Some Other Time: A Novel
Prologue
It could have ended a hundred different ways.
She could have stayed in that mess of an apartment, seated uncomfortably on the scratchy, secondhand yellow couch, listening as the boy she thought she loved lectured her on the vast differences between emotional and physical cheating, and why what he’d done didn’t fit neatly into either category.
She could have remembered to put gas in her car the night before, just like her parents always told her to do ( a little gift to your future self the next morning ) instead of driving around on fumes and then finally, moments after leaving said apartment, having to pull off the main road, wipe her tear-soaked eyes, and then ask the man in the blue coveralls to please put twenty dollars’ worth of poison in her tank. Better yet, she could have asked him to fill it and then sat there breathing in fumes for five extra minutes.
Or she could have said screw it, pushed the car to its limits, ridden it out on E, and gone straight back to her apartment, with her books and her bed and that quiet little balcony, and just sulked, the way all twentysomethings do the day they learn the person they thought was the one is actually an enormous ass. But she didn’t, because she knew her new sublet roommate, whom she hadn’t quite hit it off with, would no doubt be in the living room day drinking or smoking weed or making out with her own boyfriend, all scenarios that would undoubtedly push her already-stretched-thin emotional bandwidth to its limit.
For the record, she could have opted not to get a sublet.
When she arrived at the four-way stop, gas tank half-full and ready for almost anything, rather than turn left to go home, she turned right instead and just kept going. She was heartbroken, and apparently single, and the only thing that felt good when faced with those circumstances was to put the windows down and to turn the music up and to drive and to feel the air and to cry.
Well, that. And coffee.
Which was why, a few minutes later, she turned right once again at a different intersection so she could stop at that new coffee shop across the street from the bookstore where she worked full-time and buy herself something strongly caffeinated, as well as some sort of gooey, sugary, you-definitely-earned-this-after-a-year-with-that-fool treat.
On that particular afternoon, Ellie Grace Adams, who in two years’ time would become Ellie Grace Baker (though she didn’t know that yet), could have made a million different decisions. She’d read once, in a book displayed near the register during an exceptionally quiet shift, that the average adult makes something like thirty-five thousand choices in a day. Ellie had wondered how researchers had come up with that number, and whether it was highly exciting or incredibly overwhelming to consider such a mind-numbing fact. As she set the book down to ring up a lone customer, she couldn’t decide if that stat did more to support the idea of free will ( The choice is, quite literally, yours! ) or fate ( With all those minuscule decisions, what are the chances of, well, anything? ).
Ellie, like so many young and wanting-to-be-in-love women, believed in the latter as devoutly as if it were her faith.
Of course, Ellie wasn’t thinking about any of this when, at exactly 1:11 p.m. (almost her mother’s “angel” number, but not close enough for Ellie to bother making a wish), she stopped her car at a red light, both the coffee shop and the bookstore up ahead. Her car noisily idling, she looked away from the road for only a minute to adjust the wires that spewed from her car lighter and fed into her yellow Discman and then played another song from the artist she’d listened to on repeat ever since she’d left not-the-one’s apartment. It was sad music, a perfect soundtrack for post-breakup, a bit of a cliché, but still it worked. Ellie clicked the Discman buttons until she reached her favorite song, which she’d already heard at least three times, then looked back up, set her hands on the wheel at ten and two, daydreaming about what hot beverage and chocolate something or other might heal her. The light turned green. Ellie released her foot from the brake, clicked the music up a few more decibels. And then— Smash !
Years later, when people asked Ellie and Jonah how they met, they’d joke that it was thanks to a little love tap—their cute manner of describing the fender bender that had brought them together. That was when things were still good, when their marriage and their life together felt like some simmered-down fairy tale about regular, everyday people. Ellie should have known better. If there was one thing she had a grasp on in life, it was books, and as such, she was well aware from the start that all stories—even fairy tales—eventually end.
But that realization—in terms of her life, anyhow—came later. She wasn’t mentally there yet.
And so, when a frazzled, midtwenties Jonah, who had just come off a breakup himself (though not quite as recently), dashed to Ellie’s driver’s side window and apologized to her in a thousand diverse ways, she could have made a dozen alternate choices. After they’d inspected both their cars and then exchanged names and phone numbers and insurance information, she could have said goodbye, turned her music back up, and driven away. She didn’t. Rather, when the man who’d just hit her car pointed to a place in the near distance and asked if he could treat her to a coffee as one final form of apology, she wiped her tearstained face and allowed herself to laugh at the ridiculousness of her day—a breakup, a car collision, what next?—right before she said yes. Yes. Funny coincidence, she’d explained, but she’d actually been heading there anyway.
It wasn’t until more than twenty years later, when asked about their story yet again, that Ellie finally started to change the narrative and tell people that no—no!—it wasn’t because of a cute little love tap.
It was because of a crash.
Looking back, her rose-colored view of the event long gone, that seemed to her like a more accurate way to describe it.
But even that felt a little bit sugarcoated.
Which was why, in those final weeks they lived together, Ellie—a lover of words and stories and happy endings, a woman who once upon a time had believed in foolish things like fate—finally mustered up the courage and began to describe their chance encounter—the one built upon the backs of so many small, throwaway choices, and that ultimately shaped the trajectory of the rest of their lives—as something else, the thing that in all reality it had always been, even though neither of them had initially wanted to believe it.
An accident.