Infinity + One (17 page)

Then he swore, loud and foul, pulled at his hair, and lay back down. It wasn’t his job to save her! He couldn’t save her! Hadn’t he told her, just today, not to try and save him? It was all bullshit. And it was her fault they were here in the first place! He pulled the pillow over his head so he couldn’t hear her. There. That was better. God’s voice didn’t sound like rushing water, it sounded like silence.

Finn commanded himself to sleep, keeping the pillow smashed into his face. But the light curled around the edges of the pillow when Bonnie left the bathroom, and the hallway went black when she flipped it off. He moved the pillow off his face and bunched it under his head, telling himself he still wasn’t listening. And he wasn’t listening, he was straining. With every muscle, he was straining to hear.

“Finn? Are you awake?” He could hear her feeling along the walls, trying to make her way to the bed where he lay. When she reached it, she sat gingerly on the end.

“Yeah,” he admitted quietly. She sat for a minute, not saying anything, and he didn’t demand a reason for her presence.

“Do you still miss Fisher?” she finally whispered.

He could say no. Maybe she needed to be reassured that the pain would go away eventually.

“Yeah,” he said. So much for reassurance. “I still talk to him sometimes. Fish and I were identical too. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I imagine it’s him. I talk to my reflection. Stupid. But yeah.”

“I can’t stand looking at myself for that reason. All I see is her.”

“You should look. Let yourself look. If it makes you feel better, let yourself pretend.”

He heard her sniffle in the dark.

“It’s better than seeing Hank. Right?” he was trying to make her laugh, but he didn’t know if it worked. It was too dark and she was too still.

“Do you ever feel like you’ve forgotten something, only to realize it’s not something, it’s someone . . . it’s Fisher? I feel like that all the time. Like I’ve overlooked something important—and I’ll check to make sure I haven’t left my phone, or my keys, or my purse. Then I realize it’s Minnie. I’ve lost Minnie.”

“My mom used to say Fish and I were two sides of the same coin. Fish said he was heads, and I was the ass. Not tails, the ass. But if that’s true, I guess he won’t ever be lost—as long as I exist, so does he. You can’t lose the other side of a coin, right?”

“Were you alike?”

“We looked alike, but that was all. He was right handed, I’m left. He was random, I’m sequential. He was loud, I’ve always been a little shy.”

“Sounds like me and Minnie,” Bonnie said. “Only I’m like Fisher and she was more like you.” Finn smirked in the dark. Yeah. He’d figured that one out all by himself.

“Finn? I’m a twin. You’re a twin. But our twins are gone. So what does that make us? Are we halves?”

Finn waited, not sure how to respond. Bonnie sighed when he didn’t speak. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he stared at her shadowy form, perched beside his feet on the little bed. Then she curled up like a kitten, laying her head on his legs like she had no intention of leaving.

“When Fish was alive, I tried to keep the numbers in my head from spilling out into everything we did together. Sometimes he would get jealous. It made him feel left out that Dad and I loved mathematics, and he was clueless. He was very, very competitive. And I’m not.” Finn shrugged in the darkness, trying to shrug off the weight of the memories.

“I just wanted him to be happy. I wanted my family to stay together. And from the time I was just a little kid, there was the Finn who loved numbers, the Finn who happily read about Euclid and Cantor and Kant. And then there was the Finn who everybody called Clyde, the Finn who played ball and hung out with Fish and a bunch guys from the neighborhood. Guys who were always up to no good, smoking pot, drinking too much, and chasing girls that I didn’t particularly want to catch. I did it for Fish. Always for Fish. I never told him no. In that way, I’ve always been split in two.”

“I never felt that way. Minnie never acted like she minded the attention I got. I hope she didn’t. I hope she wasn’t just good at hiding it. It’s possible. She hid other things from me.” Bonnie sounded sad and bitter, and Finn guessed there was a part of her that was angry with Minnie, the way he’d been angry with Fish for a long time. Maybe it was sick and wrong to be pissed off, but the heart doesn’t understand logic. Never had. Never would. Evidence of that truth was curled around his feet at the end of the bed.

“She didn’t tell me how bad off she was, how sick she was,” Bonnie continued. “Every time we talked she would tell me she was feeling better. She didn’t warn me. She knew I would have come home right away. I never told Minnie no either. I would have done anything for her.”

“Maybe that’s why she didn’t call you, Bonnie.”

He felt her shaking her head against his legs, rejecting his suggestion. “But she left me without a word, Finn!”

“Fish left without a word, too. Bonnie. One minute he was looking up at me as I tried to stop the blood pumping out of his gut. And the next minute, he was gone. Without a word.”

“What word would you have wanted, Finn?” Bonnie asked, and he could tell she was trying not to cry. “If you got one word, what would you have wanted him to say?”

It was Finn’s turn to shake his head. “I don’t know, Bonnie. No matter how many words we get, there’s always going to be the last one, and one word is never enough.”

“I would have told her I loved her,” Bonnie whispered. “And I would have told her to save me a mansion next to hers.”

“A mansion?” Finn asked gently.

“There’s a song we always sang in church. “My Father’s House has Many Mansions.” Ever heard it?”

“No.”

“My Father’s house has many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you,” she sang the line softly.

“Maybe God lives in the Grand Hotel,” Finn murmured, wanting to sit up and beg her to sing the rest. Instead, he folded his arms beneath his head and pretended that her voice didn’t make him feel things he didn’t want to feel and make him consider things he refused to consider.

