Aubrey sleeping with Kai. Ilena married to Felix—and pregnant. And Grayson. No matter the how, he’s no longer alive. Mallory’s stomach twists, and her heart clenches, and she has to put it aside. She can’t care, not now, not here, not amid all this. She sticks Ilena’s phone under her thigh, bouncing against it. She stares at the meditation corner and breathes through the storm raging inside of her.
She then faces her two best friends and lets logic guide her. “You both know I’m the last one to go for any kind of mystical crap.” She also never believed in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy but pretended to for the benefits. And yet, she finds herself saying the impossible: “Fuck, Marry, Kill. We each did exactly that.”
Ilena says, “I said there has to be a reasonable explanation for this.”
“Then let’s reason this out.” Mallory assesses the changes in her friends, trying to quash the screaming in her head and sort through the thoughts firing one after another. “If this is real, actually real, then one of two things is going on. Either the place we call home has changed, and we’re still us, in which case, Aubrey’s thumb should be the size of an heirloom tomato and Ilena’s hair shouldn’t be touching her shoulders and her stomach shouldn’t have another human squatting inside of it. Or this isn’t home. And we’re not us.”
“Not us?” Aubrey says. “What does that mean, ‘not us’?”
Mallory looks between Ilena and Aubrey. “I think, if we agree that this isareality, then we have to consider that it might not be ours.”
Ilena tries to clamp her shaking hands together in her lap, but her belly stops her. “That’s just not... possible?”
Ilena’s voice trembles, her tone as unsure as Mallory’s ever heard it, and it steals her breath and rattles her bones, andthis, this is the sound a rock makes when it breaks.
Mallory fights the sob rising in her throat and turns away from Ilena. A silence fills the room, broken by an actual soft cry from Aubrey and a matching one from Harley. Ilena then releases a long exhale. Mallory returns her gaze to her best friend, and they lock eyes, grounding them both in the people they have always been.
“We’re clearly us in mind,” Ilena says, in a way that is quintessentially Ilena—with a “but” coming.
One that Aubrey steals. “But in other bodies. So what’s happened to our bodies? At home? Do we think they... I mean, we... still exist? As us? Or as, what?Them?And who’s them anyway and—”
“Breathe,” Ilena says softly. “Let’s all just breathe. Because there’s no way to answer any of that yet.” She turns to Mallory. “But I think no matter where this is or what this is, an unexplained death still requires a call to the police. And this unexplained death is Grayson, Mallory, Grayson Fields. You chose him in the game, what? On a whim, to be funny, or was there another reason?”
Mallory’s skin grows cold. She slowly lets her eyes drift to the kitchen... to Grayson’s loafer... to Grayson.
Grayson sliding a check with more zeroes than she could imagine across the conference room table, wrapping his arm around her waist at the bar that night in celebration, her thigh against his during board of directors meetings, his grin pumping up his cheek, hand on a glass of wine at that vegan restaurant in the South End, fingertips wiping ketchup from her lips at the Shake Shack where their grumbling stomachs led them after, the half walk, half run to his building, where Grayson took her around back and punched in the code for the service elevator, whose secret ride let hands and fingers and lips go everywhere they’d been longing to go, stumbling over Harley, tearing off shirts and shoes and pulling back sheets and laughing and backs arching and oh, god, Grayson.
Her lips begin to quiver, and a deep hole of sadness opens in her chest. It grows and widens and threatens to swallow her whole. She can’t let it. She can’t acknowledge it. She can’t give in to it. There’s nothing more she can do for him. She has to stay focused on what she can control. And no matter what this is and what’s going on, what they can control is their response to it all.
“I was just being my outrageous self,” Mallory says. Admitting that she’d been sleeping with Grayson in their world would have made their relationship real. Here, it gives her motive. “He’s not going anywhere, and we need time to figure out what happened, what this is...”Time to not see that bent leg or feel the cold of his skin, to wonder if she might have...“And we certainly can’t do all of that if we’re stuck in a police station trying to answer questions we have no way of answering.”
Ilena’s lips remain thin as she attempts to retrieve her phone. Unaccustomed to her new center of gravity, she falls back into the chair. Those same peacock-blue eyes that grabbed hold of Mallory twenty-one years ago take the measure of her now. Ilena is well aware of the lengths Mallory’s willing to go to get what she wants but equally as aware of who Mallory is and what she holds dear. And that’s everyone in this room.
With the barest of movements, Ilena dips her chin in agreement. Mallory knows how hard that is, especially since it’s not the first time she’s had to ask her best friend to set aside her morals recently. (Or the second.) Mallory returns Ilena’s phone and then searches Aubrey’s face for signs of a panic attack or worse. But Aubrey is simply staring straight ahead, eyes tinged with red, clutching the dog like he’s a life preserver.
Mallory breathes in. “Who knows, we could wake up tomorrow back at the sandbox.”Or somewhere else entirely.Mallory pushes through a wave of nausea.
“We could—?” Aubrey sneezes, but instead of Harley flinching or jumping off of her, he only burrows in deeper. “Do you think we could, Ilena?”
“I don’t know,” Ilena says, slowly. “I honestly don’t know anything.” Her hand floats to her round stomach, hovering as if afraid to let herself feel what’s right in front of her.
Mallory looks at the marks on her own forearm and understands completely. “For now, let’s get our bearings. Let’s act normal. Go to work, go to... to... prenatal yoga, whatever, let’s just get out of this goddamn apartment and away from this(him)so we(I)can think. Think and see what’s here and who’s here and what hereisbefore anything else happens.”
Aubrey remains still, holding on to Harley, but Ilena again bobs her head in agreement, her hand still unable to settle on the impossibility inside of her. All the years stretching between the two of them never included what it does now.Mallory slides to the edge of the couch, puts her hand on top of Ilena’s, and presses both to her belly. “A baby, Christ, Ilena, a fucking baby.”
Mallory doesn’t know if this is a dream or a trick or some supernatural anomaly or maybe some Groundhog Day loop, but she’s not spending the time it’ll take to figure it out in jail for feeding Grayson Fields nut crackers. Her friends need her, AIM needs her, and the goddamnShandy Shane Showneeds her.
7
Aubrey
Friday Morning
One DayAfterthe Outing
Aubrey sits on Grayson Fields’s bed with his orphaned dog in her lap while her best friends debate what to do with the body. The body, like it’s a thing, an old armchair with peeling leather and a saggy cushion kept around because you can’t remember how it got through the door in the first place.He’s a person, Aubrey wants to scream, but doesn’t. She doesn’t have anything to follow it with. No solution to offer.
She’s seen enough movies and TV shows to know that there’s still a window of time where they can make this right, not get in any deeper, call the police and justify Mallory not doing so sooner because she was in shock. Shock can do all sorts of things to a person. Something she learned with Ethan. She pictures him, his sandy hair falling into his light green eyes, and drops of sweat erupt along her hairline. Her vision narrows as if traveling through a darkening tunnel, and she roots herself deeper into the mattress to stay upright.
