After Image

Eli woke groggily as he was shaken back and forth. He opened his lead filled eyelids and saw Viola standing over him grinning.

“Ready to go? I got you all packed. Tried to wake you up earlier but you were completely zonked out.”

Eli looked around the library and noticed that a duffle bag was near the door. He quickly climbed out of bed and put on the one outfit that Viola hadn’t packed. He tossed his night clothes into the laundry basket and put away the spare mattress and blankets he had been using for the past week. Viola looked far too perky this morning. She had her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail revealing how poker straight it actually was. And long, I didn’t realize her hair was that long. He figured her subdued look at the moment with just jeans and a sweater was more for comfort as they traveled in the car. He imagined she had an array of outfits in her own packed bag.

“I slept really good last night,” Eli said yawning, “In fact, I could use some more shut eye. Still really tired. Mind if I sleep in the car for a bit?”

“Are you sure you slept good last night? When I am as tired as you are in the morning, it means I actually had insomnia and didn’t sleep at all,” Viola replied.

“What time is it?” Eli asked, glancing at the clock as they shuffled towards the front door. It read six thirty.

“Early. It’s about a 10 hour drive to get down there,” Viola replied.

Eli grabbed his jacket from the coat hook and slipped into his shoes. Grabbing the duffle bag, he followed Viola out to the car. “Are we taking the treasure chest with us?” Eli asked glancing into the back seat and noticing that the old chest she had Imaged yesterday was still half concealed by a blanket there.

“I don’t exactly want to leave it here. Besides, it would make more sense if we go snorkeling and say we found it in the ocean there.”

“Snorkeling in winter on the coast of British Columbia? No thanks,” Eli replied.

“Well I don’t mean right now. I’ll stash it at one of my family’s residents until a more convenient time.”

“That’s good thinking, Vye,” Eli said, yawning once again. He waited as Viola unlocked the car doors and got into the passenger seat. Grabbing the blanket off the chest he slid his seat into a prone position and curled up for another sleep. The tiredness that he felt reminded him of the time he had taken prescription sleeping pills for insomnia. It made him sleep but he had always felt groggy for the entire next day. That was the kind of tired he felt now, a drugged tired. The thought faded from his conscious mind as he felt Viola put the car into gear and get them traveling down the road. The steady motion of the car on the road soon made him fall completely asleep once again.

Violet breathed a sigh of relief as Eli finally fell back asleep. With the Police coming to investigate the events from last night, her need to get Eli out of the house without a hitch had been vital. The rest of the crew would finish cleaning up and they could concentrate on the false documents they would need to get Viola out of the hospital and into their custody. Playing the part of her other self would hopefully be a breeze. After watching her for many months, she was quite aware of the differences between herself and Viola. Eli, not knowing Viola very well yet, might let the inconsistencies between them be overlooked. If not, she would deal with the complications as they came.

Eli didn’t wake again until the car rolled to a stop in the driveway of a two story home. He rubbed his eyes groggily and sat up the chair.

“Maybe I’m getting sick,” Eli replied. It was the only reasonable explanation for how he has slept for almost ten hours.

“I hope not. It would really suck if you got sick just in time to meet our family. Don’t worry about driving, I actually took a nap myself for part of the trip. Self-driving cars rock!” She said caressing the steering wheel lovingly. Eli laughed and got out of the car. The warmth of the air, although still chilled, was increased drastically from the mountain air of Cranbrook. Warm enough that he decided to take off his jacket. He was just stuffing it back into the car when he heard squeals of delight and the pad of small feet. The familiar voices of his nieces made his heart suddenly flip in his chest. They were here, they were alive and well. Tears were filling his eyes. It was all a bad nightmare. My family is all right. He stood up from the car and saw them running into Viola’s arms and his hand stiffened on the door. I have to remember where I am. I have to remember that they don’t know me. It was better than the alternative, that of him never seeing them again. He couldn’t live that lonely life without them. If Viola hadn’t pulled him into her world, he would have been dead by now. Killed by his own hands. She was saving him in so many ways he was starting to feel there would never be a way to properly repay her.

“Aunty, Aunty!” He heard Olivia crying out. She was just as he remembered her. A short little four year old with curly blond hair and a stern take no guff look on her face. She also had no clothes on at all except for a pair of underwear. Eli laughed to himself. Olivia had always gone around the house tearing her clothes off, protesting that it was too hot in here. It didn’t matter if it was snowing or not, she was always hot. “Sing Stray Child, please!” That was a request that he had never heard before. A lullaby that Viola sings to them? Viola grabbed Olivia in a big hug and pursed her lips together in thought.

