“Well, it’s only been forty-five for me,” Mileva corrected. “Since I’m coming from 1948. Relative time and all that, remember?”
Albert laughed as he let go of her, and she sat back.
“Oh, it’s good to talk to you again,” he said. “Really talk, like we used to do before you grew so sullen and silent . . .” He seemed to realize what he was saying. “Is this why you started acting so depressed? Because you couldn’t tell anyone what you knew?”
“It gets complicated,” Mileva said. “I would have been truly depressed without my secret. I mean, really, Albert, moving us to Prague with all that sooty air when you knew Tete had those lung problems, and—” She stopped herself. She waved her hands as if trying to erase everything she’d just said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to restart old fights. I really have forgiven you.”
“Tete,” Albert said. He rubbed the hospital sheet between his fingers. “Hans Albert was here, watching over me all day—he’s such a son to be proud of. But Tete . . . I haven’t communicated with Tete in years. He’s had such a sad life . . . with all your secret maneuverings, why couldn’t you help our Tete, too?”
A happy expression burst out over Mileva’s face, and for a moment she looked young and optimistic, not old and beaten down.
“Oh, Albert, I so wanted you to ask about Tete,” Mileva whispered. “I told myself I wouldn’t take the risk of telling you unless you actually asked. Unless you cared!”
“Of course I care about my own son,” Albert muttered. “I just never knew how to help. Mental illness is so . . . ”
“Misunderstood in the twentieth century,” Mileva finished for him. “So I helped Tete the only way I knew how. I took him to the future. To a time period where they knew how to cure him.”
“What?” JB exploded.
“Shh!” Jonah, Katherine, Emily, and Angela all said at once. Jonah noticed that all of them were sitting on the edge of their seats.
“No, no, Tete’s still here,” Albert said, screwing up his face in befuddlement. “Back in Switzerland. I still pay for his care. His—confinement.” He said the last part bitterly.
“That’s another young man,” Mileva said. “I knew everyone had to think Tete was still in this century, still alive, so I borrowed this other man from the distant past, when madness was even more misunderstood. And . . . when those who succumbed to madness were routinely murdered. I saved this young man’s life so I could send Tete to the future, to save his sanity. I made the swap when Tete was still a teenager. I only regret I couldn’t save the fake Tete’s sanity too, because he’s such a delightful youth when he’s lucid. But at least I managed to give him a better life than he would have had . . .”
Jonah missed Albert’s reply because JB was screaming so loudly: “How could she have? That’s two time periods she could have ruined! Why didn’t we see this? How did she cover everything up so well?”
He began typing furiously on his Elucidator. Hadley was doing the same thing.
“Let’s focus on the more dangerous change first—what time period could she have taken Tete to?” Hadley asked.
“This could lead to such a major paradox,” JB complained, stabbing at his Elucidator as fiercely as if it were a weapon and he was at war. “People found the cure for mental illness before they figured out time travel—we’re just going to have to undo this whole visit between Mileva and Albert, go back and erase Jonah giving her the Elucidator—”
“Undo? Erase? You can’t do that!” Jonah complained. “Can you?”
“Aye, lad,” Hadley answered. “It’s true, nothing quite like that has ever been tried, and it’d be incredibly risky given the proximity to stopped time, but—”
“Can’t we at least see how the rest of their conversation goes?” Emily asked.
JB and Hadley both looked at Emily. They seemed to remember all at once that these were Emily’s birth parents they were watching, Emily’s brother they were searching for.
“All right,” JB said grudgingly. “Unless things get too dangerous.”
Jonah realized that he’d missed a huge chunk of the conversation between Albert and Mileva.
“—and that’s what you were missing in your unified field theory,” Mileva was saying.
“I knew it would be something that simple,” Albert said. He beamed at Mileva. “Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to know that so much.”
He started to reach for something on his bedside table: paper. Pen and paper.
Mileva shoved his hands away.
“Surely you understand why you can’t write that down,” Mileva whispered.
“But—the world would want to know,” Albert said. “Other scientists . . . some of them are seeking this as earnestly as me.”
“Then let other scientists find it out for themselves,” Mileva said. “Albert, you’ve discovered so much. Why don’t you leave this one to someone else?”
Albert started to answer, then lay back, groaning.
“That . . . painkiller . . . more . . . ,” he whispered.
“I know, Albert, it’s wearing off,” Mileva said. “I’m sorry—the nurse is about to come back. I can’t give you another dose. Shall I tell you how it all ends? You’re going to say something in German—it really doesn’t even matter what you say, because the nurse isn’t going to understand.”
“Maybe tell . . . dirty joke?” Albert muttered.
“If you want, Albert,” Mileva whispered, leaning close. She looked over her shoulder, probably checking to make sure the nurse hadn’t come back already. “But when you die, people are going to find two things on your bedside table that you’d been working on. One is a speech for Israeli Independence Day—”
“Right . . . over . . . there,” Albert said, struggling to point.
“Yes, I see it, Albert,” Mileva said, glancing toward the table. “I like your line, ‘I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being’—very nice, Albert, very consistent with your beliefs about humanity.”
