After Image
Chapter 22

Viola jerked awake as she felt the car come to a complete stop. Until the moment of awakening, she had not even been aware that she had been asleep. She rubbed her eyes and looked at the clock. It was close to four in the morning. She was staring at a cast iron gate. She looked at Will, who was talking to a security guard. The security guard looked through the window at Viola, waved and smiled and the gate opened. Viola gave him a sleepy smile in response and yawned. There was a manicured lawn on the other side of the gate and the driveway was made of bricks lined with deciduous trees, all without leaves, waiting for spring to come in March. As the car emerged from the tree line, a fountain came in to view that the driveway circled around and beyond that, lit up with the glow of old fashioned street lanterns, was Viola’s dream house. She gasped as she looked at the old Victorian style house. The house was all wood panelling painted a deep burgundy with navy blue trim. There was a three story tower off the house to the left and many windows, most of which were round. The front porch of the house had stairs leading to a round entrance way on the porch. There was so much detail in the wood work on the eaves of the house that added an aesthetic beauty to the whole place, making it not only a home, but also a work of art. She was almost reluctant to go inside, wanting instead to take in the majesty of the place. She changed her mind about staring at the building when she saw a glow coming from the front entrance and saw Eli standing there, a relieved look on his face. She abandoned the car as soon as Will had put it in park and ran into Eli’s arms.

“I am so happy to see you safe and sound, Viola,” Eli replied sleepily.

“Me too. I was so worried about you,” Viola said yawning.

Eli tousled her short hair. “Glad to see your hair is growing back. It was weird seeing you without your hair.”

Viola touched her hair subconsciously and smiled. “Will and I had a long drive. Could you show us to some spare rooms so we can sleep? I would be happy to talk with you and Mrs. Ironside in the morning when I can possibly control my emotions better,” Viola said. Will had finally made it to the top of the stairs and was standing behind her.

Eli nodded and gestured for them to enter the house. Leaving their shoes at the front door, Eli led them up a set of grand stairs and down a wood paneled hallway. Viola stepped into the room that Eli proffered and flicked the light on. The opulence of the room took her breath away. A large four poster bed, wood paneling on the walls, hardwood floors, and large area rugs greeted her. She flicked on a bedside lamp, turned off the overhead light and dumped herself unceremoniously onto the down comforter and proceeded to fall asleep, already feeling as if she was in a dream.

In the morning, she woke up feeling rested. Glancing around the room, she noticed there was a pair of jeans, a sweater and fresh undergarments on the bed. She grabbed the new clothes and headed into the en suite. There was a large jacuzzi bath and just behind it a large glass enclosed shower. Wanting answers quickly, she decided to take a shower instead of soaking in the bath. Half way through the shower she laughed as she realized that this was the first private bathing she had had since her capture months previous. She left the shower, still expecting to see some female guard standing at the door making sure she didn’t use an Image to escape.

Once fully dressed, she wandered down the grand stair case back into the main hall. She saw a dining room off to the left and saw Will and Eli talking over breakfast. Viola entered the room and sat down next to Eli at the extravagant table. A servant appeared from nowhere and set a steaming plate of food in front of Viola who looked at the man behind her in mild surprise.

“Some posh place you have got here, Eli,” Viola said as she started into the food on her plate. “I didn’t realize you were the servant kind.”

Eli’s face reddened a bit as he swallowed. “This isn’t my place, Viola. It’s Violet’s.”

Viola looked up at him and pushed her food away. She wasn’t particularly hungry anymore. She assumed Violet was Mrs. Ironside and she wasn’t entirely sure she was prepared to owe this woman anything. Thinking about it further, she pulled the plate back to herself and began eating again. If anything, that woman owes me a lot more than I could ever owe her.

“So when do I get to meet this mysterious Mrs. Violet Ironside?” Viola asked.

