The Copenhagen Interpretation
by C. E. Powell
|
Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
In the morning, just after sunrise, Danny and Matthew leave their cabin to find that housekeeping is already cleaning Zoe and Ellie’s.
“Hi,” Danny calls out, her hands buried in the pockets of her coat to keep them warm. “Hi, sorry, are you... I mean, did the girls who were here check out?”
The housekeeper takes a step towards the door. He looks no older than twenty and his bangs brush his eyelashes. “What?”
“The people who were staying in this cabin,” Danny says. “Did they already leave?”
“Probably,” says the housekeeper, shrugging. “Since we’re cleaning it.”
Danny stands motionless on the path in front of the cabin and stares at the housekeeper. She wants to tell him that he must be wrong, somehow, because Danny doesn’t want to leave this place — this row of cabins, this patch of forest, this state — without answers, and she doesn’t know how to articulate why she needs them so badly.
“You can ask at the front desk,” the housekeeper offers, after a minute. “But I don’t think they’ll be able to tell you anything. I think it’s, like, illegal or something.”
“Right,” says Danny. She backs up, slowly, and Matthew takes a step to the side so she doesn’t crash into where he would be. “Right, sorry.”
The housekeeper peers at her, head tipped sideways. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” says Danny, “I’m fine.”
She walks stiffly to her car and climbs into the driver’s seat, and she feels more than she sees Matthew settle in beside her. She pulls onto the road in a daze as the windshield wipers push a clump of soggy leaves back and forth across the glass.
“You don’t know them,” Matthew reminds her. “Whatever they were talking about last night, it’s their business. It doesn’t affect us, you know? They’ll work it out. They’ll be fine.”
“What if they don’t?” she asks. The faded pavement is dappled with light, with the patterns of the morning as they filter through the firs, and she wonders how far the road would go if she simply didn’t stop driving it. How entangled it’s possible to become with a person she’s only met in passing.
“There’s the café,” Matthew says, bringing Danny back down to earth. She parks and leads Matthew to the front door of the coffee shop, a bell on its interior doorknob giving a bright, clear jingle when she opens it.
“What can I get you?” asks the barista, when she sees Danny approach. She’s holding a carton of milk in her hand and she’s smiling a bland, approachable smile. She makes Danny a latte and toasts Danny a bagel and Danny thanks her before carrying her breakfast to a table by the window. She’s about to sit down when something catches her eye.
There, in the corner of the coffee shop with two plates of coffee cake sitting between them, are Ellie and Zoe.
“Oh, my God,” says Danny, under her breath. She sets her food down and goes over to Zoe and Ellie’s table, clutching her coffee between her chilly hands. Ellie looks up when Danny gets close and her eyes widen when they land on Danny’s face.
“Hi,” Danny says. She finds herself examining Ellie for some sign of distress — exhaustion, maybe, or bloodshot eyes — even though she doesn’t know what it would mean if she found one. “I saw your cabin was empty this morning.”
“Yeah,” says Ellie, “we checked out a little early so we could get on the road.”
“See,” says Matthew, from a few feet behind Danny, but Danny ignores him. She smiles at Ellie instead.
“You must have left before dawn,” Danny says, like it’s small talk, like she’s not looking for answers to a puzzle she made up herself. “Did you get any sleep? I heard you talking so late last night.”
Ellie’s expression shutters at this, a house no longer welcoming visitors. “Sorry,” she says. “Did we keep you up?”
“No, no, of course not.” Danny sips her coffee and almost burns her tongue. “No, I was just... you know, hoping you’re okay, and everything.”
“We’re fine,” says Ellie. Zoe is swinging her feet, sipping from a cup in a way that obscures half her face and watching Danny with the same wary, untrusting frown that she’d worn by the pool. “We just needed to get to Canada a little earlier than we expected. We’re meeting a friend.”
When Ellie says this, Zoe glares, and Danny nods uselessly, knowing no more answers are forthcoming. She hovers for another moment, the silence tense and uneasy, and then she turns back to Matthew.
“We should go,” Danny says, under her breath. “I want — I need — to go.”
“We just got here,” Matthew says, sounding confused, but he follows Danny out of the coffee shop anyway. They stop in the middle of the parking lot.
“What’s wrong?” Matthew asks. “Everything’s good, right? They’re just having breakfast.”
“Yeah,” Danny says. “Yeah.” She stands frozen a few feet from her car and looks up at the sky to stop herself crying.
“Hey,” says Matthew, “it’s okay. They’re okay.”
“I know,” says Danny, but she’s too close to an emotion she’s worked too hard to bury. Everything’s fine, she reminds herself. Ellie and Zoe are sitting at a table eating coffee cake, cinnamon and sugar coating their lips. They’ll drive north until the end of the day and, when they get to wherever it is they’re going, someone will be there to welcome them home.
“Who do you think the man was?” she asks eventually. “The man Zoe thought was following them?”
Matthew seems to consider it. He clasps his hands behind his back again and says, thoughtfully, “A husband, maybe? A brother?”
