It’s quiet.

I sit in the living room alone. Earbuds are in place and I’m leaning against the front of the sofa, letting my mind drift as I listen to music streaming from my smartphone.

There’s a soft touch on my shoulder and I stir as Veronica lays on the sofa behind me. She pulls one of the earbuds out and places it in her own ear. She’s silent, listening to the strums of the electric guitar and the opening lyrics. There’s a point where the one voice is joined by two other women in perfect harmony. Their voices rise and fall, growing in energy, pushing and pulling against each other. I reach up, holding Veronica’s hand against my shoulder as we continue listening to the short EP until it fades into silence.

“Did Eleanor go down easy for you?” I ask after a while.

Veronica stretches out on the sofa, responding with a stretched “Yeah.”

“How are you feeling?” I ask her.

“Tired.” She pauses for a moment before adding, “And hungry.”

I smile and stand, going to the kitchen and opening the fridge. I grab a handful of leftovers and pull out a cast iron skillet from underneath the stove. After the oil has heated, I throw in a mixture of vegetables and chicken and crack open a couple fresh eggs. As I’m stirring the concoction, Veronica comes behind me and wraps her arms around my chest, leaning into me—pregnant belly first, followed by the rest of her.

“Is that for me?” she asks.

I grunt in agreement and we stand there. Me stirring and her leaning in until I switch the burner off and step out of her embrace grabbing a plate to dump everything on there.

At the table we sit with the single plate between us, eating in silence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask her.

She looks up and I can tell that part of her doesn’t. Part of her wants to keep the experience to herself and part of me wants to be okay with it.

“He’s you,” she begins, “but different. I can’t really explain why. He mentioned something about the multiverse and string theory, but I can’t explain it. There was another version of me that died from cancer and another version of Eleanor, too. He was just sad and alone and didn’t know how to be there for his daughter.”

The silence stretches on between us.

“Well,” I say, “at least we know it’s not a ghost.”

She laughs and we continue eating.

“Do you think we’ll see him again?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Veronica responds. “When I did see him it was random; there was no pattern to it. Most of the time, I didn’t even know I was gone. His house is exactly the same as ours. I couldn’t tell any difference. Most of the time I just thought I was going crazy.

“I feel sorry for him,” Veronica continues. “Every time I saw him he looked sad. He told me that Eleanor misses me—or rather her, the other version of me.”

Upstairs there’s a muffled thump and Veronica and I trade a knowing look. I push back from the table and head up the stairs.

There, on the floor of her bedroom is Eleanor, still asleep. I contemplated picking her up and laying her in her bed, but I decided against it. Even though the floor was hard and uncomfortable—something I knew from a couple nights keeping her company while she was sick—Eleanor obviously didn’t mind as she lay curled up on her side.

I reach into her bed to pull down her pillow and blanket, but freeze as I see another figure in her bed. Her face is towards me and I know it’s her—Eleanor, my Eleanor—sleeping in the same position she was in when I had tucked her in and gave her goodnight hugs, kisses, and cuddles.

Crouching down, next to this other Eleanor, I study her. She is identical in every way to my Eleanor. She is even wearing the same goddamn pajamas. But everything about her is the same. She even sleeps the same way as my Eleanor with her hands folded and tucked beneath her chin; her mouth slightly open as she breathes in and out.

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How is this possible?

For weeks we had been experiencing these strange anomalies in our house: ghosts and visions of another me. I had only seen him once. Thinking he was an intruder in our bedroom, I beat him with my wife’s softball bat. But then I saw his face; the mirror image of my own except more tired and sad, and then he was gone.

As frequent as these sightings were, they were just that: sightings. Apparitions. Fleeting visions. They came and went within a matter of minutes. There was never this sense of thereness that this other sleeping Eleanor had.

I’m not sure how long I sat there watching her, but she didn’t fade away.

My mind reeling, I step back outside the room. Veronica is at the base of the stairs.

“Is everything okay?” she asks.