“Right now,” she heard a voice say from behind her. It startled her straight in her chair. She saw the woman walk around the table and sit across from her, pulling up a chair beside Will, and Viola’s world started to reel. She was looking at an older version of herself. She had the long gorgeous brown hair that had been hacked off Viola’s own head, the same blue eyes with the same flower pattern as her and Eli, and she had almost identical mannerisms to Viola. It was startling, looking at her across the table sitting there like this was the most natural thing in the world. Viola dropped her fork. It hit the side of her plate and clattered onto the floor.

She had to process this. This was another her from another world, and for some reason this other self decided to abduct her, dissect her brain and experiment on her. She was having a hard time believing that any version of herself could be so cold, so cruel. What had gone wrong in Violet’s life to make her this way? More importantly, why was she suddenly helping Viola now, after she had orchestrated the whole thing?

“Why?” Was all that Viola said as her mind filtered through many other things she could have said. You bitch, how dare you ruin my life. We are the same person. How could you treat yourself with such disdain and disregard. What happened to you? It sickens me to know that there are versions out there of me that are so cold and insane.

Violet looked downcast for a moment, steeled herself and looked up again at Viola with cold resolve in her eyes. “I have a rather long story to tell you, if you will listen to me. I understand if you say no. I would in your position.”

“I need to understand why you would do this. How I could do this to myself,” Viola replied.

“Don’t think that I am anything like you, Viola, because things happened in my life that made me a completely different person than you could ever be. I believe that had you been in my position, you would never have done what I had. We may look the same, have the same DNA, mind, fingerprints and eyes, but physical similarities is all there is. Something broke in me a long time ago and I let it consume me.”

Viola thought about that for a moment. Something had broken in Viola a long time ago. Something that made her unable to trust herself to open up and love another human being, but she hadn’t let it consume her. She had risen from it, conquered it, and found a way to live on and still care for people. Had Violet gone through that same thing and let it drown her? She couldn’t figure out why Violet was trying to distance herself from her.

Violet took a deep breath and started: “I guess this tale really starts when I was still a teenager in school. When I was seventeen and in grade eleven half of one of my semesters consisted of grade twelve courses. I also took choir because I loved to sing so much.”

In grade eleven, Viola had taken no grade twelve courses, she had focused on art class and psychology and all the sciences. She had jammed her year so full, skipping to grade twelve courses had been out of the question. She had spent all her time writing during the lunch break, so she had never enrolled in the choir.

“That was how I met Brandon Ironside, the love of my life, my soulmate. Brandon was my muse for writing music and singing and he encouraged me every day to keep at it and I was Brandon’s muse for his own music and his love of film. We moved to California in pursuit of our dreams, his of directing and mine of being a singer. There I sent out demos and he went to school for directing. Two years after living a meagre existence, I had this brilliant idea for a movie and Brandon and I drafted a script. We started an independent film company and made our movie. I made a song for the ending credits, and lo and behold when we got it done and people saw it, we were nominated for the Oscars. Brandon and I won for best original screenplay and I won for best original song and that launched our careers. Here we were barely into our twenties, Oscar winners and living our dreams. My life was perfect.” Viola let her eyes go downcast.

“When I turned twenty five,” my age, Viola thought, “I became pregnant. I was ecstatic. Brandon and I were starting a family. We moved here, to Asheville, to get out of the hectic California scene because I had always liked this area. This house,” Violet gestured around her, “Was my and Brandon’s dream come true.

“Then the delivery date crept closer and everything changed. When I started having Braxton Hicks contractions the world would shimmer and ghost. It terrified me. When we went to the doctor, he said I was perfectly healthy and not to worry, it was probably just the stress of the oncoming pregnancy. He confined me to bed rest and sent me home. Three days after that appointment, in the middle of the night, I started contractions. The first one was so violent that it activated my power and suddenly I was lying in an unfamiliar bed with a man and a woman beside me I had never seen before. The worst thing was, I wasn’t pregnant.”

