He dropped the knife and hid his face in his hands. The date on the crumpled sheet on the floor found him and screamed the truth: The crack would open and he would see Andrea again, but Andrea was never going to see the man she knew.
And so, my dearest Andrea, this is goodbye. I have no more stories to tell and no more visits to remember. I am writing this letter because it helps me believe that you and our child are living your lives behind my wall, happy and safe. Whether this farewell is for now or forever is beyond my knowledge. There will not be a day that I will not devote to finding you and our child, but I cannot write this letter in good conscience and promise you something that has no certainty. Though the wall may keep you from my arms, you will eternally be in my heart’s embrace.
Yours always,
Isaac
—
Andrea’s eyes clung to Isaac’s name. As long as she kept it in sight, his letter was not going to end and she was not going to have to say goodbye. A tremor in her fingers shook his letter from her hands. It fell onto their daughter’s lap. Margery grabbed it, giggled, and ripped it in two.
“No!” Andrea yanked the pieces from Margery’s grasp.
Margery burst into tears. Andrea bundled her to her breast. “Hush. Hush. Mommy didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, Margery.”
Margery. Though her daughter’s name slipped off her tongue, it was Mr. Westin’s voice that Andrea heard speaking it. He had called Margery by name when he bid them goodbye. A realization ruptured over Andrea as cold and sharp as the rain that had fallen the last time she had stood at the graveyard. She had not told Mr. Westin her daughter’s name. She tightened her hold around Margery and sprinted to the church, her heart beating faster than she could run.
—
Andrea scrambled down the church’s nave. Her eyes flew around the empty pews. Mr. Westin and the answers she needed from him were gone. Andrea sat down in the last row and held Margery against her heaving chest. Margery wriggled. Andrea cradled her tighter. The back of her leg brushed against rough cloth. She looked under the pew. Her old backpack sat on the floor. Mr. Westin had delivered more than just a letter this year. She set Margery by her feet and gave her the pieces of Isaac’s last letter to play with. They were all she could give her of a father she was never going to know. Andrea pulled the backpack out.
A jumble of journals were stuffed inside it. She arranged them on the pew like a multicolored Moleskine road. Their pages had guided Isaac to her like a trail of breadcrumbs dropped across time. She laid a battered journal near the end of the pew and reached into her backpack for another. Her hand scraped its cloth bottom. Her story had run out. She turned the bag over and shook it, begging for another chapter. A letter fell into her lap. Andrea steadied her hand and broke its seal.
My dearest Andrea,
This is the letter that I did not bury and in its pages are the words I had hoped I would never have to write. I compose it with a heavy hand and an infinitely heavier heart.
A Shed, Cambridge University
1676
Isaac is thirty-four.
His shirt was soaked through with sweat and clung to his chest. Isaac shielded his nose with a sticky sleeve that had once been white. The fumes spewing out of the small shed’s furnace pierced the cloth and mingled with the odor of his unwashed skin. Isaac gagged but forced himself to take another breath. Fainting was not an option. He could not leave his experiment unattended. He stood by the furnace and kept his eyes on the small ceramic crucible inside it. He checked his Omega. In a few minutes, he was going to find out if he was right about Ovid’s ancient tales.
In his book Metamorphoses, the poet had written about Vulcan and the night the god had caught his wife Venus in bed with Mars. Consumed with anger, Vulcan trapped the lovers in a net and left them hanging on the ceiling for all to see. Isaac believed the myth to be a chemical recipe, with the gods representing the metals he required. Venus was copper, Mars was iron, and Vulcan was fire. Isaac watched them melt into each other inside the glowing furnace, locked in their ancient, illicit embrace.
Isaac gripped the white-hot crucible with a pair of iron tongs and pulled it from the flames. He set it on a narrow wooden table next to his stained laboratory notes. He fidgeted as it cooled. A shadow stirred in the corner of his eye. Isaac turned. His reflection greeted him from a large, round-bottom bottle. The candlelight swimming over the glass curves warped his face, but he could make out the fine lines that marked the years since the crack had wrenched his family from him.
