Chapter 13 Sparks #4
“Do you remember what you said while we drove home from Cedar?” she asks.
“That Silas’s lungs had composed a little too well?”
“No.” Laurel works up her courage. “That we were going to have to talk about what happened eventually.”
“Oh.”
She watches him carve the mango into squares. It would be easier to reverse course, but three months have passed since the night they slept together. Laurel owes him this much.
“The thing is,” she says, “that I worked so hard to feel nothing for you.”
Eli keeps his eyes on the cutting board, but his head tilts slightly toward her, as an animal lifts an ear to listen.
“I didn’t think I had a choice,” she says. “The past three years—living together, waiting for him—it would have been…”
“Impossible otherwise,” says Eli.
She nods. “When you’ve been training yourself that way, for self-protection—and out of fear of what could happen, fear of what already happened—when you’ve been doing that for years, it’s very hard to…”
Eli sets down the knife. “I know.”
“So it wasn’t that I didn’t—or that I don’t…”
Laurel is coming to tears.
“You’re the only person I have—really have—in this world,” she says. “I can’t lose you again.”
“You could find someone else,” says Eli.
Laurel shakes her head. This is not what she wants to hear, but she can’t blame him. To Eli, her uncertainty must have felt like rejection.
“Maybe,” she says. “But I couldn’t find you.”
Eli gestures to Ghost Particle. His double gazes out from the back cover.
“As it turns out,” he says, “you can.”
She smiles. “Well, that one is taken.”
Eli peels the mango back and tugs the first square with his teeth.
“Can I have some?” Laurel asks.
She rises onto the balls of her feet to kiss him. The mango is still in his mouth. He pushes it into hers: firm but softening, warm from his body.
“Let’s go slow,” he says.
That evening, they walk through the neighborhood with Silas. At the cemetery, they see Mr. Nakamura, who waves. On the way home, Laurel takes Eli’s hand. And swings it as he grins.
“I love you,” Laurel says.
“I love you, too,” he says. “Again.”
—
Some people reacted to Silas’s birth with discomfort. When Laurel and Eli told Janet Rosen, she gasped, a hand flying to her mouth. One of Laurel’s colleagues sent the name of a grief therapist. But Clare has taken delight in Silas since the first time she saw him.
“Oh, honey,” she told Laurel. “He’s absolutely perfect.”
At daycare, Silas is the youngest newborn by several decades. Sometimes Clare joins Laurel to pick him up. Everyone else has come to retrieve their parents, not their children. Once, Laurel and Clare arrive behind two middle-aged women.
“Have you seen the little boy?” says one. “I think his name is Steven.”
“Tragic,” says the other. “I hate to say it, but I look at the mother, putting on this brave face, and I think: Thank God that isn’t me.”
Laurel fumes as a staffer wheels Silas to the door. On his cheek is a butterfly, the result of a face-painting activity. Seeing Laurel and Clare, he waves madly.
“Excuse us,” says Clare. She stalks forward to envelop Silas (“There’s our beautiful boy!”) before she turns back toward the women.
“You might consider minding your own business,” she adds, driving the wheelchair between them.
At six months, Silas can stand on his own. By March, he teeters from Eli’s arms to Laurel’s. He understands questions: Where is your nose? Let’s get your sweater. Do you want to take a bath? When Laurel asks him to get his favorite book—Hats, Hats, Hats—he looks through the shelf until he finds it.
His passion is for containers: putting things into them, taking things out of them. He giggles as they pull him in a laundry basket. When Laurel puts on Raffi, a rising star in children’s music, Silas shimmies.
Every week, he becomes a little more himself.
Laurel feels guilty for thinking this way.
Silas Two has always been himself; the person she hopes he is becoming is Silas One.
Sometimes she scans his face for hints that he is more than what—or who—he seems. She longs for the son she knew to look out of his eyes, like an actor breaking the fourth wall.
His first word—light—is the same, but this time, he points to an iPhone flashlight instead of a lamp. He builds a small library of words, tended lovingly through repetition. One can foster an entire conversation.
“Tree,” he might say, pointing.
“Tree,” says Laurel, confirming.
“Tree,” says Silas, contemplating.
“Tree,” says Laurel, touching.
“Tree,” says Silas, touching.
“Tree,” says Laurel, staying with him.
They spend Christmas at Maisie and Noah’s with Clare.
A popcorn garland hangs from the mantel, and Nori wears a collar with a bell.
Silas has transitioned from his wheelchair to a walker, but that night, he refuses to use it.
He staggers into the living room, arms outstretched, and collides with the tree.
