I know I’ll be tired all day tomorrow if I don’t fall back asleep, but my mind won’t shut down. God only knows what the clock reads—3 a.m., maybe 4 a.m.—but my brain has been whirring like it’s midday for a good hour or more. After I got home last night from my universe-bending rendezvous with Elie, I daydreamed all the way through dinner and the rest of the evening before dropping asleep at eleven, but I awoke from a Chagall-esque dream which has left my neurons firing at Mach 5.
The bizarre reality that is Elie won’t stop swirling through my brain. She was a normal, albeit odd-acting, foreigner as of yesterday morning. Intriguing, yes. A tad beguiling, yes. Even the slightly strange, puzzled reactions she had to everyday words didn’t tip me off she’s a one-of-a-kind time traveler. Now that I know the truth . . . I can’t believe it, and I saw it and heard her story with my own eyes and ears.
It all makes sense, and I do believe her, but my rational physicist brain doesn’t understand how it could be possible. How is it a mere girl can accidentally be transported through a century when treasure seekers, crazies, and serious scientists have been trying to do just that for ages?
Of course, Elie isn’t a “mere girl.” She’s the great Ernest Rutherford’s daughter, I remind myself. She’s more intelligent than she lets on.
The more I think about what happened, the more my brain slows with exhaustion. I need to sleep. I pull my light cotton blanket over my face to block the moonlit skies. It could be daytime in here with that damned reflected light burning my eyeballs.
But there’s so much to this new truth that I need to sort out the problems and figure out a solution to them. I guess that’s the engineer in me: collect the data, analyze the data, and formulate a solution. In Elie’s case, she needs about sixteen solutions. She needs the obvious things like food, clothing, and shelter, but between her, me, and Jeanne she miraculously has that taken care of. She can survive from day to day, but how can she make a life for herself?
I give into my thoughts and prop up my down pillow behind me. Locking my hands behind my head, I wonder how she can complete her education. How can she get credit for the classes she’s taking? She’s not registered! She’s basically ghosting the classes, which is interesting for her but potentially problematic come time to hand in assignments and take tests. Someone—probably very soon—is going to catch on and call her out. And then what? What will she say? Would they merely kick her out of class or call in the police? Once they question her, surely they’ll call her bonkers and throw her into an institution.
Literally shuddering at the thought, I close my eyes and rack my brain for a way to make her legit and prevent that nightmare.
Can I register her? Won’t she need a Social Insurance Number? Is it too late?
And on and on my mind runs. . . .
*
* *
Finally dawn breaks and I can straggle from my mess of sheets. I stumble like a zombie and probably look like one too.
“Will! Watch it!” Evan mumbles loudly as he rubs his shoulder. I must have body-checked him on my way to the bathroom.
“Ugh, my bad. Where are my glasses?”
“Uh, where every man of the dead keeps them? On the nightstand?”
“Mmm, must be.” I turn back to my room for them before I do more damage.
“Dude, Will—did you not sleep last night? Up thinking about that girl?” This time it’s him elbowing me.
“Ha, ha. Funny.” Too true.
“Better be careful or you’ll end up in worse shape than you were with the last girl, man. . . .”
I don’t hear the rest of what Evan says once I reach my nightstand. But good God—he’s right, isn’t he? This girl and her time traveling madness certainly have a grip on me already.
*
* *
It’s twenty minutes past ten and pure mayhem in front of the McConnell auditorium where Elie’s class is held. Two thoughts repeat through my head like a set of perpetually swinging Newton’s balls: first, will I actually see her in the mass of students pouring out of the previous class and in for hers, and second, will she be freaked out that I went online to time out her schedule based on what classes she said she’s taking?
“William, hi!” a quietly surprised voice sounds behind me. Elie.
“Elie, hello. And hello, hello,” I add, nodding a greeting to three other girls—at least two I notice blushing a bit. God, how embarrassing.
“What are you doing here?”
“Not much.” Idiot. “I was passing through the building on my way to a tutorial I teach and knew you’re in one of these classes, so I thought I’d say hi.”