“Thank . . . you,” Albert muttered. “I was always a better . . . defender of humanity than . . . a husband.”
“We’ve already been over that, Albert,” Mileva said. “Don’t worry about it now.”
“What . . . other thing . . . I’m supposed to leave?” Albert asked.
Mileva picked up a piece of paper from the table.
“A math calculation you wrote out earlier this evening,” Mileva said. “People will like it that you kept looking for answers right up until you died.”
“Always a seeker,” Albert murmured. “Wish I could tell world . . . what I finally found.”
“You can’t always tell everyone everything you know,” Mileva said.
She put the piece of paper back down on the nightstand, angling it exactly the same way it’d been before. Jonah wanted to tell JB, See? See? She’s being careful to preserve time. But he was afraid he’d miss something else.
“Shall I tell you what happened to Tete in the future?” Mileva asked, as she smoothed Albert’s hair back from his face.
“Yes . . . please,” Albert whispered.
He seemed barely conscious now, barely aware of Mileva’s words. Strangely, she had her head turned half away from him, as though she were trying to speak to someone else as well. Jonah peered carefully at the corners of the hospital room, but there was no one there.
“I arranged Tete’s transfer to the future the same way Lieserl’s worked,” Mileva murmured. “Through time travel he became a baby once more, so he had no memories of me or you or the twentieth century.”
“At least she took that precaution,” JB harrumphed.
“He was adopted by a very nice set of parents—better parents than you or me, I’m happy to say,” Mileva continued. “He received a vaccine for his schizophrenia. So the thing that took over his twentieth-century life became as nothing for him, a momentary pinprick that he instantly forgot. He thrived in the future, and grew up happy, and you mi
ght say that he went into the family business—”
“Physics, you mean? Like you and me?” Albert mumbled. “Engineering, like my father and uncle and Hans Albert? Or—”
“Time,” Mileva said firmly. “He became a time agent.”
Now Jonah was certain that Mileva was trying to talk to someone besides just Albert. She had her head turned completely away from him, and seemed to be staring directly into the time hollow where Jonah and the others sat.
Could she know we’d be watching? Jonah wondered. Is she trying to talk to us?
“Nooooo,” JB moaned. “Tete couldn’t have become a time agent. That situation is just ripe for paradoxes. It shouldn’t have been allowed. It—”
“I even met our son once, in his capacity as a time agent,” Mileva was saying. “In a manner of speaking. Time was stopped then, and I didn’t know who he was until later, but—”
Wait—I met Mileva during stopped time! Jonah thought. Is she saying I was the real Tete Einstein? Mileva and Albert’s second son? Am I Emily’s brother?
It wasn’t possible. Nobody had developed a schizophrenia vaccine in this part of the twenty-first century. And Mileva wouldn’t call him a time agent. She knew he was just a kid who’d gotten caught up in the time-travel mess. So . . .
Around him, Katherine and Emily and Angela were gasping and exclaiming. But JB and Hadley had fallen silent. They were staring at each other in a very strange way. Their faces had gone pale; Jonah realized that both of them had dropped their Elucidators.
Mileva smiled sweetly, gazing straight out at Jonah and the others.
But mostly, it seemed, at JB and Hadley.
“I’m sure everyone understands now that nothing I did can be changed,” she said. “You can search for answers. You can ask how a time conundrum so intricately constructed was meant to be. But mostly I just want you to know that I did this out of love for you, Tete.”
She paused. Nobody so much as took a breath.
“Or should I say, I love you, my son JB?” she asked.
EPILOGUE
Jonah stepped down from the school bus alone. Chip was still absent with the stomach bug, and Mom had picked up Katherine at school to take her to a dentist appointment. Katherine had been agonizing for days that the dentist was probably going to tell her it was time for her to get braces. To Mom and Dad she’d wailed, “I’ll look hideous! I won’t be able to eat!” Privately, to Jonah and Chip, she’d whined, “And what if we have to make another trip to the past? And the invisibility conks out on us again? Braces will give me away every time!”
“Katherine,” Jonah had said quietly. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to make another trip to the past. Everything’s too confused.”
And confusing, he thought now, as he kicked his way through the clumps of fallen leaves that had drifted here and there between the bus stop and his own house. For perhaps the millionth time in the past week, he mentally replayed his most recent trips through time, culminating with JB finding out that he had a secret second identity of his own.
“JB,” he muttered, “you really weren’t fair.”
Even as Emily had stood there in the time hollow gasping, “Wait—JB—you’re Tete Einstein? You’re my brother?” JB had been violently shaking his head no. He’d held his hands out, as if trying to shove everyone else away.
“We can’t have this,” he’d cried. He’d grabbed his fallen Elucidator from the floor and begun punching in commands. “All of you—go back to your regular lives. Go back to normal. Forget all of this!”
And then Jonah had found himself back in the seventh-grade wing at Harris Middle School, right beside the lockers. And Katherine had gone back to the sixth-grade wing. He assumed that Emily and Angela had gone back to their regular lives, too, but he was afraid to contact them to find out.
With JB acting so terrified, how could that not terrify Jonah, too?
