Page 60 of Under Story

She couldn’t blame him. She wondered which was the real her, the true her: the person she had been until that moment—devoted, even self-sacrificing—or the woman who had left her child for such a small and selfish pleasure, for desire itself. It did not seem possible that she was both.

Perhaps it would have been different had they been together when they lost Silas, if the mistake had been shared, but instead, there was a schism: he felt one thing, she another, and they followed these separate feelings into basements of the mind. At one point, Eli began to sleep in Silas’s room. He said that Laurel’s snoring kept him awake. She thought, but did not say, that he had never had to leave before.

In January, Eli attended a conference out of state. Laurel called in sick to work. She spent most of her time asleep on the couch, startling when the postman pushed something through the mail slot. Every so often, she remembered to eat. At points, the air in the house became so stale that even she noticed, and she went for a walk, but always at night, so that she didn’t have to speak to anyone.

On the day before Eli’s return, the doorbell rang. It took the form of a chime in her dream. Laurel ignored the sound, but it persisted. She hauled herself up.

Her mother trembled on the porch.

“You can’t do that,” Clare said. “I’ve been calling.”

“I turned my phone off,” said Laurel.

“What if Eli needs you?”

“He doesn’t.”

In her mother’s gaze, she saw her own condition. Laurel hadn’t showered or changed her clothes. She understood that there was a smell.

“Please,” said Clare. “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll run you a bath.”

Laurel followed. Clare knelt to test the water with her hand. Then she stepped outside, to let Laurel change. Minutes later, when Clare knocked, Laurel still hadn’t undressed. She felt attached to what she was wearing, a many-layered shell.

“May I?” asked her mother.

Laurel nodded. Clare peeled off each item: the sweatshirt, the long-sleeve, the tank. She sent these down the laundry chute, along with Laurel’s sweatpants, underwear, and socks. Laurel whimpered with embarrassment, but she also felt relieved. She had been so exposed, so humiliated and debased, by what she’d done. Nudity could not be as revealing as that.

The water steamed invitingly. Clare murmured as she slid a bar of soap over Laurel’s skin. Laurel cried, high-pitched, forced out. It was astonishing that she could do nothing to make her mother stop loving her.

Eli’s parents drove to Madison on what would have been Silas’s birthday. The atmosphere was grim, and Laurel regretted that she and Eli weren’t alone. Before the Rosens left, they paused at the door in a triangle, Janet and Leo holding Eli by the shoulders. Laurel looked on from the kitchen. She felt loose, wounded, dangerous.

“They barely talk to me,” she said, when Eli returned.

He began to load the dishwasher. Eli often visited his parents alone. Laurel did not know what was said on those trips, what he admitted or whether he defended her.

“It’s like they think I’m not in hell,” she pressed, “like I did it on purpose,” and Eli winced, his arms slack, the dishwasher dropping open.

Quietly he said, “I’m tired of having to tell you it wasn’t your fault.”

The world cleaved in half again, or perhaps it was that Eli had put it back together honestly, and exactly the way she had feared. Laurel did not cry. She felt the eager pull of destruction, as fire consumes what it can.

“You think it was,” she said.

He lifted a palm. It said everything.

“It was an accident,” he told her, firmly as ever. “But you were the one watching him.”

Antarctica’s Polar Day will begin on October 10. For three months afterward, the sun won’t sink below the horizon. Laurel and Eli plan to dive on the seventh: they want to have darkness for cover while leaving the station. On the sixth, though, winds surge to the coast with the speed of a hurricane. The sound is a sorcery.

At galley rally, Jules says, “Absolutely no one is going outside today.”

Sweat collects beneath Laurel’s baseball cap. She can see no more than several feet beyond the window. The storm continues on the seventh, with just as little visibility. She finds Eli on his way into a meeting.

“We can’t go,” he says grimly.

“There’s still tomorrow,” says Laurel.

But she wonders whether, when the storm blows over, something will subside in them, too. The winds remind her of just how dangerous the continent really is. Even if she doesn’t back out, Eli might.