An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes (7 page)

Andrew spoons cereal into his mouth, some milk from the spoon dripping back into the bowl as he continues staring at the TV. Mouth full, he asks, “Are we religious?”

Mari shrugs. “Not really. But you can decide what to believe for yourself when you're older.”

He turns to Mari. He looks at her with the same sad blue eyes of their mom, so different from the green of Mari's. “What do you think?”

Mari considers his question for a moment. “It just kind of ends.”

“Like closing your eyes?”

“Maybe.” Mari closes her eyes, trying to imagine it. “Except you probably won't be able to think or dream anymore.”

Andrew's face scrunches as he tries to comprehend nothingness. “So when I die, it'll be like turning off the TV?”

She opens her eyes. “Maybe. Nobody knows for sure.”

“That makes me sad.”

Mari's afraid he's going to cry, but then he turns back to the television and continues eating his cereal. The cartoon cat has come back to life and has captured the mouse. Although the cat is strapping sticks of dynamite to the bound mouse, Mari is certain this will not turn out well for the cat.

In that moment, Mari decides to cancel Magic tonight. She sends a text out to the group, drawing her attention away from the episode's foregone conclusion.

Her phone chirps with a reply from Dante:
no problem. everything alright?

In her reply she lies that everything is all right.

The next text is from Archie:
it's cool. i've got a lot to do tonight
.

Then her phone falls silent. Nothing from Sam. Nothing from Sarah.

A moment later, it chirps with another message from Archie:
hey, want to hang out tomorrow . . . just the two of us . . . ?

She wonders if it is a joke.

Does he like her?

Mari doesn't know how to respond to the strange request so she just doesn't. She sets her phone down and turns her attention back to the TV. But the screen is now blank. Her brother and Macadamia have left.

• • •

Mari runs her hands along the surface of the tomato's skin as the water washes over it. Setting it aside, she cleans two more and then pulls out a cutting board.

Mari's mom is next to her, quartering raw chicken. Macadamia sniffs around their feet, scavenging for dropped food. The annoying voices of sports announcers spill over from the living room TV. Video game explosions rumble through the ceiling from her brothers' room upstairs.

Her mom brings the butcher's knife down with a heavy
thunk
.

Mari sets to dicing the tomatoes.

Her mom looks over. “Still upset about your friends cancelling another game night?”

“Of course.” Mari fails to mention that she cancelled it because she doesn't know how much time she has left with her mom. Why waste it playing some pointless game with friends whose fictional characters she knows better than the people behind them?

Her mom smiles. “Well, some things are just out of your control. But it's nice to have you help me in the kitchen. Those boys of ours are useless.”

Mari shrugs. “It does seem to be a trait of the gender.”

Her mom finishes with the chicken, pushes it aside, and washes her hands in the sink. She begins opening cabinets and pulls out a few bottles of spices. After setting them out on the counter, she examines Mari's work.

“You didn't cut out the stems first?”

Mari continues dicing.

“I've told you to cut out the stems first before.”

“You've told me a lot in my life,” Mari says.

“Sometimes I'm afraid I haven't told you enough.” Mari's mom sets to seasoning the chicken.

As her words hang in the air, Mari wonders if this is how it will be from now on. Every conversation ready to take a turn for the grim. Every sentence ready to foreshadow. Her mom must sense it too because she changes the subject. “So. School starts in a week. Excited?”

“About as excited as that chicken you're butchering.”

“Oh, please. I bet you are. I mean, it's your
senior
year.”

“It's just school, Mom.”

“But senior year is absolutely
the best
. God, I had so much fun! Cheerleading. Student council. Senior trip.
Prom.
You're going to love it; I know you will.” She wipes her forehead with the back of her forearm, and then pauses. “There's so much to do. So much I want to see you do,” she adds.

“Yup, I really do think they're going to make me head cheerleader this year,” Mari says.

Her mom ignores her. “Do you know who you want to ask you to prom yet?”

“I'd sooner walk into a lake.”

“What about
Dante
?”

“Sheesh, cool your jets, Mom. I tell you what—you can go in my place.”

“I guarantee you'll get excited once we start dress shopping . . . and you know, you really should start letting me give you a few style tips. You're such a beautiful girl. A few small adjustments and you'll have to fight the boys off with a stick.”

“I think I had that nightmare once,” Mari says. “Need me to cut anything else?”

“You really should start dating. It'd be good for you.”

“Let it go, Mom.”

Her mom's eyes brighten. “What about Archie?”

“I have a knife.”

“Fine.” She puts her hands up in surrender. “I just want to make sure you're happy.”

“Cutting things makes me happy.”

“Then here,” her mom says, handing her a head of romaine lettuce.

They work in comfortable silence for the next few minutes. There is no conversation, just the sounds of the kitchen. From the living room, a crowd erupts on the television. Mari's dad lets out a happy shout. Yay, sports.

“You read that letter yet?” her mom asks.

Mari sets down the knife and looks up at the ceiling. She wants to make her mom happy, but she's sick of this topic. She wants to scream at the top of her lungs. She wants to scream so loudly that it will shatter glass, send birds to flight, and set off car alarms.

Instead she drops her eyes to the chopped lettuce. “I don't care about contacting that woman, Mom. She's a stranger. You've always been here for me. I want to be here for you. What's wrong with that?”

Her mom sighs. “Nothing, honey. Just don't forget that there are other people out there that need you, too.”

Mari clicks through the search results. All the first several websites are laid out in the same way. Neutral or light color schemes meant to exude reassurance. A large, happy logo on the main page. Links on the left-hand side that lead to sections that explain the basic information, the process of diagnosis, the treatment options, support group information.

The survival rates.

