My Real Children

She settled into the routine of the home. There were meals at regular times. She could see trees outside the window, and sometimes there were birds, when she could find her glasses and the binoculars at the same time. She read the chart on the end of the bed to see how confused they thought she was. She read her books, and books Flora brought her from the library. She made friends with the other residents, as best she could. She remembered her mother and tried hard not to be like that, not to attack people, not to scare them.

 

She became deaf and needed hearing aids, which were one more barrier to communication and one more thing for her to constantly lose. “You were lucky to be spared this,” she told the photograph of Bee.

 

Flora visited every week, occasionally bringing Mohammed and the children. Flora also took her out sometimes—to the park, or down to the shore, and at Christmas to Flora’s house. Sammy sometimes came alone, and Pat tried to be interesting when she did, telling her about Florence, showing her pictures and reminding her. Flora’s family went to Turkey most summers to see Mohammed’s family, but they never went back to Florence. She tried to encourage Sammy and Cenk to remember it, but she never knew how successful she was.

 

Sanchia’s baby was a boy, Karl Ragnar. The next baby, two years later, she thought might be Philip’s, but she didn’t ask. That was a girl, Anna Louise. She wrote the names down and tried hard to remember them. Philip brought her mended photograph back, and she put it in the center of the shelf. He came to visit every few months but he seldom brought the rest of the family. His career as a composer seemed to be taking off, but she found it hard to keep track. She had given up on the news entirely now, especially after the nuclear exchange in the Middle East.

 

“They got Tel Aviv and the Assam Dam, but they didn’t take out any of the Seven Wonders,” Sammy told her. “Mummy said that’s because of you and our grandfather.”

 

“Bee used to say using them at all was unconscionable,” Pat said. “And all the fallout.”

 

“Well, people have them, they’re going to use them,” Sammy said, shrugging. She showed Pat a photograph on her phone of a boy she liked at school. “Isn’t he smooth?”

 

Jinny had two children, a boy and a girl, Domenic Michael and Beatrice Patricia. She sent photographs of them, which Pat stuck in the back of her album with their names written on the back. It meant a lot to her that Bee had genetic descendants, however much they both had truly believed that all the children were all of theirs. Bee had been so interested in genetics—mostly plant genetics, true, but human genetics too. Jinny visited only very occasionally, because she had small children and Florence was a long way. She wrote often, and Pat treasured her letters. Jinny wrote that an elm tree had been planted in a dome on Mars in memory of Bee by one of her old pupils. Pat wrote that on all her lists so that she wouldn’t forget. She did forget, but she kept finding it again. (“Was that the best you could do, St. Zenobius? Well, I suppose it was better than nothing.”) Jinny sent her postcards of Florence, which she kept on her bedside table and looked at until they became crumpled and the nurses threw them away.

 

Sometimes she dreamed that Bee was dead and woke with a sense of relief that it had been a dream, and then remembered that it was true. She forgot that she had tried to kill herself and wondered why she had not. She beat her head on the pillow and bit her lips, and sometimes she called out for Bee, although she knew she would not come.

 

 

 

 

 

34

 

 

Choices: Patricia 2015

 

 

“Very Confused Today” her notes read.

 

She lay face down on the bed, her eyes buried by the pillow. If she sat up and looked around she might see something to anchor her in one life or the other, her MacTop, or her photograph album, Doug’s gold disk or her framed picture of Bee with the babies. Lying like this she could hold herself between them, hold all the memories, both lives, both worlds. The life where she had married Mark and the life where she had lived happily with Bee for forty years. The life where she had been Tricia and then Trish, and the life where she had been Pat. It occurred to her as she lay there that in the world where she had been Trish she could have married Bee, there had been marriage equality there from the early Eighties onwards. That was so deeply and bitterly unfair that she could hardly bear to think of it.

 

In the world where she married Mark, she could have married Bee. If she had ever met Bee in that world. She couldn’t make it make sense. Bee had been in both worlds, though she hadn’t realized it. Sophie had worked with her in both worlds. Bee’s work on plants for space had been the same—but in one world it had been for an international space station and moonbase, and in the other it had been for a European one, hostile to the Russians and the Americans. She could remember both things at the same time, as if both things were true, but they couldn’t be. How could it be possible?