Once Again

by Catherine Wallace Hope

  She abandoned the idea of baking muffins and returned to her notebook. On a fresh page, in her spidery calligraphy, she wrote: Sunday, June 20, 2021. Day 500. She was supposed to let what was trapped inside escape onto these pages. Prove to herself that she was making an effort. After a pause, she skipped down two lines. Same, she wrote. Nothing there for Group to peck at, though they would certainly make the attempt. The ten of them would meet with Dr. Tanner in his tranquil office tomorrow morning, perched on pillowy chairs, sipping chamomile tea from cups decorated with honeybees and dragonflies.

  I should skip Group if I don’t have anything to share. That was the excuse she gave herself, but in reality, Group had devolved into a competition, with some of the mothers vying for the spot as top patient, determined to show how progress was made, each one willing to share her most earnest notes to show how her loss was the most profound, because none of the others knew her child. No one could know what it was to lose that child. And thus, her progress was the most hard fought; hers, the effort Dr. Tanner would most admire. And all of that was understandable. Yet lately, a sense of hierarchy had formed, an atmosphere of judgment about those who were trying to move forward versus those who refused.

  One reason Erin had originally agreed to go was that she wanted someone to reassure her that she’d been a good mother, before. And that it hadn’t all been swept away by what had happened. But it wasn’t that kind of group.

  On the page in front of her, she underlined the numerals three times and crossed out the word she’d written. What could she tell those women? Dr. Tanner? Tell them once again how a couple of trivial mistakes had cost her everything? How no penance could bring Korrie back? And how the threads that bound Erin to this world now were so thin, spun glass finer than spider silk. So easily snipped between her fingernails. She could sever them in a heartbeat.

  One ordinary day in the last springtime of Korrie’s life, Erin had taken her for a hike up a gentle trail through the hills, to gather wildflowers for the house. The two of them hiked a shady slope through the aspen. Korrie skipped ahead in her flouncy summer outfit, her dark curls bouncing against her back, hands bobbing as she conducted the music of her own made-up tune. She hopped over fallen branches, stopped, and galloped back.

  Beside the trail, a small brook wove idly downhill. Sunlight broke through the canopy in dusty slants and glinted on the surface, and water striders rowed around on the mirror of a slow eddy. Erin edged closer to the brook and inhaled the sweet grassy fragrance. Korrie joined her, and Erin followed the direction of her gaze as she watched small alpine butterflies, moss elfins and hairstreaks and lupine blues, dropping down to the flattest stones to approach the rim of the water.

  Korrie’s expression transformed with wonderment. “Look!” she whispered. “See all the butterflies?” She turned her head toward the origin of the brook and then the other way, all along its curves. A smile of discovery lit her face. “This,” she said, and she extended her arms parallel to the flow of the water, “this is the place where butterflies come to drink,” as if it were the one magical spot in the whole world that they all returned to.

  No. Erin wouldn’t share that with Group. She would give them nothing. But tomorrow she would get dressed and force herself to show up because she’d promised Zac she would.

  At 9:30, she pressed her phone awake and touched a square to access “Favorites.” Of all the faces who had previously resided there, now only one remained. In his small circle, Zac smiled. She knew important things were happening at his job, but she needed him to set aside time today for this milestone if it was going to mean anything. Her request of him would be simple, brief. She would ask him to come home just for a little while, so she wouldn’t be alone in the motionless ether, and to stay long enough to acknowledge this five-hundredth day since Korrie’s death.

  Erin tried to remember what she had been like with Zac before, who she’d once been, how she’d sounded, and she wondered if she could sound like that person again.

  “It’s time,” she said. She pressed the image of his face and drew the phone up to her ear to listen for the sound of his voice.

  Chapter Two

  9:30 AM

  Sunday, June 20, 2021 | National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado

  Zac stepped into his office, flipped on the lights, and closed the door behind him. With a deep inhale, he tried to ease the constriction in his chest. The hour had almost arrived, and he didn’t feel ready. His eyes ached, his cheeks were shaggy with stubble, and his mind was racing in a state of accelerated vigilance. He’d done all he could do this morning to prepare, to set things up before the others arrived. The guys on his team were his best friends, and he knew their habits. Mark would be on time, no matter how late they’d worked the night before; Jin would be late because he was always late; and Walter, with his supervisory prerogative, would breeze in whenever it suited him. Zac had gone to the other building, opened the Clean Room, and verified the thermal shield of the new atomic clock. Today’s endeavor had officially begun when he switched it to “On Duty.” With the spectroscope, he confirmed the frequency of the clock’s new time crystal, only the second one in the world that could keep time in perpetuity without a supporting pacemaker of lasers. He calibrated the spectroscope, measuring the crystal’s pulse to account for the electromagnetic field it generated and the pattern it created with the energy field broadcast by his own heartbeat.

  These were the steps he’d taken to begin this momentous day, and then he had come back here to his office, to stick to his ordinary schedule, here behind the privacy of a closed door so he could take his call from Erin.

  The other Erin, as he’d begun thinking of her, the one who’d replaced his wife, this lifeless Erinesque version who had appeared when the love of his life, mother of his child, was sucked into the void. When Korrie died, Erin departed without him for regions unknown. First Korrie and then Erin.

