Once Again

by Catherine Wallace Hope

  The other solutions that occurred to Erin were quickly shot down by her own logic, things like getting Jeanna to call her cell phone again, just as she had earlier, only this time Erin would answer the call, and then it would be different. Or the vice principal would call the teachers on the field trip and they would count the children again and then it would be different. Or Erin would call the landline at home, and Korrie would pick up the phone.

  The assistant superintendent called the communications office and relayed the information, then sent Korrie’s school picture for a media release. As time unfolded, Erin sifted through the morning again and again, trying to isolate the moments when she should have done things differently. Meanwhile, Jeanna was at her desk, crying her eyes out, inconsolable and noisy, and Erin barked at her from across the room, “For God’s sake, will you shut up? People can’t even think.”

  The school psychologist, who had planned a non-student-contact day, came in because the other children would be returning now, and the lot lined with police cars and the K9 teams searching the maintenance and equipment sheds would require explanation. The other parents had been sent a text message notifying them that the school was on lockdown and they should come in an orderly fashion to pick up their students.

  Erin was aware of all of these things going on around her, but her body temperature seemed to swing from one extreme to another, her muscles shivering with cold one minute and then going limp as she flushed with heat. Her face was damp with sweat, and she felt sometimes dazed, sometimes acutely focused, but seeing everyone as if she were somewhere apart, watching from a distance. Whenever she stood, she had the terrifying sensation of falling from a great height, dropping at high speed, and she just wanted something to hold on to.

  Zac’s flight got in on time, and when he called her, Erin tried to be clear as she explained the situation to him. “Just get here,” she implored. “Don’t wait for your luggage. Just come to the school.” He arrived at the office thirty minutes later. Fleetingly, Erin thought she should have felt more relieved when he got there, but he looked so scared, like a child himself, so lost.

  He gave her a hard, desperate hug.

  “They still don’t know anything,” Erin told him.

  “Where can she be?” He seemed to ask her as if she had the answer.

  “She’s missing, Zac.” She felt the tinge of cruelty in the way she answered. As if he were refusing to catch up.

  Zac went out into the hallway to call his parents and his brother and Erin’s parents. By the time he finished those calls and came back to sit beside her, he looked like a man under the heel of doom, ashen-faced and red-eyed, veins thick at his temples and down his neck.

  Finally, an officer herded her and Zac out of the building and told them to go home. Erin wanted to get Korrie’s things out of her cubby, but he wouldn’t let her take anything with her. She thought she should head home in her own car, couldn’t see the point in leaving it there, but Zac insisted on driving them both in his car, said that they’d get hers later. She understood that she was in shock and that some of the things she’d said had been at odds with the situation, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the situation should resolve and the feeling of falling should stop.

  As they drove up the road to their house, Erin scanned the snowy woods for any sign that Korrie had somehow come home. Trees slipped by, white and still, snowflakes descending to the ground, the carpet at the feet of the trees untouched. A large police vehicle sat in front of the house, and Dan’s car was parked there too. Zac pulled into the garage and coaxed Erin out of the car. She could hardly make her legs walk her forward. Dan and Maggie came out and helped her and Zac into the house. The investigators had finished and were on their way out. They gave Zac and Erin their contact information and left.

  Once the police vehicle disappeared down their road, Erin, Zac, Dan, and Maggie searched for some missing piece. Could Korrie have asked someone for a ride? Could another parent have dropped her off? They looked through the house again. Living room, kitchen, mud room, bathroom, upstairs hall closet, bedrooms, bathroom. Could she think she was in trouble or something? Could she be hiding? Could she be unconscious? Korrie’s room again, the mud room, the garage. Then later, the garage again, the snowfields around the house, the ground beneath the junipers around the garage, snow drifts along the road. All of the hills until the sun set at 5:30. All along the road until last light at seven o’clock. By the light of their cell phones once it was dark.

  Later, Dan and Maggie went out and brought back bags of food, and then eventually they left too. When it was just the two of them, that was when Erin started to see that it was really inescapable. She searched her phone for a call she might have missed, but the only message was the one from 9:32 that morning.

  Bethany appeared in her mind, with her finger hovering over her tablet while Erin’s phone hummed in her pocket; the actors from the video smiled from inside their suits; the security guard told her to wait; and the car slipped on the ice in the parking lot. And she’d been harsh with Korrie.

  “Can you remember anything else?” Zac asked.

  She looked at him for a long time, hunting. Korrie was several inches shorter than the kids around her, and they’d engulfed her as they all trudged into the building.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  And he wept and hugged her and she hugged him back from some automatic place inside, but she felt as if she were not quite there. She was within a space apart, and she was locked away, and it was where darkness seeped in from the windows and the cold crawled up the back of her neck.

  Chapter Nineteen

  12:15 PM

  Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Peregrine Elementary

  The motor had been running this whole time. The sun blared down on the windshield, and the car felt like a fierce kiln inside because of the heater Erin had turned on when she’d been driving through the freezing storm. She turned it off, opened her window, and pulled away from the curb and around the dusty drop-off loop.

