Page 132 of Under Story

“I suppose they could say the same about us,” says Laurel. “An inevitable march toward old age? They might think we have nothing to look forward to.”

Eli hasn’t shaved in months. His beard is as long as Eli Two’s.

“Wisdom,” he says. “We look forward to wisdom.”

Laurel watches Silas giggle on the grass. “Maybe they look forward to innocence.”

His happiness requires so little. The sight of Laurel or Eli is enough. So is a favorite song, swimming at the pool, ice cream in a cone.

“This is fun!” he cries, jumping up and down on the bed.

—

On Halloween, Maisie becomes pregnant. The day before, during a phone call, Laurel heard Hazel crying. Now Hazel rests in Maisie’s womb.

Three years earlier, Noah and Maisie lost Frankie. Laurel couldn’t bear to ask how it happened. Instead, she brought meals and carried out errands. She would have done this out of love alone, but she also thought of it as penance. For shying away from the story—for being too scared to ask questions.

This time, she steels herself. Laurel will have to know these answers soon enough. If Maisie wants to share, she’ll listen. When she visits, though, Maisie only clings to her in silence.

By spring, Maisie is no longer visibly pregnant. Laurel wonders how many people are carrying children just as imperceptibly. Those whose pregnancies are obvious receive special treatment, but the slant is somber. When a pregnant woman rides the bus, other passengers treat her with tense respect, sometimes a hush of pity. After the woman departs, there is often a relieved adjustment.

In January, Noah calls to tell Laurel that Hazel is gone. Her heartbeat had been undetectable for several days, but Maisie’s urine still showed hCG until that morning. Laurel drives over. In the bedroom, Maisie is weeping. Laurel climbs under the covers and holds her, crying, too. She thinks of the way Hazel looked on at her birthday party—like a fairy-tale girl with a wizened old woman inside. And how absurd it is, the bargain of life: that we should be gifted love while guaranteed loss, love’s tax.

—

At three, Silas loves the neighborhood playground. Once, while pushing him on the swings, Laurel notices a teenage girl.

The girl watches Laurel and Silas from a bench. Her red hair looks uncombed, and her face is torqued by longing.

“Such a difficult age,” she says.

Something in her affect makes Laurel uneasy.

“He’s a beautiful boy,” the girl adds. “He looks like mine did. Can I hold him?”

“Oh,” says Laurel, surprised. She’ll have to say no: the request is inappropriate. Yet something makes her pause. It is the memory of her own yearning—how, after Silas died, she could not bear the sight of women with sons.

An older man hurries down the hill. He wears house slippers and a bathrobe, as though he left in too much of a hurry to change.

“I’m so sorry,” the man says to Laurel. He takes the arm of the redhead and leads her away.

Laurel is disturbed by her own confusion. Did she almost hand her child to a stranger? Silas fights her when she lifts him from the swings. Wrestling him into his coat, Laurel begins to cry—panicked tears of frustration, tears she remembers from another lifetime, when a different Silas threw a tantrum in a public place.

But his sweetness frequently disarms her. On his second birthday, Laurel and Eli give him a toy kitchen. Tearing the wrapping paper, he says, “Wow! Oh, wow!” As they sing happy birthday, tears come to his eyes.

They hold his party in the toddler section of the pool. Clare comes early to help set up. Just before the guests arrive, Silas’s mood reverses without warning.

“Are you two today?” asks Laurel encouragingly.

He glares at her in his party hat. “No!”

“That about sums up where we’re at,” Laurel tells Clare. She’s been nervous about the party—Silas has entered an unfortunate hitting stage—but the pool distracts him. His school friends, Victor and Sabrina, attend with their parents. The group gets along well, and only one child has an outburst.

“Well done,” says Victor’s mother, squeezing Laurel’s hand. “Birthdays are never easy.”

—

Work is a distraction. After her epiphany about volatile signaling, Laurel planned to invite Tess Two to collaborate remotely. Then the botany department advertised an opening. Laurel noticed a familiar name among the applicants: Teresa Torrez, currently in Utrecht, now seeking to move closer to family.