Page 96 of Under Story

Laurel lies awake for hours, berating herself. By morning, her confidence has splintered into second-guessing. Eli sits in the living room, his face obscured behind a book.

“Can I use the car?” she asks. “I need to clear my head. I think I’ll hike.”

“Fine by me,” says Eli. He knows better than to ask if she wants company.

—

Laurel doesn’t hike. She drives through town, past the ice cream stand and the shop that sells Polish pottery; then she turns on to a county road. She may be doing something stupid, something that will only upset her, which is why she didn’t tell Eli about it. The car has a GPS, but she remembers the route. White birch trees whiz past the windows. Getting closer now, and so much faster than it was the first time. An unpaved road leads to the parking lot.

Breathe, says Nita, in Laurel’s head. The way Miles showed you, says Louis. She does, dropping her shoulders. Then she slings her bag over her chest, a small linen cross-body with a silver button.

The place looks unchanged: the hemlocks, the dunes, the crooked wooden boardwalk to the beach. Laurel glances at the water, just to show herself she can. Families cluster on the sand: children with buckets, seniors under umbrellas, middle-aged people keeping an eye on both parties. She walks away from them, into the trees.

—

Laurel has wondered why the other Laurel’s research is so different from hers. Eli shares his double’s interests, but Laurel has never studied fossils or forest decomposition.

One week before they left for Michigan, she tidied her office on campus. At a State Street bus stop, Laurel saw Samir. The semester had just ended, and she held a box of office detritus as well as her messenger bag. They had finished their paper on the fossil forest. Samir asked what she planned to study next.

“I’m not sure,” Laurel admitted, readjusting her hold on the box. “We could continue to look at fungi and fossils. Or wood composers, specifically.”

Samir nodded, but she could tell he was holding something back. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did you drop your work with electricity?”

Laurel became aware of her facial features. She tried to hold them in a way that feigned normalcy.

“It’s just that I thought you really had something,” Samir added.

It was the first time she heard that Laurel Two had studied electricity, the first hint of a throughline between them. She didn’t know why the other Laurel had given up that work. She could only say why she’d abandoned hers.

“I couldn’t prove it.”

Samir’s bus trundled toward them.

“Well,” he said, queueing to board, “you have to admit that you didn’t spend all that long trying.”

—

Shorebirds arc overhead. Laurel knows the way. She can still hear the gulls, the spray, though they muffle as the maples close around her.

In her linen bag is a notebook. A black pen. Her foraging knife. And a headlamp, the one Samir said he’d found in her caving supplies.

Fainter now are the voices of beachgoers. Laurel walks over rocks and through black cherry trees. The last fall mushrooms stud the forest floor: black trumpets, with their floral shape; shaggy lion’s mane. Soon she catches sight of the ravine, but the cave seems to be missing. She sees only more trees, oaks as high as fifty feet.

Laurel stops to situate herself. Could she have gone the wrong way? The cave should lie straight ahead, between the dunes.

Some of the oaks are still golden, but most wear their new summer leaves. An unusual tree stands in the center of the ravine. It looks older than the others, which would make it younger here: the crown isn’t nearly as wide, and the bark is loose and scaly, some flaking off in vertical strips. Dark cords—rhizomorphs—surround the trunk and branches.

Laurel tilts her head. Strangely, the tree seems to be growing at a curve. The branches reach toward the sky, but the lower trunk leans diagonally.

It strains from the mouth of a cave.

—

Her scientist’s brain powers on. She notes the cave’s familiar shape: like the one that drew her last time, the opening is roughly circular, its circumference close to five feet. The oak tree fills most of that space. To squeeze around it, Laurel will have to cut a branch away.