Chapter 7 Bottomlands #7
“Louis,” she croaks.
“I know,” Louis says. “That was the worst part. Shall I stop?”
Laurel shakes her head.
“My father moved us back to Arizona. Once, I heard him tell my aunt that Mum’s death was his fault.
I could have been nicer to him, but I wasn’t.
Hating him was easier than being angry at Mum.
And I was. He sent me to a boarding school for teenagers with problems. I was a terror, to be fair,” Louis says. “I kept running away.”
“Those places seem brutal,” Laurel rasps. She’s heard of young people woken in bed and carted out of the house in handcuffs.
“Some are. That’s probably what my father had in mind.
But the strangest thing happened: I actually liked it there.
I’m not saying it was cushy. In the beginning, we had to live outside for three months.
No phones—I couldn’t have called home if I’d wanted to—and no toilets, either; we carried our shit in a box.
But everything was simpler. In the morning, we hiked, and in the afternoon, we set up tents.
People had always gone on about nature, and now I understood what they meant.
“The rec room on campus had board games, like Sorry! and mancala. One day, a boy asked me to play. His name was Zachary. He liked to draw with ballpoint pens and listen to jazz. Music was contraband, so he hid his Discman in a ceiling panel,” Louis says.
“I didn’t know if he liked boys, but I did know there were rules.
No fraternizing—instant offense! Nothing happened until our senior year, when we got to go camping in the Grand Canyon.
One night, I couldn’t sleep, so I used a stick to scratch on his tent.
I saw his shadow sit up. I saw him see me through the mesh.
“We pretended we were dinosaurs. Then aliens—like kids. I can’t remember who kissed who. It didn’t matter. It was bliss.”
Laurel can tell that Louis is becoming tired. He pauses between sentences, and his hands shake under her arms.
“It was really fucking stupid. That’s my problem.
I don’t think. It was almost graduation; I should have waited two more weeks.
They would have kicked us both out, so I said it was my fault.
Zachary was smart: he’d gotten into college, and I hadn’t even applied,” says Louis.
“My father was furious. He let me move home under one condition: I had to leave by the end of the summer. Zachary wanted to be together, but I knew I’d only hold him back.
I worked at Blockbuster, and met men online, and one of them worked at McMurdo. ”
Laurel tries to respond, but her vision blurs, and she grips his arm to keep from falling. As they enter the dorm, her knees buckle. Louis steers her toward his room instead of hers.
“It’s not good, what happens next,” he says. “But it won’t last forever.”
Laurel has never had the screaming barfies so badly before. She vomits into a trash can. The pain is as brutal as the nausea. Braced on the floor, she writhes. It feels as though there’s something that she must get up and out of her.
When it’s over, Louis wipes her face with a washcloth. He wraps her in blankets as she stares out of the window. Outside, light moves in the sky like liquid. It’s the first time that Laurel has seen the aurora.
They fall asleep holding each other—not accidentally, as they did in the quinzee, but outright.
In the morning, Laurel takes a shower so hot it stings, and then she walks to the supply closet.
There are no cleaning services at McMurdo, so chores are divvied up and rotated.
Today is her turn for house mouse duties.
Laurel scrubs the sinks and buffs the mirrors to a shine.
She feels raw and somehow new, as though her body has molted.
When she finishes the common areas, she brings the supplies to Louis’s room.
She mops the floor and washes the trash can, careful not to wake him.
When she leaves, he’s tousle-haired in sheets, like one of Caravaggio’s angels.
—
On September 1, the sun returns for less than an hour.
The station celebrates. Some people run out to meet the first bus; others hide at Southern Exposure, grumbling about the new arrivals.
After six months of frozen food, Laurel nearly cries to eat an apple.
There are no longer enough dorm rooms for everyone to have a single, so she moves back in with Nita.
Sam arrives at the end of the month, her skateboard under one arm.
Charlie is returning to Wisconsin. They hug on the ice, swaying.
“What will I do without you here?” asks Laurel.
“What will I do in Wisconsin?” Charlie counters. “I don’t want to go back to real life.”
“Maybe real life will change,” Laurel says. “I think it might, if you keep drawing.”
She finds one of Charlie’s sketches on her pillow. Pressing it to her chest, Laurel wonders whether she was a fool for not taking the same flight home. She struggles to conjure the confidence she used to feel about the basin. Every day, she checks her email, but Gloria hasn’t responded.
On October 1, there are more than sixteen hours of sunlight. Louis, pied piper, leads the new stewards to Gallagher’s. Laurel hides out in the lounge, playing Solitaire. She finds the background strangely calming: it’s still the golf course green that she remembers from the nineties.
At midnight, Laurel yawns. She decides to refresh Gmail before she goes to bed. While it loads, she plays another game. She navigates back to the browser to find one unread email.
Laurel,
Please forgive my delay. Months ago, I received your email. I waited until now to respond for reasons I hope I can explain.
Something very strange happened when I saw your links. I was alone at my desk, with Cygnus sleeping nearby, and I began to weep. At the time, I couldn’t understand my reaction. Later I realized that it stemmed from something that happened over sixty years ago.
You know I lost my parents at the age of sixteen. What I haven’t shared is that their bodies were never found. The car had fallen down the hill, but my parents weren’t inside it. Technically, they were only ever missing.
Your message retrieved a detail I had nearly left behind.
You might recall that my parents drove to Yosemite after a farmer saw green light in the sky.
Your Arc reminded me of what he described: light that was close to the ground.
It didn’t sound like the aurora. I told my parents that he must have made it up.
Everyone assumed my parents had died, so I did, too. I thought: What else could have happened to them?
What else could have happened to them?
Go.