There were four informal places set around the dining room table, since Scott would be eating with them too that night, as usual. Back home, Winnie and Brunhilde took their supper at the kitchen table, and Father didn’t eat dinner until quite late, if at all. Here, dinner was a family affair.
Mama dished out some Wiener schnitzel and buttered cabbage for each of them, and Father cut into his breaded pork and took a bite.
“Hmm—new recipe?”
Mama smiled ruefully.
“A rationing experiment—I left the eggs out of the breading. Not quite how Grandma used to make it, eh?”
“It’s good! Just . . . different.”
“Well, extra eggs means we can have cake with Sunday’s dinner.”
“Aha! In that case, this is the best Wiener schnitzel I’ve ever had!”
It was odd to see this levity from her double’s parents. Her Mama and Father had certainly loved each other, but Winnie remembered there being so much resentment and arguing too.
Had her double been troubled by those memories? Or had those dark early days been papered over by the later, better ones?
Mama and Father seemed so happy with each other now, and so in love. People could grow together through shared tragedy—or be torn apart. If Winnie told them what happened to their daughter, would she be bringing those dark days back?
“Are you feeling better today?” her double’s father asked. “No headaches? No double vision?”
Winnie glanced up from her plate. She felt so cut off from them, lost in her own unhappy thoughts, that she was surprised Father could even see her from across the gulf.
“No, sir,” she said. “I’m feeling much better, thank you.”
Father gave her a funny look and a little grin. Winnie reminded herself that here, Father was “Daddy.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s very good to hear. Now, Scott, tell me more about this project you’re working on?”
“Oh, I just constructed a Faraday cage for extra credit in Gilmore’s class.”
“And Winnie, you wanted to help? We just may make a scientist of you yet! I wonder if there are any summer programs we should be looking into for you for next year.”
He seemed so eager for his daughter to show more interest in such things. It made Winnie’s heart hurt in ways she didn’t quite understand. He thought he was seeing his daughter change, when in reality, she would never change again. Never develop new hobbies or interests. She would be forever sixteen. Stuck there, unfinished.
Winnie swallowed thickly, but her discomfort went unnoticed.
“Oh, Heinrich!” Mama said lightly, swatting at his arm. “Let the girl study what she likes.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Father said to Mama with a smile, “but if your father hadn’t encouraged your academics, we never would have met at university.”
Mama shook her head in amusement. “True, but I’m not sure our daughter’s interests are purely academic, in this case.”
“Ah, but neither were ours,” he replied with a wink.
Mama grinned, and she looked younger than Winnie had ever seen her look, even a decade ago.
Father looked at Winnie and must have misinterpreted her consternation, because he said, “I know, I know—your parents are a couple of silly-heads, and it’s awfully embarrassing.”
Winnie had never thought her father capable of such—such lightheartedness. She and Father were such a grim pair compared to their doppelgängers, although she knew her double had carried her own burdens too.
Winnie glanced at Mama. It was the loss of her that had done it—especially since rather than putting her death behind them, grief remained the engine that drove their work on the splinter machine.
Was that why Father had always kept Winnie at a distance—because losing his wife had schooled him to believe that love equaled loss?
It was a more generous interpretation than she had ever thought of before—generous to him, but also to herself.
This version of her parents seemed so comfortable. Their relationship seemed so strong. But was it strong enough to weather the loss of their child?
Should Winnie tell them now—who she really was, and what had happened to their real daughter? If she and Scott were caught that night, on campus, breaking into Fermi’s office, she might end up being carted off to a military prison. This could be her final chance to be honest with them.
As Winnie was considering this course—its risks, her fear—she felt the stomach jolt of an oncoming splinter.
“I’m not your daughter!” a splinter-her confessed.
She told them what had happened. All of it, including the role Hawthorn played and the threat he still posed.
There was confusion. Then shouting. Then tears.
Finally, that splinter-Father grabbed his coat and fled the house to go confront Hawthorn, “the true author of my daughter’s demise.”
What happened to Father then was beyond the scope of the splinter she saw . . . but Winnie felt safe concluding it could be nothing good.
Winnie couldn’t tell them.
Not until Hawthorn was no longer a threat.
“You look so deep in thought,” Mama said with a frown. “Is everything okay?”
Winnie faked a smile. “Yeah, I’m just tired.”
It was an odd family they made. Professor, wife, protégé—and the changeling who had brought about the death of their daughter.
Scott helped Winnie clear the table, then she walked him to the foyer to say goodnight. He paused in front of the door, taking her hand in his own. Winnie thought he was going to assure her everything would be all right, something anodyne and untrue like that, but instead he just gave her fingers a gentle squeeze and whispered, “I’ll see you tonight.”
He would be coming to get her at one o’clock—even Father should be asleep by then—and then the two of them would head to campus.
Winnie squeezed his hand back and tried not to think of all the things that could go wrong.
After he left, Winnie headed upstairs and dressed for bed. She lay down—it would be nice to rest, although she had no intention of sleeping.
After a little while, there was a knock on her bedroom door.
“May I come in?” Mama called softly.
“Yes,” Winnie said, “come in,” even though she dreaded the prospect of a conversation with her.
Mama was wrapped tight in a beautiful blue dressing gown, and her golden hair was pinned up under a silk scarf for bed. She carried a tray with two steaming mugs.
“I brought you some drinking chocolate,” Mama said. “Can I sit with you a minute?”
Winnie nodded, and tried very hard not to let the woman see that she was about to cry.
