Chapter Text
There is a life waiting for you. It’s out there, custom made, given shape from a cast-iron mold and laser engraved with the declaration Rose Lalonde in a font that is just barely too small to read. It has been waiting for you since the moment you were born, every delicate branch shaped in precognition on the path you have been deposited on this Earth to take. Experience Childhood, Mature, Find Love, Acquire Success, Reach Fulfillment, it says, the bonsai tree of choices as illusory as it can be. The pruned branches on the ground may make fleeting change, may treat the delusion that every other human shares, may even ignite something inside you that could (theoretically) be a semblance of free will. You know better. This reality was not meant to house you. Choices are still made—like when you say you don’t want to share a room with Dave anymore, like when you spend weeks pouring over college selections—but they are perfunctory. You know you have the ability to see which path you will take, to open your eye and just look, and though you don’t the fact that you can has stolen any pleasure you might have gotten from something even as mundane as looking past your reflection in the vending machine. You can know, and somehow that is just as bad as knowing.
You go through life as best you can. Waiting. In some distant splinter, in a time you can’t fully touch, you swipe a page from another girl’s book and come to the very cliché existential conclusion that nothing is coming. You are not the special Rose Lalonde. You do not get to see beyond stars, you do not get to play the rain. The anchor of gravity weighs so heavily on you, you think your spine might snap with the effort. That other girl, the one you’re stealing your rather unfortunate character arc from, was also burdened with a great Knowing, but by God it couldn’t have hurt this much.
Physics shouldn’t hold you. You should be able to fly.
It is after great psychological interrogation of your own mind that you determine the only way you’ll avoid stymieing into depression is to follow the lead of every other human on this planet when they wake up one day and realize no stylishly dressed denizen will ever whisk them from their childhood bed and off to adventure: you keep your chin up. Live on day at a time. Hence, the life that is waiting.
You are a very successful author. You have a loving wife. You live together in a stylishly modern house that is a completely different flavor of stylishly modern house than your father’s, and the two of you have a cat. You age with the grace that is expected of your species.
But still. You dream at night. There are visions of still moments and hands placed in the smalls of backs, there are intertwined fingers you can’t make out. But more important than these glimpsed moments is the shape of the thing that they command. You know that it—the cavity that holds the memories—belongs to a person, but only tangentially, a mark in the dictionary that simply says see here for more information. The sense is powerful. Potent. Your vision does not know specifics, does not know the color of her eyes or the way her nose catches the light in profile. Instead there is the solid and unmistakable recognition of love. Of resoluteness. You miss something you never had because whatever you and her had to withstand, it did not make it to this universe.
Dave goes traveling abroad. The cat dies. You and your loving wife hold a funeral for it.
It makes no sense for you to long for her. A girl, a concept you have never met. There is no fate in love, there is no incompleteness to you as a person simply because in another time you had met someone and chose to commit. It would not follow for your other you, (the one who is a million thousand versions of a her teenage self) to pine for a woman on Earth because you, (the ragged and aged you) happened to marry her.
Your loving wife leaves you because you are too emotionally distant.
John wakes up when you try to move his head off your shoulder, all the orchestrated effort of the past six minutes down the drain. He yawns, his entire face going wide then contracting, the whole range of expression like an artist studying their face in a mirror.
When he sees the bit of drool he left on your blouse he says, “aw jeez Rose, I’m sorry. I guess I forgot we can’t really do all nighters anymore.”
“I was able to manage our ‘movies where an estranged cousin shows up and ruins everything’ marathon just fine, thank you very much,” you point out.
He grins, the remains of his boyish bucktooth’dness peaking through on his middle-aged face. “Wow. Guess you owned me at movie night. I’ll go grab the big gold trophy.”
You allow a pleasantly neutral smile to cross your features. You fail to mention that you spent the entire night with your back straight and your gaze locked unflinchingly at the poster-encrusted living room wall.
He gets up and makes you both breakfast, which is chocolate cereal and nothing to drink, the exact same as the past two mornings. Memories vanish from your mind like blown dandelions, time so stretched and grainy that you find yourself missing full hours. One moment, you finish your breakfast first, and the next thing you know you’re alone in the kitchen and staring down into a sink of unwashed cereal bowls. Archeologists will be able to date them back at least three weeks. You are wrist deep in hot water when John comes in.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says evasively. Or maybe it’s guilt. “I was going to get around to them eventually.”
“It wasn’t a problem,” you say. “I was already here.” This feels like a lie. You are implying there was some sort of conscious thought to it.
John gets ready for work while you pretend to look at something on your phone, listening as he lists places you guys could go tonight since he’s just such a horrible cook and he feels bad making you eat microwave chicken nuggets all the time. You nod noncommittally. He never asks how long you think you’ll be staying—knowing John, it probably hasn’t even crossed his mind as of yet. You’d probably have to stay a full month before the idea of not being a Perfect Host would even settle in that big wholesome brain of his, and even then he’d probably only ask if you wanted him to get you out an air mattress.
