Page 114 of Under Story

Initially, Laurel was shocked by the size of their doubles’ bank accounts. Then she realized that they must have saved for decades: in the antiuniverse, they wouldn’t be far from retirement.

“And you think that they aren’t using ours? Maybe they’re trying to get home, too. They might even be taking the same cruise.”

But Laurel is tired of the constant hunt for an escape, another break. Life has begun to feel like a video game: she’s always seeking the key to the next level. For the first time, she’s stopped wishing she were elsewhere.

“Do you ever feel like things are slotting into place here?” she asks.

“We can’t think like that.”

“Can’t we? I don’t want to lose what we have.”

Eli sets his phone down. “If we make it home, Silas One could even be there. We could have both of them.”

“We have had both of them. We do have both of them.”

Right away Laurel is confused by her own meaning, confused by the problem of tense. In loving Silas Two, has she relinquished Silas One?

She looks into Eli’s eyes, afraid that he will judge her this way, but his expression is compassionate.

“It’s confusing,” he says. “Overwhelming, almost. It feels too incredible to hope for.”

Laurel nods, but the truth is that this isn’t how she feels. As their life here has become fuller, more concrete, she has, perhaps subconsciously, consigned their previous plan to the past. Now it seems to belong to the naivete of youth: something she believed when she understood less about how the world really works.

“Things finally seem stable,” Eli adds, “but that’s just an illusion. Yesterday, I measured Silas’s height. He’s already lost two inches.”

Laurel recoils. “That can’t be true.”

“Sweetheart, it is,” says Eli.

He hasn’t called her that in years.

“You’re right,” says Laurel. “Of course.”

Eli takes her hand. “I’ll keep looking for other leads. If I don’t find one by January, we can book the last cruise of the season.”

—

Silas wants to learn to swim. For months, Laurel hedges. The pool makes her think of what happened to Silas One. Children are flighty, she thinks—Silas Two will forget—but his pleas intensify. When the fall semester ends, Laurel purchases a family membership.

Silas takes to the water like a native. In a way, she supposes, he is.

“So happy,” he says, floating on his back with goggles.

By now, he speaks in short sentences. Occasionally another child asks why he doesn’t talk very much, and Silas freezes, his eyes sliding to Laurel, as if he wonders what the answer is himself. She tells him how proud he makes her every day. Though Silas lags behind his peers, the pediatrician thinks he’ll be ready to join the second grade that May.

They hold his seventh birthday at the pool. The swim teacher installs a floating obstacle course, and Silas clambers through it with a band of other boys. Tanned, jaded teenagers patrol the pool from lifeguard chairs. Lounging with a book, Laurel feels like any other mother. After his guests have gone home, Silas trawls the bottom of the pool, looking for treasure. He surfaces with a fist raised in victory.

“What’s this?” he asks, showing Laurel.

“Beads,” she says.

Two of them, pea-sized, plastic: one pink and one green.

“Beads,” Silas repeats.

At home, he puts them in a Tupperware. No other gift compares. Watching him, Laurel thinks five dangerous words: What if we just stay?

But the temptation to surrender never lasts. It happens in those golden moments at the pool, or as she and Silas fall asleep while Eli reads a book. Then she wakes up and remembers that all three of them are getting younger. In her universe, Laurel resented the obsession with youth—you had only to look at a tree to see the beauty of maturity—but she still felt subject to the pressure. Here, antiaging products don’t exist. Time smooths her wrinkles and plucks her gray hairs, but getting younger comes with consequences. Wellness items claim to preserve adult faculties for as long as possible. In May, Silas bites an apple, and an adult tooth falls out.