When You and I Collide

by Kate Norris

  Scott just glared at him, jaw set.

  “Thank you,” Winnie said. “Scott, could I take a look at your notes—and do you have a pen?”

  He pulled out the papers detailing their experiment and passed them to her wordlessly, along with a notebook and pen. Winnie began making her list. They would have to build a Faraday cage themselves—it was obviously too large to transport—but everything else she wrote down, then she handed the paper to James.

  He took a crumpled dollar bill and some change from his pocket and put it on the table.

  “I need to get back to the lab. The meeting should be getting out soon. You two split my burger—they really are good.”

  He stood up, and without thinking about it, Winnie stood too, scooted out of the booth and gave him a quick hug. “Thank you. Is there anything—”

  James shook his head. “Just do your experiment as soon as you can,” he said. “And if it doesn’t work, at least get out of the city. He’ll find you if you stay here.”

  Winnie could hear the concern in his voice. And he didn’t even know the half of it. “Where I’m from,” Winnie said hesitantly, “you disappeared.”

  James gave her a crooked smile, but just like his mentor’s, the expression didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Winnie. I know how to take care of myself.”

  She truly hoped he did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  That evening, after Scott finished his work at Professor Schulde’s, they began building the Faraday cage with materials Scott picked up from the hardware store. Winnie wanted to say something that would make him feel better about how he and James had argued that afternoon, but she couldn’t think of anything that would help.

  She understood why James wouldn’t just walk away from his work with Hawthorn; the tangle of emotions she saw in him seemed to mirror her own feelings about Father’s work. She recognized the pride, the shame, the protectiveness—dare she say, the love—that had made it feel impossible for her to stop participating in Father’s experiments.

  But she could no more explain any of this to Scott than she could have made James understand that he not only could, but must, escape Hawthorn’s project. Winnie hadn’t realized escape was necessary herself until it was too late. Things always seemed bearable—until they weren’t. James would have to come to the realization by himself, or not at all.

  She could only hope that for him, it wouldn’t take the same sort of tragedy it had taken her.

  * * *

  • • •

  Constructing the Faraday cage was mundane work. They were building it with collapsible panels so that they could easily transport it to wherever they decided to attempt their experiment. It complicated things, but basically the cage was just a cube of wood framing with chicken wire stapled to it, so it was still simple enough to build.

  Winnie and Scott worked together in companionable silence. It reminded her of those too-rare times when Father would step out of the lab for a bit and leave her and Scott to work together alone. Would she ever have moments like that with her own Scott again?

  Winnie set the stapling gun down for a moment so she could brush a piece of hair away from her face. She liked the way her new hairstyle looked, but her pinned-up braids never got in the way like this. She wondered how her double could stand having hair in her face all the time. Then again, since Beta wasn’t in the lab every night, assembling and cleaning equipment and leaning over to take notes, maybe it wasn’t an issue for her.

  Winnie finished stapling a panel, then pressed her hand to the chicken wire to make sure there wasn’t too much give. The sensation of the fine mesh hexagons against her palm brought back a memory from long ago.

  “We used to have chickens,” Winnie said, “back in Germany.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and it was like she could see their little cottage, henhouse out back, and Mama in a housecoat throwing down feed. She shook her head. “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

  Scott frowned. “Winnie never talks about her life before she moved here.”

  Winnie didn’t normally talk about her time in Germany either. Partly because many people were unwelcoming toward immigrants, and partly because thinking about those days made her think of Mama, and the accident, and how wrong it had all gone in the end. When Father had been hired on as a lecturer at Columbia, he’d been adamant. America was a new life for them. A fresh start. She’d wanted that too. What was there to leave behind but pain? Of course, pain had no trouble traveling along with them.

  But even though it wasn’t something she mentioned much, Winnie was surprised her double never talked about her childhood with Scott. She seemed more open than Winnie, and Winnie had longed to share all the details of her life with Scott, good and bad. Still, there was wanting, and there was doing. Maybe Beta wanted to talk to Scott about those times, but it wasn’t so easy to actually do, was it?

  “Well,” Winnie said slowly, “not all the memories from that time are pleasant ones.”

  And some of those unpleasant parts, like Father’s drinking, continued into the present. She had no desire for Scott to know about that, both out of protectiveness for Father, and a feeling of shame that she couldn’t quite make sense of, since she wasn’t the one who overindulged and then flew off the handle. She supposed it wasn’t really possible to separate her own identity from Father’s, seeing as how he was her whole family. They shaped each other. Maybe if she’d been different, he would have been too.

  Scott was looking at her intently, and she knew he was eager for her to say more, but of course he was too polite to pry.

  Winnie hadn’t gotten the chance to share these things with her own Scott. She was shy at the prospect now, but she couldn’t let herself miss this opportunity again.

  “You have to understand, after Mama died, that house . . . it was like a picture she’d been cut out of. There was this massive, obvious hole, but around it everything just—stayed the same. You know Father. How meticulous he is. He didn’t let the household fall to pieces. Before he hired Brunhilde, he did it all. Cooking, cleaning, scrubbing our clothes on the washboard outside and hanging them to dry just like Mama did.”

