“My mom used to say Fish and I were two sides of the same coin. Fish said he was heads, and I was the ass. Not tails, the ass. But if that’s true, I guess he won’t ever be lost—as long as I exist, so does he. You can’t lose the other side of a coin, right?”
“Were you alike?”
“We looked alike, but that was all. He was right handed, I’m left. He was random, I’m sequential. He was loud, I’ve always been a little shy.”
“Sounds like me and Minnie,” Bonnie said. “Only I’m like Fisher and she was more like you.” Finn smirked in the dark. Yeah. He’d figured that one out all by himself.
“Finn? I’m a twin. You’re a twin. But our twins are gone. So what does that make us? Are we halves?”
Finn waited, not sure how to respond. Bonnie sighed when he didn’t speak. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he stared at her shadowy form, perched beside his feet on the little bed. Then she curled up like a kitten, laying her head on his legs like she had no intention of leaving.
“When Fish was alive, I tried to keep the numbers in my head from spilling out into everything we did together. Sometimes he would get jealous. It made him feel left out that Dad and I loved mathematics, and he was clueless. He was very, very competitive. And I’m not.” Finn shrugged in the darkness, trying to shrug off the weight of the memories.
“I just wanted him to be happy. I wanted my family to stay together. And from the time I was just a little kid, there was the Finn who loved numbers, the Finn who happily read about Euclid and Cantor and Kant. And then there was the Finn who everybody called Clyde, the Finn who played ball and hung out with Fish and a bunch guys from the neighborhood. Guys who were always up to no good, smoking pot, drinking too much, and chasing girls that I didn’t particularly want to catch. I did it for Fish. Always for Fish. I never told him no. In that way, I’ve always been split in two.”
“I never felt that way. Minnie never acted like she minded the attention I got. I hope she didn’t. I hope she wasn’t just good at hiding it. It’s possible. She hid other things from me.” Bonnie sounded sad and bitter, and Finn guessed there was a part of her that was angry with Minnie, the way he’d been angry with Fish for a long time. Maybe it was sick and wrong to be pissed off, but the heart doesn’t understand logic. Never had. Never would. Evidence of that truth was curled around his feet at the end of the bed.
“She didn’t tell me how bad off she was, how sick she was,” Bonnie continued. “Every time we talked she would tell me she was feeling better. She didn’t warn me. She knew I would have come home right away. I never told Minnie no either. I would have done anything for her.”
“Maybe that’s why she didn’t call you, Bonnie.”
He felt her shaking her head against his legs, rejecting his suggestion. “But she left me without a word, Finn!”
“Fish left without a word, too. Bonnie. One minute he was looking up at me as I tried to stop the blood pumping out of his gut. And the next minute, he was gone. Without a word.”
“What word would you have wanted, Finn?” Bonnie asked, and he could tell she was trying not to cry. “If you got one word, what would you have wanted him to say?”
It was Finn’s turn to shake his head. “I don’t know, Bonnie. No matter how many words we get, there’s always going to be the last one, and one word is never enough.”
“I would have told her I loved her,” Bonnie whispered. “And I would have told her to save me a mansion next to hers.”
“A mansion?” Finn asked gently.
“There’s a song we always sang in church. “My Father’s House has Many Mansions.” Ever heard it?”
“No.”
“My Father’s house has many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you,” she sang the line softly.
“Maybe God lives in the Grand Hotel,” Finn murmured, wanting to sit up and beg her to sing the rest. Instead, he folded his arms beneath his head and pretended that her voice didn’t make him feel things he didn’t want to feel and make him consider things he refused to consider.
“What’s the Grand Hotel?” she asked.
“It’s a little paradox about infinity—Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel.”
“What’s a paradox?”
“Something that contradicts our intuition or our common sense. Something that seems to defy logic. My dad loved them. Most of them are very mathematical.”
“So tell me about the Grand Hotel. Tell me the paradox.” The tears had faded from her voice, and Finn eagerly proceeded, wanting to keep them at bay.
“Imagine there’s a hotel with a countably infinite number of rooms.”
“Countably infinite?”
“Yeah. Meaning I could count the rooms, one by one, even if the counting never ends.”
“Okay,” she said drawing the word out, like she wasn’t sure she understood, but wanted him to keep talking.
“And all those rooms are filled,” Finn added.
“So infinite rooms, and all are full.”
“Uh-huh. Pretend someone comes along and wants to stay at the Grand Hotel. There’s an infinite number of rooms, so that should be possible, right?”
“Yeah, but you said all the rooms are occupied,” she countered, already confused.
“They are. But if you have the person in room one move to room two, and the person in room two move to room three, and the person in room three move to room four, and so on, then you just cleared out some space. You have an empty room—room one.”