Page 125 of Under Story

“No,” whispers Louis, sitting back.

“It’s true.”

Louis shakes his head sympathetically. “Didn’t even get your makeup done. What’s happened, then?”

“Eli and I have a child,” Laurel says.

He snorts. “You’re joking.”

“I wouldn’t joke about that,” she says. “It’s a boy. His name is Silas.”

“Then how come you’ve never once mentioned him?”

“He was only born two years ago. I’ll show you a picture.”

Laurel takes out her iPhone and scrolls to find her current favorite photo. Silas sits on Eli’s shoulders, picking apples. She turns the phone around for Louis.

“Oh my God.” There is something in his tone she doesn’t like, something that feels familiar. “How old is he?”

“Seven.”

Louis looks stricken. “I’m sorry.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I mean, it’s—it’s not a happy thing, is it?”

“What do you mean?” asks Laurel, flinching.

Rabbity, agitated, Louis fiddles with the zipper on his jacket. He seems to know that he’s taken the wrong tack, but he also lacks the artifice required to change course.

“Don’t you know what they call children like that? Kids who never had the chance to be grown-ups? It’s tragic,” he says. “It isn’t right…”

Laurel realizes what she recognized in his voice. It’s pity. He reminds her of the other couples in the NICU—how they stared at her and Eli, the only parents with a child-aged child.

“What are they called?” she asks. “Tell me.”

“Half-lives.” Louis looks at her despairingly.

—

In a way, she’s glad that Louis said it, no matter how awful the term. He knocked the fear back into her. Her priorities are absolute, the wager clear.

Eli was right. She’d lost her sense. They must get Silas out of here.

An hour earlier, Laurel might have been more nervous to steal a PistenBully and an air tank in broad daylight. Now she picks a vehicle at random. As always, the key waits in the ignition. Two divers are unloading equipment in the locker, but Laurel takes a tank of air without a second glance. Back in the PistenBully, she reviews Eli’s instructions: the tiller, the switches, the blade functions. She tells herself to drive slowly, lest she attract attention, but she needn’t have worried: the PistenBully isn’t designed for speed. Soon she becomes accustomed to its rhythm.

She heads north, past Hut Point and a jagged ice tongue glacier. Mount Erebus stands as pale and cratered as the moon. Near Ross Island, she passes a colony of penguins. They shuffle through the slushy ice near shore. It strikes Laurel that the fluffy, mohawked juveniles will never lose those youthful feathers, that they grow into but not out of them, and her stomach turns as she drives on.

At Cape Evans, the sky is a bold, bright blue, the water restless periwinkle hemmed by rough black stone. The dive hut waits against a dual background. To the left is a rocky cliff; on the right is a wall of ice. They meet in the center, black and white, the dive hut laid over the join.

Laurel parks as close as she can and transfers the Pelican case. It holds her own equipment along with Silas’s safety items. In the hut, the stove is running, and a downline sits coiled in one corner.

She strips down to her undergarments. The process is now second nature. To prepare better this time, Laurel and Eli took an ice-diving course in Wisconsin. There was no dive hut on Lake Monona; instead, their instructor, Kyla, sawed a hole for every session.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said at the first class. Students milled on the ice, clutching hot cocoa. “You’re wondering if it’s too late to return that outrageously expensive dry suit. And you’re nervous, because you’re about to do something really stupid.”

While the other students laughed, Laurel looked at Eli. She wished that this was the stupidest thing they’d be doing. At Lake Monona, there was a warming tent, with huge coolers of hot water. For safety, each student worked with a partner. Eli checked Laurel’s air supply, and he held one end of the rope she carried through the water.