You should go home. You have a perfectly nice house to wait out your wretched mid-life crisis in, one with clean clothes and non-canned tea. At the very least you should have brought your laptop, but when you left your seaside cottage and began the two hour drive up the coast, you were in…quite a state.
“Bye Rose,” John says, shouldering his own laptop bag. “I’m working double shifts, so help yourself to whatever.”
And then he’s out the door. Your first day alone in the Egbert house, and you spend the hour after he leaves staring at that same spot on the living room wall.
You could go home, text John later and know he’ll be perfectly understanding. That’s the adult thing to do. But John’s house is so much closer to the fabric store and you’ve been meaning to pick up new yarn.
The excuses will run out eventually, but you occupy yourself by paying $3.86 for a bundle of malachite sheep’s fur you’ll never use.
As you pass by the rows of bolts, each one shining with color and promised softness, you reach out and feel the fabric between you fingers. It draws you to her, and you wonder if that means she liked to sew. You don’t let yourself draw the conclusion, though. You have no way of knowing what the tangential threads of association might mean, if the unique patterns were something she liked or something she did or some connection that present perspective won’t yet let you imagine. You’ve learned your lesson about conclusions, that you only look the fool when you try to grasp the images you can’t really see.
You used to think of her as The Madonna. It was summer, and your father took you to Florence, trying on “cool hats” while he escorted you and Dave around the walking streets as the petulant churn of family vacation rattled on. It was the least terrible of any trip he’d whisked you away to, actually. There was never a moment Dave’s camera parted from his eye, his glasses pushed into his hair for a greater length of time than the rest of his life combined, and you likewise found that the city spoke something to you. You found you loved the art, the smells, the way everything seemed ancient and ill thought out instead of strange falsified monuments for your benefit alone. The Ufizi drew you into her clutches. It showed you things. You were stood in front of the Madonna del Granduca when you were struck so hard with familiarity that you allowed the smallest cry of shock from you young lips. The other gallery attendees must have thought you were having a particularly divine revelation.
As you looked at the soft tones of her robe, the delicate way she held her child, you couldn’t help but see someone else, find comfort in her compassion. This was at a time when you still believed your visions were that of the future, and you went on to conclude that the girl from your dreams was a particularly Christian woman, and thus your union was particularly star-crossed. You spent many an embarrassing year flitting through Catholic church groups, trying to find a gossamery face.
So you’ve given up trying to make sense of her. You cannot even make sense of you.
You would be proud of yourself for going out and managing to run an errand if not for the fact that that as soon as you get back to John’s place, you sit in the exact same spot for the remaining six hours, except there is now a new ball of yarn on your lap.
John rattles the keys outside the front door. You look idly at where the living room connects to the hall and strain your ears. He isn’t alone. He’s talking, joking with someone as they walk into the front hall and the muffled voices straighten out into two recognizable ones.
“Hey sweetie!” your father says, holding one of John’s grocery bags and greeting you with an overly sanguine smile that would wrinkle his crow’s feet if they weren’t so expertly concealed by his shades. “You haven’t been sitting there all day, have you?”
“Hello father,” you say evenly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Just wanted to come by and check to see how my favorite girl is doing.” He comes over and, still balancing the bag on his hip, presses a kiss to your temple. “You know I had to learn about this whole thing from Dave?”
“I saw no reason to trouble you with it,” you say, fighting the urge to wipe at the kiss’s ghost. “As you can see, John has been expertly helping me through this difficult time.”
“That so?” If your father notices the empty chip bags and dirty dishes surrounding your movie couch, he doesn’t comment. Instead, he says, “movie night, huh? I remember the first time we had John over back in New York. I swear the three of you watched movies for like…forty-eight hours straight.”
“There wasn’t much for children to entertain themselves with in said house.” For once, the ice in your voice seems thinned.
“Roxy pulled up just as I was coming home!” John chimes in. “Isn’t that a cool coincidence Rose?” Even John can’t be that enthused by something so mundane. He must be trying to change the subject.
Your father, mercifully, takes the cue. He goes over and drops his cargo next to John’s, likely glad to be of service. They’re quire a pair: Father with his hair grown silver like bleached sand, and John’s as dark as windswept nights. Father reaches out to ruffle it.
“Lucky you, bouncing from one pretty face to the next,” he says, and John laughs.
“Our host shouldn’t have to suffer your ceaseless flirting, Father,” you say stiffly.
John shakes his head. “I don’t mind really-”
“And I should be going,” you add. “I am sorry John, I know you wanted to go somewhere for dinner but I really have been away from home for far too long and the plants will be getting very thirsty without me.”
