by Laurel Brett
I waited at the reservation desk for Daphne to arrive so we could be seated together. She swept in, small and vibrant as always, dressed in a simple black sheath, her cloud of curly auburn hair swirling about her, making her into a pre-Raphaelite princess.
“Garrett,” she said, meeting my eyes with a steady gaze, “you look different. You got contact lenses.” Her voice was neutral—I couldn’t tell whether or not she liked them. And there was a spark missing from her emerald eyes. I wondered if something was wrong.
We were seated, and I gazed around, noticing other recent graduates about the room, their families beaming with pride. We were at one of those places reserved for special occasions. The tables were a generous distance apart, and the ambiance was hushed and elegant, yet I felt stifled. Apart from my date with Caroline at the Russian Tea Room, and then our recent joyous Thanksgiving, I had never appreciated the pretension of fancy restaurants.
I had resigned myself to talking to Daphne in this mausoleum when I caught her eye, and she said, “This isn’t a good place to talk. I have an idea.” She asked a passing busboy if she could to speak to the maître d’. I was surprised at how effortlessly she took control. She really had grown up.
“Is there any way we could sit outside? The swans are so enchanting. Do you have any tables where we could eat alfresco?”
“No, miss. Sorry. We have some small tables out back, but they’re just for cocktails. We use them at weddings.”
“I’m sorry too,” she said. “Could you arrange to get our car?”
“As you wish. May I have your ticket?”
I gave him the chit. “I thought you were driving yourself. Don’t you have a car to retrieve?”
“No, at the last minute I decided to be dropped off in case I wanted to drink.”
I left a one-dollar bill, generous since we hadn’t ordered anything, on the table, and we went to wait by the swans. Their metamorphosis from small gray birds to these elegant creatures was the stuff of myth and fairy tale.
“Where shall we go?” I asked.
“Let’s go to Cold Spring Harbor and sit at a clam joint by the water.”
That sounded perfect to me. I put the top down on my convertible. She gave me directions, and soon we found ourselves traveling along the shore. The ambient sounds of waves and the patterns of the changing sky were my only distractions as I drove. Daphne was quiet so I was quiet too. I thought it very unlike her.
We stopped at the first clam joint we found. She went ahead and sat on a gray bench at the weathered table closest to the water while I lingered at the trunk of the car trying to decide if I should bring the new sturdy leather satchel I had brought packed with all my notes from the Schrödinger mystery—even the time line I had taped to the wall and the postcard in front of the swan boats Galen’s Daphne had given me. I knew that Caroline expected me to discard it all. I remembered what she had said, that our baby Daphne would have to be the only Daphne in our lives. I was considering another idea—giving all my clues to my magical Ur-Daphne so she could pursue the mystery for both of us. That would satisfy Caroline’s conditions, but I would not have to destroy two years of work. Unbidden, a memory of tossing my rat research into the trash the day I met Daphne came to mind. That’s how all this started.
As I sat down I said, “Now this is more like it.” She gave me an artificial smile, the kind when someone’s mouth smiles but not her eyes. This was supposed to be a celebratory dinner. I wondered again if something was wrong, and then a wisp of a suspicion took shape—that this girl was a new Daphne. This was not how the evening was supposed to go. I had so looked forward to being with my original Daphne, but nothing felt the way I had thought it would.
I went to the little shack and got us a bucket of steamers, some stuffed clams, more french fries than we could possibly eat, and two sodas. The table was arranged so we could face each other but also turn our heads to see the surf. All ten tables were filled, yet the great outdoors absorbed all the chatter, so it felt like we were alone with the waves of the Long Island Sound. The day had been in the eighties, but I felt comfortable with the small breeze off the water. When I got back to the table with the food, paper plates, and plastic utensils, I noticed that Daphne wore the pearls she had hated when she was sixteen; now they suited her. I still loved her unruly red mane and impossibly green eyes.
First she asked about me.
“Really? You had a baby? I mean your girlfriend did? Really?” I almost saw the old enthusiasm in my young friend.
When she asked the baby’s name I was evasive and simply said, “She’s named for Caroline’s grandmother.” I’m not sure why I did that. I tried to ask her about her plans, but she was being evasive too, and offered only that she would be attending the University of Chicago.
“It has a great physics department,” I replied evenly. The wide sky over the water was gradually turning rosy as the sun began to set. I had brought a paper bag from the car with me. By this time we had finished the clams and I had gotten us each a second soda.
“I’ve brought gifts for you,” I said.
“That wasn’t necessary.”
“Don’t be silly. After all the gifts you’ve given me?” I began listing all the things she’d sent me.
“Stop,” she said.
But I continued: “Without you, I’d still be a stick-in-the-mud, stuck back in the 1950s. You gave me Dylan and the Beatles. Through you I reconnected with Caroline. I can’t bear to think about how different things would be if I hadn’t met you. You have been like a pied piper to me.” But now that I’d had the idea that I wasn’t with Ur-Daphne, I couldn’t let go of it. Maybe this girl hadn’t been the bestower of all those gifts.
“I have something for you,” she said. I had noticed her oversized purse. She reached inside and handed me a baseball cap.
