Chapter 12 Wave Function #4
But if today goes the wrong way—if they stand waiting for a child who never comes—Laurel knows that they won’t be okay, no matter how they reassure each other. They’ve relinquished an entire world for Silas Two. She can’t contemplate the emptiness of a Duoverse without him.
—
They work together to pack the car. The briefest touch of his hand on her arm.
Yes, they still need it, their bond, at least for one more day.
Eli loads the cooler and a thick coil of rope.
Beach chairs. Blankets, to keep Silas warm, if Silas is there.
Laurel double-checks the hospital bag. Inside are fleece pants, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks.
The last time she packed a bag like this, she was nine months pregnant.
They lost Silas in late afternoon, but they arrive in the morning just in case.
The clouds have discouraged other visitors: there is only one other family on the beach.
A middle-aged man and woman sit in sweatshirts, reading.
Near the line of the water, a small child and an older woman—his grandmother, presumably—play with buckets and shovels.
Eli watches the lake. Laurel opens the magazine she took from the apartment, Midwest Living, and stares unseeingly at recipes.
“You should eat,” she tells Eli, at lunchtime. She hands him his sandwich, egg salad on wheat.
—
By early afternoon, Laurel’s heart rate has started to scare her. She isn’t warm enough to swim, but she gets in anyway, just for the shock of the cold.
The other family packs up. When his parents take the bucket, the toddler cries; his grandmother, who can’t find her shovel, whimpers, too.
The younger woman carries the child to the car.
The man follows with the older woman, arm in arm, and Laurel sees that she is his mother.
After Silas died, she noticed similar pairs, elderly women with strong, middle-aged sons, and felt an envy so acute it verged on madness.
Once, in weather like this, she sat with Silas on the beach in San Francisco. Eli had been invited to give a talk at UC Berkeley, and they decided to make a family trip.
Seymour and Julian offered their empty bedrooms. Laurel and Eli hadn’t been there since the night of the Other Worlds party. The house seemed shy this time, withholding. Silas crawled under furniture and slid down the banisters. At dusk, he ran through dark hallways, turning on lights.
Across the bay, Eli bounced between meetings. Julian let Silas play with his paints and brushes so that Laurel could work on her postdoc research. She used the attic room that had once been Gloria’s.
“We never come up here,” Seymour said. “It’s barely changed since she left.”
Laurel couldn’t envision Gloria in the attic.
There was the matter of the steps: Laurel had only known Gloria after her Lyme diagnosis, and this room was five stories high.
It was also spartan in a way that seemed unlike her.
A twin bed sat below a slanted wall, a simple desk beside the only window.
The most colorful thing in the room was a piece of fabric, hung over the bed.
Folk patterns had been expertly embroidered in red thread.
Affixed to the door was a framed scrap of cloth that read Top of the Stairs. These words had been embroidered, like the wall hanging, but not by the same fine hand.
“She chose this room,” Seymour explained.
“God knows we tried to interest her in any other. I think she needed distance, at least in the beginning…maybe being close to us made what happened feel more real. The wall hanging was Olga’s, and the desk was Ted’s, but Gloria stored most of their belongings in boxes.
Do you know, I still have some of them in one of these old closets. ”
This was surprising. Anything Gloria packed away must have been intensely charged.
“She was different then,” Seymour added. “Gloria, that is. Not such a big personality. But she always had a kernel of…” He trailed off, then smiled. “Well—she was like her mother. Olga was adoring. But I wouldn’t want to be her enemy.”
When Laurel finished work for the day, she took Silas on long, blustery walks. To the bison in Golden Gate Park. Or to Ocean Beach, where they watched surfers in wet suits and talked.
“What’s down there at the bottom of the ocean?” Silas asked.
“Fish,” said Laurel. “Kelp forests. Coral.”
“Dolphins?”
“And stingrays. And sharks.” She bared her teeth.
Silas giggled. “And little teeny-tiny plankton.”
“Yes, those.”
“And trash.” Water pollution had been a subject in Silas’s first grade class. “But what’s at the bottom-bottom?”
“The deepest part?” Laurel said. “We don’t have a very good idea. There’s too much pressure for humans to swim, even in scuba suits. We do know that it’s very dark, and very cold. And we know that there’s life.”
“How?”
“Explorers went down in a submarine. There’s a lot of muck on the seafloor, and soon, it covered the window.
