A Million Worlds with You
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THE VERY FIRST GOOGLE SEARCH REVEALS THE DARKNESS hanging over this house. LOCAL PROFESSOR, DAUGHTER MURDERED IN CARJACKING GONE WRONG
Although Dad and Josie were in his car, Josie was behind the wheel. This detail is only a random one in the story, because the reporter couldn’t have understood the significance. If Josie had been driving her own car, nobody would have tried to carjack it, because carjackers aren’t interested in bright yellow Volkswagen Beetles that the cops will spot within seconds. And if Dad had been the driver, he would’ve done exactly what the carjackers wanted: gotten out, made sure Josie did too, and handed over the keys.
But Josie’s quick temper—the way she responds to any risk by rushing straight at it—that made her reckless. She “resisted leaving the vehicle,” the story says, without specifying exactly how. Whatever she did, it spurred the would-be carjacker to fire his gun.
Ms. Caine, 21, died on the scene. Dr. Caine was able to speak with first responders but lost consciousness during transport to Alta Bates Medical Center, where he was declared dead on arrival.
You’d think I’d be used to finding worlds where one or more members of my family have been lost. It’s happened often enough that I handle it better now. But it never gets easy.
If Josie was twenty-one when she died, that means this happened three years ago. Since then Mom’s been . . . broken, I guess. Devastated. Is she even still teaching? On leave? We’re still in the house, but to judge by the mail piling up outside, she’s not coping well, if at all.
Which is why this makes me so completely furious.
I sit in my room, knees balled up to my chest, staring down at the glowing laptop screen. Josie’s senior portrait smiles out at me from the screen, as does Dad’s last faculty picture. How could Wicked try to take away the one person my mother had left? A chill goes through me as I realize my mom might even have committed suicide. That’s what Wicked set her up for—she went after both of our lives this time.
The venomous cruelty of it goes beyond anything else I’ve seen of Wicked, especially because, according to Conley, there was no tactical reason for this Marguerite to die.
Wicked might enjoy her other murders, but I always thought that at least part of her motivation was getting Josie back. I’ve underestimated her sadism. I never guessed how low she would go.
And yet somehow, I have to acknowledge, Wicked and I must be the same.
I learned about the potential for darkness within Theo early on. Then I learned about the darkness Paul hides inside. But I turned out to be the darkest one of all.
Once in my life I planned to kill another human being. When I believed Paul had murdered my father, in that first rush of hate and loss and pain, I honestly thought I could kill. But even then, when the moment came, I hesitated—and thank God, because Paul was innocent and Dad was alive. And it wasn’t even the strength of my hate that fueled me—it was the strength of my love for my dad. That brought me to the point of murder when nothing else could.
So what twisted another version of me into Wicked?
I look up at my walls, where my paintings decorate the room as usual. However, this is one of the few worlds I’ve visited where I don’t focus on portraits. Instead, I’ve turned to landscapes, cityscapes, even some still lifes of fruit and vases, that kind of thing. This Marguerite’s color work shows real depth, as does her treatment of light—I could learn from this. But I can sense the pain that has led her to avoid painting human faces.
With a deep breath, I sag back in my easy chair. I’ve probably done everything I can do for this version of me. I definitely don’t want to hang around this depressing universe any longer. I hate leaving Mom like this, but I can’t bring back Dad and Josie for her. And another Marguerite will be put in danger any time now.
I take hold of the Firebird, try to jump. Nothing.
Exhaustion claims me, body and soul. Physically, my muscles still ache from my desperate car escape, and the bruises around my hipbones and knees have begun to throb. Emotionally, I’m so drained that I’m not sure I’d care if the house caught on fire.
Bed, I tell myself. Now. I’ll set the alarm to go off every three hours or so; that way I can keep trying to jump out as soon as possible. But then I remember my phone sank in the river along with my car. Great.
In my own dimension, Josie gave me a Hello Kitty alarm clock for my sixth birthday. It doesn’t get cooler than that when you’re six. Josie took pride in having picked out such a great gift, and the alarm clock remained one of my prize possessions until well after the age when Hello Kitty felt like “my style.” Even when I replaced it with my tPhone, I didn’t throw out the alarm clock. It’s still sitting in the back of my closet, serving as a makeshift dummy head for my knit winter caps.
If Josie gave me the clock in this dimension, too, then Hello Kitty is about to get called back into action. So I shuffle to the closet and flip on the light to start rummaging around, then stop.
My portfolio case has been jammed in the back corner, crumpled like paper, and all over the floor lie old canvases of mine. Frowning, I kneel to examine them. My first glimpse chills my heart.
It’s a portrait of Josie—with the eyes scraped away.
I keep going through them, and over and over, the destruction is the same. Josie, Dad, and Mom, their eyes or mouths or both missing from their original portraits. The mutilation makes their faces look hollow and ghoulish—the stuff you’d expect to see in horror-movie posters. At first I wonder whether this Marguerite made an artistic choice to deface her old pictures as a symbol of the destruction of her family. But then I see the tiny flakes of paint on the floor of the closet. No, this was done within the past day or two.
In other words, Wicked did this.
Last of all I find a self-portrait, very like one of my earliest ones back home. The me in the picture is even wearing a blue flowered T-shirt I still own. But her entire face is missing, scraped away so violently that Wicked’s knife tore the canvas in several places.
She hates herself more than any of the others. Sitting cross-legged on the closet floor between my rows of shoes, I study each of the faces in turn. But why does she hate them? Does she just hate everyone? Maybe something went wrong in utero, and my brain didn’t develop into a normal person’s. Wicked might be a psychopath, only the shell of a human being. . . .