76 pages • 2 hours read
Gabrielle ZevinElsewhere
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 2, Chapters 10-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Book of the Dead”
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Well”
Liz quickly settles into her work at the DDA: “She was in that rare and enviable situation: she excelled at her work, and she loved doing it. Work helped the rest of her first summer in Elsewhere pass quickly” (137). Nevertheless, as she and Thandi walk Sadie and Paco one night, Liz wonders if this is all there is to life in Elsewhere.
As Liz’s father’s birthday approaches, she finds herself thinking more and more about the cashmere sweater she had bought for him and hidden beneath the floorboards in her closet: “She knows that Contact is illegal, yet she refuses to believe that getting one insignificant sweater to her father could really cause that much trouble” (140). She therefore once again decides to visit the Well.
Liz is an experienced swimmer and diver, and she reaches the Well without incident. When she looks into it, she sees her family sitting down to eat, and she yells at them to look under the closet floorboards. This causes all the faucets in the house to begin running; her parents shut them off, but when Liz once again sets them running, Alvy announces that he can hear Liz’s voice. Liz is repeating her instructions when a net closes over her and pulls her to the surface.
Liz finds herself on the deck of a boat captained by a young man who introduces himself as Detective Owen Welles. As Liz pokes fun at his name, Owen tries to explain the seriousness of what she’s done, finally insisting that she look through the boat’s telescope; when she does, she sees Alvy mistakenly searching in their parents’ closet, and their father getting angry with him for claiming to hear Liz.
To Owen’s surprise, Liz says that the situation is Owen’s fault: if he’d let her finish speaking to Alvy, she could have clarified her instructions. Owen refuses to let her do so, but he says that he understands how she feels, having died at 26 himself. Though Liz doesn’t feel this is comparable, she insists she isn’t obsessing over her past life; she simply wanted to give her father his birthday present. Owen is surprised she would try to contact Earth for something so minor, but he says that as it’s her first offense, he’ll let her go with a warning. After taking Liz back to shore, Owen can't stop thinking about her.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “A Piece of String”
As Liz gets into bed, she tries to run her fingers over her stitches—a nervous habit she’d developed—only to find that they’re gone. Thinking about it more, she realizes that they might have fallen out before the dive: “Since starting her avocation, she hadn’t needed to touch them so much” (151).
Hearing Liz’s laughter, Betty checks in on her. Liz explains that she was arrested, but she has no intention of returning to the Well. Still, she asks how Betty managed to stop missing Earth. Betty says that she didn’t, but she advises Liz first to make a list of the three or four things she misses most, and then to choose whether to throw the list away or to find a way to recover what she’s lost.
Liz’s list includes breakfast with her family, a sense of anticipation, smells she associates with different people, and the pocket watch her father had given her. It was this watch she was worrying about repairing on the day of the accident, and she’s distressed to think that her father might think she didn’t care about it, as it once belonged to him.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Owen Welles Takes a Dive”
On Earth, Owen was a young firefighter married to his childhood sweetheart—a woman named Emily Reilly. He died on the job and was unable to move on, spending all his time at the Observation Deck and trying more than 100 times to communicate with Emily via the Well. These sporadic attempts at contact made Emily miserable, so Owen eventually limited himself to one weekly visit to the OD. He also took a job at the Bureau of Supernatural Crime and Contact, hoping to help others acclimate to life on Elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Owen recognizes that he himself hasn’t truly moved on, and his interaction with Liz brings his sense of guilt to the foreground: “In his opinion, she legitimately wanted to move on and he had hindered her in that process” (158). He therefore decides to reach out to her family himself, and after making the dive to the Well, succeeds in contacting Alvy and explaining where to find the sweater.
Owen visits Liz at work the day before Thanksgiving to tell her that her father got her present. Overwhelmed, Liz thanks him and invites him to Thanksgiving dinner. Owen hesitates but ultimately accepts.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “Thanksgiving”
When Liz tells Betty she invited Owen to dinner, she admits that she isn’t sure she actually likes him, but she felt obliged given what he did for her. Aldous, Rowena, Thandi, Shelly, and Paco also come. Betty tries to open the meal with a toast, but she loses her train of thought because Aldous keeps interrupting with jokes. To Liz’s surprise, Owen joins in on the joking, and the group eventually toasts to “laughter and forgetting” (165).
After dinner, Owen offers to help Liz with the dishes; she notices his wedding ring as he does, as well as a tattoo on his forearm that reads “Emily Forever.” Owen begins whistling, which Liz teases him about, and the two collapse in giggles. Liz remarks that she hasn’t laughed like that since she was alive and admits that she’s homesick. Owen notes that even on Earth, “[I]t’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people” (167); nevertheless, he thinks Liz is handling the situation well, and he admits that he spent most of his first year in Elsewhere at the OD. He continues to visit every Thursday, and Liz says that she recognized him from her own time there. When Owen leaves, Liz sadly remarks to Sadie that no one will ever love her the way Owen loves Emily.
Owen stops by the OD on his way home, but he watches Emily for less than a minute. Scolding himself for wasting his life, and he resolves to visit Liz at work and adopt a dog.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary: “A Mystery”
When Owen calls about a dog, Liz invites him to the DDA and introduces him to several; a golden retriever named Jen soon decides she wants to go home with him. Owen is nervous about how quickly the matter has been settled, but Liz assures him that dogs are good at picking out owners. After he has filled out the paperwork and settled Jen in his car, Owen asks Liz if she wants to wash dishes again, then explains that that’s “[his] awkward way of asking [her] over for dinner” (173).
