We move across the lobby toward the precinct entrance.
A black Escalade is parked at the curb, twenty feet ahead.
Pushing through the doors, I pull Daniela along the sidewalk toward the idling SUV.
There’s no trace of last night’s storm, at least not in the sky. A fierce north wind has raked away the clouds and left in its wake a brilliant winter day.
I open the rear passenger door and climb in after Daniela, who gives the black-suited driver the address to Charlie’s school.
“Please get there as quickly as you can,” she says.
The windows are deeply tinted, and as we accelerate away from the precinct, I look over at Daniela and say, “You should text Charlie, let him know we’re coming, to be ready.”
She turns her phone over, but her hands are still shaking too badly to compose a text.
“Here, let me.”
I take her phone and open the messaging app, find the last thread between her and Charlie.
I type:
Dad and I are coming to pick you up from school right now. There’s no time to sign you out, so you’ll just have to excuse yourself to the bathroom and head out front. We’ll be in the black Escalade. See you in 10.
Our driver pulls out of the parking lot and into a street that’s been plowed clean of snow, the pavement drying out under the bright winter sun.
A couple blocks down, we pass Daniela’s navy Honda.
Two cars ahead of hers, I see a man who looks exactly like me sitting behind the wheel of a white van.
I glance through the rear window.
There’s a car behind us, but it’s too far back for me to see who’s driving.
“What is it?” Daniela asks.
“I want to make sure no one’s following us.”
“Who would be following us?”
Her phone vibrates as a new text arrives, saving me from having to answer that question.
CHARLIE now
Everything ok?
I respond with:
All good. Explain when we see you.
Putting my arm around Daniela, I pull her in close.
She says, “I feel like I’m caught in a nightmare and I can’t wake myself up. What’s happening?”
“We’ll go someplace safe,” I whisper. “Where we can talk in private. Then I’ll tell you and Charlie everything.”
—
Charlie’s school is a sprawling brick complex that looks like a mental institution crossed with a steampunk castle.
He’s sitting out on the front steps when we pull into the pickup lane, looking at his phone.
I tell Daniela to wait, and then I step out of the car and walk toward my son.
He stands, bewildered at my approach.
At my appearance.
I crash into him and squeeze him tight and say, “God, I’ve missed you,” before I even think to stop myself.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. “What’s with the car?”
“Come on, we have to go.”
“Where?”
But I just grab hold of his arm and pull him toward the open passenger door of the Escalade.
He climbs in first and I follow, shutting the door after us.
The driver glances back and asks with a heavy Russian accent, “Where to now?”
I thought about it on the drive over from the police station—someplace big and bustling, where even if one of the other Jasons followed us, we could easily blend into a crowd. Now I second-guess that choice. I think of three alternates—Lincoln Park Conservatory, the observation deck of the Willis Tower, and the Rosehill Cemetery. Rosehill feels like the safest option, the most unexpected. And I’m similarly drawn to Willis and Lincoln Park. So I go against my instinct and swing back to my first choice.
I tell him, “Water Tower Place.”
We ride in silence into the city.
As the buildings of downtown edge closer, Daniela’s cell phone vibrates.
She looks at the screen and then hands it over so I can see the text she just received.
It’s a 773 number I don’t recognize.
Daniela, it’s Jason. I’m texting you from a strange number, but I’ll explain everything when I see you. You’re in danger. You and Charlie both. Where are you? Please call me back ASAP. I love you so much.
Daniela looks scared out of her mind.
The air inside the car is prickling with electricity.
Our driver turns onto Michigan Avenue, which is clogged with lunch-hour traffic.
The yellowed limestone of the Chicago Water Tower looms in the distance, dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers that line the expansive avenue of the Magnificent Mile.
The Escalade pulls to a stop at the main entrance, but I ask the driver to drop us underground instead.
From Chestnut Street, we descend into the darkness of a parking garage.
Four levels down, I tell him to stop at the next bank of elevators.
As far as I can see, no other cars have followed us in.
Our door slams echo off the concrete walls and columns as the SUV pulls away.
Water Tower Place is a vertical mall, with eight floors of boutique and luxury stores built around a chrome-and-glass atrium.
We ride up to the mezzanine level, which houses all the restaurants, and step off the glass elevator.
The snowy weather has brought the crowds indoors.
For the moment at least, I feel perfectly anonymous.
We find a bench off in a quiet corner, out of the flow of foot traffic.
Sitting between Daniela and Charlie, I think of all the other Jasons in Chicago at this moment willing to do anything, willing to kill, just to be where I’m sitting.
I take a breath.
Where to even begin?
I look Daniela in the eye and brush a wisp of hair behind her ear.
I look into Charlie’s eyes.
I tell them how much I love them.
That I’ve come through hell to be sitting here between them.
I start with my abduction on a crisp October night when I was forced to drive at gunpoint to an abandoned power plant in South Chicago.
I tell them about my fear, how I thought I was going to be murdered, about waking up instead in the hangar of a mysterious science lab, where people I’d never seen appeared not only to know me, but to have been anticipating my return.
They listen intently to the details of my escape from Velocity Laboratories on that first night, and my return to our house on Eleanor Street, to a home that wasn’t my home, where I lived alone as a man who had chosen to dedicate his life to his research.
A world where Daniela and I had never been married and Charlie had never been born.
I tell Daniela about meeting her doppelgänger at the art installation in Bucktown.
My capture and imprisonment in the lab.
My escape with Amanda into the box.
I describe the multiverse.
Every door I walked through.
Every ruined world.
Every Chicago that wasn’t quite right, but which brought me one step closer to home.
There are things I leave out.
Things I can’t yet bring myself to say.
The two nights I spent with Daniela after the installation opening.
The two times I watched her die.
I’ll share these moments eventually, when the time is right.
I try to imagine what it must feel like for Daniela and Charlie to hear this story.
When the tears begin to slide down Daniela’s face, I ask, “Do you believe me?”