Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  But her children were coming alive to her. They were becoming individuals. The twin on the right was rowdy, strong, and active, kicking, hiccuping, and punching. One tiny heel continually jabbed Joanna in the rib cage, under her right breast, as if trying to make more room. The twin on the left was more sedate. His movements were blunt and rolling; he seemed to stretch his body and arch his back. Joanna thought of the twin on the left as the Swimmer, content and introspective; the twin on the right she called the Chorus Girl, bored with her small space, eager to get out and start dancing.

  Joanna wished they could be born now. She felt so sorry for them, all squashed up against one another inside her. Certainly her own activities were limited. She couldn’t even drive anymore. Her bulk would not fit behind a steering wheel.

  With one brisk movement, Gardner undid the black cuff on her upper arm. As he folded his equipment, he asked, “Have you been having headaches or vomiting?”

  She thought a moment. “No.”

  “Vision problems?” His clear yellow-green eyes were intense as he watched for her reply. He would not be an easy person to lie to.

  “No.”

  “Swelling?”

  “Yes. My feet.”

  “I don’t think we’ve got anything to be alarmed about, but your blood pressure doesn’t make me happy. We want you to carry these babies to term. I want you to have a serious amount of complete bed rest. My best guess is that if you don’t do that, you’ll end up in the hospital.”

  Joanna reached out an entreating hand. “Gardner, is it that bad?”

  He patted her hand. “Don’t be alarmed. My point precisely is that it’s not dangerous, but it could be. Tell me, how are you coming on those books?”

  “I’m almost done.”

  “Almost means—?”

  “Another two weeks of work, a month at the most.”

  “Have you chosen a birth partner?”

  “No. Well, I did, I asked my friend Tory, but she won’t be here.”

  “How about a sister?”

  “I have no siblings.”

  “Another close friend?”

  Briefly she thought of June Lathern; no. June was too formal, too reserved for the naked intimacies of childbirth. And Pat Hoover was very kind and perhaps would one day be a close friend, but they’d only met in May. “I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

  Madaket was standing in the doorway, watching, and now she crossed the room and, coming around behind the sofa, stood with her hands on Joanna’s shoulders, protectively. Today she wore a cotton dress of a pale topaz color, almost exactly the color of her skin. She was darkly luminous and strong yet soft, and Joanna was grateful for her touch.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Gardner looked up at her. “Could you live here?”

  Madaket paused, then replied, “I have animals. A dog, a cat …”

  Gardner looked back at Joanna. “Are you allergic to animals?”

  “No. I love animals. At least I think I do. I’ve never had any of my own.” She smiled. “Wolf is wonderful. I’d love to have him around.”

  Gardner was folding his stethoscope and blood pressure kit into his black bag.

  “Don’t forget, after your babies are born, you’ll need help at night as well as day.”

  “That’s right. We agreed you’d work for me for at least a year, Madaket. Oh, do move in!” Joanna reached up and covered Madaket’s hand with hers. Madaket squeezed her shoulders in reply. “You could make yourself a suite of rooms on the third floor. Your animals could have the run of the house. You could give up your other place and you wouldn’t have to worry about paying rent.”

  “Could I have some time to think about it?” Madaket’s voice was low with indecision.

  “What else is there to think about?”

  “I’d hate to leave the garden at my house. My grandmother started it, and we tended it together for years. The house isn’t much, but the little plot of land with it is very good. Good soil. It gets lots of sun.”

  Joanna waved her hand impatiently. “There’s plenty of land right outside!” she reminded Madaket.

  “Yes. But building a garden takes time. If I give up my little rented house, I’m giving up all those years of enriching the soil. I know Mr. Sherman would rent it out to other people. Who knows what they’d do with it. It would all change.”

  Joanna closed her eyes, admonishing herself to be patient. Caring about gardens was not something she was used to. Her mother’s friends had gone in for swimming pools with cabanas and drink carts. Perhaps a pot of petunias or geraniums for color. Her father’s girlfriends had lived in town houses or apartments, only occasionally bringing in cut flowers to brighten the room.

  “Gardens are part of my life,” Madaket continued. “My grandmother knew everything about plants and nutrition and health. We made teas and tonics and sachets, using what we’d grown without any pesticides or fertilizer other than compost. We’ve worked on the garden for years.”

