The Love That Split the World (20 page)

I remember all that,
I want to say.
You and I were there too.
You and I made fun of Cameron’s butt germs, and felt guilty when Matt finally put a stop to it.

“That’s when I fell in love with Matt Kincaid,” Megan says quietly.

It’s like a dagger in my heart. Not jealousy, at least not toward Megan. If anything, I’m jealous that she loves Matt but doesn’t even know me. And I’m jealous that this Megan would tell me about things mine never has. I wonder when her feelings for him went away, if they even did, and how I didn’t notice them.

Had I been hurting her, hurting both of them, for the last six years over something it turns out I’d never been sure I wanted? Or is a world without me in it really so different that Megan could have feelings for Matt in one reality and not the other?

“He’s going to get through this,” I say. “You guys still have centuries of mooning people together ahead of you.”

She laughs into her hand, but the tears keep sliding down her cheeks. “I’m not sure that’s even what he wants,” she says. “He’s had girlfriends the whole time we’ve been friends. It was just starting to seem like . . . and now . . .”

I grab her hand in mine, my Megan no matter what. “He’ll have time to figure it out,” I say. “And if he gets it wrong, then he’ll have plenty of time to experience crushing regret as he watches you grow old with your hot professional hockey player husband.”

“God, it’s like you’ve been reading my search history,” she jokes, and I feel a rush of pain at realizing how much I miss this.

“I’m super intuitive when it comes to hot guys,” I say. “They’re my love language.”

“Well, you’ve got your hands full with one, that’s for sure.” She shakes her head. “Beau Wilkes staring wistfully at an Ivy
League girl. Who would’ve thought? It’s tragic, really.”

“How’d you know about Brown?”

“Oh, please. Beau is our resident disenchanted, uninterested, gorgeous, yet undeniably broken one-night-stander, heavily marked by the scent of Rachel Hanson. You’re news, Natalie.” She sees the look on my face, then hurries to add, “Don’t get me wrong. I love Beau. Everyone does. It’s just, you seem great, and I hope you know what you’re getting into. Poor guy has enough baggage to fill CVG Airport.”

I shake my head. “I’m not getting into anything. I’m leaving for the rest of summer in a few weeks. Beau’s just helping me with something.”

“Right,” she says, nodding. “Helping you make out. There’s probably no better coach in the county.”

I laugh and, for a second, the heaviness in my chest lifts away. “So what kind of baggage are we talking about?” I say, then feel a jab of guilt over my impromptu background check.

“Well, there’s his mom, obviously. She’s a little bit . . . out there. And his dad left and
never
visits. I don’t think he came to a single game in five years, not even the two times they went to State. Apparently he sends Beau liquor in the mail—I mean, the guy’s a recovering alcoholic, and he’s practically begging Beau to take his place now that he’s sober. Of course all of this is hearsay. Probably just rumors.”

“I’m not so sure,” I say, staring down at my feet, thinking of Senior Night, Beau slipping into the school to get drunk by himself and play the piano.

Megan sighs. “And then there’s everything with Matt.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sure that’s hard on everyone.”

Megan chews on her pinky nail and shrugs. “Yeah, but especially Beau. I mean, the Kincaids totally blame him.”

“For the
accident
?” I say, stunned.

“For the drinking. They can’t fathom that Matty might make his own mistakes once in a while. Anytime something goes wrong, good old Joyce is quick to point a finger at Beau. The two of them burned the barn down when they were kids, and according to Matt, it was mostly
his
fault, but Matt was afraid what his parents would do. So Beau took all the blame, and Matt had to convince them not to press charges.”

“Wow,” I say, vaguely thinking that the Kincaids make my parents look like the progeny of flower children and Mother Teresa. I think about the way Joyce and Raymond sat apart from Beau in the hospital the morning of the accident, only sparing glances at him to shoot him daggers. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell Megan. “It’s all going to be okay.”

“I’m glad I ran into you,” Megan says. We both stand up to go, and it’s the same as it’s always been—the two of us, understanding one another without too many words.

“Me too.”

It’s true that nothing has the potential to hurt so much as loving someone, but nothing heals like it either.

21

“There once was a hunting party,” Grandmother said. “Among this party were an old man, his daughter and her husband, and their young son. Though they set off together, it wasn’t long before the hunting party was separated. The old man, the woman, and her husband went one way, while their child accidentally went the other.

“They did not notice the missing child until the sun was going down, and then there was nothing much they could do but camp. Luckily, they happened upon a cabin in a clearing, and so they decided to camp there for the night.

“They built a powerful fire and went to bed, the old man on one side of the cabin and the married couple on the other. When the fire had dwindled to sparks, a noise awoke the couple. When they listened, they determined it was a dog gnawing
on a bone. Then the noise turned to a sharp rattling, and they got out of bed to find the source.

