Summer Days and Summer Nights (54 page)

I waited till she was on her way in, then I parked and got out and followed her. Listen, I know I was being a prying asshole, it's just that I couldn't stop myself.
Please don't let her be sick,
I thought.
She doesn't have to talk to me, she can ignore me for the rest of eternity, she just has to not be sick.

The lobby was hushed and businesslike. Margaret was nowhere to be seen. I read the signs next to the elevator: Radiology, Surgery, Birthing, Bone and Joint Center, Wound Care … After weeks of timelessness it was strange to be here, where so much of time's damage and destruction ends up. There's nowhere less timeless than a hospital.

I tried them all. I finally found her in Cancer.

I didn't speak to her, I just watched. She was sitting on a bench, knee to knee with a woman in a wheelchair who was way too young to look as old as she did. Bald and desperately thin, she was crumpled in a corner of the chair like an empty dress, her head drooping, half awake. Margaret was bent forward, speaking softly to her, though I couldn't tell if the woman was awake or not, with both her gray, thin hands in Margaret's young, vital ones.

It wasn't Margaret, it was her mother. She wasn't on a business trip. She was dying.

*   *   *

I drove home slowly. I knew I shouldn't have followed Margaret to the hospital, that I had no business intruding on her private tragedy, but at least now I understood. It made sense of everything: Why Margaret always had somewhere else to be. Why she was so distracted. Why she didn't want to escape the time loop. The time loop was the only reason her mother was still alive.

I still didn't understand why Margaret had kept it a secret, but that didn't really matter. This wasn't about me. I thought I was the hero of this story, or at least the second lead, but I was nowhere near it. I was just a bit player. I was singing in the chorus.

I didn't know what to do with myself, so I stopped in the center of town and bought a map and went home and filled it out. I looked over the tiny perfect things to see what was left. Too late for BOUNCY BALL (09:44:56). Too late for CONSTRUCTION SITE (10:10:34). Still time for REVOLVING DOOR (17:34:19). And good old SHOOTING STAR (21:17:01).

I realized it had been a while since I saw a new perfect thing. Somewhere along the way I'd stopped looking for them. I wasn't super-alive anymore. I'd stopped living in the now. I'd dropped back into the then.

But what was even the point? Suddenly it all seemed kind of silly. Perfect moments, what did they even mean? They were blind luck, that was all. Coincidences. Statistical anomalies. I did some Googling and it turned out somebody had actually bothered to do the math on this, a real actual Cambridge University mathematician named John Littlewood (1885–1977; thank you, Wikipedia). He proposed that if you define a miracle as something with a probability of one in a million, and if you're paying close attention to the world around you eight hours a day, every day, and little things happen around you at a rate of one per second, then you'd observe about thirty thousand things every day, which means about a million things a month. So, on average, you should witness one miracle every month (or every thirty-three-and-one-third days, if we're being strictly accurate). It's called Littlewood's law.

So there you have it, a miracle a month. They're not even that special. I stared at the map anyway, giving particular staring attention to the ones that Margaret had found, such is love. And I did love her. It made it better to understand why she couldn't possibly love me, not now, probably not ever, but I'm not going to pretend it didn't hurt.

The perfect moments were surprisingly evenly distributed. There were fewer of them in the nighttime, because nothing was happening and we weren't really looking anyway, but the rest of the day was evenly filled. There was only one bare patch in the schedule, right around dawn—a bald spot where statistically you would've expected a perfect moment, but we'd never found it.

The longer I stared at the map, the more it looked like there was a pattern in it. I played a game with myself: Pretend that the points on the map were stars in a constellation. What did it look like? Look, no one should ever have to apologize for doing stupid things when the person they love has walked out of their life and they have way too much time on their hands. And I had an eternity of time. I sketched in lines between them. Maybe I could make—what? Her name? Her face? Our initials intertwined in a beautiful romantic love knot?

Nope. When I'd connected all the dots they looked like this:

Except not quite. There was one dot missing, down in the lower left corner.

I stared at it, and a funny idea struck me: What if you could use the map not just to remember when and where perfect things happened, but to predict when and where they were
going
to happen? It was a stupid idea, a terrible idea, but I sketched it in with a ruler anyway. The missing dot was right on top of Blue Nun Hill, which I happened to know well because it made an excellent sledding hill in winter, which at this rate it would never be again. Something should really be happening there, and judging by the rest of the schedule, it should be happening right around dawn.

The sun rose at 5:39 a.m. on August 4th, I happened to know. I waited until time flipped at midnight, then I set my alarm for five, to wake up in time for the last tiny perfect thing of them all.

*   *   *

I drove over to Blue Nun Hill in the warm summer darkness. The streets were deserted, the streetlights still on, houses all full of sleeping people resting up so they'd be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to sleepwalk through another day. It was still full night, not even a hint of blue on the horizon yet. I parked at the bottom of the hill.

I wasn't the only one up. There was a silver station wagon parked there too.

I have never actually seen a Marine or any member of the armed forces take a hill, but I'm telling you, I'm pretty confident that I took that hill like a Marine. There was a big boulder at the top, dropped there casually by a passing glacier ten thousand years ago, during the Ice Age, and Margaret was sitting on it, knees drawn up to her chin, looking out at the darkened town.

