Chapter 12 Wave Function
Wave Function
Hours before Silas died, Laurel and Eli sat with their toes in the sand. Silas snoozed on his towel. Eli was telling her about wave function.
Usually, he said, we use Newton’s laws to describe the motion and placement of an object. On the level of quantum particles, though—the smallest ones—those laws don’t work.
Laurel had asked him to explain this. She liked learning new things. She wished that Eli would ask her more about fungi.
Take an electron. Wave function describes where the electron is most likely to be detected. This means that wave function isn’t a traditional calculation. Instead of definitive answers, it gives us possibilities.
A foamy wave unscrolled in front of them. Eli pointed to its crest.
See that? In a quantum equation, the tallest part of the wave is where you’re most likely to find the electron.
You’re less likely to find it in the lower parts, though it isn’t impossible.
But here’s the other thing: quantum physics suggests that the location isn’t definite until someone measures it.
Before that, every possibility exists in what we call a superposition.
Laurel said, Like Schrodinger’s cat?
Eli nodded.
Remind me?
An imaginary cat is locked in a steel chamber, he said, along with a radioactive substance that may or may not kill it. Until someone opens the box, the theory goes, the cat is both dead and alive.
Laurel leaned her head against Eli’s shoulder. How can something be both alive and dead?
Well, that’s the problem. People think that Schrodinger was arguing in favor of superposition. Actually, he was trying to make a different point—that quantum mechanics makes no sense when applied to large objects.
But aren’t large objects made of quantum particles? Laurel asked, and Eli smiled the way he always did when she surprised him.
They’re bickering by breakfast. Like every other restaurant in the antiuniverse, Culver’s is vegetarian.
Laurel places their typical order—the mushroom fritter for her, the tofu pocket for Eli—while he waits in the car.
Back on the highway, he rustles through the bag while Laurel stares out of the window, drinking coffee.
When she looks back at Eli, he has one hand on the steering wheel. In the other is her mushroom fritter.
“Excuse me,” she says. “I got you the tofu pocket.”
Eli has already eaten half of the fritter. Laurel is so disappointed that she almost demands he turn around, but Culver’s is no longer visible. All she sees behind them are cows.
“I wanted the pumpkin pocket,” says Eli.
“Well, they stopped making the pumpkin pocket in September. It was a seasonal special.”
“What’s the big deal? Can’t we just switch?”
“I’ve been looking forward to the fritter since we left the house.”
“Actually, you’ve been sleeping since we left the house.”
“Which means I owe you the mushroom fritter?”
Laurel’s pitch is dangerously low, but Eli refuses to be cowed.
“Doesn’t sound unreasonable to me,” he says, and they lapse into silence, which Laurel maintains until they reach the Michigan border.
—
Kenji Nakamura’s visit diffused some of the tension that had dogged Laurel and Eli that fall.
Soon afterward, it returned. Where to pursue Silas Two was no longer the question: the overtaker had made that point clear.
Instead, they argued about takeout, about who had rights to the television, and once, at length, about whether the reheat setting on the microwave was more effective than the defrost. The vigor of these arguments approached bombast. For three years, Laurel and Eli had repressed their fear and anticipation, their burden and bewilderment.
Aside from Nita and Mr. Nakamura, they’d shared with no one the truth of their presence in this universe, nor the loneliness of being alien.
They had no choice but to book the same apartment where they had stayed with Silas.
A celebrity family had visited Cedar on a recent episode of their reality show, and tourist bookings surged.
Laurel opened Airbnb as soon as she heard, but the only other properties were a waterfront mansion and a beach shack without indoor plumbing.
Silas had died on the eighteenth, so Laurel and Eli wanted to arrive on the nineteenth, one day earlier.
They were foiled here, too: the apartment was a weekly rental, booked except for the third week of August. They would have to wait for five days, which sounded to Laurel like as many years.
Eli pointed out that they’d be just as anxious at home—and that it might help to reacquaint themselves with Cedar.
They arrive just before dusk.
“Well, let’s get this over with,” Eli says, popping the trunk.
Laurel snaps when he forgets to hold the front door open for her. There are two bedrooms: the room with the bunk beds and the one with a queen. Eli offers Laurel the latter.
