Chapter 16 Guest Wing #8
Laurel rises to a seat as if tugged by a hook. She knows that pull by now, and she knows who it comes from.
—
Laurel walks downstairs in her pajamas. Quietly she lifts the receiver of the landline in the kitchen.
“Gloria?” she whispers. “Can I come over?”
“Did something happen?” Gloria asks.
Laurel can hear the concern in her voice. It’s not that something happened, she explains, but that she hopes something might.
—
Laurel pages Eli. Then she climbs back upstairs, to her parents’ room.
Pete is sleeping soundly, his head turned to one side. Laurel scans the things he loves: his bluegrass CDs and books on fruit growing, his pictures of her and Clare. She kisses his cheek, taking in his particular smell. After that, she walks to the other side of the bed.
“Mom?” Laurel whispers, sitting.
Clare tussles with sleep, trying to surface.
“It’s okay,” says Laurel. “You don’t have to wake up. I just have to tell you two things.”
Clare’s eyes open slowly. With Laurel seated and Clare lying down, they are both parent, both child.
“What is it, my dear?” Clare asks.
“Well, the first thing is that I’m sorry. I know I haven’t been easy lately.”
Clare smiles. “I’m sure I didn’t make it easy on you, either, in the beginning.”
Laurel takes Clare’s hand and squeezes. “The second thing is that I love you.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” says Clare, squeezing back. “I know you do.”
—
They stay like that, holding hands, until Clare falls back asleep. Before she leaves the house, Laurel pages Maisie 143.
—
Laurel drives her father’s truck to the Rosens’ house. Eli jumps into the cab, rubbing his arms and laughing.
“Are you crazy?” he asks.
Cold beats at the windows like wings. Eli wears a hoodie over his pajamas. Laurel explains her idea as she turns onto the beltline. When they reach Prospect Avenue, Gloria’s street, a blinding flash precedes rumbling.
“Was that thunder?” says Eli.
“Thundersnow,” says Laurel; she’s never seen it before. To Eli’s incredulity, she adds, “It’s a thing.”
They park and climb out of the car. Snowflakes cling to her eyelashes like tinsel. Most of the houses on Prospect are unlit, but Gloria’s windows gleam.
The person who opens the door is a man: tall but spritely, with an elfin, welcoming grin. Laurel has seen him before, but only on Facebook.
“I’m Paul,” he says. “Come in.”
—
“I hope we didn’t wake you,” Laurel says.
“Hush,” says Gloria. “We’re night owls. I’m going to make a plate of cookies.”
The living room has only been wallpapered halfway. Mismatched chairs—“Free,” says Gloria, cheerfully—face a plummy velvet couch. Music wafts from a record player; Paul shows Eli the knobs and gears. In the hearth, a boisterous fire is burning.
Gloria sets the cookie tray on a mosaic table. She goes back for a pot of coffee. Just as Laurel and Eli sit, the house plunges into darkness.
For a moment, nobody speaks. Then Gloria laughs.
“Well, shoot,” she says. “There goes the power.”
“I’ll get candles,” says Paul.
Gloria had mentioned that she was dating someone, but she hadn’t told Laurel his name.
Now Laurel tries to remember what she learned of Paul from Gloria One.
He was a physicist, and he loved language—he’d found the Gerard quote, fungi as “new fangled meates.” Paul Two returns with a shoebox and roots through it, matching candles to their holders.
He sets a half-melted pillar on the table while Gloria watches him.
Laurel has never seen her with such an obvious crush.
She is sixty now, and striking. Auburn hairs mingle with white.
Paul sets tea lights on the mantel. Gloria pours the coffee into mugs.
“Now,” she says to Laurel and Eli. “It sounds like you have something to tell us.”
—
The story comes more quickly this time, now that Laurel and Eli have had practice.
“I knew it,” says Gloria. “I knew that you were hiding something.”
“By the time we met, you had already gone through so much. It seemed like your life was finally stable,” says Laurel. “I didn’t want to upend it.”
“But you wouldn’t have,” says Gloria. “We could have worked on it together.” There is wistfulness in her face, and perhaps envy, too. It is an envy that Laurel recognizes, native to scientists as well as nosy people: the desire to learn something big, to be inside a secret.
“So you believe us?” asks Eli, looking from Gloria to Paul.
“I’ll need some time to process it. But I’m a physicist,” says Paul. “I’m used to believing in things that are out of this world.”
“I suppose two universes don’t seem more unlikely than one. It’s sort of like the question of life on other planets,” Gloria says. “Maybe Earth is totally singular. But I’d be more surprised if this were all there was.”
