Andrea straightened her shoulders. “About what?”
“What do you think? I doubt this is a conversation you want to have in your hallway.”
Andrea stepped aside and let him in.
Nate eyed the music sheets on the coffee table and the cello on the floor. “You’ve tried playing the song?”
“Yes.”
He exhaled. “It’s over then.”
“It’s not over.”
“Come on, Dre. You’ve played the stupid song. You know it doesn’t work. What else do you need to show you that none of this is real?”
“But, Nate, the song…”
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “I have something for you.”
“What is it?”
“Something you need to hear.” Nate unfolded the paper. “In 1727, Isaac Newton collapsed. His niece’s husband, John Conduitt, recorded that his pain ‘rose to such a height that the bed under him, and the very room shook with his agony, to the wonder of those that were present.’ ”
Andrea clenched her teeth. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to face the truth. There is no such thing as cracks through time, and Isaac Newton is not writing you love letters from the other side of your wall. My mother died in an institution because she was convinced that little fairies flew around our living room, and because she believed it, I believed it, too. She swore to me that they were real. But what’s real is the padded room they lock you in when you won’t stop talking about things that aren’t there.”
“But Isaac is real.”
Nate tightened his grip on his research notes. “After two weeks of intense suffering, Newton died in his home at Kensington at the age of eighty-four. Mercury was later found in his hair, a possible consequence of his extensive alchemical experiments. Mercury poisoning was thought to be behind his odd behavior toward the end of his life.”
“Are you done?” Andrea folded her arms.
“No.” He turned to the next page. “Newton never fell in love nor married. In 1733, French writer and philosopher Voltaire wrote that the scientist ‘had neither passion nor weakness; he never went near any woman.’ He died as he lived, alone.” Nate looked up from his notes. “Now I’m done,” he said, tears eroding the edges of his words. “I couldn’t stop them when they took my mother away. I don’t want to lose you, too. I’m begging you. Stop chasing ghosts.”
Andrea touched the bruise on her cheek. “Nate…I—”
“Please, Dre.”
She nodded.
“I want to hear you say it.”
“I promise.” She hugged him tight and didn’t flinch. She wasn’t lying. Isaac was not a ghost. Behind her wall, he was as alive as Nate.
—
Andrea crouched by her bed after Nate left. She pulled out Isaac’s letter from under her mattress. She was back from her “trip” and it was time to read the rest of it. After sixteen years, she no longer had to imagine what Isaac’s voice sounded like.
Welcome back, Andrea.
You said that night that you came too early. I disagree. I have waited for you all my life. You could not have come sooner. I will forever remember the night I found you in my bedroom and heard your voice. It told me all that I needed to know. And more.
Woolsthorpe Manor
1665
Isaac is twenty-three.
A burst of light stole Andrea from him. Isaac dropped into his chair and pressed his palm to his forehead. He had heard that the plague gave its victims fevered dreams, and Andrea had vanished without leaving him with anything to prove that she wasn’t a delusion. She had spoken of letters he had not written, a code he had not made, and a song he had never heard of. None of it made any sense, but there was nothing he wanted to believe in more. A knock jolted him from his seat. Isaac steadied himself and opened the door.
“Good evening, sir.” A stocky man flashed a gap-toothed smile from the hallway. Isaac’s traveling trunk was on the floor by his side. “Welcome home.”
“Thank you, Tom.”
“Where would you like me to set your things?” Tom asked.
“By the door is fine.”
Tom arranged the trunk next to the wall. “Will you be needing anything else?”
“That will be all. Thank you. Have a good evening.”
“Good night, sir.”
Isaac shut the door and slumped against it. His insides had not stopped trembling since Andrea had appeared and told him where she was from. He had always known that she was not remotely from anywhere near Lincolnshire, but he had not expected her to be from quite so far away. Years of poring over musty history books had taught him how to scour the past, but nothing had prepared him to cast his gaze three hundred years into a future where he was long forgotten and dead.
He unlocked his traveling trunk and pulled out the battered journal buried beneath his clothes, textbooks, and a thick leather-bound book he had stolen from Cambridge’s library. The journal had been his confidant since he was a child. Between its covers was the only place where he could speak freely about Andrea. He opened it. Half of its pages were filled with detailed accounts of her visits. The other half contained the equations, charts, and graphs that failed to explain them.
Isaac scribbled down all that he remembered of the evening. His fingers shook. In all the years that Andrea had appeared through the crack, he had never feared for her safety when it closed. A part of him always knew that she was coming back. Tonight, he wasn’t so sure. This was the first time she had burst into flames.
—
Isaac rose late, just as he had every day since Andrea’s visit. He had spent the past month toiling over the puzzle she had left him. The grand sum of his efforts was the shadow under his eyes. He still had no idea if he was ever going to see her again. He dragged himself to the oak dining table and helped himself to what remained of his family’s breakfast. He tore a piece of brown bread and sprinkled a poached egg with vinegar, black pepper, and salt.
His mother walked into the room, her lips pressed together in a terse line. “You are awake. Finally.”
Isaac looked up from his plate. “Good morning, Mama.”
