Caught (Missing) (20 page)

“Hanserl,” she crooned in his ear. “Our little Hans Albert. You’re going to grow up so big and strong—and smart! So smart!”

The real Mileva sitting by Emily was sobbing again, but these might have been tears of joy. She rubbed her hand against her stomach.

“A little boy! Hans Albert!” she cried out. She paused. “Will you ever have a chance to live for real?”

Maybe the tears weren’t tears of joy.

Albert’s and Mileva’s lives kept unspooling on the wall, before Mileva’s eyes, before Jonah’s eyes. Hans Albert was a useful addition to their family, because as he grew up, Jonah could see how much time was passing, how far ahead Mileva was watching after 1903. Little Hans Albert could sit up, he could crawl, he could walk . . . He was one, then two, then three . . .

Albert played the violin and talked boisterously with friends. He wrote letters bragging about the great scientific papers he was about to publish. He played with Hans Albert, then forgot about the little boy in the middle of their games and began writing down formulas instead . . .

The Mileva who showed up projected on the wall still checked Albert’s math, when he wasn’t showing it to someone else, but mostly she was cooking and cleaning and
boiling Hans Albert’s diapers on the stove. She seemed to be fading away before Jonah’s eyes. When she and Albert went to parties, he laughed and talked and told bawdy stories. More and more, Mileva sat silently in the corner.

“Don’t,” the Mileva who sat on the floor of the time hollow pleaded with her own self. “Join in. What’s wrong with you? Everyone there is your friend!”

But the future Mileva just looked more and more hollow-eyed, more and more angry, more and more pained.

Another Einstein child arrived, a second little boy they named Eduard but seemed to mostly call Tete. A parade of important-looking men began showing up to talk to Albert. They offered jobs at one university then another. Prague, Zurich, Berlin . . . Albert stood behind podiums and spoke, and whole auditoriums full of very serious-looking scientists listened intently.

Albert kissed a woman who wasn’t Mileva.

Oh, no!
Jonah thought.
Did I miss something? Did those two get divorced while I wasn’t looking?

No—that kiss also seemed to be a surprise to the real Mileva watching her future life.

“Albert Einstein!” she hissed. “How could you! With her?”

She had tears in her eyes once more.

Is that Mileva’s future life?
Jonah wondered.
Or just a possible
future? Is there anything anyone can change—if any of us ever get out of this time hollow?

Maybe Jonah was distracted pondering these questions, because huge gobs of time seemed to be passing on the wall before him. Little Hans Albert and baby Tete grew up. Albert and Mileva both turned gray and a little wild-haired—the change in appearance making Albert more and more recognizable. This was the man Jonah had seen pictures of all his life, the lovable genius who jokingly stuck out his tongue for photographers, who helped little kids with their math, who made forgetting to wear socks the sign of a brain that just had better things to think about.

Albert was honored in a ticker-tape parade. He won a Nobel Prize. He traveled the world.

He and Mileva fought about getting divorced. About their children.

Mileva collapsed and had to be hospitalized. She found out her brother was missing in action in World War I in Russia. She saw first her sister, then Tete, have mental breakdowns and get sent to asylums—sometimes in horrifying places. Still, Mileva visited each of them faithfully. She taught piano lessons and math, rented out apartments, scraped together money to seek better treatment for her troubled son.

Some of the time Jonah felt as if he were watching a
movie in history class, only in 3-D color rather than in black and white. Armies marched across Europe. People carted wheelbarrow-loads of money just to buy bread. Nazis threatened Albert because he was Jewish. Albert moved to America. He wrote a letter to the president of the United States about nuclear weapons, about how to win World War II.

Mileva died.

Albert died.

The wall went blank.

The real Mileva sat staring at the emptiness, breathing hard.

“And Lieserl?” she finally said in a broken voice. “What of Lieserl, if . . . ”

Jonah wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but evidently the Elucidator could follow her line of reasoning.

The scene on the wall came to life again, but it didn’t look like history anymore. Or, rather—it looked like history that even Jonah remembered.

A phone was ringing.