“Maybe,” agrees Danny. “I couldn’t tell if they really knew him or not.”
“I mean, there’s no guarantee you know your husband any better than a stranger,” Matthew points out, and Danny stares past him. She thinks about the couple on the ferry from the night before and wonders if they’d suspected, when they’d taken their seats in the belly of the boat, what the stranger beside them might do.
Through the window of the coffee shop, Danny can just make out Ellie’s profile as she leans forward to say something to Zoe, and Danny reminds herself that in a few minutes, Zoe and Ellie will become a memory. Tomorrow, when she wakes up in British Columbia, she won’t know what road Zoe and Ellie are on, what country they’re in, if they’ve crossed the border into Canada or if they’ve vanished somehow into the woods. She won’t know if they’re alive or dead, if they’re still moving and breathing in the hushed, wintering world. It’s so easy, she thinks, to project her own life onto the gaps in her knowledge of theirs. It’s so easy to forget that understanding Ellie and Zoe isn’t the same as understanding herself.
“What’ll it be like, when we make it to your house?” Danny asks, eventually.
Matthew gives her a sad, almost pitying look. “I don’t know,” he says, softly. “What do you think it’ll be like?”
Danny imagines it. Maybe, she thinks, she’ll arrive at Matthew’s parents’ house just as the sun is setting, the reddening leaves of the trees along the street like blood against the gray of the sky. Maybe she’ll knock on the door and Matthew’s mother will answer. Maybe she’ll ask where Matthew is, and Matthew’s mother will look at her with the sort of pity reserved for people who can’t accept the truth.
“Maybe you have a secret family,” Danny says to Matthew. “Maybe that’s where you went. Maybe I’ll get there and you’ll be home for Christmas with your other wife.”
Matthew hums, and Danny continues, “Maybe you told your parents you left me months ago. Years ago. Maybe they’ll be surprised to see me, you know? Maybe they’ll yell at you. Maybe they’ll kick you out.”
“Maybe you were the second wife,” Mathew suggests, lightly, and he looks unreal, suddenly, as though Danny might be able to see all the way through him to the spider that’s methodically weaving its web across the driver’s side mirror of the car.
“I wasn’t the second wife,” Danny says.
“No,” agrees Matthew, “you wouldn’t be. But do you really think that’s how it’ll happen?”
* * *
In the morning, just after sunrise, Danny and Matthew walk to the cabin next door and are faced with what looks like a crime scene.
“This cabin was theirs, right?” Danny asks, looking around. She clenches her hands into fists to keep her fingers warm.
“This was where the voices were coming from last night,” Matthew confirms. “So I assume so.”
Danny climbs the set of steps to the front door of the cabin and looks inside. The door is unlocked and thrown halfway open, the bedspread yanked off the bed and tossed onto the floor. A suitcase full of clothes has been upended and its contents spilled across the carpet. It’s all so exaggerated that it looks like a prank.
“Don’t go in,” Danny says, automatically, when Matthew moves in her peripheral vision. “It might be evidence.”
“I won’t,” says Matthew, “but if you think it’s evidence, you should tell someone.”
Danny’s halfway to the lobby before Matthew’s done speaking. She rings the bell on the front desk three times before Abigail appears from the back.
“I think something’s happened in cabin three,” Danny says, without preamble. “Something bad.”
“What?” Abigail asks, and Danny doesn’t miss the way her eyes light up, just a little. “What happened?”
“The door’s open. It’s a mess in there — stuff all over the floor, their suitcases. Everything.”
Abigail’s face falls. “But no one’s in there?” she asks. “No, like, body, or anything?”
Danny opens her mouth and shuts it again. “If there were a body,” she says, “I’d be calling the police.”
“Right,” says Abigail. The acrylic nail that had been broken the day before is gone. “Well, I can call my boss. But usually when someone leaves their stuff, we just hold it as lost property for a while.”
Danny shifts from foot to foot. This is too big for calling Abigail’s boss. This feels too big.
“Can’t you check if their car is still here?” Danny asks. “Or if their phones or IDs are still in the room?”
Abigail shrugs. “I’ve only worked here for a few months. I’ll just call my boss.” She starts to turn towards the back room and stops, chewing on her bottom lip. “You can wait here, if you want?”
“Yeah,” says Danny. “Yeah. Okay.”
But when Abigail disappears into the back, Danny doesn’t wait. She goes to the parking lot and paces in a semicircle around her car.
“Hey,” says Matthew, “there’s nothing we can do.”
“We can wait and see if someone comes back,” Danny says. “We can wait and see if Abigail’s boss calls the police.”
“Do you want to wait for that all day?” Matthew asks. “And let’s say someone came and found evidence of some kind of crime. What would you do about it? You’re not a witness to anything. You didn’t touch anything in their room. They wouldn’t tell you anything or need you for anything. You’d just be in the way.”
Danny chews on a hangnail and glares at him. “I’d be in the way? Thanks.”
