“I don’t have a choice,” I lash out. “You know I don’t. You practically raised me for this. You spent years drilling it into my head. You taught me that to love was to die.”
“Oh, honey. You misunderstand. I didn’t tell you those stories just to change your mind. I told them because I remember how badly it hurt, not being able to see the truth, feeling like I was going to be swallowed up by the dark. What is love,” she says, “other than putting someone else before you? Our birth mother gave us away because she hoped we could have a better life away from her. Our parents kept the car accident from us because Mom suffered from PTSD for years. She worked so hard to make the pain manageable for herself, but she also protected us from that pain. Love is nothing but putting someone else first. I didn’t teach you that so you’d save Beau. I told you so you’d see how this whole world was made for you, how it warms when you smile and aches when you hurt. I told you so you could stop being afraid.”
“If that’s true, then there has to be another way,” I snap. “How can you tell me the whole world loves me and in the same breath tell me I have to die? I want to know. I want this secret knowledge you have that has you so confident that this is it, that you’re willing to ask me to go to the past and lie down in the road in front of my own car to kill my child self. Because I don’t buy it. There has to be another way.”
“Why?” Grandmother challenges. “You’ve seen evidence of exactly two presents. I’ve seen evidence that Beau died that night in our world. Beau’s seen evidence that you don’t exist in his. You’ve looked at your own memorial in the same place as his. So why does there have to be another way?”
“Because this is happening,” I shout. “This doesn’t happen every day, Grandmother, or at least not to everyone. There has to be a better reason for why I can change things. Why Beau and me out of everyone in the world? Why do we get a second chance? What makes us special?”
“Maybe nothing,” Grandmother says. “Maybe chance. Or maybe someone thinks the choice is just the kind of gift you would appreciate.”
“Or maybe it’s because the world would be better with both of us in it,” I counter, “or because things are broken and when we’re together, they’re less broken. Maybe it’s because we’re connected or we fit or we’re right together, and if time is really flat, then maybe it saw all of that. Maybe, even though Beau died, time itself saw every possible world where we could love each other and that was as good as us having loved one another. Because we could’ve loved each other anywhere, in any world, and maybe the reason we can change things is because the thing between us is big enough to reach through every branch in time. Maybe our love couldn’t die, even when we did. Something’s pulling us together, Grandmother. Something brought him back from the dead to me. Even if I go back to the night of that accident and die, why would death and time be any stronger this time? It has to mean something. It has to mean a future.”
“Maybe there is another way, Natalie. But I’m not going to promise you something I can’t give you.” Her words are stretched taut and shivering with tears, her voice wild and round, a meniscus about to flood the lip of a glass. “I’m not going to tell you that you get a future with Beau because I don’t know that. I won’t be the one to tell you that you can have it all, no matter how badly I want Beau to have a chance to live. I want to believe in that future, Natalie, but I don’t. You say you saw it? Well, I never did. Even if you can make a future, who’s to say it’s really you in it? I mean, look at us. We’re the same person, but we’re living different lives. If you can create a world with you and Beau in it, it’s still not quite you, just like you’re not quite me.”
It feels like she’s dropped a weight on my chest. “Then lie to me,” I beg. “Because I’m doing this, and I need you to tell me it’s going to be okay. I need you to lie to me.”
When her mouth shifts into a smile, tears break and slip down her cheeks. “It’s not a lie,” she whispers. “It will be okay.”
I shut my eyes against the tears, and Grandmother’s stories flash through my mind, a warm current of electricity woven throughout my life, like Grandmother Spider’s web and Alice’s trails of light, guiding me and teaching me everything I know about love. But that whole web hurts, like it’s growing through my veins, all the life I want to live pulsing alongside the one I want to give Beau. The things I want to lay out in front of his eyes and place in his hands and sing into his ears and the places I want him to be carried, the thousands of golden sunsets on that day-warmed porch.