“Is something troubling you, Isaac? You have hardly left your room since you returned and you never join the family for meals.”
“I apologize.” Isaac poked at the egg with his fork. It bled over his plate. “I have been studying.”
“You should go out more and get some air. Spend some time with your brother and sisters. We can go to the village this afternoon and—”
“I can’t,” Isaac said. “I have to finish my work.”
His mother sighed. “Isaac, Cambridge is closed. What possible work do you have that requires all your attention? Whatever it is, it surely cannot be as urgent as you think.”
Isaac’s fourteen-year-old half brother, Benjamin, barged into the kitchen. A grin stretched across his square face. Isaac could not look at him without seeing the face of Benjamin’s late father, the Reverend Barnabas Smith. The man had been dead for several years, but Isaac doubted that he would ever be able to forget the face of the man who had once stolen his mother from him.
“Mama, look what I found. It was in the barn.” Benjamin set a dusty wooden chest on the table and rummaged through the cupboards. He pulled out a knife and used it to pry the chest’s rusted lock. He dug through the box, pulling out little handmade tools, odd-shaped pieces of wood and metal, and a miniature apple cart that was missing a wheel. He tossed the cart back into the chest and pouted. “It’s all rubbish.”
“And mine,” Isaac said.
Isaac’s mother patted his hand. “We stowed some of your things in the barn when you went away to school. They were gathering dust in your room. I did not think you would mind. We can have them brought up, now that you are home.”
“No. Leave them there. I shall be returning to Cambridge as soon as it reopens. But I shall take this.” He picked up the wooden chest and squeezed his half b
rother’s shoulder. For the first time in his life, Isaac smiled at him and meant it. “I had forgotten all about it, but it is exactly what I need for my work. I am grateful for your assistance, Benjamin. Truly.”
Benjamin shrugged. “What are you going to do with a box of rusty tools and wood scraps?”
Isaac got up from the table. “A lot, I imagine.”
—
There were two things that Isaac had come to rely on in this world: numbers and Andrea. On the surface, they were polar opposites. The first existed in the universe of logic, the other in the realm of magic and dreams. But they shared the one thing that mattered. Together, they made the world make sense. Numbers gave life order. Andrea gave it meaning.
Isaac brushed the dust from his wooden chest. He did not bother opening it. He knew what it contained. Inside was the answer to Andrea’s puzzle, the solution traditional mathematics failed to provide.
In school, numbers had allowed him to do sums, measure distances, and estimate volume. It gave the physical world a common language with which to speak and be understood. But Andrea’s last visit had made it clear that she was not from his world. She had journeyed across three hundred years to break through his wall and make him smile. He could not use the math that measured tables and trees on Andrea for the same reason he had not been able to use Woolsthorpe’s bulky tools for his projects when he was a boy.
The farm’s breastplows, chaff cutters, and sheep shears were too cumbersome and crude to create the things he imagined. He’d handcrafted tools that served him better. He had made each with a specific function but had not foreseen their most important purpose: to remind him of the boy who built them all those years ago. His younger self had created the tools he needed. If he was to understand Andrea, he had to do it again.
—
Isaac sat in the shade of his favorite apple tree, reviewing the equations in his notebook. His thirteen-year-old half sister, Hannah, sat across from him, darning an old skirt. Isaac looked up from the page and watched her sew. Her name was not the only thing she shared with their mother. She had her pale skin, straight dark hair, and slim nose. Her brown eyes, however, were rounder and less tired. She pulled her needle through the skirt and smiled.
“Why are you smiling like that?” he asked.
“I am not used to seeing you outdoors,” she said. “Or seeing you at all.”
“I know. I apologize. I have been terribly busy.”
She snatched his notebook from him and giggled. “With this?”
“Give it back.”
“Let us see what you have been scribbling away in here, shall we?” She flipped through the notebook and rolled her eyes. “Numbers. How dull. I thought you kept more thrilling secrets.”
“I am sorry to disappoint you.” Isaac leaned against the tree trunk and stretched his legs over the grass. Sunlight weaved through the apple tree’s leaves and found his face. He had forgotten what the sun felt like on his skin.
“So what are they for?” Hannah nudged his leg with her foot.
“That, I cannot tell you.”
She pouted. “Why not? I am your sister. Do you not trust me? I will not tell anyone. Not even Mama. I promise.”
“Very well.” Isaac looked her in the eye. “Hand the notebook back and I shall tell you their purpose.”
“You will?”
Isaac nodded.
Hannah gave the notebook back to him. “Go on then. Tell me.”
“To catch the wind.”
“The wind?” Hannah huffed. “Do not tell me then if you do not want to. I do not care.” She scooped up her sewing basket and stomped away.
Isaac chuckled. He had not meant to tease his younger sister, but neither had he lied. He had been holed up in his room attempting to do exactly what he had just told her. The wind was not an easy thing to predict, much less grasp. He had been trying to catch it since it first blew through a crack in his bedroom when he was seven.
