Once Again

by Catherine Wallace Hope

  The idea occurred to Erin that maybe she had caused this, but she shut her mind against it.

  She drew out her phone, but it didn’t wake. She pressed the button harder. No illumination at all. Her phone was dead.

  “Where do we go now?” Korrie said.

  “It’s okay.” Erin patted her back. “We just have to wait for it to change.”

  “What?” Korrie looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

  Erin couldn’t answer. It should be summer by now, shouldn’t it? Tension pulled tight across Erin’s chest. She thought back. They’d been within an interval of the past when she faced Clype, and then they’d suddenly ended up here, where time had skipped forward into some future, and there had been no return to summer.

  She focused on Korrie’s bewildered face. With a quick breath, she said, “We’ve got to keep moving, Squid. We have to get you to the car.” There was no time to sort it out. She would file the facts for later and let Zac decipher what it all meant. She gauged the slope of the charred peaks around them. The burn area seemed to stretch in every direction. She estimated that she and Korrie had come out of the mine shaft north and west of the mill. They had to scale the incline directly ahead and hopefully head downhill from there to get back to the old road.

  Korrie’s bare feet shone the color of little white mushrooms against the cold, sooty earth. She shivered and pulled her shoulders up to her ears.

  “Here you go,” Erin said, kneeling down. “Here are your socks.” She pulled them from her pocket.

  Korrie raised a foot and said, “You got my socks back.”

  As Erin slipped the second sock onto Korrie’s other foot, she realized how impossible it would be to explain any of this to her. When Korrie put her foot down, she swayed and nearly lost her balance. “I’m going to carry you, Korrie.” Erin knelt back-first at Korrie’s feet. “All aboard, Squid.”

  But Korrie cried, “Oh, Mommy, there’s lots of blood. You’re bleeding.”

  “Korrie, I’m okay. We have to hurry. Climb up, quick.” She folded as low and flat as she could so Korrie could squirm aboard piggyback, using just her legs. Erin winced at the sharp sting of the wound as Korrie pressed close and wrapped her bare legs around Erin’s waist.

  She slid her arms underneath Korrie, pulling the hoodie down so it would at least cover her underwear, and locked the child in place with her left hand clamped around her right wrist. Her hands crackled like splintered matchwood, bones in fragments. Pain lit bright and sharp, and a cry slipped out.

  “I’m sorry,” Korrie sobbed.

  Erin made her voice steady and calm. “We’re okay, Squid. Let’s go.” With a searing shrug, she hiked Korrie higher and stepped forward into the parched char.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  6:30 PM

  June 20, 2021 | National Institute of Standards and Technology

  Zac circled his finger on the “Enter” key, but he didn’t press it. If he simply ran the sim again, he would get only the same result.

  Erin.

  His heart knocked around, lost in his chest, and meanwhile his mind hunted, but his thinking refused to come together. It was as if an oar was intermittently dipped into the water, disturbing the surface, calling his focus away from the glass in front of him.

  Erin.

  It was as if he were listening for her, and though he couldn’t see her in the water, each dip of the oar sent ripples toward Erin, swimming her way back to him.

  He drove a pen frantically across a page of his notebook, the black ink streaking across the path of mathematical journeys forged by other men. He prayed for them to prove today wrong. Because if what he was seeing was true, it would mean that the life remembered is only an abridged re-creation of life lived, a Frankensteined butterfly stitched together from survivor fragments. It would mean that there were moments in his life with Erin that had been stolen. Moments stolen from everyone.

  Zac crossed out the equation he’d written, but when he tried again, it repeated itself. Every attempt ended in extinction of everything that inhabited the gap.

  Walter stood and shook out his hands. “Let’s see where we are in another hour.” Everyone looked at him in disbelief. Waiting an hour would not solve the impossible position they found themselves in. If anything, it would only become more of what it was. Walter surveyed their faces. “Let’s humor each other. Let’s let it stew for a while.”

