Mom moved next to me. “You could have, but I’d already seen Gibbs that day, or thought I’d seen her. She had a habit of lurking in his shadow.”
My eyes shot up, and my stomach twisted. “You saw her?” For some reason, I panicked. She’d seen Gibbs? Before I did? What else had she seen?
“I wasn’t sure,” Mom said, “but when I noticed Sean missing, I sent you to look for him. None of this is your fault, Delaney. Your father and Gibbs had a long history together before me. He evidently couldn’t leave her in the past. He made the decision to follow her into the woods. You had nothing to do with it.”
My heart pounded, and I tried to catch my breath. A glimpse of a scene flashed through my mind—a woman following a man into the woods. Or maybe she was younger. Was this from one of my stories? Or some place else?
“How many versions have you written?” She held up one story and pushed the others into a pile.
I grabbed them from the floor and clutched them. “Maybe twenty.” It was actually thirty by that time.
Mom grimaced. “Dear, God.” She touched my cheek. “Maybe you should see a doctor.”
“We already tried that!” I heard myself say too loudly. “He just made it worse.”
Flashback to six weeks of, “How does that make you feel, Delaney?” And, “What are your treatment goals?” And then Mom complaining about spending time and money if all I was going to do was walk out of the sessions. Never again.
She paused, searching my face with her pale gray eyes. They always seemed cold to me. Her thin lips and no makeup reinforced the image. I knew she cared. She just had trouble showing me.
Dr. Hannah Strong is an Endowed Professor of Physics at U.T. Austin and world-famous. Maybe being a female in a typically male discipline forces her to embody her last name, which she kept even while married to Dad. Stocky, thick-boned, and short, she seems the exact opposite of the woman Dad would pursue. Fortunately, he passed his lanky height and looks onto me, though my arms are too long, while Mom gave me at least some of her brains.
She moved closer. “We could find someone else.”
I shook my head then looked away. I tried to speak, but my breaths hitched. My mouth was so dry. “Have you heard from him?” Please say yes, I thought.
“No. Not for over a year.”
My chest felt cold. “Did he ask about me?”
“He did.”
I was afraid to look at her. “Where . . . where is he?”
“At the time he was in Alaska.”
My eyes found hers. “So far? Why?”
She looked down. “I don’t know. Job, maybe. He told me years ago he’d gone as a teenager and liked it.” She met my gaze and tightened her lips. “He was always prone to whimsy. He rarely thought anything through. At least as long as I knew him.”
We both sat in silence. Her thoughts seemed to turn inward, and she sighed. Perhaps she had regrets too.
“What made him call?” I asked.
“Actually, I’m sure he was drunk.” Her lips tightened. “He called me about 5 am, which means it was 2 o’clock his time.” She scoffed, “His night was still young.”
“What did he say about me?”
“He wanted to know if you were still mad at him.”
Oh, God! My chest tightened as I felt tears flood my eyes. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing because he hung up. He was drunk, Delaney.”
“And nothing since then?”
“No.”
I hugged my legs against my chest. Almost every day I had written versions of that episode at the lake and afterward. I had never stopped thinking about him. Once, I had tried to imagine me leaving with him after Mom kicked him out, but I couldn’t make the story work. Why would he want me?
I’d hoped he might call me, and I thought about calling him, but all I could think of saying was, “I’m sorry.” I knew I couldn’t handle his anger at me. I regretted too much already.
“You don’t need to write these stories,” said Mom. “They’re making you feel worse. As much as you want to live in these new versions, you can’t.”
I felt numb. “I know. We can’t change the past.” Tears trickled down my cheeks.
“No, we can’t, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. Every possible choice you or I or they could’ve made already exists in another reality. All the choices we didn’t make live in their own worlds. They split off into separate universes and then move forward in their own time. There is no past to go to.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, wiping the snot off my face. “Split off? How?”
She held my face. “Will you listen, or do you want to keep crying?”
“I’ll listen.” I shuddered and tried to keep my lip from quivering.
She paused and sighed, probably trying to decide how much to dumb down her explanation. I was the top student in the best private school in the city, but I was in eighth grade at the time. And she was a genius. I always felt she couldn’t wait for me to go to college so she could really talk to me.
A thin smile spread across her lips. “Math and science have given us lots of explanations as to why and how things occur, but they also show us how much we don’t know. Light can be both a wave and a particle, for instance. An electron can be in a million different places at the same time. We really don’t understand what gravity is or where it comes from. Maybe it leaks in from another universe.”
“From so far away?”
“Or nearby. Universes can be parallel or like bubbles in a foam, undetectable, on the other side of a thought.”
My mouth dropped open. “How?”
Her eyes twinkled. “You’ve heard of this question: If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?”
“Yes.”
“Here’s a better question. Does the tree fall if no one’s there to see it?”
“If you find it on the ground, it fell.”
“Yes, but how could you prove that your observation of the tree didn’t cause it to fall?”
“Because of evidence. The wind or disease in the bark. Saw cuts.”
“Those are still observations. If no one is there, no recording devices of any kind, each tree is both standing and fallen. Only when we look does the tree live or die.”
“That makes no sense. Our eyes aren’t power rays.”
“Exactly,” she grinned. “We don’t force things to happen just because we measure them. According to the Many Worlds Theory, each option exists in its own universe—one where the tree stands, and one where it’s fallen.”
She held my hands. “One year ago you told me what your father had done. Another universe exists where you never told me. One exists where I forgave him, but we live in the one where I didn’t.”
A tingle rose up my neck, and I lifted my stories off the floor. “Then each of these stories describes another universe. Right? Since each option could’ve happened.”
“That’s one way to look at them.”
“What’s the other way?” She tightened her lips. “Creations of an obsessive mind?”
“I didn’t say that. I know it’s a lot to absorb. Look all this up. Read about it. This is what I think about every day, what I try to understand and explain to others. I don’t have room in my brain to worry about one decision I made long ago. The average adult makes 35,000 choices each day, and I am certainly above average in everything I do.” She winked.