He hits me again.
I blink through a sheet of tears and blood, and the next time I can see clearly, he’s holding a knife in the hand he was hitting me with.
Gunshot.
My ears ringing.
A small black hole through his sternum and blood spilling out of it and down the center of his chest. The knife drops from his hands onto the floor beside me. I watch him put a finger in the hole and try to plug it, but the blood won’t be stopped.
He takes a wet, ragged breath and looks up at the man who shot him.
I crane my neck too, just enough to see another Jason aiming a gun at him. This one is clean-shaven, and he’s wearing the black leather jacket that Daniela gave me ten years ago for our anniversary.
On his left hand, a gold wedding band gleams.
My ring.
Jason2 pulls the trigger again, and the next bullet shears off the side of my attacker’s skull.
He topples.
I turn over and sit up slowly.
Spitting blood.
My face on fire.
Jason2 aims the gun at me.
He’s going to pull the trigger.
I actually see my death coming, and I have no words, just a fleeting image of me as a child on my grandparents’ farm in western Iowa. A warm spring day. A massive sky. Cornfields. I’m dribbling a soccer ball through the backyard toward my brother, who’s guarding the “goal”—a space between two maple trees.
I think, Why this last memory on the brink of my death? Was I the most happy in that moment? The most purely myself?
“Stop it!”
Daniela is standing in the kitchen nook, dressed now.
She looks at Jason2.
She looks at me.
At the Jason with a bullet through his head.
The Jason on the screened-in porch with his throat cut.
And somehow, without so much as a tremor in her voice, she manages to ask, “Where is my husband?”
Jason2 looks momentarily thrown.
I wipe the blood out of my eyes. “Right here.”
“What did we do tonight?” she asks.
“We danced to bad country music, came home, and made love.” I look at the man who stole my life. “You’re the one who kidnapped me?”
He looks at Daniela.
“She knows everything,” I say. “There’s no point in lying.”
Daniela asks, “How could you do this to me? To our family?”
Charlie appears beside his mother, taking in the horror all around us.
Jason2 looks at her.
Then at Charlie.
Jason2 is only six or seven feet away, but I’m sitting on the floor.
I couldn’t reach him before he pulled the trigger.
I think, Get him talking.
“How’d you find us?” I ask.
“Charlie’s cell has a find-my-phone app.”
Charlie says, “I only turned it on for one text late last night. I didn’t want Angela to think I’d blown her off.”
I look at Jason2. “And the other Jasons?”
“I don’t know. I guess they followed me here.”
“How many?”
“I have no idea.” He turns to Daniela. “I got everything I ever wanted, except you. And you haunted me. What we could’ve been. That’s why—”
“Then you should’ve stayed with me fifteen years ago when you had the chance.”
“Then I wouldn’t have built the box.”
“And that would be so terrible, why? Look around. Has your life’s work caused anything but pain?”
He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.”
Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”
So slowly, I transfer my weight onto my feet.
But he catches me, says, “Don’t even.”
“You going to kill me in front of them?” I ask. “Really?”
“You had such enormous dreams,” he says to me. “You could’ve stayed in my world, in the life I built, and actually lived them.”
“Oh, is that how you justify what you did?”
“I know how your mind works. The horror you face every day walking to the train to go teach, thinking, Is this really it? Maybe you’re brave enough to admit it. Maybe you’re not.”
I say, “You don’t get to—”
“Actually, I do get to judge you, Jason, because I am you. Maybe we branched into different worlds fifteen years ago, but we’re wired the same. You weren’t born to teach undergrad physics. To watch people like Ryan Holder win the acclaim that should’ve been yours. There is nothing you can’t do. I know, because I’ve done it all. Look at what I built. I could wake up in your brownstone every morning and look myself in the mirror because I achieved everything I ever wanted. Can you say the same? What have you done?”
“I made a life with them.”
“I handed you, handed both of us, what everyone secretly wants. The chance to live two lives. Our best two lives.”
“I don’t want two lives. I want them.”