“Maybe it is just a coincidence,” I offer lamely, but I know it’s not. Because that wouldn’t explain why the same strange sensation pools in my gut, the one that gripped me in the dank basement of the psychic. He give you baby. It wasn’t just the words that rattled me, it was the conviction with which Isak said them—as if everything was already written in stone, inevitable, a train in motion, and I didn’t have access to the brakes.
I realize Oliver’s still talking. “And I keep having that nightmare. The amusement park. It’s worse each time and I can’t get it out of my head. It’s awful.” I peer at him, noticing the bags under his eyes, how he doesn’t look just tired, but like he hasn’t slept in days. “And that book. I can’t stop thinking about that book,” he mumbles. And suddenly he’s talking about quantum physics.
I open my mouth to tell him I’ve been having trouble sleeping, too. That the dreams are awful. To ask him why the hell he’s talking about quantum physics. But what comes out instead is: “I can’t do this right now.”
“What?” Oliver’s eyes meet mine.
“I can’t do this,” I repeat, but this time I leave off the “right now.”
“But—” He leans toward me, confusion clouding his face. “But it feels like we’re getting closer.”
And I know he means to the answer, but it’s not what he said, and that’s the problem. I love my husband. I love Harrison, or I loved the Harrison he used to be? All I know for sure is that I’m hurt and raw, but mostly I’m confused, because I have feelings for Oliver, too. I don’t know what they are or what it means, but I know that I’m standing on a precipice with him in this room and if I take a step—if I move my foot three inches forward to brush against his, there’s no turning back.
I can’t get any closer. I’m too close already. I lean back, away from him, before we do touch, before I can change my mind.
“I’m sorry,” I say and stand up. “This is all . . . so much. And I need time. To think. I can’t see anything clearly.”
“Yeah,” Oliver says slowly. “OK.” I can feel his eyes on me, but I find that I can’t meet his gaze. Or allow myself to wonder why it feels like I’m breaking up with him.
Or why it feels like part of me doesn’t want to.
* * *
Somehow, I make it through my art class that evening with a plastered-on smile and ever-widening eyes to prevent tears from forming. It takes me longer than usual to wash out the brushes, stack the easels, recap the paints. I’m still working when a man enters the room in blue coveralls with a broom in one hand and a large black trash bag in the other. The janitor. We exchange hellos and both go about our own duties in silence. I’m too absorbed in my own thoughts to carry on a conversation with a stranger.
As promised, Harrison texted that afternoon when he arrived at his parents’ house, just outside of Buffalo. I typed and deleted a thousand messages before finally settling on OK. Then I alternated between draping myself on the couch and the bed, my emotions changing by the hour. Harrison. Oliver. Dreams. Beau’s wedding album. Babies. I was right about only one thing: It’s all too much, and I don’t know where or how to begin processing any of it.
“Nice painting.”
“Huh?” I look up to see the janitor studying the amusement park that I have yet to retrieve from the easel. “Oh. Thank you.”
“It’s yours?”
I nod.
“Lake Cedar, eh?” says the man. “You from there?” I’m sluggish, a step behind, exhausted from the myriad events of the day, and it takes me a minute to comprehend what he’s said. “What?”
“That’s Lake Cedar Amusement Park in Altoona, right?” he says.
My heartbeat picks up as I come fully back to myself, the room, his words. “You recognize it?”
“Of course. I grew up there. Went every summer.”
“Are you sure?”
“That I went every summer?” He scratches the thin yellowing hair on his head. “Might have missed one or two, I guess, but for the most part—”
“No, I mean are you sure it’s Lake Cedar?”
He squints at the painting. “Well yeah, it’s got the giraffe and the dolphin on the carousel. Used to fight with my brother over that one. And then the lights of that ring toss game right next to it. The Tilt-A-Whirl. Threw up once on that, matter of fact. Had a belly full of Dr Pepper and funnel cake.”
I stare at him, my heart hammering now.
“Wait, why are you asking why I’m sure?” He narrows his eyes at me. “Didn’t you paint it?”
“Yes, I just—”
“So don’t you know what you painted?”
I look from him to the painting, then back to him. “No,” I say, honestly. “I didn’t.”
But I wonder if I do now.
Chapter 24
That night I lie wide awake in bed, my mind still a jumble, one thought knocking up against another, all stemming from the same three main subjects:
Harrison.
Oliver.
Lake Cedar.
I couldn’t find much about the park online—no pictures—only a brief entry in Wikipedia acknowledging its distinct honor of being home to the world’s oldest roller coaster, Leap-the-Dips, now a national historic landmark. I’m not sure what I was hoping to find, maybe something that would jog a memory, make me say, “Aha! Of course.” But I’ve never been to Altoona, not that I remember, anyway.
Part of me wanted to text Oliver, but it felt like a can of worms I wasn’t ready to open back up, especially considering the limbo of my marriage.
And that’s when I remember the book. I sit up and turn on the light, squinting against the sudden brightness. Sliding open the drawer of my nightstand, I pick it up, rereading the title: Psychic Psychology: The Science Behind the Supernatural.
I flip to the table of contents, scanning until I come to a chapter titled, helpfully, “Visions, Dreams and Prophecies.” Turning to the requisite page, I scan the first couple of sentences and paragraphs, not finding anything that makes sense to me. It’s not until page ninety-seven that two words jump out at me: Abraham Lincoln.
Again, with the president? And then two more jump out: quantum physics.
This must be what Oliver had been talking about.
While some dreams are purely imagination, or inconsequential, precognitive dreams, like Lincoln’s, are tapping into another time and space. How is that possible? Two words: quantum physics. We often think of time as an arrow, a straight line: past, present, future. But quantum physics views time as another dimension, like space. There’s up, down, east, west—it’s more than bidirectional. And if you think of time that way, the future already exists. It’s just that our brains allow us to focus only on the here and now—just like you can see only the little patch of earth where you’re standing, even though an entire world exists outside of it. Many Native American cultures understand this intuitively. They view time as a circle, where everything is happening all at once. For them it’s no surprise that you can dream about the future.