Still Here

The first package arrived on Lilly’s ninth birthday, eleven months after we buried her in the yellow dress she hated when she was alive. Inside the box were red sneakers. They were one size larger than the ones Lilly had on the day of the accident. The soles were worn thin beneath the toe box, a common occurrence with all of Lilly’s shoes because of the way she bounced when she walked. Both sets of laces had been tied into hard, uneven knots.

Claire pulled a crumpled note out of the right shoe. Upon opening it, her bones immediately turned to water, and she slammed down to a seated position on the kitchen floor.

“These are the ones I was wearing after I didn’t die.” The words were written in purple marker with deliberately drawn circles that just barely didn’t connect together above every i. This characteristic of Lilly’s handwriting always made it easy to distinguish it as hers.

We took it all to the police, and they had called it a cruel imitation or someone playing a sick joke. The accident was all over the local and regional news outlets. Everybody knew everybody around here, and the boredom that can accumulate in a small town often led to the morally bankrupt filling their time with minor acts of suffering. Claire and my mailbox is pulverized at least once a year, with no less than two smashed beer cans left behind at the end of the driveway. Any comparisons or assumptions went out the window when the DNA swab results came back. A small speck of blood was on the back of the tongue of one of the shoes. It matched the routine sample they took from Lilly’s body 11 months ago.

“It might have matched her body,” Claire repeated, as if in the throes of a manic episode for days afterward. “But that doesn’t mean it matched her!”

The second package arrived three months later, looking exactly the same as the first. I almost had Claire convinced to just throw it away without opening it, but she said she had to know. She carefully cut the packing tape and opened the box to reveal a science fair ribbon and a certificate. The certificate acknowledged first place in a science fair for demonstrating that ants could navigate a maze even after part of it had been removed. The name on it said “Lilly Harris, age 10.” When I picked up the ribbon, the faint smell of Lilly’s strawberry shampoo caused tears to well up before I even placed it.

After that, we started receiving the gifts more frequently. Sometimes once a month, sometimes once a week. Braces held together with rubber bands, a cell phone with a cracked screen full of pictures of a teenage Lilly, a college sweatshirt, a small urn labeled “Minnow” containing the ashes of a dog that never existed. Claire eventually started arranging everything in Lilly’s room in chronological order. It looked like an altar to some god whose name everyone had forgotten, or a museum time-capsule exhibit for a person who didn’t exist and for things that never happened.

“She lived. I don’t know how, but she is alive,” Claire kept repeating constantly to herself and to me. As much as I wanted to believe her, as much as I wanted to believe that these things were really coming from Lilly, and she was living some fantastically sped-up version of a life somewhere that time and space had skewed to allow all this to happen, I saw her body. I’ve seen her body every day, plastered and made foundational behind my eyelids every time I blink. She is dead. I know she is.

The packages continued. One contained a copy of Lilly’s doctoral degree, which she earned on her twenty-ninth birthday. Another had a photo of her at thirty-four, showing her standing next to some massive machine constructed with concentric silver hoops that seemed to stretch for miles into the distance behind her. A few days later, a box with a medal and several newspapers with pictures of Lilly at thirty-eight years old appeared to be celebrating her discovery of something called “Observer Continuity.” In that same box was a small flash drive. Claire plugged it into our living room smart TV, and then there she was. She was older than Claire or me. Her hair was cut short, with lines of grey and silver occasionally breaking up the familiar dark brown of her childhood hair. A thin, barely perceptible scar was under her right eye.

Clarie reached out to the TV soundlessly, then nearly collapsed, sobbing inconsolably. How could this be? We received the first package a few months ago. That wasn’t even a year after Lilly died, and she wasn’t even nine years old yet. This woman on the screen was thirty years older than Lilly when she died.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.” Her voice hit with a cascade of recognition. Claire started crying even harder, and I almost joined her. The light and musical quality of her voice was almost exactly the same as that of eight-year-old Lilly’s had been.

“If this worked,” older Lilly continued, “You’re living in a branch of reality where I died. I’m sorry about that. From where I am sitting, the truck missed me that day. I made it home that day, and Dad had to make two batches of pancakes the next morning because he burned the first ones.”

