Chapter 14 The Albatross #3
“Absolutely not.” After Laurel and Kwame’s article was published, word spread to the media, and they appeared on Good Morning America. “They didn’t even fly us out. The whole thing happened over Zoom.”
“No,” whispers Louis, sitting back.
“It’s true.”
Louis shakes his head sympathetically. “Didn’t even get your makeup done. What’s happened, then?”
“Eli and I have a child,” Laurel says.
He snorts. “You’re joking.”
“I wouldn’t joke about that,” she says. “It’s a boy. His name is Silas.”
“Then how come you’ve never once mentioned him?”
“He was only born two years ago. I’ll show you a picture.”
Laurel takes out her iPhone and scrolls to find her current favorite photo. Silas sits on Eli’s shoulders, picking apples. She turns the phone around for Louis.
“Oh my God.” There is something in his tone she doesn’t like, something that feels familiar. “How old is he?”
“Seven.”
Louis looks stricken. “I’m sorry.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I mean, it’s—it’s not a happy thing, is it?”
“What do you mean?” asks Laurel, flinching.
Rabbity, agitated, Louis fiddles with the zipper on his jacket. He seems to know that he’s taken the wrong tack, but he also lacks the artifice required to change course.
“Don’t you know what they call children like that? Kids who never had the chance to be grown-ups? It’s tragic,” he says. “It isn’t right…”
Laurel realizes what she recognized in his voice. It’s pity. He reminds her of the other couples in the NICU—how they stared at her and Eli, the only parents with a child-aged child.
“What are they called?” she asks. “Tell me.”
“Half-lives.” Louis looks at her despairingly.
—
In a way, she’s glad that Louis said it, no matter how awful the term. He knocked the fear back into her. Her priorities are absolute, the wager clear.
Eli was right. She’d lost her sense. They must get Silas out of here.
An hour earlier, Laurel might have been more nervous to steal a PistenBully and an air tank in broad daylight.
Now she picks a vehicle at random. As always, the key waits in the ignition.
Two divers are unloading equipment in the locker, but Laurel takes a tank of air without a second glance.
Back in the PistenBully, she reviews Eli’s instructions: the tiller, the switches, the blade functions.
She tells herself to drive slowly, lest she attract attention, but she needn’t have worried: the PistenBully isn’t designed for speed.
Soon she becomes accustomed to its rhythm.
She heads north, past Hut Point and a jagged ice tongue glacier.
Mount Erebus stands as pale and cratered as the moon.
Near Ross Island, she passes a colony of penguins.
They shuffle through the slushy ice near shore.
It strikes Laurel that the fluffy, mohawked juveniles will never lose those youthful feathers, that they grow into but not out of them, and her stomach turns as she drives on.
At Cape Evans, the sky is a bold, bright blue, the water restless periwinkle hemmed by rough black stone. The dive hut waits against a dual background. To the left is a rocky cliff; on the right is a wall of ice. They meet in the center, black and white, the dive hut laid over the join.
Laurel parks as close as she can and transfers the Pelican case. It holds her own equipment along with Silas’s safety items. In the hut, the stove is running, and a downline sits coiled in one corner.
She strips down to her undergarments. The process is now second nature. To prepare better this time, Laurel and Eli took an ice-diving course in Wisconsin. There was no dive hut on Lake Monona; instead, their instructor, Kyla, sawed a hole for every session.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said at the first class. Students milled on the ice, clutching hot cocoa. “You’re wondering if it’s too late to return that outrageously expensive dry suit. And you’re nervous, because you’re about to do something really stupid.”
While the other students laughed, Laurel looked at Eli.
She wished that this was the stupidest thing they’d be doing.
At Lake Monona, there was a warming tent, with huge coolers of hot water.
For safety, each student worked with a partner.
Eli checked Laurel’s air supply, and he held one end of the rope she carried through the water.
There’s no one to hold her rope now. Laurel feeds the downline through the hole. She takes the entropy device, waterproofed with shrink-wrap, from her backpack. Before she puts on her gloves, she clips its cord to her waist.
Delaying will only make her more fearful. In she jumps, through a glitter of bubbles.
—
She finds herself in murky turquoise water near the surface. The briny ceiling breaks apart, in places, like clouds, and the water is so cold it feels gelatinous.
To descend, Laurel exhales deeply. Her task is to repeat the path she took the first time: to the center of the basin, and then back to the hole.
