It’s the answer to the question Jane came here to ask. The answer, now that Jane has it, is both crushing and not as crushing as she thought it would be. Would Jane really want to know a UD17 Aunt Magnolia? Would she really want to pile so much hope and expectation onto that person?
Jane realizes she’s been wondering if this, the multiverse, is why Aunt Magnolia made her promise to visit Tu Reviens. So that if anything ever happened to her aunt, Jane could surround herself with other, different Aunt Magnolias. But no, Aunt Magnolia would have known that she was the one Jane had, and the one Jane lost. The only one she wanted.
“I’m sorry about your aunt Magnolia,” Jane says to UD17 Jane quietly. “My aunt Magnolia died too. In Antarctica. She was an underwater photographer.”
A look of comprehension crosses the face of this other Jane. “Is your tattoo based on one of her photos?”
“Yeah,” Jane says, surprised. “How did you know that?”
UD17 Jane turns to show Jane her other shoulder. A comet tattoo streaks up the arm of this other Jane, reaching all the way to her neck. “My aunt Magnolia was a galactic photographer.”
Jane is speechless. The tattoo is so like hers.
“And a spy,” continues UD17 Jane. “She died on a mission.”
“Aunt Magnolia a spy?” Jane says, surprised.
“Yeah. I never knew it, until she died.”
“Wow,” Jane says, trying to imagine what that would be like. “Did that feel like a betrayal?”
“Not nearly as much as her dying,” UD17 Jane says with a quiet bitterness.
Jane feels the pressure of her own rising tears. Some instinct causes her to reach out, curiously, to touch the other Jane, to touch that familiar grief. The other Jane understands and reaches back. The two Janes grasp hands, warm, alive, and a perfect fit.
Behind the other Jane, UD17 Ravi shifts, snores. Their grip on each other tightens in a strange sort of instinctive, mutual self-defense. Jane has a feeling that if UD17 Ravi wakes up and sees her, he’s going to invite her into bed. And she realizes, suddenly, why her own Ravi, home Ravi, who’s a better Ravi than this Ravi, is not for her. Ravi makes Jane feel excited, delighted, but he does not make her feel anchored in herself. Ivy makes Jane feel excited, delighted, and anchored in who she is.
“Will you be okay?” UD17 Jane asks her.
“I don’t know,” Jane says. “But this has been a helpful visit.”
“For me too. I think you’ve inspired me, actually,” other Jane says, “with the jellyfish.”
“Are you an artist?”
“I’d like to be,” says UD17 Jane. “I’ve been designing some pretty wild lampshades lately.”
Jane’s mind flashes with images. Adornments for lights; jellyfish that glow in a world of no jellyfish. She lets out a laugh, surprised to recognize that she likes this Jane. Her next umbrella, she decides, will be a lampshade umbrella.
“I make umbrellas,” Jane says. “I’ll have to make a lampshade-inspired one next.”
The other Jane scrunches her face. “I think I know what an umbrella is.”
“Look it up, if you like,” Jane says. “Umbrellas might be inspiring too. I could totally see them coming into fashion here.”
“Thanks,” says other Jane. “I will.”
“I hope you’ll be okay,” Jane says.
“You too.”
“I really mean it.”
“Yeah. I do too. I feel like I have a vested interest.”
This makes Jane laugh again. “I have to go back now. But a word of advice for you?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t piss off the house.”
UD17 Jane raises an eyebrow. “Okay. And one for you?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t sleep with Ravi.”
Jane grins, then nods, not mentioning that she’s already figured that one out. Something is tugging at her throat. It’s a conversation she wants to have with Ivy. A few conversations, really; she wonders if Ivy will want to have them with her. She has no idea. Anything can happen. She’ll find out.
Holding the hand of this different version of her, Jane takes a deep, jellyfish breath. When a quietness suffuses her, she lets go and turns for home.
A bell rings somewhere in the depths of the house,
sweet and clear, like a wind chime.
