“I don’t really want to talk about it,” she says.
Jonas doubts anyone has ever said that and meant it. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“I said I don’t feel like talking.” The lights of a nearby city comet past.
“I know. You seem upset about something.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Or you could put it another way,” he tries. “You could talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you.”
“Right,” she says with a hint of sarcasm, “because when I said that I didn’t feel like talking, what I really meant was that I wanted to talk.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry to push.”
They drive on. In the quiet of the car, each little sound seems magnified. The tires bumping over the seams in the highway. The purring of the engine. The snapping of Jonas’s knuckles as he cracks them in a vain effort to fight his discomfort.
Finally, Eva breaches the silence. “You made it sound,” she begins, her tone clipped, “like you were doing something noble—even heroic—just trying to get back to your wife.”
Jonas is confused. “I am,” he reassures her. “That’s all I’m trying to do.”
“Thibault said the universe favors certain outcomes.” She says it like an accusation.
“Actually, I said it. I told you that weeks ago, and Thibault merely confirmed it.” He shakes his head, at a loss. “What’s going on?”
Eva’s hands grip the steering wheel tight. “You told Thibault . . . back at the university, you said that your wife . . . I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but you said it’s your wife’s fate to die in that accident.” Jonas watches her frown in disapproval. But not at him. At herself. He can see she doesn’t want to be this person.
“That’s right. And so?”
“So,” she says, biting off each word, “you’re screwing around with the fundamental laws of the universe.”
“Actually, I’m screwing around with the fundamental laws of the multiverse.” Another attempt at lightening the mood.
It doesn’t work. “Don’t make light of this,” she snarls. Then, calmer, “My Introduction to Physics professor liked to say, ‘Einstein described the workings of the universe as being like a finely tuned watch.’”
“Yes. Einstein said that. I’m sorry, but what’s your point?”
“That watches are fragile.” Eva takes a deep breath. Her exhale is ragged. Primal. She takes her eyes off the road to drill them into his. “You think you’re the only person to have lost something or someone? The only person who wishes things were different? That the dice roll of their lives came up as another number?” She doesn’t raise her voice, but it trembles with rage. She returns her eyes to the highway with a faraway stare, accessing a distant and painful memory. “I was married too. An American army ranger. He was stationed here before deploying to Afghanistan. Paktia Province. His unit received intel on a ‘potential’ Taliban stronghold.” She chokes back tears. She swallows bile. “There was nothing ‘potential’ about it.”
Eva’s grief, so palpable that Jonas can almost touch it, fills the small car. He forms condolences in his mind, but they all sound hollow and wrong. A lone tear tracks down Eva’s face. She swats it away.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry I didn’t ask.”
“Why do you get a second chance when the rest of us don’t? What makes you so special?” There’s a bitterness to her words that Jonas didn’t think she was capable of. A reminder that, in the end, everyone shares the same human shortcomings, the same pain.
“You know I’m not special,” he says with care but also sincerity. “If your husband meant as much to you as Amanda does to me, you have to know why I have to do this.”
“I do. Of course I do.”
“But?”
The question goes unanswered. Silence hangs between them. The next few minutes are filled with the droning of the car’s engine and the rush of traffic.
Finally, Jonas reminds her, “You said you’d help me.”
“This is me helping you,” Eva rebuts. “The fifth and last stage of grief is acceptance. Your wife is dead. You need to accept that.” She turns to him again to make her point firm. “You can’t swim against the tide of the universe.”
The words hit like blows, pummeling Jonas with the truth. With reality. “I don’t believe that,” he whispers.
“Don’t. Or won’t?”
“Can’t,” he answers. He’s never set foot in a confessional, but he speaks with the urgency of the penitent and the resolve of the faithful. “I can’t let her go. I can’t . . . accept that in an infinite number of worlds, there’s not even one where Amanda and I can be together.”
Not for the first time, Jonas watches pity pass across Eva’s face. “But you have to accept it.”
“Why?” He honestly doesn’t know.
“Because you’re fighting the universe.”
“I know,” he admits. “But so what?”
“So the universe is going to fight back.”
The words prove prescient as the driver’s side of the car suddenly caves in, crunching glass and rending steel. The impact sends Jonas flashing back to another road in Switzerland not all that different from the one he’s on right now. History has a way of repeating itself, so the saying goes, and there must be a reason for the axiom. What if there is an infinite dance of events, fated to unfold in the same movements, over and over and over into infinity?
He sees Eva clutching the wheel, wrestling it for control of the car. Wind shoots in from what had been the driver’s side window. Jonas peers through the jagged aperture and sees the cause of the collision—an eighteen-wheeler as big as a small house running alongside them.
His mind races, grasping for an explanation. The driver is drunk. Or fell asleep at the wheel. Or is simply negligent. But all these possibilities are dashed when the truck escapes from its lane again, missiling back toward the FIAT, once more digging its mass into the car’s crumpled side.
