Love and Gravity

by Samantha Sotto

  Glass sparkled in his periphery. Isaac stopped and glanced its way. Two prisms glittered on a table of tipcats, tops, sap whistles, balls, and teetotums. He had no practical use for them, but they were the brightest things at Stourbridge. They reminded him of the smile in Andrea’s eyes. He didn’t bother haggling for them. Missing a meal was worth it to feel Andrea near. He paid for the prisms and turned to leave.

  A tattered copy of Euclid’s Elements called to him from a stack of secondhand books next to the toy stall. Isaac offered to buy it for half its price. The merchant refused but proposed to give Isaac a second book at no extra cost. The dusty music book’s pages dangled from its spine, but free was a price that Isaac found impossible to resist. One day, he reasoned, he might even find a use for the volume on acoustics and the vibration of instrumental strings.

  Woolsthorpe Manor

  1666

  Isaac is twenty-four.

  Isaac rummaged through his traveling trunk. He pushed his collection of mathematics textbooks to the side. His purchases from the Stourbridge Fair the year before poked out from under them. He pulled the music book out, leaving Euclid’s book behind. He balanced his two prisms on top of it and brought them to his desk. All three were a part of a tool kit he had assembled for one purpose: to understand the wall that kept him from Andrea and learn what it took to break it down.

  What he knew of the nature of the crack that gave him glimpses of Andrea and her world was limited at best. He knew that it opened when she played her silent song and shut when she didn’t. He dusted his old music book off, praying that somewhere between its covers was something that would give him a better grasp of the vibration of strings. Sound, in the right volume and pitch, could shatter glass. Andrea’s song broke through walls. To see her again, he needed to know how her music worked.

  The white light that illuminated the borders of the crack befuddled him equally. He had used his prisms to lend clarity to it. His recent experiment had proved his theory on its composition but explained little else. He set the prisms aside. The night was best for tools that required more discretion. Magic had brought Andrea into his life and Isaac swore to master the art beyond his childhood card tricks. Alchemists were hanged for their dark art, but life without seeing Andrea was worse than the slowest of deaths.

  Isaac pushed his candlestick next to a large flask in the middle of his desk. Spidery silver branches bloomed inside the glass, growing into what appeared to be a small metallic tree. It had taken him several attempts to grow the Arbor Diana, or “Diana’s Tree,” but on this night, he appeared to be successful. He scribbled the amounts of silver, mercury, and nitric acid he had used in his notebook. Four ounces of nitric acid made the tree’s shiny twigs sprout the fastest. His hope flowered from its branches.

  He checked the hour on the Omega on his wrist. There was still time to package Andrea’s presents before dawn. He wrapped the two prisms in parchment and twine. The first was a gift. The second was a spare. Andrea was going to need it when she broke the first prism he sent.

  —

  The second hand ticked away on the 1952 Omega Seamaster. The morning rushed past him. Time, Isaac thought, seemed to move faster ever since he had started wearing it around his wrist. He pulled his sleeve over the watch’s glass face. Loneliness was not a luxury he could afford. There was still much he had to do. He turned his attention to the notebook lying open on his desk. He reviewed the calendar of dates and times scribbled on it and checked his watch again. His heart pounded two beats faster. Andrea was arriving soon. He reread the answers he had prepared for the questions she was going to ask him.

  I have been well, thank you.

  I know.

  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55.

  Andrea would not be pleased with this last response, but it was the truth. She did not understand it now, but when the time was right, she would.

  He read the rest of his message and chewed on his thumb. His next words were not a response to any question that she was going to ask him. They served only as a release for his longing. He gripped the page to rip it out. The white glow on his wall stopped him. It was too late to change his mind. Isaac stood up, squared his shoulders, and waited for Andrea to appear.

  The wall cracked open. Andrea played her silent song on the other side. The ache in Isaac’s heart grew with every stroke of her bow, but he did not want to waste any fraction of this moment by feeling sad. There was plenty of time for that later. He smiled at Andrea and waved.

