Page 102 of Under Story

Wind blew off the water. Laurel snuggled him close.

“Something could be alive down there forever,” he said, “and we wouldn’t even know.”

—

The sun emerges from behind clouds, just as it did while she stood in the cave, watching Armillaria glow.

Laurel and Eli stand. He threads his fingers through hers. Though she cannot know for sure, Laurel has always believed that this was the moment when Silas woke up. He might have looked at the water, wanting to swim, feeling hot. Just for a second, he might have thought. The lake would have seemed calm, as it does when a rip current starts.

—

The lake is a box, and Silas is inside it, and he is not.

—

She could wait here forever, not yet knowing, biding her time. A coin balanced on its side. And would that not be better than an ending in which Silas never comes? She’d prefer uncertainty to certain heartbreak, purgatory to hell. She’d gladly take if over then.

Yet her senses sharpen of their own accord, as they did when she gave birth. On that night, the chaos of the hospital receded like land from a boat. She drifted into a different place—life’s antechamber—to work in tandem with Silas.

—

Eli’s eyes rove over the water. She knows what he’s thinking: there’s no sign of a current. Only the grandmother’s lost shovel, bright green, afloat. Though something seems to be drawing it outward, away from the shore and the sand.

Then the water breaks, and Laurel sees a hand.

—

Crash into the water. In one breath, she is swimming. She was encumbered on the dive, but it is so much easier this time: no tank, no gloves, nothing between the lake and her own body. She rises between strokes, gulping air, to make sure that the hand is still there.

Water pours into her nostrils. When she surfaces, the sun swings into her eyes. The terror of last time comes back to her, the chaos and dislocation—the smallness of her efforts compared to the vastness of water.

Her fear is a vortex. At the center is defeat. The conviction that she’s weak. It takes such effort to have faith, like holding an invisible shape. Two universes in one circle. A basin with a portal inside. Before evidence, that shape lives in the mind.

She turns onto her back to rest and inhales fiercely, like a seal. Didn’t she believe in Antarctica, when the odds were infinitely slimmer, and she was years instead of yards away from Silas?

Eli is swimming to her right.

“Let the current carry you out,” he shouts.

When Laurel stops struggling, she swims easily. The current functions like a moving walkway.

“Give me the rope,” she gasps, touching skin. Slippery, wriggling. Warm.

It is Silas. Eight. And howling like the day he was born.

—

Laurel wraps the rope around his waist. She ties one end to her arm and gives the other to Eli, who mirrors her. He is laughing, weeping, kissing Silas’s head, but the current won’t release them willingly.

They move in complicated parallel. Each props an arm beneath Silas’s shoulders, to hold up his head. With the other arm, they paddle. They take only the slightest diagonal, but even this angle is grueling. The current erases their progress, and the distance to shore seems unchanging.

The sound of Silas crying gives her strength. Holding each other, Laurel and Eli make incremental progress; linked by the rope, no one drifts away. Still, the remainder feels interminable. Eli shouts encouragement, but Laurel needs all her air. Her legs begin to shake as soon as she touches sand.

A surge of ecstasy. They heave onto the beach.

She removes the rope from Silas’s waist. In the water, he jerked with fear, but now his limbs are limp, his pupils rolling upward. Clouds drift back over the sun; a gray tone returns as the opening shuts. Eli lifts Silas’s chin and makes a seal with his own mouth. Laurel presses on his chest. Every fifteen times, Eli gives him two rescue breaths.

After two cycles, Silas vomits.