33

While her father sat at the kitchen table, continuing to pore through Spooky Ed's book, Amity prepared a dinner salad of butter lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes, black olives, and chopped peperoncinis, topped with chunks of Havarti cheese. There was a large sausage pizza in the freezer, and dark chocolate ice cream with orange swirls for dessert. Comfort food in the comfort of home.

As much as Amity loved their bungalow, it didn't feel all that comfortable at the moment. For one thing, she kept listening for the clatter of helicopters. And she couldn't stop thinking how much warmer these rooms would be if the right Michelle lived here.

Amity knew that the heart was deceitful above all things, but she also knew that the heart was a lonely hunter, that the heart was slow to learn, that the heart was an open house with its doors widely flung. Because she'd read enough books to bring an elephant to its knees if they were stacked on its back, and because writers had so much to say about the human heart, she knew a gajillion truths about the heart, many of them in conflict with one another. When a girl was racing toward her twelfth birthday, life was confusing enough without the complication of parallel worlds.

After putting aside the book, her father pressed his fingers to his eyes as if what he read made them ache. "He doesn't say anything about a key to everything let alone about batteries to power it. But if I understand what he's saying about something called the ‘quantum wave' or the ‘de Broglie-Schr?dinger electron wave,' Ed thought that any method of traveling across the multiverse could be continuously powered by radiation emitted by the electrons in this wave when they aren't constrained in Bohr orbits, whatever the hell that means."

Putting the big bowl of salad in the refrigerator to keep it chilled and crisp, Amity said, "I found Mom's recipes in a ring binder. You haven't cooked any of those meals in a couple years."

"Ed says time travel will never be possible. We don't live in just space or time. We live in space-time. The only constant speed of anything in the universe, the only reliable scale, is the speed of light—186,282 miles per second. So it's also the speed of time. If you're in a chair reading a book, in one hour you've traveled over 670 million miles in space-time. Imagine trying to turn a car around at such a speed. Momentum makes it impossible. There is no brake on light, on time. You can't stop and go back. And because you can't go faster than light, you can't speed ahead to the future. But it's possible to go sideways."

"Her recipe for vegetable-beef soup looks really good," Amity said as she took the pizza from the freezer. "It's easy enough. If I had all the ingredients, I could make that. I've never had her soup. Wouldn't it be nice to have Mom's soup for dinner one night, just as though she was here and made it and was at the table with us?"

Picking up the book once more and paging through it, her father said, "Here's a bit that worries me. The positions of subatomic particles aren't fixed. They exist in a cloud of possibilities. At the very base of matter, everything in the universe is always in flux, as are the infinite universes in relationship to one another. You know what I think maybe that means?"

Putting the frozen pizza on a baking tray, Amity said, "The oven's hot, so this'll be done in like twenty minutes. It's past dinnertime, and I'm starving. Can you take a break to eat?"

"What I think it means is, the routes to those hundred eighty-seven worlds cataloged in the key are only approximate directions. Things change. So if they change enough ... maybe you don't end up where you wanted to go. Maybe you arrive between universes, if there is such a place. In a vacuum. In a void. Dead on arrival."

Sliding the tray into the oven, Amity said, "Have you heard anything I've said?"

He looked at her. "Recipes in a ring binder, Michelle's vegetable-beef soup, maybe make it yourself, but pizza tonight, dinner in twenty minutes. Did you hear anything I said?"

"Quantum wave, no battery, the speed of light, forget time travel, go sideways, a vacuum, a void, dead on arrival."

He smiled, and so did she, and he said, "We're always on the same page, aren't we?"

"You can close the book on that," she said.

He closed the book and pointed to the key to everything. "Maybe I should mix up a barrelful of cement right after dinner, sink that gismo in it, and take it out to sea."

"Bad idea, Dad. We might need it if that Falkirk guy comes around again. Remember?"

"But we're in way over our heads, Amity. We shouldn't have this thing."

Bringing plates to the table, she said, "Have you wondered why Ed gave it to you?"

"I've wondered until I'm sick of wondering."

"He liked you."

"So he pulls the pin on a hand grenade and gives it to me."

"The gismo isn't that dangerous," she said.

"It's more dangerous than a grenade."

"It's his life's work."

"His life's work will get us killed."

"He couldn't bring himself to destroy his life's work. You can understand that."

Jeffy looked at her, his life's work.

Amity said, "So he trusted you to keep it safe."

"He shouldn't have trusted me."

"He shouldn't have trusted anyone else but you."

"I'm no hero, sweetheart."

"True heroes never think they are. I mean, holy guacamole, how many times have we read that story?"

Regarding the key to everything with trepidation, he said, "Maybe with what the bullet did to its face, Good Boy will seem to be just a chimp in a costume, somebody's creepy pet. Maybe the cops won't look too close at it. Maybe they won't think it's weird enough to call in the feds. Maybe we'll never see Falkirk again."

Amity didn't know what math to use to calculate the probability that all those maybes would be fulfilled.

With her father, in silence, she stared at the so-called key. The darn thing had an aura about it that drew the eye. Even if you didn't know what it did, you'd have known in your bones that some terrible power coiled in it, evil magic ... but maybe some good magic, too, if you used it for the right purpose. It seemed to have a sorcerous glimmer akin to that of the One Ring, the Master of all Rings, that had been made in Mordor and which could be destroyed only by returning it to the fire where it was forged.

After a while, she said, "I'll check on the pizza."