“Crossing the cabin, they found that the old man had been killed by some kind of animal, his blood pouring from his body onto the bed where he slept. They were frightened, of course, but it was the middle of the night, and there was nothing to be done. The attacking animal had vanished, and so the couple covered the old man’s body, fed the fire, and went back to their bed to wait for sunrise.

“But again, when the fire went down, they heard the noise. They leapt out of bed, running toward the old man’s body. This time they saw the creature that had killed him: a living Skeleton, who peered up at them before fleeing through a hole in the cabin wall. The husband and wife were terrified. They knew the creature would not willingly let them escape, so they crept
back to their bed and made a plan in hushed whispers.

“They stoked the fire back to life, and then the wife said, loud enough for the Skeleton to hear from wherever he hid, ‘I am so thirsty, husband. I must go down to the stream for a drink.’ And so she left, and the Skeleton did not pursue her. Then the husband built the fire up further and said aloud, ‘Where is my wife? Why has she been gone so long? I must go down to the stream to make sure she’s all right.’ And so he snuck from the cabin too, breaking into a run as soon as he was clear of it. He found his wife in the woods, and together they ran back toward their home.

“But the Skeleton returned when the fire had gone down and found his prey had vanished, and so he took off in pursuit of them, howling terribly. The couple ran fast until they
reached their home, where their people were in the middle of a great celebration and feast. Hearing their kindred’s cries for help, the people ran out into the woods to meet them, and the Skeleton fled.

“The next morning a group of people set out for the cabin. They found the remains of the old man’s body and, in the loft, they found an old bark coffin that held a Skeleton, a man whose friends had left him unburied. To destroy the cabin and the Skeleton, they surrounded it with dry bark and fuel and lit a fire to consume it. As they stood watching the cabin burn, they saw a fox with eyes that glowed like fire flee from the house and dart into the woods.

“The end.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. Grandmother smirked.

“You would know if I was kidding,” she said. “I’m hilarious.”

“Your stories are about as funny as
The Diary of Anne Frank
.”

“That doesn’t mean
I’m
humorless. I have a life outside of our time together, you know,” she said. “I’m telling you the things you need to know. Later, if there’s time, I’ll tell you about the time I found a latex glove in my salad.”

“No thanks,” I said, subduing my gag reflex. “What even happened to the boy?”

“What do you mean? He left the story.”

“So he stopped existing? Why even mention him?”

“To show you it was a good thing he went the other way.”

“Okaaaaay. And that means . . . ?”

“Look, Natalie, sometimes stories only mean whatever you get from them.”

“I hope this isn’t supposed to be one of those times.”

She surveyed me with heavy concentration. “I guess not. You got nothing, did you?”

“Sorry,” I told her with a shrug.

“The nation this story comes from saw the fox as a symbol of sexual love.”

“Erotic vampire fox—
now
it all makes sense.”

“Listen up,” Grandmother said, sharper than usual. “Some people think this story is about youth versus age. The child avoids the pain of life while the adults suffer.”

“What do you think?”

“That’s part of it,” she said. “But it’s also about the cost of love. To grow up is to love. To love is to die.”

“Charming.”

“Girl, if I could get up right now, I’d smack you across the head. Joke all you want, but this stuff’s important.”

“So what, I should be like the kid? Veer off and forget about love, live utterly selfishly?”

“No,” she said. “But you should know what to expect from your life, Natalie. You feel things deeply. Growing up is going to hurt. Only you can decide if the pain is worth the love.”

Grandmother taught me that eventually—whether with a thousand tiny fissures or one swift split—love will break your heart. My heart is breaking.

22

“So tell me about your experiences,” Alice says, her eyes wide and pupils dilated. I strongly suspect she smoked pot right before we came, and I kind of wish she’d offer some to Beau, who seems roughly as comfortable as a witch in the middle of being burned at the stake. It doesn’t help that things are so tense between us. Since the hospital, we can barely look at one another, barely touch one another.

He glances sideways at me then back to Alice. “Started when I was five or six.”

“Okay,” Alice says, leaning so far forward over her knees that I’m waiting for her to tip over and face-plant into a stack of books. “Describe that for me—the first time you can remember.”

Over the next hour, Alice manages to drag just about as much information from Beau as I got in ten minutes in the
closet. But she seems content, and she doesn’t stop writing once, not even while she’s asking questions, despite most of his answers being four words or fewer.

When she runs out of questions, she starts tapping on her mouth and doing that flip-flopping thing with her head again.

“There’s something else,” I say, taking the opportunity to speak. “Our friend Matt was in an accident. In both worlds. But in my version, I sort of caused it. And obviously I didn’t cause the other one, but it still happened.”

