Chapter 1: Birth and Confusion

The Family

Shivers ran through Ramie and gooseflesh raised on her neck and arms as her hands stroked the polished wooden box. It had sat untouched for three and a half years as far as Ramie knew.

“It’s not good to keep them together,” Caitlin said as she handed Ramie the key to the box. “I’ll keep the box safe. You take the key.”

“It’s a Schrödinger’s box,” Phile added. “The cat is both dead and alive until you open the box. One day, your need to know will outweigh your fear that you’ll find a dead cat.”

“When you make that decision, come and get the box,” Caitlin concluded.

Her bratty brother and sister had been gone for a year now. They disappeared right after the family’s celebration of their twenty-first birthday. Everyone went to bed that night just like always. In the morning, Caitlin, Phile, and their two horses were gone. Even that didn’t trigger alarms. It wasn’t unusual for the pair to disappear for a few weeks or even a month and then show up back at the ranch as if nothing had happened.

But when a few days stretched to a few weeks and then a few months a dark cloud seemed to settle over the ranch. The two kids had been a source of chaos on the ranch, but after their disappearance, worry and then despair had permeated the family.

It cast a pall over the celebration of Theresa Miranda Bell’s third birthday. The elder of the third generation living on the ranch had been born on Caitlin’s nineteenth birthday, a day after Phile’s. The three-year-old didn’t know there was a problem. She happily accepted the wagon, the dolls, and the toy horses as her due. After all, for the past few months, her position as princess of the household had been usurped by baby Katherine Renee.

The family loved Aubrey’s little critters. Of all of them, Miranda, riding quietly in Ramie’s mind, was the most affected.

I never even got to hold my baby. Oh, my poor Kyle. How can your parents stand not having their children in their arms? How can you stand it, Ramie? How can you stand thinking you’ll never have a child with our husband?

“I think about it,” Ramie answered. “We’d be risking everything. But the more I look at those little ones, the more I’m willing to take the risk.”

It was so sweet of Aubrey to give our daughters family names. It is like my stepsister and our lover still live in them.

“And you,” Ramie added. “Our darling wife is as committed to the family as our husband. The names seem to be part of the land we dwell on.”

Ashley and Mary Beth are distraught. Cole is hardly better. It is time to open the box.

“It is,” Ramie sighed. Cole looked at her and opened his arms. His daughter hugged him.

“We all miss them,” Cole said.

“I have something, Pa,” Ramie said. “They gave it to me on my golden birthday. Caitlin kept it in her room so I wouldn’t be unnecessarily tempted to open it.” Ramie drew the key from beneath her shirt, held by the leather thong next to the wolf’s teeth that had never been taken from around her neck.

“Tempted?” Cole asked quietly.

“It’s a locked box, Pa,” Ramie said. “Phile said our need to know had to outweigh the possibility that it would contain a dead cat.”

“Schrödinger. Taught you kids all about that, whether you were time traveling or not.”

“Are we ready, Pa?”

“Look at your moms,” he said. “At me. We’ve aged ten years in the past year, not knowing what happened to our children. Do you think that’s what is in the box?”

“Knowing the brats, they might have literally left a dead cat in it,” Ramie snorted. “I think we need to know.”

“Get it.”

Ramie held the box in her arms almost as lovingly as Aubrey cradled their baby. They joined Moms and Pa in the ranch office. Pa was in his big chair by the fireplace and held out his arms for his granddaughter. Aubrey surprised him by plopping herself in his lap. He laughed and held both baby and daughter-in-law. Theresa ran to her grandmothers.

Kyle paused behind Ramie and put his hands on her shoulders.

“What have you got?” Ashley asked.

“Schrödinger’s box,” Ramie answered. “Caitlin and Phile gave it to me three and a half years ago. They said it was for when the need to know...”

“And you’ve been holding onto it for a year since they ... left? You never once thought that we should investigate this?” Ashley demanded.

“We won’t be able to change anything once the box is open,” Kyle said. “We always hoped there would be something we could do. The box holds the answer.”

“You think,” Mary Beth said.

“We decided it should be a family decision whether we open it or not,” Ramie said.

“We who?” Cole asked. Baby Theresa was trying to reach his glasses and he was catching her little fingers in his lips. She giggled.

