By Paths Coincident

Chapter 13

Cassandra closed the door of her apartment and leaned back against it.

When she had flown from Heathrow to PDX, she had left her life behind in New York. Nothing in her previous apartment had held meaning for her because that had been where she had done her best to forget who she was and who she could have been. She'd had her roommate send a suitcase with her clothes and told her to keep whatever else she wanted or give it away.

This little studio apartment was hers, in a way no other place had been. When she had told Jake that she had never had a kid's bedroom, he had looked at her with pitying astonishment and, in spite of the awkward tension of those early days, immediately piled her and Ezekiel into his pickup and taken her shopping at every quaint or quirky interior design shop Ezekiel could find in Portland.

Instead of ignoring her synaesthesia, Jake had drawn her to talk about how the colors had sounded to her, what the shapes smelled like, what numbers she saw, what different textures made her feel. It had been such an astonishing experience for her. All her life people had treated her as though she were broken, as though speaking of her disability was painful for them, as though her very existence made them uncomfortable. But Jake had reacted as if her cross-wired brain had simply created a far greater depth and height and breadth to the ways she could perceive and appreciate art. For the first time she had tried to see herself through his eyes—as more rather than less, as a person uniquely gifted rather than horribly cursed. Like a blind man creating a masterpiece, Jake had coaxed her into describing sensations he could not feel or see or hear so that he could paint her room with them.

Cassandra found most places full of jarring and competing sensory bombardment, but this space she could now slip into like a comforting robe, her frayed nerves easing into peace, her fragmented sense of self coalescing into wholeness.

Now her room rioted with botanical murals blending into blackboard on which she could chalk math equations to her heart's content. A light that looked like a glittering atom hung from the center of the room, and her walls were decorated with framed prints of scientific art from classical illustrations to images from scanning electron microscopes. Her bed was covered in plush versions of the weirdest animals the boys could find—an octopus, a wombat, and an iguana were her favorites. The three of them had spent a day at the Oregon Zoo before descending on the gift store like a horde of locusts.

Jake had even used his landlady's deceased husband's workshop to put together a set of hexagonal shelves painted to match the mural with some of them plastered with pages from mathematical textbooks. Cassandra, who had no idea what had happened to her childhood collections, had purchased a fossil to sit on one shelf as the seed for a new collection.

She had once again a desk and table for her computer and lab work. Some days she would just hold up each beaker and retort and even the lowly test tubes to watch the light glow through them and take deep breaths of cinnamon and cardamom.

In one corner she had an overly enthusiastic Boston fern that was trying to take over the room, and in another, she had a fish tank, burbling away, that she was fairly certain Ezekiel had stolen for her, with guppies and neon tetras and sword tails and one snail that had somehow become one hundred. The multi-colored fish, swirling with such complex patterns, could mesmerize her with the equations they made, each minute a new secret. Along the counter of her small kitchen, she had a parade of chubby cacti, whose protective prickles created a design that always made Cassandra laugh when she ran their equations. Jake had looked at her wistfully and told her he wished he could hear the jokes that a cactus told.

Cassandra always felt surrounded by herself in this room in ways she never had before. Which was a good thing, because she wanted to curl up in the zebra-striped chair Jake had found for her at an antique store after the debacle of the Apple of Discord, and hug her pillow printed with the periodic table information for the element Carbon, and cry.