(“Sorry,” Eli says, retrieving a fallen ornament.
“We call this the zombie apocalypse.”) Laurel brings their contributions to the kitchen: roasted vegetables, rosemary rolls, and a pot of indecent Swedish glogg.
It has three kinds of alcohol and twice as many spices, as well as almonds, raisins, and an entire cup of sugar.
Maisie stands at the stovetop, stirring citrus and cloves in water: the O’Briens’ Christmas scent. She puts the spoon down to hug Laurel. “Hi, you.”
“I’ve missed this,” says Laurel, inhaling. Maisie’s parents were the only people she knew who cooked something you couldn’t eat. In kindergarten, Laurel and Maisie used a fork to surface a shriveled orange, which smelled much better than it tasted.
Maisie holds Frankie on one hip. She is now under two, three years younger than she was when Laurel met her.
Her vocabulary is shrinking: juice, more, bye-bye.
Maisie and Noah have joined a support group for parents of toddlers.
They seem determined to find joy in small quantities.
A homemade b?che de Noel waits in the refrigerator, and the tree is crowded with presents.
By the time they finish dinner—and with it Laurel’s glogg—Silas isn’t the only one doing the zombie apocalypse.
The adults sober up while playing charades, and the children watch a movie in the den.
Frankie falls asleep before it’s over, but Hazel and Silas whisper as they come upstairs.
“We want to sleep next to the tree,” Hazel says.
“Please?” asks Silas.
“He’s welcome to stay over,” says Maisie.
Laurel looks at Eli, who shrugs affably.
“You wouldn’t mind?” she asks Maisie and Noah.
“Not at all,” says Noah. “Come back in the morning for bread pudding.”
Maisie brings pillows and blankets downstairs. Laurel puts her outerwear on slowly, in case Silas changes his mind—they’ve never spent a night apart before—but after she kisses him, he chases after Hazel.
Laurel and Eli drive home in the snow.
“First sleepover,” she says.
“First sleepover,” says Eli, putting his hand over hers.
At home, he turns on lights while Laurel removes her coat and shoes. Thanks to an overactive furnace, the house is warm, so she takes her tights off, too. She enters the living room in her skirt and blouse. Eli sits on the sofa.
“Come here,” he says.
The house is quiet without Silas. Laurel and Eli have begun to share the bedroom, but they haven’t slept together since the night he was born.
Eli puts his hand on her thigh. Then he moves it underneath, between her legs, and finds the warm pink base that is already wet.
He holds his palm there before he enters with one finger, two, making a noise of release as he does so, as if finding something he’s been searching for.
At the end, she threads her arms through his, bringing him closer.
The next morning, Laurel curls around him in bed. “I’m happy.”
“Me, too.” Eli rubs tiny circles on her back. “Laurel…”
She cranes her head to meet his eyes.
“I think we should go to Antarctica,” he says.
Laurel sighs. Eli has raised the idea before, and she has always pushed back.
Three years ago, the Arc faded from view.
What was unusual was not its disappearance but the fact that it never returned.
The departure sparked a flurry of media interest, as well as a podcast, but interest subsided in the years that followed.
By now, the story reemerges every so often, usually in speculative articles or even more speculative Reddit posts.
“It feels like a fool’s errand,” Laurel says.
“It’s the only lead we have. There’s a chance that the portal still exists. Even if it doesn’t, we could collect data.”
“But we can’t bring Silas. McMurdo doesn’t allow children.”
“No,” agrees Eli. “But cruises do.”
He takes his phone from the bedside table and opens a browser window. On screen is a rotating slide show of images: a white ship, a whale’s tail, servers holding trays of champagne. Below that is a banner: Heroic Expeditions. A tag line reads, Become an Explorer.
“Cruises are for tourists,” says Laurel. “And they probably don’t go to Cape Evans.”
Eli taps on a package called Premium Explorer. “This one does. The ship actually docks for two days at McMurdo. One of us could stay with Silas while the other visits the portal. If it seems to be working, we’d take Silas through together.”
Laurel scans the itinerary, which begins at the tip of Argentina.
The ship will navigate the tumultuous Drake Passage—a bottleneck where the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans meet—on the way to the Antarctic Peninsula.
After docking at McMurdo, it reverses direction to steer toward New Zealand.
“Eli, this costs thirty thousand dollars—for one person,” she says.
“Most cruises only go as far as the Antarctic Peninsula. It takes longer to get all the way to McMurdo. It’s obscene, I know,” says Eli. “But we have the money.”
“That money isn’t ours. It’s theirs.”