The Love That Split the World

  “Well, it’s a small town,” I say. “How hard could it be?” A little voice in my head points out that I’d never seen Beau until a week ago.

  “I’ll find you,” he says.

  “I hope so.” I turn to go, chest fluttering and abdomen incongruently cramping inward from the run.

  When I get back to the parking lot, it’s still empty, but as I’m standing there, there’s a flicker of color and form across the asphalt as the cars—mine included—appear for the breadth of a blink. I stand there watching until it happens once more, this time for three whole seconds. That seems like a good sign, so I go inside. As far as I can tell, the school’s still empty, but after my conversation with Beau nothing feels as eerie as it did before my run, and I’m not as anxious either. Perhaps misguidedly, I’m totally confident the world will go back to normal soon, just like it has all week. So I go down to the locker rooms and rinse off as quickly as possible before I head back up to the library, crossing my fingers that I can get in without any trouble.

  When I get there, it’s the same as I left it: void of everything except bookshelves and one lone sleeping bag and duffel. The clock on the wall reads 6:01, and, because I have no clue what else to do, I get in my sleeping bag and lie back down, watching and waiting for the world to right itself.

  Next thing I know, someone is shaking me awake. My eyes pop open onto a pair of round blue ones, framed with sheets of straight blond hair. “Good news or bad news first?” Megan says.

  “Bad news,” I croak.

  “Okay, well, that’s the wrong order, and the good news is: I know you very well, and I didn’t even bother trying to get you up to go running with me this morning, so you’re welcome.”

  “Thanks,” I say, though my mind is still sorting through the fog of knowing that I absolutely did go running this morning.

  “The bad news is, you have to get up right now, because breakfast started ten minutes ago, and everything’s obviously super greasy and everyone’s obviously super hungover so it’s sort of a fly-to-bug-zapper situation.”

  “Rachel’s going to eat all my bacon,” I whine, running my hand over my face.

  “No one wants to see that happen. Please get up.”

  “I left,” I tell her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it happened again. First, the school disappeared and I was lying in a field. Then the school was back, but everyone else was gone, and I left. I went for a run, and I saw Beau down at the stadium.”

  “Oh my God. Natalie Cleary is dreaming about a boy who isn’t Matt Kincaid. I’m so happy I think might explode.”

  I shake my head. “It wasn’t a dream. Beau was one hundred percent real. And the other stuff, it was like the other times, like when I see Grandmother. I can’t really explain it.”

  “That’s so weird.” Megan sits down beside me. “So . . . did anything happen? With Beau, I mean.”

  “He invited me over.”

  “In what way?”

  “There are multiple ways someone can come over?”

  “So many ways,” Megan assures me.

  “Are these ways, like, the front door, the back door, the bedroom window, et cetera?”

  “Sometimes,” she says. “What was his energy like?”

  I bury my face in my hands because I know exactly what she means, and I know the answer, and I don’t want to tell her. “Please don’t make me say these words aloud.”

  She breaks into giggles and lies down beside me. “What does he look like?”

  “Well, his biceps are roughly the size of my head, and his eyes look like summer incarnate, and he has two little dark freckles on the side of his nose, and a mouth that somehow manages to look like a shy kid’s one minute and a virile Greek god’s the next. So I guess you could say, pretty decent.”

  “Oh my God,” Megan says. “I’m shaking I’m so giddy right now. I feel like this is happening to me. Where did he come from?”

  “No idea,” I say.

  “You’re going to make out with him,” she says knowingly.

  I roll over and bury my face in my pillow. “What if you just jinxed me?”

  “No way. I love you too much. My psychic energy is literally incapable of jinxing you. If anything, I’m willing you into this make-out.”

  “Hey, perhaps you’d like to react to the fact that an entire building and the many people within it vanished before my eyes too? Or no, not really of much interest to you?”

  “Of quite a bit of interest,” she says. “Slightly less interest than your incomparably soft and beautiful heart opening like a flower to Beau, but yes, I’m interested.” Her smile fades, and she squeezes my hand. “You know, I like to think of myself as somewhat of an expert on my best friend, but the truth is I have no idea how to help with all of this. So tell me, okay? Tell me what you need, and tell me every single time you need it, and I’ll be there.”

  I squeeze her hand back and swallow a lump. “You are the best person,” I tell her. “But I don’t know what I need either.”

  But by the time the last Spirit Week activity, the Seeing Off, is over, and we’ve walked through the halls saying goodbyes and giving out hugs to teachers and underclassmen, I’ve figured out the only thing I really can do.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Megan asks as we walk out to our cars. “I can make sure Dr. Chan knows you’re not crazy.”

  “Good thinking. I’ll just bring a friend to see a psychologist I don’t have an appointment with, and you can open with ‘She’s not crazy!’ So she’ll know I’m not crazy.”

  “I can wait in the car.”

  “No, you can wait at Steak ’n Shake with the soccer team, where I know you were planning on going before I sprung this on you.”

  She sighs. “Call me after the Cleary Family Celebration Dinner and let me know how things went?”

  “Sure. Or maybe, like, while I’m still on Dr. Chan’s couch. If she questions my sanity, I can demand we conference you in.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll put you on speaker with the soccer team. We can have them vote on whether they think you’re crazy.”

