Buried Realities

It was nestled within a stack of otherwise meaningless parcels in the mail, a worn and faded envelope that had my name scribbled on it. It was written in my mother’s handwriting.

Ricky.

The letter arrived a day before my fortieth birthday. It was thirteen years after ovarian cancer had stolen my mother from our family. I knew the postal service wasn’t great, but thirteen years? My sister, June, must have found this in a box of relics and sent it to me. She had always been sentimental. I grabbed a knife and sliced open the envelope, retrieving a sheet of notebook paper with my mother’s unmistakable writing.

Ricky,

Remember the big oak tree down by the little league field? The one you fell from, and cut your hand, when you were nine? There’s something buried beneath it you need to see. Bring a shovel.

Love always,

Mom.

I put the letter down and furrowed my brow in confusion. What was this? Why hadn’t my mother just told me about this secret burial before she passed? And how did this envelope sit undisturbed for over thirteen years?

My conversation with June only muddied the waters. She had no clue what I was talking about. She had never seen the envelope before.

Early the next morning, I drove to the old ball field. The field where once upon a time, I was king of the league. It brought back memories.

The diamond was barren and unkempt, but in a good way—nearly everything else from the lush green outfield I remember had since been infringed upon by developers nibbling at its edges with shops and apartment complexes.

Feeling sillier than I could ever remember feeling, I gripped my shovel and circled the tree. Where was I supposed to dig? The tree was massive. I didn’t particularly feel like going to jail for mutilating a public park, so I hoped to find a signal. Some clue that would tell me where to look. After a few minutes of searching, I noticed a faded arrow carved into the tree’s bark, pointing downward. Above it—this time, in what vaguely looked like my own childhood writing—was scribbled Ricky.

I had no memory of burying a time capsule here. We had made time capsules for school projects, now and then. But I had no recollection of doing so in this park, where I had spent so many of my childhood summers.

Hoping there were no cops or other persons of authority wandering the area, I dug. The sun was still rising; the grass was glazed with the morning dew. A few minutes later, my shovel clanked into the solid edge of an item buried about a foot below the surface.

I withdrew the box and brushed aside the dirt and tiny insects covering its edges. It was a gray metal box with a small latch on its seam. Popping open the latch, I peered inside.

The first thing I saw was a cassette tape labeled Playlist for Ricky’s 40th.

Then there were a few action figures, some of which I remembered and others I did not.

There was a drawing of my childhood home—clearly created by a child, but I had never been artistic. It looked better than anything I remembered illustrating.

Last, there was an envelope, quite similar in size and shape to the one my mother’s letter arrived in, that said Future Ricky on it. It, too, appeared to be in my own handwriting.

My heart was racing now. Why didn’t I remember any of this? And why did it simultaneously feel so familiar?

I opened the envelope. A paper was folded up inside, detailing an array of predictions.

1. You’ll break your leg in a skiing accident when you’re seventeen. (I had. At Breckenridge.)

2. You’ll kiss Samantha Brown at prom. (I had, junior year. My first kiss.)

3. You won’t become a professional baseball player. (Duh.) You won’t become a pilot, either. You’ll become a teacher, and a damn good one. (My aviation dreams sputtered, and I was, in fact, head of the physics department at Edgemont University).

4. Mom will die too young. You’ll be 27. (She did. I was.)

5. June will have twins, a boy and a girl. She’ll name the boy after you. (She did, and my nephew was an ace in the making on the mound.)

6. You’ll still be alone at forty. You’re afraid to let anyone in. (It hurt, but it was true.)

7. You’ll read this letter on your fortieth birthday. (There I was.)

8. Tomorrow, you need to answer the door when they knock.

I slid down the side of the oak tree, covering the back of my t-shirt with bits of bark and dirt. Sitting on the ground with my elbows curled around my knees, I read the list three more times.

What the hell was this?

It was definitely my handwriting, but I couldn’t have written this. How could I have known these things? They were impossibly accurate. I would have remembered if any of these outlandish predictions had come true, particularly the early ones. This list would have been fresh in my mind at that point, right?

Equally mystifying was the letter from my mother. She had been gone for thirteen years, but she wrote that letter. If this box was buried recently, as some kind of prank, my mother couldn’t have known about it more than a decade ago.

I was shivering. I refilled the hole I had created and gathered my things to leave. The sun was shining now, beginning its efforts to evaporate the morning glaze and provide a pleasant Saturday morning.

That night, I didn’t sleep. I spent hours rummaging through my basement, which housed every hoarded item that had accumulated throughout the years, looking for a cassette player. When I finally found one and loaded it with fresh batteries, I listened to the cassette from the box.

It was a mix of songs I knew and songs I didn’t. Some were oldies, released long before I was born. A few were inexplicably sung by hit artists in the present day—Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, for example—but the songs were new to me. Other tunes were entirely foreign, both artist and song. As I listened through the playlist a third and fourth time, I recognized the lyrics bore a striking relevance to my life and the lonely path it had taken.

