Begin Again | ongoing - Chapter 36: Chapter 36

After too long in the dingy back office, Sunny's forgotten how nice a day it is until she bursts out onto the sun-soaked seafront. The rain has gone at last, after a couple of dreary weeks in a row, and there's warmth in the rays that have made it ninety-three million miles from the surface of the sun to graze her cheeks. It's the kind of day to be spent outside, reading on the beach or bargain hunting in Black Sands' winding lanes, not stuck inside the library. But stuck inside the library is exactly where Sunny plans to be.
Black Sands has a half decent library, with a couple of computers and at least ten shelves, but that is not where Sunny plans to go. No, by far the best library belongs to the university five miles west of here in a stunning Gothic building that has featured in the background of many a moody, darkly academic film. Cromwell University boasts a vast, ancient library harking back to the seventeenth century that houses thousands of books on every subject from international law and social policy to crime fiction and cookbooks. The campus doesn't belong so close to Black Sands: it is so grand, so majestic, so much better suited to somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge than this quiet, salty little city on the northeast coast.
A home bunny at heart and with Cromwell on her doorstep, where her mother taught, no less – and still teaches to this day – Sunny never considered anywhere else when she applied to university. She has not strayed far from Black Sands in her almost twenty-five years and she has no regrets: what if she had gone to London or Edinburgh and been deprived of Ravi and Fraser and Delilah? That does not bear thinking about. It is fate that she stayed close to home, and it is fate that despite being so close to home, she chose to stay in campus accommodation, and she met three people who mean the world to her.
The third floor in Cromwell's impressive library boasts a relatively new instalment: several banks of cubicles outfitted with the latest Acorn computers and plenty of desk space for students to spread out their work and hunker down for a day of intense studying. Sunny and her friends spent much of their degrees in here, commandeering a row in varying states of distress over deadlines and essays and relationship crises.
Half an hour after leaving Vinyl Countdown, Sunny hops off the bus at the top of College Avenue and takes a moment to appreciate the view. The university is a couple of miles inland but it's higher than Black Sands, high enough that she can see the sea from the bus stop and she knows that from the top floor of the physics building, she can see the pier on a clear day. It's May, which means the academic year is drawing to an end and the majority of Cromwell's students are entering exam season, and Sunny's tummy flips at the memory of cramming for tests, never quite sure what she was doing.
She tries not to make eye contact with any of the students, who rush across campus with bulging bags on their backs, bulky laptops in their arms, takeaway coffees in their shaking hands; she bypasses groups of first years who cluster around the campus clock in the hopes that good luck will be bestowed upon them if they're standing under it as it chimes midday.
The library has a specific scent that both comforts and disconcerts Sunny. Old books, new books, coffee going cold and dust collecting on the shelves. It reminds her of a period of her life that was so stressful, yet it's a time she looks back on fondly, wishing she could do it all over again because the passage of time diminishes the pain. Four years ago she was regretting ever deciding to get a degree. Now she yearns to be eighteen again. She likes to think she has a better grasp on life now, though that's debatable. Especially right now. Granted, everything she thought she knew about life in general has been shaken up recently.
A handful of computer cubicles are empty and Sunny slips into one, wiggling the mouse to wake up the screen and input the username and password her mother gave her access to after her university credentials expired – another perk of a faculty parent. While the library isn't locked and no student ID is required to enter, it is technically for Cromwell University students only, and a valid Cromwell-issued login is required. Sunny is soon on the system and impatiently double-clicking the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop. She may not be the most computer literate, but she knows what she needs to know: open the internet, type a name, see what happens.
That's exactly what she does. She opens the browser, glossing over the Microsoft homepage, and navigates to Google. It's hard to tamp down the itch of anticipation as she types in Isabel Beecham, and she thinks please let there be something. She knows the odds are small. She knows that life does not exist on the internet – hers surely doesn't; anyone typing Tennyson Shelley will find many results but none related in any way to her – but she can't help praying that somehow, Isabel Beecham became someone worthy of an article featuring her name, her story.
The page of results loads. It's impossible to tell if any of it is relevant because she doesn't even know what she's looking for, and for all she knows, there are hundreds of Isabel Beechams in the world. There's no saying that any of the Isabels she finds are the right one. The first link she clicks on is an article from BBC News about a tech startup duo whose names don't quite match. Sunny exits the site and scrolls down, scanning the link and previews for anything that might be relevant while holding dates in the head – Celeste said that Isabel would be in her late seventies by now.
