Chapter 6 #2
Ilena releases Mallory’s hand. “That’s a question, but not the question. The question is . . .” Her soft fingertips glide over the red marks on Mallory’s forearm. “Have you . . . did you . . . ?”
“Kill Grayson?” Aubrey says. “Of course she didn’t.”
They wait for a confirmation that Mallory cannot give. She steps back, allowing them to enter the penthouse.
Ilena moves with a speed that, though not swift, must be her top in this state. Aubrey follows a reluctant several paces behind. A humming clogs Mallory’s ears, but soon through the fuzziness comes the scuffling of knees on a floor, a long cry, a gasp, a “Grayson!”
Mallory remains still. Ilena appears in the hall, her face tight, her eyes wide, but somehow still managing to exude her usual
calm. She extends her hand. “Come.”
So Mallory does. She lets Ilena take her hand and guide her to the couch where Aubrey’s sitting with tears in her eyes and
Harley in her lap. The television’s still on, the morning show continuing to play on mute, and Mallory wants to turn back
the clock and live in that brilliant span before she saw Grayson when the only thing on her mind was AIM being on The Shandy Shane Show.
Ilena settles herself in the armchair beside the couch. “I’m assuming you haven’t called the police?”
Mallory shakes her head.
“And you have no memory of last night? Of . . .” Ilena gestures toward the kitchen, swallowing audibly.
Again, Mallory shakes her head, a chill starting in her toes and snaking up her legs.
“Then you have no idea how?” Ilena says.
That chill shrouds her torso, seizing her lungs. Grayson was always careful. He never ate anything without checking. Organic,
GMO-free, grass-fed, all of that, for his health, sure, but also for his allergen and that “slight” complication of anaphylactic
shock.
“Mallory?” Ilena prods. “Do you?”
“No,” she lies, pressing her teeth into her bottom lip. “I just woke up and found him. I don’t—I just woke up.” The weight
of Ilena’s stare nearly suffocates her.
Finally, Ilena’s eyes detach from Mallory’s. They flicker to the red lines on Mallory’s arm before Ilena says, “Okay.” She takes out her phone and starts dialing. Mallory sees the “9” on the screen and snatches the phone out of Ilena’s hand. “Mallory!”
“What, Ilena, what? You actually want to call the police? You think they’re going to believe I just happened to wake up in
a dead man’s apartment with no memory of the past fourteen hours?”
Aubrey’s hand quakes as she adjusts Harley. “But it’s not just you, it’s all of us.”
Details follow of Aubrey and Ilena waking up to homes and lives that are a degree or two or a hundred off from their own.
None of this should be possible. Have they all been drugged for some practical joke? But it’s so elaborate, involving so many
people and the renting and staging of apartments. And how could anything of this magnitude be done in that short amount of
time? And Ilena would have to be in on it, wearing a fake belly and—
“How can the world just change overnight?” Aubrey asks.
“It can’t,” Ilena says. “Life is logical. Which is why I never believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or monsters under
the bed. There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation—”
“One that also explains this?” Aubrey holds up her hand. “I remember everything up to the sandbox, including the mosquito
bite on my thumb from last night that’s magically gone.”
Ilena peers at Aubrey’s skin. “But you swell up for days.”
“I know.” Aubrey sticks out her thumb. “But nothing. Unlike my nails. Pink polish? Did I sleepwalk and paint my nails? And
look at my cuticles. As perfect as yours. And this?” Aubrey pulls on the waistband of her pants. “Two sizes smaller, but they
fit. Not even snug.” She reaches across the couch and pulls an elastic out of Ilena’s hair. “And unless this is a wig . . .”
Ilena’s ballooned belly overshadowed it, but her hair is longer, nearly to her shoulders, and Aubrey’s face does look thinner, her wrists, chest, waist, all just a bit smaller, yes.
Mallory reaches for her own hair, the same length as it’s been for the past ten years.
Her body feels like her body, feels the same, but is it different?
Besides her jumpsuit not being aubergine but a rather hideous shade of Crayola crayon grape?
She rubs the fabric, cheap and fit for a clown.
The one she wore yesterday was couture. Thanks to AIM, she’s become a public figure, one people pay attention to, down to her shoes.
Mallory’s mind churns, trying to put this in some box that makes sense. “We agree we’re alive, right? Not in some sort of
joint hallucination or purgatory?”
Ilena’s hand reaches for the ends of her long hair. “Logic would say so.”
Logic. Right, okay, logic. Logically, what do they know? They were at their summer outing last night. They played a game.
They woke up with no memories of anything in between. Except they woke up here. In this place. This place with these differences. These differences that are all connected to the game.
Aubrey sleeping with Kai. Ilena married to Felix—and pregnant. And Grayson. No matter the how, he’s no longer alive. Mallory’s
stomach twists, and her heart clenches, and she has to put it aside. She can’t care, not now, not here, not amid all this.
She sticks Ilena’s phone under her thigh, bouncing against it. She stares at the meditation corner and breathes through the
storm raging inside of her.
She then faces her two best friends and lets logic guide her. “You both know I’m the last one to go for any kind of mystical
crap.” She also never believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy but pretended to for the benefits. And yet, she finds herself
saying the impossible: “Fuck, Marry, Kill. We each did exactly that.”
Ilena says, “I said there has to be a reasonable explanation for this.”
“Then let’s reason this out.” Mallory assesses the changes in her friends, trying to quash the screaming in her head and sort through the thoughts firing one after another.