At exactly 9:51 the following morning, there was a knock on my door.

I almost didn’t answer it. Maybe by ignoring the knock, I could end whatever strange dream this was. Maybe I would wake up, confused, and relive my fortieth birthday in peace and quiet.

But I had to answer it.

When I opened the door, a woman stood before me. She was strikingly familiar in a way I couldn’t understand. Her eyes felt like mirrors reflecting my own eyes back at me.

“Hi, Ricky,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Dr. Allison Wells, chair of the Northridge Temporal Physics Institute. I believe we need to discuss something you found yesterday.”

I stared at her, unable to decide what I should say. After a few seconds, I hesitantly accepted her handshake and tried to mutter some words.

“Who… How do you…”

She smiled and held up her hand, a gesture that seemed to plead for me to hear her out. As she did so, my heart climbed into my throat—her palm bore a large scar across its surface, nearly identical to the one on my hand. The scar had remained with me after my fall from that oak tree thirty-one years ago.

“May I come in? We don’t have much time.”

I was rattled. I stepped aside gingerly, letting her slide past me. She looked around my living room as if she recognized it. I closed the door behind her and left my hand resting on its handle for an extra few seconds.

“You’re wondering who the hell I am,” she said. It was an assertion, not an inquiry. “And why I have your scar on my hand.”

You’re damn right I am, I thought to myself. But outwardly, I stared blankly.

“Have a seat,” she said.

My impulses told me to expel this intruder from my house, but I felt powerless. I was compelled to hear her out.

“What’s going on?” I asked anxiously.

She started to speak, but I felt my own paralysis ease and let more words fly out, cutting her off.

“Can you tell me how I buried a box next to a tree without any recollection of it? How I predicted my own life as a nine-year-old without any recollection of it? How my dead mother is writing me letters?”

Allison had a softness in her eyes that signaled she empathized with my outburst. By the end, I felt my voice getting shaky.

“I know what you’re going through,” Allison said. “This is complicated, so please. Let me explain.”

I gazed expectantly at her.

“You didn’t bury that box,” she said. “I did. Or, rather, I will.”

This lady is bonkers, I thought.

“I’m from a parallel timeline, Ricky. One where Ricky Wells isn’t Ricky Wells. He doesn’t become Dr. Richard Wells, the esteemed head of the physics department at Edgemont. Same two parents, same genetic contributions, just… well, just a different outcome.”

She locked her eyes onto mine, waiting for a response I wasn’t yet able to give. When she broke eye contact, she looked down at her hand.

“Same misguided confidence in climbing ability, though,” she said with a smirk.

“No,” I said, rejecting her attempt at humor. “No, it’s impossible. Leave me alone.”

I spoke the words, but I didn’t believe them. The evidence was sitting right in front of me.

“Please,” Allison said, her eyes shifting closer to a beg.

“Even if you wrote that stuff… What about the letter from my mother?”

She sighed and shifted in her seat. “Ricky, your… our mother… in my timeline, she’s still alive. Cancer research was more heavily funded over the last two decades in my world, and combined with the early detection of her cancer, they saved her.”

I stared at her, again speechless. It was becoming a recurring theme.

“When she learned what was happening, and that you were key to the solution, she wanted to help. Even though that version of her has never known this version of you. You know Mom. She’ll do anything to help.”

I shook my head at her. “How am I the key to this solution? Solution to what?”

“My team at Northridge, we began this research years ago. Temporal jumping. Creating bridges to other timelines. Each jump creates a new tether in the multiverse,” she said.

I was shaking my head. “You’re out of your mind. None of that is possible.”

“Says the chair of the physics department who just found a thirty-one-year-old time capsule predicting every major event in his life,” Allison retorted sharply.

It shut me up.

“We moved too fast. We never understood what the consequences would be. The fact is, the universe hates paradoxes. And when we created too many tethers—connected timelines that were never meant to connect—things started happening.”

“What kind of things?”

“Fracturing. Pieces of people’s consciousness, splintering at the seams. They end up hospitalized, institutionalized. They’re seeing fragments of other realities. Everyone assumes they’re crazy. Truth is, we’re the ones making them ill.”

The implications of her testimony settled in. I didn’t know whether to believe them, but I felt obligated to consider them.

Then I got scared again.

“Is that going to happen to me? You being here, is it dangerous?”

Allison leaned forward. “No, you’re safe. We’re safe. In all the combinations we’ve tested, the bridge seems stable whenever I’m connected to a Richard Wells timeline. Sometimes you’re a physicist, like here. Sometimes you’re a pilot. Sometimes you’re…”

She didn’t continue. I understood the unspoken depictions were less favorable.

“What do you need from me?”

