The Love That Split the World

  “But he died,” I protested.

  “It’s a condition of living,” she said. “Besides, judging a story by the ending alone, or a life by its death alone, is as pointless as judging a long hike through the mountains by the fact that when you get back to where you parked your car, there’s a pit toilet full of you-know-what and beer cans.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Why not stay out in the woods forever?”

  “Because,” she said. “You need that car to get to the next hike. I want you to understand something, Natalie. No matter how hard it feels, you don’t need to be afraid to move on, and you don’t need to be afraid to stay either. There’s always more to see and feel.”

  “You really think so?” I said.

  “I know so.”

  13

  Alice closes her notebook thirty minutes early, while I’m mid-sentence. “You’re not stressed, Natalie. You’re sad. I can’t do anything for you if you’re sad.”

  “It’s a little bit hard to control that,” I reply edgily. It’s been a week since Megan left. The Wrong Things have all but vanished. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve barely left my house in the past three days.

  “It shouldn’t be. Stress starts to overshadow, transform sadness when you’re overcommitting your time, keeping yourself awake all night, spending time with people when you need to rest and be alone.”

  “You’re the worst therapist in the world.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m a research psychologist, not a therapist. Look, I’m starting to see some threads forming in your history, and I agree with what your last doctor said—there’s some other trauma there, something you haven’t worked through. All of your behaviors, your decisions and habits suggest so.”

  “What behaviors—?”

  “The fact that you can’t pinpoint a new aspect of the memory,” she cuts me off, “or recall any other event indicates that either you’ve suppressed the memory or it’s something that seemed really mundane to you at the time. I once read a case about a girl who was abandoned by her father, who went through EMDR and recovered a memory of opening the mailbox on her birthday. It wasn’t her parents’ fights or the memory of the day he walked out. It was the absence of a stupid birthday card. We’ve got to find your missing birthday card.”

  “What if I don’t have one?”

  “You do,” she says. “I feel it. I’m going to start bringing in a colleague to do hypnotherapy on Thursdays. We’ll keep having our normal one-on-one Tuesday sessions. Meanwhile, you need to push yourself. Do things that make you uncomfortable; overextend yourself. In the long run it’ll be good for you, and in the short run it will overrun you.”

  Mom gets back from a run looking like a Nike advertisement, dressed in her sleek pink and gray workout clothes and only dewy and bright with sweat. “Hey, honey,” she says, ruffling my hair from behind the couch. She takes a long swig from her matching pink water bottle then comes to sit beside me. “Everything okay?”

  The tone of her voice tells me she knows it’s not. “Yep,” I lie.

  She nods, her eyes intense on mine. “It must feel really weird around here with Megan gone, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I want to be in my room, waiting for Megan to get done with practice so I can call, but thanks to Alice, I’m down here instead.

  Mom puts her arm around me and squeezes me. “College goes by so fast,” she says. “I honestly felt like I blinked, and it was over. These are going to be some of the best years of your life, and when they’re done, you can go anywhere, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we go see a movie tonight?”

  The thought of going somewhere I’d likely run into classmates makes me feel sick and anxious. I don’t know who knows about Matt and Rachel, but I’d bet money the answer is everyone, which of course makes me feel embarrassed. And angry. It makes it look like he rejected me, completely hides the fact that he practically forced himself on me then ran off to hook up with Rachel for revenge.

  “A movie sounds fun,” I tell Mom.

  “Really? You don’t have to,” she says hesitantly. “If you already have plans. I would just love to spend some time with my girl.”

  “No, no plans,” I say, as if she didn’t already know.

  “Great! I’ll just take a quick shower and then we can go.” She kisses the side of my head and walks off.

  An hour later, we’re heading over to the theater. Following Alice’s orders, I chose the movie that looks the most disturbing: a drama about a girl who was kidnapped and forced into the sex trade for ten years, until she manages to escape.

