Nevertheless, the office manager was patient with me. And once I explained what was going on, she agreed it was troubling and volunteered to get Reiner on the line.
Finally, some help. Surely, if anyone could cut through medical bureaucracy, it would be an insistent doctor.
I walked Reiner through my journey from the information desk, to the ER, to the ICU, to Neurology. When I was done, there was nothing on my screen for a short while. Then the words started coming.
“Well, I’m sure he’ll turn up. I’m going to have my office manager keep Matt’s record open. If there’s a new entry, we’ll know immediately and we’ll call you, okay?”
I momentarily returned the phone to my lips to say, “Thank you.”
He started talking again. I was getting tired of the screen and the delay, so I just mashed the phone’s earpiece against my hearing aid and hoped for the best.
“In the meantime, why don’t you check with Hanover Emergency Medical Services?” he suggested. “I’m sure they’ll have a record of where they took him.”
“That’s a good thought. Thank you, Doctor.”
“Let us know when you find him, okay? I want to be able to see him immediately.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” I said again, then hung up.
I looked up the number for Hanover EMS. When a man answered, I explained my situation.
His answer was definitive:
“We haven’t made any pickups at Dartmouth today.”
He was a natural shouter. I didn’t need my screen.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m the dispatcher, ma’am. I know where all our units are, all the time, and I haven’t sent any squads to Dartmouth. I’m sorry.”
“Is it . . . is it possible a different ambulance service picked him up?”
“Your husband works at Dartmouth?”
“Yes.”
“Not UMass Dartmouth. Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire?”
“Yes,” I said, exasperated.
“Well, then I don’t know what to tell you. We’re the only game in town. We cover Hanover, Norwich, Lyme, the whole area. If your husband was picked up by an ambulance, it would have been us. But we haven’t made any trips to Dartmouth today.”
“Do you have any idea where he might be?” I asked, aware I sounded frantic.
“I’m sorry. All I can tell you is, he’s not with us.”
I ended the call, now damp everywhere from sweat. I finally shed my down jacket, stood up, and took a few deep breaths.
Then inspiration struck: Matt had the Where’s My Phone app. My phone was programmed to track his.
I pulled out my phone, swiped, and prodded. But elation was soon followed by disappointment.
The blue blob was centered on Wilder Hall. It had been left behind.
Just in case, I called his number. It rang twice; then my screen read: “Hey, Brigid. It’s Sheena.”
“Hi,” I said into the mouthpiece, keeping my eyes on the screen. She was soft spoken.
“If you’re looking for Matt’s phone, he left it on his desk in the lab.”
I grunted to signify my disgust.
“But I don’t think he was working on the virus,” she added.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I came up here not long after he made his departure and the laser was cold. If he had been using it, it would have been warm. It takes a while for the thing to cool down.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on him like I told you I would. I just didn’t want you to think he had gone behind your back or anything.”
“Then why did he get sick?”
“Who knows? Maybe there are still some traces of the virus around that he accidentally came into contact with?”
“But you’ve never gotten sick,” I pointed out. “And you’re in there all the time.”
“Maybe I just didn’t touch the same things or my immune system fought it off,” she said. “How’s he doing anyway?”
“I, uhh, I don’t know. They . . . can’t find him.”
Just saying the words made me feel crazy.
“Isn’t he at the hospital?” Sheena asked.
“No, I’m here now. They have no record of him. His doctor doesn’t know where he is. The ambulance people say they haven’t done any pickups at Dartmouth today.”
“But how is that possible?”
“I’m trying to figure that out. Sheena, did you actually see Matt get taken out by the EMTs?”
“Well, yeah. It was kind of a big thing, you know?”
“What, exactly, did you see?”
“I . . . I was in my office and I heard . . . kind of a commotion. Then someone said, ‘Oh no, Professor Bronik must be doing that thing again.’ Everyone was sort of gathered on the stairs. He was strapped to the stretcher and just completely out of it. Exactly like last time.”
“And you saw him on the stretcher?”
“A bunch of us did.”
“Did you see him get loaded into the ambulance?”
“No, I just went back to my office, but . . . Brigid, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
Sheena offered me the same reassurances as everyone else. I quickly chased her off the phone.
Then I turned toward the window in the waiting room and looked out on a world that was still spinning at its usual thousand miles an hour, oblivious to the terror I was feeling.
Beppe Valentino and Sheena Aiyagari were brilliant scientists, not people prone to delusions. They had both seen the same thing: Matt taken out of his lab on a stretcher.
From there . . . well, from there, the trail ended. No one, it seemed, knew anything.
It was giving me the same feeling I sometimes got when Matt talked about his work. And every time I said “I’m not sure I get it,” Matt just smiled and replied, “Don’t worry. Neither does anyone else.”
The most famous and venerated proof of quantum mechanics is the double-slit experiment. By demonstrating that light acts as both a particle and a wave, it neatly shows what’s known as quantum superposition—the head-scratching fact that a single particle can seem to exist in multiple places at the same time.
Which is utterly baffling.
Except it was still less baffling than what was suddenly going on with my husband.
He didn’t seem to exist anywhere at all.
CHAPTER 10
Without even realizing it, Emmett Webster was staring at the picture. Again.
It was the one of the Leisure Travel Vans twenty-four-footer, which he and Wanda should have been in right now. They probably would have been poking their way through the Carolinas, looking for the ultimate roadside barbecue, luxuriating in early spring weather that wasn’t even a rumor yet in New Hampshire.
Instead, here he was, sitting in a cubicle at New Hampshire State Police headquarters, the result of a series of decisions that no one besides him seemed to like very much.
The first was that he wasn’t going RVing. He couldn’t really afford it anymore—their calculations had involved two pensions, not one. Plus, traveling the country with Wanda felt like an adventure. Doing it by himself felt like being a long-haul trucker.