I wave her up the stairs and point inside the room. Veronica puts her hand to her mouth in disbelief. But after a few moments, Veronica’s motherly instincts kick in. She goes into the adjoining bedroom that we usually keep for guests and pulls out a pillow and blanket from a chest of drawers. Going into the bedroom, she lifts Eleanor's head onto the pillow and covers her up.

Following Veronica downstairs and back into the living room, we sit in silence.

“Did he—the other me—say anything to you about this?” I ask finally.

“No,” Veronica responds.

I lean forward, putting my head in my hands. “Okay,” I say after a while, “can you run through everything with me again? How many times did you see him?”

“Three or four times, but I’m not sure. There were so many other times where I thought I had heard or seen something or felt that you weren’t you.”

“Did you feel like you were there or here?” I ask.

“I’m pretty sure I was here,” Veronica responds. “But our houses were identical.”

“When I saw him I knew that he was in our bed.”

“But when I saw him today,” Veronica says, “it was as if I was there and here. Things were out of focus on the periphery, but I could see all this trash around his place.”

I swore under my breath. Since the first sighting, Veronica and I would discuss and dissect what happened at length. It wasn’t until today that I felt like there was a sense of escalation in these sightings. Given what had happened tonight, it meant that this other version of me could push and pull himself and others between multiverses. Even the idea of the multiverse was insane. I had always gravitated towards the spectrum of a strong skeptic. The idea of ghosts were always discounted as figments of the imagination, but to discount our shared experiences as hallucinations created by an aberration in our minds meant that we had to have a shared consciousness and that in itself was impossible.

When I could escape on the weekend without jeopardizing family plans or father/daughter time, I would drive into the mountains, find a trailhead and run or hike to the top of a nearby peak. What I loved about that experience is that when you’re up that high, you feel how small you are in the universe and are reminded that there is something bigger out there that you’re connected to. It was a moment of calm and a sense of release. One that was short-lived, because eventually I would head down the mountain, get in my car, drive back home, and be back in the thickness of my patterns of anxiety, stress, and worry.

They were all forms of fear; the biggest one being the fear of letting go. Deep down there was a sense of belief that was rippling through me and I knew that I needed to let go of my sense of reality and accept what had happened and what was happening upstairs was my new reality. It was insane to resist what already was. I had to resist instead the personality defect that always led me to judge and analyze and retain control.

There was something bigger than me at play here.

“What should we do?” Veronica asks.

Before I can answer there’s crying upstairs. I get up quickly and head up the stairs, Veronica a short distance behind me.

Opening the bedroom door, the other Eleanor is sitting on the floor crying. Her eyes are halfway open, but she’s rubbing the tears out of them, moaning and repeating, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Our Eleanor is sitting up in her bed, rubbing her eyes as well.

I kneel on the floor, stroking Eleanor’s hair away from her face, some already matted with tears.

“Hey there. Daddy’s here.”

She looks up at me and screams. It’s incomprehensible. Seeing Veronica in the doorway, Eleanor runs to her, wrapping her arms around her mother, saying over and over again, “Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy.”

Veronica kneels down, pulling her into her lap, making shushing sounds.

Our Eleanor is quiet and I go to her, helping her lay back down in her bed, pulling her blanket on top of her. She lays there watching Veronica hold her doppelgänger, rocking her back and forth.

“Do you want to lay down?” Veronica asks the other Eleanor.

“I want Daddy,” the other Eleanor sniffles.

“I’m here,” I tell her, scooting closer.

“You’re not my Daddy,” Eleanor says. “Where’s my daddy? I want my sad daddy.”

My presence isn’t helping, so I leave the room sitting down in the hallway, my feet resting several steps down on the stairs. I can hear Veronica calming the other Eleanor down and eventually it’s quiet.

Veronica comes out of the room and sits next to me. “She’s in the bed with our Eleanor,” she tells me.

The silence grows between us.

I reach over and hold Veronica’s hand in mine. She leans into me, her other hand stroking my back.

“We need to talk to him,” she says.