  “Are you sure about this one?” Mom says, trying and failing to not look horrified. “This kind of thing usually upsets you, doesn’t it?”

  “It has a happy ending, I think,” I say.

  Mom pays for the tickets and we go into the theater. “Let’s use the bathroom first,” she says. She’ll have to go again in the middle of the movie regardless. It’s the Davidson family curse, apparently, which she inherited from her father. I wouldn’t know what that’s like since I don’t have any Davidson blood. I could probably hold my bladder if a tornado picked me up.

  I pee anyway and wash my hands, waiting a minute in the bathroom for Mom to come out. “I’ll meet you in the lobby, okay?” I say finally. When she doesn’t answer, I bend over to look under the stall but her feet aren’t in there. “Mom?” I’m alone in the bathroom. She must’ve already slipped out.

  I turn and push through the door, immediately colliding with someone in the lobby. I stumble backward, apologizing, until I see who it is. All the blood drains from my face. “Matt.”

  He looks confused, glancing almost impatiently between me and the ticket-taker. “I’m so sorry,” he says, clasping his hands in front of his chest. “We’ve met before, haven’t we? I’m horrible with names.”

  “Are you serious?” I say, fuming.

  His gaze cuts across the lobby again. “I’m really sorry. My girlfriend’s waiting for me inside. It was great to run into you.”

  Girlfriend.

  He jogs toward the bright red podium and stretch of velvet ropes leading to the theaters, and I’m left staring at his back, my whole body on fire yet tingling with chills. On the one hand, I can’t believe I ever loved him, someone capable of convincingly pretending I’m a complete stranger to him. On the other, I’m legitimately freaked out. Matt’s familiar blue eyes looked blank—no recognition behind them at all—as if really and truly his brain had erased me from its archives. This has “bad dream” written so vehemently all over it that I open and close my eyes hard a few times, hoping I’ll wake up in my bed.

  “Ready?”

  I turn to find Mom emerging from the bathroom, and more chills rush down my arms.

  “Where’d you go?” I ask, biting back the remnants of angry tears.

  “I was in the bathroom,” she says. She grabs my chin. “Honey, what happened? Are you okay?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “I just ran into Matt. He has a new girlfriend.” It’s an easier explanation than the whole truth.

  “Oh, baby.” She pulls me into her arms, and we stand there until a woman approaches the bathroom and we realize we’re blocking the way. We step aside and head into the concessions line. “We don’t have to stay,” Mom says. “If you want to go home, that’s fine.”

  I shake my head. “I need a distraction.”

  She nods. “Okay. But if you change your mind, just say the word.”

  We pay for our popcorn and head into our movie. Within five minutes, I know I’ve made a horrible mistake. This movie’s the most upsetting thing I’ve ever seen, and there’s no escaping it. My insides are in alarming turmoil, and I’m fairly sure I’m going to have diarrhea for days. I close my eyes and shut out the sounds.

  But when I steer m
y mind away from the awful plot unfolding in front of me, another gruesome image resurfaces with a vengeance. I think of the boy I fell in love with as we sat on a hillside, swarmed in fireflies, and of how, on the night I broke his heart years later, he promised he could never hate me. Then I think of the guy who just treated me like a stranger. I think of the two different Matts my mind can’t reconcile, and then I think of a story Grandmother told me.

  “This is the story of Brother Black and Brother Red,” Grandmother said. “There once was a brother and sister who lived in a lodge deep in a forest. They rarely saw any visitors. The brother was different from other people, in that one half of him was red and one half of him was black.

  “One day, he went away to hunt, but no sooner had he left than his sister saw him coming back down the path toward their lodge. ‘I thought you went to hunt,’ she said, following him inside.

  “‘I changed my mind,’ he told her and went to sit by her on the bed. He seemed different to her, and when he tried to embrace her, she became afraid and fought him off.

