Chapter 16 Guest Wing #4
She touches the pendant on her necklace: a small vial with a grain of rice inside. Maisie has one, too. Her name is written on the rice in Laurel’s pendant, and Laurel’s name is written on the one in hers.
Laurel calls the next morning.
“What took you so long?” asks Maisie.
“I’m sorry. I have friends in town. We met at McMurdo,” says Laurel.
“You didn’t tell me they were coming.”
“I thought I did.” To Maisie’s silence, Laurel adds, “Do you want to have dinner with us tonight?”
“That’s okay. I’m going to Riordan’s.” Maisie’s voice is clipped. “Have fun.”
Laurel’s relief is greater than her guilt. The McMurdoans have no time to spare. The next day, a second séance produces equally dismal results.
“Maybe it’s me,” says Zachary.
“Baby, no,” says Louis.
Charlie’s exercise produces baffling combinations. An eyeball becomes a clock with feet; a bed hovers between a lightning bolt and a snowflake. Laurel is beginning to wish that she’d chosen a movement more candid than surrealism.
Nita leans her head against the wall. “I think we need a break.”
The next morning, Eli takes Nita on a hike to Picnic Point.
Zachary and Louis eat brunch on the square, and Laurel brings Charlie to her favorite bookstore.
In the antiuniverse, Charlie illustrates picture books, and Laurel wants to see them.
It was after she visited McMurdo, Charlie explains, that her style solidified.
Just like Charlie One, Charlie Two excels at roundness and depth—button noses, full cheeks—and she’s known for her distinctive pinks and bluish-greens.
The bouncing balls in her most famous book seem to project in 3-D.
When the group reconvenes, no one feels ready to continue.
“Maybe our subconscious minds are working in the background,” says Charlie.
“I don’t know,” Laurel says. “It doesn’t seem smart to lose a whole day.”
“Yeah, but just being together—that’s half the job, isn’t it?” says Louis, who, cheered by Charlie’s angle, has adopted a tone of expertise. “I bet we just need a little more time. Our brains are probably still syncing.”
They decide to spend the afternoon at the pool. At the entrance, Laurel curses under her breath. Maisie sits alone on a pool chair by the fence.
Louis and Zachary head to the snack bar while Nita goes for a dive. When Maisie sees the group, she tugs her bucket hat down.
“Ask her to join us,” Eli murmurs. “She looks really sad.”
But Maisie seems to detect that Laurel’s offer is half-hearted.
“I wouldn’t want to interrupt,” she replies, lifting a dELiA*s catalogue.
Laurel waves to Maisie weakly when the group leaves for the mall.
Aside from Louis, who buys two Auntie Anne’s pretzels, everyone orders Panda Express for dinner.
They debate next steps at a table in the food court.
Zachary thinks that it’s time to pivot to dream analysis.
Nita argues that they’ve only scratched the surface of free association.
Charlie counters that they could expand Exquisite Corpse: if they fold a piece of paper six times instead of three, the entire group could make a single drawing.
Behind them, a chair scrapes the floor. Its occupant—a redhead in a bucket hat—stalks out of the food court, toward the stores.
“Maisie?” Laurel calls.
The other person doesn’t respond. Laurel stands and follows her. They pass Gadzooks and Express before weaving through the kiosks. The redhead slows as she nears the fountain in the center of the mall. There she whips around, as if to end the chase on her terms.
“What the hell are you doing?” Maisie asks.
“What are you doing?” asks Laurel. “Have you been following us?”
“You wish,” hisses Maisie. “I’m not a stalker. I could tell that something weird was going on, and obviously I was right. I sit down, and you guys are talking about séances, and dreams, and a corpse—”
“That isn’t what it sounds like,” Laurel says.
“Are you in a cult?”
“It’s not a cult.” Laurel looks into Maisie’s face, freckled and dear. “Let’s sit down, okay? I’ll tell you everything.”
—
Laurel speaks for ten minutes without stopping. When she finishes, Maisie is trembling.
“Talk to me. What are you thinking?” Laurel says.
“I’m thinking I don’t know if I can trust you,” says Maisie.
“Because I’m not the person you thought I was?”
“Because what you’re saying sounds insane!”
“You think I’m delusional.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
Laurel may not be able to convince Maisie of her story. Now that she’s told it, though, she can finally stop acting. She gazes at Maisie Two as honestly as she once did Maisie One.
“Don’t do that. You aren’t looking at me,” Maisie says. “You’re looking at her—the other me. If what you’ve said is even true.”
“I’m not sure how separate you are.”
“We’re separate to me,” says Maisie, fiercely.
“You’re right,” says Laurel. “I’m sorry.”
It took decades for her to come to peace with the other Laurel. Maisie Two has only had minutes.
