He begins to skip shaving in the morning and wears the same pants three days in a row. He leaves the house so late on some mornings that Madeleine knows he will miss his train. There is nothing she can do, she tells herself, except trust. He has come this far in his life without her. He is more of an adult than anyone else she knows. Men, of course, go through transitions and investigations like anyone else. This is normal, healthy. No one is—or should be—completely stagnant and predictable, year after year. This will prove a brief episode, she assures herself. At worst, a midlife crisis.
She goes about her own concerns: choosing paint for the nursery, a runner for the upstairs hall. She prepares a macaroni-and-cheese casserole for her first book club meeting. The invitation had come from a neighbor named Rosalie Warren, who’d swooped in the wake of their moving van with a tray of lemon bars. Her army of children is impossible to ignore, patrolling Whistle Hill Road on bikes and scooters, peering into the windows of parked cars.
Madeleine pulls on a white eyelet maternity dress and carries the casserole the half mile to Rosalie’s house. Arms aching, she shuffles up to the brick facade with an oval window like a third eye above the door. Flowering shrubs flank the walkway, and on the front step a shoe brush grows from a stone hedgehog’s back. Feeling watched, she rubs the soles of her sandals over it.
Inside, women mingle in shades of melon and chartreuse. The furniture is permanent-looking: a vast coffee table of distressed wood, armchairs of cream-colored linen. Madeleine’s tub of macaroni sits on the buffet like a fat girl among asparagus wraps. The women gather on tufted dining chairs and discuss the book selection, In the Path of Poseidon, a memoir of a man who sailed around the world with his family. They dive right in. The author was reckless, they agree, to endanger his wife and children in this way. They could have been killed.
Madeleine listens, nodding when appropriate. She thinks of David, surely home already, huddled in the woods. A flare of something like dread goes through her body. She is uncomfortable in her chair, unable to cross her legs, forced to squeeze them together. She curses herself for wearing such a short dress. The women volley their opinions around her. Within half an hour, the conversation has devolved into a lament about the economy, worry that husbands will be laid off, that home renovations will have to wait. The book is not mentioned again.
After the meeting, Madeleine walks home. Some of the women drive past, their headlights illuminating the macaroni tub in her arms, still nearly full. Her next-door neighbor Suzanne—whom she has just met—rolls slowly alongside in a Range Rover like an abductor, but Madeleine politely tells her she prefers to walk. It is good to do this, she thinks, to breathe the night air, absorb her new habitat. As Suzanne’s engine dies out, the only sound remaining is that of her own sandal steps. The darkening sky is the color of the open sea, bare and boatless. All around, windows smolder with lamplight. The seafaring author is indoors somewhere with his family now, sheltered in some American home, perhaps looking out a window at this same nautical sky, pining for the sway and jostle of water beneath him.
She finds David on the couch, barefoot, eating ice cream. He smiles as she comes in the door, as if he has been waiting for her.
“It’s the end of an era,” he says, holding up his bowl. “I’m done with work.”
Madeleine puts the casserole on the console table. “What do you mean?”
David sucks on his spoon. “I mean I’m not going back.”
She steps into the living room. “You didn’t quit.”
“No, not exactly.” He crosses his legs, exposing overgrown toenails, curled and yellow as claws. “They asked me to leave.”
“You were fired?”
“I would have left anyway.”
Madeleine feels an immediate numbness in her face, as if the blood is blockaded in her veins. She drops onto the large leather easy chair, newly purchased for a thousand dollars.
“I can’t use the computer anymore,” David says simply. “The sound is awful, and it gives off a toxic emanation. I know I’ve been sensitive lately, but I can’t even sit at my desk when it’s on.”
Madeleine stares at him, at the ice cream bowl in his hand, the simian feet. “David, this was never a problem before.”
He shrugs.
Madeleine leans forward, grips the arms of the chair. Controlling her breath, she says, “What are you telling me? You’re telling me they fired you.”
David looks away, giving her his profile. He seems to be playing some memory in his mind. There is an unnerving little smile on his lips. A long moment extends, a bloated silence, and Madeleine realizes she has been holding her breath. She lets out a slow wheeze.
“How are we going to pay the mortgage?” she says softly.
“I have a plan.” He glances at her with a weird light in his eyes. “You have to trust me.”
In the pause that follows, Madeleine remembers her first visit to his childhood home in Pennsylvania, with wind chimes on the porch and laundry in the front yard. Inside, David’s gray-braided parents sat at a big wooden table, churning apple butter. Incense burned on the counter beside a statuette of Krishna. In his oxford shirt and loafers, David appeared as foreign to this environment as his parents were native. How strange, she’d thought, that something so strong and unbendable had been forged by this queer fire.
“Trust me,” David repeats.
Madeleine studies his face. He appears to be the same man. A man who has never given her a reason not to trust him. She had so easily, eagerly, fallen into the habit of trust. In their wedding vows, when they had promised to help each other achieve their dreams, to stand beside each other through any difficulty, it had seemed that the words were skewed to her benefit. It had never occurred to her, really, that she would be called upon.