  “He’s an exceptional man.”

  “No, you don’t get it. I mean yes, he’s exceptional. But it would have been better if he’d fallen apart. Not forever, obviously. But if we could have grieved—out loud, together—then maybe we wouldn’t each have had to grieve in silence, alone, these past eight years.”

  That’s what Winnie remembered most from those long months in Germany after Mama’s death, before Father received his job offer from Columbia: the silence. Her eyes filled with tears. Maybe her life was a bit lonely now, but nothing like it had been then.

  Before Mama died, the house had been full of her chitchat. A woman who’d wanted to be a physicist talking to herself—possibly to fight the tedium of housework, Winnie realized now. Father tackled those same tasks after her death with a grim—and silent—determination. That, and the muffling effect of her own grief, had muted even the everyday outside sounds.

  Only one sound remained crisp in her memory. The loud tock of her grandparents’ sitting room clock, marking the seconds of every long pause during her and Father’s continued Sunday visits with Mama’s parents.

  “I’m sorry it’s still so—fresh,” Scott said.

  “Yeah, I think I’ll always miss her. But maybe that’s a good thing—remembering her. I just wish it didn’t still hurt this much. For me or for Father. Your Winnie—she seems so much more normal than I am. She and this world’s Professor Schulde—I think they must have done a better job of it. A better job grieving. A better job moving on. Father and I got stuck somehow. I wonder how they did it.”

  “Winnie, you shouldn’t—”

  “I know, I know. I guess I just can’t help . . . wondering.”

  They were both quiet
for a moment.

  “Scott, with time dilation, do you think there’s any way . . . ?” Winnie asked, trailing off.

  Scott shook his head gently. “If you’re right about the inverse relationship between time in our worlds, you would have to wait—what, a decade? Even then, I mean, you aren’t even you there yet. You’re just a little girl. You would be displacing the wrong amount of matter.” He gave a heavy sigh. “I can’t speak to the theoretical limits of time dilation, but practically speaking? I just don’t think there’s any way. And I don’t think it’s . . .” He shrugged and shook his head. “I think maybe it would be wrong, even if it were possible.”

  Winnie frowned, then shrugged. “I didn’t think so,” she said quietly.

  It had been a mistake to dredge up this old stuff. She’d thought it would make her feel better. That it would make them closer. But his curiosity—it was really Beta’s past he wanted to know about, wasn’t it? Not hers.

  If Scott thought she was going to be a tool for him to grow closer to her double, he was sorely mistaken. If he had questions about his girlfriend, he would have to ask her himself.

  Scott opened his mouth to say something more, but just then a brisk knock on the door startled them both.

  “The rent’s paid,” Scott whispered, “and I don’t usually get many visitors. I don’t know who it could be.”

  That was a lie.

  He knew who it could be.

  They both did.

  How detailed was the description the librarian had passed on to Hawthorn and Nightingale? Apparently not so detailed that James had immediately thought of her . . . but clearly detailed enough that he made the connection after just a few moments of looking at Scott’s experiment notes.

  “Winnie,” Scott said, “I think you should hide.”

  Winnie nodded and ducked into the bathroom. It wasn’t a great hiding place. If anyone searched the apartment, they’d find her. She felt her stomach lurch.

  She heard Scott’s footsteps on the creaky bare floorboards as he crossed the room.

  The knock came again, pounding this time.

  “Who is it?” Scott asked without opening the door.

  “It’s me!”

  The door muffled the voice, but it was unmistakably Beta. Scott opened the door, and Winnie let out a shaky breath and came out of the bathroom

  “You were hiding? Isn’t that kind of paranoid?”

  Scott laughed, but it sounded a bit breathless, and Winnie could tell from his degree of relief that he had been just as scared.

  “Now I feel silly,” he said, “but I assumed it was something bad. I really couldn’t think of a single person who might pay me a visit just because!”

  Beta frowned.

  “I would. Obviously.”

  “Well, yes, you of course,” Scott said. Then he gave Beta a severe look. “But I thought we agreed it would be a needless risk for you to join us while we worked. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m just stopping by for a moment—I wanted to drop off some dinner,” she said, holding up a bag, “and see how things are progressing.”

  “Winnie—”

  “Scott, I need to feel like I’m doing something. This affects me just as much as anyone.” She gave Scott the sort of doe-eyed look Winnie had seen Dora use when she was trying to get her way with a boy, and Winnie saw him instantly soften.

  “Not as much as it affects Scott—my Scott,” Winnie interrupted angrily. Or as much as it affects me, she thought, fighting the feeling in her stomach. “He’ll stay dead unless we figure out how to send me back. What is you coming here going to do to help, besides make us both feel sick?”

  Scott and Beta gave each other a look, and Winnie saw them come to a silent agreement. That wordless communication was more intimate than any display of affection, and witnessing it was a harsh reminder that she and Scott had only ever been together as a couple in the flat space of her imagination.

