Your education?
No, he said with a laugh, not to my education. To this.
Us?
Is that crazy?
Yes. —Although she had thought the same thing. If he left campus, she guessed their space-time wouldn’t overlap anymore, and she wouldn’t hear from him again. The thought made her surprisingly sad.
You’ve been claiming you’re crazy since the night I met you, it hasn’t stopped us yet.
Cady smiled, but she knew she had to make him take this job. It could save his life.
I know it’s too soon to pledge any grand emotion. If we were in high school, it’d be too soon to ask you to wear my pin. But meeting you, spending time with you, everything has felt … different. I have this gut feeling that we could really have something here, there’s … potential. We have this beautiful potential, and I don’t want to walk away before it begins.
Potential is always beautiful. It’s easier to imagine the happy endings and harder to imagine the bad ones. It’s a mind trick to protect ourselves when the truth hurts. You should stick to your plan, stick to what you know is real. And the reality is, we’re not on the same path.
Then where’s the room for a leap of faith? Just because you can’t explain something doesn’t make it untrue. I believe in intuition. The other night in the observatory, I felt something between us—
I did too, that was a great night. But that’s all it was.
Why don’t you sound like you believe that? Your voice is all quivery.
Whit, we can’t have a future together. That we’re together now makes no sense.
And yet we keep crossing paths.
I don’t want you to change your plans for me. I can’t carry that burden!
It’s not yours to bear. Maybe I changed my mind, make a different choice. The Navy will always be there.
But it’ll be more dangerous for you later—
We don’t know what’s ahead of us, we can only guess. But you know that horizon line my father laid out for me? You moved it. You let me see beyond it for the first time in my life. To imagine a future I couldn’t dream before. And all I want to do is keep looking.
Cady felt her eyes well up. With this new opportunity, Whit’s future was safer, his fate lashed to something lighter than air. So why did she feel herself hesitating to send him on his way? She would miss him. He understood Cady with an ease few in her normal life did, and his presence entertained, comforted, even excited her. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see him, he saw her the way she wanted to be: capable, lovable, and good. She hadn’t seen herself like that since before Eric died. Whit deserved better than to feel she didn’t care. He deserved the truth. But if she really cared about him, there was only one thing to say:
I don’t feel the same way about you.
He was silent. They both were.
I’m sorry.
Please don’t apologize.
No, I need to. I don’t know what came over me to say all that, I put you in a terrible spot. You’re right, I got it all wound up in my head, got carried away, jumped the gun, other clichés for being an idiot.
You’re not—
My timing has always been terrible. You should see me dance; it’s almost as embarrassing as this.
You have nothing to be embarrassed about.
But I want to be clear, I meant what I said. I’m sorry I told you like that and gummed up the works, but I’m glad it happened, glad and grateful to you. I’m glad we ran into each other today so I could say goodbye.
This isn’t goodbye-goodbye— It was Cady’s turn to balk at the abruptness. —When are you leaving for real?
Monday. You can knock on my door anytime before then, if you’re so inclined, Lowell G-41. But listen, Cady, you’ve been wonderful. You don’t owe me anything.
“Yo, can I help you?” a different voice broke in, and Cady turned to see a tall, well-built young man standing in the back of the room. He wore black spandex shorts that went to his knee and a tight Under Armour long-sleeved tee that showed every bit of muscle definition in signature crimson.
“No, I, I’m looking, taking a quick look around,” Cady stammered.
“How did you get in here?” he demanded.
“It was open.”
He frowned. “I doubt that. Newell’s not open to the public.”
“Oh, I’m not the public, I’m a Harvard student.”
“Newell’s not open to anyone but the men’s crew and staff, no girls allowed, student or not. You want to tour a boathouse, the women’s boathouse has public visiting hours. Men’s is off limits.”
“Really?” A double standard more suited to Whit’s time than to the present day. “Okay, I’m leaving.” But Cady lingered by the door of the boat room, hesitant to leave, trying to refocus her mind’s ear on Whit. She hadn’t wanted to rush their goodbye, and she had a flash of anger at the rower for interrupting them. Was Whit still there?
“I mean it, you have to go,” the rower called out after her. “Hey, was that one of our towels?”
Outside, Cady shut the front door behind her and leaned against it. She looked up at the pouring sky. The hurt in Whit’s voice echoed in her mind and wrung her heart with regret, but she knew she had done the right thing. He would be safer and happier working on an airship that would never see combat. Maybe he could serve a few years, satisfy whatever duty to the military he felt from his family, and then go work in the music business like he wanted to. She loved talking to him, but it wasn’t as if they could be together in any real, physical way. Her reasons for wanting him to stay were completely selfish. She had been selfish with Eric at the critical moment, and it had sent him to his doom. She had learned her lesson.
Cady held the towel over her head like an umbrella and sneaked around the boathouse to check that dock post before she went home. Nothing was there.
