A World Without You (10 page)

Phoebe

I hear the door click open,
and two sets of heavy feet stomp on the tiled floor of the kitchen. Why are boys—men—always so loud when they walk? It's like they have a need to announce their arrival.

“We're home!” Dad shouts, which, obviously.

I swing my feet over the side of the bed, tossing my book onto a pillow, but I don't get up. It's weird, but I'm not really sure what to do next. Bo's my brother, but to rush out of my room and greet him with a hug and a smile wouldn't feel right. We're not brother and sister like that. We share the same memories of growing up, but that's basically where our relationship ends.

“Phoebe!” Mom yells from the bottom of the staircase. “Come say hello to your brother!”

“Why?” He's home every weekend. There's no point in making a production of it.

“Phoebe!”

I roll my eyes and get up off the bed, grabbing an empty
glass on my way out the door. I fiddle with it as I descend the stairs.

Mom has Bo wrapped up in a hug, and I squeeze past them to refill my glass with Diet Coke from the fridge.

“Hey,” I say to Bo.

“Hey,” he says back.

I return to my room.

Usually, Mom lectures me about spending too much time in my bedroom. Not on the weekends, though.

I camp out on my bed with my laptop and
As I Lay Dying
—extra credit for AP lit, even though I hate Faulkner. The rest of the family pretty much follows suit. Dad hides in his office. Bo keeps his notebook in front of his face, blocking anyone from making eye contact. Only Mom flits around the house, dusting, vacuuming, straightening pictures, cleaning mirrors, going from room to room as if she can fill all the empty spaces.

At noon, there's a bang on Bo's bedroom door, across the hall from mine. For a moment, I freeze, not unlike a rabbit that's heard a predator. You can tell a lot from the sound of knuckles on a door. A tap-tap knock is friendly; a quick rap is urgent. This was the deep thud of a fist against wood. I creep off my bed, tentatively inching my own door open so I can see what's going on.

Dad stands in the hallway with a power drill in his hand.

“What?” Bo asks. He means,
What do you want?
but I hear the old sullenness in his voice, the challenge in his tone, just like he used to sound so often before he went to Berkshire. That one word—
“What?”—
holds more of a threat than his balled-up fists.

“I'm taking the door down.” Dad's white-knuckled hand has a tight grip on the drill.

“What?”
Bo repeats. “Why?”

“Dr. Franklin,” Dad says, as if that's a perfectly reasonable explanation.

I take a step further back into my room, although I linger near my open door.

“The Doc wouldn't just tell you to take my bedroom door away,” Bo says, his voice rising. “Stop! Why are you doing this?”

Dad stomps forward, his large presence enough to make Bo back down. Dad touches the power drill to one of the screws.

“Wait!” Bo says. “This is ridiculous!”

“We have to keep an eye on you,” Dad says, his attention on the hinge. The drill whirs, and one screw is out.

“What the hell?” Bo shouts.

“Watch your language!” Dad whirls around, glaring at him.

“Treat me like a human being, then!”

“We're doing this for
your
safety,” Dad growls.

“The hell you are.”

“I said, watch your language!”

“If I could close my
damn door
, you wouldn't have to listen to me!”

I carefully shut my bedroom door, but I can still hear them fighting in the hallway. My phone buzzes, and I pick it up. It's a text from Rosemarie: a picture of her face with her eyes rolled into the back of her head and a slack expression.
Entertain meeeeeeeee.

In the hallway, Dad shouts something about safety, while Bo storms into the bathroom, slamming the door shut. A second later, Bo opens the door and yells down the hall: “Is it okay
to pee behind a closed door? Or do you want to remove this one too?”

What's up?
I type into my phone.

“Son of a
bitch
!” Dad shouts, and then I hear the drill bang against the hardwood floor. I'm not sure if he's cursing because he dropped the drill, or if he threw the drill down because he's mad at Bo.

Can I come over?
Rosemarie texts.
Super bored.

Nah,
I type. My friends know that Bo is at a special academy, but they think it's a military school or something. And they don't know that he's home every weekend. It's not really a secret; I'd just rather not discuss him at all.
Life's more boring here,
I text.

Then you come here.

I look up from my phone, at my closed bedroom door. Outside, my dad has resumed drilling, and I can hear the sound of ripping wood.

I can't. Mom wants me home.

Come onnnnnnn
,
Rosemarie says.
Tell your mom it's my birthday.

