Relativity (14 page)

I nod, and even though they say I don’t have a fever, I’m burning hot. Burning with an anticipation so intense it hurts. This cannot be happening, but it is.

My not-dead mother is on her way.

Patrick and I sit on a bench outside the ER entrance. I chug a bottle of water that Patrick bought for me from a vending machine. Turns out the quarters also have the face of Henry Lee III on them.

I start reciting the periodic table in my head. It’s the only thing I can think of to keep my mind occupied. Hydrogen, helium, lithium.

Patrick checks his watch and scans the parking lot. “Mom should be here any minute.” He’s fielded at least three calls from her so far, and now his cell phone rings again. I catch a few words here and there: head injury, gash on leg, just not right, and really worried.

Every time Patrick thrusts the phone to my ear and tells me to say something to Mom, I turn away. “I can’t,” I choke out.

Have I ever felt this particular emotion before? Amped up to the point of short-circuiting? No, not the time I gave a speech to a thousand people at a science fair, and not when I first pressed my eye to a
high-powered telescope and saw Jupiter’s atmosphere. But maybe when I was ten and climbed too high, into the weak upper branches of a tree. Because once again it feels like I’m teetering on something spindly that can’t support my weight.

“I’m driving Dad’s Jeep home, and you’re going with Mom back to her apartment for the night,” Patrick says.

Mom. Ghost Mom. Resurrected Mom. Alive-and-Breathing Mom is coming to pick me up. How can it be? How can this be true?

I remind myself that sometimes complicated phenomena unfold backward. We discover a truth in nature, in the universe, and then we figure out the science and the math much, much later. Or a seemingly zany theory comes first, and then we find data to prove that it’s possible. Like when Hugh Everett III, back in the fifties, wrote about his many-worlds interpretation. He wasn’t nuts. He was a PhD candidate at Princeton. He was brilliant and ahead of his time.

Science can explain all of this. Somehow.

Mom is coming. To pick you up. She’s not dead.

“Stop that,” Patrick says.

“What?”

“You just said oxygen, fluorine, neon. You’re making me nervous.”

“I have the feeling you were born nervous,” I say.

You were born.

Born.

The words resonate through my brain, my chest, my gut. “You’re my big brother.”

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? Why didn’t I make the connection?

A few years ago—and only once—Dad had mentioned that there
was a baby before me. But something went wrong during childbirth; he didn’t get enough oxygen. Now, in my mind, I see a blue baby, tiny but with Patrick’s face, his legs pulled to his chest. Stillborn.

Mom got pregnant with me about a year later. When Dad told me this story, I remember thinking: I wonder what they were going to name him.

I look at Patrick and I feel a rush of warmth. Are you my big brother, who died at birth in Universe One?

“Yes, I’m your big brother.” Patrick sits up straight, a proud look on his face. “I take that job seriously.”

Suddenly, Patrick isn’t a stranger anymore. He’s the brother I should have had all along. He would have taught me to throw a ball, make paper airplanes, swim underwater. We would’ve fought over the TV remote and the phone and who got the bigger bedroom. I reach out and squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“It’s like Coach Brown always says. Family above all else. Even football.”

Too bad Dad doesn’t have a similar motto. Family above work. “I like your priorities.”

We sit in silence for a long while. “By the way,” Patrick finally says, “I didn’t tell Mom about Kandy’s shoplifting relapse. So don’t bring it up.”

“No problem.” Kandy is the last thing on my mind. I finish the water and realize how dehydrated—how weak—I am. “Could you get me a Gatorade?”

“What’s a Gatorade?” Patrick looks at me, weary.

“You of all people should know. It’s a sports drink.”

He disappears into the ER lobby again, then returns with an
orange drink called TriAthlete. Within seconds, I’ve drained half the bottle.

“Patrick?” I need to know. “Was Mom ever in a car accident?”

“Ever? I don’t know. When?”

“When I was four, and we still lived in California.”

Patrick shakes his head. “Seriously, Ruby. Here we go again. We never lived in California. Mom and Dad moved to Ó Direáin before either of us was born.”

“I see,” I say quietly.

I thought it might be something as simple as Mom forgetting her coffee mug. She went back into the kitchen, and in that three minutes, she changed her fate. Or maybe she decided to stop at the ATM, or fill up the gas tank, or she just kept getting every light red. Anything that would delay her a few crucial minutes. Anything that would make her late for her appointed spot on the freeway.