A decade had gone by since Andrea had disappeared through the crack. His child would have no memory of him, but he wondered if Andrea would still know his face. Time had turned his hair prematurely silver and carved creases around his eyes and mouth. Even his voice had changed. The soup of smoke he waded through in his little shed had added a grit to his voice that he feared Andrea would not like. He exhaled a heavy breath and shoved away his aged reflection. The bottle shattered over the floor. Shards of glass twinkled in the furnace’s light. If he squinted and tilted his head just so, Isaac could pretend they were stars. He did not bother to name the new constellation but made a wish on the largest of its stars: His experiment had to work.
He struck the crucible with a small mallet. The ceramic shattered over his table. A purple alloy, striated with a web of thin silver lines, rolled out of the broken cup. Isaac held it to the furnace’s light. “Vulcan’s net” gleamed between his tongs. A grin, the lopsided kind that had lit his face as a boy when his floating paper lanterns glowed in the sky and scared his neighbors, found its way back to his lips. He was one step closer to the end of his alchemical quest.
The secret he housed in his little shed restored the hope that science and math had stolen from him. His calculations had declared that forty-seven years would pass before the crack would let him see his family. He would wither in that time, shriveling into a man his wife would not recognize. Alchemy was the only tool he had left to change his fate. Behind the doors of his shed, he was forced to commit the crime that men were hung on gilded scaffoldings for. Here, until dawn seeped through its windows, he toiled in a haze of fumes to create the lapis philosophorum, the philosopher’s stone. But unlike those who sought it out to transmute base metals into gold, Isaac required its fabled power for a simpler task. He needed it to help him remain the man Andrea loved. He had already lost ten years. He could not afford to age another day.
A Shed, Cambridge University
1696
Isaac is fifty-four.
Today was his last day in Cambridge and when he left for London to assume his new post as Warden of the Royal Mint, he was leaving the world of academe, science, math, alchemy, magic, and Andrea behind. He had chased a fable for thirty years, but the time had come to accept defeat. Had the lapis philosophorum he had desperately sought magically appeared in front of him at this very moment, he would no longer have found any use for it.
He had lost his youth a long time ago, and all that was left for the mythical stone to preserve was a man as dusty as the notebooks on the shed’s shelves. More than half of his life had passed, while Andrea’s whole life remained ahead of her. They had met as wide-eyed children and had grown up alongside each other through a glowing crack. They had fallen in love, as only young lovers could, recklessly, fiercely, and fast. Behind the wall, Andrea was still the same young woman who had lain beneath the constellations and dared to claim them. Without her by his side, he had lost all interest in lying on the grass and pondering the night. There were no stars in his sky. Lonely decades had worn him down and where dreams had once lit a fire in his heart, only their ashes remained. He and Andrea had always been from different times; now they were from very different places in their lives.
He scanned the empty table that had once been heavy with all manner of bottles, crucibles, and flasks. It appeared much larger than it had looked in all the years he had ground metal over it and splattered elixirs over its wood. He had discarded all of his equipmen
t in recent weeks, careful not to leave a trace of his experiments. All that was left to do was pack away the notebooks and manuscripts that documented his covert pursuits inside a large metal chest.
Isaac took a stack of manuscripts from the corner of the shed and stuffed them inside the chest without bothering to go through them. He knew exactly how many times his experiments had failed without reading his records. But no matter how much he loathed what his notebooks contained, he could not bring himself to get rid of them. It was all he had left to remind him of the family he’d briefly had.
He thought about the letters he had buried in Woolsthorpe. All he had to do was dig them up and burn them to sever the chain of events that had led him to this moment. Andrea would never receive his letters, cross over, and steal his heart. And he would not be sitting alone in a dark shed, filling a metal chest with lost years and regret. A tear rolled off his wrinkled cheek and splattered over his aged reflection on the chest’s lid. He looked into his own eyes and promised himself to go back to his apple tree and change his past. One day. Perhaps.