“What’s the Grand Hotel?” she asked.

“It’s a little paradox about infinity—Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel.”

“What’s a paradox?”

“Something that contradicts our intuition or our common sense. Something that seems to defy logic. My dad loved them. Most of them are very mathematical.”

“So tell me about the Grand Hotel. Tell me the paradox.” The tears had faded from her voice, and Finn eagerly proceeded, wanting to keep them at bay.

“Imagine there’s a hotel with a countably infinite number of rooms.”

“Countably infinite?”

“Yeah. Meaning I could count the rooms, one by one, even if the counting never ends.”

“Okay,” she said drawing the word out, like she wasn’t sure she understood, but wanted him to keep talking.

“And all those rooms are filled,” Finn added.

“So infinite rooms, and all are full.”

“Uh-huh. Pretend someone comes along and wants to stay at the Grand Hotel. There’s an infinite number of rooms, so that should be possible, right?”

“Yeah, but you said all the rooms are occupied,” she countered, already confused.

“They are. But if you have the person in room one move to room two, and the person in room two move to room three, and the person in room three move to room four, and so on, then you just cleared out some space. You have an empty room—room one.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Sure it does, you can’t find the end of infinity. There
is
no end. So if you can’t tack space onto the end of infinity, you have to create space at the beginning.”

“But you said all the rooms are filled.”

“Yes. And they will still be filled,” Finn said, as if this were completely reasonable.

“So if ten people come along and want to stay at the Infinity Hotel . . .” her voice trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the rest.

“Then you have the person in room one move to room eleven, and the person in room two move to room twelve, and the person in room three move to room thirteen, and so on, clearing out ten rooms.”

She laughed quietly. “That makes no sense whatsoever. Eventually someone’s not going to have a room.”

“There are infinite rooms.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And infinite people,” she muttered, as if her mind were a little blown.

“That’s why it’s called a paradox. In a lot of ways, infinity makes no sense. It’s impossible to get your mind around that type of vastness,” Finn said thoughtfully. “But no one argues with infinity. We just accept that it’s beyond visualization.”

“I don’t know about that . . . I frequently argue with Infinity.” Bonnie rubbed her face against his leg as if she liked the feel of him beside her.

“Ha ha,” Finn said dryly, wondering if he should pull away. He probably should. But he didn’t.

“Do you think heaven is filled with countably infinite rooms filled with countably infinite people?” she asked.

Maybe Bonnie wondered if Minnie was in her own heavenly room. Maybe Fisher was there too, in a room near Minnie’s. Maybe they had found each other the way Finn and Bonnie had, Finn mused to himself. And then he swallowed a groan at his romantic thoughts. He was getting delusional. And it was all Bonnie’s fault.

“I don’t know, Bonnie Rae,” he said.

“People in Appalachia have been singing that song since the dawn of time. They’re hoping there are infinite rooms and that the rooms are all mansions.”

“That’s kind of sad.” The cynic in Finn didn’t like the thought of people singing about mansions that didn’t exist. It felt like buying lottery tickets to him—a huge waste of emotion and energy.

“Yeah. I guess so. But it’s hopeful too. And sometimes hope is the difference between life and death.”

Finn had no answer for that.

“Hey!” she said suddenly, her voice rising with her epiphany. “I know how we can make some room at the Infinity Hotel without making everyone move. I’ve officially solved the paradox. Call it Bonnie Rae’s Solution.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. We’ll all double up. Problem solved. You wanna double up, Infinity Clyde?” Finn was sure if he could see her face she would be waggling her eyebrows. She liked to tease. And she was damn good at it.

Yeah. He wanted to double up. Instead he decided to poke back a little. “The problem is, when people double up, they start to multiply.”

She giggled, and Finn found himself smiling in the dark.

“And then we’re right back at square one,” he whispered.

Bonnie snuggled further into his legs, throwing her arm across his knees. It was several minutes before she spoke again.

“How did we end up together? Don’t you think it’s . . . strange?” she mumbled into the blanket. “I mean . . . what are the odds?”

He had asked himself the same thing over and over. But he wasn’t ready to admit that, so he pulled out his mental math book and dusted it off, speaking softly, but impersonally.

“Mathematically speaking, they’re pretty low. But not as low as you might think.” Finn’s mind settled into the comfort of percentages and the odds of certain coincidences with relief, not wanting to linger on thoughts of fate or destiny. He offered Bonnie a few examples of how oddities weren’t really oddities at all when you examined the numbers. It was all true. And it was all bullshit.

Bonnie’s head had grown heavy on his legs and she hadn’t offered up so much as a “hmm” for several minutes. Finn sat up and looked down at her. He’d done it again. Two nights in a row. He talked about numbers and she was instantly asleep. Asleep. In his tiny bed—in Katy’s tiny bed. He sighed and looped his hands under her armpits, pulling her up beside him. It was narrow, but doable. He threw the pink comforter over them and closed his eyes, willing himself to ignore the press of her body against his, willing the numbers in his head to take him away, the way they’d done for Bonnie.

THEY LEFT JUST after seven the next morning, before Shayna and her girls were even up. Bonnie thought it would be easier that way, and had shaken Finn awake with a light hand against his shoulder. He’d scared her, shooting up from the bed, the slam and slide of prison doors ringing in his ears, carried over from a dream that visited almost every night.