She was just an old woman with memory problems. Or maybe two old women with memory problems. She laughed to herself. She was herself, whether she was Pat or Trish. They knew different things and cared about different people, but she was the same person she had always been. She was the girl who had stood before the sea in Weymouth and in Barrow-in-Furness, the woman who had stood before Botticelli and before hostile council meetings. It didn’t matter what they called her, Patricia or Patsy or Trish or Pat. She was herself. She had loved Bee, and Florence, and all her children.
Could she slide the worlds closer together? Get rid of the wars? Or would one world end and the other go on? Would Pat’s world end in fire and she would forget it and go on as Trish? Would she forget Bee and Flora and Jinny and Philip and the sky over the Palazzo Vecchio and the taste of gelato? She wondered who owned her house in Florence in Trish’s world, and whether they loved it as much as she and Bee had. The door wouldn’t have been widened for the wheelchair, and there wouldn’t be rails in the bathroom. For that matter, who owned her Lancaster house in Pat’s world? It wouldn’t have her mother’s ashes in the garden, or Doug’s or Mark’s. She felt herself drifting. She leaned harder against the cold glass to hold herself there.
As Trish she had lost all faith in God. As Pat she had gone on believing. Now she didn’t know what she thought. She didn’t believe in Providence, in a loving God who did what was best for everyone. That wasn’t compatible with the facts. But she did remember both worlds. Maybe God, or something, wanted her to choose between them, make one of them real.
She had made a choice already, one choice that counted among the myriad choices of her life. She had made it not knowing where it led. Could she made it again, knowing?
She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed and looked up at the blur that was one moon or the other. How many worlds were there? One? Two? An infinite number? Was there a world where she could have both happiness and peace?
All those deaths, all that destruction, all those cancers, and also that slide to the right, that selfish dangerous pattern. Or the open world, the world with hope and possibilities and Google.
Mark. Those letters. How had she been so young, so naive? How had she been taken in by him? Mark or Bee. No choice, except that she wasn’t choosing only for herself. And whichever way she chose she’d break her heart to lose her children. All of them were her real children.
But she took a breath and smelled again that corridor in The Pines, the smell of summer sweat, of chalk, of hot dust and iodine disinfectant. She saw the late evening sun coming in through the little window at the end and catching all the dust in its beam. She felt her strong young body that she had never appreciated when she had it, constantly worrying that she didn’t meet standards of beauty and not understanding how standards of health were so much more important. She bounced a little on her strongly arched young feet. She felt again the Bakelite of the receiver in her hand and heard Mark’s voice in her ear. “Now or never!”
Now or never, Trish or Pat, peace or war, loneliness or love?
She wouldn’t have been the person her life had made her if she could have made any other answer.
Acknowledgments
First I must thank my husband Emmet O’Brien for love and support and putting up with me when I am writing. My aunt Mary Lace read the book as it was being written and was helpful and encouraging. I had useful conversations as it was being written with Rene Walling and Alison Sinclair. I also had a great deal of help on all sorts of odd questions from my Livejournal correspondents—papersky.livejournal.com, where I post wordcount and queries as I am going along. I really appreciate this help—there are still some things you just can’t Google, and having a community to ask has meant that I have been able to come much closer to answers. Thank you.
I especially want to thank Ada Palmer for Florence, and also for being supportive and perceptive about this book both in progress and in revision.
After the book was done it was read by Caroline-Isabelle Carron, Maya Chhabri, Pamela Dean, David Dyer-Bennet, Ruthanna and Sarah Emrys, David Goldfarb, Steven Halter, S. Kayam, Madeleine Kelly, Naomi Kritzer, Marissa Lingen, Elise Matthesen, Lydia Nickerson, Emmet O’Brien, Doug Palmer, Alison Sinclair, and Tili Sokolov.
Ruthanna Emrys and Lila Garrott helped me write more confidently about sexuality. Doug Palmer was immensely helpful on matters relating to amputation. Maya Chhabri was a godsend when it came to Italian affairs. Lesley Hall was terrific on many things medical and sexual. Marissa Lingen gave me wonderful help with tech, and not the kind people usually mean when they say that.
I’d like to thank the Evans Library at Texas A&M for allowing me to do my copyedit in their space.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden and everyone at Tor have been supportive and worked hard on this book, as always. I really value that and try not to take it for granted.