An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes (6 page)

Archie looks confused.

Mari turns back to her drawing.

Archie starts talking again. Starts ogling her again.

Then he starts rolling his twenty-sided die. Over and over and over.

She grits her teeth. She digs her pen into the page.

Mari tries to let it go because she recognizes that she's not being fair to him. Her indecision about contacting her biological mother is getting to her.

Still, it's all she can do to keep from picking up Archie's die and launching it out the window, launching
him
out the window.

“I'm calling it,” Mari says and closes her notebook.

Mari watches her blood fill the tube. The red liquid sloshes and foams as it pours in the container, the level rising past the fifteen cups mark.

“There's a lot of blood in me,” Mari says.

“There's a lot of everything in you,” her mom says. For some reason, she says it like she's sad even though this is the first Ladies' Night they've had in years. Her mom had surprised Mari by suggesting they do so. Mari agreed. And they got into the car and drove to the Franklin Institute.

Mari steps off the platform that has weighed her in order to calculate and then demonstrate the contents of her circulatory system. A small boy pushes past her for his turn.

“How long has it been?” Mari asks, wandering away from the exhibit.

Her mom trails behind her. “Maybe ten years? You must have been in the second or third grade last time we were here.”

“Man, I'm getting old.”

“You have no idea.”

A few children run about, bouncing and bounding, their parents in tow. For some reason, the museum is far less crowded than usual.

Mari stops in front of the exhibit with the model heart the size of a small house. “It's smaller than I remember.”

“You've grown,” her mom says. “Everything looks smaller once you're bigger.”

“It used to scare me when I was a kid. Felt like I was playing inside of a giant's chest. Thought I might kill him if I bumped against the sides too much.” Mari turns to her mom. “Want to go inside?”

Her mom shakes her head. “I'll wait for you out here.”

“Oh, come on,” Mari says, pulling her mom by the hand. Her mom relents.

They slip through the narrow entrance and step into the right atrium. Strategically placed lights cast eerie shadows in the recesses of the interior. The sound of a beating heart plays through unseen speakers, and a deep and steady rhythm echoes throughout the cavernous space. It is comforting yet ominous.

Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . .

Mari drops her mom's hand and runs her fingers along the heart's plaster walls. The pink paint has been rubbed white from hundreds of thousands of touches, people who had come before her doing the same. She makes her way through the tunnel-like main artery, ducking to avoid the low spots in the ceiling.

“Still there?” Mari asks over her shoulder.

“Always.”

Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . .

The pathway leads them up a narrow set of stairs that opens in a tiny balcony at the top of the heart. Mari pauses to survey the room from twelve feet in the air. A small group of children wearing identical bright yellow shirts squeezes past. Mari's mom smiles after them.

They proceed through the passageway and down into the next chamber. Mari stops, presses a finger against the side of the heart, and begins tracing the network of blue and red veins painted along the walls.

A small black girl, not older than five or six, walks into the room, looking around in wonder. She grasps Mari's free hand while still examining the heart's shadowy interior.

“I'm scared, Mommy,” she says. She pulls Mari toward the exit.

Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . .

Mari looks down, amused that the girl has mistaken her for her mother. She then glances up at her own mom. A shadow seems to pass over her mom's face.

“I'm sorry, honey,” Mari says to the girl in a soft voice. “I'm not your mommy. But I'm sure she's her somewhere around here.”

The girl lets go of Mari's hand when she realizes her mistake. A moment later, a woman appears through the main artery. The girl runs to her and they exit the left ventricle, hand-in-hand. Silence settles back into the chamber.

Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . . Thump-THUMP . . .

Mari is about to follow behind them when she notices that her mom has turned away. She is covering her face with her hands.

“You okay?” Mari says, coming up next to her and wrapping an arm around her shoulder.

Her mom turns and wraps her arms around Mari. When she pulls away from the embrace, Mari sees that her eyes are brimmed with tears. This scares Mari more than the possibility of killing a giant.

“What's going on, Mom?” she asks.

“Nothing. I just . . . I need to step outside for a moment. Take as long as you want.”

Her mom rushes out of the heart. Mari pauses to wonder what might be wrong and then follows after her.

Emerging from the left ventricle, Mari scans the exhibit room. There's a skeleton slowly riding an elliptical machine to her right, a spiraling display of various animal hearts to her left, but no sign of her mom.

She walks back into the main atrium, past the gigantic, godlike statue of a seated Benjamin Franklin. The hall brightens and then dims as a cloud passes over the skylights.

Mari steps out of the museum and onto the top of the marble stairs that lead down to the busy street. The sound of traffic is unusually loud. She squints at the brightness of the day, shields her eyes from the sun, and spots her mom to the left of the staircase. Her mom is sitting on a low wall in front of a sculpture of an early plane's wire frame. Birds flit in and out of the iron skeleton.

“Hey.” Mari sits down next to her.

“Hi,” her mom says. She wipes her eyes with a crumpled tissue and then drops her hands to her lap.

They sit and watch the traffic pass, the noises weaving together in the air.

“Want to tell me what's up?” Mari asks.

“Sorry,” her mom says, smiling through new tears. “I tried to not cry. But then I saw you with that little girl. And it made me think . . .” She trails off.

“About what?”

Her mom sighs. “How someday you'll have kids.”

“Maybe,” Mari says. “I haven't decided yet. I might just be a crazy cat lady.”

Her mom laughs.

“But why'd that make you cry?” Mari asks. “Is this about me not wanting to contact my biological mother?”

Mari's mom stands. “Let's walk.” She tilts her head in the direction of a large fountain on the other side of a grassy area in front of the museum.

