Chapter 10 Anima #2
They made plans to meet for lunch at a café (“Your favorite,” said Clare).
As she approached the blue-and-white awning, Laurel’s stomach plummeted.
What mother wouldn’t know her own daughter?
But when she entered the café, it was Laurel who found herself fooled.
The other Clare wore her hair in a familiar braid; her posture was characteristically straight; and her face held all the careful warmth of the Clare she’d always known.
Laurel could not believe that this woman was not her mother.
She sank into Clare’s arms. Clare rubbed her back as she cried.
“I know,” Clare said. “It’s been a long time.”
Even the parallels between universes were disorienting.
Breakfast still came before dinner, even though the dinner of September 7 preceded breakfast on the sixth.
The intervening sleep felt exactly the same as one in which time flowed forward.
It was possible to see that they were moving backward only on a larger scale.
In anticipation of the 2016 election, yard signs began to appear throughout the neighborhood.
Most supported Barack Obama, who promised to restore hope after a second Trump presidency and the wreckage of Covid-19.
They could at least chart time by the natural world. As September moved toward August, the weather became warmer. Animals picked at caved-in pumpkins on the side of the street, and maple leaves reeled from red to green.
—
The man in the dark coat returns to Beth’s house several days later. This time, an ambulance follows, and paramedics carry someone indoors on a stretcher. Beth stands on the porch with her palm to her mouth. One year ago, in another universe, Laurel brought apples over before leaving for McMurdo.
In the following weeks, medical professionals arrive frequently, all of them wearing black scrubs. Other visitors come with food or flowers. Laurel’s curiosity escalates. At the end of August, she makes an apple crumble and knocks on the door herself.
“Oh, Laurel,” says Beth, “it’s you.” She’s barefoot in a linen dress, her orangeish hair clipped back. “I’m so sorry I haven’t come by; you’ll have to tell me all about Antarctica. It’s just that—well, I’m sure you’ve guessed. My mother was born.”
Laurel nearly drops the apple crumble. Beth ushers her inside, Laurel following hastily and certain that she can’t have heard right.
Like Beth One, Beth Two must be an art teacher: an easel stands in the living room, and charcoal drawings line the hallway.
In the kitchen, Laurel sets her crumble beside a Tupperware of pasta salad.
Beth plates two pieces, thanking her, and leads Laurel to the garden.
“We’ll have to keep our voices down,” Beth says. “She’s sleeping—but would you like to see her?”
Laurel nods. She has the sense of standing on a cliff, and peering over.
Beth sets their plates on a small outdoor table. Facing the garden is a bedroom. The French doors stand open, and a light breeze moves between spaces.
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.
The building’s round white stone makes it seem out of time.
It is unlike the boxy, concrete older houses, as well as the newer-looking wooden ones.
Benches have been placed not on the grass but within the paths themselves.
Initially, this struck Laurel as odd. Now she remembers the security guard’s rebuke when she strayed from the walkways herself.
A young, pregnant couple sits on the nearest bench, so Laurel walks to the next one. It faces away from the guards, toward the margins of the cemetery. She looks out at the tombstones. All are equal in size, without religious symbols or text.
Laurel kneels to examine the nearest one. A twig jabs into her shin. She tries to brush it aside, but the twig doesn’t move.
She glances over her shoulder at the guards. One is talking to a visitor; the other is eating a sandwich. Laurel turns back to the tombstone. She sweeps away dirt to reveal something smooth: not a twig, after all, but a wire.
An aggressive beeping sounds from the white building. Laurel rocks back to her feet, pulse speeding, and looks at the entrance again. Someone stands at the door: an employee, judging by his black scrubs and coat. The man hands his keycard to the guards in confusion.
Laurel kneels over the tombstone again, working quickly. Her fingers find a latticework of other wires, fine as rhizomorphs.
They converge at a small screen. At her touch, it powers on.
She expects the screen to solve the mystery of the blank tombstones. It might display identifying information, or even an obituary. Instead, Laurel finds something more baffling: an electrical readout.
The readout measures watts—total power—over the course of each day.
Laurel’s mind goes first to fungi: based on the placement of the wires, the source seems to be underground.
But the signal doesn’t look like one she’s ever seen.
In fungi, electricity spikes slowly. These peaks are much more frequent.
The strength is more powerful, too: almost one hundred watts, more than a thousand times what she would expect for even a large fungal body.
—
In her universe, Laurel could bike to campus in no more than fifteen minutes.
This trip takes double the time: the campus population is unusually geriatric.
At crosswalks, people ambulate slowly with the aid of canes or walkers.
Laurel wonders whether she and Eli arrived during a spate of class reunions.