Chapter 13 Sparks #5
Initially, Laurel was shocked by the size of their doubles’ bank accounts. Then she realized that they must have saved for decades: in the antiuniverse, they wouldn’t be far from retirement.
“And you think that they aren’t using ours? Maybe they’re trying to get home, too. They might even be taking the same cruise.”
But Laurel is tired of the constant hunt for an escape, another break. Life has begun to feel like a video game: she’s always seeking the key to the next level. For the first time, she’s stopped wishing she were elsewhere.
“Do you ever feel like things are slotting into place here?” she asks.
“We can’t think like that.”
“Can’t we? I don’t want to lose what we have.”
Eli sets his phone down. “If we make it home, Silas One could even be there. We could have both of them.”
“We have had both of them. We do have both of them.”
Right away Laurel is confused by her own meaning, confused by the problem of tense. In loving Silas Two, has she relinquished Silas One?
She looks into Eli’s eyes, afraid that he will judge her this way, but his expression is compassionate.
“It’s confusing,” he says. “Overwhelming, almost. It feels too incredible to hope for.”
Laurel nods, but the truth is that this isn’t how she feels.
As their life here has become fuller, more concrete, she has, perhaps subconsciously, consigned their previous plan to the past. Now it seems to belong to the naivete of youth: something she believed when she understood less about how the world really works.
“Things finally seem stable,” Eli adds, “but that’s just an illusion. Yesterday, I measured Silas’s height. He’s already lost two inches.”
Laurel recoils. “That can’t be true.”
“Sweetheart, it is,” says Eli.
He hasn’t called her that in years.
“You’re right,” says Laurel. “Of course.”
Eli takes her hand. “I’ll keep looking for other leads. If I don’t find one by January, we can book the last cruise of the season.”
—
Silas wants to learn to swim. For months, Laurel hedges. The pool makes her think of what happened to Silas One. Children are flighty, she thinks—Silas Two will forget—but his pleas intensify. When the fall semester ends, Laurel purchases a family membership.
Silas takes to the water like a native. In a way, she supposes, he is.
“So happy,” he says, floating on his back with goggles.
By now, he speaks in short sentences. Occasionally another child asks why he doesn’t talk very much, and Silas freezes, his eyes sliding to Laurel, as if he wonders what the answer is himself.
She tells him how proud he makes her every day.
Though Silas lags behind his peers, the pediatrician thinks he’ll be ready to join the second grade that May.
They hold his seventh birthday at the pool.
The swim teacher installs a floating obstacle course, and Silas clambers through it with a band of other boys.
Tanned, jaded teenagers patrol the pool from lifeguard chairs.
Lounging with a book, Laurel feels like any other mother.
After his guests have gone home, Silas trawls the bottom of the pool, looking for treasure.
He surfaces with a fist raised in victory.
“What’s this?” he asks, showing Laurel.
“Beads,” she says.
Two of them, pea-sized, plastic: one pink and one green.
“Beads,” Silas repeats.
At home, he puts them in a Tupperware. No other gift compares. Watching him, Laurel thinks five dangerous words: What if we just stay?
But the temptation to surrender never lasts.
It happens in those golden moments at the pool, or as she and Silas fall asleep while Eli reads a book.
Then she wakes up and remembers that all three of them are getting younger.
In her universe, Laurel resented the obsession with youth—you had only to look at a tree to see the beauty of maturity—but she still felt subject to the pressure.
Here, antiaging products don’t exist. Time smooths her wrinkles and plucks her gray hairs, but getting younger comes with consequences.
Wellness items claim to preserve adult faculties for as long as possible.
In May, Silas bites an apple, and an adult tooth falls out.
—
One night in March, Laurel wakes long before sunrise. Eli isn’t there. When she stands, the creaky floorboard whines, as always. She wraps her shawl around her shoulders before padding downstairs.
Snow falls steadily. The first floor of the house is dark, but a soft glow comes from the basement.
Eli sits at his desk, which is strewn with materials: wire, scattered batteries, a mound of tiny copper discs. Before him is a Styrofoam box. A battery has been attached to the left side, a laser to the right. On the top is a button, as well as a thumbnail-sized screen.
“Are you making a robot?” Laurel asks.
Eli smiles. “It’s a universe detection device. We’d put it through the portal.”