Before that happened, though,” she said, “the explorers saw a fish—just one! But if there’s one, there must be others.
There are probably millions of species that we still haven’t discovered. ”
The waves looked fluted, lettuce-like. A woman walked by with a baby, who waved its sea star hand.
“Say hello, Celeste,” the mother said.
Laurel waved back. Celeste was one of her favorite names; if Silas had been a girl, they might have chosen it. In moments like this, she felt the pull of another child, a blinking milky creature who, like Silas, would have Eli’s curls—or not. Who knew how their genes would combine a second time?
Silas said, “I don’t want you to die.”
“Sweetheart, I won’t,” said Laurel, startled. “Not for a very long time.”
He looked at her cannily. “How do you know?”
It was a constant challenge, deciding how honest to be, when to pull the plug on the tooth fairy or admit that meat came from animals slaughtered for that purpose and not—as Silas had assumed—from roadkill.
“Most people live into old age,” she said.
“But you will die,” said Silas. “Someday.”
“Everyone will.”
Laurel pulled him onto her lap. Silas made a reflexive noise of protest, but then he leaned against her chest.
“Even the creatures at the bottom-bottom?” he asked.
“Yes. They’ll die someday, too.”
“You said no one’s ever seen them.”
“That’s true.”
Wind blew off the water. Laurel snuggled him close.
“Something could be alive down there forever,” he said, “and we wouldn’t even know.”
—
The sun emerges from behind clouds, just as it did while she stood in the cave, watching Armillaria glow.
Laurel and Eli stand. He threads his fingers through hers.
Though she cannot know for sure, Laurel has always believed that this was the moment when Silas woke up.
He might have looked at the water, wanting to swim, feeling hot.
Just for a second, he might have thought.
The lake would have seemed calm, as it does when a rip current starts.
—
The lake is a box, and Silas is inside it, and he is not.
—
She could wait here forever, not yet knowing, biding her time. A coin balanced on its side. And would that not be better than an ending in which Silas never comes? She’d prefer uncertainty to certain heartbreak, purgatory to hell. She’d gladly take if over then.
Yet her senses sharpen of their own accord, as they did when she gave birth. On that night, the chaos of the hospital receded like land from a boat. She drifted into a different place—life’s antechamber—to work in tandem with Silas.
—
Eli’s eyes rove over the water. She knows what he’s thinking: there’s no sign of a current. Only the grandmother’s lost shovel, bright green, afloat. Though something seems to be drawing it outward, away from the shore and the sand.
Then the water breaks, and Laurel sees a hand.
—
Crash into the water. In one breath, she is swimming. She was encumbered on the dive, but it is so much easier this time: no tank, no gloves, nothing between the lake and her own body. She rises between strokes, gulping air, to make sure that the hand is still there.
Water pours into her nostrils. When she surfaces, the sun swings into her eyes. The terror of last time comes back to her, the chaos and dislocation—the smallness of her efforts compared to the vastness of water.
Her fear is a vortex. At the center is defeat. The conviction that she’s weak. It takes such effort to have faith, like holding an invisible shape. Two universes in one circle. A basin with a portal inside. Before evidence, that shape lives in the mind.
She turns onto her back to rest and inhales fiercely, like a seal. Didn’t she believe in Antarctica, when the odds were infinitely slimmer, and she was years instead of yards away from Silas?
Eli is swimming to her right.
“Let the current carry you out,” he shouts.
When Laurel stops struggling, she swims easily. The current functions like a moving walkway.
“Give me the rope,” she gasps, touching skin. Slippery, wriggling. Warm.
It is Silas. Eight. And howling like the day he was born.
—
Laurel wraps the rope around his waist. She ties one end to her arm and gives the other to Eli, who mirrors her. He is laughing, weeping, kissing Silas’s head, but the current won’t release them willingly.
They move in complicated parallel. Each props an arm beneath Silas’s shoulders, to hold up his head. With the other arm, they paddle. They take only the slightest diagonal, but even this angle is grueling. The current erases their progress, and the distance to shore seems unchanging.
The sound of Silas crying gives her strength. Holding each other, Laurel and Eli make incremental progress; linked by the rope, no one drifts away. Still, the remainder feels interminable. Eli shouts encouragement, but Laurel needs all her air. Her legs begin to shake as soon as she touches sand.
A surge of ecstasy. They heave onto the beach.