“Who was dying?” Mom asks.
I can barely get the word out. “You.”
“Me?”
A feeling of nausea sweeps through me, and I break into a cold sweat; saliva floods my mouth. I pull away from Mom’s embrace and convulse with dry heaves.
“Ruby! Are you okay?”
I nod, spitting the foul taste from my mouth and wiping my face on the back of my shirt sleeve.
She gives me a few seconds to recover, pacing, wringing her hands. “Please explain this to me!” She motions to the tree, frantic. “What on earth is going on? I feel like I’m losing my mind!”
“We’re in a parallel universe,” I say, bracing myself for her reaction of disbelief.
“What?”
“Just try to calm down, okay? Do you remember at your apartment, when we were talking about string theory?” I put my hands on the trunk of the tree and take a deep breath. “This oak contains a portal to the multiverse.”
“No.” Mom’s eyes are wide. “That’s impossible!”
“You’re familiar with the way the sun—any huge object—causes the fabric of space to bend around it?”
“Yes, of course,” she says.
“The bent fabric then causes orbiting planets to act differently—they have to navigate a distorted spatial road.” I can see that she’s getting impatient, but I continue explaining. “The more massive the sun, the more gravity it brings to bear, which means the warping of both space and time. It can work on smaller scales as well. Subatomic particles can also cause warps—”
Mom holds up a hand to stop me. “Ruby, please!”
“String theory allows the possibility of parallel universes.”
“That’s what you think this is?”
“The tree is a wormhole of some kind.”
“That’s impossible,” she says again, but not as emphatically. She bites her lower lip. “I thought I’d found you back in that one place. I walked through the woods for what seemed like hours and found this little town. Everyone was dressed so strangely, like Native Americans in animal skins. I saw you, but your hair was so long! Tied back in a braided ponytail. It just didn’t make sense. It was you, but it wasn’t. And when I tried to talk to you, you were scared. You ran.”
“You met my parallel self!” I say, feeling a flood of relief. This is good! If Other Ruby in Universe Five was displaced while I wandered around the woods this morning, that means she was back by the time Mom arrived there. She’s okay.
“What does that mean?” Mom asks. “Parallel self?”
“She’s me,” I say. “In a parallel universe.”
The thought seems to settle in. Mom gently turns me around and runs her fingers across the nape of my neck, across my tattoo. “You’re not my Ruby,” she says, “are you?”
“No,” I whisper. “And you’re not my mom. My mom died in a car accident eleven years ago.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she says sincerely, and then a look of panicked confusion crosses her face. “But she was me?”
“No, not you, not exactly,” I say haltingly. “That was in another universe, a long time ago.”
“But you just said I was dying at the hospital.” Her voice fails her; she takes a slow, deep breath before she can speak again. “Tonight?”
A few raindrops make their way through the tree’s umbrella-like leaves. Mom shivers and pulls her arms around herself.
“You’re fine,” I say.
“I’m fine,” she repeats with a curt laugh, looking at the tree and then me. “So where’s my Ruby? What did you do with her?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say, not sure if I’m speaking the truth.
“You made her disappear!”
“I—I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I didn’t mean to mess anything up. I’m trying to make things better. To make things perfect!”
She glares at me, and the look in her eyes makes me wither.
“Please just listen,” I beg. “Haven’t you ever thought about how different things would have been if you’d made different choices along the way? What you majored in, where you moved, who you married? Parallel realities are the result of quantum junctions. There could be an infinite number of junctions.”
Mom is quiet.
“And in these parallel universes, our lives are playing out differently,” I say. “There are forks in the road that our parallels have taken.”
I don’t know how to tell her that she’s dead in so many universes. Mom, you have a tendency to get in car accidents. If you go back to Universe Four, you might be destined to die.
“Is it like that Robert Frost poem?” she asks, sounding vacant, far away. “Two roads diverged.” She’s talking mostly to herself, lost in thought. And I’m suddenly seized with a thought of my own, a blazing idea.
“You can come with me to Universe One!” I blurt. “We’re just a few clicks away. You’ll be safe there!”
“Where’s Universe One?” she asks. “I’ll be safe from what?”
The word won’t come to me at first, but then I whisper, “Death.”
Mom puts her hand to her chest. “What do you mean?”
“You would be safe because that path has already played out there, eleven years ago. That fork in the road is behind us now.”
“Ruby,” Mom says, her eyes growing wide. “I was in a car accident eleven years ago. That’s how I got this chipped tooth.”
“What?” I gasp.
“I hit my mouth on the steering wheel. And a windshield wiper grazed my throat.” She pulls the collar of her shirt away from her neck. “I have a faint scar.”
“You survived?” I’m relieved. And then I’m outraged. “Why didn’t you survive for me? In my universe? It’s not fair!”
“It was a minor accident, but the doctor said it was a matter of inches. If I’d had my seat a little less reclined, well, then …”
“Come with me,” I beg. “Come with me to Universe One!”
“I can’t, Ruby. Think about it. Think about Patrick,” she says. “I can’t abandon him. And what about my Ruby? My Ruby. If you keep me with you, now she’ll have lost her mother.”
I shake my head, sobbing. “But I can’t give you up again. I just can’t!” I reach out and grab her arm, but she pulls it away.
“And don’t you have your father to go back to?” she presses.
I nod, trying to imagine Dad’s reaction if I showed up with Mom. He’d freak at the sight of her, wouldn’t be able to comprehend where she came from. She’d be some long-lost ghost, returned from the dead. He’d probably end up in a mental institution.
“You’re not thinking of anyone but yourself!” She waves her hands wildly toward the tree. “Make this thing take us back to where we belong.”
I wipe my face and take a step toward Mom. Her body is rigid with suspicion. She matches my move and steps away from me. “Please don’t do this,” I say. “I need you.”
“Don’t you see that you’re robbing me?” Her voice cracks. “If you don’t take me home, I’ll be dead inside, because I can’t live in some almost-place with a mangled mess of what could have been.”
I turn away, not wanting to hear any more. “Stop it.”
“To my Ruby, I’ll be dead. To Patrick, I’ll be dead. To all my students and friends. Vanished. Kidnapped. Is that what you want? Don’t you see that you’re killing me?”
“Stop it!”
Kidnapper. Identity thief. Interloper. Impostor.
Murderer?
A menacing crack of lightning sends a jolt of adrenaline through my already overtaxed nervous system. Too close for comfort.
“Let’s get going,” she orders. “Did you decode the inscriptions?”
I take a deep breath, trying to get myself together, needing to think straight. No matter what we do, we can’t stay here. We have to move on to the next world. “I figured out the one above the door, but it was useless. ‘Who are you seeking?’”