Chapter 10 Anima #5
Eli slides a pancake onto her plate. “This is a big day.”
The recipe was her father’s. Laurel savors the first bite.
“Thank you, Eli. This is the best thing to wake up to.” She pours each of them a cup of coffee. When he sits down, she says, “I’m nervous.”
“I know,” he says. “But you shouldn’t be. You’ve been working on this all summer.”
“The other Laurel has probably studied it for decades.”
“And so have you. Sure, fungi might give birth to people here, but now you know this stuff backward and forward. You’re an excellent scientist.”
She blushes at the pep talk. The weather is ideal, and Eli tells her not to think about the dishes, so she sets off on foot.
Near campus, the sidewalks are crowded, but not with the teenagers she’s used to: most students seem to be in their sixties.
Science Hall’s wheelchair-accessible entrance is at the front of the building, instead of tucked to one side.
When she enters the auditorium, an excited murmur moves through the audience.
Laurel pauses in the wings to find her bearings.
She hasn’t taught a course since graduate school.
Even then, she was assisting someone else.
These students have come for her—or, rather, they’ve come for Laurel Two.
At thirty-seven, she would be solidly mid-career, even eminent: a Gloria herself.
The hour strikes. Laurel channels Gloria’s command as she takes her place at the podium.
—
By April, the scent of lilac drifts through the air in currents.
Fall was Laurel’s favorite season at the orchard, but spring came close.
She savors the memory of full bloom, every tree in its fluffy petaled petticoat.
The abundance was brief: soon, rain swept the flowers from their branches, and the ground was spattered with wet pink confetti.
Laurel and Eli have spent almost six months in this universe, but she still hasn’t gone to see the orchard.
She is pulled toward it viscerally—the familiar, the beloved, in this place with its upside-down rules—but she is also afraid of what she’ll find.
According to property records, the orchard is owned by the same high-density buyer who bought it from the Salters in her world.
The possibility of full bloom convinces her.
Laurel asks Eli to come so that she doesn’t lose her nerve.
Her breath hitches as they drive down the road that divides the orchard in two.
There it is: the barn, though no sheep amble outside; the farmhouse, its paint colors all wrong, the porch too modern for her liking; and the trees, twice as many as there should be, but waving.
Laurel doesn’t see the owner. Still, Eli parks out of sight of the farmhouse. Upper Orchard fringes the road. Silently they walk into a line of Jonagolds.
It is not quite full bloom, but close. Laurel touches the leaves, smelling the buds, feeling the breeze in her hair. Most of the trees are flowering, though some—like the Winesaps one row over—are still bare.
“Eli,” she says. “Look.”
In her world, a pollinated flower matures into fruit. Here, the ground below the Winesaps is already studded with apples. Laurel picks one up. It is soft, and splits apart easily. Like the Winesaps she knows, the flesh is yellow, but something crucial is missing.
“It doesn’t have seeds,” she says.
Laurel looks at the branches. Where the fruit has been picked, or fallen away, a pale green cup is now exposed.
“What is that?” Eli asks.
“The ovary,” says Laurel. She moves farther into the trees.
The perfume of the orchard is heady; it is sweet with the scent of the blossoms, sweet but turning beery from the fresh and softened fruit.
Everything is red, pink, white, green, cream.
She feels Eli’s presence, hushed as they are, trying not to be seen.
He waves her over to the Braeburns. In this variety, flowers have already grown from the ovaries.
Laurel prods a stand of petals open with her finger.
The ovary is sticky with nectar. Bees loop from flower to flower, their hind legs furred with yellow dust. Absorbed like spores by a mushroom, the pollen will act as a fountain of youth.
Some of the flowers, sufficiently full, have already closed in tight pink fists.
“Where does the pollen come from?” Eli asks.
The ground is strewn with the same yellow dust. Laurel suspects that this was purchased in bulk: the powder is dull in color, and there’s much more of it than she assumes could occur naturally.
She walks to the neighboring property. The landscape is wilder here, with tall grasses and native prairie plants: bear’s-grape, poppy mallow, trillium.
Interspersed among the older plants are sprouts. Vibrant yellow puffballs wobble on their tiny stems. When Laurel kneels, she accidentally jostles one. It sways before collapsing in a shower of pollen.
She tries to hold it in her mind: the seed that composes in soil; the plant that grows into adulthood; the seedless fruit that emerges, and, when picked, exposes the ovary.
The animals that bring pollen; the petals that turn into buds; the plant, immaturing to a sprout; the particulate crown.
The fresh pollen falling, to be retrieved by butterflies, hummingbirds, bees. And the cycle beginning again.
