Chapter 12 Wave Function #3
Laurel’s body doesn’t feel like hers. To prove that she didn’t imagine the maze of roots—or the pins with the other Laurel’s handwriting—she removes the contents of her bag.
On the coffee table, she unloads the voltmeter and the camera.
She finds plastic bags in the kitchen for the rhizomorphs and pins.
The sandwich she bought that morning sits uneaten in the car, and she feels queasy with hunger.
She checks her phone again, but Eli hasn’t called.
When she texts him, his phone chirps from a side table.
The sound brings Laurel back to her life: the cave fades in her mind, and shame replaces it.
Nothing is more important than tomorrow—than Silas.
On today, of all days, how could she have focused on anything else?
The screen door opens. Eli appears in his swimsuit, a towel thrown over one shoulder.
Laurel stands. “Eli, thank God. Where were you?”
“At the park.”
His tone is cool, and he only glances at her—until he notices her knees, which are raw, one trickling with blood.
“Are you okay?” Eli asks. “What is all this stuff?”
If Laurel can explain what happened, maybe she’ll be able to understand it.
She takes a breath, and then she tells him all of it.
Her gnawing confusion about the gap between the other Laurel’s research and hers.
Samir’s comment about electricity. At the mention of the beach, Eli stiffens.
She forges on, describing the tree, but she can see that she’s already lost him.
She doesn’t mention what she found inside the cave.
“You went to the beach,” Eli says. “The beach where it happened.”
“I didn’t go down to the water.”
Laurel knows how feeble it sounds.
“I don’t care whether you went down to the water. I care that you went there at all. I care that you didn’t ask if I’d mind, that you didn’t wait to go together,” he says. “I care that you’ve been working.”
“I needed to distract myself.”
“You could have talked to me.”
“But we’ve gone through the plan, over and over! I was starting to lose my mind.”
“That’s not what I meant. We could have talked about—our feelings.”
His face is pink. Laurel almost softens. Then she sees how angry Eli is, which strikes a pang of fear in her—not just of his anger, but that she deserves it.
“I mean, Jesus, Laurel,” he says. “You’ve said it yourself: you left Silas to go to that cave. Why would you even think to go back? Was it masochism? Or self-sabotage?”
Laurel wavers, stunned. Eli’s framing makes her wonder whether she can trust herself. These thoughts are unbearable: she must purge them, or invert them.
“How dare you,” she hisses. “Who got us here, Eli? If it weren’t for me, you’d still be working on equations.”
“I’ve always given you credit for that,” says Eli.
In a perfect world, Laurel would turn back.
She’d be her best self, or at least her better self, and salvage what she could.
But isn’t it about to collapse, everything they’ve built, or rebuilt?
All through the past three years, they’ve had each other: that close, closed loop, not married but together.
Whether or not they find Silas, this trip will be an ending.
Afterward, she and Eli will go their separate ways.
“And frankly,” she continues, “I doubt that you care where I was. Let’s be honest. We’re not a couple. I owe you one thing, and that’s what happens tomorrow. If you really cared about me, we’d still be together.”
This was it, she thinks. If he had loved her as he claimed to—loved her in the way she thought he did—wouldn’t that have been enough?
Eli becomes rigid. “That is not what happened.”
But Laurel needs the story to be simple. She can’t bear more complication, new feelings thatched with old—doubting herself, doubting him, never defining what they are to each other. She is angry at Eli, and angry at herself for caring, as though she’s been suckered into something, or humiliated.
“Okay,” she says. This caustic tone is one she almost never uses, but it comes to her easily now, summoned by the desire to win. “Tell me how it happened. Tell me how I ruined everything.”
“You want to know what did it? That’s what was too heavy. On top of everything else, I had to save you,” says Eli. “I felt like you wanted two things from me, things that were opposed: you wanted me to forgive you, and you wanted to be punished.”
“What?” Laurel’s shock is genuine. “I needed support.”
“I think you needed more than that. Because when I tried—when I forgave you—that still wasn’t enough.”
She stands still, her vision smeared.
“Laurel, I can’t fix this for you.” Eli looks exhausted now, and older, though both of them are three years younger than they thought they’d be again. “You have to find a way to live with yourself. I thought you had, but if you haven’t, I can’t give you permission.”
