JC stayed frozen a few feet from the bridge. Her mother kept looking at her. Tears were descending down her face, hitting the crease of her smile and filling into the corner of her lips.

“Jessica.”

JC broke from her paralysis and walked to the bridge. She reached her mother and reached out to touch her face. Her mother pulled her in and squeezed.

“How is this possible? How are you here right now?” JC asked.

“It worked. It really worked. I wasn’t sure what I would find out here. But here you are. My baby.”

“Mom. What’s going on?”

JC asked her question while her face was still pressing into her mother’s hair. It had been so long since she’d seen her mother with a full head of hair that she’d almost forgotten what it smelled like. The smell that all kids remembered of their parents. One that meant comfort and safety. She didn’t want to let go. She feared if she did her mother would fade away and she would wake up in her bed. This whole thing nothing but a dream. He mother drew back first though. She didn’t disappear. She was real.

“You have to come with me.”

“Where? Where did you even come from?”

“The other side of this trail. My side of the trail.”

“What does that even mean? How do you have hair? The cancer. You don’t look sick at all.”

“And neither do you.”

JC was confused. She didn’t understand anything that was going on.

“What do you mean? I’ve never been sick like that,” JC said.

Her mother gripped her hands tighter. Like she didn’t have any intention of ever letting go.

“Where you are from no, you’ve never been sick. But from the world I just came from. You’ve had cancer for years. You’ve been in pain for so long. I just couldn’t take it anymore. There’s no cure. So I had to go looking for another way to not lose you.”

JC pulled away from her mother. The words that were coming out of her mouth were crazy. Nonsense that only confused the situation further.

“You’re world?”

“I know how it sounds. But you know that I would do anything for you. I couldn’t protect you from the sickness. I just had to watch as it ate away at you. When I couldn’t watch anymore I went looking for some way to save you. And I found something. Something tucked away in the dark corners of the occult. I spent everything paying people for information, for directions, for the book. Then I finally found it. I held it in my hands and cast the spell. It brought me here. To you. Now you have to come back with me. We can be together again, both of us like we were before. You just have to cross the bridge to this side.”

JC looked down at the bridge as her mother gestured to it. There was a line down the middle of it. She hadn’t noticed it before. Her mother hadn’t taken a step past it.

“What are you saying? Come with you? What’s on the other side of the bridge?”

“My world. It’s the same as yours with only minor differences. You can be happy there. We can be happy there. A world where neither of us is sick.”

“You want me to leave my mother behind? For you?”

“I’m your mother! I want you to come with me so we can be a family.”

“My mother is in a hospital bed right now. Fighting her sickness. She might win. And you, whoever you are, want me to leave her? That’s not something my mother would ever do to me. She would never leave me if I was the one that was sick!”

“I DIDN’T LEAVE YOU! YOU DIED! You got tiny and sickly and turned into a skeleton with a heart. And you cried for me to help you. To not let you go. So I didn’t. I held you while you coughed and cried and tried to speak but couldn’t form words through the pain. The strong, beautiful girl, my strong beautiful girl, was turned into a dying child asking her mother to save her. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but hold onto you and try not to bruise you. Then I set you down because you’d stopped crying. Because you’d stopped breathing.”

JC’s mother was on her knees. She had almost stumbled over the line but had caught herself just in time. She sat in her mess of emotions on the bridge. JC was crying now. She hadn’t even noticed and didn’t know when it had started. The woman in front of her sounded, smelled, and looked like her mother. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t be. He mother was back in the city in a hospital room doing what she did best, survive.

“I can’t go back with you. My mother is going to make it. If you were strong enough to get here, to make all of this happen. Then what makes you think that my mother would let anything take her away from me. You found a way. She will find a way.”

“No. She won’t. There’s a price for things like this. It took something to get here to you. A life that was equal to my own. Your mother will be gone when you go back home. There’s nothing back there for you.”

“That’s not true,” JC said.

“It is. And if you leave here and go back then your chance to come with me will be gone also. You just have to believe me. She’s gone. She was going to go anyways. Just like my Jessica. They were the slight differences. A different one of us sick in each world, but both of them were going to die. You know it. In your heart you know it. The cancer has taken so much from both of us. But we have a chance to beat it. This is our chance. You just have to cross the bridge and come with me.”

Thunder crashed above them. A storm had appeared out of nowhere. Somehow slipping in unnoticed while they talked. JC looked up and saw the trees begin to part. But they weren’t just pulling away, they were turning to ash and drifting away into the dark clouds above.

“What’s going on?” JC asked.

“This was only temporary. We have to go. Right now.”

“Why don’t you come with me instead? You said it yourself. There’s nothing left for you in your world. So why not step over the line?”

“The spell was a one way road. I gave up the life of my equal to bring the equal of my daughter back with me. I can’t.”

JC’s mother reached across the line and her hand greyed to the color of ash before she brought it back.

“You have to make a choice. To live in your world without your mother, or live in mine with me. Please. Just come with me. You’re so close. The closest you will ever be to me again if you don’t, and this is the last time you will ever see your mother alive again if you don’t. Please. I’m begging you.”

Faith wasn’t something JC talked about much. Her mother was never one to say god bless and definitely didn’t pray. But they had faith in each other, that they would carry one another through the shit. A scraped knee or an incurable disease, it didn’t matter. They would fight it together. The storm above that was sucking the world into it might be the biggest pile of shit they would ever face. Even if her real mother was in a bed down in the city, she was still with her. JC knew that she was alive. Regardless of what the mother across from her was saying.

“Goodbye,” JC said.

“NO!”

JC turned and ran from the storm. She ran from the trail that was turning to ash. She ran from the easy way out. She ran from the mother that was screaming for her to come back. Everything faded away as she ran. The woods, the trail, the weather. It all disappeared as she ran through the grey nothingness. Her heart filled with the frozen air and shocked her chest. She started to slow down and couldn’t see anything now. Her eyes were full of either sweat, tears, or both. She had nothing left. She fell to the ground with a crunch. The leaves and dirt below her were frozen again. It smelled of the autumn cold. She brought herself up to her knees and saw the guard rail in front of her. Her car was still parked on the other side of it. She got up and walked to it. She pulled her keys out of her pocket and a piece of paper came along with them. It had her name on the outside of it. A final reminder of what she’d just experienced. She put her key in the door and opened it. She reached in and opened the center console and pulled her phone out. Multiple missed calls appeared on the screen when she checked it. They were from the hospital. There were also voice messages left with them. She stared at her phone and then back at the piece of paper in her other hand. She opened it up.

“Jessica. The name of the book and its location are listed below. There are many worlds and many equals. I love you. I hope that you won’t ever need to read this. I hope that we are together right now.”

JC looked back at her phone, back at the missed calls and messages and swiped on them. She put the phone to her ear as the message began to play.

“Jessica, there has been some developments with your mother. You should come to the hospital when you get this message to discuss them further.”

Her grip on the paper loosened as she listened. The wind was strong enough to carry it away if she dropped it. The message ended and her fingers were too cold and numb to tell if she was still holding on to anything. JC got in her car and started it. She backed out of the trail head and drove away, headed back to the city.