“It’s okay,” Trix said, and she felt tears burning behind her eyes. But she had to keep them in, because Jim was suffering more. He’d lost his entire family.
“That’s our home,” he said.
“And it will be tomorrow. But maybe for tonight it will be best to stay at mine.”
“What if they come back?” he said. “What if they find their way home and I’m not there, Trix?”
Trix had no real answer for that, though she thought: Wherever we are, Jenny and Holly have never been here. It was an odd idea, and it shocked her to think that maybe she and Jim had gone somewhere else instead of the other way around. But in some respects it seemed to fit. This was not the exact world she had known a few hours ago-there were differences close to her and Jim, and those changes must stretch farther afield-and she dreaded what she would discover when she arrived home. “Losing it won’t help them,” she said. “We need to recharge. Think it through. And maybe find someone who can help.”
“Someone?” he asked. Trix just shrugged. She remembered everything they had to do, and where they had to go. That is, if the Trix she was now would even consider such things.
“I’ll come back later,” he said, nodding at the apartment. “Tomorrow. I’ll come back.”
“Good plan,” she said.
Jim started the car and drove them across the city, and Trix watched from the windows. She searched frantically for signs of something being as wrong out there as it felt inside, but the shop names were the same. Dunkin’ Donuts wasn’t spelled differently, and the mix of old and new Boston architecture presented familiar facades. They passed Monument Square, and the Bunker Hill Monument looked exactly the same as before. But Trix couldn’t tell how high it was, nor could she read the inscriptions or identify the face on the statue standing before it.
Boston looks just the same, she thought. It’s just us who are different. But that wasn’t quite true, either. Jim’s agent, Jonathan, was dying. The brain cancer that had been cured due to Jenny’s involvement years before had run riot, and soon it would take him. “Because Jenny’s not here, and never has been,” she whispered.
“What?” It had started raining, and Jim turned on the wipers. They whispered left and screeched right, a rhythmic gasp and moan.
“Jenny and Holly,” she said. “I was just thinking aloud. It’s not just that they’re gone now, but that they’ve been gone…” Forever, she almost said. But that was too final. “Their past has been stolen, as well as their present.”
“And their future?” he asked, voice breaking on the last word.
“I’m going to help you,” Trix said. She eyed Jim in the car’s dark interior, wondering how much he had changed and where. He seemed a little thinner than before, perhaps a bit more heavily muscled, facial structure more defined. He’s a bachelor; he’ll want to take care of himself more so that the women flock to him. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and something about the familiar smells of Boston-wet streets, car fumes, coffee, and a suggestion of Italian food-calmed her. At least the city smelled the same.
As they neared the old townhouse on St. Botolph Street-not far from Symphony Hall-where she had her apartment, Trix sat up and clasped her hands in her lap. She checked out the cars parked along the sidewalks and recognized some of them. She saw a tall, thin woman walking her standard poodle along the street and went to wave. But would Mrs. Wilkinson recognize her with her pink hair and punky gear? In this world, yeah, Trix thought. It’s only me who doesn’t recognize myself. She lowered her window and leaned out to put that to the test, but by then they’d passed Mrs. Wilkinson and Jim was pulling up at the curb.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“No, Jim, it’s okay, I’ll-”
“I’m coming with you!” His tone invited no dispute. She tried to smile, and he reached out and squeezed her hand. “Trix,” he said. “Whatever we find…” He looked past her at the building.
“I know,” she said. “Whatever we find, I’m still me.” She opened the car door, got out, and stood waiting on the sidewalk, staring at her apartment’s drawn curtains. They did not look familiar. And when she ran up the three steps and checked the nameplate beside her buzzer, she groaned and leaned against the wall.
“It doesn’t mean…,” Jim began.
Trix went to try her key in the front door, but it had been left unlocked and drifted open as she leaned against it. Inside, she heard music emanating from her apartment. The harsh, thrashy guitars, drums, and growling lyrics of the Dropkick Murphys. You couldn’t be young and living in Boston and not know the Dropkicks, but they had always been a bit too brash for her taste. “Jim,” she said, “I always open my curtains in the morning.”
“Maybe not this morning.”
This morning I was someone else, she thought, and she swayed as unreality washed over her. She felt Jim’s hand steadying her and leaned into him, and then a horrible sense of anticipation lit inside her chest. Who am I going to find in there? she wondered. In her real life in the real world she hadn’t had a girlfriend for over a year, since her last long-term relationship had ended badly. And as Jim’s hand rested against her upper arm, a startling, electrifying certainty hit her.
This was a world with different rules. Perhaps here Jenny loved her as much as she loved Jenny.
She headed for the apartment door, already knowing that her thinking was skewed. No one knows Jenny, she thought. But no one knew the Jenny she and Jim remembered. Maybe here she was someone else entirely.
She tried her key, and it did not fit.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Jim said.
Trix’s heart was thumping as she reached for the buzzer, but she held back, kneeling instead and lifting the letter flap. It had a draft shield on the inside, and as she pushed her finger through and lifted it, she closed her eyes, because everything was already strange. That music’s not mine, my key doesn’t fit, I smell Chinese and I hate Chinese, and…
She looked into the apartment. “That’s not my home,” she said. The decor was different, the furniture, and as she watched, a strikingly tall black woman walked naked from the bathroom, across the hallway, and into the living room.
Trix caught her breath. Perhaps we’re lovers, she thought, but then a man emerged from the bathroom, naked and sheened with sweat, smiling and still semi-erect.
“Ice?” she heard the woman call, and Trix let the letter flap close softly as she rested back on her heels. Instead of being shocked or upset or disturbed, all she could wonder was how they could still make love with the city falling apart around them.
“Trix?” Jim asked.
“We can go now,” she said, standing and walking toward the stairs.
“You’re sure?”
She turned to him and was sad to see the hope fading from his eyes. “We’ll look somewhere else,” she said. “We need to go to someone who will listen.”
“Who?”
Trix glanced back at the familiar building one more time, glad that the rain would camouflage her tears.
“In the car,” she said. “We need to leave here. I’ll explain then.”
Rare Ould Times
As Jim drove through the city, windshield wipers battling the rain, he glanced at familiar stores and landmarks. His sense of dislocation had increased, despite the absence of any obvious changes. Every detail of Boston remained the same, at least based on a cursory inventory, and yet somehow it seemed as alien to him as if a tornado had dropped him into Oz. “Seriously, Trix, where are we going?” he asked.
“I told you. State Street. Try to get a parking space near the Old State House.”
“Easier said than done,” he said.
Trix nodded, peering out the rain-slicked passenger window. “I know. But we only need a few minutes. Double-park if you have to.”