Lol, that's next month.

Rosemarie sends me a shrugging emoticon.
They don't know that. And my gramps is over, so we do have cake.

Outside, the hallway is silent.
Lololol, be right over.

I stuff my phone into my pants pocket. I hesitate for a second, then I twist the doorknob slowly and peek outside.

Bo's door is gone. The wood at the bottom of the doorframe is splintered, as if Dad kicked it off instead of bothering with the drill. There's a huge, white gouge in the floor from where the drill fell on it. The bathroom door is still shut, and Dad's nowhere in sight.

I creep down the hall, away from my bedroom and past Dad's locked office door. I wait until I'm at the bottom of the steps before I call softly, “Mom?” She doesn't answer, so I go looking for her. I find her in the den, on her hands and knees, polishing the wide wooden legs of the coffee table so forcefully that the little brooch she's wearing on her blouse shakes. Dad gave Mom that pin after I was born: a tiny golden bee dangling from an enameled bow to represent my and Bo's names. Mom always wears it on the weekends when Bo is home, but never on the days between visits.

“Can I go over to Rosemarie's?” I ask.

“Family dinner tonight,” Mom says without even looking up. Before Bo went to Berkshire, she never really cared about the idea of “family dinner.” Sure, she cooked, and sometimes we ate together, but it wasn't a requirement. Now, though, she's adamant: When Bo is home, we “eat as a family.” It never feels natural, though. Mom always places food on the table like it's an offering, and even though she says the point is to stay connected, she hardly talks at all.

“It's Rosemarie's birthday,” I say.

Mom pauses and sits back on her heels. “Why didn't you tell me about it before?”

“I got the dates mixed up. She's really mad I'm not there already.”

I can tell that Mom is wavering, though her eyes glance up at the ceiling, toward Bo's room. But rather than cave, she says, “Ask your father.”

I groan. “Come on, Mom. Don't make me do that.”

She's no longer polishing the coffee table, but she doesn't look up at me either.

“Please,” I say. “It's not that big of a deal. It's one night, and I'll be home before nine. Come
on
.”

“Fine,” she tells the coffee table in a small voice.

“Thank you!” I say, bouncing on my heels. I turn to go, but then turn back, drop to my knees, and give my mom an awkward half hug.

I rush to leave, pausing before I pull the kitchen door closed behind me. Just a few minutes ago, there was nothing but shouting and the drill and slamming doors. Now there's nothing at all.

• • •

Rosemarie lives about fifteen minutes away from me if I stomp on the gas of my old clunker, but to be fair, the car barely tops fifty when I do that. This car was my reward for being the normal child. Mom didn't phrase it like that, of course she didn't, but it's the truth. Bo got sent to a fancy school, and I got a car that cost less than one month's tuition. But I love it anyway. It's mine. And it's freedom. Not that I would ever really go anywhere with it—knowing my luck, it'd break down if I tried to drive more than an hour at a time—but the car is full of potential. I
could
go. Theoretically.

It's always so unsettling, the way everything changes when Bo comes home. During the week, when he's gone, life is normal: school for me, work for Dad, whatever Mom busies herself with all day. After dinner every night, I sit in the den with Dad while he watches the Patriots or ESPN and I text Rosemarie and Jenny. Eventually, Mom makes popcorn and joins Dad on the couch. Sometimes, we each do our own separate thing, but there's still always a sense of home. Of family.

Bo's part of the family
, I remind myself.

He is. He is. It's just that he's a part of a different family. When Bo's in the house, everything is so much quieter, so much heavier. Except when it isn't, like this afternoon. The family-with-Bo is like the spikes of a heart monitor—a loud burst, followed by nothing, followed by another loud burst.

To be fair, there's always been silence in the family. Before Bo went to Berkshire, it was there to protect everyone from the toxic mix of my brother and my father. But the silence filling the house now is different. It's
informed
silence. It's a silence born from the fact that we know—we all know—something is really wrong with Bo. It's not angry teenage rebellion that can be fixed by grounding him or taking his bedroom door down or whatever else Dad has tried. He can't be punished into normalcy.

We're not ignoring the problem, not really. We're all aware it's there, even Bo. We see the edges of this new Bo, this Bo who's special, different. We're not ignoring it. We're just carefully, carefully avoiding it.