He looks both proud and sheepish. Eli has always been a thinker more than a doer, and the device has a clumsy, mad-scientist quality.
“How does it work?” she asks.
“It measures entropy. Do you remember the conversations we had when we got here? You were learning about composition, and I said that it made sense, because of the laws of entropy.”
Laurel tries to remember the details. “Entropy is a measure of disorder, right? In our universe, energy disperses. Here, it builds up.”
“Exactly.” Eli retrieves the Best Guesses notepad from McMurdo. Below a new question—How can we measure entropy?—is a drawing: a cross-section of the Styrofoam box.
“This is what the device looks like inside: two chambers connected by a pipe.” The chamber on the left is labeled Hot, the right one Cold.
Between them, in the pipe, is a sliding copper disc.
“The left chamber is attached to a heat coil and a battery, which are triggered when you press the button. In our world, entropy dissipates, so heat would spread from the hot side to the cold one. The laser detects how far it travels, and the results show up on screen. U1—for Universe One—indicates our world. This world is U2.”
“Can I try it?”
“Go ahead.”
She presses the button on the top.
“It takes a little while,” Eli admits. “That’s one of the things I have to work on.”
“I’ll wait with you.” Laurel hugs her shawl closer. In the harsh light of the desk lamp, Eli’s face looks pallid. “How often do you come down here?”
“Very.” Eli shrugs. “All-nighters aren’t as hard as they used to be.”
“Getting younger will do that for you.”
“And it’s already summer in Antarctica. I can sleep after the cruise.”
“Let’s say that the device works perfectly. How would we bring Silas through the portal? If he panics, he’ll stop breathing,” says Laurel. “I don’t think they even make dive suits his size.”
Eli opens his laptop. On screen is a large, padlocked Pelican case.
“We are not,” Laurel says, “dragging Silas through the ocean in a box.”
“ ‘Crushproof. Insulated. Watertight,’ ” reads Eli. “I honestly think it could work.”
“He’ll need oxygen!”
“I thought of that, too. We’d get him a regulator and a small tank of compressed air. It wouldn’t be hard to teach him how to breathe through the mouthpiece.”
Laurel is struck by Eli’s foresight, and by how much work he’s done without her. She grazes his scalp with her fingers. It still feels surreal to be so close to him, to touch him whenever she wants to.
The screen on the box glows faintly.
“U2,” Laurel reads. She shakes her head. “Incredible.”
“I’m still working out the kinks,” says Eli, but she can tell that he’s excited. The next morning, she pulls up the Heroic Expeditions website. The last cruise of the season departs in November. As she takes out her credit card, she hopes that her double is doing the same.
—
Laurel still has Nita’s contact information. She calls on the thirtieth of December.
Nita sounds breathless. “Hello?”
“Nita? It’s Laurel, from McMurdo.”
For seconds, she hears no reply, only commotion. Then a door closes and the background noise muffles.
“Which one?” asks Nita.
“The second.”
“Ah.”
If Laurel detects disappointment, she tries not to hold it against Nita. She was the other Laurel’s friend first.
“Sorry for the chaos. We always have our New Year’s party a couple of days late. I snuck into the bathroom,” Nita says. “Are you okay?”
“More than okay,” says Laurel. “We found Silas.”
Nita gasps. “You didn’t.”
“I know.” Laurel laughs. “I still can’t believe it.” She tells Nita about the cruise. “The ship stops at McMurdo. Will you be there? I’d love to see you. I’m really sorry that I haven’t been in touch.”
As she says so, she feels even guiltier. Years have passed, and she hasn’t even sent an email. Life with Eli and Silas seemed to require all of her attention—and it does occur to her that Nita didn’t reach out, either.
People move on. You’ll see, Louis said.
“I’m in Seattle,” Nita says. “Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back. I have the data I need. And Sam and I—well, we aren’t together anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Nita.”
“That’s okay,” she says, tightly. “It isn’t for everyone, having multiple partners. In the end, Sam wanted a full-time wife—not just an ice one.”
Laurel hears someone knock on Nita’s door.
“Listen, I should go,” Nita says. “But Louis is at McMurdo this season. I’ll give you his email, though he only uses Google Hangouts. You’ll have to wait until he’s online and pounce.”
—
Laurel adds luckylouis@ to her contacts. For weeks, she keeps Google Hangouts open, but the circle by his name never turns green.