“Aha, well, it’s nice to see you.” Elie is eminently polite, but her eyes say this impromptu meeting isn’t something she enjoys. “Pardon me—these are my friends Lindsey, Natalya, and Isabelle. We’re all taking Twentieth Century Novel right now. Ladies, this is William Hertz.”
After a few shy waves toward me, I face Elie again.
“Look, I was wondering if you’re free later. You, er—you mentioned you’re taking a physics class that my friend is the TA for, and I thought I’d give you a hand if you need to get caught up on the material.” She of all people, I know, needs no help for an intro physics course.
A pause, then an imperceptibly small shrug. “All right, yes. Thank you for offering. I’m free after lunch, but only until one thirty. Perhaps we can meet after my last class in the Arts Building? At two thirty?”
“I can meet you up there, outside the front doors, by the small garden.”
“Sounds lovely, William. See you then.”
I can’t help but grin, a bit wider than intended.
“See you, Elie. And, nice to meet you guys.” I almost forget to acknowledge them.
They wave me goodbye, and as they turn to walk into the classroom, I see the two next to Elie give her playful elbow nudges.
*
* *
I get to our meeting place a few minutes before Elie’s class is due to end, so I take the opportunity to relax and people watch. I’m immediately struck by how easy it is to pick an arts student from an engineer, who I’m used to being surrounded by. Most engineers and physicists are nerdy looking, myself included—there’s no denying it. Arts students manage to have a slightly hip, chic, and sometimes hippy look to them. My best guess is they take more care in their appearance to look current than we do because we have to spend more time draped over books and keyboards.
When Elie dismounts the Arts Building steps, however, she’s like a gazelle walking through a herd of zebras. She’s obviously taken pains to look more modern, but I’d pick her out of a crowd in an instant. Her posture is like that of a master yogi, she seems to glide rather than walk, and her curls are like a golden waterfall. There’s no doubt she’s been bred a Victorian, now that I know the truth.
She says goodbye to Natalya, walking at her side, and continues down the steps to meet me.
“We meet again, Ms. Newton.”
“Hello, Mr. Hertz. Did you have a fine tutoring session earlier?”
“Meh, it was all right. It’s always a mixed bag at the beginning of a semester: half-filled with bored people who are showing up out of politeness and the other half genuinely lost.”
“I see. Well, are you ready to give me a physics lesson?” She winks.
“Ha, yes—the daughter of Ernest Rutherford must be completely flummoxed by a simple Mechanics and Waves class!”
She laughs, those high cheeks turning into pale cherries. “Well, it isn’t complex yet, though I won’t pretend that we’ve already covered knowledge ten times that which was known during my time. It follows logically though, and I’m not having difficulty. I may at some point though.”
“If you do, you know who you can turn to for help.”
“Your friend Alain?”
I turn my head sharply to her as we’re walking down the front walk through campus.
“I believe, William, he was excited about there being, and I quote, ‘a hot froshie I can tutor?’”
My jaw drops with a thud. “What!” I scramble to remember when he might have said it, and then I remember—it was when we were coming down the library steps the first time I saw Elie. I was barely listening to Alain then, focused as I was on Elie, but sure as anything that sounds like something he’d say. “Elie, do you even know what that means?”
“I made an inquiry as to the nature of the phrase, yes.”
“Uhh. . . .”
“Don’t worry; I was only joking. I’ll depend on you if I have class troubles.”
“Phew! I’m smarter than he is anyway,” I tease. “Plus, I don’t have an accent to get in the way.”
She laughs, tipping her head back. I guess some humor transcends centuries.
“Speaking of class troubles, Elie, have you thought about the fact you’re not formally registered?”
“Of course! It weighs me down along with every other facet of my illegal life here. I’m really surviving on both the generosity of others and relative anonymity thanks to McGill being an enormous university now—oh, and pure luck, of course.” She tugs at a low-hanging maple leaf cluster from the tree we’re walking under. “I’m keenly aware I’m attending classes gratis, though paying for my classes hasn’t been my highest priority thought lately.”
