Page 58 of Under Story

Silas’s hat had drifted to one side. Laurel adjusted it before she left.

—

She didn’t want to interrupt the rhizomorph network. Instead, Laurel sampled a mushroom. She carried a knife in her purse for exactly this purpose. At one tip was a boar-bristle brush, for cleaning dirt. A sharp, curved blade folded out from a beech handle.

As she made an incision, the sun moved behind clouds, and the cave darkened. A ring of moss circumscribed the black hole of its interior.

In seminars, Gloria had used Armillaria to demonstrate bioluminescence. First, two teaching assistants rolled a covered lab cart into the room, like vaudeville magicians. Gloria turned off the light, and the assistants sealed the cracks around doors and windows with towels. It took time for the human eye to adjust, so Gloria spoke until her pupils’ pupils widened. At last, she unveiled the contents of the cart: a block of wood colonized by Armillaria. The mushrooms glowed a ghostly green, as if seen through night vision goggles. Even their gills were perfectly legible.

Laurel had never encountered bioluminescence in the wild. She wondered if Armillaria had spread inside the cave, too.

Silas tugged from a string in her center. Her own wishes tugged back. She shouldn’t stay for long, but why not a few minutes?

She entered a soft, moist cavern. It smelled like wet soil, with an undercurrent of rot. To one side was a nest of logs, likely carried in by flooding. Laurel could not quite tell whether they were glowing.

Patience, she thought. Wait. As if in reward for her looking, a patch of green became visible. Others followed almost shyly: a raising of hands. Mycelium had invaded the wood. Strands knitted through logs like stitches in skin.

The sky brightened then, and the green light went out. For the first time all day, the clouds dispelled. Divine timing, Laurel thought, as she walked back to the beach with the mushroom, her prize; and because Silas was asleep, he wouldn’t complain while she took notes.

She scanned the water as soon as she came in sight of the beach. The sun had brought breeze, whitecaps forming. Seeing no one in the water, Laurel felt reassured. She had overworried, but that was parenthood. Eli’s chair was still empty. She walked around it to her own.

Where Silas has been, there was now a wrinkled towel.

—

Reason came to her mind’s defense. Perhaps he had wandered toward the woods in search of her. Or maybe Eli had returned, and taken Silas with him.

She was about to turn around when she saw something in the water. It flickered: a hand, beige, maybe twenty yards away.

—

Laurel dropped the mushroom on the sand. With her shoes still on, she thrashed into the water.

She was pure purpose. She had a sense of her entire life converging at this moment, of being called. Adrenalized by fear, she believed she could not fail, as mothers were able—or said—to lift cars. But the shoes bogged her down, and the current dragged her out: she could feel it now, an undertow, wrenching her from shore.

She screamed his name. It sailed away. Water poured into her throat, a wrong sensation that made her gasp, then choke. She had only seconds between waves and refused to rest, but soon she was so exhausted that she had no choice: she flipped onto her back, which gave her just enough strength to endure the next break.

A dark descending spiral, a staircase into hell—not the way it was supposed to happen—the hand, its fingers splayed, as if it were waving goodbye to her. No. Don’t think it. He had been here, or so Laurel thought: there were no landmarks, no way to mark space. How could she be sure of what she’d seen? When she tried to open her eyes underwater, there was only raw stinging, plumes of sand.

A hand on her shoulder, an arm around her chest—Eli heaved her out, though she didn’t want him to; it was like feeling the pull of another world, a past life—and she hated him in that moment, though her hate was but a skin, a cracking shell, over raw unholy terror.

On shore, she vomited lake water.

He went. She gestured. Down.

And lurched, with the force of a much larger mammal, toward the water again.

—

Eli’s voice, hoarse with panic: A hand? You’re sure that’s what you saw? He searched the water himself. There was no cell service on the beach. A couple arrived, two men with young children, and one drove back to the road to call 911. Every minute was interminable, and Laurel wailed, for too much time had passed—she knew this in her core, though she refused to accept what it meant.

Eli emerged from the water, panting, nightmarish. From the highway Laurel heard sirens. An emergency vehicle sped over the dunes, spewing sand.

Are you the mother? A female medic crouched. She asked what Laurel had seen in order to direct the rescue swimmer. When Laurel responded, her speech was slurred.

The medic, to Eli: She’s probably dehydrated, maybe hypothermic. How long was she in the water?

Eli looked at Laurel. She could not say. It had felt like seconds, like years.