Andrea darted in and out of his life as she pleased, wanton like the breeze. At times there were only months between her visits and there were others when she stayed away from him for years. She was in flux and slipped through math’s fingers. To hold on to her, Isaac needed something with a firmer grip. The notebook on his lap was filled with a new method he’d crafted to do just that. It found order where there was none and calculated change.
He had worked until dawn over the past months, wrestling with equations that pursued his theory that if a constantly changing thing was chopped into small enough pieces, one would find that within each piece, things remained the same. If he could apply such a method to Andrea’s visits, he could predict when she was coming back. Or so he hoped.
Isaac opened his notebook to an ink-stained page. In the sunlight, the jumble of minuscule equations appeared even more chaotic. Isaac reviewed his new math for the tenth time since he had risen. He wasn’t entirely convinced that he wasn’t dreaming. Proof was going to have to wait for the sun to set. If his calculations were correct, a glowing white crack was going to appear on his wall that evening.
“Hannah. Wait.” He stood up and ran after his sister.
Hannah turned and planted her hands on her hips.
“I was only teasing.” He smiled. “Please do not be cross with me.”
“Give me one reason why I should not be mad at you.”
Isaac waved his hand in front of him. A curd cake appeared in his palm. “Because I’m your big brother and I still know how to make you smile.”
My dearest Andrea, my new math did not lie. You came as it predicted. You do not remember this. You cannot. Despite all the rules that we flaunt, there remain a sacred few that we cannot break. You cannot recall an event that, for you, has yet to come to pass. The crack shall open an hour before midnight two weeks from today, and when you come to me this second time, you will linger longer than I ever dared to hope. No words can ever express the depth of my gratitude to your friend for his assistance. Without him, I would not have known the joy of having you by my side.
Yours always,
Isaac
1666
The result justifies the deed.
—OVID
Los Angeles
Present Day
Andrea is twenty-three.
Isaac called his new math “Fluxions” after the word flux. The world renamed it “calculus,” the mathematics of change, and immortalized it as the method Isaac had invented to prove his theory on gravity. Andrea knew the truth. Before Isaac had employed his math to study the universe’s physical laws, he used it to break them and find her.
The day she had circled with a red marker on her calendar arrived swiftly. The nausea from her first trip across the wall was fresh in her mind, and she did not dare try to hold down anything more than two saltine crackers and half a cup of instant tomato soup. She finished her dinner and put away the dishes with an hour left to decide what she was going to take with her through the crack. A carry-on toiletry kit would have been her default choice, but an extended trip to the seventeenth century required something more than just travel-size toothpaste and shampoo.
Andrea completed her packing list with twenty minutes to spare. She used it to carefully apply rosin to her bow and tune her cello. This was not the time for second thoughts or squeaky strings. The alarm on her phone beeped. She massaged her wrist and arranged her fingers over the cello’s neck.
Her bowing was flawed but Isaac’s coded score was forgiving. On its second measure, it kindled a white glow on her wall. The doorbell cut through a vibrato. Andrea ignored it.
“Andrea?” Nate yelled. “Open the door. I know you’re in there.”
Her fingers flew over the cello’s strings, urging the glowing crack to widen faster.
“Don’t do this.”
“Go away,” Andrea said, raising her voice over Isaac’s song.
Nate pounded his fists against the door. “Dre, I’m begging you. Stop. Let me in.”
Andrea kept her eyes on
the large glowing hole taking shape on the wall. “I can’t.”
The apartment door broke open with a loud crack. Andrea glanced over her shoulder without missing a note. Nate stumbled through the doorway. His eyes flew to the crack on the wall. Color fled his face.
“Don’t come any closer,” Andrea pleaded.
He sprinted toward her.
The wall glowed brighter. Andrea slipped her backpack over her shoulder, grabbed her cello and bow, and dashed to the crack. She stopped half a step from it and turned to Nate. “I’m sorry. I’ll come back. I promise.”
Nate lunged for her hand. “Don’t—”
His voice was the last sound she heard when the wall closed behind her.
—
Her memories swirled inside silver bubbles rising around her.
The spotlight bouncing off Nate’s silver pendant when he kissed her after they had played Coldplay’s “Clocks.”
The Post-it note Nate gave her before her performance at Carnegie Hall.
The weathered tombstone that bore her name.
Andrea thrashed her arms at the bubble containing the grave. If she could break the past open with a stroke of her bow, surely she had greater power over her future. A crumbling epitaph was not going to dictate her fate. Her palm slammed into the bubble. The memory of the tomb leaked out, dissolving into silver froth. Andrea kicked her legs and pushed herself away.
The swim across the crack’s silver pool was as endless as it had been the first time around. The nausea was worse. Andrea burst free of the wall and fell to the ground, her head spinning one direction one moment and the opposite way the next. Something dry and rough prickled her cheek. She opened her eyes. Darkness surrounded her.
“Andrea,” a voice, more air than sound, whispered.
Andrea twisted in its direction.
Isaac ran to her. “You came back.”
“Where am I?”
Isaac offered her his hand. “The barn.”
Andrea gripped his fingers and pulled herself to her feet. He was as warm as she remembered. She squinted and looked around. Bales of hay took shape in the dark.
Love and Gravity Page 19