  She had taken too long, and the chance to reach Korrie had blinked out like a flash going off. What will happen now, she thought. Will that day end the same way again?

  It had been a rigorous and peculiar battle she’d fought for months against Dr. Tanner. He had issued her a forward-looking time line. Landmarks in the future that she should aspire to reach because he wanted to teach her not to live in the past, not to dwell on Korrie’s end. He’d given Erin self-care techniques to interrupt the fixation, the return again and again that masked what she was really up to when she thought about it. What she was really doing, he said, was picking through the details, searching for a way to change the outcome, something he thought kept her from acceptance and prevented her from moving forward in her grief. A stalling ploy, denial.

  But she had just had a chance to change the outcome—and missed it.

  Zac hadn’t answered the message she left earlier, and Erin understood that he couldn’t. He couldn’t have his phone with him in the Clean Room once recording of data had begun. He and Jin and Mark would be like astronauts in a capsule, so weightless and intent and distant at this end of their long wait that they might as well be on the dark side of Neptune. There would be no one there to open the gate on a Sunday, no one answering phones at reception. She took out her phone and tried the main number, but she got only the recording that referred her to the website for further information.

  She needed to explain to Zac what had just happened. She rounded the corner onto Table Mesa Drive and tried to think of how she would start to tell him, if she could even find a way to speak with him face-to-face. At the stoplight, she paused and tried to straighten out her patchy thinking.

  But she knew Zac had doubts about her perceptions since Korrie’s death, because she’d let herself get carried away once, and in front of him—not a soliloquy in her own head. It was in May, about four months after Korrie died, and they’d been sitting across from each other at the island
in the kitchen, arguing in some ridiculous loop about his return to work full-time and wanting to know what she was doing with her days while he was gone. It was late in the evening and they were tired, and she was holding back from saying that she just wanted him to leave her alone.

  Something outside caught her attention. “Did you hear that?” she said.

  Zac listened. “I hear the wind,” he said.

  “No. I heard something.” Erin got up and raced to the door. She threw it open. “Korrie?” she called.

  Zac stood behind her. “Erin, stop it.”

  “I heard her,” she said, and she ran down the front steps and called again. There had been a cry. Not just the wind. She thought she’d heard her in the distance. “Korrie!” she called into the dark as she started for the trees.

  “Erin!” Zac shouted. “Stop this.”

  She spun around and glared at him. “You stop.” But she saw she was scaring him. His eyes searched hers for some reassurance. She turned her back on him, turned toward the woods and listened for a long time.

  The wind shushed through the trees on the crest. That was all it was. She’d indulged in a little moment of madness and let herself fantasize for a moment that Korrie was not tucked away in the satin of her casket, but was out beyond the aspens where Erin could find her. It was a little vignette she’d slipped into and played publicly, as if it were real, even if it hurt Zac.

  When she admitted all of it to Dr. Tanner, he said that the grieving often do hear the voice of their beloved. They often see what they would have expected to see if the death hadn’t happened. “It’s a powerful force, the mind,” he said, “and it resists the loss.”

  But on this day, sitting at the stoplight, Erin knew the difference between her little moment of drama back then and the reality of what was happening now. She needed some kind of proof. She wished she’d had the foresight to bring something from the house with her. She lit on something: She could ask Zac about the valentine on Korrie’s desk, something that couldn’t be her own memory because she’d never seen it, never read the writing on the back before.

  Once she turned onto Broadway, it would be a straight shot to NIST, but part of her was tempted to just sail past it and head toward home, where she would not have to see the look on Zac’s face when she told him that she’d seen the return of winter and that she had, somehow again, lost their daughter. What magnitude would it inflict on him if she laid out the sequence of events for him, explained that the phenomenon he was tracking was much more far-reaching than he knew, that it had swept her quite physically into a moment in time when she could have reversed Korrie’s fate, the fate of all three of them, but that the moment had slipped away. She could imagine the look of desolation on his face when he absorbed this second loss.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. What kind of coward was she that she could consider running away instead of doing something? She had to face whatever was before her. Pins and needles ran down her spine with the thought of what might be happening to Korrie, somewhere in the world, somewhere in winter.

  She had to know if the interval would happen again and if time would resume where it left off when the frame changed or if the minutes had ticked away while she was gone. Zac would have to explain the phenomenon to her again so she could understand the mechanism at work. She had to admit everything and give him the chance to analyze what was going on. Because what if he could figure out a way to undo what the shift of time had done? It was what he lived for, after all, the time scientist.

  She sped the rest of the way to NIST. Pressure beat in her head in rhythm with her pulse. Veering into the driveway, she whipped past the guard station and braked to a stop in front of the security gate. She glanced toward the buildings. Across the nearly empty parking lot, she saw Zac’s boss. Walter always acted as if he was some kind of manager of Zac’s life, both professional and personal, and even at Korrie’s funeral he’d made Erin feel like an underling. He was walking toward the crosswalk with someone, a woman. They were headed toward the main building. Erin leaped from her car and called his name. She started to run toward him, but once he seemed to recognize her, he jogged over and headed her off.

