“That makes no sense.”
“Sure it does, you can’t find the end of infinity. There is no end. So if you can’t tack space onto the end of infinity, you have to create space at the beginning.”
“But you said all the rooms are filled.”
“Yes. And they will still be filled,” Finn said, as if this were completely reasonable.
“So if ten people come along and want to stay at the Infinity Hotel . . .” her voice trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the rest.
“Then you have the person in room one move to room eleven, and the person in room two move to room twelve, and the person in room three move to room thirteen, and so on, clearing out ten rooms.”
She laughed quietly. “That makes no sense whatsoever. Eventually someone’s not going to have a room.”
“There are infinite rooms.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And infinite people,” she muttered, as if her mind were a little blown.
“That’s why it’s called a paradox. In a lot of ways, infinity makes no sense. It’s impossible to get your mind around that type of vastness,” Finn said thoughtfully. “But no one argues with infinity. We just accept that it’s beyond visualization.”
“I don’t know about that . . . I frequently argue with Infinity.” Bonnie rubbed her face against his leg as if she liked the feel of him beside her.
“Ha ha,” Finn said dryly, wondering if he should pull away. He probably should. But he didn’t.
“Do you think heaven is filled with countably infinite rooms filled with countably infinite people?” she asked.
Maybe Bonnie wondered if Minnie was in her own heavenly room. Maybe Fisher was there too, in a room near Minnie’s. Maybe they had found each other the way Finn and Bonnie had, Finn mused to himself. And then he swallowed a groan at his romantic thoughts. He was getting delusional. And it was all Bonnie’s fault.
“I don’t know, Bonnie Rae,” he said.
“People in Appalachia have been singing that song since the dawn of time. They’re hoping there are infinite rooms and that the rooms are all mansions.”
“That’s kind of sad.” The cynic in Finn didn’t like the thought of people singing about mansions that didn’t exist. It felt like buying lottery tickets to him—a huge waste of emotion and energy.
“Yeah. I guess so. But it’s hopeful too. And sometimes hope is the difference between life and death.”
Finn had no answer for that.
“Hey!” she said suddenly, her voice rising with her epiphany. “I know how we can make some room at the Infinity Hotel without making everyone move. I’ve officially solved the paradox. Call it Bonnie Rae’s Solution.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. We’ll all double up. Problem solved. You wanna double up, Infinity Clyde?” Finn was sure if he could see her face she would be waggling her eyebrows. She liked to tease. And she was damn good at it.
Yeah. He wanted to double up. Instead he decided to poke back a little. “The problem is, when people double up, they start to multiply.”
She giggled, and Finn found himself smiling in the dark.
“And then we’re right back at square one,” he whispered.
Bonnie snuggled further into his legs, throwing her arm across his knees. It was several minutes before she spoke again.
“How did we end up together? Don’t you think it’s . . . strange?” she mumbled into the blanket. “I mean . . . what are the odds?”
He had asked himself the same thing over and over. But he wasn’t ready to admit that, so he pulled out his mental math book and dusted it off, speaking softly, but impersonally.
“Mathematically speaking, they’re pretty low. But not as low as you might think.” Finn’s mind settled into the comfort of percentages and the odds of certain coincidences with relief, not wanting to linger on thoughts of fate or destiny. He offered Bonnie a few examples of how oddities weren’t really oddities at all when you examined the numbers. It was all true. And it was all bullshit.
Bonnie’s head had grown heavy on his legs and she hadn’t offered up so much as a “hmm” for several minutes. Finn sat up and looked down at her. He’d done it again. Two nights in a row. He talked about numbers and she was instantly asleep. Asleep. In his tiny bed—in Katy’s tiny bed. He sighed and looped his hands under her armpits, pulling her up beside him. It was narrow, but doable. He threw the pink comforter over them and closed his eyes, willing himself to ignore the press of her body against his, willing the numbers in his head to take him away, the way they’d done for Bonnie.
Chapter Ten
THEY LEFT JUST after seven the next morning, before Shayna and her girls were even up. Bonnie thought it would be easier that way, and had shaken Finn awake with a light hand against his shoulder. He’d scared her, shooting up from the bed, the slam and slide of prison doors ringing in his ears, carried over from a dream that visited almost every night.
Finn couldn’t have felt much worse if he had actually woken up to find himself still behind bars. He’d spent the night snuggled up to Bonnie in a glorified Barbie bed, a bed as hard and small as a pink, plastic shoebox, and his back hurt and his hips ached and he had a headache that only sex or black coffee would ease. Since sex wasn’t an option, he got himself ready in a hurry and was out in the Blazer within minutes of rising, hoping for black coffee and unfortunately, still thinking about sex.
Bonnie climbed in beside him and they were off. Off—just long enough to go through a McDonald’s drive thru for coffee, long enough to get half of it in his belly, long enough to be driving along at maximum speed on highway 51, headed toward Cincinnati, when they heard the awful thumping sound that only means one thing. Steering became almost impossible.