Page 38 of Under Story

Laurel speared a tomato. Her surprise was so total that she nearly choked as it went down.

“The baby would be due—when?” he continued.

“August.”

“August.” Eli folded his hands. “My postdoc would be finished.”

“They’ll ask you to stay. The physics department will create a position for you if they have to.”

“And we would live…where?” he asked.

“Well, I suppose we’d have to move in together.”

“Don’t sound so excited,” said Eli, and Laurel laughed. “The house next to my apartment is for sale.”

The thought was enchanting—for panic was not the only thing she’d felt since learning she was pregnant. A rabbit hole had appeared in the flat ground of everyday life. If she skirted it, she would always wonder where it might have led.

“Can you afford a down payment?” she asked.

“No,” he admitted, and she felt dizzy again, not because of the down payment but because she knew nothing of his finances at all.

“We can’t do this,” she said. “I’ve never even met your parents. I don’t know your middle name. You could decide I drive you nuts.”

“This may not be relevant,” said Eli, “but you should know that I love you.”

It took a moment for the words to reach her. “You…?”

Eli put his fork down. In the candlelight, his face was speculative. She never wanted to stop looking at it.

“Have you ever been on a walk,” he said, “going nowhere in particular, or so you think, when you feel pulled in a certain direction?”

Laurel nods. “Like—you think you’re walking aimlessly, but then you come to an intersection and know you have to turn that way, even if you aren’t sure why.”

“That’s how I felt when I saw you in San Francisco,” Eli said. “Didn’t you?”

Her face was very warm. “It was different. You were taken. The choice wasn’t mine.”

“It’s yours now,” said Eli.

—

Unlike Maisie, Laurel had never babysat. Though she had raised plenty of lambs, human infants made her anxious: their unrelenting need, their puckered faces vaguely blameful. She expected pregnancy to feel alien, but her body knew what to do. There was a sense of underground construction—joints wiggled; ligaments loosened—and she felt the way she had when Eli came to Madison: gravity, momentum, a strange and knowing déjà vu.

January was the first time they saw the baby, a dark lima bean against a roving backdrop of white; its heartbeat was an oceanic suction sound, and from then on, they called it the whale. In March, they moved, not to the yellow house across from Eli’s apartment but into one of the full-sized units below Laurel’s garret. Eli and Noah lugged furniture through the snow, and Clare brought an apple pie. That night, for the first time, Laurel felt a kick. She tugged her shirt up, calling for Eli, and they watched the limb move beneath skin as if under a sheet. Later the baby’s entire body undulated, so that it seemed to cruise the surface of her stomach.

One night, she dreamed of her own severed head. Eli drove them to a diner on Willy Street, where they ate scrambled eggs and hash browns and hypothesized. Eli thought she was afraid of losing her intellectual life, and Laurel suspected that was true. Eli had been hired by the physics department. Laurel had begun to apply for postdocs—she still wanted to pursue her electricity experiment—but she felt a disturbing lack of urgency: her mind was elsewhere.

By summer, her stomach was a taut dome. Her heart sank when she dropped something; it was such a long way down. She had begun to think of herself not as me but we, and felt guilty that she meant a duo—herself and the baby—and not a triad, including Eli. She was utterly in love with him, but Eli had not grown the child in his body, had not felt its foot in his ribs or soothed it with the rhythm of his heartbeat. Her relationship with the baby felt private, inarticulable, and profound, an experience that went back to the first woman, the first mammal—even back to primordial oceans, when the first cell became two.

Her water broke during a thunderstorm. Lightning flared as Eli drove to the hospital. She was still in labor one night later, so tired she could sleep between contractions; they came like waves, building, crashing, her entire body clenched. The obstetrician watched the monitor and told her when to push: “Okay: now.” Laurel took in all the air she could, summoned strength from the depths. “Now.” There was a clock over the bed, a white school clock with a large second hand, used to note the birth time. At last, Laurel heaved, reached down, and felt the child—“A boy!” someone said—with her hands. He was slippery, wriggling, crying so loudly it scared her, but when she lifted him to her chest, he paused, and their eyes met in a pact. It was a pact that would stretch across eons, a pact in which distance meant nothing. She had become a mother.

The last flight out of McMurdo departs at the end of February. People hug on the ice in Big Reds and sunglasses. Some promise to come back, but many will only revisit the continent in memory. Louis glares at Patrick. Nita kisses Sam in front of Ivan the Terra Bus, her fingers in Sam’s brown curls.

The last supply ship of the season arrives the next morning. The crew offloads ten million pounds of cargo before reloading a summer’s worth of trash, recycling, and scientific equipment. Less than two hundred people remain on station, and nearly half of them gather to see it off. The sky is overcast; Laurel can’t see the Arc. With a mournful bellow, the ship blurs into fog.

“God help us!” someone cries, to scattered laughter.

“The first few months are all right,” says Louis, as they walk back to the dorms. “Really, it’s not until Angry August that you start to lose your mind. And then comes Stabby September.”