Page 56 of Under Story

On September 1, the sun returns for less than an hour. The station celebrates. Some people run out to meet the first bus; others hide at Southern Exposure, grumbling about the new arrivals. After six months of frozen food, Laurel nearly cries to eat an apple. There are no longer enough dorm rooms for everyone to have a single, so she moves back in with Nita. Sam arrives at the end of the month, her skateboard under one arm.

Charlie is returning to Wisconsin. They hug on the ice, swaying.

“What will I do without you here?” asks Laurel.

“What will I do in Wisconsin?” Charlie counters. “I don’t want to go back to real life.”

“Maybe real life will change,” Laurel says. “I think it might, if you keep drawing.”

She finds one of Charlie’s sketches on her pillow. Pressing it to her chest, Laurel wonders whether she was a fool for not taking the same flight home. She struggles to conjure the confidence she used to feel about the basin. Every day, she checks her email, but Gloria hasn’t responded.

On October 1, there are more than sixteen hours of sunlight. Louis, pied piper, leads the new stewards to Gallagher’s. Laurel hides out in the lounge, playing Solitaire. She finds the background strangely calming: it’s still the golf course green that she remembers from the nineties.

At midnight, Laurel yawns. She decides to refresh Gmail before she goes to bed. While it loads, she plays another game. She navigates back to the browser to find one unread email.

Laurel,

Please forgive my delay. Months ago, I received your email. I waited until now to respond for reasons I hope I can explain.

Something very strange happened when I saw your links. I was alone at my desk, with Cygnus sleeping nearby, and I began to weep. At the time, I couldn’t understand my reaction. Later I realized that it stemmed from something that happened over sixty years ago.

You know I lost my parents at the age of sixteen. What I haven’t shared is that their bodies were never found. The car had fallen down the hill, but my parents weren’t inside it. Technically, they were only ever missing.

Your message retrieved a detail I had nearly left behind. You might recall that my parents drove to Yosemite after a farmer saw green light in the sky. Your Arc reminded me of what he described: light that was close to the ground. It didn’t sound like the aurora. I told my parents that he must have made it up.

Everyone assumed my parents had died, so I did, too. I thought: What else could have happened to them?

What else could have happened to them?

Go.

8

The Basin

Silas’s eighth birthday would take place on August 21. Eli suggested that they spend the week at Lake Michigan. Laurel and Eli hadn’t been to Cedar since their honeymoon, and they knew that Silas would love the water. He took swimming classes at a local pool. That year, he’d qualified for the Little Dolphins team.

Laurel booked an apartment in town with room for three. Actually, there was room for four: the attic bedroom had a bunk bed, which renewed Silas’s longstanding gripe about not having siblings.

He pointed to the bunk bed on the top. “I’m gonna sleep in there. And if I had a sister,” he said—a frequent refrain—“she could have the bed under me.”

—

The day: flat, gray, leaves quivering in the wind. Strange weather, said the cashier when Laurel ran out for sandwiches. Something restless to the air, or maybe the restless thing was Silas, who had been jumping on the furniture since he woke up that morning.

He wants to go to the beach, Eli said when Laurel returned.

And then the drive, no more than twenty minutes on a weekday but twice as many on this Sunday. They parked in the lot and walked down a wooded path: the beach was flanked by forest. In the ravine between two dunes, a cave opened into the ground. Small brown mushrooms huddled at the entrance.

Armillaria gallica, Laurel thought. Also known as honey fungus.

The mushrooms themselves weren’t particularly eye-catching. What distinguished Armillaria were its rhizomorphs: thick, fused cords of hyphae coated in protective melanin. Unlike traditional mycelium—those feathery white strands—these darker structures grew aboveground, not below. Near the mushroom cluster was a decomposing tree. Rhizomorphs surrounded it in strange and rune-like patterns.

She wanted to show Silas, but he had become resistant to these demonstrations. He associated mushrooms with Laurel’s professional life, which took her away from him.

“No working,” he had begun to say when she paused to examine something, and since it was his birthday trip, this time, she didn’t.

—