Superposition (20 page)

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I guess I'm pretty messed up right now. I haven't been much of a help to you.” We were silent for a while, then I added, “And I don't love Claire more than I love you.”

Alessandra didn't answer.

“She's like your Mom,” I said. “She's pretty, she follows the rules, she studies hard. People like her easily. I know what to expect with her, and I'm proud of her. You, on the other hand . . .” She glanced at me, concerned, but I went on. “You're more like me. You're not satisfied doing what other people tell you. You question the rules. You lose your temper sometimes. Claire can get manipulated or run over by other people, but you stand up for yourself. It means we clash more. But it doesn't mean I love you any less.”

She considered that for a moment. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay? That's it?”

“I don't love Mom more than I love you, either,” she said. I glanced at her sidelong, but she was smiling. “I'm good, Dad. Thanks.”

We met Jean at Einstein's Brain, a classic American restaurant near the NJSC, which featured cheap food, red vinyl seating, and more pictures and paraphernalia from the great physicist than I had seen anywhere else, even at the Einstein Museum on Nassau Street. They didn't actually have a piece of Einstein's brain at the restaurant, though I knew there was one on display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, about ten blocks from the court building where I was on trial.

Jean had dark circles under her eyes, and her hair looked like it hadn't been brushed, but she put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a compassionate smile.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

I shrugged. “We're getting through. How are you? You look tired.”

“I've been up late working on your trial,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope it's not taking you away from your family too much.”

She grimaced. “To tell you the truth, Nick and I aren't doing so well.”

“Oh, Jean. I'm sorry to hear that,” I said. “I hope it's not because of the trial.”

“No, nothing like that. We just don't see eye to eye anymore.” She waved a hand dismissively. “It's an old story. But look at you!” Jean hugged Alessandra and exclaimed over how tall she had grown. “I hope my daughter grows up to be as lovely as you,” she said.

I remembered Chance and what Nick had said at their house, and I wondered how much of the tension between Jean and Nick was due to their daughter's condition. “I'm sure she will,” I said.

We settled down at a table. Jean bought a “Relativity Reuben,” and Alessandra and I both chose the “Black Hole Burger.”

“What about the trial?” I asked. “What secret strategies have you and my double been planning together?”

Jean seemed a bit relieved at the change in subject. She related the difficulty of explaining quantum physics to a lawyer—“like teaching knitting to a sea turtle”—and her concerns about getting a jury to understand it, much less believe it.

“You can convince them,” I said. “What about the footage from Alessandra's viewfeed I sent to Sheppard. Is he going to use it?”

Jean shook her head. “No, he's not planning to.”

Alessandra looked up from her burger. “Why not? Then they could actually see the varcolac; they'd know that Dad's story is true.”

“He doesn't want to bring up the varcolac in testimony at all. He says the science is hard enough to swallow,” Jean said.

“But it's part of what happened,” Alessandra said.

“It has nothing to do with Brian's death, that we know of,” Jean said. “And Terry's afraid that if we show it, we'd lose the jury entirely. They might just refuse to believe it, and dismiss everything the defense has to say after that. It's like people's home videos of alien abductions. Would you believe it, if you were on the jury?”

“Well, what's the strategy, then?” I asked.

“Terry says the best way to win a murder trial is to have an alternate theory. A way that someone else could have done the crime that fits the evidence just as well as the story the prosecution is telling. If you can do that, then there
must
be a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, because it's equally possible that the alternate person is guilty.”

“So who's the other person?” I asked.

“Brian himself.”

I made a face. “He didn't commit suicide,” I said.

“Actually, I think it's the best explanation,” Jean said. “He split, and there were two of him. Brian's always been pretty self-centered. So one of him figured the only way to guarantee his own survival was by killing the other.”

I was skeptical. The version of Brian in my car had seemed honestly surprised that his double was dead. In fact, he didn't seem to realize that he even had a double. Brian was an accomplished liar, however—all those years of trying to juggle multiple relationships with women had taught him that—so I supposed I couldn't be sure.

“Listen,” Jean said. “I knew Brian, well enough anyway. He was egotistical, self-absorbed, vain. He was in love with himself.” I thought that was a bit harsh, but I let it slide. “He would have done anything to save himself,” she continued. “Even shoot someone else. Even if that someone else was himself.”

“So you think you could stand in front of yourself—the same face you see in the mirror every day—and pull the trigger?”

“It's not unreasonable. Trust me, people will go to any length to secure their own survival, or the survival of someone they love. Things they don't want to do, things they would never normally do. They'll do whatever it takes.”

Alessandra stood with a sudden scrape of her chair. Her face was mottled red.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I'm just going to the bathroom,” Alessandra said.

“Alessandra, she didn't mean . . .”

She walked away without listening. When she was out of earshot, Jean said, “Is she okay? Did I say something wrong?”

I sighed. “When the varcolac attacked, Alessandra saw it kill her mother, and she ran away, straight out of the house, without warning Claire or Sean,” I said. “She thinks she's a coward. It probably saved her life, but she thinks it makes her a terrible person.”

Jean looked stricken. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . .”

“It's okay. You weren't even talking about her.”

I ate the last bite of my burger, which was actually pretty good, black hole or no. A poster on the wall advertised the restaurant's coffee while explaining Brownian Motion. I had tried their coffee before, however, and knew better than to try it again.