She keeps one hand on Eli’s device, paranoid that the cord might detach.
Her progress is cumbersome, but she has to move quickly.
If the portal works, she’ll have to dive a second time, and she must rejoin the Astralis group by evening.
Lake Monona is emptiest in winter, but the Southern Ocean streams with life.
Laurel passes fields of bottlebrush coral and peach sea stars, their points peeling up.
A jellyfish floats by, saucer-like; kelp twists and flickers.
She sees no seals but hears their calls, which are so resonant that they seem to leave a trail.
Not far ahead is the edge of the basin. Laurel inhales to curb her descent.
The shape is familiar; she reaches out to touch the sea floor, relieved to have made it this far.
But something is different this time. As she travels deeper, plants and animals become scarce.
Even so, nothing prepares her for what she sees at the bottom.
There is no cloud of octopus ink. The base of the basin is empty, abandoned, and spiked with crystal plates.
She’s heard of this: anchor ice. Instead of freezing at the surface, colder water hardens and attaches to the bottom. The atmosphere is funereal. This, Laurel thinks, is the portal’s afterlife. For several dreadful seconds, she stops breathing.
Kyla, the ice-diving instructor, liked to use rhyming reminders. The most important one was this: Hold your breath too long and everything goes wrong.
“As you descend,” she explained, “the pressure on your lungs increases. If you don’t exhale, air can move into the blood, blocking vessels in the brain. The consequences range from paralysis to death. So make sure you’re breathing, okay?”
Laurel’s dry suit stiffens with excess air. Helplessly she rises toward the surface. Her arms begin to straighten, and she struggles to hold the device. If the suit becomes fully inflated, she could lodge under the ceiling, plastered there until her oxygen runs out.
She exhales for as long as she can. To let air out of her suit, she must release the valve on her left shoulder, but the arms are still too rigid. She inhales—just a sip—before breathing out again. As the suit deflates, she passes Eli’s device from her right hand to her left.
She fumbles with the valve on her left shoulder. Air rushes out, and she drops.
Laurel has no time to acknowledge the depth of her terror, nor to steep in relief. Though she is almost certain that the portal is gone, she still needs to confirm it.
As she travels, the hole appears larger, brighter, as if to urge her to continue.
Laurel pauses in its moonlike shaft of light.
Breathing evenly, to maintain her depth, she unwinds the rope.
Eli’s device rises like a balloon. Laurel struggles to guide it into the channel; at first, it bounces off the rim, as if in some upside-down game of basketball.
Finally, the box bobs into the dive hole and snakes toward the surface.
Eli told her to wait for five minutes. Laurel begins to count.
If heat spreads to the cold side, the device has made it to her world.
She could come up and breathe its air, if only for a moment: her universe, where neutrinos spin left and clock hands tick right, where bodies break down and people get old and disorder wins out every time.
Perhaps she loves it irrationally. Once, she pined for the antiuniverse, land of second chances.
But more and more she doesn’t know where she wants to live.
After she counts three hundred seconds, Laurel pulls the device down. Midway, it snags on the ladder, and she nearly stops breathing again. She maneuvers the rope, pulling at an angle, until the box floats free. At last, she loops the rope around her waist. She scans the screen.
U2, it reads.
At first, her reaction is matter-of-fact.
Yes, she thinks. That’s what I thought.
Laurel clips the device to her dry suit.
Then she climbs the ladder as if it were a tree, and when she pulls herself into the hut, she sees the future from that vista.
She knows that Eli will keep looking for a portal.
And she will encourage him, all the while knowing the ending. Eli will need to feel he has a choice.
Laurel places the device on the ground, removes her gloves, and walks to the stove to get warm. Only there does she hang her head forward and sob—both for Silas Two and for Silas One again.
And her heart, while fast, does not skip a beat. For the first time in weeks, it is constant.
—
The dive locker is empty. As she returns her equipment, her legs nearly buckle from exhaustion.
Laurel has fifteen minutes to get to the ice pier. She wraps her shawl around her mouth, so that only her eyes are visible, and pulls her hat down low.
Outside the locker, she stops. Several yards away is Pippa Cooke. She might have been there for minutes. She might, Laurel thinks, have seen everything.
“What are you doing?” Pippa asks.
“What are you doing?” asks Laurel.
“Taking a walk. I got bored.”