  “Erin,” he said as he approached her, “what are you doing here?”

  Breathless, she answered, “I have to see Zac.”

  He stood too close, tall and imposing, stern behind his walrus-weight mustache and as domineering as ever. He stopped her. “Not today.”

  “Yes, today.”

  “I’m afraid not.” He gestured for her to turn back. The woman stood waiting on the far side of the lot.

  “You don’t understand—”

  He cut her off. “You’re upset. I can see that.”

  She started to interrupt, but he shushed her and said, “I’ll tell him to call you, but you can’t be here now.” He looked at her in a way that made her feel like an inferior species. “What he’s doing is something truly important.”

  “What I have to tell him is important. I have to talk to him right now.” She moved to step around him.

  He raised his arms to stop her. “No, no, no. You’re not going to make a display of yourself. Especially not in front of her.” He gestured toward the woman. “That’s Anna Schacht, our director and the purse strings for everything that happens around here.”

  “Just listen to me.” She tried to control each word, tried to make herself sound rational. “Maybe you can understand why it’s happening. Our daughter is— What happened to our daughter is happening again. Because of this thing.” She waved an arm into the sky.

  “Right,” he said dismissively

  “I’m serious, Walter,” Erin said in a louder tone. “I’ve seen it. It shifts to winter and it’s the day our daughter died. Time shifts. It must be about the event Zac is tracking.”

  Walter scoffed. “Okay, Erin, you need to run along home.” He stepped forward and herded her toward her car. “I’m sorry for you. I really am. But we are trying to peel open reality today. And you—” He shooed her to the door of her vehicle. “You cannot make your husband look bad.”

  She pleaded, “Walter, I’m trying to tell you— What’s happening today is—please, please let me tell Zac—”

  “No.” His word stomped hers out. “I’ll tell Zac you want to talk to him.” He frowned down at her. “I will have to have you escorted off the property if you won’t leave on your own.”

  Erin stepped back from him. For a second, she saw herself the way he must have seen her—unstable, unpredictable, insignificant. She knew he would never in a million years let her into the building. She glanced toward the woman, hoping for an indication that she might help, but the woman was looking down at a phone she held in her hand.

  While Walter stood with his hands in his pockets, watching her, Erin got in her car and slammed the door. She backed past the guard station and turned the car around. In her rearview mirror, she glared at the reflection of Walter trotting back toward the woman.

  The daylight blinked bluer for a second, and then the sky grayed and flooded with snowfall. She sat alone outside the lot crowded with cars mounded over with heaps of white. Flakes showered in through the open window before she could close it. She checked her phone. February 7, 2020, 12:32 PM. She laid the phone on the seat. At this moment of time past, Zac was asleep in an Air India Dreamliner. She pictured him stranded in the air at about thirty-seven thousand feet, somewhere out of reach over the Bering Sea.

  She was not crazy, and she would not surrender, but she was on her own, and time was vanishing.

  “Be logical,” she whispered to herself, “and find an answer.”

  If there was the slightest chance that Korrie still existed somehow, Erin had to get her head together and go find her. Wasn’t that the only thing she could do? She’d exhausted all other options. Focusing her mind, she turned the car onto the street, blasted into the frenetic whiteness, and skidded down the dark strip of icy road.

  Chapter Twenty

  1
2:40 PM

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

  Zac thought Walter seemed uncharacteristically quiet as he suited up in Tyvek and joined him, Mark, and Jin in the Clean Room, where they waited for the sim to reload. There was something paternal, protective, about the way Walter brought him a no-spill cup of peppermint tea and positioned himself next to his dock. He even put a patriarchal hand on his shoulder, but he was nothing like Zac’s father, and Zac wished his father could be here now to see this day unfold.

  When he was four years old, Zac announced that he wanted to be a paleontologist, like his daddy. His mother used to brag about how dazzled people were that Zac could even pronounce the word at such a young age. His earliest memories were of weekends when his father took him to the Berkeley campus, to the storage rooms in the basement of the Campanile bell tower, where they would rummage through decaying wooden drawers to find the next relic. Then, together, they would walk back to the Life Sciences Building, and Zac’s father would lift him onto a stool in the fossil prep room. Zac remembered an afternoon when his father put a plate of rock under a bright lamp on the table.

  “He’s embedded,” he said, “but we can let him out.” He took a dental probe and started loosening grains of rock from the matrix. “You see?” he said, pointing at the outstretched ridges. “Can you see the fingers?” Zac could. The fossil skeleton was that of a prehistoric bat the size of an adult’s hand. “Icaronycteris,” his father said. “Icarus, the night flyer.”

  Now, in the Clean Room, Walter broke into Zac’s reminiscence and pointed to his monitor. “It’s coming in now.” He stood. “Let’s see it on the big screen.”

  Jin keyed in the command and then parked himself on the other side of Zac. Mark stood at his dock and said, “This should be it.”

  On the screen, the simulation faded in. The vast undulating gray sea came into focus, and, far off toward the horizon, a violet wave began to rise.