Page 111 of Under Story

“We do use quite a lot of glassware,” says Laurel.

—

She walks home at dusk. As Laurel approaches the house, she sees Eli in the yard. He’s shoeless in work pants, planting the apple trees they purchased over the weekend. Facing him is a woman, Whitney, who lives down the block.

Whitney says something to Eli. He laughs. Laurel quickens her pace. She arrives to find Whitney describing her homemade apple crisp.

“Hi, Whitney,” Laurel says.

“Oh,” says Whitney. “Hi, Laurel.”

Whitney is a young mother, recently divorced. She hitches her purse up on one shoulder, and Laurel smiles a smile of a thousand knives as Eli pours soil into the planting hole.

Laurel is not an inherently jealous person. During her marriage to Eli, it was clear that other people found him attractive. When someone flirted with him at a party, she observed the interaction with amused tolerance, just as he did when the same thing happened to her. In these moments, they saw each other not with the goggles of marriage—familiar baggage, dirty laundry—but through the lens of a stranger. It was a pleasant optical illusion, a return to original settings. Under the right circumstances, it could even be arousing: sex acquired a reviving intensity, and Laurel mentally thanked the graduate student who had sidled up to ask Eli about WIMPs.

Silas lies on a blanket, batting at particles. Laurel kisses his head as Whitney departs. She isn’t the first neighborhood single to loiter while Eli does yard work. Maybe they wonder why Laurel and Eli don’t wear rings. After he spreads the roots of the tree, Eli retrieves Silas (“Come on, old man”) and carries him inside. Laurel follows uneasily. She recognizes that a door has opened between her and Eli. To make a decision, they would have to relinquish the détente of the past four years—the safe space of maybe. Laurel is afraid to find out whether a relationship would work. She’s afraid to find out how badly she wants it.

The next day, during Silas’s afternoon nap, she joins Eli in the kitchen. He stands against a backdrop of watery sunshine, cutting a mango.

“Do you remember what you said while we drove home from Cedar?” she asks.

“That Silas’s lungs had composed a little too well?”

“No.” Laurel works up her courage. “That we were going to have to talk about what happened eventually.”

“Oh.”

She watches him carve the mango into squares. It would be easier to reverse course, but three months have passed since the night they slept together. Laurel owes him this much.

“The thing is,” she says, “that I worked so hard to feel nothing for you.”

Eli keeps his eyes on the cutting board, but his head tilts slightly toward her, as an animal lifts an ear to listen.

“I didn’t think I had a choice,” she says. “The past three years—living together, waiting for him—it would have been…”

“Impossible otherwise,” says Eli.

She nods. “When you’ve been training yourself that way, for self-protection—and out of fear of what could happen, fear of what already happened—when you’ve been doing that for years, it’s very hard to…”

Eli sets down the knife. “I know.”

“So it wasn’t that I didn’t—or that I don’t…”

Laurel is coming to tears.

“You’re the only person I have—really have—in this world,” she says. “I can’t lose you again.”

“You could find someone else,” says Eli.

Laurel shakes her head. This is not what she wants to hear, but she can’t blame him. To Eli, her uncertainty must have felt like rejection.

“Maybe,” she says. “But I couldn’t find you.”

Eli gestures to Ghost Particle. His double gazes out from the back cover.

“As it turns out,” he says, “you can.”

She smiles. “Well, that one is taken.”