“Shoot,” he responded. Typical Coop. Too sweet to swear much. “Lemme see yours,” he said.
I handed it to him and watched as he studied my image.
He looked at me and smiled. “Handsome as usual, Mikey. I wish mine looked this good.”
In my eyes Cooper was good looking for a guy. In fact, I’d begun to see him as a beautiful boy. Different than I was in that regard. I had a squarer jaw with more masculine features. I also had that dimple in my chin that Coop said was like a small ass crack even though he also said it made me looksuper sexy.
“I think yours is good actually,” I stated. Which I honestly did but had hesitated to admit to him that he always looked so damn sweet and innocent in pictures.
Cooper was blond and blue eyed like me with a smaller frame. Even though he was about three inches shorter, he was muscular because we were both active in sports and exercise. His face was where we differed. He had high cheekbones and delicate features that caused him to appear less manly. His soft features defied the naturally athletic boy he really was. Shaggy, blond, beach-bum hair framed a face with soft flawless skin that continued over his entire body. Coop had a muscular build but nature had given him a pretty face. A face that caused a heat to stir inside, a face I wanted to touch, a boy I wanted to protect out of fear he was too gentle to protect his own self.
“You sure the picture is okay?” he asked, startling me out of my daydream because he was simply too beautiful to look at.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “I was just pickin’ on ya. You know you always look terrific in pictures,” I reminded him because he did.
Both of our folks sat across the room in the DMV where they waited for us. I noticed that they smiled and whispered to each other.
“Let’s go show the folks,” Coop said, laughing and pointing out the foursome that were as tight as Coop and I were.
“Look at my dad,” I whispered, cupping my mouth and leaning into Coop. I could see Dad was a minute from tears. He was a sensitive soul like Mom, but less weird about the world. “He’s gonna hug the shit outta both of us, Coop,” I added. “Consider yourself warned.”
The moms hugged each other as we approached and commented on how their boys were growing up too fast. The dads stood side by side, bobbing their heads in unison like those goofy dogs you sit on a dashboard
“Get it over with, people,” I urged, opening my arms. “Your boys are men now,” I added, tugging Cooper toward me as we got crushed in a group hug.
“We’ll get you a used car,” Dad said, pulling me aside and resting his hands on my shoulders after the hugs ended. “Possibly when you’re seventeen after you show Mom and me you can be responsible enough to have your own.” He beamed at me and pulled me in for another hug. “I’ll teach you how to tune it up and change your own oil too,” he spoke into my ear, squeezing me one more time beforehe pulled back, a tear in his eyes as usual.
Dad died the following summer, just before my seventeenth birthday.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Mike
Chapter seven of the book Mom wanted me to read about parallel universes ended with a thought provoking idea:
Many people believe that when a person dies in one universe, they can still exist in another. In fact, others have daringly hypothesized that when one person dies in one dimension, a space can open for a departed to return to another in an exchange of universes.
I closed the book and set it beside me, watching as Mom fought sleep with labored breathing. She’d mentioned that she didn’t want to waste a single living moment on sleep when she had so much to share with me, but the frailty of her body was catching up to her. We’d recovered from our disagreement about her desire to expire on the anniversary of Cooper’s death; neither of us conceding our wishes.
I’d read the last paragraph of the chapter several times and wondered if Mom had been thinking about the specific passage as well. I had to admit the book had some interesting concepts. The proposed science stated that we had an infinite number of universes, with an infinite amount of possibilities.
The author counted the fact that there were billions of stars supporting billions of planets just inside our Milky Way galaxy. With billions, even trillions of galaxies going on to infinity, he opined that there could be countless other beings with countless other parallels to our own. In fact, we could surmise that just maybe, there were millions of parallels to our own lives currently living at the same time.
The book theorized that our lives in each universe were like a book. Wehad the basic storyline but that chapters could be different in each universe as we made casual choices that altered our journeys during our day-to-day lives. I thought about Mom’s theory concerning déjà vu. I had experienced the phenomena before and I had to admit that it felt like I’d been there and seen that, even though there was no rationale for having actually done it before. Was that a rip in the parallels? A brief recognition of our other selves?
Out of curiosity, I picked the book up and began to read another theory about parallel universes:
Religion has held sway over humans for thousands of years. Is there a God? Does he/she/it really exist and do we pay a price for our misdeeds while on earth? Do we make decisions based out of the fear of retribution? Then there are those that suggest that perhaps there was a creator or creators that formed the world as we see it. The difference being that this entity is running simulations on a grand scale and that we all could be in an endless loop of simulated possibilities, therefore, an infinite number of possible realities and or universes.
“What a crock of shit,” I muttered, placing the book in my lap and gazing at my mother. “What the hell are you up to?” I whispered. Her chest moved shallowly as she took short and weak breaths.
Marie had told me that Mom was in the final stages of life and that things would end soon. I hoped the hospice nurse was armed with morphine in the event that Mom wanted to ease her suffering. I doubted Mom would take the drug because she wanted to feelallof life, even the rough stuff. However, even with her idea of experiencing everything she had zero problems taking a couple of edibles or microdosing mushrooms, but she didn’t count that as poisonous western medicine so it was acceptable.
Her eyes popped open and she turned toward me. “What day is it, honey?”
she whispered, smiling at me like all was good in her world despite her body betraying her spirit.
“Tuesday, Mom,” I responded.
“Did I ever tell you what the last words that Cooper spoke to me were?” she asked, motioning toward the cup for a drink.