A week later, Liz and Sadie visit Owen and Jen. All four go to the park after dinner, and Owen says he’s really enjoying Jen; he wasn’t able to have a dog on Earth because Emily was allergic. Liz admits that she wishes someone had loved her as much as Owen loves Emily, and Owen implies that he might have if he had known her. Impulsively, Liz asks Owen if he’d teach her parallel parking and three-point turns—the last skills she needs to perfect before taking her driving test.
Owen agrees, and the two begin meeting every day after work. When Liz continues to struggle with parallel parking, Owen suggests that her problem might be psychological. Liz discusses this with Thandi later, and Thandi says that Liz doesn’t want her lessons to end because she has fallen in love with Owen. Annoyed, Liz hangs up, and she manages to parallel park successfully the following day.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary: “Liz in Love”
While visiting Curtis, Liz asks him how to know if you’re in love. He teases her, but he eventually suggests that “love is when a person believes that he, she, or it can’t live without some other he, she, or it” (180). Liz finds this both reassuring and disappointing; she’s relieved that her happiness around Owen doesn’t necessarily mean she’s in love with him, but she can’t help but wish that he loved her.
Without Liz’s driving lessons to occupy him, Owen finds himself restless. Jen tries to tell him to go see Liz, but Owen doesn’t understand Canine; nevertheless, he decides to take Jen for a walk, and they end up at Betty’s house. Betty, Liz, and Sadie are decorating for Christmas, and Liz—to Owen’s confusion—is initially distant and somewhat cool. However, when Owen proposes continuing the driving practice until Liz’s road test, she accepts.
The night before Liz's test, Owen admits that he loves her, and she says she feels the same. They meet again the evening after the test; although Liz passed, Owen tells her that there’s one place she still hasn’t practiced parking, and he directs her to a drive-in movie theater. In response, Liz teases him for not asking her out on a date directly.
Going to the drive-in becomes a weekly routine for Liz and Owen. Eventually, Liz points out that “it’s odd that in all the time [they’ve] spent in cars [they’ve] never made it to the backseat” (186). Although Owen is only two years older than her in Elsewhere, he admits that he isn’t sure it’s appropriate. He also remarks that intimacy isn’t solely (or even mostly) about sex. As they talk, Liz once again notices Owen’s tattoo, which is getting brighter as he grows younger. She suggests that he get her name tattooed somewhere, but he points out that new tattoos vanish more or less immediately in Elsewhere. Half-jokingly, Liz insists that the gesture would still matter, and suggests that he get a tattoo reading “Liz for Now.”
Part 2, Chapters 10-15 Analysis
When Liz makes her list of the things she misses most from Earth, she isn’t immediately sure what to do with it: “Do I throw it out, or do I try to get everything back? Can you possibly do a combination of both?” (153). Although Liz ultimately chooses to toss the list, the novel as a whole suggests that the answer to her question is yes. In fact, the passage in many ways encapsulates Elsewhere’s attitude towards the transience of human experience; the more we understand this transience in terms of change rather than of loss, the more it’s possible to both let go of the past and find ways of regaining what was best about it. Liz’s work at the DDA is a good example of what this process might look like. Although not identical to her former dream of becoming a veterinarian, the job fills a similar niche in Liz’s life and satisfies the same emotional need.
Liz’s desire to experience romantic love initially seems less translatable to life in Elsewhere, if only because of the way that aging works there. More than once, Liz wistfully remarks that she’ll likely never have sex and will “probably spend the next fifteen years alone” (95). Of course, part of what Liz comes to realize is that love doesn’t need to be romantic (much less physical) to be worthwhile. In many ways, life on Elsewhere even opens the door to forms of love Liz couldn’t have experienced on Earth; for instance, the existence of cross-species communication allows a very different kind of relationship to exist between pets and their owners in Elsewhere.
That said, with the introduction of Owen, it begins to look as though Liz may be able to experience romantic love after all, if not quite in the way she had once imagined. Though close in biological age, Owen and Liz have vastly different levels of experience—something that (to Liz’s frustration) gives Owen pause when considering the possibility of physical intimacy. In addition, their young age at the time of meeting makes the prospect of marriage unlikely. Nevertheless, Liz’s remarks about a “Liz For Now” tattoo—though half-joking—indicate that she has come to see even a transient and imperfect experience of love as meaningful and worthwhile.
In fact, the novel suggests that there’s a great deal of truth to Curtis’s definition of love as the inability to “live without some other he, she, or it” (180). Curtis insists that he’s speaking of a belief rather than of a reality, elaborating that “No one actually needs another person or another person’s love to survive” (180). This may literally be the case, but much of the novel’s plot suggests that there’s a figurative sense in which love truly is necessary for life. The change that takes place in Owen over the course of his acquaintance with Liz offers a particularly dramatic example. After nearly a decade in Elsewhere, Owen still has no real existence outside of work and visits to the OD: “He typically eschews holidays like Thanksgivings, holidays spent among other people’s loved ones. Even after ten years, making other plans somehow feels like betraying Emily” (160). In this sense, meeting and falling in love with Liz brings Owen “back to life,” not only as a result of his relationship with her, but also via the connections he forms with Jen, Betty, Thandi, etc.
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