I did make pancakes the morning after her funeral. I threw them all away because I burned all of them. Lilly went on to explain that she had discovered death was completely unobservable to human consciousness itself and reality was divided among all possibilities. In most branches, the truck killed her, but in some, it didn’t. Subjective awareness persisted wherever a version of Lilly remained capable of awareness.

“No one ever experiences not existing,” she said. “From the inside, we always survive everything.”

Claire let out a noise that could have been a laugh or a cry. “How do we ask her? How do we ask if she’s the Lilly from our branch, or whatever the hell it’s called?”

The recording continued as if it heard her, “I know what you want to ask me. No. Your Lilly died when the truck hit her. I’m a Lilly from a different place that became capable of answering you.”

The screen went black, and for several years, they received more gifts. We received a wedding ring that belonged to a physicist named Julie. About a week later, we got another ring that belonged to a man named David. Both came with dozens of photographs pieced together to show us two completely different weddings where Lilly was the bride. Then a third ring came. A prison ID card came, a Nobel Prize for scientific discovery, a sobriety chip. A suicide note came that was dated sixteen years before a letter that was delivered the following day that described the weather on Lilly’s seventy-fifth birthday.

One package came with photographs of Lilly with three of her children. Another showed a pathology report that said Lilly had never been able to have children. A third box was delivered with a hazardous medical waste label and contained an umbilical cord from something with human DNA, along with another report stating it had six chromosomes that their lab couldn’t identify.

The messages that accompanied the items began to take on increasingly paranoid tones. They started contradicting and arguing with one another.

Don’t trust the Lilly with the scar.

Julie was my wife. David never existed.

Please tell Mom I forgave her.

THERE WAS NOTHING TO FORGIVE UNTIL SHE OPENED THE BLUE BOX

We hadn’t received a blue box, so I started to suspect these were coming from multiple Lillys across multiple different branches. Then, the next day, we received three different blue boxes. Claire had completely stopped trying to arrange the objects in any kind of coherent order. The way they were being delivered now made it an impossible task anyway. Lilly’s bedroom became a trash heap of completely incompatible lives. Several dozen wedding rings were looped on a closed pair of handcuffs. Photographs showed generations of daughters and granddaughters who shared similar facial features, but there was no way to piece together their histories. We received about two dozen more phones. They rang occasionally. We never answered them after the first time, when a child on the other end called Claire grandma and then screamed for help because mommy was trying to grow herself through the walls.

The later gifts were no longer anything resembling keepsakes. When Lilly was ninety-seven years old, we received a titanium jaw sitting atop a pile of baby teeth. It snapped at our fingers when we tried to touch it or move the teeth. At one hundred and thirty years old, she sent us an artificial lung in a large bell jar that somehow produced its own atmosphere. Every hour or so, it would expand itself and whisper, “still here” in Lilly’s voice on its exhalation. Lilly’s two hundred and sixth birthday present was a warm container. Inside it, a strip of translucent skin carried hundreds of moving, whorling fingerprints that migrated across the surface in random trajectories.

Eventually, the eyes came. Forty-two eyes suspended in clear liquid, connected by thick, braided optic nerves, silently kept their gazes on us as we moved around the kitchen. When I covered the container with a large dish towel, the eyes started hissing and banging against the glass. We had to get rid of the whole thing after they started audibly vibrating the word “Mom” over and over again out of the covered darkness.

The next and last recording we received was a nightmare. Lilly floated inside a large glass tank, big enough to fit a medium-sized two-story house. Artificial organs orbited a dark mass at the center of the tank. Several child-sized arms pressed against the glass in one part of the tank, quietly scratching equations into it with their fingernails. Lilly’s face randomly appeared in different areas of the dark tissue in the middle. Sometimes she was eight years old, sometimes hundreds of years old, but each face only surfaced for a few seconds before screaming back into the folds and the meat of the thing.

She had no greeting for us; she just started talking through several different mouths at once, “Survival becomes incredibly difficult. At first, the truck only had to miss. Later, the cancer only had to regress, the reactor had to not fail, the meteor had to miss, the transfer had to not be rejected, and the stars had to last longer than stars can last.”