  Mark tapped on his desktop to get Zac’s attention and nodded toward the door of the Clean Room. Out in the fluorescence beyond the glass, on top of the property lockers, Zac’s phone was a rectangle of light. He sprinted, pulled up short when the doors didn’t open fast enough, ran to the lockers, grabbed the phone. Erin? Dan? It was Dan.

  Zac answered. “Hey,” he said.

  “So, um …” Dan said. He took a deep breath. “I’m here.”

  “And?” Why so slow, little brother? What is it?

  “And … I don’t know,” he drawled.

  “So,” Zac said. “Is she there?”

  “No, but …”

  “But what, Dan—Christ, what is it?”

  “She’s not here. Her car’s not here.”

  He was like a mule that wouldn’t go through a gate. “Okay …”

  “And things are kind of interrupted-looking, I guess. Like she left in a hurry. There’s stuff spread out. There are eggs and stuff left out on the counter.”

  “Okay, so it’s kind of—”

  “So there’s this note. Looks pretty weird. Like … morbid, Zac.”

  “A note from Erin? What does it say?” He wanted to snap his fingers to hurry Dan along.

  “I don’t know. Different times written down and Korrie’s name and maybe a casket.”

  Zac felt a sharp inhale as if a cold wave had splashed up his bare chest.

  “It says ‘To Korrie first.’” Dan made a humph sound. “Strange. Haphazard. I’m sending a picture.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Zac made a fist of his other hand and released it, but the tension remained.

  “Sure,” Dan said. “I’ll lock up. Call me whenever.”

  “Could you please keep trying to reach her?” Zac said. “Leave me a message when you talk to her?”

  “You bet,” Dan said.

  Zac held his phone face up in his palm until Dan’s photo of the note arrived. It showed a page in Erin’s strung-out hand. The date, a smattering of times, and an arrow pointing down to what Dan had described as Korrie’s casket. Lines making a box around her name. Ah, damn, Zac thought, poor Erin. Submerged in that current, the rip current of her mind. No escape for her. Alone there in all that. He didn’t want to drown with her, but he wanted to be there where he could hold on to her, his once beloved. Still beloved.

  On his phone, he touched the image of her face, the younger version of Erin, her face undiluted joy. The number rang a few times until the phone beeped with a notification that the call had failed.

  He looked through the glass into the Clean Room, at Mark hunched at his keyboard in frustration. Working toward the improbable, maybe counting on Zac to rejoin him and help him bring sense to it.

  What words had Zac and Erin said to each other that they couldn’t now recall because the memory was swept away when a fragment of time was ripped to pieces by a passing gravitational wave? How many? Maybe that was the question he should be asking. Not “how is this possible?,” but “how much is possible?” How much was lost as the waves rolled over a lifetime and stole wisps from it? A second? A minute? More? And could this question explain anything about Erin? About her empty message? He repositioned his phone on its perch. There was nothing to do but wait.

  With a new sense of what had to be done, he put on another pair of coveralls and reentered the Clean Room. Until Dan found Erin and one of them called him, all he could do was work. In the time remaining, he had to figure out what was left of a life once physics was done with it.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  November 1, 2022 | Thre
e Dog Knight Mining Mill

  Erin trudged with Korrie on her back through the bitter twilight in the direction of the moon above the horizon. It had been too long since the last shift to summer. Time was just one long stretch of this time, this windswept wreckage of a fire-ravaged November. It took longer than Erin expected to reach the mill. When she slowed, Korrie shifted against her. The clutter of blackened tree trunks thinned, and the blown-apart building appeared. The mangled graphite framework loomed aslant.

  “Is that the place I was, Mommy?” Korrie murmured. Her speech was slurred. “What happened to it?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” Erin’s breath hung suspended in the air. “Daddy will tell us when we get home.”

  “Daddy is home?”

  “Maybe,” Erin said, rushing past the twisted husk of the structure. She’d forgotten that for Korrie, Zac had never moved out. In her chronology, he was on his way back from his trip to Hingoli. But that was in a different winter, one from the past, one that was no longer repeating. “We’ll call him when we get to the hospital.”

  But how could she call him if he was living in their true time, in summer, in a time that stood months behind this winter of the future?

