Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  The name exploded in her mind, blinding, obliterating, inescapable. For a split second, the shock of it eliminated any further thought. Then, the boom. Synapses firing in her brain flashed on every image of the atomic bomb she had ever seen. The burst of light, bright as a thousand suns, the monstrous mushroom cloud rising with the alien grace of a jellyfish, the eerie silence before the crack of sound splits the sky and skulls of all who hear. Then the furious earth roaring after it, ash chasing fire upward until hell reaches heaven. And the victims. Bodies, peeled back by layers, broken by shockwaves, poisoned by radiation. Houses bent and burned as though they were made of paper. Cities reduced to rubble in the blink of an eye. Innocent people, with souls and dreams and pasts and futures, vaporized, annihilated, as if they had never existed at all.

  Robert Oppenheimer.

  The father of the atomic bomb. Each clue detonated its own tiny blast in her memory—the precocious genius, physics, thermodynamics, Niels Bohr, summers in remote New Mexico. But of course she hadn’t recognized him. He wasn’t the Robert Oppenheimer, not yet. He was only a twenty-one-year-old boy with the heart of a poet, ambitious and insecure, too shy to talk to the girl in the next carrel, too gentle to fight back at summer camp, doing his best to live up to the awful fact of excellence. “If, in the end, I’ve got to satisfy myself with testing toothpaste, I don’t want to know till it has happened.” If only such a banal ending were possible. Her Robert didn’t know what he was capable of. Her Robert didn’t know he was marked to open Pandora’s box. He didn’t know he was carrying the potential to destroy cities, to imperil generations to come. He was only a student, arming himself in a quiet classroom to invent the end of the world. And he had no idea.

  Cady leaned against a rough trunk of one of the trees to stead herself, as she asked one more time what she already knew was true:

  You’re Robert Oppenheimer?

  Only no one was there to answer.

  48

  Robert was gone.

  It was like Schrödinger’s cat; the alternate realities where the ghosts could exist in two places at once, or two times in one place, had collapsed now that she had seen the ending. Their known fates could not be unknown, the past could not be undone. She ached at the realization that she would never hear from him or Bilhah again.

  All along, she had asked herself, why these voices, why these ghosts? There could be hundreds of spirits trapped within the gates of Harvard Yard, but something about these three marked them for her. A budding scientist, a young mother trying to save her son, an optimistic young soldier—what was the common thread between them? What did the infamous Robert Oppenheimer and the erased Bilhah share in common?

  They were doomed.

  All their gifts, all their potential—Robert’s genius, Bilhah’s love and courage—warped, twisted, and turned to ruin. They were ghosts, after all, and happy endings don’t haunt anyone.

  And there was one unaccounted for. Whit, who had broken through the boundaries of time to love her. Whit, who had dodged the bullet—or had he? Why would he be the exception? Whit had changed his course. He wouldn’t be on the front lines of World War II. She had saved him from that fate. But her belief in that grew brittle and cracked with doubt until it crumbled beneath her feet and plunged her into a fear so cold, it could only be true.

  She fumbled to yank her phone out of her pocket, and she quickly typed “Akron dirigible” into the search engine with shaking hands. She could read the first line of the search results, like a Wikipedia article beginning, “The USS Akron (ZRS-4) was a helium-filled rigid airship of the United States Navy that was lost in a weather-related accident …”

  But Wikipedia isn’t always reliable. Cady clicked the next link, a military history website, and skimmed the page:

  “The mighty Akron soared over Washington, D.C., presiding over Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration, bolstering his famous dictum, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Less than a month later, the Akron would be no more.”

  Her eyes raced over the words:

  On April 3, 1933, the USS Akron left Lakehurst base for a routine training mission. The seventy-six men on board had no idea they were flying into one of the most violent storm-fronts to sweep the Atlantic in a decade …

  … Lightning splintered the skies, radios filled with static. … They lowered their altitude to avoid being struck, but found themselves flying blind, with clouds above and fog below. … a tailwind had increased the Akron’s speed without their knowledge, rendering their dead reckoning erroneous. What happened next has been pieced together by the survivors …

  —Survivors, so there was hope.

