Chapter 8 The Basin #2
Eli emerged from the water, panting, nightmarish. From the highway Laurel heard sirens. An emergency vehicle sped over the dunes, spewing sand.
Are you the mother? A female medic crouched. She asked what Laurel had seen in order to direct the rescue swimmer. When Laurel responded, her speech was slurred.
The medic, to Eli: She’s probably dehydrated, maybe hypothermic. How long was she in the water?
Eli looked at Laurel. She could not say. It had felt like seconds, like years.
To Eli, she said, Don’t let them take me. She was the only one who had seen Silas—they needed her—but Eli watched the medic speak into a radio.
There was a thunderous beating of wings. A helicopter landed with the dreadful splendor of an alien spacecraft. Laurel was carried, loaded, strapped.
—
In a hospital bed, she drifted through agonized fog. At some point, Eli arrived. She knew by his face that no one had found Silas.
—
They sat in the living room of the rental with two police officers. The younger man said undertow, wind speed. “In water like this,” he said, “I have to tell you: what goes under might not come back up.”
The older officer leaned forward. He walked with a limp.
“A case like this is what we call a Critical Missing,” he said. “We won’t give up on your son.”
Eli stood to show them out. Laurel could not move. Her inertia was a dam to keep the future back: anything she did or said would carry her from Silas even further.
The younger officer followed Eli, but the older one stayed with Laurel. His eyes were blue. The depth of their compassion pained her.
“I lost a child,” he said. “People will tell you not to blame yourself. That’s good advice, but you’ll do it anyway. So I’m going to say something different: don’t abandon yourself.” The officer pointed to her sternum. “To get through this, you need her.”
—
Every object lanced: Silas’s goggles and toothbrush, his copy of A Wrinkle in Time.
Clare drove to Cedar with the Rosens. Her face was a mask of pathos, but Eli’s parents couldn’t look at Laurel.
Laurel did not want to hold a memorial, not unless she could be sure that Silas was gone.
In some ways, it was worse not to know. She had not previously understood the need for a burial, the idea of bringing someone home, but uncertainty kept the wound open.
Silas was lost in both ways of the word.
She had dreams in which some incorporeal version of him drifted past chimneys and over fields, a silvery cloudlike substance moving away from her.
She took long, rambling walks through the neighborhood cemetery, loath to be home.
Sometimes she passed another mother; her son had been killed in a school shooting.
Laurel had seen the woman on television, begging fruitlessly for a change to Wisconsin’s gun laws.
Though Laurel ached for her, she could not help but wish that she could visit Silas, too.
It was the most impoverished form of envy, a scrap so paltry: in lieu of her child, a way to be near her child’s body.
By fall, Eli insisted on a service. Laurel would have held it at the orchard, if the orchard were still theirs. Instead, they chose the arboretum.
A small group stood in a circle, holding hands: their families, Gloria, Maisie and Noah. Eli read from the letter that Albert Einstein had written to the family of Michele Besso, a close friend, after Besso’s death.
“ ‘Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.’ ” The paper shook as he held it. “ ‘That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ ”
—
Certain friends stopped calling. In the lab, or the grocery store, acquaintances looked away.
Laurel knew what they were thinking: she had done the most blasphemous thing a woman could.
She should have known that she couldn’t stop being a mother, not even for five minutes.
And what could she say? It was my fault, all mine.
It was human error. It was monstrous. I’ll never forgive myself, never—and how could the gawking faces, the invasive curiosity and smug sense of exemption (I wouldn’t have taken my eyes off him), compare, in the end, with the contempt in which she held herself?
Of course they believed it couldn’t happen to them, that they were incapable of such miscalculation. So had she.
Maisie visited frequently. Often the curtains were closed, the house dim. After the memorial, Laurel couldn’t meet her gaze.
“Look at me,” whispered Maisie. Gently she touched Laurel’s chin.
Laurel lifted her eyes. She felt as though she were laying them in Maisie’s hands.
“We’ve all done it,” Maisie said. “Forgotten to turn off a burner. Left the kid in the car. What happened this time was one in a million. That’s the injustice of it.”
The pain changed, but it never lessened. On some days, Laurel wanted to undo herself, not to take her life but to cut it out—to never have been. On others, she operated in a dull workmanlike state, though this was interrupted by flashes of Silas, bright and dangerous as lightning.
