Undone

  Nothing had changed.

  I wasn’t sure how Taylor Barclay knew to send us here. Sure he was some high-up Interverse agent who was policing the universes, but I hadn’t expected him to deliver us right to my doorstep. The how and the why didn’t matter, though. I didn’t care.

  My parents were inside, sleeping in that house right now.

  I pulled away from Eli and jogged up the driveway. As I reached the front door, I paused.

  “What are you waiting for?” Eli said when he caught up. He reached out to knock.

  I grabbed his hand. “We need to remember this moment,” I said. We’d waited for this moment forever, and now we were finally here. But not all of us. Reid wasn’t here, and no matter what he had done or how it had ended, he had been part of this. Janelle and Alex had been a part of it too. We wouldn’t have gotten here without them.

  Even though it might have seemed ridiculous, we needed to pause and memorize these details. I wanted to be able to tell Janelle about all of it. She loved me enough to know I needed this moment, and I wasn’t going to lose that. Our good-bye wasn’t forever. We would find a way back to one another. I knew that as much as I knew anything. We were both still alive. Just in different places.

  I thought about Alex and Reid.

  “Reid’s parents,” I said. I wanted to be able to tell them what this moment was like too.

  Eli knew what I was thinking. “We can’t tell them what he did.”

  I shook my head. We couldn’t. They deserved to remember him better than that. We could tell them this, though. We could tell them that the night was silent, the darkness almost heavy, as if the whole world was asleep. The only sounds were our own excited breaths.

  I knocked on the door.

  It wasn’t like in a movie. A light never flicked on. I didn’t know when she was coming. I had to keep knocking, and I had to knock hard, until my knuckles felt numb because of it.

  Finally, after what seemed like minutes, I heard the locks click on the other side of the door.

  A woman in a gray long-sleeved shirt and checkered blue-and-white pajama pants stood behind it. She was tall, her hair cut short around her head.

  My mother.

  Over seven years. Twenty-six hundred and thirty-seven days. That’s how long it had been. All of that time had added up to just one single wish: that I would get back to her, that I would see her again. I’d envisioned what she would say to me, what I would say to her.

  In the end I didn’t need to say anything. She glanced at Eli and then back to me. Her mouth parted, her eyes widened, and she gasped.

  I opened my mouth to explain, but she reached through the door and touched my face, as if she wasn’t quite sure I was real. Then she started to cry.

  I moved in, circling my arms around her, pulling her to my chest. She was smaller and thinner than I remembered. Her skin was soft and papery, and my chest contracted. Those seven years had been long for her.

  When she pulled back to look at my face again, she shook her head.

  I smiled. “I’m home.”

  I held her until she’d calmed down, then the three of us went inside.

  My mother held my arm, leading me, and she turned on the lights as we moved through the house. “The portal,” she said. “We figured out that you went through. We looked for you. We did everything we could to try to get you back. . . .”

  “I know,” I said, squeezing her hand.

  She gasped when she looked down and saw mine were stained with blood.

  “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I tried to save someone who was hurt.” The blood as it washed over Janelle’s and my hands, warm and thick. The image made me shiver.

  Eli and I took turns washing our hands.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked as she stood in the kitchen by the sink. Under the lights I could see the lines around her eyes. She looked older than I thought she would.

  I shook my head.

  “How . . . ,” she started. “How did you . . .”

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. I wanted to tell them everything. We could sit in the den and drink hot chocolate. I would tell the story. It would be like every Friday night when I was a kid and we talked about the best and worst things that had happened in our week.

  She didn’t answer me, though. Not right away. She moved into the den, turned on a floor lamp to its lowest setting, and then turned around. Her face was even, too even, like she was trying to keep her emotions safely guarded. “He’s not here.”

  I heard her, but she sounded strange. There was an emptiness to her voice, like it was something she had said a lot. She wasn’t just saying he was out or that he was away on a trip. She was saying he didn’t live here. She sat down in an armchair.

  I held my breath and waited for her to say something. For the first time it occurred to me to think about them in a different context. What if they hadn’t been sitting around waiting for me to come back? What if something else had happened? What if my father had died?

  I looked around the room. It was the same beige carpet, the same comfortable brown suede couches, the same cream-colored walls. They were decorated with a few paintings that I didn’t remember, but that wasn’t the only thing that made the house seem different. It took me a second to put my finger on it. Things looked the same, but . . . shabbier. The carpet was worn, fraying at the edges, like it wasn’t nailed down properly. The couches were sunken in and droopy, the walls were scuffed, and some of the edges looked like they were yellowing. No one had taken care of this house. Not with the same love and pride we had taken care of it when I was a kid.

  Something was wrong. Very wrong. I sat down on the couch, just a foot from the chair. Eli stood next to me.

  “Is he . . .”

  I couldn’t bear to finish.

  “We’ll call him,” my mother said. Her voice was even, but she was wringing her hands. “I’ll have to make a few calls, though. His number isn’t listed.”

  I looked at my mother and couldn’t find the words.

