Including, I realize, make mistakes. Some of Phoebe’s futures are . . . not good. In one path, she goes to Boston University, but then drops out for a year to travel around America. She’s usually pretty safe, but at one point, near Wyoming, she hitchhikes and . . .
I don’t want to think about what happens to her there. The abuse she suffers at his hands. No. I force myself to properly name it. The rape. It’s terrifying. My fingers want to pull back from this thread, to find a way to cut it and make sure it never happens, but there’s more to this future than that one horrific moment. There’s another man, a kind one who loves her and never raises his voice at her because he can’t bear to see her flinch. There’s a daughter, a thin girl with dark hair like mine and clear green eyes that are all her own. There’s a dog and a house and a career and friends and travel and happiness. And it’s all wrapped up together, woven into Phoebe’s past and future, irrevocably and literally tied to that moment in Wyoming. I let go of this future’s string, wondering if that family and that life are worth the path it takes to get them. I think, from the way Phoebe held her daughter, they are.
In some of Phoebe’s futures she’s rich, and in some she’s not. In some she marries—in those versions, she almost always ends up with the same guy, although she meets him in different ways—and in some she doesn’t. In several of her futures, she dies young—either from some stupid risk or decision, or from just blind, dumb, horrible luck. Most of her futures give her at least sixty or seventy more years, though, and in one she makes it to 103, with three kids and eight grandkids and even a great-granddaughter.
But the thing that strikes me most about Phoebe’s future is that, of all the possibilities, there’s not a single one that’s definitively right. I cannot pull apart the threads and find the one that’s perfect for her. They’re all perfect and imperfect in different ways, even the one that includes Wyoming. They all have moments of intense joy and intense sorrow. Each decision Phoebe makes, each circumstance she can’t change and must find a way to live with . . . every one ends in a life that’s not really that much better or worse than any of the others. She finds just as much joy in having kids as she does in not having them; in getting a high-paying job as working for pennies in an art gallery; in traveling the world or making one place home. But she finds just as much sorrow in each life too.
After I sort through her threads, I sit back on my bed, and . . . I don’t know, I feel sort of peaceful. It’s weird. I was super anxious before, but this is like a perfect moment of calm. I can’t really help my parents; they’re old, they’ve made their decisions, they made them a long time ago, before I was ever born.
But Pheebs . . . man, Phoebe has a real chance. She has the whole world, a myriad of futures, all within her reach. And it feels a little like a burden has been lifted.
I’ve never really known what I was supposed to do with this power of mine. Stop horrible things from happening? Ensure the right course of events? But I don’t have to worry about Phoebe. There is no right path for her, no wrong path. They’re all just . . . possibilities, and she can pick whichever one she wants. It’s not up to me to change her future, to make sure the right future happens. I’m not responsible for her. I can let her spin-spin-spin away into her own future.
CHAPTER 20
Phoebe
Rosemarie’s house is almost hidden by the trees in her yard. It’s . . . not much. Dad’s in real estate, and he was the one who sold Rosemarie’s family their home three years ago. So he knew exactly what kind of loan they had (and hadn’t) qualified for. On the few occasions when I couldn’t drive, Dad would drop me off at her house, grumbling the whole ride there and then frowning at the trash in her yard and the car that never left the driveway because it didn’t work.
Whatever. I love it here.
There are already tons of cars in Rosemarie’s driveway and yard. I park near the mailbox and walk up to the house. Late wild daffodils bloom in scattered patches, filling in the spotty grass. The front door is mostly open—Rosemarie’s home is always hot—and I don’t bother knocking as I walk inside.
“Bee!” Rosemarie’s little brother shouts, crashing into my legs.
“Hey, Peter.” I rub the bristly ends of his buzz cut. “Nice hair.”
“Rosie did it,” he says.
Peter’s nine years old and what his parents call “precocious” on good days and “annoying as hell” on bad ones. Rosemarie always calls him the latter, but she usually doesn’t mean it.