You rise. Your father watches you with a frown on his face, and John just looks uncomfortable as you gather up your few things. “O-oh, okay. Let me know how you’re feeling later? You can come back any time, you know.”
You do know. What you didn’t know was all that you needed to leave this place was the kick of being subjected to oppressive family concern.
Roxy has, and always will, remind you of Dave. The demented mirror of a twin brother you possess, who doesn’t even give you the decency of acting like his multitude of doomed selves. Dave is not the sort of person who maintains a real, paper subscription to The Economist. All hope for him dies the night of your sixteenth birthday when you find him with several articles from Business Insider printed out and held together with binder clips shoved under his pillow while he drools on the corner. Irony be damned, this is not a Dave Strider.
But he is your Dave Strider. You were fourteen when you asked him, “Dave? Do you remember our earlier conversation about zombies?”
His head lifted instantly. “About how in zombie movies no one can ever have heard of zombies before because otherwise they would know to just shoot them in the head and then the movie would be over?”
“Yes, that.”
“No I don’t.” He was sitting on your bed, setting out the developed pictured from Italy one by one in alphabetical order. What “alphabetical order” meant in a visual medium, you failed to ask.
“Well I have an extension of that theory,” you said, knees pointed outward as you sat in the perfect center of your velvet pillow. “Are you aware of the movie Groundhog Day?”
“Yeah Rose, I’m John’s friend too.” His face didn’t change as he set a close up of a bird next to a sunset shot of Perseus with the Head of Medusa.
“The concept of a Groundhog’s Day Loop, or sometimes simply a Time Loop is implicitly fascinating to our popular culture ever since the release of Bill Murray’s cinematic masterpiece in 1993. So when we, as an audience, recognize such a Time Loop in another piece of media, we shorthand the plot to our fellows as ‘like Groundhog Day’. However, in every subsequent interpretation of this classic story structure, whether meant to be moral or fantastical, no character in universe ever recognizes the fact that they are inside a Groundhog’s Day Loop, despite the fact that it is practically burned into our collective cultural understanding of time travel.”
He looked at you. Finally. Your fingers picked at a loose thread in your quilt. “Are you saying that all time travel media resides in a universe where Groundhog Day doesn’t exist.”
“Precisely.”
“Damn. That’s fucking good.”
“If I might posit a question.” Your hands stopped, needles drawn inward as the scarf ceased. “If I were to tell you I was Groundhog Looping, would you believe me?”
“Fuck no,” he said. “Movies aren’t real, Rose.”
So that is how you and your brother part. Still, he has his fairly successful accounting position, and you have your…magnum opus? A work you’ll never top and so since its publication you’ve never seen the need to try. What they never tell you about authorship is that it sinks into your cortex, affects your train of thought until you begin to narrate your own life. Rose Lalonde-Evans sits down at her computer. Rose Lalonde-Evans stares at the page for forty-five minutes before making herself some hot chocolate. Though, maybe you will need to drop the Evans in the future. The thought leaves you standing in your kitchen until your cup becomes cold chocolate.
It isn’t fair. Her love has cost you your own, and you don’t even know if longing for this gone girl is even worthwhile when you’ve never seen how your story ends. Would you have lasted? Only a singular time do you see the two of you making it to adulthood, and after that is the white blur in your vision where your Sight is replaced with the exceedingly less helpful Ultimate Self. You hope Ultimate You is having fun with her new self-actualization, because her gain has left you a pathetic woman holding what amounts to a handful of acrylic dice. She’s probably looking back at you, maybe musing how this strange doomed offshoot came to exist, a place with no Gods, no Game and instead just a small, angry planet.
You flip off your reflection in the chrome refrigerator, just on the off chance.
The adult in you realizes that whatever you feel isn’t love. Love is miniscule decisions made every day, and whatever you can say of your alternate selves, the ability for informed compatibility was minimal. Ideally, these teenage versions of yourselves could have grown up, continued to love each other every day, but in the nature of Paradox Space there will be millions of them and only one of you to take on their discarded memories.
Rose eats. Rose sleeps. Rose stares at her screen and ignores texts from her father. She goes out and buys cat food for just for something to do, to feel alive in this modern existence where trying to make a human connection is so much more difficult in a world absent of forced contact. A sixteen-year-old Rose is more socially developed after living on a meteor for three years but that doesn’t help when her barren offshoot can’t even remember the girl’s face.
Rose goes home. Rose tends to her lemon tree. Rose winds back at John’s house a few weeks later.
Dave brings back a girl.
The line between bringing back a girl and bringing you back a girl is remarkably thin, because as soon as you hear Jade’s name it all falls back into place. You know she used to have the universe in her palms but, unlike you, she doesn’t even know what she’s lost. You don’t know which of you that makes more pathetic.
