Page 46 of Under Story

“I’m trying,” she says, “to redeem myself.”

“Oh, Laurel.” Eli shakes his head. “We were both fantasizing, okay? If I started acting like the Duoverse is real, I’d be an idiot.”

Laurel thinks of the person he was at eighteen, in the orchard, and at twenty-four, in San Francisco, full of theories as they walked from Lone Mountain to the Mission. She wonders whether these versions still exist inside him, selves tucked within selves like Russian dolls.

“You wouldn’t be an idiot,” she says. “You’d be a believer.”

By 2011, Laurel and Eli moved from their apartment on the east side to a house on the west. In the neighborhood was a cemetery whose winding paths were shaded by oak trees. Centuries earlier, the Late Woodland people built sacred effigy mounds throughout Wisconsin. Most had been destroyed by Europeans, but four survived in the graveyard. Laurel brought Silas there and told him about the mounds. A goose, which symbolized the Upper World, appeared to fly downhill; below were water spirits of the Lower World, with long, horizontal tails.

One night, Eli took Laurel’s face in his hands the way Silas often did.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

Laurel laughed. They were eating ice cream and watching Lost, a bottle of wine on the coffee table. Over the years, they had talked about marriage, but each time, they’d decided against it. Partly, it didn’t feel urgent: they were already domestic partners. Laurel had never fantasized about a wedding. Life was full, and their relationship was fantasy enough.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

Eli flopped back on the couch. “So what?”

“So you’ll feel different in the morning.”

But the next morning, in bed, he said the same thing. It was May. A shaft of light stood between curtains. Laurel could smell the lilac blossoms in the yard.

“Why now?” she asked.

She knew that he was haunted by his parents’ marriage, the yoke of a contract they refused to break. His engagement to Angela had been hasty, and he still felt guilty about ending it.

“I was always afraid to be in an unhappy marriage. I guess the whole thing felt dangerous—even wanting it. But I want it with you,” he said. “I want to be in a happy one.”

The words made her feel tingly. Eli pulled her on top of him. She propped herself up to look at his face, which was unambiguous.

They went to the courthouse, he in a borrowed suit, she in a knee-length silk dress. Silas held the rings, simple gold bands from a jeweler on State Street, and Clare acted as a witness. Afterward, they had a party on the patio at Mickey’s Tavern, tubs of cheese curds and sliders beneath fairy lights. Maisie and Noah brought their daughter, Hazel, and Riordan Salter came with the girlfriend he’d met at a Renaissance faire. Gloria arrived at the same time as a rowdy group of Eli’s colleagues; Tess, who had left Madison for a fungal research center in the Netherlands, FaceTimed them from a café on the Oudegracht canal. Everyone, including Eli’s parents, danced to a Cake cover band called Icing.

Silas stayed with Clare while Laurel and Eli took a honeymoon. They found a cottage on farmland in Cedar, Michigan, near the Great Lakes and Sleeping Bear Dunes. There was a pigpen out front and a porch out back and a vast, dazzling field to one side. Ten minutes from the cottage was a place to swim. One morning, they jumped in naked, clinging in the cold water while a toad chastised them from shore. Later they drove to Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor, where they drank cherry beer and ate cherry salsa and purchased jars of expensive cherry jam for Clare and the Rosens.

In Wisconsin, they had taken a scuba certification course. Eli had always wanted to learn: astronauts practiced EVAs by diving, and they described it as the closest thing to outer space. Shipwrecks littered the Great Lakes. One afternoon, they signed up for a dive charter. The guide handed them a map of the bottomlands and steered into the Manitou Passage.

Buoyancy was the most important part of diving. Too much and they’d cork to the surface; too little and they’d sink to the bottom. The key was to match the density of the water, so Laurel breathed as she’d been taught: Inhale, pause, exhale, pause. She swam through hairlike, fractal grasses. A turtle emerged from murk to study her. At one point, she was surrounded by a school of fish with celery-green tails, organized but leaderless, expanding and contracting in unison.

The guide showed them a supply wreck. Perch drifted between beams; thousands of bricks were still stacked inside. “The Passage is known for unpredictable weather,” the guide said. “There can be five-, ten-mile-per-hour winds, and the next thing you know, you’ve got tripled wind speeds and twenty-foot waves.” The wrecks reminded Laurel of a bygone civilization, and she felt uneasy, swimming through someone else’s tragedy. She preferred to stay near the surface, where tiny minnows glinted like foil.

Aside from thoughts of Silas, which pinged throughout the day, they felt loose and expansive, with periods of carefree teenage giddiness. Newlyweds, Eli told everyone, and everyone crowed. They received free desserts and free champagne. Occasionally, Laurel felt annoyed: for five years, they had raised a child together, which seemed to her more challenging than walking down the aisle. In the past, people who learned that Laurel and Eli weren’t married often changed the subject, as if to linger longer would cause everyone embarrassment. Laurel thought that it made just as much sense to lavish a couple with gifts at the end of a marriage, to equip each party with the housewares and alcohol that would be useful once they were on their own again.

Eli threaded his fingers between hers as they drove back to Madison. They had discussed the idea of another baby, but Laurel wanted to finish her postdoc first. Two years earlier, the results of her maze experiment had been published in Science. She had come home to looping streamers and a sign that said Congratulations Wawa, because Silas had written the Ms upside down. Eli framed the first page of the article.

It was just the boost she needed while designing her next experiment. In human beings, electricity was key to brain activity. Scientists knew that fungi generated electricity, too, and that communication took place throughout the mycelium: when wood-rotting fungi detected a log, only a small number of hyphae made contact, but the entire network changed. Still, there was no proof that the two processes were connected. Laurel wanted to plug electrodes into hyphal strands. That way, she could record what happened as they traveled through the maze.

She had to apply for grants to cover the cost of new equipment. To measure electricity, she used a device called a voltmeter. Laurel placed probes—known as pins—in the mycelium. The pins came in pairs, and wires connected them to the voltmeter. Because mycelium was fragile, the pins kept falling over. Even when they stayed upright, Laurel’s results were discouragingly random. Possibly she hadn’t placed the pins correctly: mycelium was a fuzzy collection of threads, and it was difficult to identify where electricity concentrated. Or perhaps her hypothesis was simply wrong. Negative data—an outcome that contradicted expectations—was still valuable, but it wasn’t charismatic. If she couldn’t produce successful results by the following spring, it would be hard to find an academic job.

—

Perhaps her distraction was part of the problem. Since Clare’s meeting with Sly Perkins, the orchard had hobbled along, but this year was catastrophic. Summer weather struck in February, forcing the trees to bloom early. When the temperature dropped again, flowers froze to death while opening. They lost three-quarters of their crop. Laurel walked through the trees in horror; it felt like watching her friends die. The farm store looked picked-over as soon as it opened.

Two months later, Clare asked Laurel and Eli to meet her at the farmhouse. It was November: fall’s patina. Copper leaves flicked beneath a sky of hammered tin.

“I can’t do it anymore,” Clare said.

She presented her best option: a different commercial grower than Sly, one who had agreed to keep a hamlet of heirloom trees and offer pick-your-own along with wholesale. Laurel still felt anguished. She didn’t blame Clare anymore, at least not rationally. Irrationally, though, she felt that they were both betraying Pete. If her father were alive, she knew he wouldn’t have allowed this.