Page 10

“Tressa Fay,” Linds started gently, folding her hands together. “I know that you must know why Michael got us together here.”

They were all at Gayle’s house. It was in the fancy Astor Park neighborhood, a big gray Dutch colonial with pumpkins and gourds piled on the front steps. The living room had shiny wood floors and matching leather furniture. There was a lot of art, so it wasn’t boring, but Tressa Fay thought Gayle could use some plants.

She’d had long moments to think about things like this while everyone in the room looked at her with various combinations of bemusement, incredulity, and uncomfortable interest.

She did know why she’d been told to come here. Ordered, really, in the group chat. It was because of her afternoon with Meryl. “I was supposed to talk to you first.” She plucked at the tassels of the pillow on her lap. “I did not do that.”

Just yesterday, she had been in her car down the street from her father’s house, texting back and forth with Meryl, making their plan, brushing away her fear. Then, this afternoon, exactly five months ago today, Meryl had walked into her salon. Tressa Fay had washed her hair. They’d spent time together. And, of course, Tressa Fay and Meryl’s decision to meet had changed reality.

Her life wasn’t the only one that had been affected.

She looked up from the pillow to Gayle. “Your house is really nice.” Gayle’s husband was a doctor. Snort, their labradoodle, had his big, warm head against Tressa Fay’s thigh, but he looked at Gayle worriedly when Tressa Fay addressed her.

Gayle nodded. She was sitting with her arms crossed in an envelope of scary silence.

Mary watched Tressa Fay, but she didn’t look upset. James didn’t, either.

Michael and Guy sat next to each other on a leather sofa. Michael had the deep wrinkle between his eyebrows he got when he was thinking hard. Guy seemed like their usual unbothered self.

“You talked to me about her until two in the morning after your date.” Mary said this kindly. “How funny Meryl is, how hot, how smart, how it had been so long since you’d done nothing on a date but walk and sit and talk and get to know each other. It’s the strangest feeling, because I sort of think it didn’t happen, but also I feel that it did.”

Tressa Fay understood what Mary meant, although the experience she was describing sounded mild in comparison to Tressa Fay’s. Today, when her two sets of memories—her two lives—had abruptly crashed into each other at the salon, she remembered everything. Two different sets of everything. Two completely separate versions of her own life.

She’d had to take a five-minute break in the back room, amazed, headachy, and wiping away an immoderate number of tears.

But also, as soon as she’d cried and the shock of the experience had passed—as soon as she’d felt it all—what was left was the story of her life.

Meryl in every part of it.

Linds had been right that first night at Tressa Fay’s apartment when she told them that their minds and bodies already knew how to live in this quantum reality. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t break anything. Even as they were here tonight because she and Meryl had messed up the plan, Tressa Fay wasn’t bothered. She didn’t feel like she had to keep track or remember the details of every way that her reality had been layered over and rearranged. That wasn’t how they were going to save Meryl.

“The only thing that bothers me is how lost and moony you’ve been for the last five months,” Guy said, “ever since you had the date of the century none of us here knew you were going to have and then never saw her again.”

“Right.” Tressa Fay looked up at the ceiling. “I have a sense of that. Somewhat.”

It was hard to be bothered with the time paradox when Tressa Fay wanted to kiss Meryl so badly. Her entire imagination was preoccupied with the knowledge of how Meryl’s head and neck and hair felt in her hands, with thinking about what her mouth—her soft, smiling mouth—would feel like. What Meryl tasted like. If she made sounds when she started to get turned on from a kiss. These were the two things Tressa Fay wanted to know more than she’d ever wanted to know anything.

They hadn’t kissed at the end of their date. Meryl had reached up and hugged her and told her she’d text her that night. Then she hadn’t. Because Meryl couldn’t text the Tressa Fay she’d met in May. When Meryl sent texts to Tressa Fay, her messages went five months into the future. Or they took five months to arrive, crossing over a thousand universes.

But twenty minutes ago, as Tressa Fay was pulling onto Gayle’s dark street, thinking about the date that, for a few fleeting moments, felt like it had just happened, her phone buzzed, and it was Meryl, with her tongue still pink from her dragon fruit granita, texting Tressa Fay a selfie as soon as she got home from their walk.

Now she knew that Meryl had loved that walk as much as she did. Now she knew Meryl had wanted to kiss her, too. Because Meryl told her so. But reading their texts, back and forth, it felt like she’d always known. Their experiment had made a shifting kaleidoscope of memory and longing and aching and excitement and confusion that made Tressa Fay wish—as she looked at Meryl-in-May’s picture and knew she smelled like sunscreen and clean hair—that she could somehow run to her and bang into her house and take her face into her hands and kiss her and kiss her and make that be the only thing that mattered.

They’d remade the world. No space fabric had ripped, tumbling Meryl out neatly through a hole in this tidy living room. The experiment’s strongest effect was on how Tressa Fay and Meryl felt about each other.

“I’m sorry,” she said solemnly.

