“Gone?” I breathe.
She folds over, racked with sobs. “He’s gone,” she chokes out. “The doctors said there’s no brain activity. He’s on life support now, but they’re going to . . .” She can’t finish. She sinks to the floor and reaches a hand up to me as she sobs, but I can’t take it.
I can’t move.
I can’t.
I can’t anything.
Behind me, Beau turns and storms back toward the automatic doors, pounding a hand flat against them and kicking them as they open too slowly, then stalking out into the night.
Still I remain frozen.
This is how it feels when the world ends.
When you know, for certain, that there’s nothing left for you to do, that you could stand there until it all disappears.
I failed. I didn’t save him. My best friend. My broken best friend. The person who has hurt me most, who I have loved deeply, from whom I always expected an apology and I meant to forgive. All that’s over now.
It’s all over.
I don’t know how long it takes me to move. I know Rachel is still on the floor crying. I know Matt’s parents are still back beyond those doors I’m not allowed to pass through.
I know Matt is still lying in bed hooked up to machines, some keeping his lungs moving, others documenting his absence of thought.
The world is still over.
When I’m sure of all that, that’s when I finally leave. Because there’s nothing else to do aside from standing in this one spot until I’m fossilized.
Beau is sitting in his truck, and when I get in beside him, he lifts his phone from his lap. “I talked to Rachel,” he murmurs. “The other Rachel.” His eyes slowly trail over to me. “The other Matt’s fine. He’s awake, talking. Doesn’t remember much.”
“That’s good,” I say, voice trembling. I wish I meant it, but I don’t. It’s not good. I wish I didn’t hate that Other Matt for living when mine will die, but I do. I wish I didn’t hate everyone in that world for having him when everyone in mine can’t. Or feel angry that we’d never make things right between us. Those things shouldn’t matter after a person’s dead. Should they?
“It’s me,” Beau says. “Destroyer of worlds.”
It’s not true, but I can’t make myself say it. “I want to go somewhere safe.” Somewhere the pain in my chest can’t follow.
“Okay, Natalie Cleary,” he says quietly. “I’ll take you somewhere safe.”
We drive away from the hospital, away from Union, deeper into the country, out toward the salt-lick-turned-state-park where they found woolly mammoth fossils in the 1700s. We drive away from life and streetlights until the narrow road corkscrews back and forth through the moonlit hills and Beau pulls off at a dilapidated redbrick house with a half-collapsed front porch and big rectangular windows framed in crumbling white paint. We get out of the truck silently, the floorboards of the porch whining as we cross them into the dark house.
We walk from the hallway into an old living room where squares of silver light shine from the windows toward the old brick fireplace. The floor, though old, is smooth, polished, the wallpaper mostly scraped off.
“Doesn’t look like much,” Beau says quietly, like he’s afraid to disrupt the dust. “But the foundation’s solid.”
I look back to where he hesitates in the doorway. “What is this place?”
He ambles toward me and takes my hand in his. Slowly we begin to move through time, as though being towed upward through calm water. Reds and golds then blues and greens pop and flicker against the windows as Beau carries us into the future. I watch another version of him travel full tilt through the room, replacing bricks in the fireplace and baseboards and wainscoting, patching holes in the drywall, painting the room a soft peach, and shoving a beat-up piano up against the wall as the sun and stars take turns splashing us. Wildflowers sprawl out from the window across the yard and die beneath frost, only to regrow. Wisteria clumps up around the windowsills, blossoms opening and closing like heartbeats.
Tears rise in my chest. I’m flooding with them as the house becomes brighter, fresher, more and more a home. Time-slipping feels different this time, though, less substantial and more like a dream—the shadow of a future. “Beau, where are we?”
Whitewashed slats appear in a pile on the floor. The blur of a bear-sized person hammers and fastens and screws the beams together. They become a rectangle, a box. They become a crib.
“You wanna hear a story, Natalie Cleary?” I nod, and he folds his arms around me. “We live in the same world,” he says softly, slowly. “After school, you get a job teaching over at NKU. I coach a high school team, or maybe middle school. We live in an old house with a big yard, and one day, I talk you into marrying me.” He rests his chin on top of my head. “You wear flowers in your hair at our wedding, and Mason gets so wasted he throws up during his speech, but we’re so happy, we just laugh.”