  She called at 9:30, the appointed time. He could hear in her voice that she was trying to sound upbeat, but a chill lay beneath the words. “I would have called you before you left for work, but I—” She paused. “I don’t know.”

  He didn’t tell her he’d stopped staying with Dan and Maggie. Whenever he saw them, they tried to take care of him, and that made him feel as crushable as a naked hatchling caught out of its shell. So for now he chose to stay at work, showering in the bike room, sleeping in a lounge chair in a darkened atrium overlooking Green Mountain and the Boulder Flatirons, those mountainous moonlit rock formations jutting out of the ground. At work, he could neatly bisect his situation: the ice-bound catastrophe of his marriage locked behind an iron gate and the silky, infinite blackness of his profession in the foreground.

  He heard Erin take a sip of something, and then she said, “I really need you to come over today. This afternoon, sometime today.”

  With the lightest touch of a fingertip, she shoved the iron gate open, and he felt the cold leaking toward him. “You know I can’t, Erin.”

  It took her a long time to come back with a response. “Because,” she said, “today is the day? The event?”

  “Right.”

  “But I thought—” Her tone became more hard-edged. “Didn’t you say it would be going on all day?”

  “It will.” That tension across his ribs tightened. He heard her take another sip and wondered if she was living on nothing but coffee. When she seemed to have drifted, he asked, “Have you eaten anything?”

  “Yes.” She sounded defensive, but he had to raise the issue because this was what they did now. He interrogated and she deflected.

  “What did you have?”

  “Muffins,” she said. “And fruit.”

  Not true, he could tell. “Erin, please, you have to eat.”

  “I know,” she said. “I will.” But there was no substance, not the slightest intention behind her words. “Couldn’t you come after work?”

  He would have willingly gone to the farthest
reaches to get his old Erin back, if he knew where to find her, his beautiful bohemian. A fragment of the past sped through his mind—coming home one evening to see Erin and Korrie with white clover-bloom crowns in their dark hair, glitter on their cheeks, strings of seashells around their necks, and aqua-blue ribbons hanging from their shoulders. Erin stood imperially on the oversized ottoman, hands in fists on her hips, and said, “’Twas a day of sport for the squid queen and her squidling.”

  Korrie leaped from the sofa to the ottoman, laughing, and said, “Squidling princess.” The slightest lisp because of that loose front tooth.

  Zac ached with the memory of their warmth hugged against his chest and their hair smelling of watermelon shampoo.

  He would have gone beyond the grave to see Korrie again. In fact, some months ago, in a bizarre moment of insomniac free fall, he had thought about digging down to her casket to be sure he still knew where she was.

  In the bewildering days before the funeral, he had convinced himself it would be a comfort to inter her at the small, old cemetery that sat just across the road from the lab. Green Mountain. Probably because her death hadn’t become real yet, and he’d imagined her being within walking distance—half-imagined her walking across the grass and up to the door of the lab. But of course, he’d been wrong; there was no comfort.

  “It’ll be late when it ends,” he told Erin, feeling as if he were heaving hard to shut that iron gate.

  Erin’s voice rose again out of the cell phone but with a more urgent, colder edge. “Zac, it’s the five-hundredth day.”

  “You think I don’t know what day it is?” He stopped himself. This was not the way he intended to talk to her. He rubbed his fingers across his forehead. Just let it play out. Let her say what she needs to say.

  “I guess what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why you have to be the one, and why it has to be all day. On a Sunday.”

  But that wasn’t true. She knew why. “Because,” he said, “I have to be there as it evolves, if it goes the way I think it will.” He’d carefully explained it all months and months ago, but she apparently couldn’t remember now, after everything that had happened. He’d opened his notebook and made a sketch for her, showing how in far-flung deep space, pairs of black holes were caught in each other’s grasp, orbiting each other in tightening spirals that would soon end in violent mergers. He told her that as the spirals intensified, the orbiting pairs threw off waves of disruption that rippled through spacetime, warping the architecture of existence.

  He sketched for her how the imperceptible gravitational ripples that reached Earth could be measured with ultraprecise atomic clocks because time moves faster the higher it is in a gravitational field. That was how Zac had started building his model, the mathematical model that yielded the staggering prediction that two isolated merger events would coincide. His pen nearly tore through the paper as it scratched down the page, his excitement outmatching his drawing skills as he dashed off waves from those events crashing up against each other, the force so great it could create a miniature black hole.

  This miraculous entity would form near enough to Earth that its effects could be observed for its intense, short life. His model suggested that the newborn black hole might form a photon orbit of only twenty-four kilometers and have a life of less than a day, but that would be long enough for it to evolve into its mirror opposite, a time-reversed white hole with an exit horizon into a possible future. He and his colleagues might be able to witness the final phase of that lifespan—its quantum collapse, a wildly tempestuous phase of unmoored time.

  Back when he’d illustrated the whole thing, he’d wanted Erin to know that only something as astonishing as these mysteries of loop quantum gravity could drag him away from her and Korrie for so long every day. Erin said she found it intriguing, that it sounded pretty epic to her. He’d thought at the time how she would love the triumph of it if the project succeeded, how impressed she would be that he was the one who would do the interviews afterward, that his would be the voice on public radio, his the face on magazine covers.