When you meet Jade and she throws her arms around you because Dave has told her so much since he found her on his many a wayward travel while trotting about the globe, and he’s brought her back because she always wanted to visit America. You now know why those childhood Pesterchum conversations seemed so empty with just the three of you, but you don’t know how to explain it to Dave and John. You’ve never tried to broach the subject since your moment with Dave, not even before then when you’d wake from childhood nightmares and your father would ask you what’s wrong. You know how it will go. You’ve opened your inner eye to that willingly.
But this time you do actually need to divulge some of your Essential Information that is absolutely Not You Going Crazy to your loved ones as much as you fear what they’ll say. Because it’s suddenly vitally important to convince Jade to stay around. Something in you knows you can’t lose her, can’t go back to three. She’s your missing piece.
You needn’t have worried. Within the week she wants to stay and get a visa, and you wonder if, even here, the forces of Space are at work.
You wonder if the same domino of triggers could be done for your mystery girl. If you could just learn her name, then maybe all the memories would slide back into place like Jade as she sticks her butt on the couch between you and Dave. You doubt it though. Wherever she is, her reality is not accessible to yours, if one was created for her at all.
It takes entirely too long for you to realize that, through a series of technicalities, you are all moving in together.
You’ve stayed with John for months now, returning the favor by buying food because at the very least shopping makes you feel like you’re moving forward. When John told you he’d be changing places in the near future, you didn’t even bat an eye, remembering the Extremely Heterosexual pact that he and Dave had made as children that if neither of them were married by forty, they would move into their own bro pad and live out the remainder of their days as the coolest bachelors around. You’ve come along like a fixture, finding yourself living with your brother once again. It’s a nice place: Dave plays the stock market well, and John makes decent enough while working both the Mini Putt-Putt and standup nights at Colonel Sassacre’s. The fact that there are four bedrooms doesn’t even register to you.
That is until Jade. She’s been staying Dave like you’ve been staying with John so of course she is there, and suddenly you all live in a house and pretend there’s nothing strange at all. It shouldn’t be like this. You’re all adults, you’re meant to be out there, living your lives, not indulging in the rather cliché childhood fantasy of spending your nights together in the living room watching Ghost Rider. It’s infantile. You need to grow up, get a job, get married, have adopted babies. You’ve broken things somehow.
“Rose is fresh out of a divorce, so there’s that,” Dave tells Jade while you eat takeout and stubbornly refuse to move from the kitchen counter. “Hey, now that she’s free, maybe you two should hook up and expedite the green card process.”
“Really?” Jade asks, all wild eyes with none of the power that should lurk beneath. “That would be so awesome!” But then her brow crunches. “Wait, no, Rose probably really doesn’t want to think about that right now. And you were joking, weren’t you? You were joking, Dave.”
Dave shrugs his chopsticks. In that they move up and down on his fingers like a tiny, indecisive marionette.
Jade turns to you with that face you love and you can’t believe you ever forgot. “I’m sorry, I don’t know if that’s a sensitive topic…”
Leave it to Jade to apologize for Dave’s dickery. “It’s alright,” you say. “It’s certainly not the worst idea to make it past my brother’s eloquent bullshit hole.” And for once, you’re not lying. The mention of The State of You doesn’t bring you a reflexive pain.
Jade snorts. John declares that it would be a super awesome idea, and he and Jade immediately launch into plans for your hypothetical wedding. You think Dave is watching you.
Later that night, when a particularly obtuse foreign film is playing on the television since it was your turn to pick the movie, John falls asleep on you again. This time, he at least has the decency to pass out on your lap, where you can use your velvet pillow as a buffer to lift his head and discretely set it back. You extract yourself from Jade’s arms, knock aside where Dave has leaned against your legs, and head to the second floor balcony.
There’s a telescope up here. John’s addition no doubt, and the corner of roof looks so much like his childhood home that you feel a pain behind your eyes. In attempt to alleviate it, you press one against the finderscope.
You don’t know what you’re looking for. Perhaps hoping you can see beyond the stars, through the infrared radiation, out beyond the universe into the one where she exists. But alas, the lens cap is on, and you have no idea how to work this fucking thing.
Distantly, you feel a memory, on that never happened exactly, but a composite of a thousand different moments that perhaps maybe happened. Long arms wrap around your middle and a chin rests on your shoulder, saying, “come back to bed, Rose.”
Instead what happens is Jade presses her head into the small of your back, wraps her arms around your middle, and says, “come back to the cuddle pile, Rose.”
You hesitate. You don’t smile. You don’t think you can, not yet for a very long time, but you do place your hands against hers. For most every other Rose, these constellations would be wrong. But for you, in this mistaken plane you’ve somehow created, they are yours. Maybe these three other pieces from the old world can be enough.
“Alright,” you tell her, not moving. “I’m coming.”