“But this is a Mets cap,” I said with true dismay. “I can’t wear that. I’m a Yankees fan.” This felt more like a punishment than a gift.
“Oh really? You are?” she asked in mock surprise. “I know that, Garrett.”
“You’re a Mets fan?” I asked. They were a newfangled team, born just seven years earlier, a team that lost a lot, belonged to the folks in the suburbs, and would never be the Yankees.
“Long Island girl, Long Island team,” she said. “Besides, I’m sure you’ve been following their season. They’re going to go all the way this year. They’re going to win the World Series.”
“Ha ha ha. That’s impossible. The Mets are never going to win the World Series.”
“Put on the cap,” she said, so I did, feeling disloyal. “It’s okay. It’s a different league. You’re not rooting against the Yankees. You’re just rooting for someone else too. And don’t laugh at the Mets.”
The sky was a riot of color—golds, salmons, and pinks all streaked across the horizon as if from Galen’s brush. Daphne’s dark-red hair formed a natural part of the sunset. It was her turn to open a present. The bag held the box with the pendant. Her eyes matched the emerald chips that decorated the leaves.
“A laurel tree! How thoughtful. Trees have such sturdy identities.” Then she opened the envelope also inside the bag. “What’s this? Tickets?”
I had purchased two three-day passes at seven dollars apiece for the upcoming Woodstock music festival, six weeks away. The tickets were about to go on sale to the general public, but I had run into the promoters at the coffee shop in Woodstock. The festival was going to be three days of continuous music. I expected her to be excited, but she had the same flat affect she’d had all evening.
“I’ve heard about this,” she allowed. “I’m afraid I can’t go, although it does sound like fun. The festival is August 15–17. I’ll already be on my way to Chicago. We’re driving. U Chicago starts at the end of August, but there’s orientation first.”
I felt a true pang. I had imagined her at the music festival, over and over again, her red hair blazing through the crowd, just as I imagined her staring up at the
sky in a few weeks when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. No history would ever be complete now without Daphne. I had seen them all at Woodstock, together, the Schrödinger girls finally meeting. In some alternate universe they might be there together, but in this reality they were all dispersing.
She had put the pendant back in its little box. “Don’t you want to put it on?” I asked. “I could help you take off the pearls.” Then I queried, “When did you get those pearls? When did I see them first? Do you remember the day?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I was having family pictures taken. You were afraid that I had suddenly become a Junior League miss. And no, Garrett. I am not another Daphne. I am the exact same girl you met in the bookstore.” Now I saw her eyes flash, and I had to remind myself to breathe. My scalp tingled. She’d been reining in this anger, and now her voice had taken on a bitter edge.
“What do you mean?” Now it was my voice that was oddly neutral.
“Just that I know there are other Daphnes and you knew and kept it from me.”
It was pointless to deny it. It was clear that we were going to talk as equals.
Daphne continued, “I suspected at the gallery. So I did some research, the same as you did, I suppose. I found articles and pictures of Galen Green and his new muse, Daphne. I even saw a picture of her in an art magazine. She was me in a chignon! Then other kids started telling me that I had a double at a school nearby, and the weird thing was that her name was Daphne too! I saw you looking for her at the march. When we talked about Borges on the bus, you asked me if I suspected that there were other realities. You were quizzing me to see if I suspected. I’ve been thinking about this as long as you have.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “And if you were so angry with me, why did you give me a present?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she replied. The questions just hung there between us. In a weird way Jerry and Caroline had been right. She really was a good actress. “I gave you a present because even though you were keeping this from me, we are profoundly connected. Don’t you think? And because I knew you’d hate it.”
“I wanted to protect you,” I explained, but it occurred to me that perhaps I hadn’t seen her for so long because acting this part felt too burdensome to her. It was time to tell her everything I knew about each Daphne. “Wait a minute,” I said.
I sprinted to my car and retrieved all the notes. Daphne was still sitting there when I returned to the table. I removed Reviews of Modern Physics, the 1957 issue of the scientific journal with Everett’s article, and showed it to her, but she said she’d already read it. I told her about Everett’s negative reception in Copenhagen that had forced him to give up physics, but she knew about that too. Then I told her how he had dismissed me.
“It’s why I’m going to Chicago to study physics,” she admitted. “I want to get to the bottom of this too. As for acting like I didn’t know? Maybe I was doing my own experiment, to see how long you’d keep everything from me.” Her cheeks were turning red with anger, but her throat was choking back a sob. Her beautiful green eyes were misty. She’d been keeping her feelings to herself for so long. Reality was swimming around me.
The desserts I’d brought sat uneaten on our table, but we sipped our coffees. The tables were emptying, though a few new patrons kept arriving. The sign said the Shell Shack was open until eleven p.m. By then the sky had faded into a nacreous gray, radiant like pearls. The sound of the waves punctuated the quiet that followed my story. An employee came around lighting the hurricane lamps on the tables, and the flames lit Daphne’s face. She stayed silent for several very uncomfortable minutes.
“You can have all these notes,” I said as an emptiness opened up in my solar plexus.
“I don’t need them,” she responded. “I have my own notes.”
