Page 36 of Under Story

Laurel looks down.

“You don’t want to be around me. I understand that,” she says. “But this could be bigger than us. Eli, if the Duoverse exists—”

“The Duoverse is math.”

“—then think about the implications,” she says, talking over him.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“What way?”

“Like wish fulfillment!” Eli says. “It’s not a theme park you can visit. It’s not a sci-fi movie about someone who goes back in time to fix a mistake.”

It’s a punch, meant just for her. He opens his mouth, as if to recant, then closes it.

Laurel backs out of the lounge. Her eyes are smarting. She stops by her room to grab her Big Red, and then she walks outside. The entire landscape is violet. On a rocky path, she paces. Eli may not believe in his own model, but even so, he’s here—which means that other people do. Beneath her hurt, a strange elation is struggling to life.

For if it were real?

And if she could go?—

—back to the site of her life’s undoing, and take it away; if she could rewind, return to a time when she did not know despair, and she and Eli loved each other still—

If she could make Silas real again.

Silas with his angel’s curls, the birthmark on his thumb.

Silas at the window, every moon an astonishment, every sun worth waking up for.

Silas in his favorite T-shirt (Chickens: The Pet That Poops Breakfast!), begging for a frog; Silas with his mispronunciations (yittle, lellow), his first word (light), his height scratched in the wall.

Silas with his appraising baby’s stare, as if he understood her all the while.

Silas, her first and only-born, her child.

6

The Whale

It began, as all things do, with change.

She had always liked eggs, and then she didn’t. She never napped, and then she did. She was not exactly nauseated but felt an intermittent gastric unease that came on, like a sneeze, without warning.

“Maybe you’re pregnant,” Tess said.

“Not possible,” said Laurel.

She had been on birth control since the age of twenty-one. When she got home, she counted the pills in her yellow clamshell case and confirmed that she’d missed none. But her symptoms continued, and when she went to Noah and Maisie’s house for dinner, Maisie insisted that she take a test.

It was December of 2005. Maisie and Noah had gotten married earlier that year—aside from a turbulent hiatus as college freshmen, they had dated since the night of high school graduation—and Maisie kept a pack of pregnancy tests under the bathroom sink.

“I’m not pregnant,” Laurel said.

“Of course you’re not,” said Maisie. “We’re just making sure.”

She sat on the edge of the tub while Laurel peed. When a second line appeared beside the test line, Laurel put her hands over her mouth, and Maisie screamed for her.

“What will I tell Eli?” asked Laurel, over dinner. They had been dating for three months.