Elliott grimaced. “Bob Ross? The guy at University of Detroit Mercy?”
“Not that Bob Ross,” Adeline said. “The landscape painter.”
Sam held his hands out beside his head. “The guy with the big hair.”
“That’s the one,” Adeline said. “What we have here is a Bob Ross-style happy accident. He said we never make mistakes on the canvas. Only happy accidents. And we need to figure out how to use this accident. We’re certainly not the first in history to find ourselves in this position. Alexander Fleming found penicillin completely by accident. He went on vacation for two weeks and returned to find mold growing over his petri dishes, mold that prevented the growth of staphylococci. Even the discovery of plastic was an accident. So was the microwave. And gunpowder.”
Adeline glanced around the room at the five scientists. “We’ve discovered something here. We just need to figure out why the world needs it.”
Adeline knew the answer. But she wanted to give it some time—time was, after all, what it was all about.
*
Two seminal events in her past were drawing closer, and Adeline dreaded each one.
Absolom Sciences had moved into a larger building in Palo Alto, but the individual offices of the Absolom Six were still close enough for her to hear signs of stress outside of work.
Increasingly, Elliott was growing desperate and frustrated with Charlie. The whispered calls had become shouting matches. In the mornings, he drank more coffee, and his eyes were more bloodshot—either from crying the previous night or drinking alcohol or both.
On her calendar, Adeline had circled the date that Charlie’s suffering would come to an end. She dreaded that night. And she knew she had to be there.
The past couldn’t be changed.
She would walk down that street and look at the convenience store’s security camera and go into that apartment. She knew what she would find there.
Another date loomed large in her mind: her mother’s death.
She had contemplated trying to stop it a million times. But that would break causality and the universe. And besides, there was no cure for her at this time. Maybe there never would be. Maybe time couldn’t cure everything, despite what her father had said.
She visited her mother more frequently then. Adeline knew she was trying to hang on to something that she couldn’t stop, as though time itself was sand slipping through her fingers.
At the door one evening, Adeline came face-to-face with her younger counterpart. The girl was twelve and cocked her head impatiently and yelled, “Mom! Your sewing buddy is here!”
She stormed out without another word, off into the evening, likely to a friend’s house nearby to homework-gossip or indulge in social media feeds.
As an adult now, it was hard to even remember herself being that moody and self-absorbed as a teen. Yet there it was.
Adeline’s mother appeared in the small foyer, a kind smile on her face. “You’re more than a sewing buddy to me.”
Adeline laughed. “Likewise.”
The quilt they worked on that night was one they had been laboring on for weeks. It was a photomosaic made from hundreds of family photos of Adeline’s youth—of her, her mother, her father, and Ryan. The individual photos combined to represent a picture of the whole family at home in front of the Christmas tree.
A stab had gone through Adeline’s heart when her mother had shown her the pattern she’d created with a website called Mosaic Quilt—because she knew it was the last thing she had sewn. All this time, Adeline had wondered if her mother knew how it would end, if she had selected the mosaic quilt as a sort of swan song for her hobby and her life. If so, it was fitting. The tiles and pictures were little slivers of a shared existence together, hundreds of moments that, when knit together, formed the tapestry of a life. A family’s journey together, one that would soon have no more pictures with the four of them.
Her mother was laying out the quilt’s batting when she said, “I was just going to make one for the living room. But now I think I’ll make three.” She set out another layer. “So they’ll all have one.”
A part of Adeline wanted to ask, Why not four—so you’ll all have one? But she didn’t need to. She knew then that her mother knew, somehow.
Instead, she steadied her voice and said, “I think it’s a great idea.”
*
As she was walking home that night, under the maple trees and the streetlights, Adeline thought about that quilt, about the pictures that formed a larger image. There was a truth there somewhere, just out of her mind’s reach.