Tess and Harry on the Dock, Summer 2016
“How is your OCD?” asked Harry.
“Occasionally annoying, rarely horrible, mostly under control. I seem to respond better to therapists and medications from my own universe.”
“Maybe you’re just in a better place.”
“I’m definitely in a better place.”
“I meant emotionally.”
“I know what you meant.”
“You know I never intended to send you there.”
“I know, Harry.”
“But since I did, I can’t help asking what it was like.”
“You waited for seven months, so you could help asking.”
“You may have been gone for a decade, Tess, but you know me. You know my tragic flaw.”
“Fatal curiosity.”
“So, how was that universe different than this one? I mean other than the fact that you drowned when you were eleven.”
“You seem awfully nonchalant about that tragedy.”
“I have enough to mourn in this universe,” said Harry. “If I started getting emotionally involved with others, I’d crumble.”
“I didn’t even know it was a different universe until Richard and Vivian told me.”
“It must not have been very different.”
“But I left here when I was twelve. The things you notice when you’re twelve aren’t all the things you know when you’re twenty-two. Like I saw on a TV documentary the other day that in this universe President Roosevelt only served two terms.”
“How many did she serve in the one you visited?”
“I wouldn’t call being forcibly sucked through a portal into a universe where I didn’t belong and having to stay for a decade a visit.”
“Fine, I withdraw the question.”
“It’s not the question I object to,” said Tess, “it’s the vocabulary. In that other universe, Eleanor Roosevelt served four terms.”
“And you didn’t notice the difference?”
“Harry, I was a kid when I left this universe, and all I cared about was science. I didn’t know how many terms Eleanor Roosevelt served as president or the exact date in 1941 when the Americans put an end to the War of German Aggression…”
“July seventeenth.”
“Yes, I know that now. But the answer where I went to high school was September twenty-third.”
“You really never noticed the differences?”
“First of all, I wasn’t looking for differences. I was dealing with the death of my father; my mother had totally rejected me; I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. How was I supposed to know that was all because I was in the wrong universe?”
“I’m sorry he put you through that.”
“He?”
“The other Harry.”
“You had a little something to do with it, too.”
“My part was an accident. He set out to remove you from your universe of origin to assuage his guilt for not saving you from drowning.”
“Wouldn’t you have done the same?”
“Let’s put it this way—I did everything I could to get you back.”
“True.”
“What about the stars?” said Harry.
“Mostly the same as far as I could tell. No Reginald Leach in the forties, but nowadays it’s Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Strong just like here.”
“No,” said Harry pointing up to the night sky, “those stars.”
Tess looked up and smiled. “I didn’t have the chance to examine every one,” she said, “but your star was there, Harry. I have a feeling in every universe your star is there, smiling down on Tess.”
The End