Parallel Infinities

PARALLEL INFINITIES

  Honnah Patnode

  with illustrations by Natalie Spence

  Copyright 2016 Honnah Patnode

  All rights reserved.

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Prologue

  On the top of a vast hill that stretched higher than a skyscraper but was just a bit too soft and gentle on the horizon to be a mountain, a girl sat, holding all the wisdom and foresight and tragic understanding of the universe in her eyes. As she sat and watched the sun rise, offering a gentle smile at all the little songbirds swooping past the vibrant colors that were lighting up the sky, the world turned around her, and she did not seem to care. There were bigger things, more important things, more significant things to think about than worrying about the world passing her by.

  Her eyes fell on the accursed river that wound like a snake in the valley below, and they welled with tears. The sadness was a reverent tribute to all the sleepless nights and decisions as loaded as guns that had led her to that gorgeous, beautiful, hateful place for the very first time.

  It was a story that she half-wished she could forget, but it was also the sort of daydream that would never fade from her memory until she had rested six feet under the surface of the earth for a hundred years or more. It was a story that was initially sweet but left a bitter aftertaste, and, like wine, was suited for nights where the world seemed to bathe in eloquence and could handle all the bittersweet fruit of its labors. It was a story that lingered on her lips like a could-have-been kiss. It was a story worth remembering.

  Chapter One

  Rosetta stared straight ahead as she marched to work, eyes ablaze with determination and vivacity. Her curly, caramel-colored hair fell in front of her face, but she was too lost in her thoughts to push it back. Walking to work was such an unpleasant experience--the prying eyes that littered the streets of Albany were her worst nightmare. She feared that they might see her cashmere scarf and think of her as pompous, or that they might see her dimpled smile and think of her as childish and incapable, or that they might see behind the mask she wore and think of her as weak. Everyone was always looking to see right through everyone else, as if skin were made of glass and the insides of every passing civilian were meant to be put on display.

  The cool chill of the early March morning nipped at Rosetta's skin as she strode forward. Weak was the last word she wanted people to think of when they looked at her. Weak was a word for lost children and brittle-boned elders that could no longer stand, those who were allowed to be weak without being patronized for it. Rosetta was no lost child, and she was entirely unafraid to stand on her own. The world--or rather, more often, society--was not often kind to the vulnerable. That much she was certain of. And she could not afford more of the world's unkindness.

  Buildings towered above her, rising story after story into the sky, held together by bricks and cement and memories. Dust in the making, though too many such structures were the epitome of permanence, standing at attention in the skyline for decades. Lifetimes ago the sticky, solid substance was poured between those bricks, fastening them all together like sequins in the fabric of the world. Rosetta briefly wondered what would cause those buildings to crumble. Maybe a storm, maybe a nostalgia-destroying, tragic incident of renovation, maybe a demolition crew. No, she mused. Time will do it. Age. More than likely, the buildings would crumble under the inescapable weight of time itself. They would resist at first, slowly becoming more ignored and more forgotten, until they stood no longer. Such was the tragedy of things that were real.

  The clouds cried above her. Their tears landed softly on her umbrella and formed puddles on the ground around her. The whole world seemed sleepy today. The sun was too tired to shine brightly. The birds were too tired to sing. Even the cars on the street seemed to slog by, drifting lazily within their respective lanes and curling together like cats when they parked, all clustered and silent. Rosetta both loved and hated days like this, days lost somewhere between the storms and the sun, when the sea and the sky seemed to switch places and time ticked on in rhythm with a waltz. Days ensnared between depression and jubilance. She felt that it illustrated life itself, because life was not a constant stormy mess in the way that her beloved fantasy novels liked to portray, nor was it an unending heaven of sunshine and bliss. All too often life was just somewhere in the middle. Boring. Forgettable. And though Rosetta hated it, hated the inescapable, suffocating normalcy that consumed every facet of every socially acceptable life, it was the unglamorous truth of existence.

  A tiny salon/beauty store came into view, wedged unceremoniously between a fragrant candy shop and a quaint bookstore. Rosetta felt the slightest flicker of pride flare up in her chest, somewhere between her lungs and her ribs. It made her breath catch in her throat. Her satisfaction did not spark up because the salon was thrilling to look at—the reality was quite contradictory to such a thought. From the exterior, it looked perhaps like even less than it really was on the inside. Bland brick walls, a thin wooden door that always managed to let in a draft, and a neon sign that read 'We're Open' did not exactly make it look more appealing than the beauty emporium four blocks away. It was the name hanging above the door. The title of the little place, Rosetta's Beauty Parlor. She had founded the place almost exactly a year ago at the young, uncertain age of twenty years. Rosetta's sister had been desperate for a job, begging anyone in a position to hire her until she was kicked out, and it broke Rosetta's heart. Besides, Rosetta herself was never happy working for a knockoff fast food restaurant, making minimum wage and scraping up abandoned coins from beneath the tables just to pay for her college tuition. Of course, such a largely unknown establishment did not allow her to glean a hefty sum of money, but it felt so much more worthwhile when eighteen-year-old Rachel moved out of their childhood home and into her own apartment.

  Stepping inside the little shop was almost like stepping into a familiar, favorite childhood hideout for Rosetta. She knew the little place so well. Strip mall establishments that came cheap were in desperate need of improvements—namely, in the salon's case, cleaning. She had dusted every nook and cranny, memorized every crack in the floor so that she could put rugs over them all, repainted the walls to bring the drab gray room into a whole new spectrum of vigor and liveliness. Rosetta knew the place just as well as lovers know the feeling of their palms pressed together.

