I know where I have to go—the only place where I stand a chance at finding her, the truth, at understanding Beau’s and my entwined fates—but first I have to make one last detour.
I get into the Jeep and speed back toward the intersection adorned in teddy bears and flowers and notes. I leave the car running, the windshield wipers dancing spastically, as I run through the rain to the memorial sign. It’s so hard to tear through the worlds, but when I do I find the same haunting words as before: REST IN PEACE, NATALIE LAYNE.
I let go of that world and it snaps away from me immediately, dropping the PRAY FOR MATT KINCAID #4 sign back in its place as my stomach slings back to my center. I feel for other worlds, but, despite my oncoming panic attack, the walls holding me here are more solid than ever. I scream in frustration as I mentally try to push at the curtain around me, and suddenly time starts ticking backward again. I’m sailing backward in time, the sun rising and falling, the cars speeding past backward, so fast that I almost miss the moment the sign in front of me changes.
Almost.
But I don’t.
Matt’s sign disappears, but there in its place is another: a wooden cross pounded into the damp earth and ruined by time. Burned into it is a date—fourteen years ago—and two words: BEAU WILKES.
I back away, horrified, fingers clamped over my open mouth as I wheeze and wail. Then it’s gone. Both night and rain have descended on me again, and Matt’s poster is where it should be, but still I’m gasping for breath, half-screaming my sobs as I run back to my car and jump in.
I race toward home, mind reeling. I reach the stone sign guarding the neighborhood’s entrance and turn down my cul-de-sac and park in front of my house.
The basketball hoop’s there. The shutters are green. This is still my world. I get out of the car and walk slowly up the yard to stand under the cover of the tree, staring up at the window of my closet.
I try to grab hold of time, to pull it upward around me and let myself fall through it into the past.
It gives in. Unlike trying to breach that ever-strengthening wall between Beau’s world and mine, it feels easier than ever before to draw the sun around the Earth, watch it splash over the far side of my childhood home over and over again until finally there’s a rental van sitting with its back open. The light hangs bright in the sky, and my family speeds from the house and garage to the van on a half-dozen different trips.
I keep going. Falling, falling, falling through time.
The van is gone. Rain shoots back up into the sky, clouds dissipate, the sun rises and falls. The cars in the driveway move backward and forward, disappearing at the mouth of the cul-de-sac and reappearing. I see Beau’s truck for an instant. I see him and me walk backward toward the truck and lie down inside it together. I see him right himself again, pulling me with him until my back is pressed against the side of the car. I see us argue. I watch myself stomp backward toward the porch and scramble back up it and into my window.
I keep going.
It’s so simple, what I have to do to find Grandmother. It’s been so simple all along, and I didn’t see it.
Time still whisking past me, I finish crossing the lawn and pull myself up onto the porch roof, sunlight then moonlight then sunlight splashing my back as I go. I hop down into the closet and see myself speeding backward between there and the bedroom, undressing in the morning and climbing backward into bed as it becomes night again.
I walk into the bedroom, my heart almost in my mouth, and everything keeps moving as I go to stand beside the rocking chair. Time keeps passing through me, the world rewinding until I see an earlier version of me kneeling in front of the rocking chair, and my mouth goes dry.
It doesn’t make any sense. Grandmother should be here. I know she should: This is the night three months ago when she came to me to warn me. When she cried, I went to her and knelt there, just like the girl in front of me is doing, only Grandmother’s not here. The chair is empty.
I take another step forward and time slips through me again, this time moving forward in one abrupt jolt, as though I were just dragged upward through a mile of water in the blink of an eye, and the room changes: every detail, but only very subtly.
A bed like mine sits right where mine should, a similar quilt draped over it. The orange and black walls shine in the moonlight, but the shades aren’t quite right, and the rocking chair in the corner has tiny roses carved into it. It’s my room, but different.
And there she is: Grandmother, sitting in the slightly off rocking chair, Earlier Me crouched at her feet.
I stop time’s movement to appear in my own bedroom, behind my own kneeling self, staring at the ancient woman I’ve always thought was God.
Her eyes, dark brown hazed by milky film, shift up from the Earlier Me, and her mouth drops open. “You,” she breathes, “already—you’re already here.”