—
There are things she chooses not to know. If human life begins in the ground, then how—and where—does it end?
For once, she refuses to find out. They’ll spirit Silas back before that happens.
Still, there are glimpses. Maisie’s daughter Hazel turns seven on Halloween. On the morning of the party, Maisie calls to ask if Laurel can come early.
Maisie lives outside of town, in a cabin-style house with acres of land. Ghost-shaped balloons bob on the porch. Maisie weaves through picnic tables, setting out bags of candy corn.
“Oh, thank God, you’re here,” she says. “Hazel won’t get ready. Maybe you can encourage her.”
Laurel says hello to Noah and Frankie, four, who is stirring cat food and crayons in a water bowl (“Cooking,” Noah says). She finds Hazel in her room.
“Hi, sweetheart,” says Laurel. “Is it okay if I come in?”
Hazel nods. She’s cross-legged on the bed, her face paint smeared.
Laurel takes a seat beside her. “I hear you aren’t in a birthday mood.”
“Don’t like them,” says Hazel.
“Why not?”
Amid a fiefdom of stuffed animals, Hazel shrugs.
“Can I see your party dress?” asks Laurel.
Hazel juts her chin at a deflated nest of black and purple netting. “It’s ugly.”
“Well, maybe we can find some party pants.” Laurel lifts a pair of velvet leggings. “These are nice.”
“They don’t fit anymore. They’re too big.”
The phrase is innocuous enough in Laurel’s universe, but she’s rattled by what it implies here. Hazel picks at a thread on her pajama pants.
“You know what?” says Laurel. “It’s your birthday, and that means you’re the queen. You can stay in your pajamas, if you want. We can even call off the party.”
Hazel’s relief is obvious. “Can we really?”
Laurel and Maisie call the other parents. Only Eli joins them. Noah serves punch from a cauldron, and Maisie mummifies veggie dogs with strips of puff pastry. Hazel, who wears a witch’s hat with her pajamas, asks Laurel to push her on the tire swing. Frankie razes the party table of candy corn.
“She used to have brains,” says Hazel, watching. “She acts so stupid now.”
“That’s not very nice,” Laurel says.
Nori, the black-and-white cat, trots over from the porch. Frankie trails behind with a fist of candy corn. She wears an uncertain expression.
“What’s he called?” Frankie asks.
“You know what he’s called,” says Laurel.
Two months earlier, she and Eli came to Maisie’s house for New Year’s. Frankie spent the evening following Nori, shouting his name.
But now she starts to cry.
“Told you,” says Hazel.
Maisie runs over from the picnic table. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing,” Laurel says. “Frankie forgot Nori’s name.”
But she knows it isn’t nothing. The look on Frankie’s face reminds her of Eli’s grandfather. Samuel Rosen had been an engineer before he was diagnosed with dementia. By the time Laurel met him, he didn’t recognize his relatives.
Noah brings Frankie to her bedroom with an iPad. Eli pushes Hazel on the swing. Maisie pulls Laurel into the kitchen, where she begins to weep.
“Oh, Maisie,” Laurel says. She opens her arms, and Maisie folds into them.
“I’m thinking of how it was in the beginning,” Maisie says, “when they took care of us. I tell myself that this doesn’t have to feel like a funeral, that every stage of life is worth celebrating, but how can we just stand there and watch?”
Was Maisie carried to Hazel or Frankie’s door, as Helen was brought to Beth’s? Laurel can avoid the truth no longer: Frankie and Hazel are becoming smaller children.
“There was one time,” Maisie continues, “when I was very old…Hazel would have been in her fifties; and I was crying about something I wanted, something I couldn’t articulate.
It was an awful feeling. You remember—how hard everything felt back then?
Your mind is constantly foggy, and your body’s held together with tape.
I mean, with the cataracts, I could barely see!
And Hazel was so patient. No wonder she was the one to keep us at home.
Frankie had her limitations, and she was a wild child, always touring with the band; I don’t think she even had a permanent address.
At the time, I was hurt, but when your own parents are born, you see how hard it is to be a caretaker.
Look at Clare, for example: you knew that she’d be better off at Progress. ”
Not far from Laurel’s house is a building that reads Progress Senior Living.
“I put her in a nursing home,” says Laurel, piecing it together as she speaks.
“I don’t blame you,” says Maisie quickly. “Not at all. I only meant that’s why I coddle Hazel now. She asked for this party, I swear. I don’t know why she changed her mind.”
Laurel rubs Maisie’s back in circles. “You’re doing the best job anyone could.”