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tested the ironing board then, pressing on it to determine if it would be able to hold her weight. It seemed that it would, but she pushed a chair beneath it, just in case. Then she climbed from the chair to the ironing board, and faced the fissure on all fours. She picked up her right hand and ran it down the length of the crack, feeling solid air press against her palm. She watched as the opening widened slightly. She tried it again, pushing her hand right into the wall, and the concrete disappeared, as if dissolved by the mass of air.
    Quinn looked into the opening, her heart pounding. Though she could see nothing but blackness, she sensed Eugene’s presence close by. She felt movement—a bustling kind of energy, as if Eugene were getting dressed and ready to go someplace. Quinn looked deep into the middle of the darkness and saw a small bit of light. It was nothing more than a pinprick, but her thumping heart began to race. Something was there.
    The experience in the hospital bathroom wasn’t the first time she had touched the other side. It had happened once, almost by accident, when she was a child. Years before that, though, she knew it existed. She always knew. It was just something she sensed. It hadn’t frightened her until she asked her mother about it, when she was no more than four.
    “Where is the other Quinn, Mommy?”
    “What other Quinn?” her mother had said.
    “The one who died.”
    Her mother got quiet for a very long time and Quinn thought she wasn’t going to answer. Finally she said, “I don’t know.” Her voice sounded soft.
    “But she’s with her mommy?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “I want to see them.”
    “We can’t.”
    “But they’re so close. Closer than Lima and Bean,” Quinn said, referring to the nicknames Nan had given to Lindsay and Ben, the twins next door.
    “How close?” her mother said.
    Quinn pointed to a spot on the floor near the wall, where she had felt a connection to the baby self who had died with her mother. Nan looked frightened then and pulled Quinn close.
    “Don’t ever try to go there, Quinn. It would be dangerous. You have to stay with me. You understand?”
    She heeded her mother’s warning and eventually convinced herself none of it had even happened. The memory faded and all but vanished. Then, one day, when she was playing with Hayden in the backyard, it all became clear to her again—clearer than it had ever been. And from then on she understood that every big decision she made had an equal and opposite reality.
    Quinn brought her face toward the fissure in her basement wall and pushed her head right inside the hole. She had to see, once and for all. The pinhole of light seemed to recede. She poked her head in farther but couldn’t get any closer. It was moving away from her.
    I should get a flashlight, she thought, and tried to back up. But she couldn’t. Quinn was being pulled inside. She tried to fight it, tried to brace herself against the solid walls of the foundation, but the force was too strong, and suddenly her entire body was sucked inside the darkness. Terror seized her, but only for a second, and then it vanished like vapor. A calmness overtook her, and she floated gently as she was pulled along in the darkness. It was like swimming without effort, the air around her cozy and quiet. Quinn closed her eyes. The tranquillity was intoxicating, and she wanted the feeling to last. She lost track of time, lost any real sense of conscious thought. Slowly, an awareness entered her. She realized she was in warm water now, no longer in darkness.
    With a jolt she was Quinn again. And she was underwater, in a very real place with three dimensions and an ordinariness that took her by surprise.
    She sat up and looked around. She was in a warm bathtub, and everything about the room was familiar. The striped shower curtain, the sink, the toothbrushes. That was her blow dryer on the shelf above the commode, Eugene’s Rogaine on the counter. All the