42
Cady had wanted to go find the third drop site yesterday, but when she’d gotten home from the boathouse, her roommates had made a big deal of her being soaked from the rain. Andrea had plied her with a stack of lilac towels, and Ranjoo, normally the resident fun czar, had insisted Cady stay in with her and study for Psych. Cady had obliged that night to placate them, but she was impatient; Bernstein himself had told her that a single test was trivial, and she had time on the Hines issue, which she kept to herself. Schoolwork wasn’t her priority right now. For the first time since Eric died, Cady felt focused, clear, and effective. She had helped Bilhah, she’d done the right thing by Whit, even if it pained her, and most importantly, she was getting closer to discovering some truth about her brother. Now that she’d found that feeling again, she wasn’t going to give it up so easily. She slipped out early that morning before her roommates had a chance to slow her down with questions.
Yesterday’s storms had given way to a frigid blue morning, as if the skies had been washed clean. On the virtual map, the pin had dropped right on top of the Harvard Square T station. Already, this third location seemed like an outlier, smack in the middle of Harvard Square; it seemed like an odd place to do anything secret. But perhaps there was anonymity in the recycling crowds; no one would look twice at someone loitering by a bustling subway station, it would be easy to hide in plain sight. Indeed, there were a number of invisible denizens of this particular part of the Square: the homeless.
One of the first things Cady had noticed when she arrived at Harvard was how many homeless people she saw just outside Johnston Gate. There were the regulars: the old woman outside the university bookstore with a single enormous dreadlock that fell almost to her knees, like a silver python swallowing her head whole; the cheery “Spare Change” guy to whom some people said hi but few gave cash; the Asian man who played a horrible homemade string instrument might not be homeless, but no one knew where he slept at night. Cady had taken inventory of others: a veteran in a whe
elchair outside the Starbucks; the guy who thought he was funny with a sign that read need money for drugs; an older gentleman who never asked for anything but simply sat on the ledge of the T station reading well-worn paperbacks with an empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup beside him. Everyone on campus knew these people by sight, but they all looked right past them on the street. They were the fallen leaves of society, skittering haphazardly across hallowed cobblestone streets like human detritus not yet blown away.
Cady had heard that there were so many of them because back in the day, some politician cut funding and abruptly shut down the Massachusetts mental institutions, abandoning patients to find their own way without treatment, and most ended up on the streets. She’d also heard that despite the constant tourist presence, Harvard Yard contains only one bench, the unofficial reason for which is to deter the homeless from making themselves comfortable on campus. They can pass through, but they can’t lie down. And still it seemed Harvard was a magnet for the homeless, hopeless, futureless members of society. Cady once thought they might enjoy the irony, but irony is a pleasure of privilege.
She wove through the throng around the T station and wondered: Would that have been Eric’s fate? When Cady heard people talk about suicide—people who hadn’t experienced it in their families—many called it a selfish or thoughtless act. She had overheard family friends say the worst part of Eric’s death was his squandered potential, how he’d thrown away a promising future—Cady strongly disagreed, there were much worse parts than that—but realistically, would his future have been so bright? Did Eric sense that his course had changed, could he feel his future promise leak out like a punctured tire? Or was his choice impulsive, a reaction to pain in the present, an escape from a world that had been too cruel to him already—his illness, the stress of school and whatever Prokop was asking of him, academic rivals like Lee, his family—his sister? Cady used to wonder why potential life was held more sacred than that which existed, but now she knew. It is far easier and more pleasant to imagine happy endings, however farfetched, in all their vivid, rainbow colors than it is to face each day’s reality and let time and fortune do their worst. She still told herself if her family had had more time, they could have helped him manage his illness better, live better, but of course she didn’t know for sure. Maybe that’s just a nice lie families tell themselves, the same lie the families of these homeless people told themselves once, too, that everything will be okay. Cady didn’t even know whether she herself was going to be okay. If we could all know our futures, how many of us would choose to see it through?
She looked down at her coordinate locator app and followed its directions to the left side of the station, away from the entrance. But as soon as she looked up from her phone, she smiled in recognition. The “pit,” a sunken area beside the T station, was filled with chess hustlers playing at café tables. Eric loved chess, and she could imagine him testing himself against the old pros.
The dot over the app seemed to hover over the table closest to the sidewalk. The player seated there was a middle-aged black man wearing a puffy down parka and a Red Sox cap. The young man playing him wore a bottle-green wax-coated jacket more suited to skeet shooting than street chess. A few of his friends watched the match with their arms crossed.
Cady watched the game while she waited her turn.
Salut, mon amie.
Hi, Robert.
Going somewhere by train?
Nowhere, I’m looking for something by the station.
My friends and I enjoy taking the train to nowhere. We go to North Station, board the first train that arrives, then ride it for as long as it takes to run out stories to embellish, and we hop off at the next stop, whatever it may be. Once we didn’t get off until we were twenty miles out from Worcester at three in the morning, and it had snowed. It took hours to journey back, including an interlude of being chased by a pack of stray dogs. Have you ever run in knee-deep snow? It’s invigorating, to say the least.
This is what you do for fun?
It’s subversive. Trains are the most orderly, regimented form of transportation available. I don’t see how anyone finds romance in train travel when it is so miserably predetermined. Adventure is only possible if you don’t spoil the ending. The fellows and I still talk about that night with the dogs.