87 Jermyn Street, Westminster, London
1713
Isaac is seventy-one.
Isaac hunched over his desk at the London home he had lived in since taking on his responsibilities at the Royal Mint. He scribbled away on a sheet of paper, indulging in a pastime he had enjoyed since he was a boy. He shuffled around the letters of his name and listed down as many anagrams as he could. Even in his old age, there were still days that he took pleasure in making himself believe that he was someone else. Queen Anne had knighted him and he found amusement in rearranging the letters of his new title.
Sir Isaac Newton
A cast-iron swine
Is now Cartesian
Creation’s swain
Oscar Ian Westin
He liked the sound of the last one best and wrote it down again. He did not smile often and when he did, it never lasted long. He seized the moment to enjoy a grin. An old loneliness closed in on him before he could tug his lips into place. Though he was miles away from Woolsthorpe Manor, there was no escape from blank walls. Today, they pressed close and crushed his lungs.
The date the numbers had told him the crack would open again had arrived. His fluxions had calculated the time when their worlds were close enough to build a bridge across, in the same way his equations had helped his friend Edmond Halley predict the return of his comet. Halley would have to wait forty-five more years to be proven right. Isaac’s wait was significantly less. He rose from his desk, walked over to a polished armoire, and pulled out Andrea’s cello from inside it.
In Andrea’s absence, he had taught himself to play the songs she had left behind. His rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” was impeccable, while his attempts at mastering the melody that summoned the crack left him deflated. He took a seat in front of his bedroom wall and placed the cello between his legs. He angled his bow arm, gathering confidence from the knowledge that the crack was going to forgive his flaws. According to Andrea’s journals, all that was to happen next had already taken place.
He had no inkling that the silver-haired man that Andrea had written of in her journals would turn out to be himself, but as his body aged, Isaac had come to see the face of Andrea’s elderly messenger in his mirror. He did not know the mechanics of how he would come to deliver his own letters, but he knew that when the crack opened, he was going to step through it and become the man who showed up on Andrea’s doorstep with his sealed messages. He was no longer the man she loved, but he was too old to be greedy. He pulled the bow across the cello and played her song.
—
The silver, silent sea of time between their walls was exactly as Andrea had described. His memories bobbed around him in little silver bubbles. The white in his grandmother’s hair. The smell of leather in Cambridge’s library. The fresh custard pies he passed over at the Stourbridge Fair. Isaac lost himself in each, happy to be young again. A bubble drifted past his chin. Andrea was in it, heavy with their child, vanishing through a glowing crack. Isaac screamed her name and tried to swim after her.
Something hard slammed into his cheek. Isaac opened his eyes and gasped for breath. His eyes adjusted to the dim light. The walls of a room took shape around him. He knew them well. His old bedroom at Woolsthorpe was the last place he had expected the crack to lead him. He did not recognize the furniture inside it. It appeared worn and older than any he had owned. He strode to the window, the bedroom’s only source of light. A pink twilight veiled Woolsthorpe’s grounds, but he could see that the orchard had far fewer trees than he remembered. Footsteps shuffled over the gravel path below. Isaac moved to one side of the window, leaned against the wall, and listened.
“The stargazing tour group will be arriving soon,” a woman’s voice said. “Your costume is inside.”
“I hope they were able to change the wig. The last one itched,” an older man’s voice said.
“Yes, I believe that’s been taken care of.”
“Wonderful. Thank you.”
“No, thank you, Harold, for volunteering to do this and for being such a good sport about the costume. I must say that you do bear a striking resemblance to Isaac Newton once you have the wig on.”
“Don’t mention it. It’s a nice little break from the bank.”
“This tour will be exactly the same as the one we did last week. You’ll first take them on a tour of the manor and then lead them to the orchard so that they can set up their telescopes. The staff will be waiting for you there.”
