Page 3 of Under Story

“Sold!” said Maisie, giggling.

Laurel hadn’t liked living by herself, despite Gloria’s encouragement. (“Now, listen to me. There are benefits to being alone. You can live in your bathrobe, eating tangerines and fudge.”) Even after Eli moved out, he was everywhere: in the kitchen he’d painted yellow; in the dresser they’d shared, half of it now empty; in the apple trees that grew in the front yard. Eli had surprised her with the first, a Prairie Spy with dark, glossy leaves. He draped a sheet on top and tied a bow around the middle, walked Laurel outside with his hands over her eyes. When he removed them, she laughed, both in delight at his thoughtfulness and because he hadn’t known that they would need two trees—different varieties, cross-pollinated—to bear fruit. They drove back to the nursery, where she found a sturdy Sweet Sixteen.

Now Laurel put her suitcase in Maisie’s trunk. She would spend the night at Maisie and Noah’s before flying out of O’Hare. Quickly she picked the ripe apples and carried them next door.

“Prairie Spies,” Laurel said, when her neighbor, Beth, came to the porch. “Your favorite.”

“Oh, Laurel,” said Beth. “You’re sweet. I wish you could have stayed, but I understand. I do.”

Beth, an elementary school art teacher, was two decades older than Laurel. She lived with her mother, Helen, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer.

“How are you doing?” asked Laurel.

“Coping, I guess. It’s funny: Mom turns eighty-eight next week, but that still doesn’t feel like enough time.” Reversing, Beth covered her mouth. “Forgive me. I’m being greedy. She’s lived a good, long life.”

The scene at the dorm reminds Laurel of college move-in day. Residents leave their doors open, and every few minutes, she hears a shriek of recognition. Duffel bags slump in the doorways; cross-country skis lean against the walls. Laurel sees more than a handful of musical instruments, protected inside latched and shapely cases.

She has two roommates. Charlie is the first; the second is Nita Choudhury, a marine biologist who studies octopuses in the Southern Ocean. This is Nita’s sixth summer at McMurdo, “and no,” she says, helping to lug their suitcases over the threshold, “I still don’t have a single, but neither does anyone else. I’ve been waiting for the two of you all day.”

Nita is tall, her thick hair secured in a silver clip. She wears a purple zip-up sweater with jeans and knitted slippers. A pendant necklace, also silver, hangs between her collarbones, and the room smells like her gardenia perfume. There are two bunk beds and a single; the desk and closet are shared. Nita maintains a steady stream of chatter (“We’re lucky to be in the same building as the galley; most people have to gear up just to get their morning coffee”) while Laurel and Charlie unpack. They take the bunk beds out of respect for her seniority. It’s hard not to feel that Laurel has regressed. In Madison, her house wasn’t large, but all of it was hers.

Nita gives them a tour. “There’s a landline in every room for calls on base—cell phones don’t work, but you’ll know that already. Don’t bother with the television unless you want to watch the military satellite feed or you brought a video game hookup, which, no judgment—a few years ago I roomed with an astrobiologist who was addicted to The Legend of Zelda, and by the end of the summer, I couldn’t believe how much I cared about the two-handed Biggoron’s Sword. Take a left at the chili pepper lights for the bathroom; there’s no electrical ground here, so don’t be surprised if you get shocked in the shower. This is the lounge—microwave, comfy couches, giant selection of VHS tapes if you want to travel back to 1995. Over here’s the Skype computer, which is mostly for morale: we all get one thirty-minute session per week and cross our fingers that the internet is working.”

The wind picks up as Nita points them toward the Chalet for orientation (“Meet me in the galley afterward; trust me, you’ll be starving”). Charlie and Laurel trudge through snow eddies with scarves over their mouths. On the deck is a bust of Admiral Byrd, the first explorer to fly over the South Pole. Inside, orb-shaped light fixtures hang from a second-floor balcony, and flags from Antarctica’s visiting nations rustle as people drop their coats over chairs. Laurel associates the Chalet’s smell with libraries, or perhaps Gloria’s house: old wood, old books. Layered over that is the welcome scent of coffee. Laurel pours two cups. She brings one back to Charlie as an administrator takes the lectern.

The presentation begins with trivia. Antarctica is not just the coldest and windiest continent on the planet, but also the driest, highest, and most isolated. (Two seats down, the curly-haired man from the plane begins to snore.) At over five million square miles, it makes up one-tenth of the earth’s surface. Almost all of that is covered by a permanent ice sheet that holds 70 percent of the planet’s fresh water and 90 percent of its ice.

Antarctica was a hypothetical continent, the administrator adds, before it was ever a real one. Aristotle believed that a southern mass must have existed to balance the Arctic of the north. Marcus Tullius Cicero named it Terra Australis Incognita: the unknown land of the south. Twenty centuries later, a Russian expedition glimpsed the Antarctic coast, but ninety years passed before Roald Amundsen’s team reached the pole.

A map appears on the projector. Research stations from thirty-seven countries are scattered on either side of the Transantarctic Mountains that divide West Antarctica from East. The outposts on Maudlandia, the eastern continental coast, include China’s Zhongshan Station, India’s Bharati Station, and the American Amundsen-Scott Station, located in the bull’s-eye of the South Pole. To the west, bases for Korea, Spain, Ukraine, Great Britain, Argentina, Chile, and the Czech Republic climb the Antarctic Peninsula. Below that, between Russia’s Russkaya Station and New Zealand’s Scott Base, McMurdo sprawls across volcanic Ross Island.

The administrator gestures to the flags. These countries have one thing in common: they all signed the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which suspended territorial claims. Military activity, nuclear activity, and extraction are forbidden. Antarctica, the only continent without an Indigenous population, is to be used solely for scientific inquiry. Though they can study polar wildlife, human beings cannot interfere with their lives—or, if it happens, their deaths. Observations are to be shared freely with other countries, and all research stations are closed to the public. To Laurel, Antarctica seems to be the most functional place on earth.

Nita was right: afterward, they are starving. Disoriented, too, with no sense of how to find their way back to Building 155. They ask for directions from a woman standing under a streetlamp, smoking a cigarette in scuba gear. When they arrive, it’s nine o’clock.

“There you are.” Nita sits at a round table with knitting in her lap. “Don’t worry about getting the lay of the land; just scarf something that looks decent and we’ll get you to sleep. There’s to-go food in the deli, but beware the pastrami—Louis!”

A furtive-looking man by the toaster oven falters, and a roll of bread drops dully to the floor.

“Jesus, Nita. I thought you were Waldrup.”

Nita sets her knitting down and skips toward him. “Because I look like a sixty-year-old Texan with a handlebar mustache?”

“I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. Everyone looks like Waldrup.”

But his tone is fond, and he tolerates Nita’s hug with cool affection.

“Waldrup runs food service,” Nita explains, waving Laurel and Charlie over. “He claims to have run a chain of Ruby Tuesdays, but the rumor is—”

“—that he only sold beef jerky at a farmers’ market.”

“You’ll meet him,” Nita says.

“Weirdly interested in the hot dog roller station. Weirdly uninterested in flavor. And he hates when people use the appliances between shifts.” The man plugs in a panini press. “Hi.”

His accent is British, and his eyes are bloodshot. Still, he’s beautiful: rosy cheeks, rosy lips, and chestnut curls, like something out of a Renaissance painting. Laurel realizes that he’s the snorer from orientation and the sleeper from the plane, the one who opened his eyes right before they touched down.

“Louis Carroll—yes, like Alice in Wonderland, but with an o-u instead of the e-w. Stewards?” Laurel and Charlie nod. Louis licks mustard off his pointer finger. “Same.”