Page 80 of Under Story

Inside, a changing station, stocked with cloth diapers, stands beside a rolling cart of medical supplies. Opposite is a recliner where Beth has clearly been sleeping. A geometric mobile hangs from the ceiling, and a wheelchair waits beside the door.

The centerpiece is a canopy bed, hung with gauzy curtains. Through a part in the fabric, Laurel sees Beth’s mother.

“I’ve named her Helen,” Beth whispers. “Modern, but I think it suits her.”

Helen looks nothing like a newborn. If anything, she seems close to death. She breathes with difficulty, and her skin has a blue tinge. She lies on her back, swaddled in blankets like a moth in a cocoon. When she squirms, a flailing hand emerges, and Laurel sees something brown under her nails.

The bed has been affixed with guardrails. Reaching over, Beth tucks the arm back inside the blanket. Though Helen is the size of an adult, she wears the same style of pink-and-blue cap that Silas wore home from the hospital.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” says Beth, with the harried radiance—the love-drunk glow—of early parenthood. Helen turns her head in Beth’s direction. Her pupils drift above a cloud of cataracts.

Laurel manages to nod. Later, she considers her biases and wonders if infants, too, are an acquired taste.

Beth brings a baby monitor back to the garden. “I like to sit where I can see her. I haven’t slept in my own bed since she arrived. Overworrying, I know; it’s not like she can get up and leave. She’ll need treatment for the next few months—breast cancer—and it’ll be at least a year before she’s walking,” says Beth. “Isn’t it a racket, what they charge for wheelchairs?”

“Criminal,” Laurel stammers.

“I mean, you wait all your life to find out who your parents are. For decades, you wonder: What will they look like? Will you feel a connection right away? The doorbell rings, and I’m thinking, It’s a package. Then I see the ambulance. When they pulled back the sheet, I knew she was mine,” Beth says. “Was it like that for you?”

Lightheaded, Laurel stares across the table. Beth must be referring to Clare: perhaps she, like Helen, was delivered to the other Laurel. But this Laurel can only think of Silas.

“I imagined so many faces,” she says, “but I can’t picture them now. As soon as you see the person, you think, It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

“That’s just it.” With preternatural instinct, Beth’s eyes dart to the monitor. On screen, Helen mewls and settles, gray-toned. “Gosh, I’m jumpy! I didn’t think all this would feel so new to me. The overtaker said she’s eighty-eight, which isn’t much older than my students. But it’s completely different when they’re yours.”

Afterward, Laurel will remember what Beth said about her students, but in the moment, she fixates on one word.

“The overtaker,” she echoes. “That’s who brought your mother home? The man in the black coat?”

“Of course,” Beth says. “Kenji Nakamura.”

Seeing her confusion, Laurel changes the subject. They eat the apple crumble while discussing formula. At the end of the visit, Beth touches her arm.

“Laurel, I just have to tell you,” she says. “I have a new appreciation for your work. I suppose most of us take it for granted—the miracle of Mother Earth.”

—

Eli opens a box of pizza. “What does your work have to do with it?”

They sit in their old seats in the dining room. Laurel raises her arms in an exaggerated shrug.

“And Beth must have meant undertaker, right?” Eli adds.

Laurel says, “She seemed pretty clear.”

“Well, she also said that Helen, her eighty-eight-year-old mother, had just been born.”

“What if she was?”

“Come on. Who gave birth to her?”

The pizzeria down the block still doesn’t use enough cheese. Laurel tears open a packet of parmesan.

“That,” she says, “is the question.”

The next day, she returns to the cemetery. If she can’t enter the white building, she’ll have to observe from the grounds.

From the top of the hill, the wheel-like structure of the paths is more apparent. She can better see the skylight, too: an oculus with sixteen sectors. Neither of these details clarify the purpose of the building. Through the skylight, Laurel can only glimpse a wall whose color—muted blue—reminds her of a hospital.