“A piece of your research on quantum entanglement,” she said. “It might help us establish the equation that has been eluding us all these years. It’s our last hope. It’s your brilliance, Ricky.”

I laughed at her. Maybe I was overtired, or maybe I was going crazy. But I laughed, and heartily.

“My research,” I said between guffaws. “The stuff that twelve scientific publications all rejected, saying it defied credibility. You’re telling me—Allison, was it?—you’re telling me that nonsense is going to save the world?”

My sides hurt from laughing. Allison let my laughter run its course, but her expression remained somber. Dire, even. Once I was finished, she pulled out a tablet and sat beside me.

“Your work on quantum entanglement across spatial distances, Ricky… It’s magnificent. My focus on temporal physics has lacked that perspective.”

As she flipped through the research on the tablet, I recognized the work. There were pieces of my own research there, but all of it looked slightly off. I continued scanning through the notes.

“The Schrödinger-Wells equation?” I said in disbelief.

Allison smiled. “An iteration of the equation, named after us in my timeline.”

I shook my head. How could this all be real?

“How will my research save everyone?”

The look in her eyes finally showed some optimism, like she was recognizing my willingness to listen.

“Ricky, your work proposed that entangled particles could maintain coherence across not just physical space, but across dimensions, too. And the idea that everyone dismissed, that everyone scoffed at you over—it’s happening now.”

I gazed at the tablet. It sounded insane, but strangely, it was making sense.

“Had anyone given your idea the credence it deserved, you might have eventually been able to test not just the creation of entanglement across dimensions, but the destruction of it, as well.”

“And we need to destroy it,” I finished her thought.

“Exactly. All the tethers we created.”

I sat in the silence of my living room, floored by everything I was learning. Allison had convinced me. For the next twelve hours, we were hunkered down in my study, poring over old equations and notes from my early days in theoretical physics. Sustained by several cups of coffee, we worked in fascinating harmony. Every time my mind stumbled, hers prevailed. And vice versa.

“By the way,” I said at one point. “Taylor Swift? Really? For my big fortieth birthday tape?”

Allison laughed.

“That one was mom’s idea.”

By sunrise the next morning, we had developed a theoretical model that might work.

“This should do it,” Allison said. “I need to return to my timeline to implement it.”

I nodded, sad to be saying goodbye to this stranger—this version of myself—I had met yesterday.

“Will I ever see you again?”

The question surprised her as much as it had surprised me.

“If this works, no. It’ll stabilize our timelines independently. They’ll stop bleeding into one another.”

I scratched my chin. “And if it doesn’t?”

“If it doesn’t, you’ll know.” She glanced at her watch. “In about forty-eight hours, reality will begin shattering around you.”

She attempted a smile, but it barely curved her lips and didn’t reach her eyes.

I hugged her. I didn’t know what else to do.

“Thank you, Ricky,” she said. She extended her hand, which held a large envelope. “Open this before those forty-eight hours go by. Just in case.”

I took the envelope from her and nodded. “Good luck,” I said.

As she opened the door to leave, she turned back within the doorframe.

“Oh, and Ricky,” she said. “Stop being afraid to let people in. You’re not alone. Never have been. Trust me.”

I said nothing, but pursed my lips as my eyes watered. Allison walked out, pulling the door shut behind her.

Sitting at my kitchen table, I peeled open the edge of the envelope. Inside, photos of my mother—much older and grayer than I recall her becoming—were stacked neatly, with small descriptions written on the back of each one.

The first photo was of my mother at a birthday celebration, blowing out the candles on a cake. The silver color in her hair was unfamiliar to me, but its style was just as I remembered it. In Allison’s handwriting—virtually identical to my own—the note on the back showed it was Mom’s sixty-fifth birthday party.

Another photo showed my mom standing with a teenager, one that looked remarkably similar to my nephew. June’s son, Ricky. Her arm was placed around him, and he wore a baseball cap and a dirtied uniform.

Thirteen years. Thirteen years of holidays, of birthdays, of Tuesdays—all taken away from me because of her cancer. All cherished by Allison in an alternate reality.

My thumb traced softly across their faces as I cried. I stored the photos in a safe place.

“Save her, Allison,” I whispered to myself.

The next morning, as I waited to see whether the universe would be saved, I did something I had never done before. I called the dean at Edgemont and told him I wouldn’t be in that day, and that he should find a substitute. I drove to the coffee shop down the road and ordered a coffee.

At a table in the corner, a woman named Amanda sat with a latte beside her as she typed on her laptop. My sister had frequently tried to set me up with her, insisting we would hit it off. I had always pushed the idea away.

I nervously walked over to her table. As I did, I absentmindedly ran a finger over the scar on my palm.

“June mentioned you’re working on some great stuff,” I said, gesturing toward her laptop. My voice was steadier than I felt. “Mind if I join you?”

She looked up, smiled, and nudged her laptop to the side.