For me, the order of time is out of sequence, she thought. Only for me. But how could that have been true? In any real sense? Erin knew that the standard for time was set from the atomic clock at NIST. She ran from Korrie’s room, down the stairs, bringing up the website on her phone as she squared herself in front of her computer and accessed it there as well. They matched. The government page on both screens read:
Today: February 7, 2020 Mountain Standard Time 10:40:08 AM
More proof of something. The time she was in now was a different time from the one she’d been in when this day first began. It was a fact she could verify against the same clock Zac had helped create. The one he’d perfected to measure what his model foretold. What if all of this was because of what day it was—the day of Zac’s time event?
“Oh my god,” she whispered, and she tapped the display of her phone, looking again at the tiny circular photo of Zac. For almost ten years, she had been married to this brilliant physicist who told her all about the whims of time, drew diagrams for her. What was it he had shown her about this day? That the waves would literally disrupt the architecture of time? Something about a black hole becoming a white hole and revealing a new physics of time?
Zac’s theories contradicted her common sense, but now her perceptions told her there was nothing common about what was happening, and she couldn’t get through to him to tell him what she was seeing. Maybe it was not her mental state that had changed after all. Zac always talked about how shortsighted perception is, how people see time only as their own small collection of memories of the past and plans for the future but that it’s a much more complex ocean of probabilities and processes. And now she was somehow swept up.
She ran to the front door, wrenched it open, and looked out at the swirling static of pale flakes. She felt frantic and electric, adrenaline surging through her as she stepped out into the storm.
She tried pressing on Zac’s image again. But it was still February, his recording still “No time like the present.” When his voicemail beeped, she said, “Zac, something’s happening. Please, please call me the second you get this.”
Chapter Nine
The Day Of: Friday, February 7, 2020 | Pearl Street Office Park
By 10:40, Erin’s need to flee the interview felt really critical. Bethany had delved into Erin’s documents while she sat there. She’d double-tapped her tablet, and said, “And this résumé.” The implication seemed to be that it was a strike against Erin. “This is the most updated?”
“Yes.” She’d formatted the document with a large square of color for the heading, giant bullet points, and wide margins to fill the page.
Bethany asked her to describe her educational experience. Erin thought back to those years and then rambled. She tried to shape the narrative of leaving school as an act of high character, the courage to admit she needed to take her own path, but Bethany seemed unconvinced.
“So nothing since Berkeley?” she said.
“Nothing like what?” Erin felt her hopes shutting down, felt less able to pretend that this interview could turn out well.
“No employment.” Bethany really seemed to enjoy this part. This fact was something she already knew, but she seemed to have to point it out, just for fun.
“I was going to—” Erin paused. In that instant, she saw herself mirrored in Bethany’s eyes, and all of Erin’s efforts, all of the busy activity of her daily life, seemed quaint and misguided. “When my daughter started school,” she said, “I thought I might open my own place.”
“Huh,” Bethany’s response did not outwardly mock Erin, but there was an opinion in her tone that made Erin feel embarrassed about her unfashionable priorities and the foolishness of her pipe dream.
Bethany asked for written consent to run Erin’s credit report, and then she pulled it while Erin watched.
“Do you always do that?” Erin asked.
Bethany lifted her head, apparently cheered even more by the chance to get a look into Erin’s financial information. “It’s just a soft pull,” she said. “It won’t lower your score.” She flicked a finger to scroll deeper into the report. She seemed to probe it with satisfaction. “Mm,” she said.
It had been over an hour since the interview began, and the only thing Erin wanted now was the chance to escape. She wanted to shake off the scratchy burlap feeling of being stuck here with this woman. She let her mind imagine running out into the pure white snow and returning to her stupid little life. If there was a way, she would have deleted her documents from Bethany’s tablet and erased the interview from her calendar.
“What do you think,” Erin said, “might be the timing now?”
“What timing?”
“How long”—Erin tried to adjust her voice to sound positive—“before we can finish up here?”
“Are you in a rush?” Bethany said, seeming to draw a line to see if Erin would step over it.
“No, of course not.” She made another attempt to look eager and bright.
“Well,” Bethany went back to her tablet. “I think we should have you out of here before lunch.”
“What?” There was disbelief in Erin’s tone that she’d been unable to cover.
Bethany tilted her head to the side. “You and I need to walk through an assessment to see how you might fit with our culture; and we have a five-factor model to show where your strengths are. We can compare your results to the team’s.” A hint of a smile came and went. “All told, that will take us half an hour or so. Right? And then we have timed tests onscreen for you. Literacy, comprehension, proofreading. And that will take us another half an hour or so. Sound good?”
“Wonderful,” Erin said.
