Maybe this dayisn’ta total wash.
I give her a few moments before I walk out of the bathroom too. I’ve only just turned the corner when I see Chris at thecounter, picking up a replacement ball for the one Jules sent into the stratosphere. “Hey,” he says, smiling. “This date is totally working.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I reply.
Delilah drives me home after minigolf. For five whole minutes she doesn’t speak. Then, at a red light, she turns to me. “Do not ever,everdo that again.”
“You’re giving me really mixed signals here,” I point out. “Am I or am I not supposed to act like your boyfriend?”
“Oh please. You and I both know that act wasn’t for me.”
My face falls. “It’s really hard to finally find someone who totally gets me and then have her ripped away from me.”
Delilah sighs. “You’re preaching to the choir, Edgar.”
“If sending them back into the book was the right thing, how come we’re all so miserable?”
“I guess doing the right thing sometimes means not getting what you want,” Delilah says. “At least you’re in the same world. You get to see her, face to face. You and Jules, you’re stillpossible.”
I think about this for a moment. “Have you talked to him?”
She takes a deep breath and nods, looking pained. “I can’tnottalk to him. But when I do, it feels like I’m tearing out my heart.”
I glance at Delilah. I haven’t really considered how much worse this must be for her.
She pulls up to the curb near my driveway.
“Sorry I kissed you,” I say.
“Sorry I’m not Jules.”
I open the passenger door and step outside but then lean back down. “Hey, Delilah?” I say. “I know you’re not really my girlfriend. But I’m awfully glad you’re my friend.”
She smiles a little. “See you tomorrow, Edgar.”
My mother’s car is in the driveway, but the house is empty. She’s not in the kitchen getting dinner ready. She’s not in the living room watching the five o’clock news. “Mom?” I call, heading upstairs to her bedroom, and I knock on the door, but there’s no answer. Gently I turn the knob to find her bed impeccably made.
She’s not in the bathroom or in my room either. Walking down the hall, I peek inside her office.
Papers are strewn across my mother’s desk, some highlighted, some with red circles, and some with sticky notes along their sides. Since she’s not there, I’m about to close the door behind me, when I notice the spines on a stack of books:
Brain Tumors in Adults
The Last Walk: A Practical Approach to Preparing for the End of Life
Hope Is Where the Heart Is: A Guide to Beating Cancer
Tucked into the top one, like a bookmark, is a brochure:ST. BRIGID MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, NEW ENGLAND’S LEADER IN CANCER RESEARCH & NEUROLOGY.
I break into a sweat, and my knees start to shake. My momsaid she’s editing a time-travel novel; why would she need any of these?
I walk toward the desk as if a live grenade might be inside it. Scattered across the top are printouts of the kind of articles only doctors can read, filled with jargon. I pick up the one on top.
CAPGRAS SYNDROME WITH RIGHT FRONTAL MENINGIOMA, I read.
Abstract: A forty-seven-year-old woman with a right frontal parasagittal meningioma who developed the delusion that her husband had been replaced by a look-alike pretending to be her spouse. This type of delusion involves a compromise of the fusiform gyrus, the mechanism in the brain that allows facial recognition. Although historically patients with such delusions have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, we suggest that the cause may be biological and part of the tumor’s pathology, as evidenced by the fact that postsurgery, the patient experienced a termination of the delusion.
I squint, as if that might make me understand the jumble of words better. Imagine what would happen if you woke up one morning and the son you knew better than anyone else looked exactly the same—but acted like a British prince. You’d look for an explanation, and the thought that your son switched places with a character in a fairy tale would clearly not be the first oneto pop into your head. So maybe you’d start blaming yourself, thinking you were crazy. Or sick.