“Can you prove any of this?” Maisie asks.
Laurel thinks. “When I came back from McMurdo, I’d forgotten things, remember? And the Eli you knew—he was a physicist, too. He’d come up with something called the Duoverse, right?”
Maisie fiddles with her slap bracelet. “I guess. We didn’t really talk about it.”
“Or—there was the time we went ice-skating, when I was pregnant with Silas. I said that Eli was distant, and you asked whether he’d been that way in the past. I didn’t know what you meant,” Laurel says. “I hadn’t learned about Celeste.”
Maisie looks up. “You seemed so confused. It freaked me out. It was like you’d forgotten her.”
“It wasn’t that I’d forgotten her. More like I hadn’t remembered her yet.”
A young girl approaches the fountain. Laurel and Maisie watch in quiet as she throws a coin over her shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?” says Laurel. “Why didn’t you mention Celeste, either?”
Maisie stares as though the answer were obvious. “Because you’d asked me not to.”
“But I didn’t,” says Laurel. “It was—”
“Okay, because she asked me not to. The…other Laurel,” Maisie says. “She wrote to me from Antarctica. She said that when she came home, she couldn’t talk about Celeste—that it would be too painful. She sent the same thing to Clare.”
Laurel frowns. “Didn’t that seem strange?”
“Now it does, looking back. But she was so depressed.” Maisie shuts her eyes. “If what you’re saying is true, why didn’t she tell me herself?”
“Maybe she wanted to protect you. It would be dropping a bomb, you know?”
“I should have asked more questions. I should have known that you weren’t her.”
“If you have to blame someone, blame me. Apparently I’m a pretty good liar.”
“And now you’re trying to leave,” Maisie says. Her ears are turning pink. “And these—these friends—are helping you. Would you even have said goodbye to me?”
“Maisie, if it weren’t for you, I don’t know how I would have managed here.
You’ve made it feel as close to home as possible.
The thought of leaving you is horrible, but I miss my parents.
I want to see them again, too. Think of it this way,” Laurel says.
“If Eli and I can get back to our world, would you want to come with us?”
Maisie pauses. “No. This is my home.”
“That’s just it,” says Laurel. “You’re my best friend in the world—here and in the one I left. And honestly, more likely than not, we’re going to stay after all. Eli and I can’t find a way out. We’ve been trying for years.”
Laurel explains the neuron metaphor: her last-ditch effort is to assemble a collective.
“That’s why we invited the others. But none of our methods are working. The only thing we haven’t done is analyze our dreams.”
Maisie touches Laurel’s shoe with hers. “Well, it sounds like you need more neurons.”
—
That night, the McMurdoans drive to Riordan’s house. When Laurel rings the bell, his parents open the door.
“What a crew!” says Maureen, Riordan’s mother. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were up to something.”
“Us?” Laurel squeezes Eli’s hand. “We’ll probably just go to bed early.”
—
She leads the others to the basement. Sitting with Riordan and his two Dobermans are Maisie, Noah, and Jules.
The groups get to know each other over pizza, Riordan’s Dobermans licking their feet.
After that, Laurel and Eli repeat their story to the new recruits.
When they finish, there is a silence whose tenor Laurel cannot interpret.
Riordan breaks first, grinning, and then they’re laughing, all ten of them.
“You aren’t mad at us?” asks Laurel, looking from Riordan to Jules.
Riordan shrugs. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened since I moved back in with my parents.”
Jules nods in agreement. “I always knew there was something weird about the Arc.”
“Maisie said that you want to analyze our dreams,” says Noah. “So what do we do? Talk about them in the morning?”
“That does sound kind of lame,” says Riordan.
Laurel crosses her arms. “Does anyone have a better idea?”
“You keep talking about this collective,” says Maisie. “What if we try to have a dream together?”
“That’s good,” says Louis, pointing at her with a mozzarella stick.
“We could pick a setting,” Nita says. “A meeting spot where the dream would take place.”
Charlie rests her elbows on her knees. “It should be mysterious.”
“And weird,” says Louis.
He scans the room. Ghost Particle, the other Eli’s book, sits face out on a bookshelf.
“Something like that,” Louis says, gesturing to the cover. Under the subtitle—The Search for a Left-Handed Neutrino—is a picture of the Super-Kamiokande observatory.
“Riordan,” says Eli, touched, “I didn’t know you read it.”
“I haven’t,” Riordan says. “But I still wanted to support you.”
Louis retrieves the book, and they crowd over the cover: the cathedral-sized tank of water, the eleven thousand gold bulbs.
“What is this place?” asks Jules.
“It’s a neutrino detector,” Eli says.
“Never mind. I was wrong,” says Louis. “That sounds boring.”