He walks past her to the stairs. Laurel hears his footsteps, slow, and then she hears him stop.
“I forgave you,” he repeats. “But I couldn’t absolve you, too. I couldn’t go back and make it not happen.”
—
Climbing into her bunk, Laurel is sure she won’t sleep. She feels sick about tomorrow, and about how she and Eli have devolved. But exhaustion takes over: eight hours later, her alarm is a shock.
A branch taps at the window, as if to remind her what day it is: August 18, 2014, the one they’ve anticipated for more than three years.
The injuries from her fight with Eli are still tender—and yet, to Laurel’s surprise, gratitude is present, too.
She is grateful to have slept. Grateful that Eli is downstairs, her partner in this absurd venture, if nothing else.
And she is grateful to feel different this morning than she did last night: she can look back with the distance earned by wisdom, seeing what Eli meant, and where he was right.
She washes her face and changes into fresh clothes.
It matters, not just what she does today but how.
Eli is making coffee in the kitchen. He turns when he hears her footsteps.
“Eli, I’m sorry,” she says, stopping. “For…” The past day. The past week. The fall. She spreads her hands. “All of it.”
“I know,” he says. “Me, too.”
“I should have stayed here yesterday. Or told you, at least. I was selfish. Somehow, it felt important,” she says. “Nowhere near as important as Silas. Still, I thought that going there could tell me something, and not just about science. About—me.”
Eli puts the kettle down. Laurel comes to stand in the doorway.
“You know who you are.” Her face is defenseless, her eyes wide as they meet his. “Side by side with Eli Two, you make sense. But I don’t. Or I didn’t. I should have told you,” she repeats. “But I honestly didn’t think…”
Coffee gurgles through the French press.
How many times has she stood with Eli in a kitchen while he finished that process?
It was one of his wedding vows: that he would always make the coffee, knowing that she was desperate for it as soon as she got up.
And he had. Even when Silas was young and Laurel took morning duty, Eli woke early enough to leave a cup waiting for her.
In the antiuniverse, he had resumed this generosity.
It was things like that, she thought. Things that pleased and agonized and confused her.
Things that made her wonder why nothing more had happened between them.
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she finishes. “I thought you’d be relieved that I was gone.”
The silver hair at Eli’s temples is brown again. She can only see his true age in his gaze, which is fatigued but forthright.
“You know,” he says, “I used to think I had two selves. I don’t mean me and Eli Two—this was years ago, when Silas was little.
There was the part of me that was a parent, and the part that was everything else.
” Eli pauses the way he does while deciding how to say what he means.
“Picture two light switches. I thought one had to be off when the other was on, so that the circuit didn’t overheat.
But then I watched you in Antarctica. You were a scientist there, as much as anyone.
And you were a parent, too. Yes,” he adds, seeing her confusion.
“Silas was gone. You were a parent, still. And I thought: Maybe both switches can be on at the same time. Maybe there would just be—more light.”
Laurel joins him. A deep peace spreads through her. It is impossible to explain how much she has yearned for this kind of acknowledgment.
“Eli, you were right. You couldn’t have saved me. I had to do that on my own.”
He looks at her.
“And you were right about something else, too. I did want to be punished. I know—it was a mistake—but something terrible had still happened. For a while, I even wondered whether I would be arrested,” she says.
“I think a part of me wanted to go to prison. At least there would have been a way to atone. This might sound ridiculous, but sometimes I envied you. I don’t think you can imagine the torture of that kind of guilt. ”
Eli holds her gaze. “I’m sure you’re right. I can’t.”
“Gloria told me something wise,” says Laurel. “Self-compassion can be harder than penance.”
She remembers the moment exactly. They sat in Gloria’s living room chairs. By the distance in her expression, Gloria wasn’t only thinking of Laurel.
Eli nods. Then he says, “I miss her.”
“Gloria?” Laurel smiles. “I miss her, too.”
She rubs her arms. The heat has lifted. Instead, the sky is gray and spitting.
“The weather was like this last time,” Laurel says.
Eli hands her the first cup of coffee. “I noticed that as soon as I woke up.”
“Thank you,” she says, taking it. She is soothed by the heat of the mug in her hands, a small pleasure never used up. “What will we do if Silas isn’t there?”
“The same thing we’ll do if he is. Find a portal. Make it home.”