Love and Gravity

by Samantha Sotto

“No.” Andrea fixed her eyes on the white wall across the bed. “But one of these days it will. It has to.”

  He very rarely went to bed until two or three of the clock, sometimes not till five or six, lying about four or five hours, especially at spring or the fall of the leaf, at which time he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire scarce going out night or day. What his aim might be I was unable to penetrate into.

  —HUMPHREY NEWTON, ISAAC NEWTON’S COUSIN AND SECRETARY, ON NEWTON’S ALCHEMICAL PURSUITS

  Colsterworth, England

  Present Day

  Andrea is twenty-four.

  Her giggle tickled the air. The breeze swept through her auburn curls and laughed along with her. Like her father’s, Margery’s joy was contagious. She had just turned one and it didn’t take much to make her smile. The little rocks strewn along the grassy path obliged. Margery waved her chubby arms and laughed as her stroller rumbled over them. She and her mother were not strolling through their usual route in their neighborhood, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  The graveyard at St. John the Baptist Church had not changed much since Andrea had last seen it, though the moss over the graves seemed a brighter shade of green in the sun. The weather report had said that it wasn’t going to rain, but Andrea had brought an umbrella just in case. It swung from her arm as the notes of Isaac’s song filled her head.

  Her mind was the only place she could bear to listen to the melody. Playing it on her cello had become too difficult. It had been easier to play Isaac’s song during the first few weeks she was back, but as time passed without a hint of a crack, her bow and cello grew heavier. As her cello became more difficult to haul out of its case, she sought other ways to tear down the wall that kept her little family apart. Science and math had once led her to her life in a little cottage in Lincolnshire, and she had hoped that they would help her do it again.

  Isaac had imagined their worlds to be winding roads that ran alongside each other. Sometimes they were close enough to touch; at others, they were an inconceivably vast distance apart. Most modern-day physicists, Andrea learned, agreed with him. They imagined the universe floating on the fabric of space and time, like a bead bobbing on the surface of a jar of water. To allow the bead to reach the other end of the jar, a whirlpool was required to serve as a tunnel between the top and bottom surfaces of the water. Physicists contended that space and time could be distorted the same way to form bridges between worlds.

  But such passageways, like whirlpools, were not stable. They were extremely tiny and in flux. They existed one moment and vanished the next like a Snakes and Ladders board that morphed each time you blinked. To make the wormholes in space and time large and stable enough to pass through, some scientists proposed expanding them with negative energy. Andrea only had her cello and a song. After three months of playing to deaf walls, she stopped. She looked for a job, surrendering to the possibility that Isaac was not going to be able to hold his daughter anytime soon.

  But Margery did not miss out on cuddles or hugs. Bas and Sylvia gave her more than her fair share. They were beyond ecstatic when Andrea called them after she was released from the hospital, but they weren’t as shocked about Margery as Andrea had expected. She guessed that learning she’d had a daughter out of wedlock made her disappearance make more sense to them. An unplanned pregnancy had made people do odder things than run away. As Andrea navigated her first year as a mother, Nate held her steady.

  Nate and his bandmates had parted ways and he had moved on to being an on-call drummer for three studios and an on-call classical percussionist for two. When he was not recording, he was happily volunteering to change Margery’s diapers and sing her to sleep. A video he had posted of his latest lullaby had gone viral, and at the time Andrea left for England, Nate was in talks with a producer who was interested in the lullaby and his other compositions.

  Andrea stepped on the stroller’s brake near the end of the cemetery’s last lane and unbuckled Margery. Her daughter smiled and squealed. Andrea kissed her rosy, round cheek and carried her on her hip, inhaling the hint of lavender baby shampoo in her curls. Andrea held the scent in her lungs and walked down the lane, reading the names on the graves that lined it. Her chest burned as she came upon the last one.

