time. What felt like months to you was actually days here, because again, time was compressed the minute you left that other life.”
“I don’t really understand,” I say.
“You’re not supposed to,” Rayanne tells me. “Most lives end and get compressed into that tiny, tiny hole and we pick up a new thread—a brand-new existence that goes on and on until it’s over and gets condensed down into a single stitch in the fabric again. But for you, the needle jumped. For you, death wasn’t a stitch. It was a veil. You got to peek through, and see what was on the other side.”
I imagine a universe draped with the gauzy textile of millions of lives, tangled and intersecting. I think of needles that might have basted together me and Finn, me and Gabriel, for just a moment in time. I think of yards and yards of cloth as black as night, every fiber twisted into it a different life. In one I am an art specialist. In another, a stranded tourist. There could be infinite versions, some where I cure cancer, or fall in battle; some where I have a dozen children, break a heart, die young.
“We don’t know what reality is,” Rayanne says. “We just pretend we do, because it makes us feel like we’re in control.” She looks at my face on the screen and laughs. “You think I’m loony tunes.”
“No,” I say quickly.
“You don’t have to believe me,” Rayanne replies. “But just remember … ?you don’t have to believe them, either.” She shrugs. “Oh, and you’re not done with all this yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“Damned if I know. I just get the message, I don’t write it.” She glances to her left. “Real talk, though, right now the universe is telling me to change Chiara’s diaper before the stench wipes us all out like an asteroid.”
She hands Rodney the phone again. He raises his eyebrows, as if to say, I told you so.
Then he lifts the plastic toy cup in his free hand. “And that’s the tea,” he says.
On the days I visit my mother at The Greens, I pack a picnic lunch and always bring extra. I can’t give any to her, because I am still not allowed inside, but I always have a cinnamon roll or a slice of pumpkin bread for Henry, who is there every time I go, no matter what day of the week it is. I always leave a wrapped offering at the front door, too, for the staff, with a note thanking them for keeping the residents safe.
I start bringing a blanket with me, which I set up on the lawn outside my mother’s screened porch. When I call her, she answers, and I tell her the same thing each time: It’s a beautiful day, would she like to join me?
We talk like strangers who have only recently been introduced, which isn’t really that far off the mark. We watch recorded episodes of American Idol, and she points out her favorite singers, who are now being filmed from their garages and living rooms without a studio audience. We look over the weekly menus at The Greens. I tell her about the little dog in a yellow raincoat that I saw in the park, and the plots of the books I read. Sometimes she takes out photo albums and walks me through her journeys, while I sketch her in an unlined journal. She can remember the most minute details about the flooding rains in Rio de Janeiro in the eighties, a dynamite explosion in the Philippines, landslides in Uganda. She was in New York City when the Twin Towers collapsed and the air was white with ash and grief. She captured the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting. She did an entire series on the coyotes who brought children over the Mexican border. “I got into a lot of trouble for that one,” she tells me, running her finger over a grainy photograph of a man and a little girl walking across a barren wasteland.
“How come?”
“Because I didn’t show a clear villain,” my mother says. “It’s hard to blame someone for breaking the law when all your choices have been taken away from you. Nobody’s all good or all bad. They just get painted that way.”
I think about what my life would have been like if she had come home and sat down at the kitchen table with me and told me these stories. Surely I would have understood better what captured her attention and drew her away from my father and me, instead of only feeling jealous of it.
These days I am thinking a lot about loss. Because of this pandemic, everyone feels like they’ve been robbed of something, or—in the most extreme and permanent of cases—someone. A job, an engagement, a painting for auction. A graduation, a vacation, a freshman year. A grandmother, a sister, a lover. Nobody is guaranteed tomorrow—I realize that viscerally now—but that doesn’t keep us from feeling cheated when it’s yanked away.