Chapter 16 Guest Wing #2
Eli jams his hands in his pockets. “We’ve tried. I’m out of ideas. And physics doesn’t come to me as easily as it used to.”
His regression frightens her. Eli’s intellect has always been a constant.
Coach Brewster waves them over. “Scrimmage!” he calls through a bullhorn, handing out blue and red jerseys.
Eli and Laurel are named to the red team.
“Maybe we can’t do this alone,” says Laurel, pulling the jersey over her head. “The problem could be too big for the two of us to solve. I mean, how many people did it take to send an astronaut to the moon?”
The question was rhetorical, but Eli knows the answer. “At the height of the Apollo program? About four hundred thousand.”
“See?” says Laurel as they walk to their positions.
Tim Wiggins serves for the red team. The ball sails over the net, into the back zone. Mikey Schneider leaps to meet it and hits the ball to Riordan.
Eli edges closer to Laurel. “We found the first portal by ourselves.”
“Yeah, but part of that was luck. The Arc was right in front of us.”
Coach Brewster blows his whistle. Riordan has missed.
“Red team wins the serve,” says Coach Brewster. “Rotate.”
Eli moves into the serving position. After he sends the ball over the net, Laurel drifts toward him again.
“Do you remember when we talked about the portal with Kenji?” she asks. “He said that each of us have different puzzle pieces.”
“Enough chitchat, Salter,” says Coach Brewster. “Guard your zone or I’ll switch you to blue team.”
Laurel glares but arranges her grip. After Coach Brewster turns away, Eli raises his eyebrows and mouths: Kenji?
Laurel feels flustered. He must have noticed something in her tone. She hasn’t told Eli what happened with Kenji, and he hasn’t told her more about Angela.
A spate of action allows her to ignore the question. Jules volleys the ball to Noah, who sends it to Maisie, who passes to Laurel. When Noah strikes the ball into the midzone, Laurel and Eli dive to the floor. Eli wins the point.
“It’s like—you and I are each one neuron,” she explains, as they stand back up. “Maybe a question this massive requires…well, a critical mass.”
The ball is flying toward her. In her haste, Laurel bounces it twice.
“Coach Brewster,” Amy Wagner shouts, “that’s a foul.”
“Blue team, point and side-out. Salter and Wiggins, trade places.” When Eli opens his mouth to protest, Coach Brewster holds up a hand. “Rosen, if you can’t control yourself, you’re both looking at detention.”
Laurel stalks to the other side of the net. She’s never been so ready for fireflies and soft serve and swimming pools: summer in the Midwest.
—
Eli can’t grow a beard anymore. His frame is narrower than it used to be.
Most of the boys at McFarland High hide these changes with baggy T-shirts and jeans.
Laurel stuffs her bra. To regain a few inches of height, she wears platform shoes.
It doesn’t matter that she was once a leading scientist: adults talk down to her, and strangers call her miss instead of ma’am.
The latest Seventeen magazine features a beauty special: “How to Maintain Your Nasolabial Folds—and Your Credibility—for as Long as Possible.”
Sometimes Laurel and Eli talk about the time they spent apart. She tells him about her friends from the Center, and how they organized when a developer tried to buy the backlands. Laurel listens as Eli describes his own adventures: his trip to Peru, or the year he sang in a skate punk band.
His tenure at Stanford was more ordinary than she expected.
“On my first day,” he explains, “this HR person brought me to my office. She kept saying things like, ‘Throw a rock, and you’ll hit a Nobel Prize winner.’ ” Laurel groaned. “The rest of us felt like duds.”
But he laughs as he says it. Eli’s attitude has changed.
In Madison, his true goal was both grueling and private.
At Stanford, work became more collaborative and less anguished.
He liked mentoring the junior professors, people in their sixties and seventies.
He even saw his biggest achievement—the Duoverse—differently.
“I used to be so proud. I felt like: Even if I never do anything else with my life, at least I came up with this. But maybe I just put a little bit of the Duoverse together. Or maybe I found one way to describe it. I can’t have been the first. Other people probably had their own ways of telling the story. ”
In July, Laurel lies on Eli’s bed as a tangerine sun fades to lavender. They keep their voices down: as always, the door is insultingly cracked.
“Eli,” she says, “what do you think déjà vu is?”
He puts his hands behind his head. “Remembering something that never happened?”
“What if it’s remembering something that never happened to you?” asks Laurel.
He waits for her to continue.
“I found something,” she says. “In our bedroom, before I moved to the Center.”
Laurel extracts her wallet and hands him the photo insert. She keeps a photo of Celeste behind the one of Silas.