The silence in our house now is born from the need for intense concentration, as we all carefully step around the truth we wish we didn't know, the person we can't help that Bo became, the future we're all afraid is collapsing around us, falling as silent and cold and crushing as snow.

I stare at the gaping hole
in my wall and wonder what Dad's going to do with the door.

I wonder
why
he took the door. Dr. Franklin definitely wouldn't tell him to do that.

Something's not right. Whatever the Doc told Dad before we left Berkshire made him feel like he couldn't trust me, but I can't figure it out. Is Dr. Franklin trying to make sure I can't work on saving Sofía?

If that was his plan, it was a stupid one. I don't need to be at school to use the timestream. But a little privacy would be nice. I rip the duvet off my bed and bunch the top sheet in my hand, pulling it closer. Grabbing a stapler from my desk, I stand up on a chair and drape the sheet over the doorframe, stapling it into place. It's not a door, but it's something.

I just don't get it. If they're not going to trust me with a door, why bother bringing me home at all? Mom kept insisting I come for the weekend, but where is she? Downstairs,
cleaning. And Dad's just in his office. I sweep aside my sheet-door and step into the hallway, turning in a slow circle with my arms held wide.
Here I am
, I think.
You wanted me, so here I am.
But of course, no one sees. No one cares. My parents have no idea what to do with me.

Hell,
I
don't know what to do with me. Phoebe's room—with its door—stands right in front of me. I turn my back on it and return to my room. It'd be easier if I were like her. She's everything my parents ever wanted. Ambitious, driven, studious, and—most important of all—normal. I'm sure she has her whole life planned, just like I'm sure it's 100 percent parent-approved. Graduate, college, job. I wonder where she'll go. I bet she's already writing her application essays. But me? I doubt I could get into any college, and even if I could, I couldn't go. Not unless I knew I could control my powers. And control feels a long way off right now. The truth of the matter is that I may never have control. I may never have “normal” in my grasp.

That's the biggest difference between my sister and me. I may be able to travel through time, but she knows more about the future than I do.

I sit in the center of my bed, staring at my curtain door.

I could know the future
, I realize. The timestream hides the future in thin, almost invisible filaments, but I found them before. I could do it again.

When I bring up the timestream around me, the first thing I notice is that some of the strings I'd seen before—the disastrous fates brought on by the officials if they'd found the USB drive—are gone. They're just . . . gone. Because I hid the drive, I made it impossible for the government officials to use it against us, and any future where they did no longer exists. The Berk's
not safe yet—some of the futures show it being taken over by the government, some show the school closing, one even shows the school on fire—but I push aside those worries, at least for now.

The strings that tie me to my home—brown and green and blue—are more prevalent now, rising to the surface. I pick up the pale blue string, and images of Phoebe flash through my mind. I follow the string back to its beginning, sixteen years ago, to her birth, and I see the way her life is woven into time. Going into the future, the string frays, splitting off into floss-like, micro-thin threads, each a possible future for my sister.

Some things feel fairly certain—there are a few offshoots of loose strings floating away, but Phoebe's graduation is close and clear. I wrap my finger around the moment, and images of her on that day fill my mind, a movie of memories that haven't happened yet.

She's far tanner in the future than she is now, and she looks thinner, almost gaunt. She's traded her pink lip gloss for something darker, and she's swapped her contacts for winged cat-eye glasses. Even though Mom and Dad hover near her, Phoebe pretty much ignores them, chatting with her two best friends. Mom insists on taking pictures of the three girls near the fountain at the front of the school, but she doesn't notice the way Phoebe's smile doesn't reach her eyes.

Once my parents are gone, Phoebe and her friends start goofing off. She pulls them closer for a selfie, but as soon as she takes the picture, she loses her footing and falls into the fountain. Her laughter rings out as she grabs her friends and drags them in with her, completely ignoring the frowning teachers nearby. I take a moment to marvel at this Phoebe. It's only a
year into the future, but I can see changes within her that I never really thought I'd see. A spontaneous Phoebe who lets her life get a little messy? One who doesn't care about what teachers think? Who would have thought.

At first, everyone's laughing and splashing, but then Phoebe pulls her wet hair back, and her hand brushes her ear.

“Hey. Hey!” Phoebe says, her voice rising when her friends don't stop playing. “I lost my earring.”