  "Oh, good, you're here," Rachel chirped from her perch behind the counter in a voice which mimicked the pleasantness of wind chimes. While both girls' skin tone was caught somewhere between the porcelain Irish tone of their mother and the dark coal color of their father, Rachel had inherited all of their mother's beauty. Her petite frame, her cheerful eyes, the freckles dotting her nose, her radiant smile, and her hair, dark, straight, and without a single wisp out of place, all made her appear to be almost like a mirror image of the woman that raised them both. The only facet of perfection that Rosetta shared with her sister was a pair of doe eyes framed by soft lashes. "I just restocked the lipstick shelves. Mrs. Alibi has an appointment for today."

/>   "Hair?"

  "Of course," Rachel said, smoothing the skirt of her pale pink sundress (an admittedly odd choice of attire for such a bland day, but lovely just the same). "Your specialty. Though it might be good if you looked like you could control your own," she ducked her head with a sly smile.

  Rosetta laughed, tossing her bushy curls behind her shoulders. "Very funny."

  "So, how's school?" Rachel asked, tilting her head inquisitively, as if such a topic could really pique her interest. Rosetta knew it could not, but the gesture itself was sweet enough to compensate for partial sincerity. "Boring as ever, Miss I'll-be-an-engineer-in-thirty-years?"

  "It won't take quite that long," Rosetta said, sweeping her eyes over the goods displayed on shelves: Makeup, shampoos, bottles of nail polish in a hundred different shades, hair dyes, and all manner of lovely little things. "But it's good. I think I could really do this. Then, I could provide for…" Instinct forced her to bite her tongue. The day was dreary, but Rachel seemed more cheerful than usual, and Rosetta was careful not to chip that gem of happiness. For whatever reason, acknowledging the fact that Rosetta could and would provide for her family was something that did not sit well in Rachel's stomach. "Anyway."

  "Yeah," Rachel murmured, managing a smile. "Daddy says he's proud of you. Says he can't believe he raised an engineer."

  Rosetta straightened her shoulders and set her jaw. Did she look like she needed encouraging today? Was her resolve of cool-headedness cracking? Shoving her anxieties down before they could finish clawing up her throat, she smiled back. "Dad said all that?" Her tone was almost sympathetic, but not intentionally. It was just impossible to ignore that Rachel was fibbing. Their father never said things like that. He was far too quiet. Rosetta theorized that that was the case because his thoughts were far too loud these days. "He must've been having a good day."

  "He was," Rachel nodded. "Yeah, he was."

  "Rachel," Rosetta said, carefully bridging the gap between herself and the petite chickadee of a girl singing sweet falsities from behind the counter. "How's he doing? Really?"

  Rachel's eyes grew very sad. Pain creased her forehead. "Better, I think. At least a little. But with the anniversary being next week and all..." She let out a shaky breath. "But he really said—well, he didn't say all that. But he said he was proud. Honestly, he did!"

  Rosetta felt her heart wrench at her sister's crestfallen expression. "I know. I know." She scrambled uncoordinatedly around the back of the counter, rushing toward Rachel to pull her in for a hug. The smaller woman felt almost like a child as she leaned against Rosetta's nearly six-foot frame. Rosetta's fingers found their way into Rachel's hair, gently stroking it like she had so often when they were both small children with sun-kissed faces and unblemished memories. Even then Rachel had been like a little bird, always twittering on about how lovely the flowers were. How lovely they would look in her hair. How lovely they always looked when tucked into their mother's auburn bun.

  "He misses her," Rachel sniffled when they broke apart.

  "We all do, Sweetheart," Rosetta said. But we don't give up. We don't watch our loved ones burn to ashes while their world collapses. Rosetta did not hate her father. She did not blame him, really. She could not. It would hurt so much worse to hate him. Still, to see him vacant, silent, and cold all the time was infuriating for reasons that Rosetta could not place.

  "He does the most, though," Rachel was so very nearly Rosetta's opposite that it was appalling; her tender heart spoke out much more than Rosetta's ever did. Rosetta clung to facts and figures. Numbers were her comfort. The only words she spoke were from the calculated reserves of social conduct in her mind. "He must."

  "Yeah, he must,” Rosetta repeated.

  The bell on the door jingled merrily, signaling their first customer of the day. Rosetta steeled herself for it all: The small talk with customers, the feigned smiles that she knew must look real, the pleasant nature she dragged up from somewhere within herself to muddle through the world of the already-successful. It was strange to be a hairdresser when she herself could not spare the money to afford one, just as she was certain it was strange for Rachel to work with makeup when her own face was always bare of the stuff, save on holidays. They were both struggling to stay afloat, grasping the pennies of the rich to keep from drowning in the turmoil of poverty they had experienced.

  Working whenever she was not at school was little more than a constant reminder of that dark time for Rosetta. The day dragged on, feeling just as slow as the weeks of uncertainty and fear had back in her last few years of high school.

  Rosetta was proud of the parlor. She was proud of herself for founding it. She was proud of Rachel for keeping the business going mellifluously, day in and day out, week after week. But she was not proud of the work itself. It was an improvement to what unpleasant work lurked in the past, certainly, but Rosetta knew it could vanish in an instant if the rich and the far-from-frugal moved away, took their business elsewhere, or, heaven forbid, passed away. If one rent payment was late: if they were robbed just one time, or if a tornado blew all of her imagined stability to smithereens, it could all be over, could simply end. The idea scared Rosetta to death. The word 'end' chilled her blood, because it could sneak up at any time and prevent a story's happy ending or the marriage of two people who once loved each other. Or even create one empty seat at an empty girl's graduation.

  Thus, she smiled. She walked with her head held high. She functioned like any good little machine, because what was the alternative? Two words I know too well, Rosetta thought. The end.