“Honestly, paying for them can be pushed down the road. There are plenty of scholarships available, especially for women. You can apply to those, plus you can get federal aid, plus you can negotiate a payment plan with the university. Trust me, I know multiple people who did that and still completed the semester.”
Elie raises her eyebrows, unsure. More than that, her mind seems elsewhere.
“Trust me, Elie. The big thing is registering, and for that you need a bit of documentation, especially a Social Insurance Number.” Another surprised look. “It’s a unique number assigned to citizens and residents, which is used for things like employment and education. Basically you need it to apply here.”
“But how would I ever get one? I appeared with nary a scrap of documentation, remember.”
“It’s not easy, but you can apply. I had to a few years ago when I came from the States; I can show you. With that you can register for the classes you’re taking. People mistakenly think you need to register before the semester starts, but McGill lets you do it through the first three weeks. So you still have time.”
“I thought this was going to be difficult, but now it sounds very complicated. I assume everything administrative is different now too. I’d probably act as stupid as a two bob watch when I do it, stick out like I’m from another era, and end up in a mental institution!” Her fists are balled up, and her face is more angry than worried.
“Elie, Elie, don’t worry. I can help you. I’ll do everything to do with computers now. This might end up being a bit unorthodox, maybe stretching the bands of legality, but I bet we can swing it.”
She stops walking and turns to face me, eyes clear and boring straight into mine. “Look, William, I understand your reasoning for wanting to help me become an official member of society here, and I do thank you for offering to use your time to do it. But . . . that isn’t exactly how I see my time here unfolding. I wonder if there’s a better use of my time, so to speak.”
“Elie, what do you mean? There’ll come a point, maybe sooner than we think, and probably when you’re unprepared, when you’ll be busted. No one will believe you time traveled, and they’ll send you to a loony bin to rot for the rest of your life.”
“And that’s the last thing I wish to happen, believe me. But my thoughts have been running a bit differently than yours. I’ve been approaching this a wee less pragmatically and more emotionally.”
She wrings her hands gently, a bit guiltily. Suddenly I realize I’ve been attacking her problems like they’re a science experiment whereas she’s been riding an emotional tidal wave.
“I’m sorry—I’m only trying to get you adjusted to 2006 and to fit you in. What’s your plan of attack?” I ask this with genuine curiosity, and I hope it doesn’t come across accusatorily.
“Well, it’s more that I keep going over how I appeared here that Friday, trying to figure out how it happened.”
“Fair enough. If I’d been sent to 2106, I bet I’d be doing the same thing.”
“The thing is, for days I thought I’d surely see Father around the next corner—in the Macdonald basement, outside under our favorite picnicking tree, coming out of our old house on Rue Ste-Famille—but he was never there. I can’t understand how I was the only one transported to 2006 when we were both in his lab that Friday. He was only a few feet away from me. Why was he left behind?”
“I’m not sure yet why it was only you, but logically if he was transported too, he would’ve appeared in the basement at the same time you did. That assumes there was enough physical space in the basement; I guess we could go back and do a sort of reenactment. But anyway, we know he definitely didn’t time travel because we went to the Rutherford Museum and read his biography there. Nothing changed to indicate he left 1906 for another time period, else he wouldn’t have discovered everything he did later in his life.”
“I suppose that is logical.” She sighs and wrings her hands in her lap. “It was . . . wishful thinking on my part. Perhaps my subconscious held onto hope because it would be much easier to . . . deal with this . . . with someone else’s help.”
As she looks up at me, those blue eyes heavy with sadness and something weightier—loneliness—I realize how alone she must have felt. Disoriented, yes, and probably confused and overwhelmed, but clearly lonely.
At least now she has me.
I reach out to pat her arm, but stop short. “You’ve confided in me, Elie. You’re not completely alone. I can help you get through this—adjustment—and acclimate you to another century.”
She smiles, the sadness lifting somewhat. “And I thank you, truly I do. It has been quite a load off me to have someone else know the truth. And having someplace to stay and kind people like you, Jeanne, and my girlfriends are a boon.”
