A Million Worlds with You
Page 43

Then Paul and I will never be together again. I lean my elbows on the table and rest my face in my hands. Every other emotion I could feel is drowned in terrible, final loss.
After a moment, however, Paul says, “But just because something’s been damaged doesn’t mean it’s ruined.” When I look up at him, he continues, “I, uh, manage violent impulses of my own. I’ve never lost control. That’s a choice I’ve made. Discipline I’ve learned. Your Paul could learn that too.”
Could he? I don’t know. But we’ll never find out if my Paul won’t even try. In order for him to try, he has to believe.
“The violent impulses,” I begin. “Those come from your parents, don’t they?”
He always goes so rigid when anyone even mentions them. “That’s obvious. But I don’t have to be the man my father is.”
“No, you don’t. But the cracks still linger, don’t they?”
Paul breathes out heavily. “If this conversation isn’t going to be constructive, then—”
“Wait. No. It’s just that I think something about how you grew up convinced you—made you doubt—” At last I find the right words. “It made you think nobody could ever love you for yourself alone.”
As badly as I needed to say it, I almost wish I hadn’t, because Paul’s flinch tells me that hit him like a bullet.
He doesn’t reply right away, but I let the silence linger. There’s no time for anything but the truth between us from now on.
Finally Paul says, “My parents . . . you know that they’re corrupt people.”
“In my world and a few others, they’re mobsters. Gangsters? Whatever word you’d use here.”
“Mobsters.” He slumps back against the wall, weariness replacing his formal rigidity. “That doesn’t surprise me. Here, they profit from the black market. They resell food, equipment, even medicines at exorbitant prices, all because they bribed the right people to make sure they received those shipments, while ration storehouses remain empty.”
“Did they want you to be a part of it?”
“It sickens me, and they always knew that. Always mocked me for it. Said I thought I was ‘too good’ to fight for my own place in the world. Mama and Papa don’t see this as a war against the Southern Alliance. To them, it’s every man for himself, always, forever.”
Maybe that’s their constant—the one thing that’s true for the Markovs in every world. I feel sure it’s true in mine. “In my world, Paul’s parents don’t even speak to him anymore. They don’t give him any money. All because he became a scientist.” I’d always known something was seriously messed up about a mother and father who were angry their kid got into college at age twelve.
“Mine are more understanding,” Paul says. “Because military service is mandatory, and because they hope that someday, I’ll achieve a high rank and be able to funnel stolen goods in their direction. They’re sure I’ll do it eventually. That I’ll ‘see sense.’ People like them understand the concepts of right and wrong. They just convince themselves that they’re in the right. It sounds like your Paul’s choices force his parents to know just how selfish and small they are.” His smile is as thin as the line of a scar. “People can forgive anything except being proved wrong.”
I think about my Paul’s bare dorm room, where he can’t afford anything but a single set of scratchy sheets he bought from Goodwill. He owns two pairs of equally battered blue jeans and a series of not-new T-shirts; even his one big indulgence, a pair of good boots for his rock-climbing adventures, he got secondhand. My parents bought him a new winter coat, and when they baked him a birthday cake he was so surprised. So grateful. I don’t think he’d had a birthday cake in years.
Maybe his father, Leonid, wasn’t merely being mean. Maybe he was trying to awaken something angry and cruel within Paul. If Paul had chafed at his poverty—if he’d thought at any point, This is ridiculous. I don’t have to live like this. It would be so easy to separate the idiots around me from their money—everything would have changed. If he’d turned his genius to identity theft or hacking into banks, he could have made himself a millionaire within weeks. Days, even. The Firebird project might’ve collapsed without him, while Paul would have turned into exactly the man his father wanted him to be.
But he never flinched. Not even once.
“It was hard for me to accept that Paul and I don’t wind up together in every world,” I say. “Still is. But I know I love him, and that something between us—in so many worlds—it goes beyond random chance. For Paul, it’s different. It’s like now that he’s been splintered, he assumes we’ll never wind up together.”
Paul considers that, his gaze turned deeply inward. Learning about another version of yourself—about the array of people you could be that would all still truly be you—it’s intoxicating. Despite my desperation, I’m fascinated to watch someone else go through it too. “You always seemed so out of reach,” he finally says. “Not only because of Theo. Because it’s so hard to believe anyone would love me back without wanting something in return.”
Although I already knew how badly my betrayal here must have hurt him, I realize now how much deeper the wound struck. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
But Paul isn’t listening. He doesn’t need an apology anymore. He wants to understand. “If it’s hard for me, it must be almost impossible for your Paul Markov. The idea of fate gave him hope. Then when that fate was torn away, he couldn’t believe any longer.”
“He knows my parents love him,” I say. “And my Theo, too. But he probably thinks it’s all about the science. About what he can help them do.”
“I don’t know. I’m not him. But . . . I could believe that was true.”
Paul and I sit in silence for a few moments. I take another couple of bites of the sandwich, but on autopilot, hardly tasting the bland food. How am I ever supposed to undo damage like that? How can I make Paul believe in us when his whole life, and all these other universes, tell him we’re impossible?
Once I thought of running from world to world, trying to find the one where Paul and I loved each other perfectly. Now I don’t know whether a world like that could ever exist.