—
Language was insufficient. What did it mean to apologize?
(She did apologize, over and over, until Eli told her to stop, that it was okay, words that also meant nothing.) She knew it was only his love that kept him from turning on her, and sometimes she wished he would, for she could see the effort it took to resist. Occasionally she caught him staring at her from across the room, as if he were trying to square everything he knew of her with what had happened at the beach.
She couldn’t blame him. She wondered which was the real her, the true her: the person she had been until that moment—devoted, even self-sacrificing—or the woman who had left her child for such a small and selfish pleasure, for desire itself. It did not seem possible that she was both.
Perhaps it would have been different had they been together when they lost Silas, if the mistake had been shared, but instead, there was a schism: he felt one thing, she another, and they followed these separate feelings into basements of the mind.
At one point, Eli began to sleep in Silas’s room.
He said that Laurel’s snoring kept him awake.
She thought, but did not say, that he had never had to leave before.
In January, Eli attended a conference out of state.
Laurel called in sick to work. She spent most of her time asleep on the couch, startling when the postman pushed something through the mail slot.
Every so often, she remembered to eat. At points, the air in the house became so stale that even she noticed, and she went for a walk, but always at night, so that she didn’t have to speak to anyone.
On the day before Eli’s return, the doorbell rang. It took the form of a chime in her dream. Laurel ignored the sound, but it persisted. She hauled herself up.
Her mother trembled on the porch.
“You can’t do that,” Clare said. “I’ve been calling.”
“I turned my phone off,” said Laurel.
“What if Eli needs you?”
“He doesn’t.”
In her mother’s gaze, she saw her own condition. Laurel hadn’t showered or changed her clothes. She understood that there was a smell.
“Please,” said Clare. “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll run you a bath.”
Laurel followed. Clare knelt to test the water with her hand. Then she stepped outside, to let Laurel change. Minutes later, when Clare knocked, Laurel still hadn’t undressed. She felt attached to what she was wearing, a many-layered shell.
“May I?” asked her mother.
Laurel nodded. Clare peeled off each item: the sweatshirt, the long-sleeve, the tank.
She sent these down the laundry chute, along with Laurel’s sweatpants, underwear, and socks.
Laurel whimpered with embarrassment, but she also felt relieved.
She had been so exposed, so humiliated and debased, by what she’d done.
Nudity could not be as revealing as that.
The water steamed invitingly. Clare murmured as she slid a bar of soap over Laurel’s skin. Laurel cried, high-pitched, forced out. It was astonishing that she could do nothing to make her mother stop loving her.
Eli’s parents drove to Madison on what would have been Silas’s birthday.
The atmosphere was grim, and Laurel regretted that she and Eli weren’t alone.
Before the Rosens left, they paused at the door in a triangle, Janet and Leo holding Eli by the shoulders.
Laurel looked on from the kitchen. She felt loose, wounded, dangerous.
“They barely talk to me,” she said, when Eli returned.
He began to load the dishwasher. Eli often visited his parents alone. Laurel did not know what was said on those trips, what he admitted or whether he defended her.
“It’s like they think I’m not in hell,” she pressed, “like I did it on purpose,” and Eli winced, his arms slack, the dishwasher dropping open.
Quietly he said, “I’m tired of having to tell you it wasn’t your fault.”
The world cleaved in half again, or perhaps it was that Eli had put it back together honestly, and exactly the way she had feared. Laurel did not cry. She felt the eager pull of destruction, as fire consumes what it can.
“You think it was,” she said.
He lifted a palm. It said everything.
“It was an accident,” he told her, firmly as ever. “But you were the one watching him.”
Antarctica’s Polar Day will begin on October 10.
For three months afterward, the sun won’t sink below the horizon.
Laurel and Eli plan to dive on the seventh: they want to have darkness for cover while leaving the station.
On the sixth, though, winds surge to the coast with the speed of a hurricane. The sound is a sorcery.
At galley rally, Jules says, “Absolutely no one is going outside today.”
Sweat collects beneath Laurel’s baseball cap. She can see no more than several feet beyond the window. The storm continues on the seventh, with just as little visibility. She finds Eli on his way into a meeting.