Viola’s eyes widened. To be thrown from your home into another universe, to be alone and have lost your husband and your baby; the terror must have been overwhelming.

“I got arrested and my story was so crazy they finally sent me to the Psych Ward. Even I didn’t understand what had happened. I spent months in that Psych Ward grieving the loss of my husband and most importantly my unborn child. When I finally got a hold of myself I learned to pretend and they set me free to the world, penniless, homeless and completely lost. The first thing I did was search out Brandon. He was living in California and so I traveled there trying to replace out what had happened. After hitchhiking and begging for money and food I finally got to him. When he saw me, he didn’t know me. He wasn’t my Brandon. We had never met. That was when I first truly acknowledged that I wasn’t in my world but in some alternate reality. It took me months to figure out how to use my power and to Image myself to another universe, and when I finally did, it turned out it wasn’t mine.

“In fact, I traveled to hundreds of worlds before I realized that it was next to impossible for me to replace my way home. I was going to give up, but that me in that world, Viola Lavallee who lived in my old home town and had never moved, was a writer and she was writing your story.” Violet looked up at Viola before continuing.

“Truthfully I thought it was my story. All I had were her notes. She hadn’t started writing the book and with the information I gleaned from those notes, I didn’t want to wait the years it would take her to write the actual book. Instead I Imaged and in that next world I started my quest to replace you, the one Viola in all the universes that had the complete power to Image both herself and other things from one world to the next. The Viola that had the ability to know which world she had taken something from and send it back to that same world. A complete Viola, not a broken one like the rest of us.” Violet took a deep breath before she continued, hesitant to go on.

“That was what began the complete change in me. I decided to employ whatever it took to replace you. I went from world to world acquiring technology that I could barter and trade in the next world; technology that would allow me to work with various government agencies, which I would then in turn use to replace you. If you weren’t on the world I was on, I would steal whatever tech I needed and move on to the next world. I met thousands of Violas and Elis and none of them were you. The Elis used to bother me so much that if I found out that the incarnation of myself on that world was an Eli I would move on immediately. I was determined. Sometimes I would replace a Viola that almost perfectly matched you and I would observe them, watch them over use their power, flame out and die. I watched so many of us die and I did nothing to stop it because I needed to know if they were you. If they died using their power then they weren’t and I could move on to the next world trying to replace you.

“I murdered just as many Viola’s as I watched die, pushing their limits in experiments that taxed them and killed them. I became a monster. Worst of all, I didn’t care what I was doing to them, because in my mind, I was the only real one. I was the only one that mattered. Getting back to Brandon and my perfect life was all that mattered.” Violet wiped away tears that were forming in an effort to keep herself stoic. She refused to shed tears in an attempt to win Viola over to her side. She was telling this for her judgement.

“I kept track of how many worlds it took me to get to you, three hundred and eighteen thousand and thirteen. Oddly the time lines don’t exactly run parallel, or at least Imaging from one to the other was never an exact science for me and I ended up all over the time stream. I saw amazing things out there, but I also saw horrible things, things I dream of night that will haunt me until the day I die.

“When I finally found you, I was ecstatic. I was finally going to get to go home.

“Instead, I had a road trip with Eli and he made me confront what I had become. I watched what I was putting you through and for the first time I realized that the Violet Ironside I am now could never go back to Brandon. I don’t deserve to go back to my life after what I have done. I could never atone for what I have done, not in all the Viola’s lifetimes put together. I was almost relieved when they barred me from the program; it meant that I would not have to face Brandon and admit what I had become.” Violet stopped and a silence ensued. She looked at Viola, looking for her judgement, her punishment, anything but the stare of pity that Viola was giving her. Violet averted her eyes and whispered, “I know it doesn’t mean much, but I am truly sorry.”

Violet felt a hand on her shoulder moments later and looked up into Viola’s eyes, she had a smile on her face, the smile that they all used to signify that she was feeling so much pain and if she didn’t smile she would cry.