  HERE LYETH

  MARY ELLEN

  WIFE OF RICHARD HARRINGTON

  AGED 56

  DIED 15TH OF SEPTEMBER 1678

  Andrea stepped back from the tombstone and exhaled. Margery wriggled in her arms. Andrea set her on the grass and watched her toddle to the patch of dandelions growing over the spot where two crumbling tombstones used to stand. Each morning that Margery smiled up from her crib soothed Andrea with the thought that they had tricked time and changed their fate, but they did not stop her from going to bed with the same fear. Mary Ellen Harrington’s tombstone promised Andrea her first night’s sleep without a dream about two graves.

  “Miss Louviere…”

  Andrea spun around.

  Mr. Westin’s hat bobbed as he approached. From the way his brows were knitted, it appeared as though this year, he was the one who had the questions.

  “Mr. Westin!” She threw her arms around him, crushing herself against the suit pocket that held Isaac’s letter. She begged the wax-sealed note to contain three things: forgiveness, a time, and a date. She needed to know when she and Margery could go home. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Andrea breathed hard into Mr. Westin’s lapel.

  “It’s…lovely to see you, too.”

  “Can I have my letter?”

  Wind swept over the dandelions and sent them swirling around Margery. She grabbed at them with her chubby fingers and giggled.

  Mr. Westin glanced the little girl’s way. His eyes lit up, making him look years younger. “And who do we have here?”

  “My daughter.”

  “She’s beautiful. Like her mother.”

  “She has her father’s eyes.” Andrea picked her up. “Say hello to Mommy’s friend, Mr. Westin.”

  Margery held out her hand and offered him a dandelion stem.

  “Why, thank you.” He took her gift. “What a clever little girl you are.”

  “I’m sorry to rush you.” Andrea lowered Margery into her stroller. “But I’d really like to have my delivery now.”

  “Of course.” He slipped his hand beneath his jacket and pulled out a yellowed letter.

  “It’s been a pleasure being of service to you all these years, Ms. Louviere. This is your last letter.”

  Andrea clutched it to her chest. She and Margery were going home. “Thank you, Mr. Westin. Take care.”

  He nodded. “I wish you and Margery well.”

  Andrea buckled Margery into her stroller and watched Mr. Westin walk in the direction of the church. Their goodbye was abrupt, but there was no time to be polite. Isaac had waited for his family long enough. Andrea pulled his final letter out.

  The red wax lay like a rose over the parchment. Andrea could not decide whether it was at its peak or was about to die. She explored its brittle ridges with her fingers. The tip of the I bled into the wax and the lines of the N were thin. It did not matter. She knew whom the letter was from. She gripped Isaac’s seal and broke it in half.

  My dearest Andrea,

  Our correspondence has reached its end. It has been many months since you crossed back into your time carrying our child, and I am left to guess what has become of my family. I still feel you slipping from my grasp and falling into a sea of silver and silence. I can only pray that you and our child are well and that the man you love on your side of the wall knows how truly blessed he is to have you back. Though I hate him as I have hated nothing and no one before, I am forced to put my faith in his love for you, to hope that he cares for you and my child in all the ways I cannot. But make no mistake, I swear on all that is sacred, that I will not stop fighting to win you back.

  I have returned to Woolsthorpe in your absence. Without you, no amount of kindling coul
d make our cottage warm. I have seen you on numerous occasions since you left, but they are past versions of yourself that have no knowledge of the life we shared. Today, you sent me a list of answers on paper wings and I sent you a query in return. I asked you if you loved me, but you did not respond. I stole a kiss from you, seeking a reply from your lips. I pray to remember the taste and warmth of your mouth, for I know that it will be all I have of you for a while.

  There is nothing more I wish to see through the wall than the woman who is my wife, and the child we had. Work provides me with my only respite, but it has proved, most recently, to be cruel.

  Woolsthorpe Manor

  1666

  Isaac is twenty-four.

  Sunlight poured through the small hole in the wooden screen leaning against Isaac’s window. Isaac nudged the screen to the left, directing the sun toward a low table in the middle of his bedroom. The beam slipped through a prism and splashed a rainbow over the wall’s cream plaster. Isaac checked the calendar he had drawn in his notebook. If his calculations were correct, he was going to see Andrea soon.

