I followed her out to Route 2 and along it as far as Emerson Hospital.
I’d never known Margaret to go to the hospital. She’d never talked about it. It freaked me out a bit. My insides went cold, and the closer we got, the colder they got. I couldn’t believe what a stupid jealous bastard I’d been. Maybe Margaret was sick—maybe she’d been sick this whole time and just didn’t want to tell me. She didn’t want to burden me with it. Oh my God, maybe she had cancer! I should have stuck with trying to cure it! Maybe that was the whole point of this whole thing—Margaret has some rare disease, but then we work together, and because we have the repeating-days thing we have all the time we need, and finally we come up with a cure for it and save her and she falls in love with me …
But no; that wasn’t this story. This was a different kind of story.
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.”