Chapter Ten
10:45 AM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | 371 Nysa Vale Road
Erin paced through the rooms of their history, wishing Zac would call back. She had to find some way to understand what was happening. She threw aside the curtain that hid the storage area under the stairs and pulled out a box full of his magazines, hard-copy reprints with his articles in The Astrophysical Journal, Scientific American, Quanta. Beautiful, glossy illustrations showed crimson nebulae at peace, all twinkle and stillness and quiet. The texts under his name proved indecipherable. These were concepts so simple to Zac that he breathed them like air, but Erin could make no sense of them. Page after page of words, symbols, formulae that meant everything to him but revealed nothing to her.
She found his old laptop and jabbed at the keyboard, trying to get it to respond, but even after she found a compatible cord and plugged it into a wall outlet, it refused.
All she wanted was some kind of summary or abstract that would show her what was happening, some visual something that would orient her pictorial mind to the nature of the thing she was caught in. Or if she could find something in layman’s terms that would explain it to her in useful, concrete words.
She gave up on his machine and went back to hers. She typed the phrases “gravitational wave” and “time change.” Her search yielded thirty thousand hits. She kept scrolling down through the list as she looked for something helpful.
She saw a link to the NIST website and hit the blue text. There on the menu was the portal to Zac’s group. With another click, she found his name, and with another, his face. The photo was serious, studious, professional, his red beard trimmed short, the way he had it before he shaved it off. Beneath the image were links to his publications. She scanned the titles. These were all old articles about gravitational-wave memory. None of the work he’d done recently on black holes. She shoved the keyboard back and got away from the computer.
She walked the floors of their past. Today it was summer, but she was in winter. February seventh. Here were all the pieces of their life scattered the way they were when she’d rushed Korrie out the door so she could get her to school and get herself to her interview. Was she living through a replay? Of the worst day of all days? The last day of Korrie’s life?
Somehow, I�
�m here, in The Day Of. I can see the evidence all around me with my own two eyes. Touch it with my two hands. She pushed the puzzle pieces around on the table. Then an idea lit up in her head. What if Korrie hasn’t been abducted yet? What if I’m actually back in that day, and Clype hasn’t taken her yet?
Her phone read 10:52. How long since the school had called? Pressure closed in. How much time had she blown? If all of this was real, could it be happening the same way all over again? The school had called just like when she was in her interview on The Day Of. On Sledding Day, at 9:32. Her phone said 10:53 now; 10:53 on February 7.
Was it possible?
Erin tapped hard against the glass face of her phone to return the call from the school. It rang once, twice, three times, four. Where the hell are you? While the ringing continued, she ran up the stairs, stalked in and out of Korrie’s room, up the hallway and back, before someone finally picked up the phone.
“Peregrine Elementary.” This was Jeanna, Erin knew, who had no idea at that moment what her part in the tragedy was going to be. “Can you hold?”
“No! Don’t put me on hold!” But it was too late. The line crackled with warped hold music.
Erin treaded the floorboards and whispered, “Oh my god, oh my god, come on, come on, please.” Somewhere in that school building, somehow, Korrie might be alive. She could be walking and breathing, her heart beating, feeling the effects of a fever and probably wanting to be home. Erin only had to make sure Jeanna could see her, would keep her in sight, and would promise she was looking right at her and would hold on to her and keep her safe. Erin felt herself bargaining with the prolonged seconds of waiting—she would give anything now if she could get it right this time.
But then, with barely a blur, the tone of the light in the hallway changed. The music cut out. Korrie’s room stood empty and dark.
“No!” Erin said.
She looked at the face of her phone, and there was no call illuminated. She flipped to “Recents”—but there was only the earlier entry when she’d started to call her mother. She pulled the school’s number from her memory and entered the digits. As she rushed down the stairs, she got a canned recording.
“Welcome. Peregrine Elementary is closed for summer break. We will return on August twenty-third. Please remember to read with your student and complete your Summer Reading Challenge tally sheets …”
She hung up.
How was this thing happening? What had Zac said? She couldn’t remember it all, couldn’t think straight. There were supposed to be the waves that he could measure, first there would be the disruption and then the entanglement would become smooth again. Was that right?
She checked the time again. 10:54. She tried to orient herself. This was the twentieth of June, the five-hundredth day. It was almost eleven. And it had happened twice, this thing. So it must have started the way Zac thought it would. And, if he was right, it would happen again and keep happening. That was why he was going to be out of reach for so long. But when the thing happened, it was February seventh, the day Korrie died. And some things are different, Erin thought. This time I answered the phone call, which means the day can be changed, right? Someone can change it.
She needed to find someone who could bypass distance and time and immediately get to the place where Korrie might be. She pressed 911. First ring, second, third. She found herself storming around the kitchen again. Outside, the trees stood motionless in the bright summer sunlight, and a brilliant turquoise sky stretched clear and clean above them.
A woman’s voice answered. “Nine-one-one,” she said. “What is your emergency?”
“I need someone to get to my daughter’s school.” Erin couldn’t get enough air.
“The name of the school?” the dispatcher said. The sound of keys tapped on a keyboard.
“Peregrine Elementary.”
More tapping of keys. “Boulder?”
“Yes.”
“And what is the nature of the emergency?”