“I think I can find a way to harness this,” David says.
“Harness what?” Madeleine asks. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m thinking I can learn traditional healing techniques and open an independent practice.”
Madeleine stares. “You’ve been in advertising for fifteen years.”
“It’s a career change, yes. People change careers all the time.”
“But the timing, David. We’re about to have a baby.”
He smiles. “Babies are born all over the world, to all kinds of people.”
“What does that mean?”
David is quiet. After a moment, he says, “What if I wanted to go to law school? Would you support that?”
There is a touch of impatience in his voice that Madeleine has never heard before. She sits for another moment, then rises to her feet, steadying herself on the back of the chair.
“Listen,” she says. “You can keep talking, but I’m going to go make dinner.”
He follows her into the kitchen. “I know you’re upset.”
She pours rice into a measuring cup without measuring it and fills a pot with water. She seizes a blind assortment of vegetables from the refrigerator and begins chopping. He stands beside her. “Listen to me. I think the bird is a messenger inviting me to change course. I’m luckier than some people, who never receive a tangible sign. They just feel sick and never know why.”
Madeleine gazes at the cutting board, where she has created a heap of cubed carrot, potato, cucumber. She slides the vegetables into a pot and her eyes alight on the backsplash behind the stove, a grid of glossy bloodred tiles. This is one of the details she’d loved about the house, but which now strikes her as superfluous.
David puts a hand on her arm. “I believe I’ve received a gift, Madeleine. I believe I’ve been selected for something very strange and wonderful.”
She turns to him and sees the fevered eyes of a teenager who has just discovered beat poetry. Her own face heats. She should have known that this was inside him all along, like a time bomb. This is what he came from, what he is m
ade of. His corporate adventure—his visit to the culture of work, of responsibility—was just that, an adventure. A rebellion against his upbringing, short-lived. What she is witnessing now, she suddenly understands, is a return to his roots, his true character. The truth detonates before her.
And is it surprising that she would align herself with someone like this, after all? People are drawn to those like themselves. On a deep level, they recognize themselves in others, so that every couple is, at the core, properly matched. Like his corporate charade, her own transformation into suburban housewife has been a hoax. She is an imposter in this place, in this house. She stands at the kitchen sink, before the wide window that is still missing treatments, and feels that the whole town can see in.
“I think a healing practice would fill a real need,” David is saying. “People are looking for release from the ills of modern culture. So many of us are disconnected from Nature, from our spiritual selves, and it’s making us sick. It’s endemic to the whole country, don’t you think? It’s something I’ve always suspected in some low-grade way, but kept pushing aside. Don’t you feel like that, deep down? Don’t you just rationalize it away?”
Madeleine takes the pot from the burner and slops the vegetables onto a platter.
“Maybe they’ll take you back,” she says.
David stares. “Haven’t you been listening? I don’t want to go back.”
Madeleine brings the platter down on the counter. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. We just bought this house, David. We’re having a baby.”
As she speaks, her body sways as if upon a boat. Another memory returns from her visit to David’s childhood home, one curious moment. Washing her hands in the rustic powder room, Madeleine had looked out the window to see David in the yard, standing beside a pole birdfeeder, its clear plastic silo filled with seed. As he stood, tall and still, Madeleine watched a sparrow circle the feeder and alight. Then a crow. As she stood at the powder room window, the feeder had swelled with birds.
David spends his first day of unemployment thumbing library books on the couch. Madeleine slips out of the air-conditioned house and into a kiln. She lumbers down Whistle Hill Road, past flat-faced houses blinking back the noonday sun, past the little pond furred with algae. She keeps a small, purposeful smile on her face, but is unable to rid herself of the sense that she is being watched, as if her husband’s aberration is visible upon her like a jumpsuit. There are men in the periphery of her vision, trimming bushes, washing cars. There are the low growls of lawnmowers and chain saws. David hasn’t mowed their lawn in over a month.
That night, David stays in the woods, in the ripped blue sleeping bag of his boyhood. Madeleine lies alone in bed with a hand on the globe of her belly, deciphering the changes in its temper. There is a sense of agitation, of looming implosion. There is a swoon of adrenaline as her abdomen stiffens, becomes hard as a watermelon. She gasps and fixes her eyes on the skylight, a black velvet kerchief crusted with stars.
The adrenaline waves proliferate, building on themselves, in the pattern of the panic attacks she’d had as a younger woman. She has learned to breathe through these, to carve a space for herself, as she would do when negotiating a crowd in Midtown.
At last, when the breathing becomes impossible, she crawls from bed and goes outside with a flashlight. She edges over the dark carpet of grass, stopping to clutch herself. In the woods, she follows a narrow path, twigs snapping, and sweeps her flashlight over the barbed branches. At last she illuminates a crude box suspended in a forked tree trunk. She calls to David.
They name the baby Annabel. The first weeks are suspended out of time, a dream of sleeping and nursing. David is mercifully silent on the topic of his spiritual vocation. It isn’t until Annabel is two months old that he comes to Madeleine with a library book, an almanac of South American fauna. Without speaking, he opens the book to a full-page photograph of an ebony bird poised upon a branch, a crest like a standing wave upon its head. Its eye is small and hard, a jet bead ringed with white, and there is a long protuberance like an empty black kneesock beneath its beak. The bird gives an impression of cool majesty, of indifference to human quandary.
