My heart stalls in my chest. I thought I’d found the key, unlocked the answer. I thought I could make Beau stop blaming himself and then he’d stop disappearing, and all along, it was out of our control. I swallow a fist-sized knot in my throat. “What do you think it means?”
He slides his hands around my hips and glances down before meeting my eyes. “We’re running out of time.”
I fight back more tears. I’ve been crying too much lately. I’m so tired of crying. I push up on tiptoes and kiss the space between Beau’s eyes, as if to smooth out the furrow there. “Don’t let go.”
And he doesn’t.
Not as we make our way inside the abandoned house, creaking with the swell of humidity and the drop in air temperature. Not as we lie down on the floor where his bed should be. Not all night as we entwine around one another.
He holds on to me with every part of him all night, hardly blinking, until suddenly, he disappears from my arms.
27
“We’re running out of time,” I tell Alice. I finished explaining everything that’s happened at least two minutes ago, but she hasn’t said a word. I’ve seen Beau for a couple of hours the last two days, but both of those visits ended with him disappearing from me—Sunday evening as we sat on the bleachers of the football stadium watching the sun fall, and Monday morning as we lay together in his bed, fingers twirled through one another’s hair. “What happened when you ran out the other day?” I ask. “Did you figure something out?”
She sighs. “Not exactly. I thought I had something when you mentioned Grandmother hiding in another time, so I went down a rabbit hole on time-travel philosophies.”
“And came up with nothing?”
“A little bit more than nothing. Albert Einstein thought time was an illusion, a sort of fourth coordinate to show where you are, relative to how fast you’re moving. So maybe that’s what’s happening when you and Beau see the future and the past—you’re rapidly moving forward or backward, but not along length or height or width. That could be why, when you’re slipping through time, nothing around you interacts with you as if you’re solid. You might be traveling so fast you could walk through the cells of a wall.”
“But we’re solid to each other,” I point out.
“Yes, and you also said Beau couldn’t get back to his world the night you met. I believe he used the word grounded. Perhaps when you’re together, you’re tethered to each other. And since neither of you appears to be fixed in the space-time continuum, theoretically one of you could pull the other along at the same speed. And perhaps there’s a looser form of tethering that occurs with animals. Thus Beau’s hamster’s epic journey and your flip-out with your dog. It’s as if the animals are somehow trying to decide where in time they belong and thus bouncing back and forth.” She opens her desk drawer and digs out a Slinky, flipping its metal spirals back and forth between her palms as she thinks.
I raise an eyebrow. “Any particular reason you, an adult research psychologist, keep that in your desk?”
“It helps me think,” she says matter-of-factly. “A physical action to busy the hands. Anyway, I was high while doing aforementioned research, which meant I was messing with this thing, and it sort of struck me.” She flattens the Slinky between her two hands. “What if this Slinky is all of time, and it all already exists—past, present, future—but the human or animal experience is, essentially, moving along a series of moments in just one direction? We can’t see, hear, touch any moment but the one we’re currently experiencing, but they all exist simultaneously.
“That’s why you saw an earlier version of yourself when Beau first showed you how to move time. That Natalie continuously exists just as the You of two minutes ago and two minutes from now continuously exist. But technically human perception should only allow you to see one of them at a time, rather than the million Natalies leading from the parking lot to this office, or the billions of Natalies and Beaus stretched across the highway from Union to here. It’s like you’re moving forward through a flip-book, but there are always other versions of you who are further behind or ahead of you.”
“I think you broke my brain. I don’t get it.”
Alice stretches the Slinky apart, pulling the metal coils taut, then points toward one near the middle with her pinky. “Each of these rings is a moment, and right now we’re both experiencing this one. But then, say you start slipping backward along the Slinky. You’re flipping through every moment that occurs in your current physical space: moving through the Slinky. When the time slip passes, you snap back into place right after the last moment you experienced chronologically, even if by then the You that didn’t experience the time slip has moved to a different physical space.”
“I’m moving through a time Slinky,” I say flatly.
“To be more exact, you are moving through a wormhole that runs through the time Slinky, that lets the version of you in this precise moment move to another moment.”