Mrs. Vanders, the little girl, Kiran, Ravi, or Jasper?
Aunt Magnolia?
The Strayhound, the Girl and the Painting
Jasper is now sprawled on his stomach in front of the tall painting, his chin on the floor, his expression bleak, like a basset hound who’s finally given in.
Jane decides.
“Kiran,” she says, “I’ll catch up with you soon, but first I’m going to try to help this dog, okay?”
“Yeah,” says Kiran, wrinkling her nose at Jasper, “what’s his problem?”
“I don’t know,” says Jane, “but I’ll see if I can find out.”
“It’s not your job,” says Kiran. “The staff feeds him.”
“I know,” says Jane. “I don’t mind.”
“Okay,” Kiran says, moving away. “I’ll be in the winter garden.”
Jane turns to face the dog. “Jasper,” she says, “dear Jasper.”
He jumps up eagerly, wagging his tail.
When she reaches the landing, there’s something of a face-off. She tries to move toward him, but he dodges her, circles her, then runs straight at her from behind.
“Jasper!” she says, trying an evasive maneuver. “How am I supposed to pet you if you’re running at me?” He shifts himself and slams into her calves.
It’s no use; her balance lost, Jane begins an inexorable topple into the tall umbrella painting. Literally into the umbrella painting: She doesn’t come up against its surface, it doesn’t stop her. She falls on through. Crashing onto a hard horizontal surface, she scrabbles around in bewilderment. She’s flat on a checkerboard floor, in a lantern-lit room, in what looks like a fancy house. An unusual umbrella of greens and reds is drying on the floor beside her.
Certain she’s just fallen through a crack in her own sanity, Jane scrambles to her feet and spins around to face the way she’s come. There’s a wall, on which hangs an enormous woven hanging. It shows the landing of a staircase in a big, grand house. A suit of armor, holding daffodils, stands on the landing, as does a basset hound. Across a great hall, another staircase is visible, rising from the ground to the third floor.
As Jane watches, the basset hound in the hanging moves toward her. Suddenly he comes stepping into the room with her, through the hanging, a real dog, but—no longer Jasper. He pants excitedly just like Jasper. But his ears are small and pointy, his snout pert, and his body more proportional to his legs. His markings are similar to Jasper’s, but the whites are whiter, the blacks blacker, the browns softer.
“Jasper,” Jane says, scaring herself when her voice comes out in a shriek.
“My real name is Steen,” the dog says to Jane, somehow conveying even the spelling to her, S-T-E-E-N, and causing her to fall backward onto the floor in utter confusion.
“I’m losing my mind!” Jane says to the ceiling, shaking her head from side to side.
“Not your mind,” he says, trotting around to her head. “Your narrow and fragile conception of the world. Oh, I’m so happy to have found you!” he says, hopping and jumping like a puppy experiencing snow for the first time.
“Dogs don’t talk,” Jane says to the ceiling.
“I’m not actually talking!” he says. “Pay more attention. You’re understanding me with your mind, not your ears.”
“What?” Jane says. “Do it again.”
I’m communing with your mind, he says. His mouth doesn’t move. No sounds come out of him.
“I guess that makes sense,” Jane says, then hears herself, and despairs of her reason.
We need to move out of this room, Jasper says, before someone in Tu Reviens notices a difference in the painting.
“What?” Jane says in her shrieky voice.
We need to move, Jasper says. Look. There’s someone coming.
And indeed, the hanging on the wall has changed again; not only has the basset hound disappeared, but there’s now a dark-haired person in a blue sweater, standing on the landing across the receiving hall, holding a small black box. It looks an awful lot like Ivy, with her camera.
“Ivy!” cries Jane.
Shh! She’ll hear you! Jasper says.
“Good! She can rescue me!”
Shhhhhh! She’ll see us in the painting if she bothers to look. Move. And stop thinking of me as Jasper! My name is Steen.