She's a couple of pages deep in her Google search and so laser focused on the task at hand that she nearly shits herself when a hand touches her shoulder and a voice behind her says, "Hey, stranger. What're you doing?"
Sunny yelps in surprise, jerking in her seat before she turns around and comes face to face with Delilah, whose arms are full of astronomy textbooks. Today she's wearing her natural hair, tight coils teased into a tidy, librarian-esque bun at the nape of her neck, and she's switched out her glasses with the thick black frames for a delicate wire-rimmed pair that she pushes up with the back of her wrist.
"Lilah! Shit, you scared me." Sunny lets her hackles down. She scoots her seat over and Delilah pulls up a chair, and she drops her voice to a whisper when she says, "I'm looking up the other two people Celeste and Astrid knew about."
Delilah looks confused for a moment, until the pieces click into place in her mind and she realises what Sunny's talking about. "She's one of them?" She nods at the screen. "Isabel Beecham?"
"Yeah. But I can't find anything."
Delilah taps the screen, wafting her perfume over Sunny, and says, "You might get better results if you spell it right."
"What?"
"It's not spelled Beecham. It's Beauchamp," Delilah says. Sunny can't hear the difference until Delilah leans over and corrects the typo.
"Fuck's sake!" Sunny harrumphs. "That's not even close!"
"Is that all you know? Her name?"
"Yeah." Sunny's bud of hope curls up, petals withering. Of course it isn't enough.
"Well, she must've been involved with Black Sands at some point, so..." Delilah leans over and adds the city to the search, and there are fewer pages of results this time.
"She didn't stay here, though," Sunny says. "Celeste said she wanted to get away and start fresh. She reckoned she left the country. And she was most likely born in the twenties."
"There we go, more information already." Delilah taps and scrolls and adjusts her glasses and Sunny watches in awe, the way her friend commandeers the internet and doesn't get frustrated by slow-loading pages or insufficient search criteria. "Why the sudden interest?"
"Viv and I went for supper with Astrid and Celeste. We didn't talk about any of this but, you know, it's on my mind." She sits on her hands, unneeded now that Delilah has taken over. "I want to know as much as I can about the others, and I'm in a good enough place now that I can take it, whatever it is."
She knows Margaret's story – the pertinent bit, at least – but there's still hope for Isabel. There's still a chance she did something with her life. The outcome of this search changes nothing but Sunny feels this compulsion to know, so her pulse kicks into high gear when Delilah clicks on a link and sits straighter with an ooh of intrigue.
"This could be her?" She moves her chair back so Sunny can read the screen, a two-year-old article from The Washington Post.
ROCKET SCIENTIST'S REMAINS LAUNCHED INTO SPACE: REMEMBERING THE LIFE OF ISABELLE BEAUCHAMP
Sunny swallows hard. The spelling of Isabelle isn't what she's been trying but there are so many ways to spell the name, after all. It can't be the same woman, can it? Her eyes flit down the screen for confirmation.
Despite her rocket to the top, not much is known about the early life of Isabelle Beauchamp, who died on the 8th of February this year at age 75. Born in the town of Black Sands in the north of England in 1923, Beauchamp emigrated to the US in 1951 with hardly a penny to her name and no contacts in the country. Beauchamp pursued studies in physics and astronomy at MIT, where she received a full scholarship, and was hired by NASA upon her graduation at the age of 32. Despite her late start, Beauchamp went on to become one of the nation's most important astrophysicists, whose work was implemental in the 1960s - she is noted, among many other achievements, for her contribution to the success of the Apollo 11 mission that landed man on the moon.
"Holy shit," Sunny says. This has to be her. It has to be.
"It sounds like she was okay," Delilah says softly.
Beauchamp never divulged much about her life before she moved to the states. Her colleagues would joke that nobody knew anything about the woman who knew everything. When asked in 1970 about her decision to leave behind everything she knew on a gamble in a foreign country, she said the following:
"I had nothing to lose. It was this or nothing. And I couldn't bear to choose nothing, so I had to make this work."