“Even better, I made up a whole bunch of new songs that I can sing for you,” Viola replied.

“You made them all by yourself?” Alexandra asked. Grace was standing beside her older cousin sucking her thumb, watching the whole scene and not saying a word.

“I did make them up all by myself. I even made one especially for you three,” Viola replied. It was at this time that Grace noticed Eli standing on the other side of the car watching the scene before him and her face lit up with a big bright smile.

“Uncle Jason!” She ran around the car and clamped on to Eli’s leg with the vice grip of a six year old.

“Hey there, Grace,” Eli replied. His voice must have been completely different from Grace’s Uncle Jason because she loosened her grip on his leg and backed away a bit.

“You don’t know me, but I am your Uncle Eli. I have been staying with your Aunty Viola and she decided to come down here so I could meet all of you.

“Oh, sorry,” Grace said shyly. “You look like my Uncle Jason.” She paused and scrunched her nose, popping her thumb back into her mouth. “Actually you really look a lot like Aunty Viola. I didn’t know that boys could look like girls.” Eli laughed at that and asked with a gesture if he could pick her up. She stepped closer in acquiescence and Eli bundled the lanky blond girl into his arms, relishing the contact with her. She was no longer a ghost, she was real and solid and true. He hugged her tight and kissed her forehead. She responded by snuggling into his chest, thumb in mouth. I’m home.

Another figure popped out of the front door; Viola’s mother, her wavy brown hair pinned back hastily. She looked frazzled and overworked, her grandchildren wearing her out while she looked after them. Her brown eyes lit up when she saw what had pulled the three girls out into the front yard.

“Viola?” She went up to Vye and gave her a big hug and frowned. “It’s been, what, six months since we were in Florida and you look like a stick. You’re so thin. Have you been eating properly? You look as if I could poke you with a stick and it would go straight through you. Come on, I made a big dinner. Your sisters should be here soon. Jason isn’t around though. I think he is in China at the moment. That boy is traveling all over the place I never know where he is.” Eli puzzled over the sudden attention that May was placing on Viola’s weight. He looked her over more closely and noticed that she was indeed a lot smaller than he had thought she was. In fact, the clothes she was wearing seemed almost to hang off her. She had to be twenty pounds lighter than she had been the day before. I wonder if her decrease in weight has anything to do with Imaging that huge ship yesterday?

May Lavallee spotted Eli holding Grace in his arms and smiled.

“You must be the cousin that Viola was telling us about. You are the spitting image of her; that is uncanny. I can’t keep track of all my husband’s relatives when they live so far away. So glad to finally have a chance to meet another part of the family.” She wrapped her arms around Eli, squishing Grace in the middle of a giant hug. Eli didn’t want it to end.

“I’m glad we could finally meet, May,” Eli replied. His mother, alive and well. His nieces all bouncing and full of life. His world was whole again. A weight lifted off his heart. They were exactly the same in this world as in his own.

He let May Lavallee usher them into the house just as a car pulled up in the driveway. A few minutes later he watched as his sisters Haleigh and Amy entered the room. Haleigh’s presence was the most overwhelming for him. The last time he had seen her she had been in a hospital bed dying, tubes and wires covering her. Her head had been shaved with a livid line of staples covering one side. He had spent two nights watching her die and it was like a dream to see her alive and well. In this world they had caught the tumor when it was smaller and had completely removed it. No blood source making it grow, no numerous surgeries. Just once did they go into her beautiful brain and fix it. It was nice to see her with a full head of hair. She must have gotten it permed because her dirty blond locks were tight spirals he had never seen on her head before. Amy’s dark brown hair was also curled in tight spirals. The two of them had always been close. It was nice to see them raising their daughters alongside one another. He tried not to hold Haleigh’s hand too long or squeeze it too hard, but even though he was sure that his moist eyes gave away his joy at seeing her, she just laughed and gave him a hug.

Dinner felt like a dream. His father showed up halfway through the meal, still in his work clothes. The whole table livened up when Louis Lavallee came to the table. Bad puns and funny stories were passed around the whole table.

“It kind of feels like you’ve always belonged here,” Haleigh whispered to Eli as she help her mother clear the table. He grabbed Haleigh’s hand before she could grab his plate and cradled it.

“Thank you, Haleigh. I feel like this is where I belong too.” He let go of her hand and she gave him a warm smile before she toddled into the kitchen for cleanup duties.

