Page 37 of Under Story

“You’re a freak of nature,” Maisie said. “He can’t blame you. Noah, what are the odds?”

Noah came in from the kitchen carrying bowls of his mother’s curry. He had just begun his pediatric residency.

“If you’re sure you didn’t miss a pill,” he said, “then less than one percent.”

“Fantastic,” Laurel said.

That fall had been the most blissful of her life. She brought Eli back to the orchard, where he gamely helped with seasonal chores, even working a shift at the farm store. Laurel had never been so unhelpful: she used any excuse to sneak him back to the storage room, where they made out against the old cider press. On Halloween, one of his new colleagues hosted a party. Laurel dressed as a bouquet, and Eli went as Einstein’s description of entanglement, “spooky action at a distance”: he hovered apart from the other guests, wrapped in an old white bedsheet and chuckling intermittently.

Often they woke up early, adrenalized by lust. They walked to the nearest coffee shop and kept going; sometimes they made it all the way from the east side to Picnic Point, a nature preserve on the west. Laurel wanted to know his opinion about everything: American Idol, the war in Iraq, Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet. During the week, they worked in different campus buildings, but texting—a new technology—gave them constant access to each other. Sleep felt like the only time when they were truly separate.

If Madison wasn’t paradise, Laurel didn’t know it. If the ground was there, she never touched it. She floated, she breezed, she skated like a sail. She was twenty-five years old.

And now she was pregnant.

Days after the positive test, Laurel made Marcella Hazan’s fettuccine al limone in her galley kitchen. The narrow stove fit little more than one large pan, and she could only open the refrigerator partway before it hit the wall. After she finished the sauce, Laurel was sweaty enough to warrant a second shower, but Eli would arrive in ten minutes. She changed into a dress, sleeveless and black with a boatneck, and smeared lipstick on her mouth. She was pulling her hair into a claw clip when he appeared on the outdoor staircase, holding a bottle of wine and a bouquet of Chinese lanterns.

“Hi,” he said when she opened the door, nuzzling her neck in a way that made her feel she did want to have his baby.

Laurel didn’t have a dining table—she usually ate on the couch, or else at the desk in her bedroom—but she’d arranged a folding one in the living room, with a candle in the center.

“Look at all this,” Eli said, his palm on the small of her back, and Laurel tensed. He noticed. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she told him, but by the time they finished their salads, she was blinking back tears. In the kitchen, serving pasta, she tried and failed to slow her heart rate. She had hoped to have the conversation after dinner, but now she knew it couldn’t wait. She carried the bowls to the table and said, “I have to tell you something.”

Eli blinked. “Okay.”

“I don’t know how it happened. I’m really careful—you’re the only person I’ve been seeing,” she said, and now she was crying, with guilt as well as dread.

He whitened slightly. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m pregnant,” said Laurel.

Eli didn’t move.

“I know,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it, either, and before you ask, I’m on birth control, and I haven’t missed a pill. Noah said the chances of this are less than one percent—he’s a doctor, that’s how he knows; or he will be—anyway, I wanted you to know, because…well, obviously…and in case you’d like to come with me to the appointment, to have it”—she paused—“removed? Obviously, the timing isn’t right, I’m still in school…”

Three floors down, a car stopped in front of the apartment. Laurel heard her downstairs neighbor—another graduate student—laugh goodbye, drunk. Eli looked dazed.

“I mean,” Laurel finished, “it doesn’t have to change anything between us.”

There was a pause the length of which she could not possibly identify.

“Well,” said Eli, slowly, “of course I would come to the appointment, if that’s what you want.”

“Isn’t that what you want?” Laurel asked.

“It certainly makes the most sense.” He took a bite of pasta, then gestured to Laurel. “Sit.”

His voice was gentle. She spread a napkin on her lap.

“The pasta is excellent,” Eli said.

“Thank you,” said Laurel.

Quietly, they ate. At one point, she stood to open a window, and cool air flowed in.

“But say we were to play it out,” Eli said.