Anna Jarzab - Tandem

Grant shrugged. “Fillmore will burn it, probably.”

“Burn it?”

“No one can know you were ever here,” Grant said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“For who?” I demanded. My stomach dropped. They were going to cover up all proof of my existence. Soon there would be no trail of bread crumbs for anybody to follow.

“For all of us, including you,” Grant said. “I told you nobody would hurt you, didn’t I? This is for your protection.”

Something went slack within me. I felt as if I was falling down a long, dark shaft; black clouds roiled in my peripheral vision and I had to sit down on the edge of the bed before I fainted. The dress slipped out of my hands and onto the floor.

“Grant,” I murmured. It was the only call for help I could find the strength to make. He passed in front of me, crouching down so that our eyes were level. I searched his for any sign of tenderness and he, maybe sensing my intentions, avoided meeting my gaze.

“Just breathe,” he advised, his own breath growing shallow as he sat there watching me. I gripped my knees, riding out wave after wave of nausea. What is wrong with me? I thought.

“Grant, I swear to you, if you just take me home I won’t tell anybody what happened,” I begged. It was the only offer I could think to make, though it was a lie. My knuckles had turned a ghostly white color. “My grandfather has incredibly high blood pressure—if I don’t show up, like, yesterday, he could have a heart attack!”

My own heart buckled at the thought of what Granddad must be going through. I imagined him waking up at dawn and going to check on me, only to find me missing. In my mind’s eye he was picking up the phone, dialing my cell—once, twice, fifteen times before giving up—then Gina’s house, then Grant’s if he could find the number, and then, finally, with a heaviness he almost couldn’t bear, the police.

Grant fixed me with a hard look. “I’m going to say something that won’t make very much sense to you at first, but I need you to listen. I need you to hear me say it.”

“There’s nothing you can say that will make me understand.”

He took a deep breath, bracing himself. “I’m not Grant Davis.”

Of all the lies in the world, that was the one I was least prepared to hear.

“My name isn’t Grant,” he continued. “It’s Thomas. Thomas Mayhew.”

“You must think I’m a real idiot,” I snapped.

He shook his head somberly. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, and I’m not lying to you. I’m not Grant Davis. You don’t know me. My name is Thomas Mayhew. I need you to understand that.”

“This is ridiculous,” Fillmore barked. “Who cares if she understands? It’s not going to change anything. She’ll do what you tell her to do because if she doesn’t you’ll shoot her and leave her here. If there’s two, then there’s more, am I right?”

What the hell did that mean? This was nonsense, all of it. I wanted to grab Fillmore and throw him to the ground. Grant, at least, looked about as sick of him as I was.

“Fillmore, shut up!” he growled. He turned to me. “Don’t listen to him. He talks a big game, but he won’t do anything without my permission, and I’m not going to let him touch you, all right? I’m not the guy you thought I was back … back there, but I have no intention of harming you.”

He looked away at the oblique mention of Oak Street Beach, the prom, the living room of Granddad’s Hyde Park Victorian, the quiet caverns of 57th Street Books—all those things that signified back there .

“If you’re not Grant, then who are you?”

“I already told you,” he said matter-of-factly.

“You told me your name is Thomas Mayhew,” I said. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“If it did, I’d be surprised.” He lifted his eyes to mine. It was shocking, how familiar they were, and yet how foreign, like I’d never seen them before in my whole life.

A horrifying suspicion tugged at me: what if Grant was crazy? I’d been operating this whole time on the assumption that he was a reasonable, rational being—I’d even considered the possibility that this was all a misunderstanding, although that seemed like too much to hope for. But what if he was insane?

Because what he was proposing was ludicrous. Was he saying that Grant Davis had never existed, that since infancy he’d been someone else, this “Thomas Mayhew” that he claimed to be? Or was he telling me that he—whoever he thought he was—had replaced Grant, pretended to be him? Of the two options, I wasn’t sure which was the hardest to swallow, but the idea that there could be two unrelated people who looked exactly the same was so unlikely that it made my head hurt.

“So you’re … what? Grant’s evil twin?” That was the only possible explanation, if he was telling the truth, although it was very telenovela, and in no way easy to believe.

A short, harsh laugh escaped his throat. “Not exactly.”

“Then what are you?”

“Sasha,” he said deliberately, “what do you know about parallel universes?”

Now I laughed. “Parallel universes? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”

“Your grandfather is a theoretical physicist,” Grant said. “You must have heard him talk about them at some point.”

“You’re not trying to tell me that you’re from a parallel universe!” I considered again my hypothesis about his mental stability. Parallel universes? That sealed it: Grant was officially bonkers.

“Actually,” he said, standing up, “I’m trying to tell you that you are.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d hit it on the head when he said that Granddad was a theoretical physicist, because that’s what parallel universes were— theoretical . No one had ever proven that they existed.

He shook his head. “I know it’s a shock. But you know that it’s not impossible.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I said, folding my arms obstinately across my chest.

He rubbed the back of his neck; he was trying not to get frustrated, a battle he was clearly losing. “I don’t have time for this to sink in gradually, so I’m going to be very frank with you. You’re from one universe and I’m from another. This one. We’re not in your world anymore—we’re in mine.”

“And what world would that be?” I struggled to suppress the wave of hysterical laughter that was rising up. “Oz?”

He was right about one thing: Granddad had told me about parallel universes. When I was young, inventing worlds was part of my nighttime ritual. I would climb into my bed while Granddad took a seat in a nearby chair and we’d spin all kinds of crazy stories about universes inhabited entirely by sentient Popsicle sticks, or talking flowers that ate cotton candy, or wizards who could only use their magic to conjure pancakes. But never this. Never universes so similar to ours that they contained doubles of people we actually knew. Because the implication of such worlds only made us remember, with sharp pangs of grief, what was missing in our own.

“That’s not an easy question to answer, but I guess you could call it Aurora,” he said. I took a few seconds to assess him as if I was just looking at him for the first time. There was nothing about him to suggest that he was crazy. He wasn’t acting shifty or unhinged. It was precisely the opposite, in fact; he seemed alarmingly serious.

“Grant—”

“My name’s not Grant,” he insisted, his voice tight and agitated. “It’s—”

“Thomas?” He nodded. “You want me to call you Thomas? Fine. That’s fine. I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ll call you Rumpelstiltskin if it means you’ll let me go.”