“Here’s something, though.” Linds reached over from where she had been sitting on a matching leather ottoman near Tressa Fay’s chair. “Remember when we finally talked about Amy?”

She closed her eyes. “I do. God. At the public pool in your neighborhood in June.”

“Honey, you never talked to me about all that before. You hadn’t looked at any of that pain—you were only bearing it, and part of me really thinks that finally opening up about that pain is definitely worth the consequences of your and Meryl’s little experiment.”

Tressa Fay looked at Linds, surprised to realize it was true.

She left me , Tressa Fay had said, with her head on Linds’s thigh, Linds’s hand on Tressa Fay’s shoulder, the sun hot on their wet swimsuits. I told everyone we broke up and it was mutual, but that’s not what happened. I came home early from the pop-up salon thing in Los Angeles. I was so happy. Linds, I bought a ring, one I’d been designing with a jeweler there, and she had it ready for me to go see it and approve the design while I was on that trip. When I looked at that ring, it made me so fucking happy . Tressa Fay had put her hands on her heart. To me, that ring looked like Amy, and all I wanted was to see it on her finger. So I changed my flight and my plans on that last day and came home.

Linds had run her fingers through Tressa Fay’s hair. What happened when you came home?

It was very late. I went into the bedroom to get into bed with her. She and her coworker Denay were already there.

Oh, sweetheart.

I knew that Denay was her…work wife? You know, someone who understood the grind of the docket and billing hours and dealing with partners. I was so grateful for Denay. I didn’t, not once, suspect anything. Ever.

Linds’s hand had gone still. Tressa Fay’s face had gotten hot.

You knew? she’d asked.

No. Of course not! If I’d known anything, I would have said. It’s more…when we found out you’d broken up, Guy and I knew something must have happened that you weren’t ready to talk about. And later, we heard through Michael and Guy’s lawyer grapevine that Amy was with Denay, and we weren’t, I guess, surprised. I’m sorry. Linds had smoothed her hand over Tressa Fay’s forehead. It wasn’t your fault. You give so much to the people you love. I just don’t want you to lose sight of what you need.

That conversation had unlocked something in Tressa Fay that she could feel now. It had meant she stopped being a hermit and started using the time on her own to think about what it was she needed. What she wanted. What it was about Meryl and their date that had made her yearn and feel so good.

She met Linds’s eyes. “So that means the consequences of my connecting with Meryl in person to cut her hair—”

“They’re life.” Linds was looking around at everyone, her eyes bright with passion.

“You’re trying to say that what we’re all feeling right now, what we’re calling time, is what life is,” Michael said. He was still frowning. He didn’t like this.

“Yes.” Linds nodded.

“That possibly the insights and epiphanies we have along the way, in our lives, are because we’re…” He shook his head. “Because we’re living our lives backwards, forwards, and sideways. At the same time.”

Linds took a deep breath. “I really think so. Even right now, this conversation? As soon as I reminded Tiff about our talk at the public pool about Amy, it started to feel like that was simply what happened. The reality where it didn’t happen is slipping through my fingers.” She made a gesture with her hands, fluid and ephemeral. “But I’m okay with that, because I’m a writer. Every book I publish has been written and rewritten, changed in so many different ways along its road to being finished that ultimately it’s almost impossible to remember any version but the one I end up with.”

Michael shifted on the sofa. “Fuck.”

“You feel it, too,” Linds said to Guy.

“Honestly,” Guy said, “as soon as we started talking about this, I got lost and thought we were all meeting because Tiff’s been so sad the last several months but also doing kind of better, and we were checking in with her.”

Linds laughed. “And so what do you think Gayle and James are doing here?”

Guy frowned. “I mean. They’re our friends?” He sighed. “Who are also Meryl’s friends, which makes zero sense, given that Meryl ghosted after one date with Tressa Fay five months ago.”

“Fuck,” Michael said. “Again. But also, yeah. I’m not going to give myself a migraine trying to keep an up-to-date reality checklist inside my head of every single change. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, and I don’t want to.”

“We’re always doing this—we just don’t see it like this. Mostly because we don’t want to. Not because it isn’t real.” Linds looked at Mary. “Your mom remembered. But maybe she remembered because she wanted to remember in order to make things better with you.”

“Good lord , Linds.” Mary fell backward into a cushion on the sofa.

“Confession,” James said. “I had no idea why I was called to a meeting on the group chat. That’s why I brought chips. I thought this was a hang.”

The vintage Bakelite clock on Gayle’s mantel ticked out the seconds.

“I really do think,” Michael said slowly, “it does depend on how close we are to what changes. Like, Tressa Fay, you must be filled with all of these different memories and feelings because what is happening is about you. But James—”

“I’m mostly preoccupied with figuring out what happened to Meryl.”

When Tressa Fay looked up, she was met with Gayle’s furrowed brow. “You saw her,” Gayle said. “You talked to her. I had to meet with the detective today, and honestly I kept thinking how ridiculous he sounded, trying to create a timeline for what happened.”