  Just after midnight, the winds grew extremely turbulent and the Akron began to nosedive. Lt. Commander Wiley released the emergency ballast, discharging nearly a ton of water to get the Akron’s nose up, but she began to rise rapidly, rocketing through the clouds. The crew regained control at 1600 feet, but the storm grew more violent, sucking the Akron into a downward current of air and pulling the ship into her final descent. Falling tail first …

  —Cady felt her stomach drop with it.

  At 800 feet, the Akron shook with what those on board thought was a buffeting gust of wind. What they didn’t know was that the airship’s tail had crashed into the ocean. Her eight engines strained, but the submerged tail acted as an anchor. Her engines stalled and her nose came crashing down. In minutes, the sea swallowed the Akron whole.

  Seventy-three men perished that night, only three survived.

  Cady’s heart thundered in her chest as she clung to one last hope. She searched for “Akron crash survivors” and drew the results: “Lt. Commander Herbert V. Wiley, Richard E. Deal, boatswain’s mate, second class, and Moody E. Erwin, aviation metalsmith, second class.”

  No James Whitaker Goodwin, Jr.

  Her body froze but her heart raced. Only her eyes moved over the text, trying to rearrange the glowing words into a different ending.

  Cady squeezed her eyes shut as her mind was filled with sounds of the crash. The engines gunning before they stalled out, the ghastly quiet for one awful moment before the ship’s hull impacted the water. She heard the squeal and groan of the Akron’s steel bones breaking, rivets popping, the frame twisting, spilling her hot fuel like blood as the ship was gutted by the sea.

  She closed her eyes and saw Whit in the ocean, his long, strong rower’s arms cutting the waves like oars, striving to stay above water, his throat burning with saltwater and gasoline. He would be looking for his fellow men, trying to help, pushing the good debris to others first, saving himself for last. How long did it take him to realize no one was coming? To understand that all his youth and muscle and courage were no match against the ocean’s ageless, tireless, peerless strength. To learn that the ocean swallows krill and heroes alike.

  And Cady had told him to go. Just as she had blithely listened to Robert talk atomic structure. Just as she had written Bilhah’s suicide note. When Whit had discussed the airships, Cady had been thinking of the perils of war, danger from an outside enemy. She had never considered a tragedy during peacetime nor imagined a foe as simple as a storm. How could inclement weather fell a 750-foot dirigible? That wasn’t the way a soldier’s story was supposed to end—in a freak accident. And yet the foolishness of anyone to rely on the constancy of the winds, the hubris of men that expect to prevail over Fortune in her heavens, was suddenly, fatally, obvious.

  Cady’s error in judgment was far worse than Whit’s, as she had the privilege of a future perspective. She’d listened quietly as Whit described the airship’s ability to protect the Pacific against an attack, when she had learned about Pearl Harbor in the sixth grade. No airships prevented the day that will live in infamy. Dirigible, what dirigible? She had barely known the meaning of the word until Whit told her. She had tried to protect him, but from the wrong danger; she had meant to save him, but from a d
ifferent fate.

  Another error in dead reckoning.

  Of course the Akron was a disaster, the lighter-than-air program failed, and the dirigible aircraft carrier went extinct—just in time for the attack by the Japanese.

  Just in time for Robert Oppenheimer’s latest discovery.

  Since her brother’s suicide, Cady had entertained the impossible fantasy that if she could go back in time, she could change history. Well, she’d just gotten three more chances and had blown them all.

  Maybe that’s what they have in common, Cady thought, the misfortune of meeting me. She had met three people at a turning point in their lives—not the moment that would deliver their happy ending, but the one that would lead to their destruction. Her curse was having a front row seat to their ruin, yet remaining helpless to stop them. Helpless at best, triggerman at worst. Why would God, or the universe, or her own twisted mind, put her through this? Again? Why dangle the possibility of redemption in front of her only to snatch it away?