  Andrea set her bow down on a crooked table, next to what looked like a small blackboard. She turned to the board and pressed a button on its stand. White words scrawled over it.

  Hello, Isaac. How have you been?

  Isaac took a step back. He had expected her question but not the manner in which she presented it. Like the music box she had given him, the words that magically appeared on Andrea’s board fell beyond his understanding. He opened his notebook and presented her with his response.

  I have been well, thank you.

  Andrea asked more questions and his notebook answered each in turn. His fingers trembled over the page he had failed to rip out.

  I have missed you, Andrea.

  Your eyes,

  your smile,

  the sound of your voice.

  Andrea recoiled from his words. His chest sank. He had said too much too soon. He glanced at the watch sticking out from under the ruffle of his sleeve and hoped that she would remember the engraving he had shown her during her last visit. She could doubt the honesty of his words, but she could not question her own.

  Andrea shoved away her cello and scribbled over a slip of paper. Her table shook beneath her pen. She crumpled the note and tossed it through the shrinking crack. Isaac caught it. He read the shaky question Andrea had written on it as the crack closed.

  When will I cross over?

  The paper glowed and vanished in a flash of white light. A constellation of stars sparkled in Isaac’s eyes. He groped his way to his wall and leaned his cheek on the spot where the crack had been. He whispered his answer to Andrea’s question to Woolsthorpe’s bricks.

  “Isaac?” a woman called through his door.

  Isaac rubbed his eyes clear and staggered to his desk. He crossed out the date of Andrea’s latest appearance from his calendar and shoved it into his drawer. He straightened his shirt and pulled his shoulders back.

  “Isaac? Are you awake?”

  “Come in, Mama.”

  Hannah Ayscough carried a wooden tray into the bedroom. “You didn’t come down for dinner. I thought you might be hungry. I saved you some pie.”

  His mother’s voice was barely louder than a dying breeze, and Isaac strained to catch what she was saying. Every word that came out of her mouth since she had returned to Woolsthorpe sounded like an apology.

  “Thank you,” he said as gently as he could, forgiving her for whatever it was she seemed to regret. He took the tray from her and set it on his desk. The scent of mutton, cloves, and orange peel rose from the golden-brown pastry resting on it. “It smells delicious.”

  The smile slipped off his mother’s lips.

  “Is something wrong, Mama?” Isaac asked.

  She wrung her hands. “Won’t you ever tell me where you have been? You were gone for ages—”

  “I want to.” Isaac squeezed Andrea’s watch through his sleeve. “But I cannot.”

  Andrea, I do not take any pleasure in keeping secrets from you or anyone else. One’s chest can only hold so much before it becomes impossible to breathe. But I choose gladly to gasp for breath rather than risk altering the course you are on. I shall keep the question you asked close to my heart until the time comes when I shall be permitted to answer it freely. I regret most profoundly that I cannot make the ground you are treading now tremble less, but I nurse the hope that my little gift shall make at least one thing in your life feel a fraction steadier. I would be most pleased if you could let me know what you think of it when I see you
tomorrow evening. Play your song at half past the hour of eight. I shall be waiting for you then.

  Yours always,

  Isaac

  1666

  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55

  Andrea tossed aside Isaac’s letter and grabbed the little wooden block he had sent. Realizing what it was for, she crouched, lifted the table, and wedged the block beneath its uneven leg. She laid Isaac’s letter on the steady tabletop, her hand trembling over the appointment he had set.

  Nothing is stronger than habit.

  —OVID

  Los Angeles

  Present Day

  Andrea is twenty-one.

  Her table had stopped shaking, but her knees had not. Andrea had played Isaac’s song as he had instructed and waited for her wall to do its part. It cracked open in the middle of the melody’s second strain. Isaac waited for her behind it. He did the same the next evening. And the evening after that.

