Other Earths (collection)

My hand closed on the key. “I hope I’m not wrong about this, sir.”

“Me too,” George said softly. “Me too.”

“I won’t be long.”

I opened the curtain. The key was hard against my palm, digging into the flesh. Mr. Chamberlain was still going on, but no one seemed to be listening now. They had heard it all before.

A FAMILY HISTORY Paul Park

Sailing to Egypt in the spring of 1798, General Bonaparte and his army passed within two miles of the English fleet, northeast of Malta in the middle of the night. What would have happened if Horatio Nelson had set a different course and had captured his enemy at sea?

Of course everything would have changed, instantly and for the better. Its revolution unchecked, France would have become a paradise on Earth, where free men and women raised their eyes from the dirt and stood up straight as if for the first time. Pigs would have learned to speak, donkeys to fly.

Colors would have been brighter, smells sweeter. The weather would improve. God would smile on France and all the French dominions. In June of 1815, gentle breezes would caress the empty fields of Waterloo. A system of high pressure would extend to the New World, and a midsummer hurricane would not rip apart the small, vulnerable French towns of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.

It would not destroy the farmhouse of Fran¸ois and Marie Louise de Fontenelle in Pointe à la Hache, a sliver of land between the swamp and the Mississippi River. It would not orphan their children, Amelie and Lucien, and force them to abandon the only home they knew and ride north along the makeshift levees from which, years before, they had hailed the flotilla of barges carrying General Bonaparte to New Orleans, when he took up his duties there as governor.

Disconsolate, the two orphans would not have found refuge with an aunt and uncle on the Rue des Dryades in the capital of New France. They would not grow up sullen and resentful in the grand house of their relatives, treated like servants’ children. At age sixteen, Lucien would not steal his aunt’s jewels and run away. He would not join the crew of a flatboat heading north, past the indigo and sugar plantations, and then the cotton after that, and then the wilderness. Still shy of his seventeenth birthday, he would not come to rest in the territory of the Omahas, at Fort St. Jean on the west bank of the Missouri River, penniless, his money spent.

Two years later, he would not send the following letter:

“Ma Chere Soeur, my heart bleeds when I think of you still in the clutches of that madwoman and her nine-times-cuckolded husband. If there is anything that mars my current exultation it is that. But let me tell you what has happened here in this great country that is as fresh as if God made it yesterday—no, as if this is still the first morning of creation.

“I think of it that way even as I lie here on my deathbed, too weak almost to raise my pen.”

(In New Orleans, Amelie de Fontenelle would not wonder at the crude, small, unfamiliar printing on the envelope, the cherished hand inside. “Ah, is it true?” she would be spared from thinking.)