Caught (Missing) (17 page)

But Albert held it, proving that these weren’t normal circumstances. Albert stood unnaturally frozen, and the dust motes stood unnaturally frozen, and—Jonah felt certain—all of time stood frozen along with them.

Mileva began to scream.

“What happened?” she shrieked. “What’s wrong with him? What happened to my husband?”

“Calm down,” Jonah said. “Nothing’s wrong with him. Something’s wrong with time.”

Like that was supposed to be a comforting thought?
No, no, don’t worry. Your husband’s fine. It’s just time itself that’s ruined. No big deal.

“Why isn’t Mileva frozen too?” Katherine asked. She was still sitting in the chair on the other side of the bed. She’d evidently had no time to move at all. “Back home when time stopped, only time travelers could . . . oh.”

Jonah figured things out at the same time as his sister: The reason Mileva wasn’t frozen was that she was a time traveler now too. She’d become one when the Elucidator skipped all of them ahead to the moment when Albert arrived.

“Could someone please explain what’s going on?” Emily asked in a small voice.

She was perched on the edge of the bed, on the side away from the door. Like Katherine, she clearly hadn’t had enough time to hide. She was sitting so still that Jonah almost could have believed that Emily was as frozen as Albert.

Jonah looked back and forth between the two of them: Emily on the bed and Albert, frozen mid-turn, moving toward her.

“Hold on just a minute,” Jonah said. “Emily, stay right where you are.”

He got up and went over to stand behind Albert. By standing on his tiptoes, Jonah could look over Albert’s shoulder and see the room exactly as Albert had seen it a moment earlier.

Emily was still out of his line of vision. But Jonah turned his head just a fraction to the left, a hair’s breadth difference of positioning. And then he could see her profile—a profile that looked oddly like Albert’s own.

“Time stopped to keep Albert from seeing his daughter,” Jonah announced, stepping back around the man.

Mileva’s screams turned into a gasp.

“No,” she moaned. “So—now even time is conspiring against me? Time itself won’t let me have my husband and my daughter together?”

“I don’t think it’s anything personal,” Katherine said. “It’s just that—Emily wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for time travel, and she certainly shouldn’t be thirteen years old right now. And since some of Einstein’s theories are connected to time travel, maybe it’s too much of a paradox for him to see his theories proved before he’s even thought of them.”

Or has time changed so much that now he’s never going to come up with the theories he’s supposed to have?
Jonah wondered.
What if that’s the real reason time stopped? What if there’s no way to fix it?

Jonah didn’t like scaring himself like that.

“Let’s test things out,” Jonah said, managing to keep his voice steady in spite of himself. “Mileva, get back into the position you were in a minute ago, when you were pulling Albert toward your daughter. Emily, when I give you the signal, could you scoot over about, I don’t know—four or five inches?”

Mileva squinted at him suspiciously for a moment, but then she got back into place. Jonah stepped around behind Albert a second time. And then he motioned to Emily.

Emily leaned slowly to the side, away from Albert. At the same time, Albert leaned forward ever so slightly, his head turning toward Emily. The dust motes in the sunlight danced away from Albert. It was as if Emily’s motion caused all the other movements.

And then everything stopped again, Albert’s face turned just to the point where the next instant would have brought Emily into view.

Mileva yanked harder than ever on Albert’s arm.

“No!” she screamed. “No! It can’t be!”

She put her hands on Albert’s face and seemed to be trying to turn his head. Maybe it felt like trying to move stone; maybe she was afraid of hurting him. After only a moment she changed strategies. She ran toward the bed and grabbed Emily by the arm, pulling her straight toward Albert. Mileva clutched the back of Emily’s head and pressed the girl’s face close to Albert’s. They were nose to nose, eye to eye. If time started up again, Albert would have to be completely blind not to see his daughter before him.

If time ever starts up again . . . ,
Jonah thought.
If Mileva hasn’t just made that impossible . . .

He grabbed Mileva by the shoulders and jerked her away. She was still holding on to Emily, so Emily jerked back, too.

“Stop it!” Jonah yelled at Mileva. “That’s just making things worse!”

“Look at her!” Mileva yelled at Albert, even as she struggled to break away from Jonah. “Look at
us
! Look at your family!”