“If this is real, actually real, then one of two things is going on. Either the place we call home has changed, and we’re still us, in which case, Aubrey’s thumb should be the size of an heirloom tomato and Ilena’s hair shouldn’t be touching her shoulders and her stomach shouldn’t have another human squatting inside of it. Or this isn’t home. And we’re not us.”
“Not us?” Aubrey says. “What does that mean, ‘not us’?”
Mallory looks between Ilena and Aubrey. “I think, if we agree that this is a reality, then we have to consider that it might not be ours.”
Ilena tries to clamp her shaking hands together in her lap, but her belly stops her. “That’s just not . . . possible?”
Ilena’s voice trembles, her tone as unsure as Mallory’s ever heard it, and it steals her breath and rattles her bones, and
this, this is the sound a rock makes when it breaks.
Mallory fights the sob rising in her throat and turns away from Ilena. A silence fills the room, broken by an actual soft
cry from Aubrey and a matching one from Harley. Ilena then releases a long exhale. Mallory returns her gaze to her best friend,
and they lock eyes, grounding them both in the people they have always been.
“We’re clearly us in mind,” Ilena says, in a way that is quintessentially Ilena—with a “but” coming.
One that Aubrey steals. “But in other bodies. So what’s happened to our bodies? At home? Do we think they . . . I mean, we . . .
still exist? As us? Or as, what? Them? And who’s them anyway and—”
“Breathe,” Ilena says softly. “Let’s all just breathe.
Because there’s no way to answer any of that yet.
” She turns to Mallory. “But I think no matter where this is or what this is, an unexplained death still requires a call to the police. And this unexplained death is Grayson, Mallory, Grayson Fields. You chose him in the game, what? On a whim, to be funny, or was there another reason?”
Mallory’s skin grows cold. She slowly lets her eyes drift to the kitchen . . . to Grayson’s loafer . . . to Grayson.
Grayson sliding a check with more zeroes than she could imagine across the conference room table, wrapping his arm around
her waist at the bar that night in celebration, her thigh against his during board of directors meetings, his grin pumping
up his cheek, hand on a glass of wine at that vegan restaurant in the South End, fingertips wiping ketchup from her lips at
the Shake Shack where their grumbling stomachs led them after, the half walk, half run to his building, where Grayson took
her around back and punched in the code for the service elevator, whose secret ride let hands and fingers and lips go everywhere
they’d been longing to go, stumbling over Harley, tearing off shirts and shoes and pulling back sheets and laughing and backs
arching and oh, god, Grayson.
Her lips begin to quiver, and a deep hole of sadness opens in her chest. It grows and widens and threatens to swallow her
whole. She can’t let it. She can’t acknowledge it. She can’t give in to it. There’s nothing more she can do for him. She has
to stay focused on what she can control. And no matter what this is and what’s going on, what they can control is their response
to it all.
“I was just being my outrageous self,” Mallory says. Admitting that she’d been sleeping with Grayson in their world would
have made their relationship real. Here, it gives her motive. “He’s not going anywhere, and we need time to figure out what
happened, what this is . . .” Time to not see that bent leg or feel the cold of his skin, to wonder if she might have . . . “And we certainly can’t do all of that if we’re stuck in a police station trying to answer questions we have no way of answering.”
Ilena’s lips remain thin as she attempts to retrieve her phone. Unaccustomed to her new center of gravity, she falls back
into the chair. Those same peacock-blue eyes that grabbed hold of Mallory twenty-one years ago take the measure of her now.
Ilena is well aware of the lengths Mallory’s willing to go to get what she wants but equally as aware of who Mallory is and
what she holds dear. And that’s everyone in this room.
With the barest of movements, Ilena dips her chin in agreement. Mallory knows how hard that is, especially since it’s not
the first time she’s had to ask her best friend to set aside her morals recently. (Or the second.) Mallory returns Ilena’s
phone and then searches Aubrey’s face for signs of a panic attack or worse. But Aubrey is simply staring straight ahead, eyes
tinged with red, clutching the dog like he’s a life preserver.
Mallory breathes in. “Who knows, we could wake up tomorrow back at the sandbox.” Or somewhere else entirely. Mallory pushes through a wave of nausea.
“We could—?” Aubrey sneezes, but instead of Harley flinching or jumping off of her, he only burrows in deeper. “Do you think
we could, Ilena?”
“I don’t know,” Ilena says, slowly. “I honestly don’t know anything.” Her hand floats to her round stomach, hovering as if
afraid to let herself feel what’s right in front of her.
Mallory looks at the marks on her own forearm and understands completely. “For now, let’s get our bearings. Let’s act normal.
Go to work, go to . . . to . . . prenatal yoga, whatever, let’s just get out of this goddamn apartment and away from this
(him) so we (I) can think. Think and see what’s here and who’s here and what here is before anything else happens.”
Aubrey remains still, holding on to Harley, but Ilena again bobs her head in agreement, her hand still unable to settle on the impossibility inside of her.
All the years stretching between the two of them never included what it does now.
Mallory slides to the edge of the couch, puts her hand on top of Ilena’s, and presses both to her belly.
“A baby, Christ, Ilena, a fucking baby.”
Mallory doesn’t know if this is a dream or a trick or some supernatural anomaly or maybe some Groundhog Day loop, but she’s
not spending the time it’ll take to figure it out in jail for feeding Grayson Fields nut crackers. Her friends need her, AIM
needs her, and the goddamn Shandy Shane Show needs her.