Laurel regards him suspiciously. “Why do you want the bunk beds?”
“I was trying to be nice.”
“You don’t have to be a martyr.”
“Fine,” says Eli. “I’ll take the queen—happily.”
Laurel drags her suitcase upstairs, glaring.
That night, tossing on a concrete mattress, she wonders why she picked a fight. She’ll apologize in the morning. Eight hours later, though, Laurel finds Eli making toast while whistling the tune of the well-rested, and she decides that her apology can wait.
Stretching out before them are five interminable days.
They agree to spend the first at a distant beach.
An accident slows traffic to a trickle. The air-conditioning in the car is tepid, as if it exhausted itself on the trip from Wisconsin, and both of them are hungry.
The nearest restaurant is another Culver’s.
This time, Laurel gets the mushroom fritter, but she takes little satisfaction in it.
“What about the park in Cedar?” Eli asks. “We can swim, and there’s shade.”
The park is where they went skinny-dipping on their honeymoon. Pine trees shadowed picnic tables, and a dock walked into the lake. The water was blue-green, the pale bottom shallow and sandy. They left their clothes in a heap.
Today, the picnic tables are occupied by families. Eli dives into the water. Seconds later, he appears in a ring of circles, shaking his head like a dog.
“Come on in,” he shouts.
His obliviousness offends her. “I’m fine,” Laurel says, pulling down the brim of her baseball cap.
—
That night, Laurel is restless again. She knew that memories of Silas would torment her in Cedar, but she didn’t expect to feel haunted by her honeymoon with Eli.
How they arrived at the cottage as night fell, passing fringed black cutouts of trees.
And walked barefoot through the field the next morning, the grass tips dipped in sunlight.
She was teaching him: Smell this; touch that.
Along the fence was milkweed, torn and pearling white sap at the seams—poisonous to many, but perfect nourishment for monarch butterflies.
The seeds parachuted in floss. Feel how soft the leaves are, Laurel told Eli, who said, Like velvet.
Snorting drew them to the barn where a pig fed her young.
The stench carried, but Laurel still stayed to look, struck by the urge and muck of family life, the messy tenderness.
After years of parenthood, she had forgotten how it was to be alone with Eli.
There were times when he came close to her and she felt the blood moving downward, a swelling.
They were sensitive to the subtlest change in the other’s expression.
Once, she yawned in the bath, and Eli echoed the sound one floor down.
Laurel doubted that he had mirrored her consciously; it was his subconscious that responded, the animal brain that danced with hers.
Even when they argued, there was a base of trust. In bed that night, he would extend a hand, and she would squeeze it.
Laurel doesn’t want to revisit any other honeymoon locations.
They’ve discussed the rescue plan dozens of times, but she suggests that they spend the next day reviewing it again.
First, they double-check the bag they packed at home.
They brought a rope, to use as a tether, and they practice at the lake that afternoon.
Afterward, they rehearse the drive to the nearest hospital.
Because the beach has no phone service, they drill each other on directions over a late dinner.
“Left or right when we exit the highway?” asks Eli.
“Right,” says Laurel. Eli looks at her sharply. “Left?”
“It’s a left, then a right.”
“Trick question,” she says, flustered.
“Silas could be hypothermic, Laurel. There’s no room for error.”
“You don’t think I know that?”
Laurel lies awake for hours, berating herself. By morning, her confidence has splintered into second-guessing. Eli sits in the living room, his face obscured behind a book.
“Can I use the car?” she asks. “I need to clear my head. I think I’ll hike.”
“Fine by me,” says Eli. He knows better than to ask if she wants company.
—
Laurel doesn’t hike. She drives through town, past the ice cream stand and the shop that sells Polish pottery; then she turns on to a county road.
She may be doing something stupid, something that will only upset her, which is why she didn’t tell Eli about it.
The car has a GPS, but she remembers the route.
White birch trees whiz past the windows.
Getting closer now, and so much faster than it was the first time.
An unpaved road leads to the parking lot.
Breathe, says Nita, in Laurel’s head. The way Miles showed you, says Louis. She does, dropping her shoulders. Then she slings her bag over her chest, a small linen cross-body with a silver button.