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Ula Frost had a cult following for a reason: her portraits—at least those painted in the last twenty-two years—were said to unlock alternate versions of their subjects from parallel universes, bringing them, somehow, into this world, the one that Marchand inhabited. Marchand wondered fleetingly about what alternate versions of himself might exist. A version of himself who’d never watched his own mother die, a version who never got shot while buying a Dr Pepper and a banana at a bodega that was being held up. A version of himself who’d studied harder, gotten better grades or advantages from
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He wanted him to be the kind of man who was into horses, who had a stable and a mare whose coat was a warm chestnut color, whom he brushed methodically every evening, listening to some old jazz record, savoring a nice port, while she swished her shiny tail.
There was a version of Pepper who’d changed her name and moved to Mexico, where she had a reckless tan and worked at a museum of indigenous art.
When Pepper couldn’t sleep—at least since she was fifteen—she imagined the alternate universes that might be out there if alternate universes really existed. A universe where antibiotics had already stopped working. A universe where cancer had a cure. A universe where that man had never become president and started that war, and all the people who’d died and the cities that’d been destroyed still lived and stood perfectly intact. A universe where she hadn’t met Ike in the hotel lobby of a conference about the evolution of human sexuality. A universe where they’d met but hadn’t skipped out on
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Pepper considered throwing herself out of the car. Scott wasn’t driving that fast. She’d never broken a bone before. She wasn’t sure who’d sign her cast, but she’d always kind of wanted one.
The worst fight they’d ever had, which started over a dirty kitchen but wasn’t about a dirty kitchen at all, ended with Ike sitting at Pepper’s side of the bed for hours while she lay silent and wretched, wishing he’d give up but also wishing he wouldn’t, until he put one hand in her hair and broke her.
It was an impossible thing, living under the weight of your other selves.
“What do you think about the stories?” Annie said. “About the alternate universes? Have you ever seen anything that made you think it was true?” Pepper knew her moms were like her, too steeped in science to be able to buy the fantasy, but also too full of goddamn longing not to think about it.
Scott blinked a few times, processing. Pepper recognized that look—he’d gotten too attached to his ideas about how it worked. It was so exhausting, the work of reconciling yourself to your own wrongness.
Her moms had left her a message, but she couldn’t talk to them, and they knew that, knew talking to them only made her homesick when she traveled. Sometimes they left messages with only the sound of a clicker, because they’d accidentally clicker-trained Pepper to sit when she was three, while training a puppy, and the sound of a clicker had since reminded her of their laughter.
“Sometimes I think maybe, if it were me, it would be nice. A chance to start over. But I’d miss my cat. The people in my life not as much, but I might die of a broken heart knowing I’d left my cat behind and would never see her again. I don’t allow myself to think about it for long.”
Somewhere Pepper was braver, and more open, the kind of woman who never withheld anything, because she only wanted people in her life who liked her as she was.
Her brain was so tired, and it spun anyway. What if she was wrong about everything she liked? What if she was wrong about her feeling of wrongness and had made Ike hate her for nothing?
Pepper had friends who had this kind of volatile relationship with their mothers, who’d complain about them endlessly but also call them immediately over the slightest crisis.
Pepper’s sandwich was the best sandwich of her life—pastrami with sauerkraut and garlic honey sauce. So at least there was that, Pepper thought. The best sandwich of her life was something.
And in every universe there was still plenty of uncertainty and grief, and kindness and anger and suffering and joy, beautiful things and miracles and tragedies that knocked people on their asses, there were mistakes and forgiveness, second-guessing and the question of what else might be out there—all constants in every universe, all existing at the same time.
