Page 48 of The Paradox Club

“I forget sometimes how smart you are,” said Harry. “Take another example. A blank sheet of paper.”

“White,” said Tess, who had recently discovered musical theater in the form of a stack of CDs in Marie’s closet. “A blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities.”

“Exactly,” said Harry, completely missing the Sondheim reference. “So many possibilities. When you take out a blank sheet of paper to create a work of art or a poem or a page of a book or a paper airplane or an origami swan, the possibilities are limitless.”

“But are they infinite?” asked Tess.

“They might be. You might take out a piece of paper tomorrow and draw a picture of the moon on it. And in every other universe—every one of the infinite universes—the only difference might be what you put on that piece of paper.”

“But what about the butterfly effect?”

“I see you’ve been paying attention when I talk to you.”

“Of course I pay attention,” said Tess.

“You’re right, Tess. It’s possible that there is a universe that is exactly like ours except a particular leaf falls off a tree a nanosecond earlier. And it’s also possible that, in falling from its branch a nanosecond early, that leaf changes everything.”

“But we’ll never know, will we? We’ll never know what that leaf changes.”

“No,” said Harry, hoisting himself up. “We never will.”

A few minutes after Harry tucked in his daughter, Marie came in to say good night to Tess.

“Still awake?” she asked.

“I’m just thinking about universes,” said Tess.

“Oh, just universes, so nothing big.”

“I want to believe that if there are an infinite number of universes, at least one of them has a Tess who doesn’t have my troubles.”

“And what troubles would those be?”

“Just difficulties.”

“We all have difficulties, Tess. I’m sure there is a universe in which Tess has different difficulties from the ones you have, but I can’t imagine a universe in which Tess or anyone else has no difficulties.”

“I’d settle for different ones,” said Tess.

“Be careful what you wish for.”

FIRE ON THE ISLAND

On a night two weeks after Harry told Tess about infinite universes, the voices in her head would not shut up. She had learned Morse code the previous summer, but no matter how many times she tapped shut up on the top of the little desk in the room she shared with Vivian, the voices kept up their incessant nattering—louder and louder. Worse than they had ever been before. If you don’t line up the Legos, something bad will happen. So, she lined up the Legos. If you don’t write the alphabet backward twenty times, something bad will happen. So, she wrote the alphabet backward twenty times. But still they kept on.

She and Harry hadn’t gone to the dock that night because a front had swept through and dark clouds filled the sky, threatening rain and lightning and obscuring the stars. Nights when she couldn’t see Harry’s star made her nervous. The wind whistled through the pine trees and blew hard enough that twigs and small branches occasionally thwapped against the roof, making Tess jump in her chair. The air felt electric, as it often did before a summer storm, but this time Tess tingled not with excitement but with unease. The whole universe seemed on edge and the voices knew it.

She had a set of twenty-five colored pencils in a metal box in her desk and the voices insisted that they each be sharpened to a fine point and that they all be the exact same length. The only sharpener she had was one of those cheap little plastic ones that came in your school pencil box, and it made precision all but impossible. Every time she had ten pencils perfectly lined up, the point would break on the eleventh one. Or when she had fifteen lined up, she’d notice that the royal blue was a hair shorter than the others. The pencils got shorter and the pile of multicolored shavings on the desk got bigger and the voices did not stop.

Marie had gone to bed early—with a headache, she had said. “Don’t stay up too late,” she had told Tess when she kissed her good night in front of the fireplace where Tess had been reading The Return of the King. Even then the voices had been warming up, but Tess kept reading for another hour or so until they became too much of a distraction. Then she said good night to Harry and Vivian—each in a chair with a book—and went to her room to arrange Legos, write alphabets, and sharpen pencils. Never had the voices been so demanding, yet they still didn’t totally drown out Tess’s memory of Marie’s voice—gentle and loving—telling her not to stay up too late. She wished more than anything that she could comply.

When the aquamarine pencil was nothing more than a nub, Tess crept out of her room and to the edge of the living room, lurking in the shadows as she watched Harry and Vivian. They sat together on the sofa, close enough that their legs pressed into one another. Too close, thought Tess. They leaned slightly forward, their cheeks almost touching, and whispered words that Tess could not have heard if she had been sitting in the chair directly across from them. But Tess understood the intonations of secrecy. And of intimacy. Whatever Harry and Vivian were discussing, they didn’t want Tess to know. Or Marie.

Tess loved Vivian like a second mother, but she loved Marie, too. She didn’t like Harry and Vivian having secrets from her mother. Especially when those secrets involved sitting so close to each other in the dying light of a fire. Tess tiptoed back to her room and slid under the covers, praying for sleep. Thunder began to rumble outside, and she considered closing her window against the coming rain, but the fresh air soothed her. Besides, if the rain blew in the window maybe it would wash away all the pencil shavings and in the morning the voices, and all evidence of their existence, would be gone.

Tess drifted in and out of sleep, often awakened by a boom of thunder. Lightning flashed, but the rain still did not come, heightening her nervous anticipation. It felt as if the world was holding back, letting the pressure build until the release would be catastrophic. The third time she awoke, she got out of bed and looked out the window. Harry and Vivian, laden with blankets and what the lightning revealed to be Harry’s antique radio, were walking toward the woods, Harry unspooling a long orange extension cord behind him. Why in the world would they take the radio outside when it could start pouring rain at any moment? Harry loved that radio. He dusted it with care almost every day and never let anyone else touch it. It could be ruined in a rainstorm.

As Harry and Vivian entered the woods to the north of the house, Tess watched the bouncing beam of Vivian’s flashlight. When that beam stilled, she realized where Harry had taken Vivian and became more convinced than ever that they were about to do something that would tear her family apart.