“Mileva,” Katherine said softly. “I really don’t think he can.”

Mileva froze momentarily, and then all the fight seemed to go out of her. She sank to the floor as if she’d suddenly lost the ability to stand. She buried her face in her arms.

“I’m going to have to choose,” she wailed, her voice only slightly muffled. “I can’t have both of you!”

Emily crouched beside Mileva. She stroked the woman’s hair, gently smoothing down the locks that had slipped down from her topknot.

“You’ve always known you would have to make that choice,” Emily said softly. “Ever since I was born.”

Mileva turned her head and blinked up at her daughter through tear-thickened lashes.

“You know now,” Mileva said.

Emily nodded.

“I think so,” she said. “I think I figured it out.”

Jonah stamped his foot.

“Would someone please tell me what’s going on?” he asked. He’d thought time travel and stopped time and time-travel paradoxes were hard enough to keep track of. But this was incomprehensible. What were Emily and Mileva talking about? They were each staring straight into the other’s eyes, and nodding sympathetically. Mileva was still crying, but she kind of looked relieved, too. And
Emily was smiling at her through tears of her own and murmuring, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Emily?” Katherine asked, and Jonah was kind of glad to see that his sister was acting as baffled as he felt.

Both Emily and Mileva ignored Jonah and Katherine.

“I thought, when Albert and I got married, then we could have you live with us,” Mileva whispered to Emily. “I still hoped . . .”

“Ooooh,” Katherine said. “Now I get it.”

“What?” Jonah demanded.

“Jonah, we should have figured this out ourselves,” Katherine said, her usual confidence back. “We saw Albert and Mileva’s marriage certificate back in Bern, remember? From January 1903, right? And this is—what? September 1903? So Albert and Mileva haven’t even been married a full year, but Lieserl was nineteen months old, so—she was born before her parents were married.”

Katherine had a “Ta-da! Aren’t I brilliant?” tone in her voice, but Mileva grimaced over every word.

“So what?” Jonah asked, feeling a little bit as if he needed to defend Mileva.

He remembered lots of awkward conversations with Mom and Dad back home, where they’d say, “When you’re grown-up, you should wait until you’re married to have kids”—but then follow it with, “Not that there’s anything
wrong with the
kids
whose parents aren’t married.”

Because of me,
Jonah thought.
Because they figure my birth parents probably weren’t married, and that’s why they gave me up for adoption. They didn’t want to make me feel bad.

No wonder he’d had such a mental block about what Mileva was so ashamed of. He didn’t like thinking about things like that.

“I didn’t think people in 1903 had children very often who were—what’s it called? ‘Out of wedlock’?” Katherine said, in a way that she probably meant to sound like she was being sensitive. Or at least sophisticated.

Mileva flinched.

“Albert and I were going to lead such bohemian lives,” she said sadly. She was staring up at the ceiling now, avoiding everyone’s gaze. “We didn’t want to be like everyone else, didn’t want to follow the rules that everyone followed. And, anyhow, we couldn’t afford to get married. And . . . Albert’s family didn’t approve of me. They didn’t think I was good enough for him.”

“But you’re married now,” Emily said softly.

“Albert’s father gave us his blessing right before he died,” Mileva said. She was still staring at the ceiling. “And I thought that would solve everything, but . . . Albert had such trouble finding a job! He’s so much smarter than everyone else that people resent him. And . . . he really
wasn’t very good at job hunting. Then he got the job at the patent office, but it’s a civil-service job, and the Swiss can be so prim and proper sometimes . . .” She turned her head and looked straight at Emily. “We can’t have him lose that job. Do you understand? We’d have nothing!”

“What?” Katherine said, leaning in toward Emily and Mileva. “You mean that even though you’re married now, Albert would be fired if his boss found out you had a baby before your wedding? That’s crazy! That’s, like, a violation of your rights!”

“Katherine,” Jonah said. “I don’t think people had those kinds of rights in 1903.”

Mileva shrugged hopelessly.