“The sky looks brilliant tonight. Perfect for stargazing,” the old man said. “Well, I better get changed. I think the tour group would be rather disappointed to find the great Isaac Newton in a rumpled gray suit.”
—
Isaac waited for the costumed tour guide to step outside the manor before stealing his clothes. Andrea’s journals were very precise about what Mr. Oscar Ian Westin looked like, and the tour guide’s gray suit and hat matched the picture in his mind. He buttoned his double-breasted jacket. The suit’s jacket drooped at his shoulders, and the sleeves were too long for his arms. From what he remembered of Andrea’s description of Mr. Westin, it was a perfect fit. He slipped on the brown wing tip shoes and pulled off his wig, donning the tour guide’s hat. He checked his reflection in the mirror. Mr. Westin appeared to be a much happier man than he was. He crept out of the manor’s back door and into a strange new world, armed with a library of Andrea’s stories about her time. The hours they had spent talking and laughing beneath the stars had filled his mind’s shelves.
He kept to the shadows. He could think of only one reason why the crack had led him to his old home, and it was buried in its orchard. The gravity that drew him to Andrea extended beyond her. It exerted its pull, it seemed, on everything that she had touched. The hopes she had stowed in her writing box had called to him from across time.
A garbage bin stood in place of the shed where the manor’s tools used to be stored. Isaac kept to the shadows as he searched the nearby buildings for a spade. A rake leaned against a wooden fence. Isaac grabbed it and made his way to an old friend.
Time had been less kind to his apple tree than it had been to him. Its branches were more gnarled than he was and its bark bore more creases than his skin. Isaac patted its crooked trunk. The infinity symbol he had left for Andrea found his palm, reminding him of a young man’s hopes. He took a measured step away from it and dug. He had been at the peak of his youth and strength when he buried his secrets beneath the tree, and every tug of the rake reminded him of how much the years had taken from him since then.
His rake struck wood. Isaac crouched and brushed the mud from the writing box’s slanted lid. Etched words whispered an old plea.
Come home.
He had carved the words for Andrea’s eyes, not knowing that the task of delivering his letters would fall on his own shoulders. He broke the box’s wax seal and pried its lid open. The cold, damp smell of age flew in
to his nostrils. He recoiled and shielded his nose with his sleeve. He held his breath and peeked inside the box. His gifts for Andrea, wrapped in parchment and twine, were scattered over its bottom. His letters, bound by a frayed black ribbon, sat on top of the pile. He picked up the bundle. The ribbon fell apart, scattering his letters on the ground.
Voices drifted across the orchard. The tour group had arrived. Isaac gathered the letters and stuffed them inside the box. He collected whatever branches he could find and tossed them over the hole. He grabbed the box and held it close. Light broke through the sleeves of his suit. Isaac drew a deep breath and waited for the crack to call him back.
—
Isaac reappeared in the bedroom of his house in Jermyn Street, clutching Andrea’s writing box. He waited for the nausea to pass. He brushed off the mud from the box. The etched designs were badly worn, but he could still make out a few of the flowers along its sides. He rubbed a patch of mud from the box’s front panel. The crude grooves of the infinity symbol he had carved, half-erased by time, brushed against his hand. Even “forever,” it appeared, could fade.
He stared at the box. The decision that he had put off for so long demanded action. His fireplace crackled next to him. If he threw the box and its contents into the flames, his heart would never know pain. Or happiness. He remembered the moments he had stroked Andrea’s growing belly and whispered to his little bean. He did not know if Andrea had been able to save their child, but he knew that if he cast his letters into the fire, he was throwing away its very existence. No amount of despair or loneliness could drive him to kill his own blood. The mere possibility that his child had lived was worth every ounce of pain. He arranged the cello over his shoulder and prepared himself to introduce Andrea to the silver-haired man who would one day lead her home.
Love and Gravity Page 25