by Kate Norris
“You’re the only one who calls me that, you know.”
“What—Winifred? It’s the name she chose for you. You wear it well.”
“Maybe, but I prefer Winnie.”
“All right,” he said tentatively. “Whatever you like.”
Would things really be different now? She knew they could be. She’d met that milder him already, and he did seemed softened by Scott’s accident and her disappearance. Would that change last? Perhaps. But even if he changed back, she wouldn’t. She would never be pushed around by him again.
* * *
• • •
The hospital wouldn’t open up for visitors for another few hours, but the nurse on duty recognized Father.
“I promise we won’t disturb him,” Father assured her.
The nurse frowned, considering. She looked worn down by her job, but her eyes were kind.
“Please,” Winnie said, “I just need to see him.”
The nurse paused a moment, then nodded at Father. “All right, Dr. Schulde.”
She walked them over to Scott’s room, although Father surely knew the way, and opened the door.
“I don’t want you going in right now,” the nurse said. “He needs his rest. Come back later this morning, and you can talk to him.” The woman put a gentle hand on Winnie’s forearm. “You must be Winifred. It’s good to see you here. Your father missed you.”
Winnie was startled to hear that Father had talked about her, but before she could really register her surprise, the nurse stepped out of the doorway and Winnie could see past her to Scott, lying there in a hospital bed. Every other thought fled.
His head had been shaved, and one arm and leg were heavily bandaged. Winnie leaned against the doorjamb to keep herself from falling over. Father reached an arm toward her and gave her support on the other side.
“Why did they shave his head?”
“There was swelling around his brain,” Father said quietly. “They had to drill to relieve the pressure.”
“And the bandages?”
“The entry point of the current, and the exit.”
“Is he really going to be okay?” Winnie asked, her voice cracking. Father had already told her he should be, but seeing him like that, thin and pale and alone there in the dark, she needed to hear it again.
“Yes. The doctors feel optimistic about his recovery,” Father assured her, but his expression was pained. “He can speak. He’ll be able to walk, once his leg is healed.” Father sighed heavily. “Will he ever be the successful physicist he was once certain to be? That, only time will tell.”
“I don’t care about that!” Winnie said fiercely. Scott stirred at the sound, but thankfully did not wake. “All that matters is that he gets well,” she whispered.
“Of course,” Father agreed quickly.
But they both knew it wasn’t true. It would matter to Scott, and it mattered to Winnie too. She would help him. Help with research, help with school—whatever he needed. The two of them would be a team, like Marie Curie and her husband Pierre, like Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire, like—
Like she and Scott’s double had been.
She let herself think of that other Scott now.
She hated not knowing what had happened after she left, not knowing what was happening to him at that very moment, a world away. Not knowing, for sure, that what she had done had taken their world back to before James or Winnie died.
Should she go back, she wondered? Not forever—just long enough to figure out some way to make sure that they were okay, and stayed that way?
Winnie now knew how to transport herself, but the way alternate realities connected, the complex interweaving of space and time . . . she couldn’t begin to pretend she understood it all.
Even with all that risk and uncertainty, she thought that if their roles were reversed, Scott would try to check on her.
Winnie pondered all this guiltily, wondering if she was being cautious or cowardly, but at the same time, watching the steady rise and fall of Scott’s sleeping breath eased the ache of grief that had been so constant and familiar, she had almost forgotten it was there.
The nurse had told her to stay out of his room, but she simply couldn’t. He was so close! It had been so long! Her heart felt almost painfully flooded. It had to discharge.
Winnie took a few ginger steps forward. The door swung shut behind her with a gentle shush; Father must have known better than to follow. She crept up to the edge of the bed and took Scott’s hand in her own, stroking the back of it gently with her thumb.
She hadn’t meant to wake him, but when his eyes fluttered open, she felt a surge of joy.
“Winnie?” he asked hoarsely.
She didn’t feel the tears coming, but suddenly they were there.
“Hi, Scott. I’m sorry I haven’t—I’m so sorry.”
Scott frowned. He looked confused, and Winnie wondered how much of this was because she had just woken him, and how much was a lingering effect of his injuries.
“You were gone?”
Winnie nodded and quickly brushed away her tears. “Yes.”
“But you’re back now?”
“Yes.”
He blinked up at her, sleepy-eyed as a child. “You’ll stay?”
As soon as he asked, Winnie knew there was only one possible answer.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll stay. Always.”
And she knew she would never leave.
* * *
• • •
As Winnie got ready for bed that night in her own home—weary as she was, and desperately worried about the one Scott, while elated about the survival of the other—there was a certain delight to her every action. Slipping into her pajamas. Washing up in her bathroom sink. Pulling back the covers of her bed. And for the first time in forever, she knew that the next day held something predictable and good: going back to the hospital to spend more time with Scott, who was alive.
