Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “You have to stop saying ‘crud,’ too,” Jonah said. “That’s something you picked up from me. It’s not even the same word in German, is it?”

  Now Mileva looked amused.

  “Jonah, think! What language have I been using with you almost constantly since the time hollow?” she asked.

  Jonah tilted his head to the side thoughtfully.

  “English?” he asked. “You actually learned English?”

  “I had to teach myself English in the time hollow, so I could understand watching Emily’s life in America in the twenty-first century,” Mileva explained. “I can’t believe you didn’t notice. You’re almost as absentminded as Albert!”

  “I’ve had a lot else on my mind,” Jonah said defensively. “And—when you understand all languages, you kind of stop noticing any of it.”

  Mileva punched him playfully on the arm.

  “Show-off,” she said, treating him like a lovable younger brother. “‘I understand all languages, so I don’t really notice,’” she mimicked in a fake-snobby voice.

  “You’re the show-off, teaching yourself a complete foreign language without any of the time-traveler help I got—you’ll have to forget the English, too, remember? No speaking it to anybody in your real life by mistake!” Jonah commanded.

  “I know,” Mileva said wistfully.

  She took a deep breath, and carefully inched the papers out of Jonah’s hand.

  “You think we should have Albert’s early thoughts about relativity near the top?” she asked in a quavering voice, as she rearranged the order of the papers. “That will draw him in right away, don’t you think?”

  “You know him a lot better than I do,” Jonah said.

  Mileva stood up and turned to face the frozen Albert.

  He was standing in the same awkward, ungainly position they’d left him in before zooming into the time hollow.

  Mileva reached for his hand.

  “Wait!” Jonah said. “How are you ever going to be able to pretend you still love him after everything you saw in the time hollow? After the way he treated you—I mean, how he will treat you—”

  “Jonah, I do still love Albert, even after everything I saw,” Mileva said evenly. She turned her head and looked straight at Jonah instead of her husband. “You have to understand—I’m really angry about the way he’s going to treat me and Hans Albert and Tete in the next two decades, but even then I’ll love him.” She shook her head. “I can’t blame you if you can’t follow the logic there. I wouldn’t have understood at thirteen either. Maybe you’ll understand when you’re a grown-up.” She paused. “No, I hope no one in your life treats you in such a way that you’ll ever have to understand.”

  “But, Mileva—,” Jonah began.

  “Here,” Mileva said, pulling the Elucidator out of her pocket. “Let’s turn you invisible first. Just as a precaution.”

  Jonah thought he could feel himself disappearing. He glanced down quickly to make sure it had really happened.

  “Oh!” Mileva said, as if something about the process surprised her. “So that’s what it looks like.”

  “What?” Jonah said.

  “Since I’ve become a time traveler myself, I can see you now even though you’re invisible—just barely, just the slightest hint . . . ,” Mileva said.

  “You knew it would be like that,” Jonah said. “You read all the fine print about the ins and outs of time travel, the way time travelers’ lives are changed forever. You probably know the rules and the explanations better than anybody else. And—”

  He was about to add another stern warning: And that’s something else you’re going to have to forget after today. Or, at least, never talk about again. But Mileva was looking at him so strangely.

  “What?” he said once again.

  “You look like glass,” Mileva murmured. “So fragile. It just made me realize—everyone’s fragile, everyone I’m trying to protect.”

  She touched his arm, just the slightest brush against his sleeve.

  “Just to be sure you’re safe, why don’t you hide behind Albert?” Mileva asked in a choked voice.

  Jonah thought this was as crazy overprotective as some of the things his parents told him to do, but he didn’t argue. He handed her the papers he’d been holding and stepped behind Albert’s back.

  Mileva tucked the Elucidator back into her pocket and got into position. She took Albert’s hand once again, as if ready to tug him toward the end of the bed where Emily had once sat. That spot was completely empty now, just as the chair where Katherine had once sat was completely empty.

