Page 77 of In What World

She knows this will make me laugh. And when I do, her face glows with pride. “I think the writers just wanted us to both like something endearing, so the death hit even harder.”

“It worked,” she says. “I was sobbing. But much less gracefully than you are now.” She gives my tears another swipe. “My point is that you got a Marlowe who has never known how to let you go.”

“I want to know you in the real world,” I tell her. “I want to figure out who we can be to each other there.”

“I want to figure that out, too,” she tells me, pulling my face to hers to kiss me.

27

Marlowe

“Well, well, well.This is a scene I never expected to watch, but consider me riveted.”

Priscilla and I break apart. My lips are tingling. My legs are shaking. I can barely remember my own name, but I know that voice. And that face.

For the first time since traveling between realities, my whole body stills, all that strange suspension dissipated. Through all of space and time, in every infinite iteration, we’ve defied the odds. This is 1995, and he’s not thirty years younger. We’ve foundourDallas Winthrop.

My sentimental heart wants nothing more than to wrap him up in a hug, but my legs do not comply. My face goes even further in its rebellion, scrunching up the way it always does when I need toreallycry. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” I tell him. “Everywhere.”

“We literally went to 1893,” Priscilla says. “We met Wilbur Reed. Very cool guy, to be honest.”

“Did he say why he put so much into the auditorium?” Dallas asks.

“Patron of the arts,” Priscilla and I say in unison.

One more little joke, and we could fall into the easy rapport that Dallas Winthrop is so good at curating.

I can’t let it happen. Not yet.

“How could you leave without saying goodbye?” Asking this lowers my defenses, my tears right at the barricade, ready to rush forth.

“I didn’t mean to leave so soon,” he says. “When I got the machine to work, I only meant to do a test run.”

We wait for him to continue.

He doesn’t.

“Yeah, we couldn’t figure out how to get the machine to work very well either,” Priscilla says. She’s taken a much more generous interpretation of his words than I have. She’s read them like he doesn’t know how to get home. I’ve read them like hechoseto stay.

She’s probably right, so I tell Dallas what we’ve uncovered in all our travels. That the key to getting where you want to go is the specificity of intention.

“I’m pretty sure it’s how we can get back to our regular reality,” I say. “We haven’t tried yet, because we’ve been looking for you.”

“I’ve always known how to get back,” Dallas says. “But once I saw this memory again, I couldn’t leave.”

The strangest thing happens. I find myself wishing for the other Dallases. Most of them are still searching for a way to make the machine work, but at least they know from us not to leave without saying why. Those Dallases haven’t abandoned everything to chase the past.

Of all the potential reasons I could share for why he should return to our home reality, I opt to go with “You can’t miss your final show as a director.”

We’ve spent so much time on the WRHS stage, seeing it through countless iterations. And all the times Dallas hasn’t been involved, the stage has felt soulless.

“You are the heart of our program. We need you.” Softer, I say, “Ineed you.”

“Come here,” he says. “Walk with me.”

He leads us back outside to the balmy September day we’ve already experienced.

“You see that over there?” he asks, pointing to the only cloud in the sky. “That’s a rain cloud. I know that now. I forgot at first that it rains today. No idea how, since the rain plays such a big part in what I’m about to share. But it sure does rain. Every single time. It won’t start for”—he checks his watch—“one hour and thirty-one minutes. Which means in one hour and fourteen minutes, he’ll arrive here with me.”