  Andrea wrote off the first week that the silver crack opened every night as a fluke, but by the end of the third week, she built her day around it. She filled in Johann Sebastian Bach with every detail of Isaac’s nightly visits. She thawed her beef and broccoli dinner at seven, did the dishes at seven twenty-five, and tried, for the next endless hour, to exhale. In between half breaths, she checked, double-checked, and rechecked all the things she needed before Isaac arrived: a stack of paper planes, a bowl of fleur de sel caramel popcorn, and her cello. Sometimes while waiting, she remembered to answer Nate’s texts.

  Isaac’s visits were always brief, and Andrea refused to waste a moment of them. In the beginning, the crack between their walls stayed open for only the first few strains of Isaac’s song. An accidental twist in the melody changed that. Andrea discovered that by changing a few notes, slurring some, and shortening others, she could stretch Isaac’s visits. The tweaks allowed her to pause from playing the song long enough to exchange short notes and tokens with Isaac across the crack. The additional time she bought for them fluctuated, but all of them began the same way: with the wall’s white glow twinkling in Isaac’s irises. Good evening, Andrea.

  Andrea watched her name slip from his lips and wished that her parents had given her a longer one. Every syllable ignited the golden embers in his eyes. Andrea hoarded every detail of his face.

  You look lovely. As always.

  Candlelight danced over Isaac’s hair and invited her fingers to wade into its dark waves. Draped in half light, Isaac promised the best kind of danger.

  Magic came next. He had made white smoke rise from his fingers and made flames leap from candlesticks. On this night, he juggled fireballs with his bare hands. Andrea applauded with her eyes, keeping the crack open with steady strokes of her bow.

  Isaac grinned, acknowledging her applause with a deep bow. He plucked a wooden apple from an invisible tree and threw it through the crack. His presents were always tiny and light, and flew through the glowing backpack-sized hole in the wall with ease.

  Andrea lifted her bow from the cello’s strings to catch this evening’s gift. The carved apple, she thought, would have made a lovely paperweight if the crack allowed her to keep it. But like the wildflowers, floating paper lanterns, and little sundials he had sent before it, the apple was destined to vanish from her grasp, return to the seventeenth century, and turn to dust. She set the wooden fruit down on her once wobbly table and plucked a piece of popcorn from the large red bowl next to it. She fixed her eyes on the hole in her wall and aimed the popcorn at Isaac’s mouth. M&M’s had not agreed with Isaac and made his lips itch, but salted caramel popcorn was an instant favorite. Andrea tossed the popcorn through the crack. She played his song and counted down the seconds he had left to chew it.

  Ten.

  Nine.

  Eight.

  Seven.

  Six.

  Five.

  The caramel-coated snack reappeared intact and lightly salted in front of the couch. On some days it took longer. The other night, it took two seconds less. The piece of popcorn glowed, dimmed, and, with a soft poof, became the newest addition to Andrea’s collection of little ash piles scattered around the apartment. A fully charged Dustbuster sat on the kitchen counter next to the coffee machine, ready to tidy up.

  Isaac scribbled on his notebook and held it up to the crack. Knock. Knock.

  “Who’s there?” Andrea asked.

  He scribbled a new line. Peas.

  “Peas who?”

  He wrote down his answer and broke into a lopsided grin. Peas let me in.

  Andrea rolled her eyes and laughed. Old English didn’t lend itself to knock-knock jokes, but Isaac had caught on quickly. She was planning to teach him Pictionary next. She had already bought a set.

  Are you ready? He formed the words slowly so that she could read his lips.

  Nothing was less necessary. Andrea knew their nightly ritual by heart and anticipated to the second what was going to happen next. She stopped playing and picked up the first of the planes she had made out of the pale blue craft paper she had bought from the Dollar Store that afternoon. On his last visit, she had sent him purple ones. She hurled her blue messenger through the crack.