After dinner, Amy and Haleigh took their sleepy children back to their homes and Eli found himself talking until late into the night with Viola, May and Louis. After everyone found their way to their rooms, Eli made his way to where Viola was staying and knocked lightly on her door.

“Come in,” she called. Eli stepped in and saw her flipping through songs on her phone with mild disgust.

“Can’t find anything good to listen to?” He asked as he sat down on the bed beside her.

“I think it’s time I clean up my music library on here,” Viola replied.

“So, you still want to keep up your Image practice while we are down here?” Eli asked.

Viola put down the phone, looking serious.

“About that, I was trying to practice on the way down here and well, I can’t seem to get it to work anymore. You don’t think I burnt myself out yesterday when I Imaged that ship, do you?” She looked concerned.

“Truthfully, I was concerned about your state. Like your mom said, you look a lot thinner than you did yesterday. Drastically so. Your clothes are hanging on you today. I was wondering if Imaging was deteriorating your body. Maybe it’s best if you let it be for a while.”

Viola nodded. “I didn’t think my clothes fit very well when I put them on this morning. Maybe I will just stick to writing things down, just in case I am still building up quantum energy.”

“That sounds like a good plan. I’ll see you in the morning?”

Viola nodded, once again roaming her music for something decent to listen to. Turning from the room, he closed the door gently behind him and went back to his room.

Once alone in his own room, he scrounged around in his bag for a pen and paper and started to make a list:

-When asked to sing a lullaby by her niece she avoided doing so by telling her about other songs she knew.

-She has lost about 20 lbs overnight.

-She no longer likes the music on her phone.

He pondered his short list for a moment. Is this the start of her deteriorating from the quantum energy or is this something else? He put the notebook aside and fell into bed, switching off the bedside lamp. Maybe she is just acting different because she is around her family. Eli thought about that for a moment and frowned. Viola is me and I am her. She wouldn’t act differently around her family. Why do I have such a weird feeling about her since we came on this trip? It’s almost as if she is a completely different person.

Amy had the day off of work on Monday and decided to take the girls, Viola and Eli to the Greater Vancouver Zoo. As it was winter and during the weekday, the place was relatively empty. This made it a lot easier for the three adults to keep an eye on the three little girls as they ran around pulling Viola from place to place and occasionally pulling Eli along as well. Oddly, it was mostly shy little Grace that was eager to show Eli all the animals. Of the three girls, she by far was the animal lover. In his world, she had confided to him that she wanted a farm with one hundred dogs. She had even memorized all the breeds of dogs from the book Eli had boughten for her. This Grace seemed to be the exact same, spouting she wanted to be a ‘vegetarian’ which Eli took to mean veterinarian.

At lunch, after collecting the three girls, he found himself alone with Amy, trying to make sure the girls ate their food instead of throwing it at one another. Viola was nowhere in sight.

“Amy, I’m just going to look for Viola, she seems to have wandered off in her own little world,” he said and wandered out the doors of the building they were in. He spotted her down one of the more narrow deserted paths, it looked more like a service road for the zookeepers than an actual pedestrian path. He started towards her and noticed she was talking on the phone, her back facing him. He hesitated a moment and then his curiosity got the better of him and he sidled up closer behind her, concealing himself behind a tree trunk within ear shot.

“-be able to get away tomorrow.” There was a pause as the person on the other end replied.

“Have Will extricate her as soon as possible. I want this to go smoothly.” Another pause.

“No problems at all. I don’t think Eli will be a problem.” Silence for a bit and then he heard Viola close the conversation. Too late to move from his location without her seeing him, he hugged his body closer to the tree as she moved passed him back towards the building where Amy and the three girls were eating. He waited until the door swung closed behind her. He walked back to the building, skirting behind it and coming from the other direction. When he got back to the table he smiled warmly at Viola.

“I was just out looking for you.” He sat down and started picking at his food.

“Sorry, I just got a phone call from Jerome about work,” Viola replied.

“Everything okay?”

“I might have to leave tomorrow. He isn’t a pro at doctoring the books and I completely forgot that I promised one of our regular customers that I would have his most recent book done by Thursday.”

Was that conversation really about books? Eli thought reviewing in his head the snippets he had caught.

“I’m sure mom and dad will be happy to have Eli stay longer, if you want that is, Eli?” Amy replied.

“Yeah, yeah, stay!” Replied Olivia. Alexandra and Grace nodded their heads in agreement as they stuffed French fries into their mouths.

“I’ll check with Louis and May when we get back. If they are okay with it, I will gladly stick around,” Eli replied. He noticed Viola give out a sigh of relief at his comment.