Mari reads page after page about fatty tissues, mammary glands, the lactiferous sinus, and lymphatic nodes. She encounters clunky medical terms, words like
metastasize
,
lobular carcinoma
,
chemoembolization
. They all sound like demons in some fantasy game. She whispers the words quietly over and over again, until they flow from her lips, hoping that mastering their names removes their power.

She studies illustrated diagrams of naked female torsos. The beige skin is always lifted from one breast to expose the spidery web of ligaments and ducts radiating from the beneath the nipple. She watches 3D-animation videos that show malevolent, black and purple lumps growing and spreading and then invading other parts of the body. She examines post-mastectomy photographs wherein single breasts hang asymmetrically opposite scars that look like crooked smiles. Mari is certain she will never be able to see another female—or herself—in the same way ever again.

Mari starts to recognize the same information and the same pictures on website after website. On the search results pages she skips past the links to medical sites and eventually stumbles across a blog kept by a woman diagnosed with stage four breast cancer.

Besides detailing her experiences with various treatments and describing how the disease affects her everyday life, the woman reflects in a way only the dying are really able to, recounting her accomplishments, noting her regrets, and offering advice. The writer, a mother of three, mostly posts about how much she loves her children. She writes with words of pain and love, of beauty and sadness.

To her children, she writes, “I pray not that you will be happy or successful. But that you will be good. That you will learn to lose your selves and lift up others.”

Mari writes those words on her wall and then continues to read every other post, falling in love with the woman's wit and humility in struggle. The final post, written by the woman's husband, over two years ago, thanks readers for their support and provides the funeral information.

When there is no Next link to click anymore, Mari finally loses it. She takes off her glasses and buries her face in her arms and sobs for the first time since her mom broke the news to her.

Mari cries for this woman she did not know, this woman who has been in the earth for over two years. She cries for the woman's husband, for the woman's children. She cries for her own mom's future, bleak and blurry.

After a long time, she runs out of tears. Exhausted, she finds a tissue and blows her nose several times. She puts her glasses back on.

Macadamia comes over as if to comfort Mari. She nuzzles into her and licks the back of Mari's hand. Mari hugs her and then imagines the dog saying, “If I could, I would hug you back.”

Mari suddenly wants to leave. Or she wants somebody to come over. Her parents had taken her brothers to the aquarium for the day, and Mari does not want to be alone. Dante is the only one of her friends she feels comfortable enough to open up to, but he's working.

Then she remembers Archie's text. She feels a pang of guilt that nearly a day has passed and she has not replied to it.

can you come over right now?
She finally texts back.

Her phone immediately chirps with a reply:
how many condoms should i bring? j/k! on my way :)

Despite his perverted joke, his text actually makes Mari feel better because it reminds her that someone is there for her. While she waits for Archie's arrival, she lies back in her bed and considers the difference between happiness and success and goodness.

• • •

All at once, the rain begins. It thrums upon the roof, patters against the windows. The wind howls. Mari goes to her window to watch the storm, perhaps the summer's last. Charcoal clouds mute the light. Trees sway. A single bird flits across the sky. An empty garbage can skitters across the street.

It's a mesmerizing sight, a reminder of nature's strength and beauty. Mari hopes Archie will arrive safely. The wind is strong, and he does not weigh that much.

A few minutes later, though, she spots him coming down the end of her street. He is umbrella-less and soaked through. As he gets closer, she notices that he is smiling to himself. It's kind of strange.

Mari waits for the doorbell, but it never chimes. Finally, she heads downstairs, grabbing a towel on her way. She pulls open the front door. He is just standing there like a creepster.

She invites him in and gives him some clean clothes that he changes into.

She makes some popcorn.

They watch an episode of
Firefly
.

They talk about the episode.

All of it is such a nice change of pace. It's like stepping from shadow into sunlight. She finally stops worrying about whether she should contact her biological mother, she stops worrying about what will happen with her mom. She just loses herself in the show, in the conversation, in Archie.

She moves closer to him on the couch.

Concerns about death and loss fall away. She wonders if she's starting to like Archie Walker.

It's such a weird possibility—her and Archie. She's never really considered it before. If anything, she had always thought of Sam, Dante, and Archie as family. Not close family. More like cousins.

Archie?

He is smart and kind of cute in a dorky way. Into the same stuff as her. He had even shown up wearing a Ravenclaw
T-shirt, before he changed into the dry set of clothes she gave him—she'd always thought Ravenclaw would be her house if she attended Hogwarts.

But he was also . . . Archie. Immature. Kind of self-absorbed. A little too obsessed with math and school.

She could do worse. Maybe. She'd never really dated anyone before.

She moves even closer to him on the couch. Just a few inches away. She wonders if he notices. She smiles, asks if he wants to watch the next episode. Who knows how close they might be by the end of the night.

“There's nothing more I'd rather do. In fact,” he says, turning to her and putting on a mock evil face, “I would kill my own mother to continue watching this show with you.”

And even though Mari knows it's just a joke, all of her concerns return in a rush, like water busting through a damn. She drops her face into her hands and starts sobbing.

It's so embarrassing, to lose it like a crazy person out of nowhere, for a reason Archie can't possibly understand. But it's out of her control. She can't stop thinking about her mom dying. She can't stop feeling guilty that she tried not to think about it for even just a couple of hours, that she let herself worry over something stupid like a boy. She can't stop.

Archie apologizes and leaves in such a hurry that he forgets to take his clothes from the dryer.

Mari goes up to her room, closes the door, and lies face down on her bed.

She is alone again. But she still doesn't want to be. She musters enough energy to push herself off the bed, grab her keys, and head out the door.

• • •

Mari pulls the car into an empty space in the McCluck's parking lot, the windshield wipers swinging madly. The fluorescent interior of the fast food restaurant glows through the darkness and the rain. Only a few people are inside. She doesn't see Dante at the register and figures he must be on the fryers.