Yeah, we had a cordless phone just like that when Katherine and I were little too,
he thought.

Now an ordinary-looking couple clutched the telephone together. The woman had the same kind of haircut Jonah’s mom had had, years ago. The father wore
a T-shirt bragging that he’d volunteered at the Columbus Marathon in 1995.

“Tonight?” the woman was saying. “We get the baby tonight?”

The next scene showed the woman holding a baby in her arms.

Jonah realized he was watching Emily’s childhood. She blew seeds off dandelion stems. She played an angel in a Christmas pageant. She received an A+ on a math test. She opened a birthday present that turned out to be a miniature microscope.

Mileva, watching, had tears in her eyes once more.

Now Emily-on-the-wall looked exactly the same age as Emily sitting frozen beside Mileva. She seemed to be wearing the same blue jeans, the same maroon shirt. And Jonah recognized her surroundings as well: a time hollow, possibly this very same one.

On the wall she was talking to a version of JB that wasn’t frozen yet.

“I’ll do it,” she was telling him with quiet resolve. “I want to help.”

What? Wait!
Jonah thought.
Did I just miss something? What did she just agree to? Mileva—can’t you back things up and show me that again?

It was maddening not to be able to ask out loud.

Mileva let the scene keep playing, but it transitioned to a moment Jonah had actually witnessed: Emily showing up in the toddler Lieserl’s room, Jonah convincing her to join with her tracer, Mileva sweeping into the room and finding her there . . .

“Oooh,” Mileva said, letting out a sigh of understanding. “So that’s how it worked.” She started punching in commands on the Elucidator. “No, no, I want to see more of her life in the twenty-first century. I want to see what’s possible for my daughter that wasn’t possible for me . . .”

The scene on the wall only froze. Evidently some sort of explanation showed up on the Elucidator, because Mileva started complaining.

“Why not?” she muttered. “Why can’t I see everything?” She paused. “It depends on
what
?”

Mileva looked up, squinting in distress. Jonah would have expected her to look toward the real Emily again—maybe pat her daughter’s face or stroke her daughter’s hair. Instead Mileva stood up and walked unsteadily toward Jonah. She lifted her arm, pointing the Elucidator at him.

“Restore him,” she said. “Please.”

A split second later, Jonah felt his right foot touch the ground. He stumbled, his ankle twisting.

Mileva grabbed his arm, holding him up.

“Will you help me?” she asked.

“What?” Jonah said, his first word in an eon. “You unfroze me first? Before your own daughter? Why?”

Mileva opened her mouth to answer, but Jonah was so relieved to be able to talk again that he decided to keep asking questions.

“Is it because you thought the unfreezing might be dangerous, and you wouldn’t really be that upset if it killed me?”

Mileva laughed. And then, strangely, she hugged him.

“I forgot how funny you were,” she murmured. She held him by the shoulders, looking directly into his face. Her eyes gleamed. “I forgot how wonderful it could be just talking to another human being, and having them answer. After more than sixty years . . .”

“Sixty years!” Jonah exclaimed.

“Well, yes,” Mileva said. “I watched the entire rest of my life, and the rest of Albert’s life, and the first thirteen years of my daughter’s life in the future . . . I taught myself everything I could about time travel too, and that probably took sixty years as well, just by itself. Though that’s impossible to measure, since time really doesn’t pass in here, and I never got hungry and I never got thirsty and”—she patted her stomach—“I never got any more pregnant . . . Oh, how Albert would love this place! He could get so fixated on his ideas, and he would forget to eat or drink or, you know, even comb his hair . . . If he were in this time hollow, he’d stay a million years!”

She sounded so merry, Jonah wondered if he’d just been hallucinating about all the sad details of her life.

“Um,” he said. “When you were watching what was going to happen to you and Albert—er, I guess, what
could
happen—I saw it too. I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for watching her life—like such a stalker—or if he was apologizing for what happened in her life: Albert betraying her, and her being so sick and sad and poor, and the tragedies and failures piling up around her even as the fame and honor and glory piled up for Albert.

Something in Mileva’s expression softened.