  “You’re right,” Beta said. “I’ll go.”

  Winnie noticed as her double placed a hand on her stomach. Good. Let her be nauseated too.

  “I’ll tell you about how it’s going later,” Scott said. “I know I need to be better about that.” He took the brown paper bag that Beta offered and walked her to the door. Winnie looked away, but she could still hear the peck he gave Beta’s cheek.

  Winnie hoped to never be alone with the two of them again, a voyeur to an improved version of her own life.

  When Scott told her that Beta couldn’t see splinters, she’d felt sorry for her double, but now, Winnie wondered if one reason Beta’s life was so much better than hers was the lack of them.

  “Wait,” Winnie called, right as Scott was about to shut the door. “The splinters—you really don’t see them? Not ever?”

  Her double shook her head.

  “Never.”

  “Not even the accident?” She could imagine convincing herself that some splinters were nothing more than an overactive imagination, but that one—that one couldn’t possibly be ignored. “There was a world where Father swerved and missed the deer,” Winnie continued. “I saw it. Didn’t you?”

  Bringing up the accident, such an important point of commonality between them, brought a gentler look to her double’s face. “I was asleep when it happened,” she said softly.

  Maybe that was the initial splinter between their worlds, the one difference all others cascaded from. Winnie had seen a sleeping version of herself avoid the crash, but in Beta’s world, she had been asleep and crashed anyway. Winnie wondered what this meant about the share of blame she’d been shouldering all these years, but couldn’t let herself think more about that at the moment.

  “I hope the work goes well tonight,” her double said. “Enjoy the sandwich.”

  Scott stepped out into the hallway after Beta, and they stayed out there for a few moments, their voices an indecipherable murmur.

  Winnie was used to feeling like an outsider. But being on the other side of that shut door, she had never felt lonelier.

  It wasn’t entirely their fault. At first, it had seemed harmless not to correct everyone’s assumption that Winnie and Scott had been together in her world too, but now the omission was beginning to feel like an embarrassing lie, like she was a little girl playing dress-up in Beta’s relationship.

  Scott came over to the couch, opened the bag Beta had left, and handed Winnie a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Winnie tore the wrapper open, but then set the sandwich down on her plate without taking a bite.

  “I feel like I should tell you, Scott and I aren’t—weren’t—together in my world,” Winnie said, forcing herself through the discomfort. “Things were heading in that direction,” she hedged guiltily, “or at least I think they were. But we never had a chance to . . . make it official.”

  Scott looked like he was wondering what made her confess that right then, or at all. But rather than question her, he just gave her a gentle smile and said, “I’m sure it was heading in that direction. Us Scotts know things.”

  She knew she should just take him at his word, but found herself resisting the easy comfort.

  “But how do you know? You and Scott—you’re identical. But you knew I wasn’t your Winnie immediately. You knew as soon as we kissed. I thought you were Scott, but you knew I wasn’t her.” She paused a moment to steel herself. “How could you tell?”

  Scott looked at her for a moment, like he was trying to understand what she was really asking, and then he said, “I don’t know. But it wasn’t because the kiss was bad, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Winnie couldn’t let the silence rest, afraid her relief would be too obvious. “What was it, then?”

  He closed his eyes a moment, like he was thinking. “You seemed surprised,” he said slowly. “I could feel you trembling.” Scott shrugged. “It didn’t fe
el like just another kiss. It felt like the first time.”

  He met her eyes, and the moment lingered a little too long. There was a charge in the air, almost like the one she’d felt right before Scott was electrocuted. They locked eyes, then both quickly looked away.

  Another thought struck Winnie then. “Do you think there will be another me there?” Winnie asked. “When I go back—will I run into last week’s me?”

  She was terrified of the answer. Winnie didn’t want to have to face herself again, even if it was her own true self of the recent past. She couldn’t bear the thought of going home and still being an extra.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Scott said firmly. He took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “There’s still just one you. That isn’t an alt-verse with a double in it. It’s your home.”

  Winnie smiled at him uncertainly. It seemed too good to be true, but she wanted desperately to believe it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Winnie had problems enough of her own, but she couldn’t stop worrying about James. She would see him when he brought the promised equipment to Scott’s apartment, and she resolved to say something to him then about getting away from Hawthorn. She saw many parallels between his life and mentorship with Hawthorn and her own life and relationship with Father. But all the relevant similarities they shared weren’t things Beta had in common with James. It would all be coming out of the blue for him if Winnie were to suddenly tell him he simply must quit working for Nightingale.

  So, she wasn’t very hopeful that James would abandon his mentor on her word. But she resolved to try anyway.

  She didn’t get the chance.

  “James wasn’t in the lab today,” Scott said as soon as he opened the door to let her inside the apartment.

  Fear spread from her stomach in an awful wave, making her limbs tingle unpleasantly.

  She bit her lip and shook her head. “What do you think happened?” A question just to say something. As if they didn’t both already know.