“Good.” I can’t help but be a bit ecstatic to be number one in that list.
“It’s just. . . .”
“Yes?”
Elie lets an eternal pause hang.
“Obviously I’ve time traveled once, right?”
“Yeah. . . .”
“And I survived.”
“Physically, yes.”
“So . . . what’s to stop me from time traveling again?”
I’ve been looking into her eyes this whole conversation, but now I have to shake my head and readjust my focus. “Come again?”
Now Elie’s eyes are shyly brightening. “I’ve moved through time once, in one direction—forward one hundred years, let’s say. What’s to stop me from constructing the same contraption that got me here so I can time travel again, only this time backward one hundred years?”
This shocks me almost more than her news that she was from the past. She wants to leave here? Forever?
“I guess, yeah, it’s theoretically possible.” My mouth is so dry I can’t believe it can actually form words. “Though we have no idea how your father’s equipment moved you here. It’s got to be the proverbial needle in a haystack to isolate the circumstances and setup that did the trick. Not to mention it’d be incredibly risky—you could end up another hundred years in the future, or multiple hundreds of years in either direction, or worse, dead.”
“I thought you’d say that.”
“But why would you want to leave?” I ask quietly. “You just got here.”
She lowers her head, pushes down on her legs, and out tumbles, “I’m from then, don’t you see? I never thought I’d be here permanently. And my family must be distraught. They probably think I’m dead by now! How can I do that to them?”
“But we have no idea what happened to you in your time, Elie.”
“No, we don’t—yet. But we can find out!”
Minutes later we’re on the fourth floor of Schulich Library, and I’m pulling a book I well know the location of.
“This is Famous Physicists of McGill,” I explain. “I was actually reading this a few days ago. It happened to catch my eye, probably since I’d researched Rutherford—sorry, your father, I should say—before. I read into his chapter but skipped right over his personal life.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to read this! Does it say anything about me in there?” Elie can barely keep from pouncing on the volume.
“Hold on, let me flip to his chapter . . . early life in New Zealand . . . marriage to Mary Newton . . . bingo! ‘Family Life and Tragedy!’”
“Tragedy?” Her already pale skin fades nearly to white.
“The author is probably referring to your unfortunate and early passing,” I say, as kindly as I can while I scan the page for her name.
“Oh, God, life is already horrible for him. . . .” Elie’s head is cupped in her delicate hands.
“It’ll be okay,” I say distractedly. “Wait!”
“What is it? Let me see the page too!”
“Here, look! This is different from everything I’ve read on him! It says, ‘Rutherford’s only daughter, Eileen, inexplicably disappeared from Montreal at age twenty. Authorities suspected the young Donalda student was abducted or possibly died of natural causes in the Saint Lawrence River, as her remains were never found. Rutherford, whose wife Mary was as distraught as he in later years and died in poor spirits two years after Eileen disappeared, entered a melancholy state from which he never emerged. Rutherford continued his work and went on to mark numerous discoveries and achievements, but friends and colleagues noted he did so with a dulled spirit. It is often wondered what else Rutherford could have contributed to physics if his health had been better.’”
We both sit back on the window-backed benches, stunned. I reread the section in its entirety, then mentally review my old research on Rutherford. “Nowhere, Elie—I swear it—did I ever read before that you just disappeared. It was all about marrying Ralph and the children. This is new, this has to be.”
I turn the book over in my hands, but sure enough the pages are flakey and aged. This is not a book printed last week.
“William, I’ve changed history, don’t you see? And for the worse.” With a barely quivering mouth, steadied only by her will, I’m sure, she whispers those words. Her small hands are now balled up, knuckles bone-white.
“Yes, you’ve really meddled with things, as every scientist has always worried about. That’s the biggest pitfall of time travel. You know that, right? The so-called butterfly effect of a tiny change in history ripples to cause enormous changes down the line.”
“I see what you mean, but this is terrible! I can’t let this happen to Mother and Father. Don’t you see? This is the very reason I have to return to them, to fix what’s been messed up. I want Mother to live to whatever age she’s supposed to, and I want Father to be happy. I don’t want him to be depressed. And me not able to say goodbye to them. . . . It’s too much!”