  “Perfect. Thank you.”

  We exchange a parting hug and climb into our cars. A few minutes later, I’m cruising on 275 East, a wide and rarely congested highway that winds out from the suburbs through a scrubby, rural valley occasionally punctuated by towns even slower and smaller than Union, pretty much until you get to the college. Though I’ve driven to NKU a couple of times for friends’ games and friends of friends’ parties, once I make it to campus, it takes me a while of aimlessly circling until I spot the psychology building: an enormous, gray-brown cement block with tiny windows grouped in twos that remind me of coin slots in an arcade game, and a faded red roof slanting up from the three narrow towers separating the two wings. The parking lot’s mostly empty, and I take a spot near the front and slip inside.

  The building is chilly, if out of date and poorly lit, and I find Dr. Chan’s name posted outside a yellowed wooden door at the end of a narrow corridor. The door is cracked open but I knock anyway.

  When I hear no reply, I push the door open, and it whines on its hinges. The little office is packed. A chocolate-brown desk and a whiteboard are wedged between two bookshelves, an office chair just barely squeezes in between the desk and the window beyond, which overlooks a long yellow lawn and a little blue pond. On my side of the desk, there’s another chair and a small couch, both of which are completely covered in stacks of stuffed filing folders and loose papers and books.

  “Can I help you?” someone says behind me, and I spin to find Dr. Chan in the doorway. She has a short, blunt bob and a dappling of freckles across her nose. Without makeup or the structured blazer from her portrait, she’s barely recognizable. She looks about twenty years younger than the austere middle-aged woman
I was expecting, and not quite old enough to be the person who holds the keys to unlocking Grandmother’s secrets.

  “God, I hope so.”

  Dr. Chan sits in the chair on my side of the desk, chewing the back of her pen, apparently deep in thought. The piles of displaced files surround her ankles like eager puppies; meanwhile my tailbone’s been balanced on one corner of the paper-strewn black sofa for the length of my life—with Grandmother—story.

  “Fascinating,” Dr. Chan says finally, leaning down to dig through a stack of notepads on the ground. She chooses one and flips to a clean page. “I’ve never heard of anyone having such long conversations with Them—the Others—before. And I’ve sure as hell never heard of a full-on scenery change.” She scribbles at the paper until the ink starts flowing.

  “So there are more than just the ones I’ve seen?” I stammer. “What are they? Ghosts?”

  She laughs and splays her hands out. “Oh God, we’re so far from knowing that.”

  “Well, have you seen any of them?” I ask. “Do you know Grandmother?”

  “No,” Dr. Chan replies. “But I saw Others, when I was a kid. The black orb you described? That’s very common for people like us, Natalie. I’ve been calling that orb ‘the Opening.’ I think that’s sort of what it is: the beginning of the encounters with the Others. I can call it whatever I want, because no one else wants to touch this kind of stuff. Not in my field, at least. Anyway, there’s the Opening, and then there’s what I call the Closing. The equal and opposite event.”

  “So it will stop?”

  She tips her head back and forth. “For me, yes. For you? No idea. The research is all so new. I hate to think how long I’ll be dead by the time anyone figures this stuff out. But . . . well, you’ve described some very unique things.” She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and drums her nail-bitten fingers against her mouth. “Okay, so typically people who have these encounters are sensitive types—they tend to be somewhere between INFJ and ENFJ.”

  “I’m not tracking,” I say.

  “They’re different personality types,” she explains. “The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator—have you taken it before? Do you know where you fall on the spectrum?”

  “My mom’s obsessed with that kind of stuff, and I try to avoid anything she might someday use to psychoanalyze me over breakfast.”

  She waves a hand flippantly. “The I stands for introvert, someone who gets energized by alone time. Its counterpart is E, extrovert, a person who gets energy from being around people. The N stands for intuition, meaning you take your cues from internal sensations or sudden knowledge rather than concrete, observable facts. The F, feeling, indicates people who tend to make decisions based on emotion rather than thought. It’s an important trait, but so is the J, which stands for judging. A person who’s judging prefers to know what to expect at all times, to work with a schedule or outline or checklist, to make plans ahead of time rather than going with the flow.

  “The combination of intuition, feeling, and judging creates people who are sensitive yet structured. They prefer boundaries and expectations, which is rarer for the intuitive, feeling type. It’s an odd mix of personality traits in and of itself, but then you throw in a little trauma, and bam! You’ve got someone with a disposition toward creative symbolic modes of thinking—e.g., vivid dreaming—and somewhat unique stress triggers and responses. Usually these responses manifest as nothing but brief flashes. Usually, but not with you. In other words, you’re super open, Natalie Cleary. You’re like the goddamn Florence Walmart on Black Friday.”

  “Open to what?” I say.

  “That’s the question you and I are going to try to answer. So this Grandmother person told you to come to me—any idea why?”

  “I was hoping you would know,” I say. “I figured maybe . . . she’d come to you too, that she knew you’d be able to help me bring her back. Can you?”

  “Probably not,” she says. “In fact, that last visit may have been your Closing.”