“Take them anyway,” I urged, trying to restore something of our old camaraderie. I couldn’t lose her.
“I trusted you, and the whole time you were keeping the most important things you knew, and the most important people you knew, to yourself.”
“You were keeping what you knew to yourself too. At least I wasn’t pretending what I felt.”
“That’s not the same thing, and you know it.”
I had never imagined her angry with me. I had been stupid and misguided, and I had underestimated her. I granted myself permission to be a sole observer. Maybe she was right to call it an experiment.
“I can tell that you were actually considering not telling me tonight,” she sullenly remarked, not letting her anger go, letting it flare again. “I can’t even look at you,” she sputtered, and she jumped up and stormed off in the direction of the surf.
The night was lit by a brilliant full moon, but I didn’t take my eyes off her. I watched Daphne sit down in the sand, pull her legs up to her chest, and encircle them with her arms. She sat there for several minutes while the sky grew inky, punctuated by only a few stray stars—the moon was so bright. Finally, I saw her walk slowly back along the beach and take her seat opposite me.
“I forgive you,” she said. “I want to meet the other Schrödinger girls. Do any of the others know?”
“Before tonight I would have said no. Now? How do I know?”
“Maybe you should tell them.”
“Maybe you should,” I said stiffly. “The case with my notes has contact information.”
“You can relax, Garrett. I said I forgive you.”
She assumed that my stiffness was contrition, and that was part of it, but I could also feel grief taking up residence in my hollow chest. We were going to say goodbye.
“People find these ideas crazy, Daphne,” I warned.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she said. “We have to find out why these worlds penetrated each other.” She was thinking out loud. “They should have stayed separate.”
I told her of my day at the Met with Caroline. “I investigated the paintings of the Daphne myth, looking for clues—you know, the tree created by the river god, a Daphne tree with branching realities, a laurel tree.”
“My pendant,” she said. “But it doesn’t explain anything, right? Though I love myths. Like Zeus coming as a swan in Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan,’” and she began to recite, “Did she put on his knowledge,” but then stopped. “Oh, never mind, Garrett.”
I asked her to recite the entire Yeats poem and explain her train of thought, but she insisted it wasn’t important, that science was the better tool. I didn’t remind her that science said our experience was impossible.
Then she asked for another coffee. I grew tired of wearing the Mets cap in the heat, so I took it off and went to get us both another cup, though we certainly didn’t need them to warm up on that summer night. I peered right at her when I returned to the table and handed her the coffee.
“I have a confession to make,” she said, her green eyes looking right into mine, which were no longer hidden behind the thick lenses I used to wear.
I just waited.
“I took the pendant and buried it in the sand. I’d like to put it on now. Could you go down to the surf to get it? It’s so difficult walking in the sand in these heels. I left it right over there.” She pointed to the spot a hundred yards away where I’d watched her sit.
“Sure,” I replied, “be glad to.”
The moment was bright with moonlight and the warm light cast by the hurricane lamps of the little café. As I walked toward the surf, I turned around once and waved to my Schrödinger girl with a big-armed gesture to express all the things I couldn’t say. She lifted her arm in salute.
I turned back, facing the silver waves, and found the spot. I lowered myself to the rocky shore and began searching through the seaweed and beach for the golden tree pendant I’d given her. For a while it felt like a fool’s errand, but finally I glimpsed something bright. Eureka! As I gently dug through the sand, links of the buried necklace appeared.
Then a startling sound, like a fluttering out on the water, at
tracted my attention, and I glanced out to sea in time to glimpse the briefest flash of large white wings, but when I looked again nothing broke the calm surface of the water. The water was serene, the moon a brilliant orange orb climbing higher in the sky. I turned back to give a thumbs-up sign to Daphne to show I had found her necklace, but even from that distance I could see that her place was empty. Jogging back, I was thinking that she must have gone to the ladies’ room. We’d had so many coffees. But the minutes ticked on, and she didn’t reappear.
A woman made her way back to a table near ours. “Excuse me,” I called out to her, trying to appear nonchalant. “Was there anyone in the bathroom with you? A young woman? I seem to have lost her,” I added, trying to make a joke of it.
“No. Empty except for me,” she said before turning back to her date.
I returned to the counter, pretending to feel confident that I’d find her there, but there were only two teenage guys buying themselves fries. I walked to the parking lot, but she wasn’t in the car. She wasn’t anywhere. I circled back to our table to wait for her, but her purse was gone and so was all the Schrödinger material. She had left the Woodstock tickets and the Mets cap primly on the table. I felt for the pendant I was still holding in my pocket. When I lifted the tickets from the table, I noticed a scrap of napkin with words written in her fancy script: I’m fine, Garrett. No need to worry.
That ended my plan to notify the authorities. I stashed the little note in my wallet. Then I looked carefully at her bench and saw a shape in the sand next to it. She’d left the satchel behind after all—the Daphne satchel. I almost sobbed in relief. I knew I couldn’t take the leather case home if I didn’t want Caroline to know that I’d kept it; I could stash it in my office at school. I wanted her and baby Daphne to stay. I lingered at the table in the moonlight, sipping coffee until it was closing time at the Shell Shack, and then I began the long ride home.