  “Voice commands, Elucidator,” Mileva said. “Resume normal time.”

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then—

  “—I-I’m worried about you,” Albert said, his first word stuttering ever so slightly, exactly like a recorded voice starting up again after being paused.

  Jonah stared at the dust motes dancing in the sunshine around Albert’s left arm.

  Movement, Jonah thought. Normal movement. Keep going, keep going . . .

  Albert turned his head to squint at Mileva.

  “You’re acting strange,” he complained.

  “I feel so much better, just seeing you,” Mileva said, pulling him forward. She looked back at him over her shoulder. Her cheeks were rosy, almost feverish.

  “What did you want to show me?” Albert asked. “I mean—who?”

  Mileva stopped in the center of the floor. Jonah thought it was almost exactly the spot where he had tripped on the carpet and fallen toward Mileva and Katherine and Emily.

  “Can you feel our daughter’s spirit here?” Mileva whispered. “This is the spot where she left us . . . left Novi Sad . . . left this world. I miss her so. But I know she’s going to be in a better place.”

  Albert’s face twisted. Was it a sign of regret? Grief? Confusion?

  Or—suspicion?

  He seemed to be deciding to humor his wife.

  “Perhaps . . . ,” he murmured. He huddled with Mileva, hugging her tight. They clung to each other. Albert opened his mouth, but seemed to be thinking hard for a moment before he actually spoke. “I’m sorry I never met her. Will never meet her. I wish things could have been different.”

  He didn’t sound like a soon-to-be-famous scientist. He didn’t sound like someone who’d figured out time travel and the secrets of the universe. He just sounded awkwardly, unbearably sad.

  Mileva didn’t answer. She grimaced, as if holding back a lifetime worth of sobs.

  “Mileva?” Albert said. He pushed her away slightly, holding her at arm’s length so he could look into her face. Just in time Mileva smoothed out her expression, hiding most of her anguish.

  Another “tip of the iceberg” situation, Jonah thought.

  “Your parents think . . . well, they think you’re refusing to face the truth,” Albert said slowly. “They told me you wouldn’t admit that Lieserl is gone.”

  “I know the truth,” Mileva said. Her voice was even and calm. She didn’t sound at all like someone who had gone mad with grief. She sounded entirely sane and competent and more composed than Albert.

  Having a century or so in the time hollow to come to terms with things had probably helped.

  Also, of course, she knew the actual truth. The one where the Einsteins’ daughter still had a chance at life.

  “So . . . are there . . . details that need to be taken care of?” Albert looked as if he’d rather undergo a root canal than explain exactly what he meant by that.

  “Are you asking, do we need to have a funeral?” Mileva said. “Do we need to bury a casket in the cemetery and fill out the paperwork with the church and dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and make it look like society dealt with our little girl properly? And then years from now, when your brilliant brain brings you the fame you deserve, people will come nosing around here and snicker behind their hands as they look up the records and say, ‘Oh, look, this little girl was Albert Einstein’s shame
.’ . . . I will not have our daughter treated like that! I will not have her memory maligned!”

  She was breathing hard now. For a moment Jonah was afraid that she was getting sick again, and would need to interrupt her passionate speech to throw up one more time. But she just shook her head fervently and kept going.

  “I didn’t have much control over what happened to Lieserl during her first year and a half of life,” Mileva said. “And I couldn’t protect her from the scarlet fever. But I will not have her treated disrespectfully now. I’d rather have her existence kept a secret outside of Novi Sad than give a single person the opportunity to say, ‘Oh, weren’t they lucky that that child died. That really solved all their problems, didn’t it?’ We were not lucky!”

  Albert recoiled, pulling back from Mileva.

  Does he think they were lucky? Jonah wondered. Had he kind of been hoping that Lieserl would die?

  It was an awful thing to think about Albert Einstein. Jonah couldn’t tell what was going on inside the man’s mind, except that he looked as if he didn’t want to be having this conversation.

