When the World was Flat (and we were in love) (26 page)

Suddenly a white dust filled the rearview mirror and I realized it had started snowing. A freak October snowstorm. The word “freak” resounded in my mind as the swirling flurries coated the windscreen, melting on contact with the heated glass. I flicked on the blinkers twice until I found the wipers, which cleaned the windscreen with the precision of a cut-throat razor – back and forth. Freak. Show. Freak. Show. Freak. Show. The insult from Melissa made me laugh hysterically now. If she had only known the half of it.

I slammed on the brakes as I came upon an intersection, spinning the wheel in the direction of Green Grove. The SUV slid out a few feet until the traction system kicked-in. A small delivery van passed, beeping its horn and flashing its lights angrily.

I reached up with one hand and pulled on my seat belt and then laughed at myself again. I could slam head-on into a tree at eighty miles per hour and not die. First, I would be cushioned by the multiple air bags and state-of-the-art crumple zones. Second, I was an evacuee and I was going to live forever and ever, Amen.

The heated steering wheel made my palms sweat, but I tightened my grip and pushed down on the accelerator. The van driver was probably an evacuee like me, I decided, shrugging off the near collision. If I had killed him he would have slid for eternity too.

I saw flashes of myself pulling a black balaclava over my head. I saw my hand reaching out and touching Lillie after Lillie after Lillie. I banged my hand on the steering wheel. What the fuck? Evacuee Lillie had merged with more than four Lillies, I realized as her memories emerged from the corners of my mind.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen… “Twenty-six,” I breathed, the tears continuing to roll down my cheeks, dripping from my chin. “I was the twenty-sixth.” And that was not counting the times my own dimension had split and she had merged with me in the kitchen or darkroom, instead of in my bedroom.

I gasped as I remembered where I had seen the antidote.

Tom had used it to chase me out of dimension after dimension. He had tried to kill me. Correction: he had tried to kill Evacuee Lillie. I guessed he had not told me about the antidote initially in case I remembered him holding the syringe to my neck until I slid into another dimension and then another and another, as if caught in my own rule of repetition. The realization left a taste in my mouth like tea laced with arsenic, but it was Evacuee Lillie who made me ill.

“Twenty-six,” I whispered. “Twenty-six.”

The railroad crossing loomed ahead and I saw the familiar “Look For Trains” sign between the snowflakes. I pushed down on the gas and the speedometer rose from seventy to ninety. Suddenly the thin layer of snow coating the tracks ahead lit up like the Fourth of July, as a train rounded the bend at breakneck speed.

I slowed for a heartbeat, before gritting my teeth and pushing down on the accelerator. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five…” I whispered, counting down the Lillies with each passing second.

I knew I would reach the railroad crossing before I got to twenty-six, and so would the train. It was like an icy hand had gripped my heart. I made the last-minute decision to slam on the brakes, pushing my foot to the floor. Too little. Too late.

I was sliding towards the train, which had already gone through the crossing, blaring its horn. Its thunderous cars followed, whizzing by my windscreen, waiting for me to crash into their side. I pulled on the wheel and the SUV careened off the road and rolled.

 

I woke up upside down. It took me a moment to work out where I was and a funny story came to mind about Deb being in a serious car accident when she was my age. She had been wearing hair rollers and had removed them while hanging upside down in the car, not wanting the paramedics to see her in that state. I reached up – or was it down? – and touched my hair, which rested on the crumpled roof. Warm sticky blood covered my hand. I suddenly felt sick. I wanted to get out, but my hands seemed too weak to get the belt off.

I must have blacked out a few times before I heard a window being smashed and the car alarm ringing out, interrupted by Tom, shouting, “Lillie, stay here. Don't go. Don't slide.”

I blacked out again.

 

27

 

There was a beeping in my ears when I woke and for a moment I thought I was still in the SUV, hanging upside down with the blood rushing to my head. My eyes flew open and I stared up at the ceiling as if raised from the dead.

I was lying in a bed, tucked into the starched white sheets like a letter in an envelope. I rolled my head to the left and saw a machine monitoring my heart rate with a high-pitched beep. I also saw a bag of clear fluid that hung on a stand, connected by a tube to an IV drip that pinched the back of my hand.