  “We haven’t spoken in a while.” She frowned and looked away from me. I could tell she was understating, that “a while” meant “years.”

  “What happened?” Eli asked, and for once I felt grateful that he wasn’t the type of person to just dance around the issue. It didn’t matter if my mom looked small and fragile. He could still ask the hard questions.

  “Your father and I got an annulment,” my mother said.

  At first I couldn’t speak. I didn’t think of my mom and dad separately. I thought of them as a unit, as my parents. How could they be apart?

  “When?” I asked, because the real issue was how this happened and whether I could fix it.

  She dropped her eyes, and pain ripped through my chest. They weren’t together anymore because of me.

  “Derek?” I asked, even though I wasn’t quite sure what I was asking.

  My mother looked up and smiled. “He has an apartment closer to the city.” She glanced at her watch. “He’ll be asleep but we can call him.”

  Eli shifted his weight.

  I turned to my mom. “Is the phone still in the kitchen? Eli needs to call his dad.”

  She shook her head, and for a second I wondered why she would have moved the phone. Then I saw that she was biting her lip, and I realized something was worse.

  Eli seemed to recognize it too, because he sat down next to me. I reached over, touching her hands, forcing her to settle them in her lap. “I’m home now,” I said. I squeezed her hand.

  Tears rolled down her face. I wanted them to be happy tears, but the way her shoulders quivered and she refused to look at me, I knew they weren’t.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” I added. Because wasn’t that what we all needed to hear? That I would just finally get home and everything would be okay. For seven years I’d thought my biggest problem was that I was missing. I just needed to get home and everything would be the same as it was. This was the first time I realized that maybe
just being back wouldn’t actually fix anything.

  My mom offered me a weak smile. Then she looked at Eli. “A lot of things have changed.”

  From the way she said it, I knew the changes hadn’t been good.

  It was my brother who told us what those changes were.

  My mother stalled by making us tea and insisting we tell her what had happened to us. We sat on the couch and told her how we had opened the first portal and fallen through. I told her about the ocean and Janelle pulling me out. I left out the details of foster care and school, focusing on all the time we spent trying to re-create the machine.

  For some reason I couldn’t tell her about opening the portals ourselves. Maybe it was because she was so dodgy with my questions, or maybe it was how small she looked when she curled herself into the corner of the couch, her long, thin fingers around her cup of tea. I had wanted to tell my family everything: the good, the bad, the ugly. I wanted them to know it all.

  Now, though, sitting across from her, I wasn’t sure she would be able to handle everything we’d been through.

  Instead I told her I’d fallen in love.

  “That fucking girl,” Eli said.

  I punched him in the arm.

  I rambled about Janelle, telling my mother about her family, her friends, her brother. I even told her about how I’d taken her to Sunset Cliffs to watch the sunset.

  Finally Eli had heard enough and we called Derek.

  He was there within minutes. He left his car running in the driveway. He didn’t knock. He threw the door open and ran through the house. Before I had the chance to register him, he tackled me to the ground with a hug.

  “What happened to Reid?” Derek asked as soon as my mother had gone up to bed.

  I didn’t answer. I had forgotten how much Derek looked like me. It was a little like seeing myself in a broken mirror. We were so similar. He was a little taller, and maybe a little thinner, at least in the face. He was also a little more put together. His clothes weren’t wrinkled, and his hair was cut close to his head, but we had been growing into the same man.

  No wonder my mother had recognized me so easily.

  But I still didn’t know how to explain.

  “I know something happened,” Derek said. “Because he isn’t here, and the two of you have been trying really hard not to talk about him.”

  How could I explain that I had just started to figure it out? I was standing in the middle of that stupid empty house in Park Village in a world that wasn’t mine, yet the girl I was in love with was leaning against the wall off to the side. Her best friend was standing eerily quiet and hugging that backpack, while Eli sat across from me in that old patio furniture we’d pulled out of the community Dumpster. I was explaining that not only were we right about the multiverse theory, we were right about there being an infinite number of worlds out there. So many of them that there was an Interverse Agency, a group of military-style cops policing all the different universes, keeping track of the traffic between them. And when I put the pieces together, I was pretty sure that Reid was breaking those laws and was killing people.

  How could I explain that to my brother?

  I looked at him but I didn’t have the words, and what had happened only hours ago had already flooded my mind.

  He had looked so guilty. Reid, standing in the doorway. He had looked at Eli and me first. Then he saw Janelle and Alex. As soon as he bolted out the door, I knew Alex was right, that it was Reid opening the portals. That it was Reid pulling the worlds closer to Wave Function Collapse. But I didn’t have time to think about that, because Janelle’s reaction was much quicker than mine. She went after him before I realized what was happening. If Reid was opening portals, he knew he was killing more people. Who knew what he was capable of doing in the name of getting home?

  I took off after them. The sun had gone down, but it was easy to tell what direction they’d gone. The canyon was quiet except for the chase. I called out to Janelle as I ran. Eli was only a few steps behind me, calling out to Reid.