  It had been three months since he had seen her, and each day that passed without her and their baby carved out a little more of his soul. The crack had opened on several occasions since Andrea had left, but it had allowed him only glimpses of days when she was younger, when so much had yet to come to pass. It was impossible to look at her and not long for more.

  This afternoon’s experiment was the latest in the slew of projects he had designed to unravel the mystery of the crack. He found the strength to breathe by believing that if he understood the light that made it glow, the laws that governed its comings and goings, and the force that drew their worlds together, he would get his family back.

  Isaac set his notebook on his bed and hauled out his traveling trunk. He lifted its lid and pulled out a light green journal. He had never asked Andrea if he could see any of her diaries, but when she left, he lost his battle to keep his distance. The map of his future was written in the pages of her past and he was determined to stay the course that had brought her into his arms. He had even found drafts of a letter in which her younger self confessed her feelings for another man. He wondered if she was with this man now. He composed a letter in response, struggling to hide the bitterness he felt. Andrea’s journal entry told him that his reply to her letter had been understanding and kind, and he strove to live up to her expectations.

  He constantly wrestled with the temptation to reveal everything to her all at once, to forgo all the clandestine clues and codes her journals had spoken of, but he did not dare to deviate from destiny’s script. If there was anything he had learned at William Clarke’s apothecary, it was that tinkering with an elixir’s recipe could produce the most disastrous results. The paradox of his life with Andrea was more volatile than any ether and more fragile than any prism. If he broke it, he did not have a spare.

  Isaac checked the time on the 1952 Omega that Andrea had left behind. He stood by his boarded-up window and waited for her to appear. The wall glowed in front of him. Andrea’s journal had detailed what was to happen next, but Isaac held his breath and clung to the hope that this time, the Andrea he would see on the other side would be his.

  The wall cracked open and swallowed the rainbow his prism had splashed over it. The sunlight from his window pierced a second prism on Andrea’s desk and shot a red beam onto the opposite wall of her dark room. The theory he had long held about white light had just been proven, but he could not bring himself to care. He squinted, trying to find Andrea in the shadows behind his wall. The crack shrank.

  Isaac pulled the screen from the window and flooded his bedroom with light. He ran to his wall, slamming his knee into the table where his equipment was set up. A lens toppled to the floor and shattered. Isaac leapt over the broken glass and peered through the crack. Plaster reappeared around the hole.

  “Andrea, where are you? Show yourself.”

  A lamp came to life in the corner of her bedroom. Light fell over Andrea’s face. Isaac exhaled through a smile. She was not his Andrea yet, but he ached for her just the same. He reached out to remember the warmth of her skin.

  “Stop!” she yelled.

  Isaac could not hear her voice, but he saw the fear flashing in her eyes. He rolled up his sleeve and offered her the only comfort he could. The Omega’s face sparkled in the crack’s light. Isaac pulled it off and shared the words Andrea had etched in its steel.

  For Isaac. Love, Andrea

  Isaac watched the wall close over the shock on Andrea’s face. He wanted to explain everything to her right then and there, but his words would have to wait three centuries to meet her eyes. His trail of wax-sealed clues required the same patience.

  He sat at his desk and twisted a thin wire into the shape of his favorite apple tree. Beneath it, he looped and pinched the wire to spell out a phrase he had come to know of through Andrea’s journals. He had considered several options to discreetly convey the key to Andrea, from the invisible ink Ovid wrote of in his tales about secret love letters, to the disappearing ink made from the milk of the tithymalus plant used by the ancient Roman general and scientist Pliny the Elder. Isaac opted to pursue a course that, though more mundane, had been proven to stand the test of time.

  Paper mills across Europe had been using wire to embed their trademark onto their work for hundreds of years. The translucent design became visible when held up against light, identifying the paper’s source. Isaac counted on fate to reveal the watermark he was creating in the same way. He twisted the last of the wire and reviewed his work.

  Come home to me now.