Normally, Pheebs wouldn't care. She's not really much of a jewelry girl. But those earrings were our grandmother's. The three girls spend the next several minutes searching the fountain, but they don't find anything. Eventually, Phoebe has to admit defeat. She walks away from the fountain, shoulders slouched, cradling the other earring in her palm, and I know she's going to remember this day not as the day she finally achieved her dreams and graduated, but the day she lost our grandmother's earring.

The string slips from my fingers, and the image fades to nothing. These strands only show possibilities, not certainties, but I want to know more. The further into the future I go, the more potential futures I see for my family. In one, my mom gets a new job as a hotel manager, and eventually she starts an affair with the concierge and leaves Dad. In another, she starts writing a blog that gets super popular, uses it to fund a trip for her and Dad around the world, and they briefly consider adopting a baby from some third world country before they come home and resume their lives just as they were before they left.

Dad doesn't change much, not in any of the futures, even the ones where Mom leaves him. He just plods along, never adjusting his job or routine. But then, about fifteen or twenty
years out, Phoebe has a baby, and she brings it to Dad, and his whole world starts to shine. It's like a lightbulb, right there in the timestream. And even though his future still doesn't seem to change much after that, all of the strings sort of glow with happiness.

Phoebe is the one with the wildly different possibilities for her future. In most of them, she goes to college, but in a few she takes time off to travel—an internship in New York, a backpacking trip in South America, a study-abroad experience in Europe. She gets different jobs too. Magazine writer, art teacher, forensic scientist for the FBI. Maybe Phoebe's futures are so varied because she's so young, or maybe it's just because Pheebs is Pheebs, and she's always been able to land on her feet, like a cat. But she's really smart, and these strings prove that she can do anything.

Including, I realize, make mistakes. Some of Phoebe's futures are . . . not good. In one path, she goes to Boston University, but then drops out for a year to travel around America. She's usually pretty safe, but at one point, near Wyoming, she hitchhikes and . . .

I don't want to think about what happens to her there. The abuse she suffers at his hands. No. I force myself to properly name it. The rape. It's terrifying. My fingers want to pull back from this thread, to find a way to cut it and make sure it never happens, but there's more to this future than that one horrific moment. There's another man, a kind one who loves her and never raises his voice at her because he can't bear to see her flinch. There's a daughter, a thin girl with dark hair like mine and clear green eyes that are all her own. There's a dog and a house and a career and friends and travel and happiness.
And it's all wrapped up together, woven into Phoebe's past and future, irrevocably and literally tied to that moment in Wyoming. I let go of this future's string, wondering if that family and that life are worth the path it takes to get them. I think, from the way Phoebe held her daughter, they are.

In some of Phoebe's futures she's rich, and in some she's not. In some she marries—in those versions, she almost always ends up with the same guy, although she meets him in different ways—and in some she doesn't. In several of her futures, she dies young—either from some stupid risk or decision, or from just blind, dumb, horrible luck. Most of her futures give her at least sixty or seventy more years, though, and in one she makes it to 103, with three kids and eight grandkids and even a great-granddaughter.

But the thing that strikes me most about Phoebe's future is that, of all the possibilities, there's not a single one that's definitively
right
. I cannot pull apart the threads and find the one that's perfect for her. They're all perfect and imperfect in different ways, even the one that includes Wyoming. They all have moments of intense joy and intense sorrow. Each decision Phoebe makes, each circumstance she can't change and must find a way to live with . . . every one ends in a life that's not really that much better or worse than any of the others. She finds just as much joy in having kids as she does in not having them; in getting a high-paying job as working for pennies in an art gallery; in traveling the world or making one place home. But she finds just as much sorrow in each life too.

After I sort through her threads, I sit back on my bed, and . . . I don't know, I feel sort of peaceful. It's weird. I was super anxious before, but this is like a perfect moment of calm.
I can't really help my parents; they're old, they've made their decisions, they made them a long time ago, before I was ever born.

But Pheebs . . . man, Phoebe has a real chance. She has the whole world, a myriad of futures, all within her reach. And it feels a little like a burden has been lifted.

I've never really known what I was supposed to do with this power of mine. Stop horrible things from happening? Ensure the right course of events? But I don't have to worry about Phoebe. There
is
no right path for her, no wrong path. They're all just . . . possibilities, and she can pick whichever one she wants. It's not up to me to change her future, to make sure the right future happens. I'm not responsible for her. I can let her spin-spin-spin away into her own future.