Beauchamp never married and never had children. Friends and colleagues remark that she was married to the job until the day she died. Her fellow scientist and close friend, Diane Buckingham, said that, "Izzie was in search of something greater than anything we know. She spent her whole life looking for some kind of meaning to the world that I don't know if we'll ever find: her science, her studies, that's what got her up in the morning. She would joke that she was nothing without her pursuit of knowledge, that her life would cease to hold any meaning the moment she stopped looking for what lies beyond our reach."
At Beauchamp's request, her body was cremated following her death from a short battle with lung cancer; a small portion of her ashes were today launched into orbit on a rocket ship along with the ashes of several other prominent figures.
Sunny tears herself away from the article. Her vision's blurring and she has goosebumps, and she can't get rid of this deep-seated yearning for a woman she never knew, a woman who died before she ever could have known about her. There's no doubt in her mind that this is the right Isabelle. The one who saw the cruellest strings of the universe and dedicated the rest of her life to studying its every thread.
"Wow," Delilah says, the word a breath. "She sounds iconic. Literally living the dream – an astrophysicist for NASA. Damn. That's so cool."
"Yeah." It's all Sunny can manage past the lump in her throat. Isabelle survived: she made a name for herself; she devoted her life to science after the world played a trick on her. But the Isabelle that Astrid and Celeste knew was a woman who yearned for a child, for a family. The Isabelle here is a woman who never had a child after the one the crack in time stole from her; she never took that risk again.
It's a lot to take in. None of it has any bearing on Sunny now, not that she can tell at least, but her emotions are all over the place. She wants to know everything she can learn about Isabelle Beauchamp.
"What happened to her again?" Delilah asks. "How much time did she lose?"
Sunny glances around to check no-one is listening. She lowers her voice to a near whisper anyway. "Four years. But then her child died after another four years and she woke up back where she started."
"And decided to uncover the secrets of the universe, by the looks of it."
With the right spelling, it's easy to uncover more articles about Isabelle. All of them commend her intelligence and her dedication, her obsessive pursuit of more; they talk of her astonishing rise to the top from being a broke mature student in a foreign country; they wonder at the questions she never answered. Not once in almost five decades, it seems, did she ever let slip what had happened to her. Never did she divulge her deepest secret, her most tragic loss, her unfathomable trip through time.
"Who was the other one?" Delilah asks after a while, pulling Sunny out of her research hole.
It's only then that she looks up and takes in all the books in Delilah's hands and thinks to ask, "Wait, what're you doing here?"
"After much soul-searching, I've accepted the fact that the life of academia is the one for me. I applied to do a PhD here last year and I got accepted, so I've been brushing up before it starts in September."
"Lilah! Oh my god! Why wasn't that the first thing you said?" Sunny cries out, accidentally breaking the one (or, at least, the main) law of the library.
"It happened a couple of months ago," Delilah says, "so technically I already told you. When I first found out, I came straight to you. But I forgot to tell you again."
"That's incredible! Wow, congrats, Lilah." Sunny beams and pulls her friend into a tight hug. Delilah smells like the patchouli incense she's always burning, such a comforting smell that Sunny draws into her lungs and holds there for a moment. Delilah is a litany of comfort, from the soft strength of her hug to her warm aroma.
"Thank you," Delilah says into Sunny's hair. "Now who was the other one? You said that Astrid and Celeste knew of two others?"
"Margaret Gastrell," Sunny says. She navigates back to the Google homepage and types in the name, taking her time to make sure she's spelling it right.
There are a few results. All living people. Sunny scrolls down two pages before she goes back to the search bar and adds Black Sands and then, as much as she hates it, obituary. Margaret's suicide claws at her gut, her heart clenching into a withered fist each time she thinks about it.
"There," Delilah says, tapping on a result from the archives of the Black Sands Bugle. Decades' worth of births and deaths and marriages have been painstakingly digitised since the advent of the internet, and the one Delilah's tapping her perfectly painted nail on is from 1974. "Do you know when she died?"
"I don't know. I never asked," Sunny says. She clicks on the link Delilah's pointing at and when it loads – agonisingly slowly, the university's internet connection struggling under the weight of all the data being asked of it – every ounce of breath leaves her body. Numbness seeps in, the way water finds a hole in a boat and takes over, until she is rooted to her chair and she can't begin to comprehend how to move.
