Caught (Missing) (16 page)

“So,” Mileva continued in an even tone. “How are we all doing in 1915? How did we manage to escape the shame?”

There was that word again.

Jonah cleared his throat.

“If you’ve helped your husband with his time experiments, then you understand that it’s dangerous to know too much about the future,” he said.

Mileva ignored Jonah and kept staring at Emily.

Emily stared back.

“Shame,” she repeated. “
What
shame? What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” Mileva said sharply. “Nothing at all. It’s what I did, what your father and I did . . . .” She clenched her fists. “If only . . . No, no, I can’t tell you, can’t let you think for an instant that
you
should be ashamed.”

“What did you and Albert
do
?” Katherine asked. “Kill someone?”

“No,” Mileva said, shaking her head violently. “No. It was just—”

She broke off, because someone was tapping on the door.

“Mileva,” her father called softly. “Can I come in? I have some good news.”

Jonah and Katherine and Emily exchanged quick glances. At once, all three of them began to scramble away from the light, toward the shadows in the corners of the room.

Good news?
Jonah thought.
Good?

For a moment he wondered if they’d misunderstood
everything. What good news was possible?

Mileva scrambled up from the bed, carrying the lamp back toward the door.

“Yes?” she said, swinging the door open.

“We sent word to Albert,” Mileva’s father said. “We just got his reply—he’s coming to comfort you. He’s on his way now. You and your husband can grieve together.”

At that exact moment a tracer version of Mileva came dashing into the room and threw herself across the bed, sobbing. She clutched a thin, official-looking piece of paper. Jonah dared to inch close enough to read the boldface words on the paper:

No. I can’t come –Albert

Jonah looked back and forth between the ghostly, sobbing tracer Mileva on the bed and the slightly more hopeful real version standing by the door. His head spun.

Albert isn’t supposed to come here to mourn his daughter,
Jonah thought.

Maybe in original time Albert hadn’t thought there was anything he could do when he heard his daughter was dead. But circumstances were different now—now Albert had undoubtedly been told that Lieserl had vanished and was only presumed dead. And Mileva had supposedly gone mad with grief, and maybe wouldn’t be capable of traveling back to Switzerland by herself. . . .

So those changes were enough to change Albert’s plans?
Jonah thought.
Is it because he’s so worried about his wife and daughter? Or . . . is it because Albert is thinking about time travel now, instead of whatever he was supposed to be thinking about? Has he figured out that Lieserl’s “disappearance” is connected to time travel too?

Jonah felt prickles of dread. He remembered the long, long trip from Switzerland to Novi Sad. It seemed too far for Albert Einstein to travel out of place, out of the path of original time.

Every time he pictured Albert making that journey, he pictured him falling off the globe completely, falling out of history.

Or falling into a completely different history and taking the whole rest of the world with him.

“This isn’t right,” Katherine whispered behind him. “This can’t happen.”

“But what can we do to stop it?” Jonah whispered back.

“You can’t tell Albert the truth,” Jonah said to Mileva as soon as her father left the room again.

“Of course I’ll tell him the truth,” Mileva said, glaring back at Jonah. She swayed slightly, looking dizzy and nauseated and pale. She clutched the bed frame and eased herself back into a seated position, mostly blocking Jonah’s view of her sobbing tracer. Now she looked strong enough to keep arguing. “This isn’t like with my father . . . This is my husband we’re talking about. Lieserl’s father. We tell each other everything. We’ll figure out what to do about all this, together. He’ll understand even the details that my brain keeps tripping over.”

She waved her hand vaguely, in a way that seemed to indicate Emily and the Elucidator and even the keening of the mourners still out in the front room of the house.

“But he’s not supposed to understand,” Jonah said. “He’s not supposed to know about any of this. It could ruin everything.”