Tressa Fay opened her mouth. To say what, she wasn’t sure.

“It’s okay.” Gayle sounded resigned. “It’s just hard.”

“She talked about you,” Tressa Fay said. “She talked about what had come between you and how you were trying to do better. How it felt like it was working, but also, it was still tricky. She talked about how she wanted to be closer to you.”

Gayle put her hand over her mouth. “She did?”

“Yeah. She did.”

Linds let out a shuddery breath. “And that changes everything. Just you”—Linds patted Gayle’s ankle—“knowing that. Right?”

“And we’ll probably talk about you more,” Tressa Fay said. “Because she loves you. And I’ll probably tell her how much you love her. Because you do. And then your relationship gets better way faster than it would’ve. Or it was always going to get better? I don’t know.”

“We weren’t in a great place when she disappeared,” Gayle said.

“Not true anymore,” James said. “Yay?”

Gayle sniffed. “Yeah, yay .” She looked at Tressa Fay. “I mean that. And tell her I love her anytime. All the time, if you want.”

“This is giving me a new appreciation for those old-school missed-connections ads that Tiff and I used to obsess over in middle school.” Guy smiled at Tressa Fay. “I wonder how many of them were actually burgeoning separated-by-time romances?”

“The last time we met,” Linds said, “we were trying so hard to figure out how to keep everything simple. Our hope was to keep a straight line and save Meryl.”

“But it turns out that’s not how we live,” Michael said, leaning forward to reach for the chips James had brought. He opened the bag and held it out to Guy beside him. “We like to think we make plans, but it’s impossible to plan. We have feelings, our health changes, other people’s schedules and problems intersect with our day, and we ask ourselves, ‘What went wrong?’ Or, sometimes, everything goes right, and we’re so pleased we made such an excellent plan. But that’s hubris.”

“And Meryl’s fearless,” Tressa Fay said. “She’s not worried about what we’re doing here. She feels in control. She has plans of her own. At this point, honestly, I don’t think we could stop her if we tried.”

“Of course,” James said, taking the chips from Guy. “That’s Meryl.”

Gayle looked at the ceiling. “You know what I’m thinking about right now? About when Meryl got a speedometer on her bike. She’d been begging for one, at eight years old! Oh my God. At that time, we lived in the last house at the end of a dead-end road, and there was a great big dead-end sign, the metal kind, fixed between two wooden poles. Meryl had been racing her bike up and down the street, testing the speedometer. Going fast, slow, looking at what she passed at different speeds. Then she was at the end of our block, and I saw her stand up on her pedals. She started going so fast that her pink bike was rocking back and forth. And I realized she wasn’t looking at the road. She was looking at the speedometer, trying to see how fast she could go. Before I could yell at her to stop, she hit the dead-end sign with the top of her head, going eighteen miles an hour.”

Tressa Fay gasped.

“Her body flew through the air, and she landed on the street, knocked out cold. I thought she was dead. I started screaming. By the time the ambulance came, she was throwing up everywhere, and her eyes were looking in two different directions. She was okay in the end, after a week in the hospital, but my point is, that’s Meryl .”

Tressa Fay could see this. She had felt this.

“Meryl is a factor that will intersect with everything. All of us.” Gayle sighed. “I think we’re just going to have to put our heads down and throw every single power tool at it on the highest speed.”

Everyone started talking at once then, throwing out ideas, but Tressa Fay could only think, Meryl is already doing that.

Meryl had been over the moon in her texts when she got home from their date.

There was nothing that could have prepared me for how beautiful you are.

I want to make you blush over and over.

I can tell, when you look at me, that you want to kiss me. How long do you think we can hold out?

James had been listening with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, his deep brown eyes pinned to the floor. “I think we have to very seriously consider something here.”

“What is it?” Michael asked.

“That maybe Meryl wasn’t a victim. Maybe no one took her or hurt her. Maybe she’s simply not here anymore.”

“She would never choose to disappear,” Gayle said with irritation. “This is something that happened to her.”

“But what if it wasn’t something that happened?” James asked. “What if there was some kind of…I don’t know, mistake, like a skip in a record that makes it possible for her to be texting Tressa Fay in the future? And she disappears into that…”

“Glitch,” Tressa Fay supplied.

Then the room fell horribly silent.

“I know.” James’s voice was patient. “I hate it, too. But I have to mention it.”

Gayle stood up. She pointed at Tressa Fay. “You tell her to try whatever she wants to. We’ll try everything we can think of. As fast as we can, heads down, no matter what’s ahead. We’ll break the universe if we have to.”

The thought didn’t bother Tressa Fay. It just made her wonder, if Meryl kissed her, whether she could stand the feeling of not kissing her again for months.

Over and over.

But then she remembered there was a Tressa Fay who had kissed Meryl after granitas and a long walk. Or the next day. Soon, for sure.

Tressa Fay realized she was actually willing to break the universe for a lot of reasons.

She probably already had.