Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Eighteen Days Gone
Vivian came to the end of the hallway and stopped opposite a door that looked like it had once doubled as a broom closet. Someone had handwritten a sign with the name “Dr. Robbins.”
The sign was crooked.
The sign’s author had originally included only one “b” in Robbins, so the other had been hastily added with the universal editorial sign for an insertion followed by a second letter “b.”
Hardly an auspicious beginning.
Polly had tried to convince Vivian to let her accompany her to Virginia, but Vivian could see the strain that being away from her girls was having on Polly, especially given everything the Abbotts were going through.
It felt like too much of an imposition to ask her friend to follow this lead with her, and she was more than a little embarrassed by the fact that she was even considering the possibility of something as far-fetched as Joe having time traveled.
Well, perhaps time traveled was the wrong word.
When she thought of time travel, she thought of H.
G. Wells and his time machine. What Dr. Robbins had proposed in his book seemed more nuanced than that.
The more she considered it—the more she turned it over in her mind—there was something about the possibility that felt right.
The finality of death didn’t ring true to her, not as it had when she’d lost loved ones before; this seemed more like a temporary absence, like when Joe had been called away on a mission for work—unreachable, but not permanently gone.
Although now that she was here, using her military spouse identification card to finagle her way onto the base and to the office where Dr. Robbins worked, the first strong stirrings of doubt emerged.
If Dr. Robbins was an expert in his field, then wouldn’t his office be in a more prestigious location, not this annexed building with no security that had been easily accessible to her with her military ID?
And she could appreciate an academic who didn’t stand on ceremony, but a handwritten sign hardly inspired confidence.
Vivian raised her hand to knock on the door, just as it swung open and a man appeared.
She’d envisioned the author who’d written a treatise on time travel with the dry recitation of a university professor lecturing before an auditorium of bored undergraduate students to be someone who’d been entrenched in his discipline for decades, but the man who exited Dr. Robbins’s office was young.
He honestly didn’t look that much older than her—a decade or so, perhaps.
He was tall and lean, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses atop his angular face, a mop of light brown hair flopping over his brow.
He froze, only inches away from colliding with her. “I’m sorry—I didn’t expect that someone would be there.”
“Are you Dr. Robbins?” Vivian asked.
“I am.”
She looked him over for a moment, taking in the rumpled trousers, the shirt that suggested no one was at home providing him freshly pressed clothes.
He looked harried, and she wondered if that was his perpetual state of being or if there was something particularly pressing going on in the world of space-time studies.
“I’d like to talk to you if you have a moment.
Is this a convenient time?” Vivian glanced over his shoulder at the open office behind him.
Her original estimation that the exterior of the place looked like a converted broom closet wasn’t far from the reality.
It was a dimly lit room, the entirety of which was nearly dominated by an enormous desk covered in a mess of papers that had her itching to organize them.
The walls were a bleak white. No pictures hung from the walls, their appearance as stark as the rest of the space, save for a chalkboard that was covered in what looked to be mathematical calculations.
If she were making a movie, this would have been the perfect eccentric scientist’s lair.
Time travel? What was she thinking?
What if this had all been a mistake? What if her grief was causing her to act in erratic ways?
Vivian hesitated for a moment, hovering over the threshold, ready to pivot on her heels and board a plane back to Florida.
Vivian reached into her purse, pulling the book out. “I read your book. I have some questions about it.”
His eyes widened slightly as his gaze settled on the cover. “You read The Mystery of Time?”
The incredulous note in his tone raised her hackles. How novel, another man who was going to imply that a woman wasn’t smart enough to understand complicated problems. She hadn’t understood it, true, but that was entirely a result of the utterly dense way it had been written and not her gender.
Vivian straightened, lifting her chin so she could meet his gaze head-on. “I did.”
“You must be one of five people who did, then,” he replied, his voice dry.
“My editor read it, but he complained the whole time that it was a sludge to get through, so hardly an auspicious start to my career as a published author. Apparently, I’m not good at synthesizing my thoughts for a general audience. ”
Vivian had to bite back a laugh at how succinctly he diagnosed his own writing. That was exactly what she had struggled with while reading it.
“My mom and dad said they read it, although I suspect they lied to spare my feelings, as parents do. And my grandmother was more honest and said that she read the first page before she was bored to tears, so while I’m not sure she counts, I must give her points for honesty, and four people reading my book seems much less sad than three, especially considering one was paid to do so.
Since you’re the first nonfamilial relative or reader who wasn’t actually paid to do so, I’d say you’re entitled to more than a few minutes of my time.
You have my eternal gratitude as well.” Dr. Robbins took a step back, into the inner sanctum that was his office. “What do you want to ask me?”
He left the door open as Vivian followed him inside. Dr. Robbins sat behind his desk, gesturing for Vivian to take the empty seat opposite him.
“Are you a student?” he asked her.
“No. I— The book was my husband’s.” Vivian waited before offering more information, wondering if he would recognize her now, considering her face had been splashed all over newspapers and television screens for the past couple of weeks.
He frowned as she said the word “was.”
“At least—I found it in his personal effects,” Vivian corrected.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you.”
Dr. Robbins might not have been good at synthesizing his thoughts for a general audience, but there was something in his manner that was distinctly reassuring, as though he were almost overly solicitous.
It could have been off-putting, but instead it came across as earnest, and it made Vivian want to put him at ease.
The part of her that had always been intensely private wanted to get through this discussion without revealing who she was, but she couldn’t figure out how to inject enough details into the conversation to get the answers she sought.
She could pretend that she was a reporter working on a story—impersonating a fellow scientist was out of the question given the complexity of the subject they were discussing—but she didn’t want abstract answers to theoretical possibilities.
She wanted, needed, to know how this could possibly apply to her husband’s exact situation.
“My name is Vivian Mitchell. My husband is Joe Mitchell, the astronaut—”
She didn’t have to go any further. She saw the moment it connected for him. He may not have recognized her, but he was a scientist, interested in space exploration. He knew who her husband was.
“Mrs. Mitchell, I am so truly sorry for your loss. What happened to your husband and the rest of the crew is a great tragedy.”
“Thank you.” Vivian struggled with the right phrasing for a moment before realizing that there simply was no right phrasing.
She might as well dive in headfirst. “As I said, I read your book. I found it among my husband’s things.
And since you had written on the subject matter, I was wondering what your thoughts are.
Is there a way that someone in space could communicate with someone on Earth?
Not with a squawk box, or something—I mean they could use a squawk box—but I suppose through nontraditional technological means.
“I know how this sounds—” Vivian added before he could say more.
“But it’s not my grief talking. At first, I thought it was; at first, I thought that the shock and pain of losing Joe was driving me mad, but that’s not it.
” She took a deep breath. “There are things happening. Messages. Objects that were Joe’s appearing in unusual places.
It feels like he’s trying to communicate with me.
Is there a way that my husband could be trapped in time as you’ve described in your book? ”
Dr. Robbins paled. “Mrs. Mitchell—”
“No. Please. Before you speak—don’t dismiss me.
Everyone has dismissed me. Everyone believes that I’m just an overwrought widow, that these things are too complicated for me to understand.
Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe this is too difficult for them to understand.
When I read your book, I thought that perhaps you would be open-minded enough to look at things from a different perspective.
My husband believed that there was still so much we don’t know about space, about the possibility there.
When I read The Mystery of Time, I got the impression that you believe that, too.
In fact, some of the words you wrote in the first chapter are nearly identical to the ones my husband used when describing his views to me.
Did you know Joe? Did the two of you ever meet in person? ”