  When we caught up to them, Janelle had Reid on the ground. She pulled back and punched him in the face. “Did you do it?” she screamed.

  I reached in and grabbed her by the arms. She struggled, but I pulled her back.

  “Stay there,” I said to him. The last thing we needed was to be running around in the dark in the middle of another earthquake.

  Reid’s eyes met mine. I saw the answer in them, but I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted so badly for him to say no. To laugh it off, to tell me to go screw myself. He didn’t say anything.

  Janelle shouted again. “Did you?” She struggled in my arms.

  I turned her to face me, bracing her against my body. “Janelle, stop.”

  Suddenly she stopped. Her brown eyes flicked to me. They looked wide with fear and uncertainty, and I wished that I could do something to take back the things that had happened to her, that I could somehow erase all of the things I had brought into her life.

  She’d lost so much because of me. Her life, her home, any normalcy this world had offered her. And her father.

  I let go of her and turned on Reid. “Did you?” My voice was hard.

  Reid stared at me. I couldn’t believe that he had done this, that he had been so stupid. We’d known each other since we were babies. We’d gone to preschool together, and learned to play soccer and baseball together, and grown up together in this strange world. But now it was like I didn’t know who he was. Opening portals, putting us all at risk, killing people. “Did you kill her dad?” I said.

  “It was an accident!” Reid said, his eyes changing as he looked from me to Eli.

  Despite the dark, I watched the world move through Janelle’s face. The wind brushed back her hair; sadness washed over her face. I was pretty sure she felt exactly what she had when she first found out her dad was dead. Then her jaw set, and I saw the anger come through.

  I wondered if this would change her, or if she’d hold on to it forever.

  And my heart broke for her.

  “Reid . . .” I started, but there were too many ways for that sentence to go.

  “Reid didn’t make it,” Eli said.

  I didn’t know what Derek saw when he looked at us, but he nodded and let it go. “You want a beer?” he said. He didn’t wait for an answer, so we followed him into the kitchen.

  “I shouldn’t,” I said when he offered me one.

  “Don’t be such a bitch,” Eli said, reaching for the beer. It was a can I didn’t remember. It was blue and yellow with the shape of a dolphin on it.

  “It’s pretty watered down,” Derek said. “But it’s what Dad drank when we were kids, remember?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want it. For some reason it was less that I was underage and more that I didn’t want to drink something that I had forgotten.

  Derek sat down at the kitchen table. “She didn’t tell you anything, did she?”

  I shook my head.

  He looked at Eli and then back at me. “You’re going to want to sit down for this.”

  When you went missing,” Derek said, “everything changed, man. Ian came running up from the basement screaming about how the three of you had just vanished. At first we thought he was crazy or that you were playing some kind of prank, but . . .”

  “Then you realized it was true,” Eli said.

  Derek nodded. “Somehow Mom and Mr. Suitor figured out what happened. Dad took me back to our house. He told me Mom would fix it. But she never came home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Derek bit the skin around his thumbnail and didn’t answer. Then he looked at Eli. “You gotta understand that the prime minister’s son going missing like that, no one could stop talking about it. Every conspiracy theorist in the republic had a hypothesis and a suspect. Your dad, man, he just lost it. Mom and Mr. Suitor called him to explain what happened, and he showed up with half the military and took the Suitors and my mom in for questioning. The next
day they came for my dad. The military questioned them; everyone was looking for you. All everyone talked about was what had happened to you guys. But it went too far. Everyone at that party . . . all the adults were brought in, and they weren’t allowed to come home until the three of you were found.”

  “For how long?” I said. Clearly they were home now.

  “I spent two years in a group home before Mom and Dad got out,” he said. “I don’t know what they did to them in there, but nothing was the same. They tried to recover. We all moved back into the house, but they couldn’t even look at each other, so they got the annulment.”

  “Shit,” Eli said.

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “I should have been more careful. I never meant to fall in.”

  Derek shrugged. “It’s no one’s fault. I just need you to know that part first.”

  I braced myself.

  “Both of the Suitors were executed,” Derek said. “Publicly.”

  I couldn’t move. The breath I didn’t release burned my lungs. Reid’s parents were both dead. Maybe in some screwed-up way that was a blessing. They were all together now, even if he hadn’t made it home.

  “Who executed them?” Eli asked.

  Derek looked away. “Your dad. He executed a lot of people,” he said. His voice was quiet, his face strained, like he didn’t want to tell us what was next. “It was bad. He started throwing people in jail and he held them without cause. If someone looked the wrong way at someone else, he pulled them in for questioning about what happened to you. It didn’t matter what kind of alibi they had. Everyone was a suspect.”

  “But it was an accident.”

  Derek shook his head. “He set nationwide curfews and lined the streets with military. People who protested were shot.”

  “He always had the worst fucking temper, but this . . . I knew he’d look for us,” Eli said. “How did it end?”

  “People started talking about how to get rid of him. Rebellions broke out . . . and he was assassinated.”

  My brother didn’t mince words.

  Silence settled in between us. Both Derek and I looked at Eli, while he just stared into empty space.