“Hmm.” Alice draws a spiral on the page as she thinks. “So, like Brother Black and Brother Red.”

“I guess,” I say. “But my friend Megan—she’s different in the other world. At least a little bit. In my world, she’s gone off to college already, to train with her soccer team. This Megan hasn’t. But she has a memory that I have too.”

“Sheesh.” Alice rubs at the corner of her eyebrow and blinks rapidly a few times. “This is complicated.”

Beau looks over at me, and I warm under this gaze. “Yeah.”

“It’s still possible it’s just the two of you causing the differences,” Alice says. “Maybe your existence or lack thereof affects some things but not others.”

“But why us?” Beau says quietly.

“That’s the million-dollar question.” Alice chews on the end of her pen but keeps talking. “
Why
are there two worlds, and why is it
you two
who can pass between them?”

“And where does Grandmother fit into all of this?” I add.

“Is it possible that, in Beau’s world, she lives in your house?” Alice posits. “Maybe she’s just a lonely old woman whose Closing never happened, and now she’s spitting out
advice just to have company.”

“She doesn’t live there,” Beau says. “I’ve seen the family who does.”

Alice scrunches up her mouth. “Didn’t think so. It couldn’t be that simple.”

“And Grandmother knows things,” I say, shaking my head. “I trust her.”

The timer on Alice’s phone starts to beep, informing us our session is over. She swears under her breath and flops her notebook on the desk. “You’re right, Natalie. Grandmother
is
different. I’m trying to make sense of all this, but we still don’t have enough information. Nothing’s going to help as much as you speaking with her again.”

“Alice, I only have two weeks before I leave for the rest of the summer,” I say. “What if it’s Matt? What if he’s going to die unless I do something? Or have brain damage for the rest of his life? Or what if it’s someone else, my dad or—” I can’t make myself say Beau’s name. I don’t want to put the thought into his head that continuously gnaws at the back corner of my mind.

Three months to save him
.

“I’m doing the best I can,” Alice says, massaging her thin dark eyebrows. “We’ll try hypnotherapy again on Thursday. In the meantime, you two need to spend as much time together as possible. Every waking second you should be bouncing back and forth between the two worlds, maybe even looking for a third you haven’t accessed yet. Natalie, stay stressed.”

“No problem,” I say, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes.

“And keep recording your stories. As many as you can. The stories are the key.”

“Okay,” I say.

One story, one phrase keeps replaying in my mind. It grips my stomach mercilessly, fills me with fear.

It’s about the cost of love. To grow up is to love. To love is to die.

Who is going to die?

“We should stop at the hospital,” I say on our way back to Union.

Beau and I haven’t been speaking. There’s a heaviness between us. His eyes dart over to me, and my chest aches under his gaze, the sunlight slanting through the window across his hazel irises.

“Okay,” he says.

In the hospital parking lot, it occurs to me that Beau and I are here to see two different Matts. “How should we do this?” I ask.

“Meet back here in half an hour,” Beau says.

I stop walking and he does too, holding eye contact. I can’t find the words to say it, but I don’t want to go inside without him. The waiting room will be too cold, too bare, too scary. The world will feel too dark. The truth—that regardless of whether Matt recovers or not, Beau and I will likely never see each other again after I leave in two weeks—weighs me down. I reach out and touch his side.

He looks down to my hand then back up, slowly, and I’m sure we’re about to kiss again when I manage to drag my gaze from his and say, “Thirty minutes.”

He turns and walks off toward the hospital’s automatic
sliding doors. Before he reaches them, both he and his truck are gone.

I talk to the man at the desk, and one of Matt’s nurses takes me back to his room, where his mom is sitting beside his bed. She stands up and gives me a hug. “He’ll be so happy to hear your voice,” she says.

I look down at Matt’s unconscious face. There are four inches of staples along his hairline, and his left eye and cheek are severely bruised. A lump of gauze is taped over his nose, from which thin plastic tubes extend and connect to machines. Joyce pulls back from me and wipes at her eyes. “His back was broken when he was thrown from the car,” she says. “They won’t know much more about the physical damage until he wakes up.”

“Oh.” It’s all I can get out. The floor seems to be swinging under my feet, all the balloons and flowers and teddy bears stacked along the far wall swaying right along with it. The entire world is a Viking ship ride, and the clear blue water on either side is made up of all the things I can’t get to.

“Will you stay with him while I go to the ladies’ room?” Joyce says. “I didn’t want to leave him alone, just in case . . .”

She trails off and I nod. “Sure.”

She leaves the room and I stay where I am, fixed to the rocking floor for seconds I don’t count, taking deep breaths and readying myself. Finally I go toward him, mechanically, and lower myself into the chair Joyce pulled up beside his bed.

