Page 178 of Under Story

A note waits in the farmhouse kitchen: Clare and Pete are tending to the sheep. Laurel leads the teens into the living room. It takes a moment for her to find The Book of Camouflage; the spine, designed to mimic wood, blends into the shelf.

The section Riordan mentioned is the last one in the book. Laurel flips through pictures of insects and spiders; there’s even a twig-like snake. She finds nothing unusual. All that remains is the back cover. As always, a plastic sleeve holds the jacket flap in place. Just to be certain, she slides a finger under the edge.

Laurel withdraws a piece of paper, folded. It bears her own name.

“Who is that from?” asks Eli.

She has no doubt. “The other me.”

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Laurel takes the letter outside. To give her privacy, even Eli stays in the living room. She sits on the rope swing that hangs from an oak tree in Upper Orchard.

February 2018

Dear Laurel,

Sometimes I think we’re dancing together. Celeste used to do ballet, and when she was a teenager, she took partnering classes. Pas de deux: a dance of two. There were never enough boys, so the girls partnered on their own. That’s you and me, I thought. We balance each other. Someone stands still while the other is turning. Someone lifts, and someone is lifted.

If I had lived in your world—if a child was something I could choose, instead of something I inherited—I don’t know that I would have wanted one. I might have figured that I had purpose already. But there she was: the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes. They say you can’t remember so far back, but I swear that I do. I remember the incubator and the dirt under my nails. There was nothing touching my skin; I’d left the soil, the moisture, the worms. Celeste stood over me. I knew her face before I knew mine.

Eli and I were born just as her career took off. NASA wasn’t exactly a forgiving place to work. Most of Celeste’s colleagues put their parents in senior centers, but Celeste was determined to keep us at home. She was steely. Meticulous. Later I learned that her colleagues thought she was cold. But if you knew her well, you understood that she was actually a very disciplined rebel.

I wish I’d recognized how hard it was for her to be an only child. She didn’t take her first space flight until we were in college, and I was still heartbroken. We had a blowout fight. I accused her of abandoning us, but now I can see that she needed to return to herself. Her missions took years. The third made her famous: she became the first astronaut to drive a rover outside of our solar system. Eli and I saw her on the news more than we did in person. Still, she made sure that we were always in touch—and when she came home, she often shared more about where she’d been than she was supposed to. That was her philosophy, how she showed her love: no matter how far she traveled, we could stay close if she was honest.

Long after Celeste raised us, she became our kid. As a teenager, she wanted to travel. Eli and I were surprised; we even worried that she’d find it underwhelming. Once you’ve been to Venus, how exciting could you find Paris? Here’s the funny thing: Celeste had flown millions of miles away, but on Earth, she’d barely left Wisconsin. So the three of us adventured. We drank pints in Dublin and hiked from Chile to Argentina. She’d worked so hard for her whole life, and now she got to be a tourist. On the day she turned eighteen, we ate Brie below the Eiffel Tower.

But age comes for all of us, doesn’t it? To watch the person who raised you break down, become less capable—there’s nothing more painful. For a while, dance saved Celeste: she felt in control of her body. During middle school, she started to act out. She was angry, and I couldn’t blame her. If I were losing my sentience, I’d be throwing tantrums, too. Big trips had become stressful, so we found a place to visit near home. It was a cabin near Lake Michigan, in a town called Cedar.

One day, as we walked to the beach, Celeste noticed something strange. Near the path, there was a cave, and a tree was growing out of it. The roots were contained by the cave, along with a huge number of rhizomorphs. Pretty quickly, I started to fantasize about an experiment. The best part was that I could keep Celeste with me. Every few months, we went back to Cedar, and she played while I took notes. The cave seemed to make her feel calm. It was quiet and dark—separate, somehow. I wondered if it reminded her of being in space.

I brought her along for as long as I could manage. The terrible twos lived up to their name: if she wasn’t yanking the rhizomorphs out, she was trying to stick them up her nose. Eli called her the Destroyer. By the time she turned one, I could feel myself coming apart. I’d spent so much of my life idolizing her, wanting her attention—and now, all day long, it was Mama, Mama, Mama. I wasn’t sleeping much, but when I did, I had nightmares about pregnancy. I was terrified about what I’d be called to do, and whether I could handle it.