“Miranda and me. They gave it to me.”

“So, open it,” Ashley said. Her impatience showed.

“Mom Mar?” Ramie said. Mary Beth put her arm around her sister wife and held her, then nodded. “Pa?”

Cole sighed. He patted Aubrey on her rump and gently pushed her and the baby toward Kyle. Mary Beth handed Theresa off to Kyle and the two wives piled onto Cole in his chair.

“Open it,” he said as he embraced his wives.

Ramie sat between Kyle and Aubrey and fished the key from her shirt. It was such a flimsy little lock that she could have twisted and broken it in her fingers. It was such a delicate barrier between her and the truth about Caitlin and Phile, yet there was something significant about inserting the key and turning it. The box opened and she lifted the sheaf of paper from the box. She could see the top page was in Phile’s handwriting. It would take a while to read this aloud, but no member of the family wanted to be left behind in the discovery.

She took a breath and began.

Phile: Entering the World

I remember being born. I was eight years old. It was summer and Caitlin and I had gone out to the pond in the north pasture. I don’t remember what we were playing. We just liked to run and whoop and holler. Seemed like we always had a lot of energy. Of course, being a hot July day, we ran ourselves exhausted, dove into the pond, then plopped in the grass and went to sleep.

I thought I was dreaming, but I couldn’t wake up. Then I realized that I was awake and Cait was crushing my hand in hers. She looked panicked, but I couldn’t reach out to her. I had this other scene in my head that I was seeing—not just seeing. I could feel everything that was happening.

I didn’t want to be born. My consciousness was telling me that it was nice and I should stay where I was, but I was being pushed and I just panicked.

I don’t think babies are supposed to remember being born. They have to forget that shit in order to survive. But I remember everything about it like it happened a minute ago.

I hated my mother. She’d given me everything I needed and now she didn’t want me any longer. She pushed and strained and forced me out where it was cold and light and rough and hurt. Why didn’t she want me? We’d been so close. I cried.

Women I didn’t know took me away from her. I couldn’t understand any of the gibberish they were speaking. If they’d just speak English, I’d know what was happening. They cut my lifeline to my mother and I felt her blood cease to flow in my veins. I was alone.

Voices I couldn’t understand spoke softly all around me. This was what it was like to be a baby? Hearing and thinking, but unable to understand anything? I was wrapped in a soft skin. I tried to apply the word blanket to it, but rejected the thought. Skin. It was almost like having a person wrapped around me. Then nothing. I thought they’d forgotten me.

I was scooped up in a woman’s arms—the softness told me woman—and taken to another place. It was dark and I kept trying to see what kind of place I was in. I expected a hospital, but a cool breeze told me I was outside. Then back inside. My eyes didn’t work right. It was like waking up in the morning with your eyes full of sleep gunk but being unable to wipe them.

And then there was real skin against me. I could feel a heart beating and I could smell nice warm milk. Instinct took over and I started sucking like mad. It tasted so good and it was like mother was taking me in her arms again. Only it wasn’t my mother.

That’s when my eyes started to clear and I looked straight into the eyes of Caitlin. I could see her in two realities. My eight-year-old sister was sitting next to me outside in front of the pond, scared and crying. My infant sister looked at me across the breast of the mother feeding us. We reached for each other and when our hands touched, I finally knew everything would be okay. As long as I had Caitlin, everything would be okay.

Caitlin: Loving

I love Phile. I’ve loved him since the day I was laid in a crib beside him. No. I don’t remember that day. I remember the day we were born, eight years later, when I reached over and took his hand at my mother’s breast. He’s sweet and he keeps me from being ... well, worse than I am. For a wild Indian, he gets real sentimental sometimes. I guess I take after Mom Ash. She would never talk about that emotional stuff. I know she feels it, though. And I feel it, too. I just thought that before I start my part of the story, I should make sure you know for a fact. My spirit is bound with my brother’s. Our hearts beat as one.

That first week after we were born ... It still seems strange to talk about something that happened when we were eight years old and we have all the memories of. Suddenly, we had Mom Mar and Mom Ash who we saw every day and had lived with for eight years, and we had another mommy who held our little infant bodies in her arms and let us suck milk out of her teats. It was impossible not to bond to her. We didn’t want to not bond with her. She was our safety in the strange world we’d just been born into. She was food and warmth and comfort. And little cooing sounds and singing.