“You know what I mean,” says Matthew, placidly, and Danny nods. Slowly, she gets into her car and closes the door. She buckles her seatbelt and stares fixedly ahead.
“Come on,” says Matthew. “Let’s just go get you some breakfast, yeah? We can come back after.”
Danny drives mechanically a mile down the road to the coffee shop and orders a bagel and a coffee from the frazzled barista, who takes Danny’s order with a carton of milk in her hand. Danny barely manages to nod when the barista asks if it’s nice, traveling alone, and the jingle of the bell on the interior doorknob when Danny pushes the door open to leave feels like needles on the inside of her skull.
Back in the car, Danny sits in silence with a paper plate of bagel on her lap. She opens her phone and scrolls through a few feeds, national news and local stories one after the other, and she stops on a short article posted five minutes ago.
Two bodies found in Olympic National Park, the headline says, and Danny knows, before she opens it, what it is.
This morning, at around five a.m., the article reads, the bodies of two women were discovered in the woods near Eagle Ranger Station. The women, who have not yet been identified, were found by the side of the road next to an abandoned car. They were bound and strangled, although no cause of death has been determined.
“This has to be them,” says Danny. “This has to be Zoe and Ellie.”
“Maybe,” says Matthew, looking at her screen. “Or it could be someone else. It doesn’t say how long the bodies have been there.”
“And the guy they were talking about last night,” Danny barrels on. “He must’ve done it, right? He must have taken them from the cabin.”
“Maybe,” says Matthew again. “But if someone had taken them from their cabin, wouldn’t we have heard something?”
Danny leans back against the headrest. She can’t decide which is worse, having an answer that might be the truth or not having an answer at all, and she understands that even if everything she’s imagining were true, she still wouldn’t know the most important parts. She still wouldn’t know who Zoe and Ellie were, back home: who they were to each other, who they were to the person who killed them. She wouldn’t know who loves them or who’s checking their phone for a message that’s never going to come. Danny thinks about the couple on the ferry from the night before and wonders what it would be like, to spend thirty years not knowing.
“I need to know, though,” Danny says. “I’ll go crazy if I don’t.”
Matthew’s not looking at her. He’s watching a spider hanging from the side mirror, lowering itself towards the ground on its invisible silk.
“You know I’m not really here,” he says. He sounds almost casual.
“I know,” says Danny, and it aches, that knowledge. It weighs so much and it weighs so little, it makes her so light and so hollow that she doesn’t know what to do but wait for the shell of herself to crack. “Where are you?”
Matthew shrugs. “I could be anywhere,” he says. “I don’t know any better than you do.”
It’s been months, and he looks just as he did the last time Danny saw him. He has a small stye on his right eyelid from rubbing his eyes too much when he works, and he’s dragged his hand backwards through his hair so many times that it’s given up on lying flat. His face is soft and young, the way it always was first thing in the morning and last thing before falling asleep, and she searches it for something she missed.
“Who does that?” Danny asks. “Who just leaves in the night like that?”
“Me, apparently.”
“I went to sleep next to you and then after I woke up, I never saw you again.”
Matthew rests his arm against the passenger door. “Do you hope I’m dead?” he asks.
Danny thinks about the life she has shared with a man whose whereabouts are now nothing but an equation, a set of possibilities spread out before her from which she has no hope of choosing correctly. She thinks about Matthew handing her a cherry from a fruit stand and watching her spit the pit out the window. She shakes her head.
“No,” she says, “I don’t.”
“I thought you said it’d be easier that way,” Matthew points out. “I thought you said you wouldn’t know when to stop looking.”
Danny imagines looking at the news one day and seeing, without meaning to, a photograph of Matthew’s body. She imagines watching some other Unsolved Mysteries episode, some other night in some other hotel room, and imagines realizing that she, too, is someone who could be called on to look into the camera and speak like she’s halfway dead.
“I just want it to stop hurting,” says Danny, helplessly, after a long moment. “I don’t care what it takes.”
Matthew looks at her, and he looks so real. There’s stubble on his chin, lines at the corners of his eyes, and the unfathomable tide of Danny’s grief threatens the shores of her being. If she lets her guard down for even a moment, the wave will crash and the places where the grief ends and she begins will be washed away like a child’s drawing in the sand. She will become the dark, damp line where water meets shore, and then the line will fade, and she won’t exist at all.
“Should I turn around?” Danny asks. “Should I go back home?”
Matthew hums. “Pretend you’re giving a lecture,” he says. “Pretend I’m your student.”
“Up until a measurement is made and the wave function collapses,” Danny recites, “no possible state of a quantum particle can be attributed any greater degree of reality than any other.”
“Exactly,” says Matthew, as if it solves something. “There’s your answer.”
Somehow, in her gut, Danny feels sure that when she gets to Matthew’s parents’ house, she won’t find any answers. She feels sure that when she arrives, the house will be dark: that there won’t be a porch light to welcome her home, that no one will come when she knocks on the door.
Copyright © 2025 by C. E. Powell