“Oh, piffle,” Mileva said. She seized the blanket on her bed and shook it out. “You’re a child—an amazing child, even, who’s known invisibility and . . . and time travel? Have you traveled through time along with my daughter?” She gazed speculatively at Jonah, but didn’t wait for an answer. “You’ve seen and done these amazing things, and yet you sound like some of the old men in my village, who claim that humans are not meant to know the miracles of science, not meant to see by electric lights, not meant to move about by automobile, not meant to see the bones of their own hands revealed to them by X-rays . . . It’s only ignorance and fear that make you think that way! Once people learn more, once people understand—you’ll see! Knowledge and science will bring us such enlightenment!”

Jonah squinted at Mileva. She looked the same as she had before: a somber, plain woman who was probably more than twice Jonah’s age. She was definitely a grown-up, and he was still definitely a kid. But for a moment he felt a million years older than her.

Doesn’t she know about nuclear weapons?
He wondered.
Doesn’t she know that cars brought pollution, and even X-rays can give you cancer if you have too many of them?

No. She wouldn’t know about any of those problems.
In 1903, Mileva Einstein was still living in an age where people could believe that scientific advances would bring nothing but good.

How could Jonah tell her any different when her own husband was going to come up with ideas that helped cause some of those very advances—and problems?

Jonah looked desperately toward Emily and Katherine.

“We know your husband is a genius at science,” Katherine said soothingly. “He’ll do what he thinks is best for science. But are you sure he’ll do what’s best for your daughter?”

“He will!” Mileva said, but now her voice was shrill and defensive.

Katherine began drawing something out of the pocket of her blue jeans. Jonah realized it was the letter from Albert to Mileva that they’d read out in the woods. The letter Mileva was supposed to read and cry over with her dying daughter.

“You probably forgot about Albert’s letter, with everything else that’s been going on,” Katherine said. Now she sounded almost apologetic, as if she regretted bringing it up. “But we saw it, and, well, he doesn’t really sound like he cares that much about Lieserl.”

“Give me that,” Mileva said, snatching the letter from Katherine’s grasp and yanking it from its envelope. She scanned it silently.

“I’m sorry,” Katherine whispered.

But the letter that had sent Mileva’s tracer into hysterics out in the woods didn’t seem to faze Mileva in the least now.

She looked up with a shrug, her eyes completely dry.

“Albert is better with numbers than words,” she said. “Sometimes when he’s in a hurry, writing a letter, he doesn’t say what he really means. But I know. He’s coming here, isn’t he? Doesn’t that mean more than mere words?” She gazed toward Emily. “You’ll see. When you meet him, when you meet your father . . . when the three of us are finally together . . .”

Emily was shaking her head.

“I don’t think it’s supposed to happen like that,” she said softly. She glanced toward Jonah and Katherine. “Right?”

“This is out of your control,” Jonah told Mileva. He pointed at Emily. “She can just run away if she wants to, you know?”

“If you try to force her and Albert together, that’s what will happen,” Katherine agreed.

Jonah felt a burst of inspiration.

“In fact,” he said, “she’ll run away if you don’t call Albert right now and tell him not to come to Novi Sad. Tell him to go back to Bern. You have to do that.”

Mileva gaped at him.

“And how am I supposed to ‘call’ my husband when
he’s on a train hundreds of miles away?” she asked.

Emily and Katherine were both frowning and shaking their heads at Jonah.

Oh, yeah,
Jonah thought.
No cell phones. There’s no way to stop Albert.

It was dizzying to think about that—the fact that Albert Einstein, in transit, was completely unreachable, completely out of touch. Jonah’s parents had talked about how, before cell phones, the whole world was like that. But time travel kept reinforcing how terrifying that must have been on a daily basis.

“Never mind,” Jonah mumbled.

“I could still run away,” Emily said quietly, glancing uncertainly at Mileva. “I don’t want to—I don’t want to treat you like you’re my enemy. I want us to figure out how to work things out together. But . . .”

“But what you want—you just can’t have that,” Katherine said. “You can’t tell your husband everything you know about your daughter. You can’t let him meet his daughter who’s eleven years older than she should be now—you just can’t. It’s impossible.”

“Really,” Mileva said flatly. She gritted her teeth. “Did you know that when I was younger, people told me a girl would never be allowed to study physics? Did you know that people said someone like me—a girl who limped, who was too old, who’d spent her whole life studying—would
never be anything but an old maid? And, certainly, someone like
Albert
would never marry me?” She clenched her fists angrily. “I don’t like it when people tell me something is impossible!”

