I look away. And what about what we do know? What we can’t fix? What has always been, for generations over lifetimes? Where do the threads of this life end and where do they begin? Or is it just an endless tangle? A DNA strand?
“Grace, what is faith but the belief in your chosen religion? What is faith but blind hope? Do you have faith in science? History? How many times has it all been proven wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I say. And for the first time, I wonder if my father’s relentless need to find answers, a cure, treatments to bring her back has been his form of religion. I just never believed the way he did.
“Neither do I. I don’t have the answers. Which is why I also believe you will be a valuable asset to my team.”
Once she stands up, I do the same. She places an arm around my shoulder and leads me to the door. “Your father would be very proud of you, Grace.”
I walk out of Dr. Mendelson’s office and into the long, empty hallway. With each footfall, the echo of my presence seems to radiate all around me. The sound floats around me like phantoms. When I look back, the hallway lengthens and stretches as though I have walked a thousand miles along a corridor that leads nowhere. My mind throbs, unbalancing me. No, no, not here, I beg. I walk forward and focus on the doors of the labs. Count them in my head as I pass . . . five, six, seven. A faint high-pitched whistle skitters into my ears. The growing crescendo of metal grinding against metal makes me stop and reach for the wall with both hands to steady myself. My eyes close against everything I do not want to see.
There is a bridge on which I stand. Behind me, all the years of my life shimmer and pulse. I remember the smooth weight of my mother’s hair like cradling threads of black gold in my hands. Dad reading to me in front of the woodstove as the heat burns into the heels of my outstretched feet. Running to the edge of the ocean as the moist salt spray coats my lips. All these moments of living in a place where water and earth and air come together precisely forming the present, a break line of space and time between past and future where life moves and struggles, rages and crawls, dances, calms, naps with arms thrown wide open, touching other lives, inhaling their scent, their breath. This existence will no longer be mine.
Ahead of me, I see the shadow of the train approaching. The thundering echoes grow louder and louder, pulling me forward into a life that is not of my making. The helix of time will swirl around and through me until I am no longer alive, but existing in a place between breaths. I stand on the bridge of prodrome, mourning all that will be lost and all that is to come. I stand on this bridge, waiting for the train. Waiting to fall backward.
Unless . . .
I jump.
Winter
The Fates. I remember you were always bringing up the Fates. The Fates like layers of reality stacked high as reams of paper handed over to you, biblical in totality. The Fates were no minor gods, you always argued.
I disagreed and always tried to make you understand my views. So what was the point of life then? What choices are truly our own versus what has been handed down through your Fates? This existence. This body. Who says this is reality or just a version of some cyborg dream? A wormhole into another consciousness? How do we begin to understand where, why, and how we live? The idea that only one truth can exist is not a truth, I argued. Fates have been known to change. With faith.
How is it that your smile was always so gentle, as though gazing upon a petulant child?
What is faith? you asked. A feeling? A premonition? A belief in the face of despair, above will and exertion? Faith is not wanting to know what is true.
Stop quoting Nietzsche, that fascist elitist. Faith is as air, love, fire, hunger, hope. Faith is elemental.
That is not on the periodic table, you said, and walked away.
Always, always you had your Fates. The tests that foretold your future. And no matter how much I tried, I could never convince you to believe that it could be different with faith. But I tried. I tried to convince you until the day you left. And even after you had gone, I kept my faith. For living in this version of reality was not a reality that I would accept as the truth.
Spring
I am willing away the rattle of the tracks. Staring at the smooth concrete floor of the hall, telling my mind what I know and see before me. There is no train.
“Grace?”
I look up. “Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Will asks.
I take a breath to explain, but the words won’t come. Will stands before me, slowly reaches out his hand.
In one breathless moment, I stretch as far as I can, the tendons and muscles of my arm and hand contracting in pain. I grab hold before I fall.
“I hear something,” I whisper. “There is a train. I hear a train. Listen.”
Will guides me gently to a door and then another door and then around a corner. Somewhere between all the twists and turns of entering and exiting labs and rooms, I lose sight of where I am and where I am going. I can only feel the gentle pressure of Will’s hands on the roundness of my shoulders.
And then I am alone. Sitting on a couch facing a wall of caged animals. I gaze around