If one of those dogs had bitten you, you wouldn’t be so happy with your adventure.
True, our feelings about the result of any action color our perception of past decision making. Memory is a volatile element, highly reactive, like fluorine, it cannot be trusted to yield an objective recollection, in fact, there’s no such thing. So to your point, that’s a case of poor scientific method, not poor judgment.
Okay, here’s a hypothetical: If I were from the future, and we were somehow communing across time, would you want to know your future?
No.
Really? I thought you wanted to know everything.
Precisely why I’d beg you to please let me enjoy my ignorance for once. Knowing everything is exhausting.
Cady chuckled. —But, for example, can you see these chess players?
Yes.
Maybe they were gifted kids with promising futures, but then they made one bad choice, or one bad thing happened to them, or one stroke of bad luck that denied them opportunities, and now all their potential is spent embarrassing college kids. Wouldn’t they enjoy the benefit of hindsight?
Or maybe they used their intellectual gifts to defy the odds and avoid a worse fate. There are too many variables to know. Hubris can be a mercy. I labor under my awful fact of excellence as if I am bound for extraordinary things. But even if, in the end, I’ve got to satisfy myself with testing toothpaste in a lab, I don’t want to know till it has happened.
But if you knew toothpaste was on the horizon, maybe you could change course.
Ah, again, your logic is flawed. If you could truly see my future, then the variables in fate’s equation for me have been solved, and thus you’ve collapsed all the alternate realities that could have led to different outcomes.
Like Schrödinger’s cat.
Whose what?
We learned it in AP Physics, I thought you would know it. —Although maybe it was after his time, Cady considered. —It’s a thought experiment to challenge the concept of superposition, the idea that quantum particles simultaneously exist in all positions until the moment they’re observed or measured, when all possibilities but one collapse. Schrödinger said to imagine putting a cat in a box with a vial of poison that’s hooked up to a bit of radioactive material and a Geiger counter. There’s a fifty percent chance the radioactive material decays and registers on the Geiger counter, which would trigger the release of the poison, killing the cat. If you accept superposition in quantum mechanics, then the radioactive material has decayed and not decayed, and the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Until you open the box. The act of observation eliminates the alternate realities. Once you look, there’s no going back.
Hm, I’ve never heard of it, but I understand the analogy, however absurd. Cats don’t function like atomic particles. If they did, I would like them better.
Cady smiled for a moment.
But what Robert said earlier resonated. Eric’s death would forever cloud her remembrance of the past. Maybe she would never be able to know what happened to her brother, all the ways she had or hadn’t let him down. But that was why understanding the meaning behind these drop locations mattered so much to her—they weren’t reliant on her memory. Now she was retracing Eric’s actions, trying to glean whatever objective evidence she could. There had to be better scientific method in that.
Suddenly the boys standing around the chessboard erupted in groans; the hustler had won again, and the student playing him seemed like he’d had enough. Until one of his friends pointed to the hustler. “Third to last play, you nudged that knight’s position to make your move.”
The hustler gravely shook his head. “No no no, I never cheat, never. I’m a man of honor, you understand? You friend made a mistake. Here, I show you.” He then proceeded to replace the pieces and walk them backward through the last five moves from memory, while also showing the better options the his opponent failed to take at each turn. When he had finished the lesson, a few other bystanders clapped. The defeated student apologized for his friend and shook the hustler’s hand, and it appeared all was forgiven.
See? I’m not so sure this is a waste of potential. I found that delightful.
The boys cleared off and the hustler reset the table, waiting for his next customer, but Cady was almost too intimidated to step forward. She stalled rechecking the GPS app.
The coordinate location looks right on this guy’s chess table. Maybe the table wasn’t always there. Or maybe Eric stuck something under it.—Do you think I can just ask?
Warm him up a bit, pay for a game. I’ll help you.
“Hi, I—”
The hustler held up his hand. “Five dollars for five minutes,” he said in a Haitian accent.
Cady got the cash from her wallet, and then he motioned for her to sit.
“I am Jean-Pierre. You win, you get your money back. Deal?”
Cady introduced herself and shook his hand, feeling guilty that she was essentially cheating with a genius in her ear.
“White moves first, den you hit de button.”
Start with something he won’t except, an unconventional opener. Move your king’s bishop pawn out first.
Cady did as she was told.
Jean-Pierre seemed pleased. “Not an amateur like de last one.” He chuckled, before making his move.
He’s a strong player. All right, take your knight …
The rest of the moves went quickly, with Cady acting out Robert’s instructions as if on instinct. Cady got worried only at one point when Jean-Pierre took her queen, but Robert reassured her the sacrifice was expected and decimated the black’s defense, queen included, over the next few turns, making Jean-Pierre curse under his breath. With fewer black pieces remaining, it was Jean-Pierre’s turn, and Robert began outlining what Cady would have to do to win the game in the next three moves. Cady was listening intently, trying to commit the plan to memory, when the black rook shot out of nowhere to knock over their king.
Ghosts of Harvard Page 32