“Albert is certain we can never tell anyone in Bern about Lieserl,” she said. “Not without horrible consequences. But I always thought—he’s so smart, Albert is, and he’s going to publish brilliant papers, I just know it. And then universities will be begging him to work for them, and he can get a job in a place where nobody cares about Lieserl’s birth date or our wedding date—or anything. So we were just leaving Lieserl here in Novi Sad for a little while, until things changed, until, until . . .”

“Until time stopped,” Jonah said, and now it was Katherine glaring at him, as if he were the most insensitive clod on the planet.

“So I just have to stay out of Albert’s sight?” Emily asked. “That’s all we have to do to get time to start up again?”

“Are you in his sight lines now?” Katherine asked doubtfully. She stood up and walked toward Albert. “Or is something else messed up now too, that will have to be fixed?”

As she approached Albert, Katherine lifted her arm to the level of his eyes, as if trying to gauge the angle of his vision. She tilted her arm down, sliding it toward Emily.

“He would just be able to see the top of your head, I think,” Katherine said. She crouched down beside Emily and Mileva. “Slide down a little more and we’ll see—oh, wait a minute, Mileva should get back into position first—”

Katherine put her hand on Emily’s shoulder, ready to push her down. At the same time, Katherine reached out her other hand toward Mileva, to help her back up.

Jonah had a sudden flash of memory: him and Katherine and Angela standing on the doorstep at Chip’s house, all of them linked together. And then, a split second later, Jonah and Katherine floating back through time. He still didn’t understand why that had happened. And that had been four time travelers linked together in the midst of stopped time. But what if the same effect worked when it was only three?

“No! Katherine! Stop!” Jonah screamed.

Maybe there wasn’t time for her to hear him and understand and actually do what he said. Katherine wasn’t that great at doing what he said under the best of circumstances. So Jonah scrambled forward, reaching for Katherine to yank her back.

Jonah wasn’t planning on tripping.

The toe of his shoe caught on the edge of the carpet, and he started falling toward the others. He saw Katherine tighten her grip on Emily’s shoulder, steadying herself. Katherine stopped reaching for Mileva and grabbed Jonah’s arm instead. Mileva reached out for him too—defensively, because she probably thought he was going to smash down onto her.

“No!” Jonah tried to scream. “Don’t touch me! Let go!”

The words were ripped from his mouth even as he felt Mileva’s hand on his wrist, even as everything went black, even as he found himself falling and falling and falling . . . .

Falling through time.

Jonah had just caused the very thing he was trying to prevent.

“Oops,” Jonah said.

“You! Are! An! Idiot!” Katherine screamed.

“Okay, okay, agreed,” Jonah said meekly. “Can we just move on from you telling me what a huge mistake I made, to figuring out what we’re going to do next? Are we all here together? Were we all holding on?”

He squinted into the darkness. Katherine was squeezing his arm a little too tightly on his left, and he twisted his wrist around to ease her grip. Just in case, he grabbed onto her arm, too. That gave him enough confidence to lean out and peer past her. He could just barely make out another person on her other side.

“Emily?” he called. “Mileva?”

“I’m here.” Emily’s voice came from the dark shape beyond Katherine. “But—I wasn’t holding onto Mileva. I was just touching her hair. Did we lose her?”

Now, see, that’s the way to act,
Jonah wanted to tell Katherine.
Emily’s really upset and worried about Mileva, but she’s not screaming or anything. She didn’t even raise her voice.

Emily being so calm helped keep Jonah calm too. He looked around cautiously.

“Oh,” he said after a moment. “Mileva’s right beside me. Mileva?”

Everything had been a jumble from the moment Jonah tripped on the carpet, but he could kind of reconstruct the whole sequence now. They’d started falling the instant Mileva had touched his wrist—that must have been the last link connecting the four of them. But at some point after they’d begun falling through time, Mileva had let go.

Now Jonah grabbed her hand, just to be sure she didn’t float away.

“Mileva?” he repeated.

He shook her gently. She didn’t answer. Her legs and her free arm flopped helplessly, as limp as a rag doll’s.

Jonah lost his Emily-influenced sense of calm.

“What happened to her?” Jonah asked frantically. “What if—what if this killed her?”

He was so sorry for tripping. He was so sorry for everything he’d done wrong leading up to this moment. Did it go back to him and Katherine deciding to walk out of school, back in their own time?