Chapter 14 The Albatross #7
Gloria’s mouth is parted. “How did you come up with this?”
“Slowly,” says Tess.
Gloria and Tess make the next visit to Cedar alone.
The time is coming for Laurel to withdraw: she feels an urge to turn away from work, toward Silas, and she heeds it.
At eighteen months, he reminds Laurel of her grandfather Bob.
Bob remained active through his eighties, but in his final years, he receded.
At family gatherings, he took his hearing aids out.
It did not seem that he was unhappy, but that conversation no longer interested him.
If they sat outside, he closed his eyes, and his white hair danced in the breeze.
—
Laurel’s nonresistance dissolves when Silas turns one. She can only think of lasts: His last word. His last smile. The last time he’ll walk, roll over, lift his own head.
Her milk comes in. She wakes from dreams sweaty, gasping, saying aloud: “I take it back.”
Eli holds her when she comes undone in the grocery store. Every day, he tells Laurel there’s still a chance. When she needs to, she lets herself believe it: they’ll escape with their baby, held to her breast.
Silas loses his last tooth. He forgets how to wave. There is a terrible momentum, like something being pulled into a drain. Even when he is silent, Laurel hears crying—either the echo of a previous scream or her own hallucinatory forecast of the next one.
In September, Kenji Nakamura knocks on the door.
Laurel steps backward. The overtaker seems like a mythical villain, his very presence a bad omen. Silas sleeps in a sling on her chest, and she puts her arms around him, as if it is Mr. Nakamura—and not nature itself—who plans to take him away.
Mr. Nakamura gazes at Silas. “How is he?”
How little Laurel knew when Mr. Nakamura was last here. Since then, she has molted, seen miracles, lost her old coat like a sheep. She does not want to need him again.
“He’s fine,” says Laurel, snapping. She has an urge to cover Silas’s face.
“I’m here to help,” the overtaker says.
No, no. Lying. She feels deranged. Silas has entered another sleep regression, but he is sleeping now, and Laurel has turned the lights off.
“We don’t need help,” she says.
“You will,” says the overtaker.
“You can’t force us. We’ll run away.”
“Your son wouldn’t survive. He’ll need to be in your body.”
There is care in his voice, but the words go in cold as a spear. Whatever Laurel might have said dies in her throat.
“Wait.” Eli’s face looms out of the darkness. “You said there was—an instrument. Last time you were here, you said you’d met a couple, and there was a device, something they used to cross over.”
The overtaker looks at them with sorrow leavened by practice. “I don’t know any more now than I told you then.”
Eli comes to stand with Laurel and Silas. Kenji Nakamura does not seem alarmed by their reaction; to him, this must be ordinary. Laurel wonders if he visited the redheaded teenage girl from the park. He must have known hundreds of people like her. Madwomen, clinging to their bundles.
“How do we know that you’re telling the truth?” asks Eli.
“I always do,” the overtaker says, and for a moment, it seems a curse as torturous as theirs. Whatever is happening to Laurel and Eli and Silas will only happen once. The overtaker—life’s midwife, death’s witness—must watch it over and over.
“Just let me say this,” he says. “When Silas is ready, come to the cemetery. We’ll take care of you there.”
—
Laurel’s heartburn is constant. Her breasts make less milk. In the morning, she vomits her coffee.
Silas’s head softens. She can feel his heartbeat through the skull. She wants to protect him—to put him inside something.
One night, Laurel is in bed when a cramp radiates to her thighs. She girds herself, enduring it. The second is worse.
Silas sleeps strapped to her chest. Laurel hobbles to the bathroom, where Eli is taking a shower. He sees her through the glass door.
“Contractions,” she says, and gasps.
Hurrying toward her, Eli nearly slips, which could, in another universe, be funny later on—after the birth, Laurel holding the baby while Eli told the story to visitors.
She doesn’t want to let go of Silas, not for an instant, but the pain gives her no choice.
Eli unwraps the sling the way he might the dressing on a wound.
Silas is wrinkled and pink, already crying at the suddenness of this transition.
Crouched, holding herself, Laurel has a desperate thought. The overtaker said that Silas couldn’t live for long outside her body—but if she withstands the contractions, could they buy another week? A month?
Laurel opens her mouth to tell Eli, but then she looks at her son. Silas writhes with discomfort. She is the solution, the end to his suffering. And only he can end hers.
“The cemetery,” she says.
Eli puts Silas in his infant car seat. Laurel staggers out of the house in a nightgown, too animal to stop for shoes. They drive for less than two blocks. The graveyard looks tidy as ever. Even at this hour, guards helm the white building, which glows in the light of the moon.
Laurel has wondered why she often sees pregnant women on the benches.
Oval, white, the dome rests in the ground like an albatross egg on its nest.
—
Rhythm of feet. Wheels, shouting. The car door opens, and nurses transfer Laurel to a gurney.
A rapid flight through cold night air before the rush of sliding doors.
The ground beneath the stretcher turns from gravelly to smooth, the light from dark to bright: they have entered a waiting room.
Laurel hears the rattle of carts, the rustle of curtains, the ringing of pagers and phones.
Above a desk are four painted words: Newborn and Infant Clinic.
She is wheeled onto a ramp, which spirals upward. The skylight is dark at this hour, and reflective. She watches their small party: herself, on the stretcher; Eli, holding Silas; and the nurse pushing the gurney, her voice steady and warm.