Page 59 of Under Story

To Eli, she said, Don’t let them take me. She was the only one who had seen Silas—they needed her—but Eli watched the medic speak into a radio.

There was a thunderous beating of wings. A helicopter landed with the dreadful splendor of an alien spacecraft. Laurel was carried, loaded, strapped.

—

In a hospital bed, she drifted through agonized fog. At some point, Eli arrived. She knew by his face that no one had found Silas.

—

They sat in the living room of the rental with two police officers. The younger man said undertow, wind speed. “In water like this,” he said, “I have to tell you: what goes under might not come back up.”

The older officer leaned forward. He walked with a limp.

“A case like this is what we call a Critical Missing,” he said. “We won’t give up on your son.”

Eli stood to show them out. Laurel could not move. Her inertia was a dam to keep the future back: anything she did or said would carry her from Silas even further.

The younger officer followed Eli, but the older one stayed with Laurel. His eyes were blue. The depth of their compassion pained her.

“I lost a child,” he said. “People will tell you not to blame yourself. That’s good advice, but you’ll do it anyway. So I’m going to say something different: don’t abandon yourself.” The officer pointed to her sternum. “To get through this, you need her.”

—

Every object lanced: Silas’s goggles and toothbrush, his copy of A Wrinkle in Time.

Clare drove to Cedar with the Rosens. Her face was a mask of pathos, but Eli’s parents couldn’t look at Laurel.

Laurel did not want to hold a memorial, not unless she could be sure that Silas was gone. In some ways, it was worse not to know. She had not previously understood the need for a burial, the idea of bringing someone home, but uncertainty kept the wound open. Silas was lost in both ways of the word. She had dreams in which some incorporeal version of him drifted past chimneys and over fields, a silvery cloudlike substance moving away from her.

She took long, rambling walks through the neighborhood cemetery, loath to be home. Sometimes she passed another mother; her son had been killed in a school shooting. Laurel had seen the woman on television, begging fruitlessly for a change to Wisconsin’s gun laws. Though Laurel ached for her, she could not help but wish that she could visit Silas, too. It was the most impoverished form of envy, a scrap so paltry: in lieu of her child, a way to be near her child’s body.

By fall, Eli insisted on a service. Laurel would have held it at the orchard, if the orchard were still theirs. Instead, they chose the arboretum.

A small group stood in a circle, holding hands: their families, Gloria, Maisie and Noah. Eli read from the letter that Albert Einstein had written to the family of Michele Besso, a close friend, after Besso’s death.

“ ‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.’ ” The paper shook as he held it. “ ‘That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ ”

—

Certain friends stopped calling. In the lab, or the grocery store, acquaintances looked away.

Laurel knew what they were thinking: she had done the most blasphemous thing a woman could. She should have known that she couldn’t stop being a mother, not even for five minutes. And what could she say? It was my fault, all mine. It was human error. It was monstrous. I’ll never forgive myself, never—and how could the gawking faces, the invasive curiosity and smug sense of exemption (I wouldn’t have taken my eyes off him), compare, in the end, with the contempt in which she held herself?

Of course they believed it couldn’t happen to them, that they were incapable of such miscalculation. So had she.

Maisie visited frequently. Often the curtains were closed, the house dim. After the memorial, Laurel couldn’t meet her gaze.

“Look at me,” whispered Maisie. Gently she touched Laurel’s chin.

Laurel lifted her eyes. She felt as though she were laying them in Maisie’s hands.

“We’ve all done it,” Maisie said. “Forgotten to turn off a burner. Left the kid in the car. What happened this time was one in a million. That’s the injustice of it.”

The pain changed, but it never lessened. On some days, Laurel wanted to undo herself, not to take her life but to cut it out—to never have been. On others, she operated in a dull workmanlike state, though this was interrupted by flashes of Silas, bright and dangerous as lightning.

—

Language was insufficient. What did it mean to apologize? (She did apologize, over and over, until Eli told her to stop, that it was okay, words that also meant nothing.) She knew it was only his love that kept him from turning on her, and sometimes she wished he would, for she could see the effort it took to resist. Occasionally she caught him staring at her from across the room, as if he were trying to square everything he knew of her with what had happened at the beach.