“Lillie? Lillie!”

It was Deb. She was leaning over the metal rail on the side of the bed. Her long hair was knotted into a loose bun that highlighted the dark circles under her eyes. Panda eyes.

I moaned.

“Stay still,” she begged. Her hands hovered a foot above me, as if holding me down. “Hush, hush, hush,” she chanted, but five hundred hushes could not have convinced me to stay still. I pushed myself up in the bed. My arms were like lead, as if they had been dormant for days or weeks. The right seemed heavier than the left and I realized it was in a cast.

“What day…?” My voice was a rasping whisper. I swallowed. “When?”

“Monday,” Deb said. “The car accident was last Saturday. They had to sedate you. We thought…” Her voice choked off.

“Tom,” I groaned, struggling to sit up as if I could go to him, but he was in his thirty-sixth dimension. I remembered his words as they had loaded me into the ambulance, his warm breath in my ear and his cheek wet with tears.

“I will find you,” he had said, squeezing my hand. “I promise.”

I laughed now, a short husky bark that came from deep in my chest. Of course he would find me. In his thirty-six, thirty-seventh, thirty-eighth dimension and beyond. But it would be another Lillie, who he would marry and have children with and live happily ever after.

My ever after was like a black hole by comparison, an unknown, full of darkness. I had a thousand memories that belonged to other Lillies, but none that told me how to slide without killing myself. I lifted my arm with the cast slowly and touched the drip in my other hand.

“Lillie,” Deb said, putting a hand on my arm. “Leave it.”

I followed the tube until my fingers found a piece of plastic. I wanted to slide. I wanted to hold Tom to the promise he had made hundreds of years ago, to the renewed vow he had given me two days ago. We would find each other in a new dimension.

“Lillie,” Deb warned and then she shouted, “Nurse! Nurse!”

I was pumping the syringe, trying to OD on whatever was in the bag.

“Stop!” Deb clamped a hand around my cast. “Lillie!”

“Good morning,” a cheerful voice interrupted and my cast was released. “You sure slept like a log these past couple of days.” The nurse approached the side of my bed, tilting her head, as she surveyed the scene. “You thirsty, dear?” she asked, attending to the IV drip. “This here is for hydration. A saline solution,” she explained and I collapsed into the pillow with a sob.

The nurse tapped a plastic box that was hidden under the blanket and I looked down to see a second drip in my hand. “This is the morphine.” She winked at me like we shared a secret – what a laugh – and then pulled out a set of keys that jangled jarringly as she unlocked the box and studied a glass vial before locking it again.

I closed my eyes, tears rolling down my cheeks as I thought about the Lillie who had died in the car accident in the Open Valley. Tom had told me that when you died you slid. I imagined him holding her hand as she drew her last breath and the cold spread through her body.

I knew I had drawn the short straw with this split dimension. If I slid on my own, I would be on my own for a number of lifetimes, perhaps for an eternity, not knowing how to find Tom and not knowing if he would find me.

“The doctor will check on her this afternoon,” I heard the nurse tell my mother as my eyelids grew heavy and I drifted into a sleep filled with dreams about Tom.

 

I woke for a few minutes when the doctor came in. I overheard him talking about a broken wrist and stitches. He touched my head and the skin on my forehead crawled like it was covered in cockroaches.

I heard the word “lucky” followed by “improved” and laughter welled up in my throat, dying before it reached my mouth.

I let myself slide into sleep again, where I could relive my other lives with Tom over and over, again and again.

 

It could have been an hour or a week later that I was woken by the hydraulics of the bed and found myself being folded up until I was in a sitting position.

“Sweetheart,” Deb said softly. “The food is here. Do you want to eat?”

I kept my eyes closed, leaning back into the pillows as if I could hide in their cushioned comfort. The thought of food made me want to heave, even though my stomach was as empty as my chest. It was like my insides had been scooped out, leaving a gaping hole that nothing could fill, not even the chicken casserole that I could smell on the tray in front of me.

It seemed that Deb had given up on my vegetarianism. I wondered if that meant she had also given up on me.