“There is one more alternate theory Terry has, in case the one with Brian doesn't fly,” Jean said.

“Who's the murderer in that one?”

Jean shrugged. “You are.”

I almost spilled my soda. “What?”

“Think about it,” she said. “It's all about reasonable doubt. If you killed Brian, then the version of you on trial couldn't have done it. How can the prosecution prove that it was him and not you?”

“But we're the same person,” I said. “We will be the same person again. Besides, I didn't do it.”

“When do you think your split with the other Jacob started?” Jean asked.

“Don't go there. It wasn't until I left the house after my family was killed. The day after Brian died,” I said.

Jean was implying that maybe I
had
killed Brian—that the split had occurred much earlier than I thought and my double had killed him while I was home with my family—but I dismissed the thought. What reason would even a different version of me have for doing such a thing?

“The question is, what can I do now?” I asked. “I want to understand what happened, but I don't know where to start. Have you seen any more of Brian's research notes? Anything that would explain more about the varcolac or what Brian discovered before he died?”

Jean shook her head. “I've been all through his things,” she said. “Terry insisted on getting all Brian's smartpads back from the police in the discovery process, and I've been going through them all with a fine-toothed comb. There's nothing of significance. What we need is the Higgs projector. Brian's letter that had all the programming circuitry on it.”

“They were both destroyed,” I said. “The varcolac took one version from Brian and the other from Alessandra and disintegrated them. Though . . .” A thought struck me with a surge of adrenaline.

“Though what?” Alessandra asked, coming back to the table. Her eyes were red, and I guessed she had been crying in the bathroom.

“The letter,” I said gently. “There was a letter from Brian that came to the house the day the varcolac came. When I was at the house, I saw the varcolac take it from you and destroy it. But that wasn't in your viewfeed.”

“I don't understand,” Jean said.

“Alessandra split briefly,” I said. “One of her left the house; the other stayed. I saw the version of her that stayed, and I saw the varcolac take the letter from her. But this Alessandra was never there.” I turned back to Alessandra, trying to keep my voice calm. “So what happened to the letter? Did you have it when you left the house?”

“You mean, after it killed Mom, and I ran away?” Alessandra's voice caught, and I thought she might start crying again.

“I don't blame you for that,” I said. “But I need to know. What happened to the letter?”

Alessandra was very still, remembering. “I saw it on the coffee table, and I opened it. Nobody was explaining anything to me, and I thought maybe I could find out for myself. When Mom came in to tell me we needed to go, I shoved the letter into my pocket and pretended to be reading a fashion magazine.”

“So then, when the varcolac arrived . . .”

“The letter was still in my pocket,” she said. “I didn't know it was important.”

My heart was racing. “So it split with you,” I said. “That means there was a third version.”

“Wait a minute,” Jean said. “If the varcolac could sense the existence of this letter from miles away and go teleporting to your house just to destroy it, how could it not know that there was another version of it out there?”

“I don't think it did sense it,” I said. “When it killed Brian, it assimilated him. It drew him into itself, and then its face looked a little bit like Brian's, as if it had incorporated Brian into itself. I think after that, it knew everything Brian knew. Brian knew a copy of the letter had gone to my house and where my house was, so the varcolac knew, too. But it didn't know everything.”

“Well, what happened to the third version?” Jean asked. She leaned forward. “Where is it now?”

Alessandra shrugged. “I don't know. When I remembered about it later, I looked, and it was gone.”

I let out a breath, disappointed. “It resolved,” I said. “It split, and then it resolved again.”

Jean shook her head. “It shouldn't have. Alessandra resolved with her other version because their paths became close again. But the letters followed different paths. One was burned; the other got away. It's still out there somewhere.”

“You mean, it just fell out of her pocket? That's just as bad. We'll never find a letter that fell out of her pocket somewhere in the neighborhood a month and a half ago.”

“We'll never find it if we don't look,” Jean said.

I hadn't been back to our house since the day I found Elena and Claire and Sean dead, and it felt surreal to pull into the driveway now, just as I had done a thousand times before. It was a bit of a risk to be here. We didn't know our neighbors well, but there could be trouble if anyone saw and recognized me. I could have let Jean come by herself, but I was up and doing things now; I didn't want to go back to waiting for someone else to do something for me.

I stepped over the threshold, feeling a strange sense of displacement. Elena's body had lain right there, empty and broken, but there was no sign of her now. I walked through the house in a daze, seeing familiar objects as if they were unfamiliar, remembering laughter and life along with the still agony of death. Which was true? When all this was over, what would remain?

While we were here, there were some personal effects I wanted to collect from upstairs. I prowled through the rooms, which looked as cluttered and normal as if we had never left. Alessandra went into her bedroom and emerged with a battered stuffed rabbit, given her the day she was born. In Sean's room, I saw the Legos and the army men and remembered the half-finished spaceship and how his shortened arm had been on the wrong side.

In my room, I saw the bed where Elena and I had slept and made love, and I remembered Claire lying there with her mirrored T-shirt. Were my children truly dead? Or were they prisoners of the varcolac? Was there a difference? I sifted through the accumulation of things on our dressers, but I found nothing but painful reminders of our old life.