  “‘Why do you act as my husband when you are my brother?’ she said angrily, but again he tried to hold her as a lover, and she fought him off again, and this time he left.

  “The next day the brother returned home, but his sister would not speak to him, though usually they spent many hours talking. ‘My sister,’ the brother said, ‘Why do you treat me as one hated? What have I done to deserve such a change in your love toward me?’

  “‘You know what you’ve done,’ the sister answered. ‘You harmed me and broke our bond.’ But the brother insisted he didn’t know what she was talking about, so the sister told him plainly, ‘Yesterday you embraced me as a lover, and today I can’t look at you.’

  “‘My precious sister,’ the brother said, ‘I was not here yesterday. I was hunting. You must have met my friend, who looks like me in every way.’ The sister was angry that her brother had given such an outlandish excuse. ‘Do not treat me in that way again,’ she said, and for many days he seemed to be his old self.

  “Finally the brother went away to hunt again, and as before, the sister saw someone who looked just like her brother and wore his clothes, hiding in the brush near their home. He followed her back inside, and this time when he tried to hold her, she tore at his face with her nails until he fled.

  “Three days passed and her brother returned again with a deer he had hunted. Again she refused to speak to him, and again he spoke gently to her, saying, ‘Sister, you’re very angry with me. Has my friend been here again?’

  “She did not answer him, but he repeated the question, and she broke down and wept. ‘How could you attack me again, when I had come to trust you? I see my nail marks on your face. I know it was you, brother.’

  “But the brother denied it. ‘My face was scratched by thorns as I hunted,’ he told her, ‘but if you scratched my friend, that is why my face is scratched—whatever happens to one of us then happens to the other.’ But she didn’t believe him. She avoided him as much as possible until he left again to hunt, and this time when he returned and attacked her, she tore his hunting shirt from his throat to his belly button and threw hot grease on his stomach, burning him and causing him to flee.

  “As before, her brother returned, and as before he denied having been there though his shirt was torn and his stomach was burned just as his sister remembered it. ‘I tore my shirt while climbing a tree, and I burned myself while cooking the meat I hunted,’ he tried to tell her, but she would not believe him, and he saw what had to be done. ‘Sister, I will find my double and bring him here to prove to you it was not me who hurt you, and for what he’s done to you, I’ll kill him, though it may kill me too. That is how important it is to me that you know my heart and my brotherly love for you.’

  “The sister did not believe him, and the brother left to find his double. He wasn’t gone long in the woods before he returned, dragging with him a man who looked exactly like him and whose clothes were torn in just the same way. ‘You’ve betrayed me by hurting my sister,’ the brother said to his double, ‘and now you must die.’ He lifted his bow and arrow and shot his double through the heart. The sister looked on as blood poured from the identical man’s chest and he slumped to his knees. Then she heard a second noise behind her—a battle cry—and when she turned, she saw her brother fall, an identical wound over his heart, blood spreading out through his shirt.

  “The sister knew then she was safe, but her heart was broken.”

  The story had upset me when I first heard it, but now it takes on a whole new meaning. I’m sure Grandmother knew what was going to happen today, how Matt’s feelings toward me would change so violently that he’d seem like a different person, one who saw me as a stranger. She had to have—why else would she have told me that story? And how many of her other stories contain hidden warnings too?

  When Mom and I get home from the movie, I go to my room and record the story of Brother Black and Brother Red for Alice. I’m in the middle of it when someone knocks on my door.

  “Yeah,” I answer, and Coco pokes her strawberry blond head in the door, looking worried.

  “Can I come in?”

  I sit up and pat the bed. “What’s going on?”

  She perches on the edge of the mattress and crosses her legs. She looks more and more like Mom every day, and while not on the school’s dance team, she takes ballet and jazz, and she definitely inherited Mom’s dignified grace. “Mom told me about the movies. That Matt has a girlfriend?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”

  “So weird—I’ve heard nothing about it.” Her pretty, deep blue eyes come up to mine. “Is it Rachel Hanson?”