  He sewed the wire phrase onto the paper’s mesh mold. His experience in purifying antimony and boiling mercury far exceeded any he had in papermaking, but he could not trust the mill’s most skilled vatman with this task. He filled the mold with a pulp made from linen rags and lowered it into a small vat of water. He lifted the mold, allowing the water to drain from the pulp. He had to press the pulp and wait for it to dry before he could set his quill upon it, but Isaac permitted himself to exhale. Compared to crafting the watermark’s design, writing down the excerpt of Ovid’s tale was easy. He knew the verses of Pyramus and Thisbe’s tale by heart. He set the pulp aside and pulled out a sheet of paper that didn’t require drying.

  The time that he sat down to write his letters to Andrea was the best part of his day. Ending them was the worst. His hand turned to marble every time he signed his name. Each farewell felt like it was for forever. Only the numbers he left for her at the bottom of the page consoled him.

  Leonardo Pisano, nicknamed Fibonacci, had introduced the number sequence to Western Europe in his 1202 mathematics book, Liber Abaci. Fibonacci had used the numbers to describe the population growth of rabbits, but Isaac discovered an alternative use for them. When converted into music, they opened cracks.

  On the surface, the Fibonacci sequence was a simple numerical pattern, but its significance in nature could not be ignored. When the numbers in the series were divided by the number before it, they derived an intriguing ratio that was first described in Euclid’s Elements. The ancient Greeks called it the “golden number” or “golden mean.” Its other name, sectio divina, or “divine section,” hinted of its true importance.

  The ratio’s ubiquitous presence in nature and frequent appearance in geometry suggested a fundamental order weaved into the very fabric of the world. Sunflower seeds and pinecone pods spiraled in accordance with it. Tree branches sprouted following the same pattern along the tree’s trunk, as did the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the spirals of shells, and the curl of an ocean wave rushing to the shore. The golden mean, Isaac noted, was likewise present in the human body. Each section of his fingers, from fingertip to wrist, was longer than the one before it by approximately the same ratio. The numbers were everywhere around him, waiting to be discovered. Andrea’s cello gave them a voice.

  The song that Andrea had stumbled upon as a child molded the
numbers into a form that could be hurled at her side of the wall. Each time the winding paths of time he and Andrea traveled on brushed close, the energy that lived in the music’s notes broke through. But though the original song could lay down a bridge that was long enough to exchange presents across, it did not keep it steady. Tiny flaws in the song’s measures spread like cracks across the path, ultimately crumbling it. Paper planes and apples were pulled back, wracked by the tunnel of time collapsing around it. They returned aged, weathered to ash by the centuries they traversed. The numbers Isaac sent to Andrea in his letters fixed this.

  The notes the numbers corresponded to mirrored the pattern infused into the very building blocks of nature. The new song built a bridge, note by note, on the same foundation that the universe stood on. When the separate roads he and Andrea were on wound close enough, this bridge would let Andrea travel safely back to his arms.

  Isaac signed his name at the end of his letter, wrote out the numbers Andrea would need for her song, and sealed his words with hope and wax.

  —

  Isaac devoted the next months to employing his new math to calculate the date when Andrea would appear next. He wrote out a date at the end of a string of equations. He glared at the date and spat out a curse. He ripped the page from his notebook and threw it on the floor. He dipped the tip of his quill into the inkpot and scribbled out a new set of equations. Andrea had opened the crack on every date he had predicted and had proven the reliability of his method over and over again. He wished she had not. It would have made it easier for him to doubt the latest date that repeatedly spilled from his pen. He flung his notebook across the room.

  Isaac hauled Andrea’s old writing box from its hiding place beneath his bed. Two butterflies perched on the upper corner of its slanting lid. Their ink wings had faded from all the times he had rubbed his fingers over them, trying to find the warmth of Andrea’s hand. He opened the writing box and surveyed its contents. Ovid’s book. Two prisms. Andrea’s letter to herself. He shut its lid and grabbed the knife he stowed under his mattress. He laid the box on its side and carved out the pain wrenching his heart. It twisted into two intertwining loops. Infinity was supposed to look hopeful, but against the wood’s grain, it looked dark.