“Thank you,” she said. “I do appreciate that. But I knew
you were watching all along. You and my daughter and Katherine, and those strange men I’ve never even met . . . It’s a strange quirk of stopped time in a time hollow, that even people frozen in time aren’t completely frozen. Time can’t ever quite stop here, since it doesn’t really exist in this place to begin with.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Jonah objected.

Mileva shrugged, the merriness back.

“Oh, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, for the contradictions of time travel!” she joked. “But it’s such a relief, that stopped time doesn’t work that way in general. I was so happy to find out that Albert frozen in 1903
isn’t
aware of anything, and when you and I unfreeze him, it will seem to him that nothing happened. For him, one second of his ordinary time will just flow right into the next.”

Jonah felt relieved by that detail about stopped time, too. It meant that if he ever got back to the twenty-first century, his science teacher would never know that Jonah had sneaked out of class.

Assuming Jonah was ever able to return to the twenty-first century and sneak back
in
to class.

Jonah realized he was getting ahead of himself.

“Hold on,” he said to Mileva. “Did you just say that you and I are going to unfreeze Albert in 1903? Aren’t you
going to unfreeze Katherine and Emily and JB and Hadley first? Can’t you just let the experts take care of dealing with 1903?”

Mileva bit her lip.

“No,” she said. She winced a little.

“Why not?” Jonah challenged.

Mileva sighed. She patted the puff of hair around her face, still preserved in the topknot style of 1903.

“Time is very fragile right now,” she explained. “I think it’s possible that outside of this room, all of time is frozen. In every time period.”

Jonah gaped at her.

She was watching him very carefully. Almost sympathetically.

“You should think of it like . . . I know,” she said. “In the twenty-first century I saw Emily—my Lieserl—reading an article about medically induced comas. Sometimes when patients are horribly sick or have been in horrible accidents, the doctors will give them medicine to keep them comatose, so their bodies can use all their energy for healing. That’s almost exactly what’s happened now. Time itself is in a coma, and as far as I can tell, you and I are the only ones who can heal it. Anybody else unfrozen would be an unnecessary complication.” She gulped, and shot a tense glance at Emily. “A . . . potentially fatal complication.”

Jonah stared at her. Maybe another sixty years passed before he could figure out an adequate response.

“You’re not supposed to know about things from the twenty-first century,” he finally said. “That’s dangerous.”

Mileva’s lips curled up into a rueful smile.

“And . . . that’s why it had to be you that I unfroze,” she said, shaking her head. “Because you will keep telling me things like that. And . . . I will need to hear them.”

Jonah squinted at Mileva.

“Why should I trust you?” he asked. “Why should you trust me?”

Mileva glanced quickly at Emily, who still sat frozen in the exact spot where she’d huddled protectively against Mileva—when? Sixty years ago? A hundred and twenty?

Then Mileva took Jonah by the shoulders, gently turning him so he faced Katherine, still frozen mid-stride, and JB and Hadley, frozen so grimly in their chairs.

“We have to trust each other,” Mileva said. “Because that is the only way to save the people we love.”

They landed in a patch of sunshine. Jonah’s head was spinning, but he couldn’t have said how much of that was from timesickness and how much of it was from the dizzying plans Mileva had shared with him. Jonah had tried to understand her explanations of what she’d learned about time travel and its underlying principles, but so much of it seemed nonsensical. For instance, she’d told him why three time travelers joining together in stopped time was no problem, but four could lead to disastrous unpredictability.

What was the reason, again? Oh, yeah, it has something to do with time being the fourth dimension,
Jonah remembered.
But that’s only an issue in stopped time, right?

He hoped it never mattered that he couldn’t remember clearly. His brain jumped to the mind-boggling array of broader topics Mileva had discussed: the speed of
light, the theory of relativity, quanta, Schrödinger’s cat, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle . . .

Uncertainty is right,
Jonah thought, his stomach lurching.
What if Mileva is wrong about everything? What if there’s some blatant error in her calculations, and I’m too stupid to figure it out? Or what if she knows I’m that stupid, and she’s tricking me on purpose?