but in the other, he took the bus on which he met the woman he would eventually marry. He was able to move between the different timelines at will, and discovered others who could do the same.”
“Handy,” I said. “Like being able to take back chess moves.”
“It’s the only science-fiction novel I’ve ever read. I don’t remember the author’s name, or even if it was very good. For some reason, I didn’t finish it, so I don’t know how it turned out, but I often feel as though I exist in two different universes at the same time, this me in this universe, getting blotto with a perfect stranger, and another me in another universe in which perhaps I’m also getting blotto, but all by myself because I didn’t let you into my house. I think I prefer this timeline,” she added, and almost smiled.
“Schrödinger’s cat,” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“Schrödinger’s cat. It was a ‘thought experiment’ in quantum mechanics by a physicist named Erwin Schrödinger. I read about it in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Physics. It had something to do with the probability that an atom of uranium or some other radioactive substance would decay within an hour, trigger a Geiger counter, and release a gas that would kill a cat in a sealed container. In one quantum reality, the atom decays and the cat dies. In the other, the atom doesn’t decay, and the cat lives. According to quantum theory, the cat’s two possible states — alive and dead — are mixed or entangled together until we look into the box to see what happened, at which point the cat’s realities separate and it will be either dead or alive.”
“How awful.”
“Tough on Dr. Schrödinger’s cat, anyway,” I said. “Fortunately for Felix, it was only a thought experiment. No real cat involved.”
“Do you believe it’s possible that with each choice we make,” she said, “we create a separate parallel universe for each alternative?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” I said.
“But unlikely?”
“The probability is not good,” I said, and she almost smiled again, but once again hid behind her wineglass.
She refilled her glass from the bottle on the table between us. There was an almost visible aura of sadness about Anna Waverley, an emotional entanglement field in which I was trapped along with her. It was distorting my reality — she was distorting my reality — and while my reality was far from perfect, I liked it the way it was. Besides, like it or not, it was the only one I had, and I was stuck with it. I wondered what was so terrible about Mrs. Waverley’s reality that she wished for another. Or was I misreading her? Maybe she was just plain nuts.
“How long were you married, Mr. McCall?” she asked.
She changed topics like a stone skipping across the water. “Six years,” I said. “It ended ten years ago.”
“Do you have any children?”
“A daughter. She’ll be fifteen in August.”
“My husband never wanted children,” Anna Waverley said. “I did, but Sam had had a vasectomy even before I married him. We’ve been married almost twenty-five years. If we’d had children, they’d be grown now. I could even be a grandmother.”
In an effort to get the conversation back on track, I said, “Is it possible that Bobbi’s attack, or the woman who hired us, is somehow connected to your husband or his business?”
“What? No, the idea is ludicrous. If you knew my husband, you’d know just how ludicrous. My husband is an extremely boring man. He was boring when I married him twenty-five years ago and he’s even more boring now. And his business is equally dull. Do you like this kitchen, Mr. McCall?”
I looked around. The kitchen of Sam and Anna Waverley’s house was as big, if not bigger, than my living room. It was equipped as well as the kitchens in many small hotels. And it was spotlessly clean, like a model kitchen in an Ikea showroom.
“It’s very nice,” I said. “Very clean.”
“It should be. It’s rarely used. My husband doesn’t like home-cooked meals. We eat in restaurants most of the time. Or order in. That’s when we eat together at all, which isn’t often. Sam lives for his work.” She drank more wine, then topped up her glass.
“Mrs. Waverley, when you were at the marina the other night, did you notice anything unusual?”
“No, I did not.”
“No strangers hanging around, especially near the Wonderlust?”
She shook her head. “No.” She picked up the wine bottle and gestured toward my glass. There was still a bit of white left in it.
I shook my head. “I should be going,” I said.
“How did you meet your wife?” she asked, as though she hadn’t heard me. Perhaps I only imagined I’d spoken aloud.
“I met her in a club,” I said. “I was doing photography for a lifestyles piece on working students and she was working her way through university as a bartender.”
“She’s younger than you are, then?”
“Just by a couple of years,” I replied.
“My husband is quite a few years older than I,” she said. I found her grammatical precision slightly pretentious, until I realized that she was more than a little drunk. “I was twenty-one when I married him. Sam was forty-two. I had graduated with a degree in art history and got a job in his gallery. There was another woman working for him then. Andrea. She was about thirty, plain, and it seemed to me that she hated me on sight. A month later she was gone, and less that a month after that Sam and I began having an affair. I was so damned utterly naive it embarrasses me to think about it even now. Andrea resented me because she’d been having an affair with him, too, and I was the usurper. She wasn’t the first of his assistants with whom he’d had an affair, of course, nor was I the last. His current assistant is Doris. A lovely woman, really. A little plain, perhaps, as have been most of Sam’s assistants, but very sweet. I don’t know what she sees in him.”
Once upon a summer afternoon a few years before, I’d happened across a couple in Stanley Park. They’d been sitting in each others’ laps under a tree, mouths greedily fastened, her legs wrapped around his waist and her wide peasant skirt spread across their hips, as they’d rocked and writhed with ever-increasing urgency. I felt as I had then, a reluctant voyeur. I wanted to stop listening to Anna Waverley, as I’d wanted to stop watching the lovers in the park, but I couldn’t. Although it was painful hearing her bare her soul to someone she had known for less than an hour, I felt a strange sense of duty to keep listening, to be there for her, to be her sounding board. Her passive therapist. Or her confessor.
“When you were married, Mr. McCall, were you ever unfaithful to your wife?”
“I was tempted once or twice,” I admitted. “But I was never actually physically unfaithful.” In this timeline, I added to myself.
“In the Bible the thought is often as sinful as the deed,” Mrs. Waverley said.
“Then, biblically speaking,” I said, “I’m doomed to