“There’s going to be—” Erin stopped herself. The emergency that was about to take place was sixteen months in the past. “There’s something that’s going to happen—” How could she say this? Until the past returned again, everything that she wanted to keep from happening was already long over. “This will sound strange,” she said, “but there’s something happening with time, it’s a physics thing, my husband predicted this, but not the time problem, and my daughter is going to be taken …” She stopped again. She sounded like a mental patient. Which is what she was. “My daughter will be abducted if someone doesn’t get to the school before he takes her.”
“Your husband?” The dispatcher’s voice was clipped with urgency.
“No, no,” Erin said, “the man who killed her.”
“I’m sorry?” The tone of voice completely changed. Just like that. Now there was only disbelief.
“I mean …” Erin shook her head. “I mean he’s going to … There’s a time distortion … I know I sound crazy, but this is real, and what happened before is happening again.”
“Ma’am,” the dispatcher said. There was more rapid typing in the background. “This service is only for emergencies. Now, I can tell you’re going through something, and I can get you help. I’ll transfer you, and you can explain what’s going on with you to someone who can assist you.”
“No, wait,” Erin cried, “please don’t.” Wooziness and the sensation of whirling overtook her. She wanted to reach through the connection, almost as if she could grab the dispatcher’s arm to steady herself.
“Hold while I get you over to someone who can help.”
“Wait,” Erin begged.
“I’m transferring you now, ma’am. Hold the line, and the right person will be able to take care of you.” Then with a beep, she signed off from the conversation.
Erin paused in the silence for a second before she disconnected. Who else could she call? Names cluttered her mind, contradicted each other. Think, Erin, think. Who can do something?
Erin ran through the scenarios of what would happen, no matter whom she called. What about Tom Drake? After he had told her and Zac what had happened to Korrie, he’d given her his card. She’d stood there shaking by the sofa, pinching the white card as she looked at the blur of black information. He’d said she could always call him. Anytime, he’d said. She looked in the Contacts on her phone, but she’d purged almost everyone. Only a handful of numbers remained, and Drake’s wasn’t one of them. She’d kept the card and called while the investigation was still active, but now she couldn’t remember the number.
She held down the voice button on her phone and said, “Call the Boulder Police Department.” On the second ring, a voice answered—male, senior, businesslike—and she interrupted, “I need Tom Drake, please.”
“He’s not available. How can I be of assistance?”
“Not available?” she said. “I need to talk to him right now. It’s an emergency.” She wanted to shake this stranger and show him what was happening, how her fragile little chance was crumbling right in front of her.
“And what is the emergency?” he said slowly, as if he were preparing to write up the details, to hear the whole thing nicely spelled out.
“I just need to talk to him,” she said. Right now, she thought. “When will he be available?”
“I couldn’t say.” The officer paused, listened. “If you’ll let me know what the emergency is—”
“Never mind,” she said. “Forget it.”
He started in again. “If you—” but she ended the call. No time for this.
On that day when Drake had given her his card, he’d written his cell number on the back. Where was the card now? She bolted into the living room and ripped open the drawer of her desk. She tossed all the papers and supplies aside and looked for the card. Not there. Not in Zac’s stuff either. Where could it be? She looked in her backpack, in her wallet. Not there.
She ran out to the garage and looked up at the boxes Zac had s
tored on the top shelf. They were marked only with the dates from the winter, spring, and summer of 2020. She yanked them down and pulled the top off the first of them and rifled through it. Nothing. She put that one away and looked in another. No luck. She opened the last box, and in this one was the waterproof document bag. On the label, in Zac’s square hand, was the letter K. She unfastened the bag, pulled out the folder, and opened it.
Here it all was. Erin felt poisoned by the chemistry of her body’s response. Korrie’s school picture shone back at her. Bright and perfect and happy and sweet. She wished she could squeeze herself into the two dimensions of the photo, to be there with her when the camera captured that instant of life. She looked past the photo, and underneath it were the pages she could almost photographically recall: copies from the case report, the final report from the attorney general’s office, Korrie’s death certificate, the deed for her plot at Green Mountain, the receipts for her casket, her funeral, her flowers. A copy of the Order of Ceremony for her service. It was horrific how it all reached out and grabbed Erin, throwing her backward into those early days again. Disorientation, dizziness, suffocation.
There was more. A hard copy of the obituary, the autopsy report, a memorandum of procedure for Korrie’s property return motion, which turned out to be only for three pieces of her clothing and the clip from her hair. And tucked in near the bottom of the pile was Officer Drake’s card. Erin put the documents back in their bag, turned the card over, and called his cell.
“Please, please, please,” she said as it rang.
When he answered, his voice sounded as if he were at a distance from the phone.
“Tom, it’s Erin. Fullarton.” She stood and paced.
It took him so long to respond that Erin thought the call had dropped. Finally, he said, “Erin.”
“Yes. And I need you to do something. I don’t have time to explain—”
He broke in and said, “I’m sorry, Erin. I’m not on the force anymore.”
Once Again Page 5