She heard me coming because I was doing a lot of un-Marine-like gasping and wheezing after running all the way up the hill.

“Hi, Mark,” she said.

“Margaret,” I said, when I could sort of talk. “Hi. It's good. To see you.”

“It's good to see you too.”

“Is it all right if I join you?”

She patted the rock beside her. I boosted myself up. The hill faced east, and the horizon was now glowing a deep, intense azure. We didn't talk for a while, but it wasn't awkward. We were just getting ready to talk, that was all.

“I'm sorry I disappeared like that,” she said.

“It's okay,” I said. “You're allowed to disappear.”

“No, I should explain.”

“You don't have to.”

“But I want to.”

“Okay. But before you do, I have a confession to make.”

I told her how I'd followed her to the hospital and spied on her with her mother. It sounded even worse when I said it out loud.

“Oh.” She thought about it. “No, I get it. I probably would've done the same thing. Kind of creepy, though.”

“I know. It felt that way even at the time, but I couldn't stop myself. Listen, I'm just really sorry. About your mom.”

“It's okay.”

But she choked on that last word, and her face crumpled, and she crushed her forehead into her knees. Her shoulders shook silently. I rubbed her back. I wished more than anything that I could spend all of my monthly one-in-a-million miracles at once, forever, to make her sadness go away. But things don't work like that.

“Margaret, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.”

Birds were twittering joyfully now, tactlessly, all around us. She busily wiped away tears with the back of her wrist.

“There's something else I have to explain,” she said. “The day before this whole thing started I went to see my mother at the hospital, and the doctors told me they were stopping treatment. There was no point—”

She squeaked that last word, and the sadness strangled her again, and she couldn't go on. I put my arm around her shoulders and she sobbed on my neck. I breathed in the smell of her hair. She felt so thin and precious, to have all that grief inside her. She'd had it this whole time, all by herself. I wished I could take it from her, but I knew I couldn't. It was her grief. Only she could carry it.

“When I went to bed that night, all I could think was that I wasn't ready.” She swallowed. Her eyes were still red, but they were dry now, and her voice was steady. “I wasn't ready to let go. I'm only sixteen, I wasn't ready to not have a mom. I needed her so much.

“That night, when I went to bed, all I could think was that tomorrow cannot come. Time cannot go on. I am pulling the emergency brake of time. I even said it out loud: ‘Tomorrow cannot come.'

“And when I woke up that morning, it was true. It was the same day again. Time had stopped for me. I don't know why; I guess it just didn't have the heart to keep going. Somebody somewhere decided that I needed more time with her. That's why I ran off that plane to Tokyo. I was afraid it would work, and I wasn't ready.”

We were silent for a long time after that, while I thought about the love inside Margaret, how much of it there must have been that even time couldn't stand up to it. There were no fourth-dimensional beings. It was Margaret's heart, that was all. It was so strong it bent space-time around it.

“But I knew there was a catch. I always knew it. The catch was that if I fell in love, it would end. Time would roll forward again, like it always does, and it would take my mom along with it. I don't know how, but I knew that was always the deal. When I could fall in love with someone, that's how I would know it was time to say good-bye to her for real.

“I think that's why you're here. For me to fall in love with. That's why you got sucked into this. I knew it as soon as I saw you.”

The sun was almost up, the sky was getting bright, and it was like I could feel a sun rising inside me, too, bright and warm, filling my whole self with love. Because Margaret did love me. And at the same time I was crying—the sadness didn't go away, not in the slightest. I was happy and sad, both at once. I thought about what time is, how we're being broken every second, we're losing moments all the time, leaking them away like a stuffed animal losing its stuffing, until one day they're all gone and we lose everything. Forever. And then, at the same time, we're gaining seconds, moment after moment. Every one is a gift, until at the end of our lives we're sitting on a rich hoard of moments. Rich beyond imagining. Time was both those things at once.

I took both Margaret's hands in mine.

“Is it time? Is this the last day?”

She nodded solemnly.

“It's the last one. The last August 4th. I mean, till next year anyway.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks again, but she smiled through them. “I'm ready now. It's time.”

The sun cracked the edge of the world and began to rise.

“You know what's funny though?” she said. “I keep waiting for the thing to happen. You know, the perfect thing, the last one. The way it's supposed to on the map. But maybe we missed it while we were talking.”

“I don't think we missed it.”

I kissed her. You can spend your life waiting and watching for perfect moments, but sometimes you have to make one happen.

After a few seconds, the best seconds of my life so far, Margaret pulled away.

“Hang on,” she said. “I don't think that was it.”

“It wasn't?”

“It wasn't perfect. I had a hair in my mouth.”

She swept her hair to one side.

“Okay, kiss me again.”

I did. And this time it was perfect.

 

ANTHOLOGIES ALSO EDITED BY
STEPHANIE PERKINS

MY TRUE LOVE GAVE TO ME: TWELVE HOLIDAY STORIES

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Leigh Bardugo
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Six of Crows
and the Grisha trilogy. She was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Los Angeles, and graduated from Yale University. These days, she lives and writes in Hollywood, where she can occasionally be heard singing with her band. Visit her online at
leighbardugo.com
. Or sign up for email updates
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