Beyond Death

The World You Knew

Conceding defeat, I drove home.

"You're being ridiculous," I grumbled to myself, throwing the groceries into the fridge and banging around the kitchen until I found the cracked old pots Gladdie and Jasper had left behind. What did I care if the Miranda and Byron from this reality didn't get along? It wasn't my job to fix her relationships. In fact, I'd probably overstepped my bounds trying to cozy up with Jennifer.

I sighed and poured the pasta into boiling water, added salt, and set an eleven minute timer on the microwave. I melted butter into milk and slowly added cheese until I had a nice little Alfredo sauce. While the pasta finished, I ran upstairs and retrieved the stack of books I was reading and brought them down to the ranch style dining table. The kitchen and dining areas were really just one long room, big and open, with a vaulted ceiling and narrow windows high up on the walls to let in a lot of natural light. The table was old and scuffed, with matching chairs that had seen better days. In someone else's house, the wear might have been intentional, it had that sort of rustic charm you saw a lot on Pinterest.

I ate at the table, surrounded by books, but I couldn't tell you what I read. My thoughts kept straying to my encounter with Byron. Was he worried about me back in my own reality? He must be. There was no way he wouldn't notice something weird going on with the other Miranda. I kind of hoped that he had found her, he'd know to call my aunt about her apparent memory loss. Probably.

I stacked the dishes in the sink and sat back down. There were so many books to read, tomes I was familiar with as well as ones from Jasper's collection that I'd never had a reason to touch before. With a groan, I lay my head down on the nearest stack and closed my eyes. There wasn't anything in them that I'd read so far to suggest there even were alternative realities, which I found disconcerting.

It was impossible that this had never happened to someone before me. Right?

"Right?" I demanded the empty room, but of course there was no one around to hear me. And you know, that's got to be the second worst thing about this whole situation—after the fact that I was in it to start with—but that I was so god damned alone. What was wrong with this reality's Miranda that her version of Aunt Gladdie and Uncle Jasper hadn't insisted on changing their plans to leave town to help me? That Jennifer was friendly, but easily suspicious of my motivations? That no one had called or texted Miranda's phone the entire time I'd been here? Was there no one in Seattle who expected to hear from her and was worried when she'd been gone for days without a word? I hadn't gone on her social media accounts yet, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know what I'd find there if this silence was normal.

Maybe I was just a needy, clingy, shit with abandonment issues. Maybe I hold onto my friends and family back home so tightly and that was why this solitude seemed strange. Maybe the Miranda in this reality was actually well-adjusted and I couldn't see it.

While I was having this little pity-party, my cell phone rang, proving me a liar. It was my uncle calling long distance from England.

"Hello, Mira?" he asked, sounding hesitant.

"Hey, Jasper. It's still me. The alternative Miranda."

I heard him give a little sigh.

"We were hoping you'd have figured things out all ready," he admitted.

"Nope. Sorry to disappoint."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean it like that. You're not disappointing—oh, this isn't how I meant this conversation to go."

"Is something the matter?"

"No, no. I actually had a suggestion I wanted to give you. I guess I could have just emailed it, but I didn't want to say anything to, well, alarm our Mira just in case you had sorted everything out."