After lunch the three girls wanted to ride the carousel, Amy went with them as Olivia was still too small to be unattended on the ride. Viola and Eli sat on the benches watching them, waving each time they came around.

Eli was the first to speak. “So, are you going to tell me where Viola is?”

Viola didn’t even look at him or stop waving at the girls, just replied with, “What?”

“You seem different, Vye. Ever since we came down here and I am not just talking about the sudden weight loss. I mean you no longer like your music or want to sing a lullaby to your nieces. You seem to be acting the part of Viola Lavallee rather than actually being her with ease. You seem detached from your nieces and that conversation you had with Jerome sounded more like you were the boss.”

“You’ve known me for a week, Eli. What makes you think that I am acting any different than I normally am? And when it comes to the book doctoring at work I am the boss.”

Eli grabbed Viola’s hand, which made her turn to finally look him in the face.

“First of all, when I was pulled into this world, I was pulled into it, I am sure, because the profound sadness in my heart over losing my family resonated with that same sadness in Viola when she decided never to write again and completely change who she was. Our hearts were broken. We were both burying a sadness over losing things in our life that defined us and created our world. You don’t have that sadness anymore. Imaging, as cool as that is, would never fill the part of Viola that longed to create worlds of her own.

“Secondly, I am a trained psychologist. The smallest change in habits and demeanour mean a whole lot more to me than the average person. So I will ask again, where is Viola?”

Viola pinched her lips together in irritation. “You know, I’ve met a lot of Eli’s out there in the wide universes and they were all as persistently annoying as you are. In fact, I stopped interacting with Eli’s about three years ago when I realized that the male versions of me have no aptitude at all for Imaging or universe hopping.”

“What have you done with this world’s Viola?” Eli asked again.

“The CIA are currently taking her into custody,” Viola replied.

“Why?” Eli asked.

“That is a very long story, Eli. Seven years long. I’m Violet by the way. Violet Ironside. I am married, I have a life somewhere out there and I can’t get back to it because I have the inverse of Viola’s power. I don’t pull things into existence in my own reality, instead I physically traverse realities. Thing is, I have no idea how to get back to my own and getting back to my own life is the only thing that matters to me anymore.”

“How does abducting other versions of yourself help you?” Eli asked.

“So dense aren’t you? I need to find a version of myself that has the ability to home in on the coordinates of where an object is being pulled from. My lovely ability didn’t come with a quantum GPS, so I jump blindly from world to world. You know how many different worlds I have visited in seven years? Three hundred and eighteen thousand and thirteen. I had to learn to fend for myself and use anything at my disposal to get home.”

“You don’t see any of the other Violet’s and Eli’s as real, do you? You think that because this isn’t your universe that anything you do here won’t have an effect on your own so why should you even care? I’m ashamed to think that any form of myself could think like that.”

Violet glared at him. “You know nothing about me, Eli Lavallee. If you had lived through the hell I have for the past seven years you would be exactly the same as I am. If I cared about every single universe I stepped foot in I would have died a long time ago. There are horrible things out there. Things that will haunt my dreams forever. Things I chose to say are not real because if they were real I couldn’t face them. Do not even presume to judge me, ever, not until you have lived the last seven years of my life.”

“Violet, everyone is given a choice at every single step in their life. There are always choices. You chose to be self-absorbed. You chose to better your life at the expense of anyone and everyone else around you. Is that really the person you have strived to be? When you get home and you hold your husband in your arms once again and you tell him the story of what happened to you, do you think he will be proud of you? Do you think he will share in the triumph of your return? Or will he be horrified by the decisions that you made to bring you one step closer to him? Look inside yourself for a moment, look really deep, and judge yourself through his eyes. See if you are worthy enough to return to his side. If you find that your sins consume you, I hope you decide to do the right thing for once, even if it means losing the ability for you to go home. Maybe you should stop striving after a dream while turning yourself into a monster and instead build a life in the world you now find yourself in.”

Violet stood up, vibrating with anger. The three little girls grabbed her legs in a hug before she could say a word. For the rest of the day in the park there was nothing but silence between Eli and Violet, one that Amy tried hard to ignore.

The next morning after Violet had said goodbye to her family and was stepping into the car Eli whispered into her ear.

“Is my kind soul still in there somewhere?”

Violet closed the door. Visibly shaken, she left Eli standing in the cold as rain started to fall. He turned back to his family feeling powerless, the one thing that Eli couldn’t stand to feel.