“Who is that?” Eli asks. He sounds almost frightened, as though the image plucks a string inside him, unknown until now. “Is she ours?”
“Theirs,” says Laurel. “The other us. She was their daughter. Celeste.”
Eli looks at her sharply. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I found out while we were apart. Maybe, for a little while, I just wanted her to be mine.”
Eli holds the picture with both hands, bringing it close to his face. Laurel waits for him to respond, but he doesn’t.
“It wasn’t right. I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Eli…something happened to me here, years ago, the first time I went to the cave. I didn’t tell you about that, either. I felt guilty for having gone at all. And after we found Silas, it seemed so much less important.”
Eli turns back toward her, just slightly.
She tells him what happened on the day before they found Silas Two: how she seemed to enter another body, another timeline.
She became the other Laurel, who stood in the cave, checking on the progress of her experiment.
Then Laurel sensed her double’s distress.
She had followed that emotion to a different scene—one that took place at home, in the other Laurel’s office.
Someone she loved lay nearby. A weakened person: sick, or dying.
“At the time, I didn’t know what was happening,” Laurel says. “But now I think the other person was Celeste. She must have been a baby.”
She explains what Kenji told her: that there is a window when an infant must enter its mother’s body. She tells Eli about the other Laurel’s miscalculation.
“I wonder if that’s why they wanted to cross over,” she finishes. “To find Celeste again, just like we found Silas.”
Eli listens gravely, but he looks bewildered, too. “Was Celeste born young, like he was?”
“No. But love makes us greedy, doesn’t it?”
Eli sets the picture of Celeste between them on the pillow.
“I want you to keep it,” Laurel says. “I’ve had her with me until now.”
Eli puts his hand over hers in response. Downstairs, a door opens, and someone walks to the kitchen. The microwave begins to hum. Eli’s parents often work from home at night. Laurel rarely sees them touch.
“Say we were to do what you said. Recruit more brain cells,” Eli says. “I’ve already tried the experts. Besides, we’re in high school now. Who would take us seriously?”
Laurel can only think of one person. “Nita.”
“I guess that’s true,” says Eli. “But how do we reach her? No one our age is on email. Most people don’t even have a cell phone.”
In the antiuniverse, landlines had been an easier sell than Laurel expected. The technology is clearly superior: when she talks to Eli, it sounds like he’s standing right next to her. Still, right now, smartphones don’t seem like such a dumb idea.
“We could use the phone book, but then we’d have to go through Nita’s parents,” Laurel says. “Besides, there could be lots of Choudhurys in the white pages.”
They lie there, thinking. Then Eli grabs her wrist.
“Laurel,” he says, “what did you do with the desk from your office?”
—
Eli skids into the Salters’ driveway. The Acura is his for one more year; after that, he’ll lose his license. They open the door of the farmhouse to find Clare waiting in her nightgown.
“You were supposed to be home half an hour ago,” Clare says.
“I’m sorry. I lost track of time,” says Laurel. “We just have to run down to the basement.”
“You can do that in the morning.”
“It’s my fault, Ms. Salter,” Eli says. “I forgot something important.”
“Then I’m sure it will be there tomorrow. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, Laurel: missing curfew has consequences.”
Laurel shrieks with frustration.
“I know,” says Clare, sighing. “No one understands you.”
—
Eli drives back to the farmhouse early the next morning. Laurel waves him inside, still wearing pajamas, and they rush downstairs. Her double’s desk is woolly with dust.
“I knew there was a reason I kept this,” says Laurel, as they root through the drawers. “Ha!”
She clutches the placemaker, victorious.
So that he doesn’t wake her parents, Eli mimes his celebration: he slam-dunks an invisible ball and runs in silent circles. Afterward, he says, “How does this thing work again?”
“It’s supposed to send our coordinates to Nita.”
“Louis, too, right? We wired them together.”
“I know. It’s an imperfect system.” Laurel sighs. “Louis was pretty freaked out when I told him about Silas. If he comes, then at least I can explain the whole story.”
Eli nods, a signal. Laurel presses the placemaker’s only button. There is no indication that anything has happened.
“Maybe our screen is supposed to stay blank. It’s not like we need to know our own coordinates,” says Eli.
“Maybe,” Laurel says, discouraged. The placemaker looks more like a relic than ever.
She keeps it in her pocket. The screen remains vacant all day. Nothing appears in the week that follows, either. Laurel plays cards in Riordan’s basement and eats ice cream at the pool, but inside her is a heaviness, a helpless sense of dwindling.