Eli suggested that I take one last trip to Cedar alone. If I finished the setup, the experiment could run while I was pregnant. Celeste was four months old. At first, it seemed like too much of a risk. You can’t know exactly when a baby will need to be delivered. But Eli pointed out that it might help to have a few days to myself—that I could come home more stable, more grounded.

Do you have contractions in your universe, Laurel? I had worried that I wouldn’t know what they were, but when they came, I had no doubt. Standing in the cave, I felt a hollowness, an open space that wasn’t there before. The pain was staggering. I crawled into the woods on my knees. I told myself that I could make it home, but even the car was too far away. I dragged myself to the tree and held on to the trunk as the waves rolled through me.

Celeste lived for several more months, but not the way a baby should. The wrongness was fundamental, like seeing an organ outside of the body. I never went back to the cave. I wanted to visit the tree, to thank it for giving me strength. Forbidding that felt like a way to atone—to deny myself comfort, just as I’d stolen peace from my daughter.

Eli and I could have blamed each other. There were moments when we both felt the temptation; sometimes, anger feels less terrible than grief. Mostly, though, we managed to be kind, which helped us to recover. Celeste had willed us her journals and notebooks, and Eli suggested we read them together. Slowly, we came to know her in a way we never had before: as the person she had been long before she was our daughter.

Something unexpected happens when you go through the worst thing—the thing you fear most. Against all odds, life opens up. Please don’t misunderstand me. I would never have chosen for Celeste to die the way she did. But after she was gone, I didn’t have the same concerns. Being successful in my work, impressing people, impressing her—none of it had the same pull. For so long I’d lived with dread. Now my goal was not to prevent pain, but to stop being afraid of it. I found fulfillment in the process, in the middle. My mind became a more hospitable place to be: I started to feel like my own friend, rather than my own judge. And I learned how to be better to other people. Suffering stretches your range, if you let it. It’s as though, before Celeste died, I was conscious of a smaller band of experience.

Celeste had told us something incredible after her last mission: there are two universes, not one, and two versions of every person. Eli’s model of the Duoverse stemmed from their early conversations. One year after her death, the anomaly appeared in Antarctica. Eli thought that it could be a portal. Celeste had never traveled to your universe, but she did travel between them, to a place she called the Void. If Eli was right, we could become travelers, too. What would we see? And what more could we learn about her?

But Eli thought of a problem. If someone were to cross over, and their double didn’t, there would be a mass imbalance. Eli believed that the traveler would replace—destroy—the native. We couldn’t do that to you. Then something occurred to me. Could you be searching for the portal, too? If the four of us cross at the same time, we should all survive. So I tried to reach you in my head. It felt like finding and holding a note—some frequency that only we know.

For months, nothing happened. But one day, I woke up and felt like I was looking out of your eyes. There was a picture of a boy I didn’t know beside the bed. I knew you’d just woken up, too, and that you were thinking about him. Another time, you were sitting outside with Clare. You had an ice pack on your neck—I could feel the cold—and you were talking about Antarctica.

I still don’t know why you’re drawn to the portal. Maybe you don’t know my reasons, either. You might not even know that I exist. There’s so much that Eli and I can’t understand: how much our worlds—our selves—diverge, or whether knowledge impacts free will. In physics, observation changes outcomes. We don’t know if our past is your future. The least we can do is to try to prevent you from observing it. If you don’t know our story, maybe yours will end differently.

If you’ve found this letter, though, I have to believe that you went looking. That’s why I left Celeste’s notes and pictures in the bedroom. I want you to have answers if you decide you need them.

Sometimes, I admit, my insecurities take over. I wonder if you’re kinder than me, or if you’re more accomplished. I wonder if you would have done what I did to Celeste. More often than that, though, I picture you talking to me like a friend. When I still can’t forgive what I did, I imagine that you do.

Maybe I’ve made you up. Or maybe that distinction doesn’t matter. After all, isn’t everyone in conversation with themselves? There is the part of you that thinks the thought, and the part of you that hears it. The second part responds. And the conversation continues.

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