“I know, I know, to you your parents are saints, and they should be. I’m not saying they weren’t absolutely lovely people. But how your mother used to go on about being descended from Russian nobility! You’d think she personally fled the Red Army with the Romanov jewels in her arms.”
“Her family was from the nobility. They did flee the Revolution. They were expats in Paris for the next four generations, before her parents finally moved to America. She’d never lie about being something she’s not.” Then I remember that I’m not supposed to have known my mother very well in this dimension, and that here, she’s as lost to me as my father. “I mean, she wouldn’t have.”
And Mom wouldn’t. She only cares about two things: science and the people she loves. The one who wears her crazy-curly hair twisted back with whatever pencil or pen she finds lying around. The one who let me finger paint the table. Nobody on earth is less of a snob than Mom.
We’re standing in the middle of the street now, still a block short of the hotel where the duchess and a hundred and forty of her closest friends are taking tea. Aunt Susannah puts one hand to her chest like an actress in a cheesy old movie, and yet I know she’s sincere—as sincere as she knows how to be, at least. “I wasn’t putting your mum down. You realize that, don’t you?”
From Aunt Susannah, “snob” is practically a merit badge. I sigh. “Yeah. I know.”
“Now, I’d hate for us to be cross with each other.” My aunt comes close and puts her arm around me. “It’s always been just us. You and me against the world, hmm?”
I could almost believe we had a good life together, if I hadn’t been in that impersonal apartment. Or if I didn’t see through the translucent lenses of Aunt Susannah’s sunglasses to her bored, impatient gaze.
It’s taken me less than a day to discover that Aunt Susannah resents having to play surrogate parent to this dimension’s Marguerite. What must it have been like for her to live a whole lifetime knowing that? To feel so rejected by the only family she had left in the world?
“You and me,” I repeat, and Aunt Susannah smiles like that’s a reason to be happy.
In my real home, it’s never been “just us.”
As long as I can remember, Mom and Dad’s research assistants have spent nearly as much time at my house as I do. When I was very young, I thought they were as much my siblings as Josie was; I cried so hard the day Swathi gently explained that she was going back to live in New Delhi because she had a job and a family there. Who were these people? How could they be her family when we were her family?
My parents started being clearer about their assistants after that, but the fact is, most of them have wound up being more or less informally adopted. Mom and Dad always wanted tons of children, but pregnancy turned out to be difficult for her, so after me they stopped. I guess the grad students have had to fill the empty places where my brothers and sisters should’ve been. They sleep on our sofas, write their theses on the rainbow table, cry about their love lives, drink our milk straight from the carton. We keep up with every one, and some of them are important people in my life. Diego taught me how to ride a bike. Louis helped me bury my pet goldfish in the backyard even though rain poured down through the entire “funeral.” Xiaoting was the only one at home when I started my period for the first time, and she handled it perfectly—explaining how to use everything from our friends at Tampax, then taking me to Cold Stone Creamery.
Still, from the beginning, Paul and Theo were different. Closer to us than any of the others. Special.
And Paul was the most special of all.
Mom joked that she liked him because they were both Russian, that only fellow Russians could ever understand each other’s dark humor. Dad made a standing appointment for them to have lunch on campus together, and, once, let Paul borrow his car. He usually didn’t even let me borrow the car. Even though Paul was so quiet, so aloof, so apparently invulnerable to laughter—to my parents, he could do no wrong.
(“He’s weird,” I protested to them shortly after his arrival. “He’s like some kind of caveman from back before people could even talk.”
“That’s not very kind,” Dad said as he poured milk into his tea. “Marguerite, remember—Paul graduated from high school at age thirteen. He began his PhD studies at seventeen. He never had much of a childhood. Hasn’t really had a chance to make friends his own age, and Lord knows he doesn’t get a lot of support from home. It makes him a little . . . awkward, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a good person.”
“Besides,” Mom interjected, “whether by ‘caveman’ you mean Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals, there’s no reason to assume they lacked human speech.”)