"Sunny?" Delilah crouches down, her face level with Sunny's, her warm hand on Sunny's frozen wrist. "What's wrong?"
Sunny can't tear her eyes from the obituary, even as they well up and the words blur, because she knows Margaret. She has never met her, never will, but she knows her.
Delilah follows her stare. She rereads the obituary. A soft oh escapes her when comprehension clicks. "Oh, Sunny." Her voice is honey butter, so soft and smooth, but it doesn't take away from the truth staring back at them from the boxy screen.
Margaret "Molly" Galanis, nee Gastrell, died 4th of September 1974 at the age of 40. Molly is survived by her husband and two children.
It feels like an age before Sunny is able to speak, before she can vocalise the two words bouncing around in her skull and crashing off every surface. "Viv's mum."
She is aware of Delilah's hands on her, pulling her close, holding her when a strange, strangled little sob lurches out of her throat. She is aware of the scent of patchouli and the light of the screen and the jangle of Delilah's bracelets and the solidity of the chair beneath her, but she feels weightless. Floating in space, untethered. Viv's mother made a wish, and when she was given everything she had asked for, she took her own life.
"I'm sorry, Sunny, I'm so sorry," Delilah is whispering. "Did you have any idea? About Viv's mum?"
Sunny shakes her head. It's as though the rug has been whipped out from under her feet and she can't catch her balance. "No. I know she died when Viv was a baby. I never asked how."
"She made a wish," Delilah says quietly.
The words sit between them as Sunny's mind swirls with everything she has learned from Astrid and Celeste, every morsel of information they fed her about Margaret, about her wish and her death.
"She wanted family and happiness," she says at last. "Isn't that what everybody would wish for? She just wanted to be happy and she had so much time stolen from her that"—Sunny drops her voice to a strained whisper when she remembers they're in a library, her throat aching with the promise of tears—"she couldn't go on. Happy people don't kill themselves, Lilah. She was supposed to be happy."
"Maybe she was," Delilah says, her words slow and measured.
"Obviously not!" Sunny cries out, snatching the attention of a few people around her, who give her dirty looks.
"I mean, the version of her who got married, who had Viv and her sister – she was happy." Delilah glances around, aware that their conversation makes no sense, hoping no-one is listening in. "She'd found what she wanted. But the version of her who made the wish, she was the unhappy one. And she's the one who woke up twenty years later in a life she didn't feel she had deserved."
Sunny crumples like a dying star, her core collapsing as she listens to Delilah, as she hears what she's saying. She reaches out, numb hand guiding the mouse to the cross in the corner of the web page, getting rid of the aching truth.
"Like me," she says.
"What do you mean?"
"I wished for a girlfriend and I woke up with Viv but I don't deserve her."
"Sunny. No, Sunny, you do. Look how far you've come. You've worked so hard with Viv. You've put the effort in." Her hands are cuffs around Sunny's pale wrists. "Look at me."
Sunny lifts her head. It takes all of her effort to do so.
"You made a wish. You got what you wished for, and it freaked you out, and you could've bailed. You could have let it overwhelm you."
"It does overwhelm me," Sunny interjects.
"But you're still here. You're putting the work in."
Tears spill down Sunny's cheeks, the weight of this knowledge pressing on her shoulders like someone is holding her down, like the entire universe sits on her back. "How am I going to tell Viv?" she whispers. Less because they're in the library and more because she can't persuade her voice to cooperate. Grief and guilt war in the pit of her stomach. She shouldn't be the one who knows this. "How the hell do I tell Viv that her mum died because she did exactly what I did?"
Delilah's eyes are wet. She shakes her head. "I don't know, Sunny. I don't know."
"You know everything, Lilah. Tell me what I need to do."
Delilah's shoulders lift in a helpless little shrug. "I wish I knew."
Sunny runs shaking hands through her lilac hair, a couple of strands coming out between her fingers. She loops them around and around until they snap. "I wish..."
"Careful what you wish for," Delilah says.
Sunny huffs. "Moral of the story, I guess. I just, I wish there was someone else. A success story. Someone like me, someone who got what they asked for and they made it work. Someone happy. Someone I can show to Viv and say, look, it doesn't have to turn out that way. This can be okay." She looks up to Delilah with a hopeful gaze.
"Sunny..." Delilah says her name like a lullaby, a soft little hush. "I think that's you."