  Isaac snatched it from the air and read the short note she had written across its wings.

  It had taken Andrea a few days and dust piles to figure out the optimum number of words Isaac could comfortably read before the plane returned to her side of the wall and crumbled. Her daily challenge was to select the best forty or so words in her vocabulary to express the volumes of thoughts, questions, and emotions written over every page of her life since she was seven years old. While she overflowed with all of the things she wanted to know, Isaac had an equally long list of questions he refused to answer. After his third visit, she learned to rein in her curiosity to the things that really mattered.

  Do you remember the second time we saw each other when we were children? You were in a smaller, darker room than the one you are in now. You were curled up on a bed. Crying. What made you so sad?

  Isaac hurriedly scribbled a reply on the wings of his own paper plane and threw it to Andrea.

  I was sent to live with another family while attending grammar school in Grantham. I was utterly lonely and did horribly in school. Each day that I languished at the bottom of my class made a future beyond the fate I had inherited from my father seem more and more like a frivolous dream.

  You changed that.

  Andrea grabbed a fresh plane and scrawled her surprise over it.

  Me? How?

  Another plane ferried Isaac’s reply to her.

  You were a magical girl who smiled at me when no one else would. If an angel had thought enough of me to break through stone just to pay me a visit, I could not be as worthless as everyone in school believed. I swore to be worthy to ask your name the next time you came. That day was the last day I sat in the back of the class, and from that moment my life’s compass knew only one direction. You.

  Isaac’s plane vanished from Andrea’s lap, but his words lingered in her mind as she played the final strains of his song. She knew the path of greatness that Isaac was on, but her own trajectory was less clear. She refused to think about the possibility of Isaac’s nightly visits ending, but every history book ever written told her that she was not even a footnote in his life. Her fingers snagged on the A string.

  A new plane landed on her lap.

  A shadow has fallen over your face. Have I caused it?

  Andrea looked up and shook her head. Her nights with Isaac made her feel a lot of things, but sadness was not one of them. Each fleeting second with him was too precious to taint with the smallest tear. She hurriedly scribbled on the wings of a third blue plane.

  Your visits make me happy, Isaac. Very happy. But I am neither magical nor angelic. I am greedy. I want more. More time. More you. More us. I’m tired of secrets and waiting. When will you tell me what the numbers in your letters mean?

  Andrea balanced on the edge of her seat as Isaac’s
eyes reached the end of her note. The blue plane vanished from Isaac’s hands in a flash of white light. It reappeared on her knee. She shook it off before it crumbled. She had worn her jeans only once that week and wasn’t in the mood to do laundry. She played the song’s final note. Isaac’s visit was coming to an end. Encores, regardless of how flawlessly she played them, were not going to crack her wall open a second time that evening.

  Isaac reached for a blank plane on his desk, scribbled on it, and sent it sailing past Andrea’s shoulder. Andrea dropped her bow and caught it, crumpling it between her fingers. She smoothed it out and read Isaac’s reply.

  Do you love me yet?

  Isaac’s latest paper messenger vanished almost as soon as Andrea finished reading it. Andrea watched it turn to dust on Isaac’s side of the wall. The glow around the edges of the crack dimmed. Isaac picked up his notebook and walked over to the crack. Andrea set her cello aside. They had come to Andrea’s favorite part of his visit. Both of their unanswered questions would have to wait.

  Repetitio mater studiorum est. Her time with Isaac gave her dad’s motto new meaning. Her bow arm was no longer the only body part it applied to. Repetition had the same effect on her heart. It taught it well. It beat faster as she joined Isaac at her wall. From the way his neck muscles tightened, she could tell that he did not wish to wait until the next evening for her reply to the question he had sent. She stretched her hand toward him. He raised her hand to his lips and brushed the softest kiss over each of her fingers. Syrupy heat trickled through her arm, down her thighs, and pooled in the back of her knees. She clung to his hand to keep from puddling on the floor.