I watch as Earlier Me starts to turn over her shoulder—just as I did months ago.
“Don’t be afraid, Natalie. Alice will help you,” Grandmother tells her. “Find Alice Chan. She can help you.”
Before her eyes can process me, the earlier version of myself vanishes, leaving me alone with Grandmother. She stands from the rocking chair, her raspy breath the only sound.
“Who are you?” I demand.
Her cracked lips break into a sad smile. “Natalie,” she says slowly. “I’m you.”
31
“How is that possible?” I ask.
She flashes a sad smile again. “How is any of it possible?” It’s what Beau said when he told me he saw the two Unions too.
“What do you want?” I say, feeling desperate. “I couldn’t save Matt. You didn’t tell me it was him, and I couldn’t save him. He’s on life support.”
Her dark eyes—my dark eyes—fall to the floor. “I know,” she says. “But I didn’t come to save Matt.”
“Then who?”
“What do you really want to know, Natalie? Ask me the question that’s been weighing on you.”
The answer surges to my lips, though I’m less and less sure I want the answer. “Why are there two worlds—why Beau and me?”
“There aren’t two worlds,” she says simply.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re slipping in time, Natalie, seeing other moments in your physical space. Hypnopompic reach forward, and hypnagogic reach back.”
“Alice already figured out the time slips,” I say, impatient. “What I don’t understand is . . .” I hesitate, gathering the courage to say it aloud. “. . . why there’s a cross with Beau’s name on it in the same place there’s a memorial for me.”
Grandmother takes a deep breath. “Oh, sweet girl. I know you better than anyone. I know when you’re lying. You do understand. You just don’t want to.”
“There’s no way I’m this annoying in the future.”
“Young people always think old people are annoying,” she says. “But we don’t care, because we think they’re annoying.”
“Stop,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
“Beau died, Natalie. That’s truth. If you look at time in a straight line—no detours, no do-overs or rewrites or wormholes—Beau’s father made a left turn into oncoming traffic. He was drunk, and our mother had fallen asleep at the wheel. He saw her coming and sped up to miss her. She woke up and yanked the wheel left, but neither of them was fast enough. The passenger sides of the cars collided. You survived, and a five-year-old boy named Beau Wilkes died.”
Full plump tears roll over my cheeks. “You’re lying,” I squeal between my fingers. “He has a future. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there.” To the house. Our house. Our wisteria. A crib.
“I’m not,” she says softly.
“Why can I touch him then?” I shout. “Why is my name written at the memorial too?”
“Because it’s not the whole truth,” she says, looking down at the floor again. “With time, sometimes there are do-overs. There are wormholes. I believe Beau’s world exists to you because you have the power to change things.”
“What things? What are you talking about?”
“Beau’s death is in the past,” she explains. “It happened. But when you tore loose from your position in time, time tore in the process, triggering the slips. And when I was your age, I met Beau Wilkes, despite the fact that he had died years before. I discovered what I thought to be another world. I fell in love with the boy who lived in it, and my whole life changed. I wanted to spend every day with him more than I wanted to hide or to run from what was happening. Loving him changed me. And then I found . . .” She pauses, mouth tight. “Well, the same thing you found: a cross with his name on it, marked with the date of our accident. I kept pushing against the barrier between our worlds and against time, trying to see through it for some explanation. Getting to Beau’s world had been getting harder for me all summer, but I stayed there, kneeling in the mud until I could slip through time again. When I got traction, I was staring at my own name, not Beau’s. No date, but that didn’t matter. I knew right then, just like you knew, somehow we both must’ve died on that night. I looked it up, found a news story about that night, the accident that ended Beau’s presence in our world. The same accident that, in his world, left our mother crying at the kitchen table, sent our whole broken family moving out of that house and its darkness.