After this, she becomes still, turning inward. Laurel has attributed Gloria’s melancholy to her years at Sunrise. But perhaps she also shares a taproot with Gloria One, who lived most of her life alone, and whose parents vanished when she was the same age Laurel is now.
“You knew her, then?” Gloria asks. “My double?”
Laurel smiles. “She was one of the people I loved most in the world.”
She expects that Gloria will have questions about her counterpart.
Louis Two wanted to know what became of Louis One, and Riordan was elated to learn that, in Laurel’s world, the Renaissance really existed.
In fact, Laurel is eager to say more—to share Gloria One with the person to whom she matters most. Before she can speak, Gloria Two holds up a hand.
“No,” she says. “Please. I want to find out on my own.”
“I thought you were upset that I didn’t tell you sooner.”
“I am. I wish I’d known about you and Laurel Two. I would have tried to help. But I don’t want anyone to tell me who I am.”
That was fitting, Laurel thought—and very like Gloria One, though she didn’t say so.
The wind whistles outside; in the light of a streetlamp, snow blows erratically. Paul crosses his legs.
“What are you thinking?” Eli asks him.
Paul smiles. “I suppose I’m being philosophical.”
“In what way?”
“Well, I’m familiar with your work. I notice that you talk about these worlds—these people—as though they’re separate. Even the word Duoverse implies two parts, not one.”
Eli leans forward with interest. “As opposed to…?”
“Let’s define your concept first: two universes, and two versions of you—each contained in their world, like twins in separate sacs. That could very well be true. But there’s an equally plausible alternative: a single person, who moves across…” He raises an eyebrow, teacherly.
“A two-part timeline,” Eli says.
“Exactly. In that case,” says Paul, “the timeline wouldn’t be a line at all. A person would turn”—he traces a circle—“from one life to the next. Each universe would not be the other’s antithesis but its continuation.”
Laurel’s mind whirls. If Paul is right, then death is merely an intermission between acts.
“The other Laurel would be…my afterlife. My ghost,” she says. “Or I would be hers.”
She must remind herself that words like beginning and end, one and two, are a matter of perspective. A line implies before and after; a circle says, And then, and then…
Paul smiles. “We can’t know, of course. And maybe the distinction doesn’t matter. But you came here for a reason,” he says. “How can we help?”
Laurel tells Gloria and Paul about her theory of the unconscious. Eli describes the group dream and the letters they found in the bulbs. Finally, Laurel explains how genus twig led to the other Laurel’s letter—and that guest wing brought her here, to the room at the end of the hallway.
—
The guest wing contains a bathroom and a bedroom; a third door leads to the yard.
In the bedroom, a tufted rug squishes under Laurel’s socks.
Embroidered folk art hangs on the wall, and a quilt drapes over the bed.
Laurel recognizes squares from Gloria’s black linen dress and the bandanna she wore during the Spark.
Laurel sets her candle down and flexes her hands.
It feels as though her body is preparing for an athletic event.
The others watch as she wanders through the room, passing a wooden desk and a family of matryoshka dolls.
The closet contains a decorative tin and two pairs of slippers. Nothing feels charged or portentous.
No, she pleads, silently. This can’t be the end of the road.
“Laurel,” says Eli, “do you think that the Twos could be trying to go home, too?”
“They could be,” Laurel says. Then: “They must be,” she adds, with more conviction. In Kenji’s office, she had asked whether she made her own choices. You both do, he said. You make them together.
Eli steps forward. “Maybe, if you try to tune in to her…”
Laurel closes her eyes and slows her breathing. She tries not to feel self-conscious, pretends that no one is there but the two of them. It almost feels like running roll call at Happy Camper School.
This is Number One, she thinks. Where are you, Number Two?
As before, there is no warning. She lets a hook down into water, and it drifts until it catches something.
The other Laurel is holding an object. Laurel can’t see it, but she feels it: smooth metal, the size of a makeup compact.
Her legs move of their own accord. They stop before the decorative tin in the closet.
“What’s in here?” she asks.
“Oh, odds and ends. Go ahead,” says Gloria. “Open it.”
Laurel sets the tin on the bedroom floor. The others bring their candles close, for her to see by. Kneeling on the rug, she pries open the lid. Inside is a sewing kit, a pincushion, and a stack of leftover fabric. At the very bottom, she finds a circular gold case.
“Now, here’s a story,” Gloria says. “Seymour and Julian gave that to me.”
“Seymour and Julian? When?”
“At the Other Worlds party, after you left. You know how they collect antiques? After I told Seymour about our experiment, he said he wanted my opinion on something.”
Eli examines the case. “What is it?”
“It’s a pocket watch,” says Gloria. “But I think it also functions as an electrical device of some kind—or that it could.”