“JB,” he muttered now, “you owe us some answers. If you don’t come and explain things soon, I’m going to have to start searching for answers on my own!”
As threats went, this one was pretty stupid. If JB had been monitoring Jonah’s life at all, he’d know that. Of course Jonah and Katherine hadn’t been able to forget anything. They couldn’t go back to their regular lives. They couldn’t act normal anymore—“normal” had completely changed for them.
For one thing they’d already begun searching for answers on their own.
The school bus zoomed past Jonah, driving away, and he let out a combination snort-chuckle. Just last night he and Katherine had convinced Dad to take them to the library. When they all three met back at the checkout table, Jonah and Katherine were each holding several books about Einstein and Einstein’s theories.
“You’re both doing reports about Albert Einstein for school?” Dad asked. “Wow—what are the odds of that?”
“And we didn’t even know what the other person was working on!” Katherine said airily, even as she kicked Jonah under the checkout table.
Jonah knew that kick was supposed to say, Don’t tell Dad anything! Don’t give anything away!
And then Katherine started making fun of Jonah because one of the books he’d checked out was Einstein for Dummies.
“Oh, yeah? Well, I saw The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Einstein on the shelf, too—want me to go back and get it for you?” Jonah asked.
But his voice came out fake and lifeless, so Dad probably did notice that there was something wrong.
And five minutes with the Einstein books had convinced Jonah that he was probably the one who needed The Complete Idiot’s Guide. It was hard to concentrate on Einstein’s examples of trains and beams of light when what Jonah really wanted to know was, Did we ruin time forever? Did I? Was that all just fate? How much free choice did any of us have if I had to give Mileva that Elucidator for JB to grow up when he did, and become a time agent, and leave the Elucidator for Angela to give me in the first place so I could give it to Mileva?
Forget figuring out the answers—just thinking about the questions tied Jonah’s brain in knots.
“JB—help!” Jonah moaned.
He’d reached the door of his own house now. He pulled out his key and turned it in the lock, then shoved the door open. He dropped his backpack on the floor.
There! That’s something I can act normal about, he thought. I can be as messy as usual!
He thought about how much time he’d spent watching Mileva cook and clean and scrub out cloth diapers. He thought about how all that drudgery had left her so bleached-out and sad. He thought about how hard his own mom worked.
He moved his backpack into the hall closet where it belonged.
Maybe Mom will think I’m being considerate because I know she’s had to deal with Katherine whining about getting braces, Jonah told himself. Wouldn’t I have thought of that anyhow? Wasn’t I sometimes a considerate kid back in my regular life, before I took my first trip through time?
It was hard to remember what his regular life had been like, now that everything had changed.
Jonah sighed and went into the kitchen for a snack. He was standing in front of the pantry thinking about cereal choices—did he want Apple Jacks? Rice Chex? Granola?—when he heard someone clearing his throat behind him.
Jonah whirled around.
JB was sitting at the kitchen table.
Jonah clutched his hands to his chest and tried to catch his breath.
“Don’t you know . . . sneaking up on people . . . is dangerous?” he gasped. “It could really mess up time if you surprise me so much that I drop dead of a heart attack!”
“Are you sure?” JB asked sardonically. “What if that’s your destiny? Why would you think I have any choice in this matter—or any other?”
Jonah realized JB had been thinking about all the same questions Jonah had been thinking about.
“You did ask me to come,” JB pointed out.
“Maybe the rules are different in your time period,” J
onah said. “But around here it’s customary to knock at the front door before entering someone’s home. Not just—appear!”
“You want to run the risk that one of your neighbors might see you letting a strange man into your home? You want them to tell your parents?” JB asked.
Jonah backed up against the pantry door.
“Maybe I do want my parents to know about all this,” Jonah said. “Maybe I want to tell them everything. Maybe I’m supposed to.”
JB tapped a finger against the table. It was the only sound in the quiet house.
“Jonah, your parents are wonderful people,” he said. “They love you and Katherine the way all kids should be loved. But they’re not going to be able to give you all the answers either.”
Jonah bit his lip.
“‘Either’?” he repeated. “If my parents don’t have all the answers ‘either,’ then are you saying . . . you’re confused too?”
JB sighed. He shifted from tapping his finger to fiddling with the edge of the place mat on the table in front of him. Mom liked switching out the place mats by month and season, so this one was part of the November set—it had We Give Thanks embroidered on it.
“If you’d asked me back in the time cave, back at the beginning of all this—when it began for you, I mean—I would have said that I understood time travel perfectly,” JB said. “I knew that the past was set in stone, and had to be kept that way, to prevent any paradoxes or cause-and-effect catastrophes. But I thought that the present—my present—was open and flexible and free for me to use however I wished. I thought my contemporaries and I had free will, but everyone in history was locked into . . . well, shall we call it fate?”
“You changed your mind about history,” Jonah said, and his voice chose that moment to go all shrill and girly. He really wished his voice would just change and be done with it. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“You realized it was safe for us to rescue Chip and Alex from the fourteen hundreds,” he said. “And you yourself refused to send all those Native American villagers back to die in 1605. And—”
“And we managed to ride out all of Second’s craziness together by being flexible,” JB finished for him.