Desperate to help his mother, a small boy crosses realities to bring back the woman who aborted him seven years ago. The boy, Michael, succeeds and returns to his reality with Alexis, a woman in her early 40’s, a free-lance writer, independent, solitary. Michael takes her to his mother, Lexy, the woman Alexis would have become had she not terminated her pregnancy.

Alexis is shocked at the unexpected and, to her, unimagined experience of entering an alternate reality, even though she knows the area in Los Angeles. At Alexis's arrival, Lexy is relieved. She has been “calling” for help to escape the life she has, but does not want to abandon Michael or his father, Richard. Lexy wants Alexis to “take over” her life. Alexis, though utterly drawn to the child, and experiencing a long-unfelt joy at the thought of seeing Richard again, is horrified at Lexy’s request. She is angry, frightened, tempted. The extremes of her emotions send her back to her own reality in Manhattan where she is overwhelmed by grief at what she has lost.

As the next weeks pass, Alexis makes her daily Central Park run, where Michael had found her, hoping to see him again. He does not appear and she can’t find her way back to his reality. She does research at the library, but nothing works for her. She has lost Michael again. Then she sets out to find Richard in this reality, making a trip to Los Angeles. She finds him, and although he is hard-hit at seeing her again, he expresses little feeling for her. Hiding her disappointment, Alexis makes small talk about New York, her writing, the morning runs at the park. He is a polite stranger. She leaves. Devastated.

Home in New York, over the next months, she tries to live with Richard’s reaction to her and with the absence of Michael. She worries about what actions Lexy did or didn’t take.

The following April, a year since she met Michael and Lexy in that other reality, Alexis varies her daily run at the park, going other paths. More than the loss, she is learning to feel the gladness of having loved Richard, of having met Michael. Then she sees a man and a boy playing Frisbee, who look very much like them. She stands back, under a tree, shocked. Checking -- this is her reality? Yes. This is now? Yes. That is the Richard she saw months ago in Los Angeles? Yes. He crosses the grass to her, the boy trailing behind. Richard tells her he has come to visit his brother -- and to find her. He introduces his nephew, Michael. Alexia can barely speak. Finally she says, “Everyone should have a Michael.” “You don’t?” inquires Richard. No, she doesn’t. He asks her, “Would you like to share mine?”

© 2000, Darlene Bridge Lofgren