Beneath the Green

The Work of Holding

Maren found the first crack on a Tuesday, running her fingertip along the basement wall the way she always did before bed. Not a habit she’d ever named. Just something her hands did while her mind was somewhere else.

The crack was thin as a hair and cold. Colder than the concrete around it.

She pressed her palm flat against it and held it there for ten seconds, the way her mother had shown her. If you feel it push back, you come get me. You don’t try to hold it yourself.

It didn’t push back. Not then.

The refinery had been closed for three years, but the company still sent someone to check the monitoring stations once a month. That was the job Maren’s mother had done. That was the job Maren did now, though the title had changed and the pay was less and nobody from the company ever came inside the house anymore.

The stations were small concrete boxes set into the ground at intervals around the town’s perimeter. Each one held a gauge that measured pressure from below. Maren recorded the numbers in a logbook, the same logbook her mother had used, and sent photographs of each page to a P.O. box in Billings.

Nobody had ever written back.

Her mother had said that was fine. They’d write back if something was wrong.

Maren had asked how her mother would know if something was wrong before the company did.

Her mother had looked at her for a long time. You’d feel it. In your teeth first. Then in your hands.

On Wednesday the crack was wider. Not much. A credit card’s thickness. Still cold.

Maren mixed the sealant—the gray kind, not the black; her mother had been specific about that—and worked it into the seam with a putty knife. She wore gloves. She always wore gloves in the basement, though she couldn’t have said when that started or why.

The sealant dried wrong. Instead of hardening to a smooth finish, it set in ridges, almost like veins.

She mixed another batch and tried again. Same result.

She stood there for a while in the dim light, looking at the wall. Then she went upstairs and called Danny.

Danny ran the hardware store, which had been his father’s store and his grandfather’s before that. He was fifty-four and had never married and he kept the store open not because it made money but because people needed screws and sealant and someone who remembered which houses had which problems.

“The gray’s not taking,” Maren said.

Danny was quiet for a moment. She heard him shift the phone to his other ear. “How wide?”

“Credit card.”

“Is it breathing?”

She hated that word for it. But she put her hand on the wall and held it there. The cold was steady. It didn’t pulse. It didn’t expand and contract against her palm.

“No.”

“Okay. Then you hold it and you watch it. You call me if it breathes.”

“Danny.”

“Yeah?”

“My mom’s sealant. The batch she mixed. Did she use something different?”

Another long pause. Danny’s father and Maren’s mother had been the same age. They had done the monitoring together, before Danny’s father got tired and moved to Billings and left the store to his son.

“She kept her own recipe,” Danny said. “She never told me what was in it. I just know it wasn’t all sealant.”

Maren looked at the wall. The ridged, wrong surface of her failed repair.

“What else was it?”

“Maren, I don’t know. She took that with her.”

Her mother had died in the hospital in Billings, which was where people from town went to die. The doctor said it was cancer. Maren had sat in the room and held her mother’s hand and watched the monitor above the bed count down and she had thought, with a certainty she couldn’t explain, that the doctor was wrong. That the thing that had taken her mother had come from somewhere else. Somewhere lower.

She had not said this out loud. Not then. Not since.

On Thursday the crack was the width of two fingers and the cold came through Maren’s gloves and she felt it in her teeth, a low hum, like a tuning fork struck against something vast and patient.

She did not call Danny. She went to the garage and opened the cabinet where her mother had kept the monitoring supplies, and behind the logbooks and the sealant and the spare gauges she found a mason jar filled with something dark green and thick, almost like resin. The jar was cold too, even through the gloves. But it was a different cold. The cold of something sleeping rather than something waking.

There was no label. No recipe. Just her mother’s handwriting on the lid: For the holding.

Maren held the jar in both hands and felt the hum in her teeth quiet, just slightly, like a sound moving farther away.

She went back down to the basement.

The crack had grown while she was gone. Three fingers now. And she could feel—she was sure of it—a rhythm beneath the cold. Slow. Patient. The way a person breathes when they are very calm and very certain of what they will do next.

If you feel it push back, you come get me. You don’t try to hold it yourself.

Her mother was in Billings, under a stone marker that said BELOVED.

Maren opened the jar.

The dark green substance inside moved on its own, climbing the sides of the glass, reaching toward the crack in the wall. It knew where to go. It had always known.

She knelt down. She put her gloved hands against the concrete on either side of the crack and she pressed the mouth of the jar to the seam and she let the green flow out of the jar and into the dark.

It went in like water into sand. Like something returning to where it had always belonged.

The cold receded. The hum in her teeth stopped. The crack didn’t close—it was still there, wide and dark—but the breathing paused. The thing on the other side was quiet.

For now.

Maren sat back on her heels. The jar was empty. Her hands were shaking.

She would need more. She would need to learn what her mother had known, what the women in this town had known before there were monitoring stations and logbooks and a P.O. box in Billings. She would need to learn it from the walls themselves, from the cold, from the thing that pressed up from below and had always pressed up from below and would always press up from below.

She would need to learn it soon.

She put the empty jar on the shelf and closed the cabinet and went upstairs to make dinner, because she still needed to eat and the day was not over and the holding was not done.

It was never done. That was the first thing her mother should have told her and never had, maybe because she’d hoped Maren would never need to know.

The second thing—the thing about what the green was made of—Maren would learn later.

She would learn it alone, the way her mother had.

The way everyone did.