The Love of My (Other) Life by Traci L. Slatton Read Free Book Online Page B

that.”
    “Hmm. You’ll think of something, Tessa, you always do. You’ve been a blessing and an asset to our eldercare program since the day you started here.
    What would we do without you? What’s it been, five or six years now? You were fresh out of graduate school when you started here. We do appreciate your good work. Hope we can keep you on. Our funds are so depleted.” He was already hurrying away to take the cordless phone that Joan was waving at him.
    Just like that, I was determined anew that some financial blessing would show up for the rev and all his worthy programs. But I couldn’t wait for a radiant, hymn-singing being to wave a magic wand over the situation. Until the angel appeared, there was me.
    Screwed up, anything-but-an-angel me, who still had a few resources up her sleeve.
    I pulled out my cell phone and found the old contact information.

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11
The laboratory at night, or through the rabbit hole

    B rian was alone in the lab, as he always was these days. He was thirty-something now, still dressing like a grad student. His shirt was stained with sweat and unevenly buttoned, his hair ragged. His face wore a raw expression as he stared at a strange machine. It resembled an arbor with a tangled flowering of wires, like a spider plant with a hundred babies, all of it connecting to several computers.
    It was strange but immeasurably beautiful. It was his last hope.
    Brian fingered one of the nodal bursts of cables and ran his hands down along it to a laptop that was bigger than the others. “I wish you were a time machine,” he told it. He held his breath, wondering if it would answer.
    “Affirmative, Brian. I read you,” was what he half-expected to hear. But only silence responded. He smiled bitterly. “If you were a time machine, I could go back and change things. That’s what I really want to do. Why didn’t I invent that?”
    A bustle and the rubbery treading of sneakers sounded. Rajiv entered the lab and leaned against the wall. He was older, too—the same age as Brian.
    He gave Brian a compassionate look, the look of unvarnished acceptance that passes between old friends who’ve shared too many beers, career victories and mishaps, conquests, weddings and funerals. “The device jumps laterally into parallel worlds.
    There’s no changing the timeline.”
    “Yet,” Brian said.
    Rajiv shook his head. “Bri, man, you must accept the limitations of the physical universe. It’s amazing you’ve come this far. Amazing and terrifying. What you’ve created goes against the order of the worlds somehow. The entire universe rests on dharma, and what are you doing to dharma with this device? I wonder if it will really work?”
    “Only one way to find out,” Brian said. His fingers pounded out something on the computer keyboard, then he leapt at the machine and threw some switches. The whole contraption lit up. Brian yelped with excitement, and the hair on his cervical vertebrae tingled. He fiddled with a dial and tapped again on the keyboard.
    A soft hum like monks chanting ‘om’ rose and filled the lab. The arbor glowed with blue light in concentric rings like the expanding wavelets in a pool.
    “My God, Brian,” Rajiv yelped.
    “Maybe I can change something, somehow,” Brian said. He closed his eyes prayerfully, and then stepped into the brilliant blue center of the arbor.
    “You’re not going to test it on yourself!” Rajiv said. “Brian!”

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12
Lamb chops, plasma, and bliss

    It was late afternoon by the time I found myself at my front door. After talking to the rev, I’d made a call I never thought I’d make again. So there you have it, Dante was right after all: hell really does ice over.
    To comfort myself, I went downtown to Pearl Paints on Canal Street and stocked up on tubes of oil paints. Utrecht makes fine oils, a pleasure to use, with their buttery texture and brilliant color and complex chemically smell. I put down the shopping bag on the floor to