Page 57 of Under Story

They set out three beach chairs, three towels, three hats. Silas was already kicking off his Crocs and negotiating his desire to go swimming before sunblock. Since it was cloudy, Laurel allowed it.

Silas tugged Eli’s hand.

“All right, all right,” Eli said.

While he was gone, Laurel set out Silas’s book. He loved any book with magic: she had read A Wizard of Earthsea aloud, and now he was reading A Wrinkle in Time to her.

She settled back with a magazine. Soon she realized she was hungry and unwrapped her sandwich, tuna salad on rye.

—

They emerged wet and ebullient. Eli winked at Laurel, his curls dripping.

“I’m starving,” Silas said, in the accusatory way that children declare hunger. She rummaged in the cooler for his egg salad sandwich, apple, and mini bag of Lay’s. Not until he was eating peacefully did she return to her reading.

“I’m thirsty,” Silas said.

Laurel put down the magazine again. She retrieved his water bottle as well as a plastic jug of lemonade.

“Two options,” she said. “Anything else, Your Highness?”

Silas shook his head, though he reminded her, through a mouthful of apple, that he was not a king but a wizard.

—

Eli kissed Laurel’s shoulder.

Freckles, he said.

It was four o’clock: the lazy hour, as Laurel and Eli called it. Silas slept in a folding chair, a bucket hat over his eyes. Every so often, Laurel made sure that it hadn’t slid to block his nose.

Eli put a hand on his bladder. Too much lemonade.

Pee in the water, Laurel said.

Eli shrugged. I wouldn’t mind a walk.

He rolled onto her towel to kiss her, lingering a little now that Silas was asleep.

—

Alone, Laurel’s mind drifted back to the cave. Armillaria could cover vast distances. In the early nineties, a colony was discovered in Michigan. It was at least fifteen hundred years old and as heavy as a blue whale. After an article appeared in Nature, newspapers dubbed it the “Humongous Fungus.” So long as nutrients remained available, it would never die.

Laurel wondered if the specimen in the cave had ever been sampled. If she cut a piece, she could bring it back to the lab for testing. It would mean leaving Silas, but only for a moment.

“If you want to go in the water, Dad or I have to be watching you, and you can only go in the shallow part”—this was what she’d told him several days ago, on their first beach excursion.

“How shallow?” he’d asked, like a lawyer.

“Really shallow.”

“Like two feet?”

“Like one and a half,” said Laurel. Silas was four feet and four inches tall. She reconsidered. “Like one.”

She weighed the likelihood that he had forgotten this exchange. Silas was thoughtful and attentive; he absorbed body language and tone. Not infrequently he mentioned something that Laurel had said offhand months earlier. Of course, sometimes he asked what was for dinner three times in an afternoon, and she said, “Silas, look at me. We’re having burritos.” In the years that followed, she would torture herself over moments like these, when she could have been a little bit kinder, a little bit more loving—would have, had she eaten breakfast, or not just stepped on a Lego.

Silas hadn’t slept very much the night before. Laurel suspected that he would be out for some time. There was no telling when Eli would come back. His walks often expanded, acquiring detours and loops. Forty-five minutes later, he’d return, sheepish, to say he’d gotten lost in his head.