Along the hearth, I see matchboxes, stacks of newspaper, a pile of wood shavings harvested from a cutlery block.
A second doorway out of the family room brings me into the kitchen. The refrigerator is open and barren, and the cabinets too. The countertops are covered with empty metal cans.
Creamed corn.
Kidney beans.
Black beans.
Whole, peeled tomatoes.
Soups.
Peaches.
The stuff that lives in the backs of cabinets and usually just expires from neglect.
Even the condiment jars have been scraped clean—mustards, mayonnaise, jellies.
Behind the overflowing trash can, I see a frozen puddle of blood and a skeleton—small, feline—stripped to the bone.
These people didn’t freeze to death.
They starved.
—
Firelight glows on the walls of the family room. I’m naked in a sleeping bag that’s inside of a sleeping bag that’s covered in blankets.
Amanda thaws out beside me in two sleeping bags of her own.
Our wet clothes are drying on the brick hearth, and we’re lying close enough to the fire that I can feel the warmth of it lapping at my face.
Outside, the storm rages on, the entire framework of the house creaking in the strongest gusts of wind.
Amanda’s eyes are open.
She’s been awake a little while, and we’ve already killed the two bottles of water, which are now packed with snow and standing on the hearth near the fire.
“What do you think happened to whoever lived here?” she asks.
Truth: I dragged their bodies into an office so she wouldn’t see them.
But I say, “I don’t know. Maybe they went somewhere warm?”
She smiles. “Liar. We’re not doing so hot with our spaceship.”
“I think this is what they call a steep learning curve.”
She draws in a long, deep breath, lets it out.
Says, “I’m forty-one. It wasn’t the most amazing life, but it was mine. I had a career. An apartment. A dog. Friends. TV shows I liked to watch. This guy, John, I’d seen three times. Wine.” She looks at me. “I’m never going to see any of that again, am I?”
I’m not certain how to respond.
She continues, “At least you have a destination. A world you want to get back to. I can’t return to mine, so where does that leave me?”
She stares at me.
Tense.
Unblinking.
I have no answer.
—
The next time I come to consciousness, the fire has reduced itself to a pile of glowing embers, and the snow near the tops of the windows is backlit and sparkling as threads of sunlight attempt to sneak through.
Even inside the house, it is inconceivably cold.
Reaching a hand out of the sleeping bag, I touch our clothes on the hearth, relieved to find them dry. I pull my hand back inside and turn toward Amanda. She has the sleeping bag pulled over her face, and I can see her breath pushing through the down in puffs of steam that have formed a structure of ice crystals on the surface of the bag.
I put on my clothes and build a new fire and hold my hands in the heat just in time to keep my fingers from going numb.
Leaving Amanda to sleep, I walk through the dining room, where the sun cutting through the snow at the top of the windows casts just enough illumination to light my way.
Up the dark staircase.
Down the hall.
Back into the girl’s room, where snow has blown in and covered most of the floor.
I climb through the window frame and squint against the painful light, the glare coming off the ice so intense that for five seconds I can’t see a thing.
The snow is waist-deep.
The sky a perfect blue.
No sound of birds.
No sound of life.
There’s not even a whisper of wind and no trace of our tracks. Everything smoothed-over and drifted.
The temperature must be miles below zero, because even in the direct sun, I’m not anywhere close to warm.
Beyond this neighborhood, the skyline of Chicago looms, the towers snow-blown and ice-encrusted and glittering in the sun.
A white city.
A world of ice.
Across the street, I survey the open field where we nearly froze to death yesterday.
There’s no sign of the box.
—
Back inside, I find Amanda awake, sitting up at the edge of the hearth with the sleeping bags and blankets wrapped around her.
I head into the kitchen, locate some silverware.
Then I open the backpack and dig out a couple of MREs.
They’re cold but rich.
We eat ravenously.
Amanda asks, “Did you see the box?”
“No, I think it’s buried under the snow.”
“Fantastic.” She looks at me, then back into the flames, says, “I don’t know whether to be mad at you or grateful.”
“What are you talking about?”
“While you were upstairs, I had to use the bathroom. I stumbled into the office.”
“So you saw them.”
“They starved, didn’t they? Before they ran out of fuel for the fire.”
“Looks like it.”
As I stare into the flames, I feel something needling the back of my brain.
An inkling.
It started when I was outside a moment ago, looking at the field, thinking about us almost dying in that whiteout.
I say, “Remember what you said about the corridor? How it reminded you of being trapped in a whiteout?”
She stops eating, looks at me.
“The doors in the corridor are the connections to an infinite array of parallel worlds, right? But what if we’re defining these connections?”
“How?”
“What if it’s like dream-building, where we’re somehow choosing these specific worlds?”
“You’re saying that, out of an infinite number of realities, I intentionally picked this shithole?”
“Not intentionally. Maybe it’s a reflection of what you were feeling at the moment you opened the door.”
She takes the last bite of food and tosses her empty MRE packet into the fire.
I say, “Think about the first world we saw—that ruined Chicago, with the buildings crumbling all around us. What was our emotional state as we walked into that parking garage?”
“Fear. Terror. Despair. Oh my God. Jason.”
“What?”
“Before we opened the door to the hangar and saw the other versions of you and me getting caught, you had mentioned that very thing happening.”
“Did I?”
“You were talking about the idea of the multiverse, and everything that can happen will happen, and you said that somewhere there was a version of you and me that never made it into the box. Moments later, you opened a door and we watched that exact scenario play out.”
I feel the spine-tingling rush of a revelation sweeping over me.
I say, “This whole time, we’ve been wondering where the controls are—”
“But we’re the controls.”
“Yep. And if that’s the case, then we have the ability to go wherever we want. Including home.”
—
Early the next morning, we stand in the midst of this silent neighborhood, waist-deep in snow and shivering, even though we’re wearing layer upon layer of that poor family’s winter clothes, which we raided from the coat closet.