"The Novel I Don't Have Time to Write" by Brenna Lemieux
And then one day, she wakes up married to the other guy—Darryl, let’s say—her first love, the artist who charmed her with his golden-hour chalk portraits in empty classrooms. The person Emma thought she’d marry at sixteen, before bills, before Mikey (who is—where, exactly? A question for later). She and Darryl were young then, too young—but now, another chance! Except she can’t just bask; she’s got to figure things out: Folgers in the pantry. His job teaching at their high school. She’s freelance, apparently, getting by on family portraits. Oh, and it’s trash day, but she doesn’t know, doesn’t drag out the bins, which sparks a fight when Darryl gets home that’s really about whether they should keep trying to get pregnant.
So she didn’t leave that behind.
Still, a joy to see him. Validating somehow: all those dreams she had. She wasn’t delusional. And look: he still dotes, still calls her Em. She’d missed him. The little sketches he still does of her, how they make her love her nose. The colorful debris he brings her to photograph. And back home (is it home?) she and Mikey had hit a sort of tundra. They’d let the rhythm of their life become a drone. Here, Darryl keeps an herb garden—every day hands her something new.
Not a happily ever after, though; not in this genre. Here, Amy’s sick. Long sick. Here, Emma’s life is one long ache of pre-missing her, a pore-seeping sadness: nowhere stares when she ought to be pitching, shooting, applying. She visits Amy and snaps only Amy, cries with Darryl but can’t explain herself, can’t explain that, partly, she misses Mikey (also validating, somehow—Mikey and his vacation spreadsheets, his carefully rotated work shirts!) and the Amy who trains for marathons and counts protein grams.
Then: ta-da! Emma’s awake again in her east-facing Mikey bed, employed again by the governor’s office, busy and buzzed on single-origin.
One part Freaky Friday, I think. One part Memento.
And now that she’s back, relief. Joy. Lesson learned, she tells herself. She saw what could be. She gets it. Better the familiar sorrows you’re calloused to. Better to learn gratitude—and she has. She really has. She calls Amy first thing.
Except that’s just the beginning. The governor gets caught cheating. A scandal, resignation. Unemployment. Back to the familiar grind, to Maybe we should try. And they can’t. One rejection after another. Frustration. Fighting. From Amy: a voicemail.
And then Darryl again, though it’s no relief. Her eyes open to the closet door: a black dress draped with pantyhose she’ll never wear again. Darryl at the bedside with a mug of coffee, which he never does, which is how she knows for sure.
She wonders what curse this is, to swing from life to life, grief to grief, with no control.
Except.
She actually does have control. It has to do with her photos, she determines (midway through, let’s say. Just when the story needs a jolt). Something about how she captures things, about what she chooses to see. And now she slips back and forth at will, runs into the governor in the Darryl timeline, quietly serving food in a shelter. Snaps some candids and gets him reelected, gets herself a job. Calls the (disgraced) governor in the Mikey universe and suggests the people would give him another chance, helps him win the Senate primary.
We contain multitudes, after all.
Multitudes but not infinities. We all have limits—even the camera. And Emma realizes hers—the one that sends her back and forth—is wearing out. Repair is possible, but who knows what it will impact? The clock is ticking. She’ll have to choose.
Then—nearing the end—she snaps and clicks her way to a third timeline: she lives alone in a tidy one-bedroom. Six tubes of lipstick in the medicine cabinet. An exhibition downtown, a flight to Madrid tomorrow for a showcase. Loneliness like a rust stain along her groin. But there’s Amy, healthy, half a block away. We can’t have it all, is the gist.
You’d suspend your disbelief for the novel, I know. I’d build it up so well. I’d explain the exact mechanism in the camera. Something about the aperture, maybe. Or else the memory card. It would sound plausible. It would. I’d have you burning out your eyes at two a.m., turning that last page, desperate to know which life she decides to keep.
Brenna Lemieux lives and writes in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Catapult (RIP), Meridian, Willow Springs, and on countless corporate blogs.