“It’s an Amazonian umbrella bird,” David whispers after a moment. “All I know is that it has a loud call, but is rarely seen. It lives its whole life in the rain forest canopy in Brazil and Peru. The male courts the female by stretching out his wattle, but then the female builds the nest and raises the chicks alone.”
“Leave it to Nature,” Madeleine says.
“I’d love to see it in person one day.”
He spends the rest of the week designing a logo—a black silhouette of a crested bird in flight—for an ad that will run in the local newspaper and the kinds of free magazines provided at spas and yoga studios. By the end of the month, he has his first appointment.
When the client arrives at the house, Madeleine hides in the bedroom with the baby. She watches from the upstairs window as a young man approaches the door, a silver bull ring glinting at his nose. The Warren children are probably running indoors right now, she imagines, calling to their mother. Perhaps Rosalie, at this moment, is dialing for a patrol car.
For the hour that David spends in the tree house with the stranger, Madeleine sits nursing Annabel, examining the same few pages of a novel. When the men finally come back through the house, they are laughing. She remains upstairs until David knocks.
“It went amazingly well,” he announces. “Rufus was perfect to work with, so cooperative. He’s trying to overcome a drug addiction.” He holds up a bouquet of twenty-dollar bills. “Not bad for an hour.”
Madeleine closes her book and funnels her whole heart into a smile.
More clients come in the next few months, smiling bashfully at Madeleine and Annabel as they pass through the house to the backyard. They go over the grass and into the woods: large women in caftans, thin girls in yoga pants, ponytailed men. At first there are two or three a week. Then one a day. By the winter, David is juggling several appointments on each square of the kitchen calendar.
“Where do they come from?” Madeleine asks.
“All over. My client this morning came down from Hartford.”
“How do they know about you?”
“There’s a very tight community. Word spreads fast.”
Today he is wearing something new: a leather cord necklace with a small pouch attached.
“It’s a medicine bundle,” he says, following her gaze. “It’s where I keep tokens that bring me closer to my spirit animal.”
Madeleine asks what kind of animal this might be.
“I’m not supposed to tell you, but I bet you can guess.” From a pocket, he removes a second leather pouch and shows it to her. “A bundle for the baby.”
Madeleine gazes at the pouch. It is made of soft leather that begs to be touched. She reaches for it, takes it from David’s hand. The leather is puckered neatly at the top, and there is a clink of hidden objects within. An amulet.
“I’d like to journey on her behalf,” David says. “And meet with her animal. Would you help me?”
“Journey where?”
“To the Lower World,” he answers matter-of-factly.
Madeleine is quiet. Her husband is in front of her, behind the rough reddish growth of beard, speaking of spirit worlds. She looks at the leather pouch again. She looks at the baby in her arms, built from nothing.
That night, she sits on the nursery floor with a drum in her lap. On the baby’s changing table is a plastic bag labeled Spirit Warrior Music & Instruments.
“It’s not perfect, but it’s something to practice on for now. Eventually I’ll make my own drum out of maple and rawhide.”
David stretches out on the sand-colored carpet. Annabel lies on her back in the bassinet, cycling her legs. The winter sun has gone down, and the room is quiet and dark. The windows make
a grid of indigo sky. It is not difficult to imagine that the three of them are alone in the universe.
“The drumbeat is a bridge to the World Tree,” David tells her from the floor, “giving me access to the branches that lead to the Upper World, or to the roots that tunnel to the Lower World.”
“Is that in one of your books?”
“More than one.” David closes his eyes. “Check your watch before you start drumming. Just start out with a nice, slow beat. When you’ve been going for about ten minutes, go ahead and change to a callback rhythm. Something faster, like a gallop.”
“To call you back?”
“I’ll hopefully be down pretty deep, but I’ll perceive the change in the drum’s tempo and know it’s time to return.”
Madeleine tests the drum. The hard surface is made of a polished synthetic that stings her palms. The sound it makes is flat and unsubtle, like something heavy dropping to the floor again and again. The effect is the opposite of soothing.
“There, keep it going like that.”
Madeleine’s legs are already starting to cramp in their pretzeled arrangement. Although there is no direct sight line from neighboring houses, she wishes with a sudden fervor that she had closed the curtains. She wishes that she had not agreed to do this, that she could switch bodies with any of her neighbors. She thinks of Suzanne Crawford in the irreproachable house next door and desperately wants to be doing whatever she is doing—sipping Pinot Grigio at a kitchen island, loading the dishwasher, paying bills.
The drumbeat is tediously slow, the plodding of an old draft horse. Within a few moments Madeleine’s hands have begun to fall mechanically, driven by their own momentum, and the strident thumps have dulled into sameness. David appears to go to sleep. She continues to hit the drum, resigned, a trudging giant in the nursery.
The Wonder Garden Page 9
