“But you . . . you can still see it. A future where . . .” She meets my eyes, shaking her head as tears bloom along her lashes. “Where you go back and you choose him.”
My mind reels with questions and mental diagrams and so much panic as I try to make sense of what Grandmother is saying. Again and again, my body replays the sensation of passing into Beau’s world, and every time I feel the same thing: the upward motion, the feeling of being lifted quickly, the same when I swim forward through time. What does it mean that Beau’s present is my future? What does it mean that his version of the last fourteen years hasn’t truly happened yet, but that it will?
Grandmother’s shoulders are shaking from the effort of holding tears in, or maybe it just looks that way because time is pulling against me even now, trying to drag me back into my present. It settles in me then, the thing Grandmother can’t bear to say aloud, at least not as plainly as it hits me. “You think seeing his world like that means that I’m going to go back,” I murmur, “that I’m going to change what happened the night of the accident, and that will create Beau’s world.”
But we’re not both in Beau’s world.
He saw my family in his world. All of them except me. Happy, he said, they looked happy.
And I saw my name on a piece of stone there too.
“You think he survives instead of me,” I whisper.
Grandmother buries her face in her hands as she starts to cry. “I can’t get back,” she says. “I can’t go back, or I would. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried. I thought maybe I could stop the accident altogether, but, Natalie—the tug and pull, the physical evidence of time travel—when we saw that headstone with our name on it, we were in the future—not the natural one but the chosen one. We felt the pull. I don’t think you can stop the accident completely, but you can change it.”
“You think I choose—” My voice breaks, and a sob wrenches my words. “To die.”
She looks up at me. Despite her thick wrinkles and age spots and cataracts, she looks young, tiny. Like Little Me in home videos, a puny frame in too-big clothes. “I think you do what I couldn’t,” she whispers.
I open my mouth but can’t make any sound come out except a high-pitched groan. “The orb,” I finally say. “I saw it tonight.”
She nods but can’t look at me anymore. She slumps to the ground and curls her thin arms around herself. “It’s tonight. It feels exactly like the first time. Like it’s all being sewn up. The tear in time is closing tonight.”
The first time.
Today I got in the first real fight I’ve ever had with my mother. I fainted for the first time. I lost a friend for the first time, my first boyfriend. I thought about my own death for the first time when I saw my name written somewhere it shouldn’t be. And I told Beau I loved him for the first time.
And the second.
And the third.
I had meant to make love with him for the first time.
Now, he’s waiting back in Megan’s bedroom as his world crumbles. I feel the imminent fall in my stomach. Something’s trying to cement me back where I belong, and when it does—if it does—Beau will be trapped under the rubble of a world that never happened. “I haven’t lived yet,” I say because I’m helpless. Because all I have to protect me now is words. Because it’s an impossible choice to bear, but I don’t feel there’s a choice to make, and I think saying that I don’t want to do this is the closest I can get to not doing it.
Grandmother reaches a hand up toward me. I take it as I lower myself to the floor in front of her. “It should be me,” she says. “I could do it and have no regrets. It’s what I would choose, but that doesn’t mean it has to be what you choose. I can’t ask that of you. I know you haven’t lived yet. I know the life you can have, and how full it will be even without Beau, all the people you’ll affect, and those who will change your life forever.
“I know all the stories you should know someday. I know both of your mothers, and how much they both love you. I know secrets about Coco that would make your toes curl in delight, and I know Jack’s kids and how much they love him. I have all the answers, and you have none.”
She squeezes my hand. “All you have are the stories I was able to tell you and the love in your heart for Beau right now. I know all that, Natalie, and I’m still here, asking you to do something I should never ask of someone your age, especially not someone I love, whose every heartbreak and joy I’ve also known. I’m asking because it’s what I wanted to do, and you have the choice now.”