Page 42 of Never Tear Us Apart
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘I think you know what’s happening, even if you don’t believe it yet. I need you to look for me. Look for me in 1942.’
‘Maia, I think you are very ill,’ she says, each word echoing a thousand times.
‘Maybe, but just look for me in 1942. If I see you again, I need to know if you find me. Promise me you will look.’
‘If?’
Then she’s gone, almost entirely – a vanishing point at the end of an expanse of dark – and I’m being dragged through the grit of starlight so fast I feel it graze the surfaces of whatever it is I am now, even though I know I am nothing.
* * *
I come to a stop with a lurch. My body coalesces around my mind. A kitchen, modern and bright white. A little girl of about three with light-brown curls and pale grey eyes frowns at me. Behind her, a woman stands with her back to the girl, chopping something. Long dark hair caught up in a hair clip.
‘Who are you?’ the little girl says, sounding not scared but intensely curious. She glances at the woman and then back at me. ‘Where did you come from?’
‘Where did who come from?’ the woman asks her. The sound of her voice frightens me. ‘Are you talking to Mimi again?’
‘Who’s the lady, Mummy?’
‘What lady?’ The woman turns around, and I glimpse her expression of horror and shock before I am unravelling again.
Her face looks just like mine.
* * *
There’s no air in my lungs, and I can’t breathe. Sal slaps my face. It seems to reanimate my body. Pain arrives on delay as I suck in a deep breath of oxygen. Clutching the edge of the table, I cling to its solidity. All I want is for the universe to stay still for more than a moment.
‘Where did you go?’ Sal asks me urgently, as I stare at my surroundings. ‘When?’
I’m in the sitting room of the half-house. It’s night outside; I’m not sure if it is the same night as when I left. Unable to form words, I ask the question I need an answer to with my eyes.
‘In the back of Nicco’s car,’ Sal tells me. ‘You collapsed, as if your soul had been ripped from you. The driver carried you in. I told him you’d had a little too much wine and not enough food. We laid you on the couch. You were not here, Maia – not for the last four hours or more. It was as if your body was a shell, emptied of all meaningful life.’
‘Hours?’ The first word comes at the cost of a sore, parched throat. ‘It felt like I was gone for only a few minutes.’
‘Where this time?’ Sal asks, intense.
‘Forwards, to Kathryn. For a little while. I was able to ask her to look for me here.’
‘Yes, good – good idea.’ Sal nods. ‘Anywhere else?’
‘Yes, but . . .’ I think of that child’s face and the face of her mother. My face. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. It was somewhere in the future. A future, I think. But I couldn’t go to my own future, could I? Especially not one that I have ever dreamt of for myself.’
‘I never have,’ Sal says. ‘But I haven’t travelled for decades. You are still settling. Perhaps here isn’t where you will land?’
‘Nothing is real,’ I say, frantic. ‘Nothing. Not you or me, and perhaps all of this is just insanity. In a way, I wish it was, because at least then I could stop feeling the spin of the earth under my feet. Except . . . except that nothing is real, and there is no meaning. Not to anything!’
Tears come then, all at once and in force. Dropping my forehead onto the table, I sob into my folded arms.
Sal pats my shoulder. ‘There, there.’ He pours me a glass of water and presses a clean handkerchief into my balled fist. He waits.
Before long, exhaustion and dehydration empty me utterly. I take a few deep shuddering breaths and take comfort in the calm made by the remnants of me.
‘I haven’t felt comfortable in my own skin . . . ever,’ I confess to him. ‘But I really want to go home right now, back to the world I understood and the me who didn’t care anymore. I don’t want to know the secrets of the universe. I just want to be still and ordinary again.’
‘I know, Maia, I know.’ He sighs deeply, and in that sigh, I hear all the years of his loss.
‘Together, we will try to find the answer,’ he says.