Mari stands. Her mom loops her arm through Mari's. They cross the street and then make their way along the sidewalk, stepping beneath the dappled shadows of trees whose leaves are just beginning to turn.

They sit at one of the benches along the edge of the circular clearing and stare at the fountain that consists of three large statues, nude figures reclining and facing away from the center. Each one has an animal behind its head that spouts arcing water into the shallow pool. Even though the air carries an autumn coolness, a few kids splash around in the water.

“I think it's important for you to contact your birth mother,” her mom says, picking up their conversation.

Mari's face hardens. “Why?”

Her mom hesitates. Looks up at the sky. “I have cancer.”

She looks at her mom. She feels like she's fallen into the bottom of a deep well. “What?”

“I have cancer.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Mari turns away. She gazes into the fountain's spraying water. Everything seems louder. The fountain. The traffic. The wind in the leaves. But nothing seems real.

“I started crying back there, in the heart,” her mom says, “because I thought about how I might never get to see you have children.”

“Or cats,” Mari adds quietly.

Her mom laughs. “I always thought you were more of a dog person.”

“Are you going to die?” Mari asks after a moment.

She shrugs. “I hope not.”

“What kind is it?”

She presses her hand across her left breast. “Stage three. The doctor said that I have about a seventy percent chance of survival with treatment—so that's good news. It could be a lot worse.”

Mari nods, but her mind flashes to all the times she's rolled a one or a two with a six-sided die. “What kind of treatment?”

“Chemotherapy . . . and a mastectomy, most likely.”

Mari tries to imagine the missing breast beneath her mom's shirt. “When did you find out?” she asks.

“The biopsy was last Friday.”

Mari realizes that was when she drove her mom to the doctor's office. She remembers the muted talk show. The flatulent old man. The artificial plant that had seemed so real. She had thought nothing of it at the time, figuring it was just a routine visit.

“They called with the results the other day,” her mom adds.

“Does dad know? Do Eric and Andrew?”

“Dad does. We wanted to tell you first since you're the oldest. Your father and I are going to talk to them tonight.”

The world darkens as a large cloud blocks the sun. Mari looks up and notes that it will probably be a while before the sun reemerges. It might even rain.

Mari wants to cry but all she feels is anger. “I hate that this has to happen to you. You're like the nicest person in the world. Why couldn't this happen to some child molester or rapist or politician instead? Why does it have to be you?”

Her mom takes a slow, deep breath. “I've been asking myself that question a lot lately.”

“And?”

“And there's no answer. It's out of my control. It just did. It happened.”

“That's reassuring.”

“The universe isn't here to reassure us,” her mom says.

“Then why is it here?”

“That's another question I've been asking myself a lot lately.”

“And?” Mari asks.

“I'll let you know when I figure it out.”

Mari closes her eyes and leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. The wind picks up, rustling the leaves and spraying the fountain's spouting water in a mist that carries to Mari and her mom. They do not notice.

“So this is why you told me about the contact information before my birthday?”

Her mom nods. “I want to be there for you. To help you work through things.”

“Do you really think you'll die before then?”

“Probably not. But you never know. I don't want to take any chances anymore.”

Mari is silent for a while, and then says, “I doubt she'll want to meet me.”

“She does.”

“How do you know?”

“We've been writing each other for years.”

“And you never told me?”

“I'm sorry, Mar. It was part of the adoption agreement. I've had to provide her with annual updates, and she's been free to communicate with me. But unless you request it on your own, she can't contact you directly until you're eighteen.”

“Why?” Mari asks.

“I guess they—the adoption agency—thought you'd be mature enough to handle it by then.”

“Do you think I'm ready now?”

“I do.”

Mari sighs. “So tell me something about her.”

Mari's mom opens her purse and pulls out a white envelope. She holds it out to Mari.

“The contact information's in here. Along with a letter.”

Mari takes it. She's surprised by its lightness. Probably just a single page, Mari guesses. Nothing like the epic letter she had written and promptly burned.

Her mom puts her arm around Mari, squeezes her, and kisses her on the head. “You'll never know how grateful I am to have been the one to raise you.”

Mari does not know if she believes in God, but she prays. She prays for light, a light so quiet and so clear, it will sweep over the world and heal everything and everyone.

Still, though, she cannot cry.

“What happens when we die?” Mari's little brother asks. He sits cross-legged on the floor, two feet from the television, holding a bowl of soggy cereal. Macadamia is lying at his side, her head resting on her paws and her eyes also on the television.

On the screen, a cartoon mouse has just used a cleaver to chop a cartoon cat into several pieces.

Mari is on the couch wearing her mom's old college T-shirt, its crest faded and cracking from a thousand washings. “I don't know,” Mari says, because she doesn't. Despite giving the question a lot of thought in the last day. “People think different things.”

“Like what?”

“Well, religious people think that you have a soul, kind of like a spirit inside of you that lives forever.”

“Like a ghost?” her brother asks.

“I don't know. Maybe. Anyways, they think that after your body dies, your soul goes to an afterlife. If you're good, it goes to heaven. If you're bad, it goes to hell.” Mari's mind flashes back to the one time she went to church with Dante years ago. She had thought it strange how the congregants held their palms to the sky and swayed while praying, as if in a trance. As if anyone could be that certain of anything.

“What if you're both?”

Mari shrugs.

“How do you know how to be good?”

Mari shrugs. “Their religion tells them, I guess.”

“Then it's easy.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Why not?”

Mari wonders the same. She wants to play the part of the wise elder, but she feels short on wisdom. She settles on an answer. “Sometimes things get confusing.”