Page 101 of Under Story

Affixed to the door was a framed scrap of cloth that read Top of the Stairs. These words had been embroidered, like the wall hanging, but not by the same fine hand.

“She chose this room,” Seymour explained. “God knows we tried to interest her in any other. I think she needed distance, at least in the beginning…maybe being close to us made what happened feel more real. The wall hanging was Olga’s, and the desk was Ted’s, but Gloria stored most of their belongings in boxes. Do you know, I still have some of them in one of these old closets.”

This was surprising. Anything Gloria packed away must have been intensely charged.

“She was different then,” Seymour added. “Gloria, that is. Not such a big personality. But she always had a kernel of…” He trailed off, then smiled. “Well—she was like her mother. Olga was adoring. But I wouldn’t want to be her enemy.”

When Laurel finished work for the day, she took Silas on long, blustery walks. To the bison in Golden Gate Park. Or to Ocean Beach, where they watched surfers in wet suits and talked.

“What’s down there at the bottom of the ocean?” Silas asked.

“Fish,” said Laurel. “Kelp forests. Coral.”

“Dolphins?”

“And stingrays. And sharks.” She bared her teeth.

Silas giggled. “And little teeny-tiny plankton.”

“Yes, those.”

“And trash.” Water pollution had been a subject in Silas’s first grade class. “But what’s at the bottom-bottom?”

“The deepest part?” Laurel said. “We don’t have a very good idea. There’s too much pressure for humans to swim, even in scuba suits. We do know that it’s very dark, and very cold. And we know that there’s life.”

“How?”

“Explorers went down in a submarine. There’s a lot of muck on the seafloor, and soon, it covered the window. Before that happened, though,” she said, “the explorers saw a fish—just one! But if there’s one, there must be others. There are probably millions of species that we still haven’t discovered.”

The waves looked fluted, lettuce-like. A woman walked by with a baby, who waved its sea star hand.

“Say hello, Celeste,” the mother said.

Laurel waved back. Celeste was one of her favorite names; if Silas had been a girl, they might have chosen it. In moments like this, she felt the pull of another child, a blinking milky creature who, like Silas, would have Eli’s curls—or not. Who knew how their genes would combine a second time?

Silas said, “I don’t want you to die.”

“Sweetheart, I won’t,” said Laurel, startled. “Not for a very long time.”

He looked at her cannily. “How do you know?”

It was a constant challenge, deciding how honest to be, when to pull the plug on the tooth fairy or admit that meat came from animals slaughtered for that purpose and not—as Silas had assumed—from roadkill.

“Most people live into old age,” she said.

“But you will die,” said Silas. “Someday.”

“Everyone will.”

Laurel pulled him onto her lap. Silas made a reflexive noise of protest, but then he leaned against her chest.

“Even the creatures at the bottom-bottom?” he asked.

“Yes. They’ll die someday, too.”

“You said no one’s ever seen them.”

“That’s true.”