“I’m not the person you need to apologize to,” Viola finally replied. “You introduced me to one of the most amazing people I could ever know, an artificial intelligence that I can talk to inside my head, and you helped me replace my potential, however misguided. I forgive you for what you have done to me. I cannot forgive you for the hurt and death you have left in you wake on those three hundred and eighteen thousand thirteen other worlds. You will have to replace a different way to make your atonement for that.” Viola grabbed Violet in an embrace which Violet was too shocked to return. Finally, she clutched her arms around Viola and tears fell from her eyes for the first time that day. How could Viola forgive her? When she let go of Viola and looked into the room she realized that the boys had left them. She smiled and looked back at Viola, who was suddenly ghosting between worlds.

“What are you doing?” Violet asked and she gasped as she realized what Viola had done. She looked more thoroughly at her surroundings and saw through the open kitchen door Brandon, her Brandon, making breakfast. Viola watched between worlds. Violet breathless, her chest so tight with emotion she felt like she was about to burst, began to take tentative steps towards Brandon. As she got nearer to the door, she suddenly saw a streak of dark brown hair flash past the door frame and run to Brandon, her small little frame crushing him in a hug. Brandon turned to look at his seven year old daughter and laughed.

“River, you ruined the surprise. I was going to eat breakfast in bed with you.” His smile sent chills down Violet’s spine and she let out a small gasp when she realized that the little girl hugging Brandon’s legs was her baby, her small baby that she had lost when she had Imaged the day she was to be born. Her body had gone and left the foreign object within her behind. Her baby, her sweet child was alive. The gasp made Brandon look into the dining room and he dropped the spatula in his hand, suddenly trembling. He pulled away from River’s grasp and ran into the room grabbing hold of Violet with disbelief.

“Is it really you?” He asked, unable to believe the apparition he saw before him.

Violet nodded, crying. “It’s me, my love. I found my way home.” Brandon grabbed her in a tight embrace and kissed her passionately.

“No one believed me that you just vanished from the bed. But what else could it have been. River was just lying there and you were gone. But you’re back. Thank the creator! You’re back. You came back to me.” He kissed her again, unable to contain himself until he felt little hands tugging at the apron he was wearing. He looked back at River and with a teary eyed smile got down to his knees and looked up at Violet.

“River, this is your mom, Violet. She finally made it back to us.” River’s eyes lit up and she ran to a picture that was on the mantle above the fire place and jumped up to grab it. She looked at the picture and examined it against the woman in front of her and smiled the smile of innocent youth. “Mommy!” With that one word she was in Violet’s arms. She was holding her child. Seven years of painful memories to get back to her.

“I have so much catching up to do,” Violet said in a trembling voice. She squeezed River close, unable to believe that this was real, that this was happening. Brandon came up behind her and wrapped his arms around Violet causing River to be in a sandwich hug. The little girl laughed giddily and then looked over in the corner of the room where she saw ghostly Viola. She stopped laughing and pointed to the corner of the room. “What is that?” She asked, still pointing. Both Brandon and Violet looked up to see what their daughter was pointing at, and Violet smiled.

“She is Viola. She is the one that brought me back to you two,” Violet replied.

“Thank you Miss Viola, for bringing my mommy back to me. I prayed every day and it finally came true. You must be God’s angel.” Viola smiled, waved and Imaged back to her own universe and the very confounded Eli and Will.

Violet turned to her family, her face somber. “I have a long story to tell you,” she finally said. “I’m sorry to say it’s not a happy story, mommy did some bad things trying to get back here, and well, she will need your help to make up for all of them.” Brandon looked at her, worried.

“Nothing you say will ever make me upset that I have you back. We’ll get through whatever it is together, as a family.” Violet smiled and the three of them wandered back into the kitchen. Here was her life, waiting for her all this time. Moving forward and looking backwards all at that same time. She was so glad to know that Brandon was a one woman man, like she was a one man woman.