So that explains it. We weren’t living in California eleven years ago, so Mom wasn’t on I-580 two cars behind the semi that jackknifed and caused a fifteen-car demolition derby. She was living in Ó Direáin, unaware of her parallel life coming to an abrupt end, unaware of the windshield wiper that sliced her neck and made her vanish from at least one universe.

And now, within minutes, I’ll have to process seeing Mom. The urge to get up and run—just run—wells up inside me.

Pull it together, Ruby.

“Rhodium, palladium, silver, cadmium.”

“What are you talking about?” Patrick asks, wide-eyed and cringing. Yeah, he thinks I’m off my rocker. At this point there’s nothing I can do to make him think otherwise.

“Trying to distract myself.”

He exhales, shakes his head. “The whole world is falling apart.”

“True. And I need to get my backpack out of the Jeep.”

He stands up and pulls the keys from his pocket. “I’ll get it for you.”

I watch Patrick cross the parking lot, the way he leans into his stride, just like Dad.

And then a car pulls into the parking lot—a red Honda—and I know, just know, it’s Mom.

I press my palms against my temples, trying to counter the feeling that my skull is too small, that my nerves are trying to escape my skin. I’m forced to put my head between my legs so I don’t pass out. N
₂
and O
₂
in, carbon dioxide out.

I can hear her footsteps, feel the slight vibration of the earth as she nears. I can sense that she’s standing in front of me, blocking the sun.

“Sweetheart?” Mom’s voice is gentle and real. It consists of actual sound waves, as opposed to the imagined voice I’ve only heard inside my head these past eleven years. She puts her hand on my back. “Are you okay?”

“Mom,” I whisper, still unable to look up.

How can it be? How can this be true? I slide to the ground, onto my knees. I clutch her legs, the rough seam of her jeans against my cheek.

“Ruby. Oh.”

Mom sinks to the ground next to me. She takes my face in her hands. “Look at me.”

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

“Sweetheart. Look at me. Open your eyes.”

“I’m just tired,” I say, my ears ringing. I wince at a surge of pain that yanks at the back of my eyeballs. “And hungry.”

Lunch with George was hours ago. And those pancakes with lingonberry preserves—breakfast in Universe Three with Chef Dad—was eons ago, dreamlike.

“A hot shower, that’s all I need.”

Mom cradles me. “Come on. Get up.” I smell her perfume or shampoo—grape scented, familiar.

“You smell—” I search for the word. “You smell right,” I say.

Patrick sprints across the parking lot. “Ruby? Mom, is she okay? Should we go back into the ER?”

“No!” I say. “I’m fine.”

Mom helps me to my feet. I brush the dirt off my jeans, and my eyes meet Mom’s.

Blue with flecks of amber, just like my own. She’s thirty-nine years old, hair short and dyed mahogany, clumpy mascara, high cheekbones, a small chip in her front tooth. I can’t bear it; I look up at the sky, at the billowing dark clouds, masses of frozen water vapor drifting in the atmosphere. One is the shape of a boat, another a barking dog.

Mom gives me a gentle shake. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”

“Oh, but Mom,” I say again, trembling. I lay my head on her shoulder.

Patrick reaches out and pats my back. “Bye, sis. I’ll call the apartment later tonight.”

“Drive safely, Patrick,” Mom says, taking my backpack from him.

“Yep,” Patrick says. “I’m going straight home.”

Mom puts her arm around my waist and leads me across the parking lot. Her car, like her grape shampoo, seems right too. A paradoxical feeling tears at me—comfortable and uneasy. I could slide into this life, this universe. I could stay here. Forever.

The drive is short, and we don’t say much. My skin tingles with excitement, disbelief. I keep looking over at Mom, trying to make sense of her, the fact that she is alive. I study her hands, wrapped around the steering wheel. Her small wrist bones; her thin metacarpal bones articulating as she strums her fingers; her purple veins returning blood to her heart. She’s alive.

When we stop at a red light, she reaches over and strokes my head. “Was the pixie cut Jack’s idea?”

“Yep,” I say, no clue who Jack is. Maybe he’s Ruby’s hairstylist here.

She lets her hand drift to the nape of my neck. “And what’s this all about?”

“It’s just a temporary tattoo,” I say, tired of explaining it. “I wanted pink roses, but this was what came out of the vending machine.”