“But some things really can’t happen,” Jonah said. “Or—they shouldn’t, because there are too many dangerous consequences.”

Katherine sank down into one of the chairs near the bed.

“We’ve got hours and hours before Albert gets to Novi Sad,” she said. “We’ve got all the time in the world to figure out how to handle this. There are three of us and only one of Mileva—we’ve got the upper hand.”

“That’s what you think,” Mileva said.

She shoved one of her clenched fists down into the pocket of her dress. Dimly, Jonah realized that that was probably where she’d tucked the Elucidator.

What if she’s so mad at us she decides to destroy it?
he wondered.

“Hey, hey, don’t—,” Jonah began, lunging toward Mileva.

But Mileva wasn’t lifting the Elucidator in order to smash it against the floor. She wasn’t throwing it against the wall. She was speaking into it.

“Skip us forward in time!” she commanded the Elucidator. “Skip us forward to the moment when Albert opens that door!”

Jonah hadn’t even thought about that as a possibility. Never in a million years would he have thought of Mileva trying to use the Elucidator in quite that way, to outsmart them.

She’ll see,
he thought.
She’ll find out for herself that the Elucidator is more complicated than that, that you always have to be careful about what you tell it . . .

But even as his brain was hiccupping out that thought, his body jerked out of his control. He had a brief sense of weightlessness, of hovering in midair.

No—of falling.

I jumped,
he told himself.
I was lunging to grab the Elucidator from Mileva’s hand.

That didn’t explain why he seemed to take too long to land. That didn’t explain why the dim, lamp-lit room was suddenly bright and airy and open, with sunlight
streaming in through every window. That didn’t explain why Mileva’s sobbing tracer, sprawled across the bed, had completely vanished.

And that didn’t explain why, a split second later, Jonah heard the doorknob rattle, the door itself creaking open.

“Hide!” he called out to Katherine and Emily, even as he himself hit the floor and rolled. He tried to scramble under the blankets hanging down from the bed.

“Albert!” Mileva cried delightedly. She leaped down from the bed and raced for the door.

Jonah couldn’t help turning around to look. It was too late to get out of the way, anyhow. He might as well see what was going on.

Albert Einstein stood in the doorway looking rumpled and travel-weary. He squinted confusedly at Mileva.

Because the Elucidator sped him forward through time too and he’s disoriented?
Jonah wondered.
No—because he expected to find his wife sobbing over their dead daughter, not beaming like all her dearest wishes have just come true.

“Mileva?” Albert asked hesitantly. He was looking only at his wife. He hadn’t broadened his gaze to notice Jonah or Katherine or Emily. He was too focused.

He smiled uncertainly.

“I—I brought you some math problems to check,” he said. “To cheer you up.”

He held out a sheaf of papers.

Mileva laughed. She took the papers but didn’t even look at them, throwing her arms around her husband instead.

“Thank you, but there’s no need for that,” she said. She kissed him. “I have something even better to show you. Someone.”

She stepped to the side and took his hand, as if she planned to lead him straight to Emily.

“You finally get to meet our Lieserl,” she said, tugging on his hand.

“I—,” Albert began.

Jonah couldn’t have said which he noticed first: the way Albert’s voice just ended, the single syllable, “I,” not even fully formed, or the bafflement and worry that flooded over Mileva’s face.

She stopped moving forward, stopped pulling Albert toward Emily. Mileva hesitated, then turned and looked back at her husband, who had stopped halfway in and halfway out of a particularly bright sunbeam. He was close enough to Jonah that Jonah could see the way Albert’s forward motion had displaced the dust motes dancing in the sunlight. But the dust motes weren’t dancing anymore. They weren’t moving at all. They hung suspended in midair, completely still, just as Albert stood completely still, one foot jutted out, one arm stretched toward Mileva. It wasn’t natural to stop in such an unbalanced pose. Under
normal circumstances Jonah didn’t think anyone would be able to hold that stance for more than an instant.