  “We . . . can keep everything secret,” Albert said faintly. “You don’t even have to tell me . . . all the details. But—what if anybody ever . . . finds the body?”

  He spoke the last word in a whisper, as if he could barely bring himself to form the sounds.

  “Our daughter is in the best place possible,” Mileva said. “I swear to you, nobody will ever find our daughter’s body in Novi Sad. And the people around here are loyal to my family. They won’t tell. We’ll be able to take this secret to our graves.”

  She was staring into her husband’s eyes now, her own eyes burning with intensity.

  He’s going to ask for details, Jonah thought. Even though he said he wouldn’t, he’s got to be curious. And he does think he’s going to be famous someday. Won’t he want to make sure that this secret never comes back to haunt him?

  But Albert looked down. He was looking, actually, at the papers clutched in Mileva’s hand. He was looking at them longingly, as if he wanted nothing more than to pull completely away from Mileva and bury himself in numbers and formulas and scientific ideas. It was like seeing a man in the midst of a horrible battle catch a glimpse of an open door to a fort. Now Jonah felt as if he could read Albert’s mind—he had to be thinking, Oh, please! Let me just escape into my beloved physics . . .

  The most risky moment of Mileva’s entire plan was almost upon them.

  “Maybe . . . maybe we’d both feel better about all of this if we just sat down and looked at those papers,” Albert said. “Leave our sorrow behind, share our happiness—why dwell on the past? Let’s look to the future. I really have come up with some interesting ideas lately! I do want you to see them!”

  Something flickered across Mileva’s face, and for a moment Jonah thought that she would never be able to hide her true emotions. How could she be anything but furious at Albert? How could she even pretend to forgive him? How could she let him gloss over their daughter’s supposed death like that?

  But Mileva smiled at her husband.

  “And I do so love hearing about your ideas,” she said in a low voice.

  Jonah could hear the pain in her voice. It wasn’t just that she was acting sad because Albert needed to believe that Lieserl had died. Or because, if her plan worked, Mileva would lose her daughter to the future. It truly pained Mileva that Albert’s enthusiasm for sharing ideas with her wasn’t going to last. Mileva had seen their future. She knew that as soon as the important men of science started paying attention to Albert, he’d stop caring what Mileva thought.

  And if I can hear that in her voice, Albert’s going to notice it too, Jonah thought. He’s going to figure out that something else is wrong. This is going to ruin everything.

  But Albert was already bent over the papers.

  “See, right here,” he began. “I figured out that if time split into two entirely separate dimensions in 1611, as I suspect, then there’d be signs of that in nature. Subtle signs, signs you’d have to look for, but still, this would be the formula for finding them . . . ”

  He was pointing to something on the top sheet of paper, one from the stack he’d handed to Mileva when he first arrived in Novi Sad.

  “Let me take a look,” Mileva said.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and Albert thrust that paper before her eyes. He settled in beside her, leaning in to read the paper with her.

  “Fascinating . . . ,” Mileva murmured. “Oh, Albert, if this is true, then . . . Oh. Oh, no. Is that a two right there or a three?”

  “Let me look at that . . .” Albert took the paper from her. He stared at it for a moment, and then his face fell. “I added wrong! I thought this idea was going to change the world, but I couldn’t even add . . .”

  He crumpled the paper in his hand and dropped it to the floor.

  “Well, let’s look at what else you have,” Mileva said comfortingly. “You’ve got a lot of papers here.”

  She shifted to look at the next sheet down.

  This was not one that Albert had handed to Mileva. It was one that Mileva had copied from Jonah’s description of the tracer pages showing what Albert had been thinking about in original time, before any time traveler had intervened. It was what Albert was supposed to be thinking about in September 1903, instead of split time.

  “Imagine yourself riding a beam of light, going the same speed as light . . . ,” Mileva read out loud.

  “What?” Albert asked. “I didn’t write that!”

  “Looks like you did,” Mileva said. “This is your handwriting, see?”