Don’t know if you remember how sick we were that week. Delirious, I think Mom Mar said. From my perspective, I’d have said disoriented. Something was happening in my brain because the world I’d always known was continuing in one half while the other half was getting a whole new data stream from a different me. And it was almost like watching a DVD at 4x. You know, that fast forward thing. And neither Phile nor I could stand to be apart from each other, even when it was so disorienting that we threw up.

We’d often slept with each other. Seemed like he always knew when I was upset over something and would come padding into my room so I could hold him. Worked the other way, too, but I learned not to go wandering into his room since he shared with Kyle. If he got upset, he just came to me. It was funny that Mom Mar insisted we share a room that week so we wouldn’t infect anybody else. It was what got us through the first wave of adapting.

Phile: Mommy

It was really confusing. Caitlin and I would lie in the bed in her room here at the ranch, and squeeze our eyes shut trying to just see one life instead of two. It was obvious that other life wasn’t in the here and now. While our mommy was warm and loving, we didn’t understand anything she said and conditions were kind of primitive.

“Are you sucking on a tit?” I asked Caitlin as we lay in bed. “Are we okay?”

“I think so,” Cait said. “Phile, we just got born someplace else. What’s happening?”

“I can ... I can taste the milk in my mouth. When I look at you here in my room, I can see baby you sucking away beside me. And I know it’s you, but...”

“Yeah. You don’t look like your baby pictures. You’re dark with black hair and brown eyes.”

“So are you. Are we twins?”

“I don’t think so. There was no one inside with me. I don’t like to think about being born. But at least when I got out they stuck me right on Mommy’s tit. I was so scared. Then you got there and I knew it would be okay,” Cait said.

“Someone took me away as soon as I got out. I was wrapped in a skin kind of thing and they brought me to you. That’s not like normal, is it? Caitlin? Do you think something is wrong with my mommy?”

It was the middle of the night in real time on the same day we’d been out by the pond, but it seemed like time was moving a lot faster in the ... We decided to call it ‘before-time’ eventually, though that didn’t happen right away. We were living some time and place that was long ago. But in a week or so of life in before-time, we’d still only seen Cait’s mommy and not mine. I felt this deep sadness and sense of loss when I thought of my birth mother. I knew ... I just knew she was gone and I’d never see her. And that kind of bled over into now-time and I was afraid I’d never see my mom here either.

“I have to go see Mom Mar!” I blurted out.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

I don’t reckon we’d busted in on Moms and Pa since we were little, but Cait and I crawled right into bed with them and hugged them all night. They were another anchor to what little reality we could grasp.

Moms weren’t sure what to do with two thumb-sucking eight-year-olds plastered against them when they woke up. Pa mumbled something about needing a bigger bed and crawled out from the middle. Mom Ash and Mom Mar tucked us back in bed.

With the initial shock fading, we slept a lot that week. I remember a doctor came out. I don’t know what he thought, but we just stayed in bed and slept most of the time. That helped because before-time was moving a lot faster than now-time and we could almost convince ourselves it was a dream if we were asleep. But we’d wake up and look at each other and still be able to see what was happening in before-time. It never stopped.

By the end of that week in bed, we were almost a year old in before-time. We could walk to the kitchen in now-time without our baby selves wanting to crawl. It was like growing a new arm or something and having to get used to it doing stuff our regular two arms didn’t know about. But the physical disorientation settled down. We’d decided we were just crazy.

Caitlin: Meeting Yelloweye

Moms watched us like hawks all the time and we couldn’t get any privacy so we could talk about what was going on. Seemed like things slowed up a little in before-time when we were awake in now-time. When we slept in now-time, before-time sped up. But we were learning things. Words. We had to be careful with our little before-time bodies that we didn’t try to do something that our eight-year-old bodies could do. But we learned quickly that if we were really quiet, we could whisper to each other in English in before-time and people would just think we were talking baby talk. We started doing the same thing in now-time to talk in the language of the people. Moms shook their heads and said something about us talking gibberish.