Chapter 6 The Whale #2
Her water broke during a thunderstorm. Lightning flared as Eli drove to the hospital.
She was still in labor one night later, so tired she could sleep between contractions; they came like waves, building, crashing, her entire body clenched.
The obstetrician watched the monitor and told her when to push: “Okay: now.” Laurel took in all the air she could, summoned strength from the depths.
“Now.” There was a clock over the bed, a white school clock with a large second hand, used to note the birth time.
At last, Laurel heaved, reached down, and felt the child—“A boy!” someone said—with her hands.
He was slippery, wriggling, crying so loudly it scared her, but when she lifted him to her chest, he paused, and their eyes met in a pact.
It was a pact that would stretch across eons, a pact in which distance meant nothing. She had become a mother.
The last flight out of McMurdo departs at the end of February. People hug on the ice in Big Reds and sunglasses. Some promise to come back, but many will only revisit the continent in memory. Louis glares at Patrick. Nita kisses Sam in front of Ivan the Terra Bus, her fingers in Sam’s brown curls.
The last supply ship of the season arrives the next morning.
The crew offloads ten million pounds of cargo before reloading a summer’s worth of trash, recycling, and scientific equipment.
Less than two hundred people remain on station, and nearly half of them gather to see it off.
The sky is overcast; Laurel can’t see the Arc.
With a mournful bellow, the ship blurs into fog.
“God help us!” someone cries, to scattered laughter.
“The first few months are all right,” says Louis, as they walk back to the dorms. “Really, it’s not until Angry August that you start to lose your mind. And then comes Stabby September.”
“Please tell me that’s a metaphor,” says Charlie.
“It’s not,” Louis says. “At Bellingshausen, one of the Russian scientists knifed his roommate over a novel.”
Charlie blanches. “What did the roommate do?”
“He spoiled the ending,” Louis says.
—
The darkness comes on slowly, then all at once.
By the end of April, the sun doesn’t rise at all.
Outside, cold lays claim to the body immediately: skin chaps, and beards acquire icicles.
Once, Laurel makes the mistake of running from the galley to the convenience store without her Big Red.
Halfway there, her legs lock, paralyzed by a rabid need for warmth.
She staggers into the nearest building and finds herself among bickering meteorologists, who pause to sit her down on an overturned crate and hand her a mug of hot tea.
In winter, the population is small enough for everyone to have a single, so Laurel and Charlie move out of the room they shared with Nita. Still, they stick together.
“You might think you want to be alone, but that’s not what you need,” says Louis, at Gallagher’s. “Too much quiet time and you’ll end up with the Antarctic stare.”
He gestures toward the OAE at the end of the bar, a silent, shaggy mechanic drinking vodka straight.
That weekend, they attend a presentation on the signs of winter-over syndrome: insomnia, absentmindedness, aggression.
The isolation and monotony magnify seasonal depression; changes in thyroid hormones can cause cognitive impairment, even memory loss.
Laurel isn’t overly concerned. Nothing she experiences here can be worse than what she’s already endured.
Sometimes she shares a joint with Miles and Louis, relishing the way it smooths her edges.
Her curiosity—her interest in the living moment—opens like an eye.
She doesn’t forget what she did, but she can live with herself.
She watches Eli in the galley. He always avoids eye contact, as if he can sense that she wants something from him.
By May, he seems more comfortable on station.
The ANITA team huddles in animated conversation.
At Gallagher’s, Laurel sees him laughing with Ingrid, a cook.
It feels like looking into the past. She turns away from them.
One night, Louis decrees it time to go bowling, and they shuffle to Building 63.
Installed in 1961 by the Navy Seabees, the bowling alley has two lanes and manual pins.
In one lane are the ANITA and IceCube scientists, who seem to have called a truce: they chat good-naturedly, drinking smuggled-in beer.
Eli is one of them. Though he’s never worked for IceCube, he knows the people who do: in the United States, the project is based at UW–Madison.
Laurel wonders if he helped to ease tensions between the two groups of physicists here.
She goes to find a pair of shoes, determined to enjoy herself. She’ll ignore Eli, if that’s what he wants. As she ties the laces, though, he glances over with what seems like apology. Later he drifts from his lane toward hers.