 

They started reducing my morphine somewhere between my seventh trip to the bathroom and the arrival of my fourth tray of food. I knew this because the pain began to increase each hour, from a nine, to a ten, to an eleven and then to a five hundred.

My sanctuary was to sleep, perchance to dream.

 

The girls came to visit me in hospital.

First came Jo. I could feel the tattoo behind my ear heat up as she settled in the seat beside me, making my face feel flushed.

“Lillie,” she whispered. “Can you hear me?” She fell silent for a moment. “The PSATs are next week,” she said. “I spoke to the guidance counselor and he said I had to let him know by Tuesday if you…”

She trailed off and the room sank into silence again, except for the beeping and the muffled voices in the corridor.

“You know,” Jo whispered, starting another one-sided conversation. “My dad is completely cured. The doctors are calling it a miracle.”

She thought she was giving me good news, but the news was as good as it was new. My skin began to burn beyond the heat of my tattoo. I had to tell her about her dad. I had to tell her about herself. I wondered whether she even knew she had a tattoo behind her ear, let alone that she was an evacuee.

“Hi,” a voice said from the doorway. Sylv.

I opened my eyes ever-so-slightly and watched through my lashes as Jo made room for Sylv. They had made up. I guess a car accident trumps a catfight in any dimension.

“Lillie.” It was Jo. She had seen my eyes open and was leaning over me, like I was a baby in a bassinet. I closed my eyes, unable to return her smile.

“How you doing, Lillie?” Sylv asked and the bed shuddered as she leaned against its rail. “Guess what? I dropped out of school.” I could hear the glee in her voice. “I start my hairdressing apprenticeship next week,” she continued, undeterred by my lack of response. “I went in for an interview yesterday and they hired me on the spot. You should see the hot college guys they have as customers.”

“What happened to Brandon?” Jo asked.

“Brandon who? I have a date tonight with Taylor Blackwood.” She gave herself a cheer. “It turns out he has a policy on not dating high school girls.”

“Does he also have a policy on not washing his hair?” Jo asked. I would have laughed a week ago, but now my face remained as slack as a corpse.

When they said their goodbyes, Jo squeezed my hand.

“Jackson says, ‘Hi,'” she said and then sighed. “I know this sounds stupid, but I think we might be soulmates.” She laughed at her own sappiness, before letting go of my hand and following Sylv towards the door.

My eyes opened. “Jo?”

She rushed back to my bedside. “Lillie!”

“Jo, I have to tell you–”

A throat cleared in the doorway and we looked up to see Mr Green. His lips stretched into a smile without sentiment.

“Look at you, Lillie,” he said, walking into the room. “You banged yourself up a treat.” Like Sylv, he leaned against the bed and it slid under his weight. “Yep,” he said, looking at the top of my head. “We thought you were a goner.” His eyes met mine and I knew by “goner” he meant he thought I was going to slide.

Jo frowned. “Dad.”

Mr Green looked at Jo, as if seeing her there for the first time. “Honey, the nurse asked me to tell you visiting hours are over. We gotta go home.” He grimaced, like he was sorry, but I could see through him like cellophane.

“Lillie, what were you–?”

“Go,” I croaked, cutting Jo off. I closed my eyes, wanting to go back to sleep, wanting to see Tom in my dreams.

She hovered for a moment, her shadow passing across my eyelids. “I'll be back tomorrow,” she promised.

“You go ahead, honey,” I heard Mr Green say. “I have a message to give Lillie.”

My eyes flew open. A message? From Tom? Who else? If I had the muscle mass I would have sat up and grabbed Mr Green by the collar until he told me every word.

He was watching the door, waiting until it closed with an audible click of its latch. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye like a vulture and then turned his head, his body following until his round stomach rested on the metal rail, as evidence of his transformation from call-me-Dave into evacuee Mr Green.

“What do you remember, Lillie?” he asked, tapping his index finger on the rail. Tap. Tap. Tap. “What do you remember about…?” He hesitated.

I looked at him, realizing that there was no message, unless he was typing it in Morse code. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. They say not to shoot the messenger, but I could have used a machine gun in that moment.