  Now he told her the only thing he could. “And it has to be me because it’s my model that the simulation is built on. The black hole won’t be visible, but the sim will illustrate what’s happening. I’ll have to be there to remodel the math as the data sets come in from the other labs. I’ll have to do it in real time so Mark and Jin can feed it to the sim.” There was no response. “It’s a big deal, Erin, for science, for a new physics of time.”

  He heard her exhale, but she said nothing. “If it does happen today,” he said, “it will never happen this way again, not in my lifetime and probably not in anyone else’s either. Ever.” After a long silence, he added, “I can’t take my phone into the Clean Room, but you can leave me a voicemail. And I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. I promise.” He sat through the seconds ticking away of her not saying anything. Part of him felt a pang of self-reproach, as if he were leaving her behind, trudging away from the iron gate across a field of ice while she stubbornly stayed where she was, where neither the present nor the future could touch her. But another part of him knew that he had to persevere, to do his work, to find some way forward. “Erin,” he said finally, “please say you understand about this day.”

  And then her voice came back to him, resonant with disappointment and bittersweet clarity. “All right, sweetheart.” She hadn’t called him that since before The Day Of. It was her. It was the voice of his wife. “I hope it goes well,” she said. “And maybe you could come by after it’s all over.”

  Christ, how he missed her. Her beauty rushed over him like a cold current, and his skin prickled alive, from his face to his feet, as if it had been numb for ages.

  Chapter Three

  9:32 AM

  Sunday, June 20, 2021 | 371 Nysa Vale Road

  With the phone still pressed against her ear, but getting no response, Erin said, “Zac?” The light in the room brightened, and her phone startled her, humming in her hand with a new incoming call. She drew the phone back so she could read the name of the caller. When she saw the ID, she couldn’t make sense of it. She refocused and looked again: “Peregrine Elem.” It still made no sense. She stood as she accepted the call and put the phone back to her ear.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Mrs. Fullarton?”

  Cool, white panic slid over Erin’s face. She knew the voice. It was unbelievable that this woman was calling her. Speaking to her again.

  “Mrs. Fullarton?”

  Erin repositioned the phone against her ear. “Yes?”

  The voice came back over the line. “This is Jeanna in the office at Peregrine Elementary.” An image of the woman surfaced from a murky pool of memories, faces of those who were involved during the days after Korrie’s death; law enforcement—Tom Drake, Rebecca Kincaid—and school officials and this distorted face of Jeanna Rattilson. Erin wrapped a protective arm over her chest. “Why are you calling me?”

  “Well—” Jeanna paused as if she were the one who was surprised. “We have Korrie here in the office. And she’s running a temp of one hundred one point eight.”

  Erin flinched from the sting of this woman saying her daughter’s name. Her lungs shrank in her chest, and she grabbed the edge of the island’s counter. “What?” The world seemed oddly slanted, and she thought she might lose her balance. She looked again at the ID and then put the phone back to her ear.

  Jeanna spoke again, slow and clear, highlighting each word. “Someone will need to pick her up. Because she’s running a temp.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Erin pulled her hand to her damp forehead. She couldn’t imagine how someone could make this call more than a year later, knowing full well what had happened, knowing the part she’d played.

  Jeanna exhaled, sounding impatient, before she spoke again. “Is this Korrie Fullarton’s mother?”

  “Yes!” Erin snapped.

  “Then you need to pick her up,” Jeanna snappe
d back.

  “What is wrong with you?” Erin paced across the kitchen tiles. “Don’t you know what a horrible thing you’re doing?”

  The quiet lasted a few seconds. Erin thumbed her ring into place. She narrowed her eyes, sharpened her vision, as if this contemptible woman were standing in front of her.

  “Mrs. Fullarton, I’m gonna have someone else talk to you.” Then there was the off-key music of being on hold.

  Erin’s pulse thrummed in her ears, and she couldn’t swallow. She had to have water. She grabbed a cup and filled it from the tap. It was then that she looked up through the windowpane again.

  Outside, it was snowing.

  She dropped the cup, and it clattered into the sink.

  Snowflakes chased down from the pearl-gray cloud cover. Half a foot of new snow lay on the ground, and the limbs of the spruce trees hung heavy with the slow-falling burden. She set the phone down and leaned on the counter with a hand over her eyes. This is what happens, she thought. Eventually, you lose your grip and start to fall.

  When the tin sounds of a voice rose from the phone, she picked it up, put it to her ear, and listened.

  “… first name on the emergency contact card, and we are required by state law to call in this order. If there’s a problem and you need to update your information—”

  “No,” Erin interrupted, scrutinizing the snowfall. “I don’t—I’m sorry.” She searched for the most accurate words. “I’m not sure what’s happening.”

  A similarly sharp exhale. Irritation. “Look,” this other woman said. “What’s happening is we need Korrie picked up. She can’t go on the field trip, and she can’t stay in school with a fever.”

  Erin stared out at the whitened spruces. “I’m sorry?”