Page 7 of Under Story

His expression is brave and delicate, searching. Laurel has an urge to reach out, put a gloved hand on his arm, but she stops herself. By high school, they had become distant: Jules was a track star, and Laurel spent most of her time with Maisie.

“Partly,” she says. “I’m happy for you; it must have taken real courage. I’m sorry I didn’t know. Your mom—well, she didn’t mention it.”

“She tends not to,” Jules says. “I should have told you myself when you emailed, but I’m not very good at putting it in writing yet.”

Two women pass them on the bridge, linked at the arms and swaying. Jules waits until they totter toward the dorms before he speaks again.

“Laurel, my mom told me what happened. I’m so sorry. It isn’t something that anyone should have to bear.”

Laurel’s throat swells. She nods in acknowledgment but finds she cannot speak, afraid of what might come out. To steady herself, she looks across the ice. At almost midnight, the sun has finally set. All week, McMurdo has been murky, the sky a dull gray, but tonight the fog has thinned to mist.

Laurel squints. “Is that—?”

Laid over the ice is the dome she saw on her first day, now the blue-green of a photo negative. In darkness, its light is even more apparent: a self-made, inner glow akin to bioluminescence.

Jules nods. “The Arc.”

Laurel is unprepared for the depth of her relief. The dome’s reappearance feels like confirmation of her sanity.

“The Arc,” she says, feeling the word in her mouth. She understands that it should be capitalized, that it describes something singular. “What is it?”

“Nobody knows. It’s fifteen miles away, at a place called Cape Evans. At night, it looks green, like this, but in sunlight, it turns pink,” Jules explains. “Back in January, when it first appeared, atmospheric scientists investigated. They thought that it was caused by light reflecting off ice, and that the color was tied to climate change: aerosols, pollutants. But that was disproven, so they left. A team of physicists came down instead.”

The Arc glows behind power lines and streetlights, coy. Laurel rises onto the balls of her feet. “What’s their theory?”

“They’re flying an instrument over it, some kind of particle detector. No word on what they’ve found, but keep an eye on the bulletin board in the galley. Every Sunday night at eight, scientists present their work. Everyone is waiting to hear about the Arc.”

2

The Orchard

When people asked for directions to the orchard, the Salters said to turn off the beltline at Nostalgia Auto Body. A gravel road led to the property and divided it in two. Below the road, along with Lower Orchard, were marsh and woodland, the oak savanna, and the farm store. Above the road, near Upper Orchard, were the sheep, Clare’s flower garden, and an 1860s farmhouse that Laurel’s parents continually rescued from disrepair.

Pete and Clare had purchased the farm in 1979—one year before Laurel’s birth—from the estate of an elderly Norwegian man named Edner, the last of the homesteading family who built the house and used the land to farm cows and tobacco. Acoustic tile, steeped in twelve decades of nicotine, covered the living room ceiling. Edner had slept on the screened porch, accompanied by twelve cats. Though the animals were gone (to where? Laurel wondered), the cat doors he had cut throughout the house remained, providing photographic squares of information about one room while you were in another and acting as a private transportation system for the Salters’ two new kittens.

The upstairs had gone unused for decades. Hunks of drywall and plaster littered the floors, having broken off from the ceiling. If the Salters had not immediately renovated the bathroom, the toilet could have dropped into the kitchen. A wasps’ nest—bulbous, painted over—was embedded in one wall.

(“Why did you buy this place?” Laurel asked when the nest came up at dinner.

Laurel’s mother looked at her father. “It was romantic,” she said.

“I think the word you’re looking for,” said Laurel, fifteen, “is difficult.”)

But she loved it. As an adult, she thought of its twin elements—romance, difficulty—and wondered if the former required the latter, or if the latter acquired the former in hindsight. In winter, they had to thaw the pipes with hair dryers, but Laurel knew no cozier feeling than wearing a pair of Clare’s hand-knit socks while the evergreen trees donned their white capes. Even summer’s tornado warnings took on a sense of adventure. The Salters kept a mattress in the basement so that they could sleep more comfortably on stormy nights. Afterward, they reentered the world through a basement bulkhead that opened directly outside, as if to Oz.

Laurel’s father had been raised on a traditional Wisconsin farm: one hundred cows, pesticides sprayed by the acre. In winter, they logged the property and sold the wood as timber. Indoor plumbing was not installed until his teens. Until then, an outhouse served as the only bathroom; in spring, a mock orange shrub deodorized the vicinity.

Pete’s family thought him snooty for going to college, and peculiar when he chose to study something he didn’t have to leave the farm to see: trees. He was drawn, too, to the serious sophomore in his forest biology lecture. When he turned to look at the clock, he stole glimpses of her, bent over a notebook with her brow furrowed. Clare’s hair was long and strawberry blond. She wore it not in the feathery bangs or middle part that were popular that year but in a single braid.

Pete kept his own shoulder-length hair in a ponytail. A rascally grin turned his eyes to crescent moons. He was five foot six, which he’d been making up for since he was old enough to realize it was short: he was genial, with a quick wit—the sort of person others wouldn’t mind having around.

Pete missed the lecture before Thanksgiving to help his parents with the harvest, and he asked Clare if he could borrow her notes. He returned them with his dorm phone number scribbled at the bottom. Months later, he learned the source of Clare’s gravity: her mother had died, and she didn’t speak to her father.

(Laurel at six, sitting atop the laundry machine, where she felt queen of the house: “Why doesn’t Grandpa Arthur ever visit us?”

Clare was folding underwear. Her thoughts were so opaque that Laurel thought she wouldn’t answer.

“You’re lucky, Laurel, to have such a good father,” she said. “Grandpa Arthur wasn’t like that.”