She looks at me sideways, but is more interested in my injury. She wants to know why I couldn’t get stitches, if it hurt when the doctor cleaned it, and how long it will take for the wound to heal. I press my head against the window and watch the clouds, some of them turning gray. Dim lightning runs horizontal veins through the bottom of the darker clouds.

Mom turns into the Ó Direáin Pharmacy lot and parks under a sign that advertises a sale on toilet paper. I hand her my prescription slip. “Back in two minutes,” she says. Her purse bumps against her hip as she hurries, and the moment she disappears behind the automatic doors, a gripping sense of loss and panic sets in. I want her back in my sight. I want to watch her chest rise and fall as she breathes. Above the pharmacy’s signage hangs a large clock. I watch the second hand sweep around once, twice, five times, ten.

She finally reemerges from the doorway, and I let out a long breath. “That was more than two minutes,” I say, trying not to sound overly relieved.

Mom slides back into the driver’s seat. “It’ll be an hour for the medication,” she says. “They’re understaffed.” She puts the Honda in drive, clicks on the radio.

“All eighties, all the time,” the DJ says in a voice that’s impossibly deep.

Mom pats her hand on her thigh in time to the music, cranes her neck into the words. “I’m for you,” she sings. “And you’re for me. Every road sign points your way, every guiding star tells me I should stay.”

She knows all the words, including the backup vocals. I turn up the volume to egg her on, and she goes for it. “Just know I’m here for you the rest of your life! I’m talking ’bout true love, yeah baby, you know!”

She’s lit up like a kid who’s tasted cotton candy for the first time. Then she suddenly turns the radio off and looks at me apologetically. “All that noise can’t be good for you.”

“It was worth it,” I say.

“Really?” She runs her tongue along her chipped tooth, narrows her eyes like she’s trying to bring my sincerity into focus. “You usually make an assortment of faces when I sing.”

“You ooze cheese,” I admit, “but it’s quality. Like brie.”

“Wow. I’ve finally been promoted from Cheez Whiz.” We laugh as she cuts the engine outside a three-story, redbrick building. Its tall windows are framed in white wooden trim. Maybe it was formerly a private home, Victorian era, back in the days when you’d lead your horse to the stables behind the main house, rather than park your car.

“Sorry about the stairs,” Mom says. She’s on the second floor, no elevator. “Can you make it up?”

“I’m okay, but how about you?”

Mom struggles with my hefty backpack, dragging it up the last two steps. “What do you have in here?”

“Books. I can carry it now. You get the door.”

Mom slides the key into the lock and turns the knob. “Home sweet home.”

Mom’s apartment is tiny and—well—cute. Hardwood floors, denim couch, and some of the Americana art that’s hanging back at the squat
brick house on Corrán Tuathail Avenue. A large wooden cow, painted in red, white, and blue stripes, with white stars on its head, hangs over the TV.

“Take your shoes off, and relax on the couch.” Mom tosses me a blanket. “I’ll brew up some hot chocolate with marshmallows.”

“Okay.” I shouldn’t even be here! I promised myself ten minutes of looking, and not a second more. Watching from a safe distance. I never intended to be curled up on Mom’s couch with a steamy drink. But now that I’m with her, the idea of leaving fills me with desperation.

Mom opens the refrigerator door, making bottles clink together. “I’ll call Frankie’s for delivery.” She pauses, then laughs. “Hot chocolate and pineapple-bacon pizza. That sounds horrible.”

“A little, yeah.”

“I’ve got lemonade, milk. I can make coffee instead.”

“Soda?”

“Perfect,” Mom says. “You could probably use a good dose of sugar.”

I take a deep breath and lean back against an overstuffed couch pillow. My body is aching for rest, my brain needs REM sleep.

Mom dials the pizza place. She orders “the Hawaiian,” a Caesar salad, and Italian wedding soup. Too much for two people, but I guess that’s what moms do—try to make everything better with food. George’s mom, without fail, made brownies whenever there was a crisis. Sometimes he faked some drama just to get the brownies.

“Now,” Mom says, settling into the recliner. “We can talk.”

“Do I have to?” I’m happy to just quietly absorb. There’s so much. I’d like to silently look at photos from the past eleven years and hear stories about Mom’s life. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to say the
wrong thing, dodge questions, or try to explain why I’m acting weird. “You talk, and I’ll listen,” I say.