  “Hos-pital,” Korrie said. Was her speech slowed by the cold or by the oxycodone? Erin clattered down the slope, through the burnt-out aspen grove, toward the road. Fighting to keep her balance as Korrie drooped first to one side and then the other, Erin half-cantered, half-skidded through the scree to the pavement.

  She squinted into the distance, along the slender carpet of ash, to where she’d parked. She hurried on, but she could tell before she got much closer that the car was destroyed. She approached it, saw how it squatted flat on the roadbed. The body of the car was an empty, blackened shell—windows no more than heaps of shattered pieces on the pavement, tires burned away.

  She stopped. Everything inside her drained away.

  “What, Mommy?” Korrie asked.

  “The car,” Erin said without thinking.

  “The car?” Korrie said. Erin felt her straining to raise herself higher, to see better. “Our car?”

  Erin sank to her knees and sat back on her heels. She unclamped her hands, unfolded her arms, and let Korrie down onto the asphalt. “Our car.”

  Korrie took two steps forward through the wind-blown ash. She turned and faced Erin, her eyes flooding. “How will we get to the hospital?”

  Erin couldn’t speak.

  “Am I going to die?” Korrie cried.

  Erin knelt, paralyzed. Yes, was the answer that sprang into her mind. Hope slipped from her like a pearl down the drain. Nothing remained.

  “Mommy, am I going to die?” Korrie threw herself against Erin’s chest.

  Erin couldn’t breathe. Her chest ached where Clype had stomped on it. Her eyes welled, and tears blurred her vision. Space, syrupy around her, slowed her movements. She carefully wrapped her arms around Korrie. A child as delicate as the wispy-winged tissue creatures she made in art class. The purest good nature of anything Erin had ever known.

  The temperature was plunging, the way it does on clear winter evenings once the light fails. A steel sky—Venus and Jupiter and a half-moon. The dry, bone-chilling current of icy air like an aggression against them. They would not last much longer, exposed like this.

  Some voice inside her said she should take Korrie back to the shelter of the mine and get her out of the wind and build a fire for her so at least she would be warm. It would be the kindest thing. Maybe the only thing. At least she would be able to lie down somewhere as the drug coursed through her, closed her eyes, stopped her heart. Darkening her world into nothingness. Erin could hold her on her lap and give her comfort. Let her go, let her rest somewhere where she would feel safe and warm.

  “Mommy?” Korrie cried.

  If Erin still saw herself as that ghost who lived in those white woods, she would have felt her history pulling inward, its gravity so intense that no memory could escape it, so dense no reflection could penetrate it, her spirit shrinking into a tiny pinpoint of darkness. But that was not who Korrie needed. She needed grit and willpower.

  Erin raised her head, pulled against the aches of her battered body, rose onto her knees, and said, “Of course not, Squid.” She straightened Korrie in front of her with the backs of her wrists. “We’re still going to get you to the hospital.” She angled herself with her back toward Korrie and gestured with the shrug of her shoulder. “I carried you here; I can carry you there.” She heard her own voice as if it were steady and self-certain and almost Seussian in its lilt. “Hurry, Korrie. We have to hurry.”

  Korrie wept hard, said, “Okay,” as she leaned against Erin’s spine, skin tugging downward, a blade of pain as the wound refreshed itself. Erin repositioned her, and, despite her ruined hands, she drew the loose sleeves of the hoodie under her own arms and tied the cloth like a sling across her bruised chest. She locked her hand around her wrist beneath Korrie’s seat again and, focusing all the determination she had into her spent legs, she raised herself to her feet.

  Chapter Forty

  November 1, 2022 | Spring Canyon

  The burn scar seemed horrendous, its extent visible even as nightfall settled into the hills. From the scenic overlook, Erin had taken stock of the damage and estimated that some time ago a forest fire had ripped its way at least as far as Chautauqua Park on the southwest side of town, maybe farther. What was once forest was now black stubble of long-dead trees on the slopes. The grid of the city’s lights blinked, but the boundary was much farther off than it should have been, as distant as the strings of headlights on the highway. Red beacons flashed at the tips of construction cranes.

