Chapter 13
Aubrey
Friday Afternoon
One Day After the Outing
Meet us out front.
That’s all Ilena’s text says, so Aubrey does. Not just because of her vow not to text but because that’s what Aubrey does.
She follows. Maybe the Aubrey of here doesn’t or doesn’t as easily, but the Aubrey of here isn’t here.
Aubrey’s chest seizes. Is the Aubrey of here in her world?
Is this some Freaky Friday, Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing?
The thought sends a chill down her spine.
That would mean the Aubrey of here is in her world not mourning Ethan.
She wouldn’t know not to wash the mug with the “My Favorite Unique Visitor” that Aubrey had custom-made for him, the coffee ring around the bottom and drips down the side left from the last time he’d used it on the morning he died.
She’d have no idea that the sand in the vase beside the bed was from Martha’s Vineyard and not HomeGoods.
She wouldn’t understand why it was beside the bed.
She wouldn’t feel the way Aubrey has been feeling for the past few weeks.
She’d be both lucky and unlucky at the same time.
Aubrey tries not to think about that mug being stacked in the dishwasher next to bowls crusted over with vanilla yogurt and
pasta sauce. She rocks back and forth on her heels, willing Ilena and Mallory to appear. But what she seems to will instead
is her one-night stand. It was just the one night, wasn’t it? They haven’t done that before, have they?
Kai crosses the plaza, iced drink in one hand and a paper bag with the name of a deli Aubrey doesn’t recognize in the other.
He’s with Noreen, hair red instead of blond, back held a bit straighter, smile as energetic as ever, widening as she approaches
Aubrey.
Kai laughs as they walk, his stride as long as his legs, his lips fixed in a gentle upturn, and shame and guilt claw at Aubrey’s
insides for seeing not all of that but him naked in her bed. When he sees her, his smile thins out. Apparently that’s the
reaction she elicits regardless of what universe she is in. It had happened with Ethan too. Months of her Aubreyisms taking
their toll.
She wipes her clammy hands on the sides of the cargo pants she yanked off the hanger in the dark, not realizing they were
bright pink. “Hey,” she says.
“Ms. Miller,” Noreen responds, with more formality than their Noreen. She’s also taller thanks to the skinny heels that are
the opposite of the white sneakers their Noreen preferred. “Fresh air’s good for the pores. Or so AIM’s total health feature
tells me.” She laughs, and Aubrey’s not sure if she’s being ironic, and she just really, really hates that she can’t tell.
And she also kind of hates that Kai smiles at Noreen, but not at Aubrey. “Y’all decide on the color palette?”
Aubrey forces a swallow. “I . . . What were the choices again?”
Noreen shifts her cup into her opposite hand.
“All the things you have to keep in your head, I swear . . . no disrespect, but support staff needs to earn its name. Ella’s so worried about making the wrong choice that she makes no choice at all.
Passes the buck, which, incidentally, is a choice too, isn’t it? ”
Aubrey can only stare at her feet, at these wedge sandals she found by the front door.
A ding from Noreen’s phone. “Ms. Latham. Gotta scoot. She needs me! Bye, y’all!” She gives Aubrey’s arm a squeeze, something
she’d never done in their world, before twiddling her fingers at Kai and rushing toward the building, leaving an awkward silence.
Aubrey finally points to the drink. “Any good?”
Kai’s head tilts to one side. “You promised it’d change my life.”
And this is why Mallory said to let others lead and direct the conversation. Aubrey doesn’t drink coffee. She never outgrew
the inability to handle caffeine. “Yes, well, it is only coffee, so perhaps I oversold.”
He takes a sip. “Not by much. It’s good. But it’s that rooibos tea. You don’t drink anything with caffeine.”
“Sure, just a little test. You were listening.” Aubrey jabs a finger at him, channeling the playfulness he seemed to have
in her world. But when he just stares at her quizzically, she lowers her hand.
Keep up appearances, don’t get too close to anyone, but try to maintain what’s going on in this world.
How is she supposed to do that when she doesn’t know what’s going on in this world? Or when what’s gone on in this world
is . . . this?
“I’d have snagged one for you,” he says, “but—”
“I was a hot mess.”
“I was going to say, ‘but I didn’t know how you liked it.’”
His leg on hers when she woke this morning, that perfect indent above his hips.
“The tea, I mean,” he says, as if he can read her mind.
“Frothy and sweet,” she blurts out, which only makes it more awkward.
“Then here.” He offers her the sweating cup. “We like it the same way, despite our age difference.”
Age. Oh, oh, she’d offended him earlier. She hadn’t meant to. She accepts the tea.
He remains before her, his tolerance for awkwardness much higher than hers. She swivels her neck, desperate for Mallory and
Ilena to save her.
“Okay, then,” he says.
He’s past her, the whole uncomfortable exchange nearly over when some compulsion makes her say, “Kai?”
He pauses at the entrance to the building and turns to face her.
“I didn’t mean it.” Her nerves almost get the better of her. “About being young. It’s just . . .” My dead fiancé who’s not really dead is only the third person I’ve ever slept with, and oh yeah, it turns out he’s not really dead but Grayson Fields is and I’m more than mildly freaking out and . . .
Kai’s fingers tighten over the folded top of the paper bag, and she feels like a liar because he looks very much like a young
twenty-two-year-old (she checked his age in the employee database that morning). And yet, if she’s being honest, his demeanor
does seem older, more mature than the Kai she met at the outing in her world.
“Thanks for the drink,” she says.
Instantly, he grins. “You bet. Best team ever, right?” He says it like it’s some private joke she should know.