  She raked her fingers through her hair, and when her hands dropped to her neck, she felt it—the scar, that two-inch ridge on her neck, just under her left ear—and she recalled the totality of the memory that she could never fully forget. Her heart began to race the way it had in the terror of that night. She knew exactly why this was happening to her. Why the universe had chosen her to meet these three ghosts.

  Punishment.

  49

  The memory was always pressing in her mind, like water against a dam. Whenever Cady touched the scar, a tiny leak bubbled in the wall that she had built. But she was weaker now, and the leak split into a surge, sweeping her right back to that night last year.

  She’d thought she was still dreaming when the sound of a blade shearing through something soft first registered. She didn’t wake up until the cool metal touched her neck.

  “Eric?” Cady jerked up and yelped at a sharp sting on her neck.

  “Shhh.” Her brother leaned over her in the dark and pulled her head back down onto the pillow by her hair.

  “Ow! What are you doing? Stop!” She kicked at him from under the covers.

  Eric groaned in frustration and hissed through gritted teeth, “Stay still.”

  “What are you doing?” Her hands flew to her head to get him off, and she found herself clutching at fistfuls of her own loose hair, her fingertips wet with dark blood. “Oh my God! Did you cut me?”

  “Your hair. I have to cut your hair. You have to let me do this.” Eric’s voice sounded panicked, but his actions were forceful and deliberate. He climbed on top of her to hold her down on her bed, pressing her shoulder down with his elbow and grasping another chunk of her hair. She could see in his other hand he held a kitchen knife.

  “Stop, Eric, what are you doing?” Cady writhed and flailed underneath him.

  “They’re going to know you by your hair.”

  “Eric, Eric, Eric—” She said his name over and over again as they struggled, trying to bring him back to himself. This wasn’t her brother; this was a maniac. The big brother who used to comfort her after a nightmare had become one himself. His string-bean arms that had cradled and carried her now pinned her down with terrifying strength. Instead of his familiar goofy smile, he bared his teeth like an animal. Even as it was happening, Cady couldn’t believe she was fighting off the same person she loved and trusted most in the world.

  And despite the roughness of his grasp and the fierceness of his conviction, the look in Eric’s eyes was not fury but abject fear. Terror took over his expression and blurred the subtle differences in their features, so that Cady had the uncanny sense of seeing her own face in horror. Even the panicked, high pitch of his voice unsettled her with its foreignness for him and similarity to hers, and she couldn’t be sure which one of them was screaming as they struggled.

  Cady could hear their parents banging on her bedroom door, but they couldn’t get in, he must have locked it. It took all her might to try to keep his hands where she could see them, but mostly she caught only flashes of the cold blade as he lunged to saw off her hair.

  “Stop, I have to do this! They’re going to know you! I won’t let them find you—”

  Cady finally got hold of his wrist, but in an attempt to pry his fingers from the knife’s handle, she wrapped her hand around the blade instead. She shrieked in pain. “Mom!”

  The next thing Cady remembered was sitting in the passenger seat of their SUV with her father driving on the icy road, hunched over the steering wheel. His furrowed brow was illuminated by the bright red taillights of the ambulance that transported Eric and her mother just ahead of them. They didn’t talk, although the car was barraged with constant noise as hail pummeled the roof and windshield, the wipers squeaking with metronomic regularity against the rattatatat of ice striking the glass. Cady looked down at her bandaged hand in her lap—back at the house, the EMTs had wrapped her palm and covered the shallow cut on her neck. Dried blood caked the webbing between her fingers, and in the center of her palm, a plum spot had appeared on the snowy white gauze where the blood was seeping through.