Winnie was surprised to hear Father’s footsteps on the creaky attic stairs. She knew he couldn’t possibly be coming to drag her down to the lab for one of his experiments, but the sound still set her heart thumping.
Once he reached the top of the stairs, he paused. “May I tuck you in?” he asked.
It was something he hadn’t done since she was a small child.
Winnie nodded. She was already under her own beloved plain blankets, but Father pulled them up snugly under her chin, then perched on the edge of her bed. He reached out an uncertain hand, and when she didn’t flinch, stroked Winnie’s hair, tucking it behind her ear.
“It’s so short.”
“I like it,” Winnie said.
“Well, it is the style of the time.”
Father sighed and looked down at his clasped hands. He was nervous, and he was trying. That meant something to Winnie. It would take time to relearn how to accept affection from him, but Father finally seemed like he wanted to build a relationship with her, his daughter—not his subject. Winnie wanted that too.
He looked up suddenly, fixing her in his gaze.
“Winifred—” Father began. Winnie took a breath to correct him, but he quickly did it himself. “I’m sorry,” he amended, “Winnie—where were you? When you disappeared, where did you go?”
The hungry look in his eyes frightened her.
How would Father react if he knew she’d visited a world where Mama was alive?
She would never tell him. She couldn’t risk him thinking there was a way to regain what he’d lost. Winnie knew that folly all too well.
But she would tell Scott everything, when he was well enough to hear it. She wouldn’t be like her double—she would never keep any part of herself from him again.
In response to Father’s question, she just shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said firmly
.
And it didn’t.
This was where she belonged.
EPILOGUE
Winnie opened the trinket box she kept on her dresser and pulled out a small embossed business card. She was glad now that she hadn’t thrown it away, although she had considered it the night Schrödinger gave it to her, so angry with him for telling her terrible truths she could never un-know. That evening had set her down a dark path, but she could no more blame Schrödinger for that than she could blame James for disappearing, or Scott for caring that he had.
Winnie sat down at her little desk. She pulled out a sheet of her nicest stationery and her finest pen and began to write a letter. Three drafts later, she was pleased enough with the result to fold it up along with another sheet of paper, slip both into an airmail envelope, and address it to Schrödinger’s office in Ireland.
* * *
• • •
“Where are you off to?” Father asked as she stood poised near the front door, tightening the belt of her heavy wool coat. The weather had turned in the past week. Late fall was now feeling more like winter, and the first snow of the season was forecast for that evening.
“Just an errand,” Winnie said, “then I’m having dinner with Scott and Dora at the hospital.”
With Winnie spending so much time at the hospital, Dora had gotten it into her head to start volunteering there. The work really seemed to be something of a calling for her, and not just because Scott’s new roommate out of the intensive care wing was a dashing young man Dora was quite taken with.
Winnie knew it would be kind to invite Father to join her, but she didn’t want him accompanying her to the post office. She hadn’t told him about her plan to write to Schrödinger and knew he wouldn’t approve. Here, Hawthorn knew her as nothing more than a plain girl he’d once met at a party—if he remembered even that. She was well and thoroughly out of that mess. And Father wanted her to stay out.
He was probably right. Winnie would be better off focusing on the future, not the past, and there was certainly enough to occupy her, between her new relationship with Scott and the extra classes she was taking so she could graduate early and enter Barnard next fall. Winnie was sticking her neck out with no way of knowing it would make any difference, but after hours of agonized contemplation, she had finally decided she must try.
Schrödinger was famous. He was well-connected. He was, technically at least, her father. He was an outspoken opponent of the Nazi party, so he must at least have some scruples, even if they didn’t extend to his attitudes about seducing young students. And he was out of the country, safe from the reach of even military police. Perhaps he could help.
Even if it didn’t work, Winnie knew she had to try.
Winnie wished Father a good afternoon and headed out. The nearest post office was just a few blocks away, an easy walk even on a cold day. She tucked her chilly hands deep in her pockets, the right one clutching her letter tight, and headed south on Sutton Place.
Originally, Winnie hadn’t planned to do anything about Nightingale, uneasy as that made her. She could live with allowing Hawthorn’s work to continue, if it meant keeping Scott—and herself, and Father—safe. So, she resigned herself to being a coward. Or she had, until a conversation with Father the night before changed everything.
Scott had been asking about James again. Worrying about him again, because that was who Scott was. Even laid up in a hospital bed, he still had the energy to worry about someone else.