The mass shuddered. Several more seams opened up in its flesh, revealing sets of teeth numbering in the thousands. Lilly continued, “There is always some branch of reality, of possibility, where awareness continues. Probability becomes very thin, but it will never reach zero.”

Claire was curled into the fetal position on the floor, violently vomiting into and through her hands.

“Why are you sending us pieces of yourself?” I asked the screen.

The mass shifted on the screen to orient itself toward me. “Because you keep opening the boxes.”

I noticed the concentric silver hoops behind the Lilly-thing. I saw the same ones in one of the pictures she sent earlier. There were just thousands more of them stretching out impossibly far in every direction now. Maybe they weren’t merely some transmission machines that were allowing her to send these items to us. Maybe the act of opening these packages confirmed some other branch of reality that had sent them to us to look at. Maybe our attention to these items gave Lilly, and every iteration of Lilly that existed, stabilized life that might have otherwise dissolved and succumbed to inevitable possibility if we weren’t taking the time to observe them. Lilly mentioned before that no one ever experiences not existing. These items keep being delivered to us because someone's or something’s observation is required for their existence to remain true. We thought we had been receiving small bits and pieces of her proof of survival. In reality, in all realities, we had actually been causing her survival with our need to see all these years and milestones we missed out on with her. Claire got to her feet, picked up the coffee table, and threw it through the TV, destroying them both. Wordlessly, she stormed out of the room.

The next day, we received a letter from a Lilly claiming to be eleven thousand years old.

“Mom and Dad, I wanted you to know that I was alive. I did not understand that I would need permission not to be. One more package is coming from me. It will know everything you need to hear. Do not open it.”

A package the exact size of Lilly’s coffin was on our porch the next morning. Something was moving inside it, and Claire and I looked at it without speaking for several hours before moving it inside. As soon as the clock hit nine twenty-six, the exact same time when the truck hit Lilly, the thing inside spoke.

“Mom?” Lilly’s muffled eight-year-old voice sounded scared inside. Claire fell to her knees and started to crawl towards the box.

“It’s dark,” the box said. “Please let me out.” Small scratching noises came from under the lid, in the pattern of three quick scrapes, then two longer, louder ones. Exactly the pattern of how Lilly would knock on our bedroom door sometimes.

Claire reached for the clasps of the box. I grabbed her wrists and pulled her back from it. It cried for nine straight hours. Sometimes it sounded like eight-year-old Lilly, sometimes it sounded like an old woman. One time, it mimicked my voice exactly and begged Claire not to listen to me. We carried it into the basement without opening it, and it is still there.

Claire barely spoke for the next six months. While driving home after a trip to the grocery store, without saying a word, she reached over and jerked the wheel into the path of a pickup truck on th either side of the road. I woke up a day later in the hospital with six broken ribs and a concussion. The doctor came in and told me that Claire had died before the ambulance even arrived. He then explained that a package was already waiting for me at the hospital before we got into the accident. It was sitting on the chair beside my bed. Once the doctor left, I opened it to find Claire's wedding ring and a letter in her handwriting.

“I’m alive. Lilly was right about all of it. But I watched you die.”

I wrote back to her. With no return address and no technology to deliver the reply into whatever branch of reality she resided in, I just put the note back into the box and left it on the porch once I got home from the hospital. By the next morning, the box I left was gone, and a new one was in its place. The new box was from a different Claire who didn’t write the first letter. Another came that same day from a Claire who said she opened the Lilly-sized coffin package. A new letter from a new Claire the following day claimed we never even had a daughter. Another one sent me a picture of her at one hundred and four years old, with a husband who looked just like me, but neither of them remembered any of this.

The packages now cover the porch. I don’t go out there anymore, and I don’t look at them, but I know they now come from Claire, Lilly, my parents, strangers who insist they are my other children, and versions of myself frantically trying to figure out which of us is the real one. The thing in the basement knocks and cries day and night. Everyone is still here, except no one is really together, but no one really died either. I knew that the last mercy I could give any of them and myself was to just stop observing them. Now, on the tenth night of being alone in the house, Lilly knocked on the inside of the coffin three times and then twice again. Before I could even understand that I was answering, I was kneeling beside the coffin, lifting the lid just enough to look for her.