“It’s no Kegonsa Bowl,” he says.
That was the alley near McFarland High, with arcade games and claw machines and a galactic carpet that hadn’t been cleaned since the eighties. Between turns, Laurel and Maisie drank blue raspberry Slurpees and ate nachos with warm neon cheese.
Laurel smiles. “No.”
Eli is watching the game with his arms crossed, but she detects a quality in him that she hasn’t seen for years.
“You’re excited about something,” she says.
He laughs. “I guess I am.”
“About work?”
Eli keeps his eyes on the game, but he smiles, too. “You’re prying.”
“I’m interested.”
“Nothing’s been confirmed. We need more data.”
A cheer goes up from Laurel’s lane: Charlie has scored a spare, putting the Nonperishables ahead. As a volunteer resets the pins, the Freshies—Louis and Miles—boo loudly.
“Salter,” Miles calls. He and Laurel have been together only once since Stewie Prom, hurried and drunk in her new single. “You’re up.”
Laurel glances at Eli. She can wait for more data. Better to ease off so that he doesn’t feel cornered.
“Well,” she says lightly, “I hope it’s good news,” and wonders if he’ll watch while she takes her turn.
Motherhood made her an animal. They named him Silas—in Latin, “man of the woods”—and when they brought him home, Laurel clutched the car seat, unused to having him out of her arms. Time was both rigidly scheduled and irrelevant.
She lived in the rhythm of him: his naps and feedings, his urgent needs.
Her world was sensation—pressure and suction, blood and milk—and emotion always spilling over.
She thought of how the universe was said to emerge from a single point.
Where there was nothing: now, everything.
Laurel and Eli’s new apartment had a screened-in back porch.
After the day’s humidity wore itself out, they sat there in reclining chairs: he shirtless in boxers with his hands behind his head and she in an old T-shirt with her breasts leaking, so tenderly alive.
In those early weeks, they existed in a state of radiant exhaustion, everything raw and indescribable.
Laurel’s love for Eli and Silas was a binding force.
What once felt like a dual relationship between her and the baby now became a triad.
Yet she sometimes felt enormous grief. She had traded her former life, which she loved, and to which she could not return. Clare sat with her as she wept.
“It won’t ever be the same,” said Laurel. “The way it was before.”
Clare put a hand to her cheek.
“Will it be better?” Laurel asked.
“Sometimes,” said Clare. “Most of the time.”
“But not always?”
One of the things Laurel loved about her mother was that she did not lie.
“Not always,” Clare said, “no.”
Silas lay in the crook of Laurel’s elbow. It seemed as though her arms would never be free again. Clare wrapped her own arms around Laurel, and they sat like that, in layers: Laurel holding Silas, Clare holding Laurel.
Over Hanukkah, Laurel and Eli drove to his parents’ town house in Chicago.
Laurel had met them for the first time in spring, an awkward dinner at which Eli both introduced her and announced that they were pregnant, but the Rosens doted on Silas.
Leo, a rangy mathematician, made uncharacteristically goofy faces.
Janet studied ancient texts and disapproved of baby talk; instead, she spoke to Silas in a sympathetic adult tone.
Laurel snuck into the kitchen, where takeout latkes cooled in their aluminum tray.
She crimped the edges to a close and put the toppings—applesauce and sour cream—back in the refrigerator.
Eli’s mother entered through a swinging door.
“You shouldn’t be cleaning,” she said, a fond, parental scolding that made Laurel unexpectedly emotional.
“I don’t mind the breather.”
Janet looked at her knowingly. “It’s all-consuming, isn’t it? Nothing prepares you.”
“Nothing,” Laurel said. Tears appeared without warning, as they had after her father’s death. Silas had Pete’s eyes. The fact that they could never meet was an unfillable absence.
“My advice?” Janet yanked on a pair of dishwashing gloves. “Make sure you don’t stay home longer than three months. Otherwise, you’ll never get back to your work.”
—
She did get back to her work. It was exciting—the lights of her mind turned back on, the engine humming to life—but she felt constantly divided.
There was the Rhizotron, where she had space to think and blessed silence; and there was Silas, his progress a mundane scientific miracle unfolding so much faster than her experiments.