  I avoid her gaze, pulling a stray thread in my quilt. “I don’t know.”

  Coco twirls her loose waves around her finger. “Abby told me what happened at Matt’s birthday—that they hooked up. I thought Matt was better than that. I definitely didn’t think they’d date.”

  Of course Coco knows. “Matt and I were broken up,” I say. “I told him I didn’t want to date him. He’s free to be with anyone he likes.”

  “Still,” Coco says. “Rachel? You guys are, like, friends. Or at least in the same friend group. And I know you were upset. Everyone’s talking about how you snuck away from the party after.”

  Ouch. So she hasn’t mastered Mom’s sensitivity training yet, but at least I know she cares. “Believe it or not, that was about something else. Or at least, it wasn’t just about him and Rachel. There was more to it.”

  She scrunches up her mouth in thought. “It’s okay to be mad at her. I would be.”

  “I’m not mad at her,” I insist, but I have no idea if I’m lying. “Rachel and I haven’t been close in a long time. It’d be weird if I expected her to choose me over Matt.”

  Coco rolls her eyes. “Whatever. She used to come over all the time. Girl code stands.”

  The strange thing is, that sounds like something Rachel would’ve said a couple of years ago. She’s always been tough and blunt—the type of teammate who wouldn’t hesitate to tell you you “sucked” at turns in second, or leapt like a grandma in need of a hip replacement—but she also has this enviably commanding confidence and fierce loyalty to her few select friends.

  When Matt and I first broke up and Kara Van Vleck expressed interest in dating him, Rachel told Matt that Kara was being treated for a contagious flesh-eating bacteria. It was a completely appalling thing to do to Kara, and I doubt Matt believed it, but that was the sort of messed-up way Rachel showed love, even after she’d been so pissed at me for quitting dance, accusing me of being too good for anything other than the Ivy League. When I found out she was the source of that particular rumor, I’d felt a similar pain to the one I felt the night I broke up with Matt: like I’d realized how much I’d always love someone at the same moment I realized that person and I might never fit together again.
>
  Maybe that’s why I’m not mad at Rachel. Because Rachel can’t help but make it known when she’s trying to hurt you, just like she makes it known when she cares about you. The look on her face, in that horrible moment at Matt’s house, told me she was horrified that I had walked in, upset that I had seen them together, distressed that she’d been caught with Matt Kincaid. She hadn’t meant to hurt me, but that almost hurt worse. Rachel, it seemed, still had the inclination to protect me. Matt did not.

  “I don’t know what Rachel and I are anymore,” I tell Coco, “but we’re not enemies.”

  Coco nods silently for a few seconds, then stands. “Anyway, I wanted you to know I’m on your side. About the whole Matt thing.”

  “Thanks.” I manage a weak smile, and she turns to go. “Hey, Coco?”

  “Yeah?”

  I’m not sure how to say this without it getting back to Mom and her putting the pieces together, which I don’t feel ready for, but I want Coco to hear it. “Sometimes you change your mind about a person,” I tell her. “Or your feelings for them change, or they change, or, I don’t know, you just want to make a different decision. And that’s always okay. You don’t owe anyone anything. You know that, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  “I mean, like with Matt. I wanted to date him, and then I didn’t want to anymore, and some people made me feel guilty for that. As if he just deserved whatever he wanted, and I was being selfish for not giving it to him.”

  “Are you talking about sex?” she asks matter-of-factly.

  “No,” I say. “Yes. Kind of. I’m talking about everything: dating, kissing, sex. All of it. You never owe another person something, no matter how nice they are to you. Relationships aren’t transactions.”

  “Mom already covered all this,” she says, “in the grossest, most uncomfortable way you could imagine. I thought I was prepared for it, but you honestly can’t imagine how bad it was.”

  “Oh, trust me,” I say. “I can. I got that talk immediately after my first date with Matt.”