John Dufresne
There are two trillion galaxies and one hundred billion trillion stars in the observable universe. There are four hundred billion stars and 3.2 trillion planets in our own small barred spiral galaxy. One hundred and seventeen billion people have lived on our tiny, overheated blue planet. More than eight billion still do. One of these billions, a woman named Trina M., when she was twenty-one, lived in Taos, New Mexico, with her three children: four, three, one; girl, boy, girl; Sophia, Jack, Brittney. This after being abandoned by their father, her husband, Matt, although they were not, in fact, married. Marriage was a convenient story they told to others.
When she could get a sitter, Trina hung drywall and tiled floors with her cousin Ernie. When she couldn’t, she took in laundry until she landed a job as a chambermaid at the Sagebrush Inn. She brought the kids with her to work. They all went room to room together. Brittney mostly slept or watched cartoons on TV. Jack played with his Hot Wheels on the coffee tables. Sophia helped her mother clean and dispose. The Sagebrush kitchen staff made sure Trina and the kids had lunch.
Eleven months after he left, Matt returned. Evidently things hadn’t worked out for him elsewhere. He was mightily impressed with Trina’s industriousness. Maybe it’s contagious, she said. It isn’t, he said. No, she said, she did not feel free, flexible, or fulfilled. And if he couldn’t find work, then at least he could watch his kids. Trina soon learned from an agitated Sophia that while Trina was at work, her depraved father was abusing his children, Jack with slaps and punches, the girls with petting and kisses. Matt had held a power drill to Jack’s forehead and kept pulling the trigger while Jack whimpered and soiled himself. Matt thought it was funny.
Trina left the children with her friend Chloe and took Matt out to the Sagebrush Inn bar as a belated birthday gift and got him knee-walking drunk. Fell on his aitchbone doing the Texas two-step, spilled a margarita onto the crotch of his Wranglers. When his face at last dropped to the bar, Trina asked her friend Ace to help her get Matt down from his stool and out to her Camry. Ace knew the whole story. They folded the dirtbag into the backseat and drove out to the high bridge over the Rio Grande Gorge. Trina pulled into the gravel parking area by the picnic tables. In the backseat Matt was snoring like a bison. Ace said the sleep apnea would have killed Matt one of these nights. Ace dragged the sleeper out of the car by his feet. Matt’s head bounced on the hardscrabble, but he didn’t wake up. Ace slung his nasty old pal over his shoulder, carried him out to the bridge, and dropped him over the guardrail into the abyss. Six hundred feet down. Ace said he hoped the son-of-a-bitch opened his eyes before he hit. Trina looked up at the milky band of light spread against the darkness, said a prayer, and made the sign of the cross. Later, whenever people asked her what happened to that cowboy she went with, she said, Failure to thrive. She told her kids, Daddy drove off into the sunset again.
Trina’s friend Merlee delivered a baby that she could not keep. She asked Trina to take him as her own. The baby had blue eyes, like Trina’s own kids. Fit right in, she thought. She named him Julian. The paperwork was taken care of by Merlee’s married boyfriend, the hazel-eyed Clerk of Courts. Trina’s other kids at that time were ten, nine, and seven. And they loved their pretty little blue-eyed baby.
Jack was a genius at numbers and got himself a free ride to study computer science at UNM, and then got another free ride, and then some, to grad school up in Boulder, then worked as a data privacy engineer for a Silicon Valley startup, became involved with an evangelical cult, and disowned his mother and disavowed his past as part of the initiation, cut all ties to his family of origin. A heartbreak for Trina. Sophia taught elementary school in Chama and battled her weight. Brittney got pregnant at sixteen but did not carry the child to term. She’s a retail clerk at a toy store off the plaza. When he was twenty-one, Julian lay dying of complications from AIDS in a Tucson hospice. Trina, then forty-eight, moved to Arizona to be with him. Julian’s siblings did not visit him. His birth mother did not visit.
Julian liked physics, especially quantum mechanics, so Trina read to him what she could not understand from his own science books. Julian listened with his eyes closed. She propped a textbook on her knees, put on her reading glasses, sipped the whiskey she’d smuggled in. Teleportation. Superposition. Entanglement. “Are they just making this shit up now?” Trina said. “Anything that can happen does happen? Really? Time can run backwards?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Julian said, and he opened his eyes, peeked at his mother, and smiled. “If we’re entangled, and we are, you and I, then we’ll always be together. There is no limit of space or time when it comes to entanglement.”
Trina patted his hand. “The only thing we need to know about time is that it stops.” She slapped the book shut. “End of story.”
Julian said, “Because I’m here now, I’ll always be here.”
Trina wiped a cool cloth on Julian’s brow. “In the end, all that matters in the world is us,” she said. “You and me. Right here, right now.”
Julian smiled. He reached up and touched his mother’s face. He said, “Death is nothing at all.” And then he snapped his fingers. “And that’s how long eternity lasts.”