  She held the papers closer to him, so he could have a better view. Then, with feigned playfulness, she jostled his arm.

  “Must be nice to be so brilliant—you come up with something like this and then forget you even wrote it down!” Mileva teased. “You know you forget to wear socks if I don’t remind you—now you’re having so many great ideas you forget one when the next one shows up. You must have written this on the train. See how the writing is a little bumpy? It’s okay, you have been under a lot of strain lately. We’ll just put this idea aside . . .”

  She started to slide past that paper to the next one, but Albert put his hand over hers, stopping her. He yanked the paper from her hand.

  “Stop! Wait!” Albert said frantically. “This is like an idea I started thinking about when I was sixteen, but then I got distracted. And yet, it’s so fascinating. . . . Speed of light . . . other factors relative . . .”

  He seemed to be reading all the way to the bottom of the page. Then he eagerly flipped the paper over.

  The back of the paper, of course, was blank.

  “Didn’t I write anything else?” Albert asked, sounding a little desperate. “But, of course, it would naturally follow that . . . Mileva, don’t just sit there! Give me something to write with!”

  Mileva handed him a pencil. He started to write with the paper braced against his leg, but the pencil poked straight through. Albert scrambled backward to the bedside table. He shoved books and cups and the lamp to the very edge and put the paper down flat. He began writing and writing and writing.

  Mileva silently moved the lamp and the books and the cups to the floor, so they wouldn’t fall.

  “Albert?” Mileva said.

  No answer. Albert didn’t even seem to have heard her.

  Mileva glanced around the room, searching for Jonah. He took a step forward for the first time since watching Albert unfreeze. Mileva shook her head.

  “You are so bad at being invisible,” she whispered. “On top of everything else, your shoes squeak.”

  Jonah put his finger over his lips.

  “Shh,” he hissed.

  “Doesn’t matter. Albert’s going to be distracted for hours,” she whispered. “Our plan worked!”

  “It did? Completely?” Jonah whispered back.

  Mileva stepped closer to Jonah. She picked up the sheet of paper Alber
t had crumpled and dropped to the ground only moments earlier. She smoothed it out, folded it over, and handed it to Jonah.

  “I think so,” Mileva said. “For now. If you dispose of that. But you’ll have to go back to the time hollow to know for sure.” She seemed to be trying to smile, but the edges of her mouth kept slipping. She took the Elucidator out of her pocket and held it out to him as well. “Here.”

  Jonah stared at the wooden case of the Elucidator. Practically every other moment he’d spent in 1903—at least, the unfrozen, time-moving-forward part of 1903—he’d longed to snatch the Elucidator away from Mileva. He’d plotted for it, agonized over it, dreamed about it.

  And now she was handing the Elucidator right to him, and he could only stare.

  “Elucidator,” Mileva said. “You can take voice commands from me or Jonah now.”

  “Wait—aren’t you coming with me?” Jonah asked.

  He’d been so focused on the first part of their plan—the need to get Albert to move past the news about Lieserl, to stop thinking about split time, and to catch up on all the thoughts he was supposed to be having in 1903 instead. Jonah had barely believed any of that was possible. So he’d barely thought about what would happen next.

  He hadn’t thought at all about how this moment would feel.

  “Don’t you at least want to come and say good-bye to Emily?” he asked. “You could zip right in and out of time—Albert would never know.”

  Mileva glanced quickly at Albert, who was still completely lost in the world of the papers he’d “forgotten” he wrote. It didn’t look as if he would be aware of anything else for a very long time.

  “It would be too . . . hard,” Mileva said. She twisted her hands. “I had thirteen years of watching Emily grow up, thirteen years of getting to know and love her. She had—what? Just a few weeks of knowing me? When she was sick and not even conscious a lot of the time, and not really herself . . .”

  Jonah saw everything too clearly all of a sudden. Mileva meant that she loved Emily too much, and Emily didn’t have much reason to care about her at all. What kind of good-bye would that make?