  Erin struggled now against the raw cold stiffening in her legs as she marched in the rising glow of the moon, following the trail through the wasteland of burned and fallen trees. She and Zac had hiked along this green stretch of trail so many times, first with Korrie in her baby sling and then in her carrier backpack and then on foot, past Bluebell, past the quarry, and back toward the NIST service road, the straightest way from the trailhead to the NIST campus where they usually parked, maybe four miles. How fast could she make the hike now?

  Korrie’s cheek pressed against the back of her shoulder. Erin shrugged lightly against her. “You have to stay awake, okay?”

  “I can’t,” Korrie muttered.

  “Yes, you can.” Erin shifted Korrie’s weight, noting that her own wound stung less now and that her hand hurt less because it was going numb. “You have to.”

  “No, that’s okay.” Korrie sounded dreamy and dull.

  “You have to keep talking to me, Korrie. We’ll do a story.”

  “I don’t want to.” Korrie’s voice began to fade. “I feel bad.”

  “The trick is to keep going, no matter how you feel,” Erin said, despite the rattle of her own rising alarm bell. “That’s how it has to be.” She gave her a gentle squeeze. “You start.”

  “Once there was … an elf,” Korrie said.

  “Who lived in the woods,” Erin added.

  She walked fast, cutting corners at curves in the trail, shaving seconds where she could. What kind of universe was this, that she would be given this second chance, if everything still fell apart and she couldn’t save her child? Were the mistakes she made this time just of a greater scale? Were she and Korrie going to die of hypothermia out here in some strange future winter? Wasn’t it ever going to turn back to summer again?

  The air burned its arctic irons into her skin. Her breath frosted on her lips. She shivered so hard that it nearly made her lose her balance. Her legs grew heavier and clumsier. Korrie kept drifting, her five-word sentences trailing into three or two or nothing but murmurs.

  Erin prompted her again. “Come on, Korrie, stay with me. What did the elf find after that?”

  “A nice, soft, sleepy nest …”

  “But,” Erin added, “she was wide awake.”

  Eventually, Korrie stopped talking and
Erin stopped shivering. She walked steadily for a stretch, and then she staggered and had to stand still long enough to reset herself. The trail quivered like a mirage before her, almost with the same strange rhythm as the manic fluttering of her heart. Part of her knew she was slipping into hypothermic confusion, but still, she thought, I’m having a backwards pregnancy. I’m carrying the baby opposite of before. Zac will help me breathe, she thought, but if I have to give birth through the spinal canal, where will they put the epidural? She flapped her free hand to see if it might fly away and go get help, but it was numb and quiet, and she couldn’t tell if it moved or not. Sharp peaks of iridescence spiked in her peripheral vision. They disappeared when she turned her head, but they returned when she closed her eyes. What point was there in sticking to the trail? There were no trees left, only shadows, and who couldn’t walk through a shadow? She stepped off the trail and followed the shadows as they marched forward down the slopes. But then they leaned in behind her, too close to Korrie, and she decided they were not trustworthy. I don’t understand my thinking. Her heart fluttered more quietly, and she felt as if the night were bearing down on her and she was sinking into some smaller space in the world. Pull yourself together, she thought, and get back on the trail.

  Just keep going, she repeated to herself, over and over until it was like a meditation. Korrie dangled limply. Slipping from the broomsticks of my handles. Not handles. Not hands. Arms, she told herself. The trail wove away in front of her, like a creek running in a storm. Straighten yourself out and hold on. Don’t let go.

  Chapter Forty-One

  7:15 PM

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

  The Clean Room was somber and uncomfortably warm. Walter had emailed Schacht that they’d have an explanation soon, and he sat next to Zac, with his arms crossed, the heel of one foot bouncing with his impatience. They’d waited in silence for a long time for Mark and Jin to finalize this critical reconfiguration of the sim: the prediction of what would happen to the white hole at the ultimate moment when the two blast fronts tore into each other over its location. Zac suspected that he knew the outcome, but he kept his fears to himself and waited for the corroboration of the sim.