“Hi, Matty,” I whisper, taking his hand in mine. My voice sounds wrong. As wrong as his face looks. As wrong as the quiet hum and beep of the machines and pouches he’s connected to. “It’s me.”

The silence that answers feels like a sky full of dark clouds waiting for the temperature to drop enough to let them break. When they do, tears fall instead of rain. I press my face into the back of Matt’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

His skin is cool against my cheek, like his heart’s too busy to be bothered with circulating blood all the way to his fingertips. The first time we held hands, that night at the football game in eighth grade, I remember being surprised how cold his skin was. I’d only held Tyler Murphy’s hand before and had unconsciously formed the belief that all boys’ hands were warm and damp with sweat.

Matt’s, though, did nothing against the cutting October wind as we huddled together on that hillside. Despite the cold, I remember thinking how I must’ve looked lit up from within for all our classmates to be watching us like they were. Eventually, being an extension of Matt started to feel like a cage, but that night it was an honor.

I loved Matt Kincaid, from the very beginning. I may never have felt swallowed up by that love, or surprised by it—of
course
anyone Matt loved would love him back. He’s the boy who sees the best in everyone, laughs easily, forgives fast, gravitates toward the shyest person in the room, doesn’t gossip or judge when the rest of us do.

That was the same person whose heart I broke, and the same person who’d sobbed to me before he drove away, and suddenly I’m so angry. With myself, with him, with the intersection where he went off the road, and the rest of the world for sitting back and letting it all happen.

“I’m so sorry.” I say it over and over again, but it changes
nothing, and soon my
sorry
s taste like poison, and I’m crying angry tears because
how could he do this to me?

How could he do this to all of us?

I close my eyes against the tears, and when I open them, I see Beau sitting on the far side of the bed, his face buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Somehow I’ve slipped into the other world, and he doesn’t know I’m there to see it. He thinks he’s alone.

He is alone.

I am alone.

I want to go to him so badly. I want to hold him and tell him,
I understand you.

Instead, I turn and run from the room, wiping tears off my chin and jaw.

Thirty minutes later, Beau walks out into the waiting room, where I’m sitting apart from a few of the younger football players. I can tell by the way they appraise him that we’re in his world. He stops to talk to them in low, soft words I can’t hear. One of the freshmen rubs at his eyes, and Beau sets a hand on his shoulder, just barely shaking his head. “. . . gonna be fine” is all I hear over the whir of the AC unit.

Beau and I find each other at the exit and walk out into the hot, sticky parking lot. His eyes are dry and determined, everything bottled back up safely inside where no one can see it. But I saw it. I see him. I wish I could hold all of him at once, but the truth is I can’t even find all of my own missing parts.

He climbs into his truck without a word. “You okay?” I ask.

He just nods. I touch his hand, and his fingers slowly,
tightly close around mine.

“I’m not either,” I say.

Beau comes for me in the middle of the night, as we’d planned, and I sneak out through the closet window. I jog up the cul-de-sac to where he parked his truck, and swing the passenger door open. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, and I try not to notice the shape of his suntanned arms, his broad chest, in the dim glow of the cabin light. I’m wearing torn-up jean shorts, and I try not to notice the way he looks at my legs either. I fail on both counts, which leaves me feeling antsy and shaky and guilty on the drive over to the school.

Beau parks around by the back door. He gets out and nudges a big rock full of tiny fossilized trilobites and seashells away from the outer wall, then picks up the key beneath it before putting it back.

“How’d you get that?” I ask as he unlocks the door.

“The key? They gave it to me with my Nobel Peace Prize,” he says. “I stole it, Natalie.”

We walk down the hall to the band room as silently as possible and let ourselves inside. Beau goes over to the piano and sits, plucking a couple of keys noncommittally.

“This always works?” I ask, staring at his back.

He turns around and barely smiles. “You gonna come sit with me, Cleary?”

I laugh at the ground and cross the room, sliding onto the bench beside him. He’s warm against my side and still smiling at me. It’s almost enough to drown out the thought of a fluorescent-
lit hospital room humming with monitors and machines pushing oxygen through Matt’s body. It feels so unfair for me to have the thoughts and feelings I have toward Beau right now, and I tap a key to distract myself.

“Yeah, it always works,” he says, focusing on the piano. “Before I met you, playing was the only sure way I knew how to grab hold of your world. Football was the only way I knew how to grab hold of mine.”

“You never changed worlds while you were playing?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t even feel like there
are
two worlds when I’m playing. Just the one.”

“That must’ve been a relief,” I say, “when you realized that.”

“Used to be.” He meets my eyes again.

“Alice thinks I won’t be able to cross over anymore in a couple of months.” It comes out as little more than a whisper, and Beau’s eyes dip.