This was something Winnie’s own mother had done for her when she was a little girl, whenever she was sick, or sad, or if Father had been particularly awful that day. Mama had told her once that it was something her own mother had done for her too, when she was a child.
Mama set the tray down on the bedside table and sat down on the edge of the bed. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead, she pulled Winnie into a tight hug. The sudden movement made Winnie’s head throb painfully, but still, that embrace was the most wonderful thing to happen to her in recent memory.
Winnie closed her eyes and clung tight. Her mother’s perfume was the same—verbena, rose, and some light musk. It took Winnie right back to Germany: picking wildflowers in the field behind their little house; carefully working on her block letters at the table while Mama prepared dinner; being read to in bed, tucked tight under the covers. Winnie hadn’t even known she remembered that smell.
Winnie was much larger than she’d been the last time her mother held her, but the embrace gave her the same feeling it always had, the feeling that maybe nothing would ever go wrong again. But it had—oh, how it had!
Mama released her from the embrace and sat back. Winnie was surprised to see that she was crying.
“What’s wrong?”
Mama shook her head. Tears poured freely down her face.
“I wanted to keep you safe, but . . .”
“You did—I am. I promise, I’m okay!”
Winnie would have told her even bolder lies, to make her stop crying like that.
“I was wrong—I see that now. Wrong to think seeing splits was something that could be suppressed.”
Oh. What made Mama want to dredge all that up now? Winnie was startled by this sudden confession, but deeply curious too.
“Why did you?”
Mama sighed heavily. She seemed to hesitate, then finally she nodded to herself, and began to speak.
“When I was young, all I wanted was to be a scientist. And I was doing it! I was at the University of Zurich—the only girl in the physics department. I was studying, hard. But no one—no one—took me seriously. They just saw, well, this.” Mama fingered a lock of her blonde hair, which had slipped loose of the curls she’d pinned it in for bed. “They just saw a silly girl. But then I was given an opportunity. A famous scientist approached me, and, well, because of my—of our—ability, I could really see what that choice meant.”
Winnie had thought she wanted to hear Mama’s reasoning, but not if it meant learning more about what had happened between her and Schrödinger. Winnie felt the same urge she’d had when she met Schrödinger himself—the desire to throw her hands over her ears. Because really, at its heart, the story of how Winnie was conceived was the story of how she’d ruined her mother’s life, wasn’t it?
But this woman seemed compelled to talk about it now, for god knew what reason, and considering what Winnie had done to her—in her own world, and here—the least she could do was listen.
“This professor invited me on a trip. I knew his reputation. I didn’t trust him. I thought about saying no, but then I saw a split. A peek at what awaited me if I said yes. If I went away with him, I would be the inspiration for an incredible scientific discovery. Winnie, we haven’t even seen everything that results yet, all from that one paper! It’s—it’s world-changing.” She smiled and shook her head. “I’m proud of it, still, all these years later. Maybe that’s wrong of me, but there it is. But being part of that work, it meant sacrifice, in all sorts of different ways.”
It meant having her, Winnie knew. It meant leaving school. It meant being the only one to know that “Schrödinger’s Equation” should have carried her own name too.
It meant marrying a man who loved her, but who never fully let her forget that severing ties with his mentor, marrying her, and raising that man’s child had complicated his own career—at least in those early years. Winnie hadn’t realized it at the time, but that was one of the things Mama and Father had argued about so much, wasn’t it?
“Why are you—”
“I saw it, Winnie. I saw a split at the dinner table. The same one, I think, that you saw. I saw you telling us what happened to our daughter.”
Oh god. Oh no. As soon as Winnie met this Mama, she understood she couldn’t keep her—but she had never expected this.
“You must hate me.”
Mama looked at her, brow furrowed, still crying. She gave a helpless shrug.
“How could I? It’s Hawthorn’s fault. And mine. I made her think she could never talk about seeing splits. If I hadn’t, she could have called me and told me what was going on. She could have told her father. She wouldn’t have had to try to solve it all herself.” Mama gave a heavy sigh. “I just thought things would be easier if she could train herself to ignore them. At least until she was older. They just . . . they make the world so big.”
“And you wanted her life to be—smaller?”
“Not smaller, exactly. Simpler. A simpler life, but a happier one. Because here’s the thing. We don’t get to see it all. We feel like we can see everything, because we can see more. But we don’t get to see it all. I didn’t see this.”
Winnie understood what Mama meant. That splinter Winnie saw, when she saw herself meeting James . . . that put her on a path, one she didn’t really understand. It had led her—it had led all of them—here.
“I wasn’t able to keep her safe,” Mama continued. “But I will protect you. I’ll figure out what to do about Hawthorn. We can’t say anything to Heinrich yet—you saw, he’ll go off half-cocked—but I’ll come up with a solution. We can talk more tomorrow, okay? Now you should rest.”
“I don’t understand why you aren’t angry with me. Why you don’t despise me.”
“It was an accident, right? And I’m your mother. There have been some forks in the road since then, but I gave birth to you.”
Mama pulled the covers snug around Winnie’s shoulders. She hesitated a moment, then kissed Winnie gently on the cheek.
Mama was so forgiving. How could she be so forgiving?
But it didn’t make Winnie feel absolved. If anything, it made her feel even guiltier.
Mama wanted to protect her from Hawthorn. It made Winnie feel even more resolved to take him on herself, so Mama wouldn’t have to.
No matter what Mama thought, Winnie understood that this was her mess. She would fix it.
Tonight.