  “Then what about what happened at school and at the football stadium—when everyone disappeared?”

  She tilts her head back and forth again like she’s weighing a few internal arguments. “Okay, second theory: Your Closing happens in three months. Grandmother knows that something will happen, possibly within that time frame or possibly not, but you only have three months left to gather information and prepare.”

  “So you think she’s sending me these visions?” I shake my head. “Why not just tell me what’s going on?”

  “Who knows? But look at every single religion in this world: They leave room for visions and prophecies when, presumably, their deities could make things a hell of a lot easier.”

  “Listen, Dr. Chan,” I say. “I appreciate your theories, but I really think the best thing would be to get Grandmother back. She can explain everything.”

  She nods fervently. “Call me Alice, and believe me, I’d love to. So let’s think about this. You did EMDR. Tell me a little bit about that—what was the memory you used?”

  I feel suddenly naked, if not totally transparent, as I grudgingly launch into the story. “My birth mother showed up when I was three,” I tell her. “I was sitting on my mom’s bed while she was in the bathroom, drying her hair, and I heard the doorbell ring. I went downstairs and opened the door, and a woman leaned down and held her hand out to me.” The memory’s foggy, even now. I can’t even see my birth mother’s face, just a blur where it should be. “She asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I said yes. So we went down the sidewalk.”

  I remember asking, What’s your name?

  She smiled and said, You can always call me Ishki.

  Ishki. I whispered it once aloud. We didn’t talk any more; we just were. I wonder if some part of me understood who she was. If I knew even then, years before Grandmother came, years before I’d pore over the Internet for clues about my past and find that word associated with at least two different tribes, that ishki means mother.

  “According to the reports, we walked for twenty minutes. By the time I returned, after she pointed me back toward my house and got into her car a few blocks away, there was a swarm of police cars with flashing blue and red lights crowded in and around my driveway.” I was afraid—terrified, actually. “And when I ran down the street to meet my mom, she was crying.” I felt so ashamed, so utterly guilty for scaring her like that. She scooped me up and held me tight, whispering, Baby, baby, I was so scared she was going to take you.

  Before the therapy I hated to think about that memory. It made my stomach tense and my skin crawl. Whenever my mind wandered toward it, I distracted myself.

  Alice looks up from her furious scribbling. “So how did the process itself go?”

  “The therapist made me choose a negative self-belief, something that might explain why Grandmother had showed up.” I’m not wanted. I don’t belong. I didn’t bother telling Dr. Langdon I didn’t really believe those things. Counseling always went better if I nodded my head a lot. Back then, I’d thought she was a total hack. “Then she made me choose a positive self-belief to replace it with. She made me sit on the couch, and she sat across from me. She moved two fingers in front of my face, side to side, up and down. She said I didn’t need to understand it—I just needed to let my eyes follow her fingers all the way to my right peripheral, left peripheral, up and down, without moving my head.

  “While her fingers moved, she asked me questions. About the negative self-belief, the positive self-belief, other things like that. I answered her, repeated after her when she told me to”—feeling incredibly stupid the whole time—“and when she was done, she told me to go back to that memory, and feel it fully. Before we’d started, she’d asked me to score how anxious the memory made me feel. I’d said a seven out of ten. After the process, I said five.” I’d surprised myself. “Then she sat forward and repeated the process again. The fingers, the que
stions, the scoring. We did it three times, and when she asked me to go back to that memory the last time, I told her, honestly, I only felt about a one on the anxiety scale.”

  Recalling it now, it sounded like hocus-pocus. And yet, afterward, Grandmother, the man in the green jacket, all the flickers in my bedroom had been shut out for nearly three years. And, still, when I think about that memory—no anxiety. “I don’t know how, but it worked.”

  Alice’s eyes glitter with excitement. She leans forward, touching the back of her head. “There’s a part of the brain called the amygdala. It stores things that you’re unable to process—like trauma. Before we’re eight years old, our minds have very few cognitive processing skills. So everything we’re unable to work through at that young age gets stored up in the amygdala, as general associations or a roughly pieced-together idea of cause and effect—a warning for future events. When we dream, our eye movements signal to the amygdala that it’s time to work through that backlog.

  “Now, the emotions and sensations of an event are stored almost exactly as they were experienced. Strangely, the same chemicals that imprint them on the amygdala can actually impede the formation of memory in the hippocampus. You might have no conscious recollection of what happened, but that won’t stop it from messing with your brain. When those stored connections are triggered, you revert to the childlike mentality in which you first experienced them. That’s essentially what a panic attack is—the full experience of fear without the tools to reason through it.

  “EMDR allows you to access those connections while you’re awake. The eye movement triggers the amygdala, while the questions trigger the memory. It allows your adult self to have a conversation, of sorts, with your child self. You explain things to your child self so that the unhealthy thought pattern, or cause-effect association, can be corrected.”

  “But why that memory? I mean, nothing happened. I took a walk.”

  “The separation of an infant from a parent can be traumatizing, in and of itself, even if you continue receiving the appropriate love and care from a new relationship. During infancy, all we know are our biological mothers. They’re our entire world, our whole sense of stability.”