Page 13 of The Paradox Club

“And yet it is both.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, but the truth doesn’t always make sense. Light behaving like waves and light behaving like particles—those two things seem contradictory.”

“What does contradictory mean?”

“It means they shouldn’t both be true.”

“Okay.”

“But opposing forces keep the universe in balance, Tess, and the human mind—your own brain—is capable of believing things that are contradictory. It just takes a little work.”

“What things do you believe that are contradictory?”

“Well, as an example, I believe in science, and I also believe in God.”

“Come on, Harry, even I know that those two things don’t have to be contradictory.”

“You can be annoyingly smart for a ten-year-old.”

“I know.”

“Okay, how about this. I love your mother more than my own life. And some days I want to hurl her into the lake.”

“Do you really hate Marie?”

“Of course I don’t hate her. Not like you’re thinking. It’s just that two people who live together all the time and share as much as your mother and I do are going to get on each other’s nerves now and then.”

“Does Aunt Vivian get on your nerves?”

“Sometimes. But I don’t love her the way I love your mother, so I don’t need the balance of—let’s call it annoyance. If light can act like a particle and like a wave, then I suppose I can want to be with your mother every minute of every day and at the same time never want to see her again.”

“You’re weird.”

“So is light.”

THE HOUSE ON VILAS AVENUE

The contradictory thoughts that Tess held simultaneously as she climbed into the Uber at the bus station were all related to Vivian. She was excited to see her aunt and to have a safe place to rest and hopefully recover, but as always she feared that Vivian’s mental health would have slid since her last visit a few months ago, that she’d end up being the caretaker and Vivian the patient. She couldn’t wait to lie back and listen to one of Vivian’s stories—the only thing since Harry’s death that consistently kept the voices in her head quiet—but she feared the stories were nothing more than delusions, the sign that she was losing a little more of Aunt Vivian each day. Excitement and trepidation—she could almost hear Harry saying, Just like waves and particles.

The car took her within a mile or so of Marie’s house in the Eken Park neighborhood—the house Tess had lived in (except during the summers) until she was twelve. Unlike the lake house, which had been the site of such happiness and yet slithered in and out of her memory, she could picture every room of Marie’s house in precise detail. Probably nothing had changed in the past decade, she thought. Harry’s study preserved like some sort of museum, Harry’s picture in the den next to the television, Harry’s bathrobe still hanging on the hook in the closet, his slippers aligned neatly below. In the little time Tess had spent in that house after he died, Harry’s spirit permeated the place, at times even more than it had when he was alive—when he was so often absent, working late at the office or off visiting some radio telescope as part of his work for SETI. As for Tess, even before she finally and completely absented herself from the house, she had been absent from it. No photographs of toddler Tess adorned the walls, no childish artwork clung to the refrigerator, no bicycle stood gathering dust in the garage.

Tess had been amazed at how quickly Marie had managed to erase a daughter from her life. After Harry died, Tess had spent some time with Aunt Vivian—she and Marie agreed it would be too traumatic for Tess to attend the funeral, which had infuriated her. And Marie said she needed time to “get things in order.” Tess soon discovered that getting things in order meant “removing all signs of Tess from the house.” In her memory, which couldn’t possibly be correct, it seemed that when she had returned home a few days (or had it been a few weeks?) after the fire, all trace of Tess, except for a few stuffed animals and the pink-painted furniture in her room, had been removed. Even her desk drawers had been emptied—her preteen diaries, her carefully saved multiplication tables and notes from science class, her treasured collection of art supplies were all gone.

As the Uber passed by Marie’s neighborhood, Tess looked out the other side of the car.

The leaves had already begun to fall from the oak tree in Vivian’s front yard, and acorns crunched under Tess’s feet as she made her way up the brick walk to the front porch. The tire swing on which she had spent so many hours rocking lazily while reading stirred ever so slightly in the breeze. She loved the smell of early October in Vivian’s yard—the musty aroma of the summer dying with a sharp hint of the winter to come. If she could bottle this, she thought, maybe she wouldn’t need all those drugs.

She knocked gently on the solid oak door, then harder when no response came. When she knocked for the third time, almost bruising her knuckles, she began to think that coming here without warning Vivian had been a mistake. Then she heard a loud click and the door creaked slowly open, revealing a white-haired woman in a house dress holding a book in one hand.

“Hello, Aunt Vivian.”

“Tess,” whispered the woman in the doorway. “How lovely to see you. Come in out of the chill.”

Tess stepped through the door into a dim hallway. An antique hall tree with a cracked mirror stood against the wall between two elaborate sconce lights, only one of which worked. A threadbare carpet covered the floor, and the dull floral wallpaper peeled in places. If anyplace was home to Tess, it was this gracefully aging house.

“Your hair’s gone white,” said Tess.