  With her good hand, Cady flipped the visor down and checked herself in its mirror; the image was grotesque. Her face was dirtied with bloody smudges and a swath of hair had been hacked off three inches from her scalp on the side of her head, leaving only a scraggly layer behind her ear. The Snow Ball was next Friday. It was the type of stupid school dance that her friend Liz liked to roll her eyes at, but that was because Liz always got asked to go. This time was the first dance for which Cady also had a date, and not a guy friend, a guy that counted—Jake Verrano. She had always thought Jake was gorgeous, but so did a lot of girls, and Cady was shocked when he’d asked her. Now she looked like a mental patient. Actually she looked worse—nobody had cut Eric’s hair.

  They pulled up to the emergency department, and Cady watched as a flurry of people ran to the ambulance and swept Eric and her mother inside. Her father dropped her off at the entrance and parked the car. It was three o’clock in the morning and the emergency room was mostly empty, but she still had to wait. Her father went to check on Eric. Cady was supposed to fill out the paperwork on her lap, but she couldn’t hold the pen properly in her injured hand. Her writing with her left hand looked like a child’s.

  Her father wasn’t back by the time the receptionist called Cady’s name, so she met with the triage nurse by herself. The nurse took her vital signs and made inventory of her injuries.

  “Will you be filing a police report?” the nurse asked.

  “What for?”

  “The assault.”

  “Oh, no, my brother did this.”

  “So, a domestic assault.”

  “He’s schizophrenic.”

  “I’m not judging, honey. But it’s procedure in these types of cases that I take pictures of your injuries, just in case you decide to press charges.”

  The very suggestion made Cady feel ashamed. But the hospital setting instilled obedience, so she sat quietly as the nurse took photos of the “lacerations” on her hand and neck and the “contusions” on her shoulder and arms where Eric had held her down. She turned her face away from the camera every time.

  She was led to her hospital room, only it wasn’t really a room, only a bed with curtains on either side. It was a while before another nurse or her dad checked on her again. Cady remembered the doctor who finally arrived was young and very good-looking, like a doctor on a TV show. She felt ugly and embarrassed while he talked to her. They had left the house in such a hurry, she hadn’t changed out of her PJs of flannel pants and a threadbare, now bloodstained, T-shirt, and she couldn’t stop thinking about how bizarre she must look with half the hair on her head chopped off. And her own brother had done it. She couldn’t stop trembling.

  Mercifully, the handsome doctor took care of her quickly. He told her she was lucky. Lucky that the neck wound wasn�
�t deeper. Lucky that the knife didn’t sever any nerves in her hand. She got nine stitches in the palm of her right hand and was prescribed antibiotics, since kitchen knives are prone to bacteria. Cady didn’t feel lucky at all.

  “Where’s Mom?” she asked her father when the doctor left.

  “She’s coming.”

  But her mother didn’t come. Cady didn’t see her until they were already discharged and she and her father went to find Eric in Room 137. The door was shut. Her father gently knocked and told Cady to wait outside while he went in. She sat in a chair against the wall in the hallway, alone, a random girl in a bloodstained T-shirt and PJ pants with her hospital-socked feet shoved into flip-flops. She kept her father’s giant puffy coat on even though it was too hot for it inside, because her shirt was too see-through without it, and every time a nurse or a doctor walked by, she sank lower into it. Finally her parents came out. Cady’s mother looked at her with an exhausted smile. Cady’s entire body relaxed and she smiled back.

  “He’s okay,” her mother said. “They gave him a sedative, and he’s resting now.”

  He, him, Eric—Cady remembered being so angry, so hurt, that those were the first words out of her mother’s mouth. Cady had been attacked in her sleep, assaulted, and still—. When her mother asked about her injuries right afterward, she shrugged her off, too furious even to speak. She let her father recount what her doctor had said.

  Her mother reached out to touch her face and Cady turned her cheek, which actually hurt her neck more.

  “Sweetie, I just want to see the one on your neck.”

  “The doctor said it wasn’t deep,” her father said. “It should heal on its own.”

  “He said I was lucky,” Cady added.

  “That’s good.” Her mother took a seat next to her, so the three of them were sitting in a row, not facing one another. Her mom brushed Cady’s newly short hair behind her ear. “It will grow back,” she said, giving her back a rub.