She holds up the tea in a mock salute as he enters the building and into her head comes “dollar oysters.” She and Ethan had been at a bar in the North End when the server finished his rundown of the specials with: “Dollar oysters.” The waiter had paused, panic crinkling his forehead as he flipped through his spiral notepad.
“I’m so sorry, but I’ll have to double-check the price on that. ”
Ethan’s hair had been long in the front then, and it bounced as he burst out laughing. Aubrey tried to cover with a “Probably
too rich for our blood,” but it only made Ethan laugh harder and the server’s forehead crinkle more.
After the server left, she’d said honestly that it wasn’t very nice, and Ethan had said, “Babe, dollar oysters. Dollar oysters. Check the price. An Aubreyism if I ever heard one.”
And he’d given that teasing smile and laughed, and she’d laughed, and “dollar oysters” had become their private joke. Every
time someone said something a bit silly or inane, “Dollar oysters,” one of them would say. It was their code word if either
of them was being held hostage. How they’d work it into conversation, a regular pastime for them after one too many craft
beers. Somewhere along the way “Aubreyism” transitioned into a nickname for her, Ethan using it each time she debated a Target
pillow or scone from Tatte for too long. He thought it was cute.
She sips the tea, carefully holding the tall cup of brown liquid far from her white coat.
When Ilena and Mallory finally arrive, Mallory sidles up beside Aubrey and says, “Missed you,” in a voice soft and oozy like
freshly baked cookies.
“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Aubrey says.
Ilena dangles a pair of sneakers. “You’re going to need these. And, the answer is no.”
Mallory counters with: “Before you say anything, you should know that Ilena thinks she may have trapped Felix with this baby.”
Ilena tightens her lips. “And Mallory almost killed Harley.”
“Grayson’s secretary is a busybody,” Mallory says, “which means, we have to move him.”
Aubrey’s heart clogs her throat. “Well, here’s something. Ethan’s alive.”
Mallory shakes her head. “You win.”
Ilena was right. Aubrey doesn’t like this. Aubrey hates this. Aubrey couldn’t hate this more.
She follows Mallory and Ilena into the service elevator of Grayson’s building, a place she never wanted to see again.
“Every time?” Aubrey says. “Every choice? I don’t understand.”
Mallory leans against the wheelchair she had Noreen borrow from the rehab center on the ground floor of AIM’s building with
an excuse Aubrey doesn’t want to know.
“I don’t either, not really,” Mallory says, “but a split happens.”
“That’s not logical,” Ilena says, slipping on a pair of blue surgical gloves. “How can a choice create an entire new world?”
Mallory shrugs. “Physics, apparently.”
“And that’s how we got here?” Aubrey asks. “Physics? Will it get us home?”
Mallory hands Aubrey an identical pair of blue gloves. “Maybe, if we knew enough.”
Ilena clucks her tongue. “Great. So one of us gets a PhD in physics, and then we get to go home? Good plan, love it.”
Mallory counters with “I didn’t say that was my plan.”
“You didn’t say you had a plan at all.”
Mallory taps the wheelchair. “Well, then, what’s this?”
Aubrey wriggles her fingers into the gloves, fighting the churning of her stomach. “This isn’t going to work,” she says softly.
“Maybe not,” Mallory says. “But there’s no alternative.”
But there is. Isn’t there always a choice? That’s what trips Aubrey up even more than making the wrong choice—the abundance
of choices.
Yet if what Mallory said is somehow true, it doesn’t really matter what Aubrey chooses.
Somewhere, in another place, another Aubrey didn’t play Fuck, Marry, Kill at the outing, another Aubrey didn’t force herself out of the bathroom stall at the start-up program to eat salad with Ilena and Mallory, another Aubrey didn’t text Ethan, and he’s still alive.
Like he is here. But with no memory of dollar oysters.
The door dings, opening into an alcove at the back of Grayson’s penthouse. Mallory exits first, pushing the wheelchair. Ilena
follows, and then Aubrey.
This Aubrey, who maybe didn’t forgive Ethan for choosing the arcade for their first date like she did and didn’t say yes to
a second. Or maybe he never asked.
She moves slowly through Grayson’s penthouse, the knowledge of what they’re about to do making her skin crawl. Making her
think of Ethan, the utter stillness of his body on the hospital bed in the ER.
She aches for him, the him who knew dollar oysters and that she loved peanut butter in smoothies and who’d decide on sushi
or pizza for dinner so she wouldn’t have to make a pro-con list.
They’re not together here. Maybe they weren’t supposed to be in her world either. Did she force it? Did she push against the
universe and the universe eventually pushed back? Taking away Ethan because Aubrey was too timid to admit that she would have
preferred a hip cocktail bar over the arcade? His death a result of a long line of cause and effect, from every choice Aubrey
had ever made? Starting with the boy in high school who’d promised her a pool house and a future she was naive enough to believe
but that only lasted long enough for her to lose her virginity in his parents’ storage shed? Did it even matter that ever
since, she’s taken her time, doesn’t make snap decisions, that she considers and debates and agonizes? She feels like she’s
drowning, unable to surface long enough to stand.
Hot dog or salad, joining AIM or staying with the start-up that became Tinder, texting Ethan or not texting Ethan. If a version of Aubrey lives every choice taken and not, how will this Aubrey—how will she?—ever know what’s right?
How will she not make the wrong choice again?
She has to figure out the truth. She has to find out why this Aubrey and Ethan aren’t together. If they shouldn’t be. If they
never should have been. If not being together could have saved her Ethan’s life too.
She takes a breath, pushes herself above the surface, and stands beside Mallory as she opens the freezer chest.