Elie’s fortitude fails her, and the quivering degenerates into gently rocking sobs while a few lonely tears fall down her ivory cheeks.
I’m not very good with women, I’ll admit, and even worse with emotional people as a whole, but it’s hard not to sympathize with her. I lean into her and lay my right arm lightly around her tiny shoulders. “Ssh, please don’t cry, Elie. You can’t change what happened, and I’m sure they still loved you ’til the end. Don’t blame yourself for their sadness.”
“But I can change what happened, William! I need to go back and fix things! It won’t be meddling with the future, it’ll be setting things right. This book proves it to me. I can’t let this stay the reality.”
“But you’re going to die in less than a decade if you do!”
“Yes, but they’ll be happy. And who knows—maybe I’ll be able to convince Ralph to stop at three children.”
My stomach turns unexpectedly. I’m not a fan of this Ralph Fowler guy, suddenly.
“Or maybe I’ll find a way to marry someone else, now that I know what happens.”
Hmm, maybe he’s not that bad after all. But. But.
“But Elie, that would be changing the future! Not having one of your children? Not having any of your children? You don’t know what effect that will have!”
“No, but suppose we now research what Ralph’s altered past is and see if he had any bad effects from me ‘disappearing.’ Maybe not marrying me won’t turn out badly for him. Maybe he’s already slated to marry someone new.”
“And have her kick the bucket at twenty-nine?” I ask, sarcasm ringing the question—coldly, too, I realize too late.
“‘Kick the bucket,’ William? That’s harsh. Die, you mean? I certainly hope that doesn’t happen to anybody. But, sadly, death during childbirth is more common than you think.”
“Not anymore, Elie. Good God, medicine is much better now—you have no idea. People live into their seventies and eighties on average now—seriously,” I say, seeing utter shock color her face. “Yeah—you’d do much better living here. It’s safer, healthier.”
She shrugs. “Maybe. I really don’t know yet. Goodness, there’s so much I don’t know; actually, there’s a hundred years’ worth of history I don’t know. But William, please—understand what I’m going through. My fault or not, I seem to have ruined my parents’ lives. I need to remedy that. I need to at least try to go back. It’s worth a try, right?”
I can’t believe we’re considering doing this—hell, I can’t believe, as intelligent as Elie is, that she believes we can actually build a time machine and successfully get her back to 1906.
But then again, if it happened once, it can happen again.
And I see the force behind her pleas. Here’s a woman who loves her family and is thrown into a new world she feels she doesn’t fit into, and all she wants is a chance to go home. How can I, the one person she’s confided in, for whatever reason she did, deny her help in doing that? How can I say no to that face, that silky voice?
Even if I do say no, a little voice inside tells me, she’ll do it anyway. But if I help her, I could help her do it safely? Use my modern physics knowledge? What a justification, Will.
“Okay,” I respond after a long pause. “We’ll give it a try. There’s no use stopping you anyway, is there? But let me caveat that it’ll be hard to do, dangerous, and even harder to hide from people. We wouldn’t be the first people to fail at building a time machine.”
“I know it’s a shot in the bloody dark, William—I truly do understand. But what an exciting shot, eh?”
“That probably doesn’t begin to describe it. But in the meantime, Elie, let’s try to get you registered officially here. Think of it as a backup in case Plan A doesn’t pan out—which has a high probability of failing, I’ll point out. We’ll do our best, but just in case.”
My reasoning is met with a placating dismissal of a nod. She’s convinced we can do this! It makes me wonder if, despite the positive attitude, she really isn’t perhaps a bit crazy.
No, it’s just desperation, Will.
“Fine, William, fine. Let’s do both things, and I suppose it’ll be a race to see what we can complete first.”
“I can already tell you what’ll be done first, Elie,” I say with a rueful grin. “Building a workable time machine has been El Dorado to people for centuries. If we can get this to work, we’ll have to rename you H.G. Wells.”