It killed Winnie to hear him talk about James, about how he would resume searching for his friend as soon as he was released, when she knew James was dead. Sitting there and nodding made her feel like the worst kind of liar, but she didn’t know if he was well enough for the truth.
So, she asked Father when he thought it would be safe to tell Scott that James was dead—much to his confusion.
That was how she discovered that, here, James’s body had never been dragged from the cold Hudson.
This didn’t necessarily mean James was alive. But, in that other world, Hawthorn hadn’t hidden James’s body when he died—he had been careful to dispose of the body in a way that practically guaranteed he would be found, and quickly. At first, Winnie had assumed it was a self-serving move on Hawthorn’s part—that the discovery of a dead, “drug-addicted” James was less likely to implicate him than a missing research assistant—but Hawthorn had, in his own twisted way, loved James. She wondered now if disposing of James’s body like that was a way to make sure he at least got a proper burial, and that his family was saved years of wondering.
Maybe James’s body was submerged in the river still, waiting to be discovered.
But maybe not.
Maybe, here, James was alive. Alive, but trapped. Still being experimented on by Hawthorn, just like Winnie would be if she hadn’t managed to escape.
Chances were slim, and on top of that, there was an even slimmer chance Schrödinger could help if James was alive—but if it were her in that Nightingale cage? She hoped someone would risk it.
Winnie paused outside the mailbox. The envelope in her hand didn’t just contain a letter. Inside, in her own careful script, was a tidy copy of the atomic bomb schematic. How could she send her father the lock, and not the key? She already had the perfect ransom to exchange for James. With that, Schrödinger could go over Hawthorn’s head, directly to the major general who Father had told her was overseeing both projects, and threaten to release the plan for the atomic bomb unless they searched Hawthorn’s personal labs for James and then shut the project down.
It was a risky gambit, to say the least. But Schrödinger had never shied away from infamy, and she was his daughter. Perhaps he would let her use up her lifetime’s worth of favors in one go.
What she was doing was treason—again—and Winnie did feel treasonous. And afraid. Not just of being caught, but of having the letter intercepted. It was an awful knowledge she was sending out into the world.
And for all she knew, she might be risking all this for a corpse decomposing at the bottom of the Hudson.
James wasn’t unlike Schrödinger’s cat now, both alive and dead until someone threatened Nightingale to find out for sure.
Winnie thought about Scott, in his hospital room across town. He would send the letter and the schematic, no hesitation.
Winnie weighed safety against cowardice, patriotism against governmental corruption, risk against reward. She thought about how Scott would never forgive her if he one day found out she’d had this chance and didn’t take it.
And she thought about the boy she’d met in that other world. How trapped he was, even while he was sitting across from her in that diner. Trapped, by habit and love and pride, just like she had been.
Winnie had freed herself from Father’s work. She wanted James to be free too.
She opened the mailbox and placed her letter inside.
She thought it was the right thing to do.
She hoped it was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has changed and grown monumentally in the several years between first draft and final form. None of it would have been possible without my agents, Lara Perkins and Laura Rennert, whose keen feedback over several pre-sale drafts helped shape When You and I Collide from an idea to a book. Innumerable thanks to them both, and to the rest of the team at Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
I’m also deeply grateful to the team at Philomel, especially my editor, Liza Kaplan, whose insights helped this book become itself, and to associate editor Talia Benamy. And many thanks to eagle-eyed copyeditors Laura Blackwell and Krista Ahlberg! I’m in awe of everything this publishing team was able to accomplish, especially during a year as tragically challenging as 2020.
I completed the first draft of this novel over one summer break during my MFA program at the Ohio State University. As a writer, I owe a debt of gratitude to the facu
lty and classmates who helped shape my work during my three years there, and as a person, I’m so thankful for the friends I found there.
If this book has piqued your interest in the history and philosophy of math and science, well, you just might want to check out St. John’s College. That’s where I was first introduced to the works of Faraday, Schrödinger, Einstein, Fermi, and the like. It’s a unique little school that’s not for everyone, but it just might be for you. The fingerprints of my education there are all over this book—and my life—in a way I’m forever grateful for. That said, I’m definitely a writer, not a physicist. Any errors on that front are my own!
Finally, deep thanks to my parents, who always insisted I was brilliant and could do anything, and who supported my writing from the time I was a little kid, when I had almost no sense of plot and my spelling was even more atrocious than it is now. And I simply must thank my brothers, Pat and Dave: growing up with the two of you by my side was a gift.
There are lots of other people I love and appreciate. Hopefully you all know.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Norris taught creative writing at The Ohio State University, and served as fiction editor of The Journal and as associate editor of The Ohio State University Press's Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in One Teen Story, Iron Horse Review, Sycamore Review, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
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