  “So leaving the garden would be a real farewell to your grandmother.”

  “It would also be a real farewell to the soil we built up and the plants we nurtured.”

  “Well, Madaket, I intend to stay here for years. I can envision keeping you on here for years. I won’t be able to raise twins and work without help. You and I certainly seem compatible. I can’t offer you complete security, but I can promise you a few years of stability.” Joanna twisted around on the sofa and, looking up at Madaket, clasped her hand and pleaded, “Madaket, please do it! I can’t tell you how I worry about this fall. The babies will come at the end of October, and I’ll be here all alone, and you’ll be struggling along in foul weather on that bike. I’ll go crazy!”

  Madaket chewed her lip a moment, then decided: “All right. I’ll do it.”

  “Great!” Gardner announced, slapping his hands on his thighs and pushing back his chair. Joanna noticed, when he stood, that his cotton chinos were slightly too short for him; he must have washed and dried them himself, and shrunk them. Why didn’t his horrible fiancée, Tiffany, tell him to send them to a laundry? She could also advise him to get a haircut; his curly sunny hair was beginning to resemble a shrub. “I’ll go along now. I’ll stop back by in a few days to check you.”

  “Thanks, Gardner,” Joanna said, but when Madaket returned from seeing the doctor to the door, she complained, “I feel like a biological specimen!”

  Madaket laughed. “You are a biological specimen. You’re an older primipara with twins.”

  “I’m what?”

  “An older primipara with twins. That’s what Dr. Adams said you are.”

  “How delightful,” Joanna groaned. To her surprise, she began to cry.

  “You’re not as depressed as you think you are,” Madaket assured her. “Water retention does this, causes you to—”

  “Oh, shut up, Madaket!” Joanna snapped.

  Madaket sent a sympathetic smile her way. “I’ll go make you some nice iced herbal tea.”

  Some days it would be true summer, hot and sparkling and dry. Suddenly, often within hours, the weather would change. Low clouds would roll in with dramatic swiftness and thunderous rain would fall. A Van Gogh wind would howl and moan around the house. For stretches of time it would be dreary and cold, not like summer, not like any season at all.

  Doug brought her flowers. The first time, he arrived with a loose bouquet of white daisies and purple phlox in his arms. The fragile lace of the blossoms set off in startling contrast the masculine strength quiescent within his roughened hands.

  “These are for you,” he said, bowing slightly as he presented them to her.

  “They’re lovely,” Joanna told him. “Thank you.” Although they were not particularly fragrant flowers, she bent her head over them, hiding her face. The petals quivered against her skin lightly, like the sense of sexual attraction flickering against her senses.

  “They’re from my wife,” Doug informed her. “She loves
flowers, can’t grow enough of them.”

  “Thank her for me, please. I love fresh flowers.”

  Another time he brought her scarlet poppies, so exotic and flamboyant and erotic they seemed a kind of declaration.

  “How beautiful!” Joanna exclaimed. She was standing just inside her study door, and Doug stood near her in the shadows of the hall. “Thank your wife for me.”

  “These aren’t from my wife. She had to give all her cut flowers to the church this week.”

  “Oh?”

  “These are just from me. I bought them for you. You said you like fresh flowers.” The color of the poppies was so intense it seemed to burn her cheeks. “You shouldn’t have—”

  “I like to do it. I like to give you flowers.”

  Joanna met his eyes and read a challenge there. She realized he meant her to interpret his words in any way she liked. His nearness, his boldness, took her breath away.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Madaket was coming up to put the clean linens in the cupboard.

  “I’ll get back to work,” Doug said, and nodded and went off down the stairs.

  What did this mean? What was she to do? She couldn’t believe Doug Snow was helplessly attracted to her, especially in her ballooning form. Perhaps he was being only nice. Still, the insinuation of the gift sent the same rich, intense, physical pleasure through her as the poppies themselves.

  With Madaket’s help, Joanna crossed the hall each morning to work in her new study. It was bliss—a beautiful room complete with worktables to hold her piles of papers, a state-of-the-art computer and printer, a small copy machine, and an electronic typewriter. She’d had a half-moon window installed at the ocean end of the room, and she found herself often just staring out the window, dazzled by the dancing light.

  Madaket moved into the house, bringing two other powerful presences with her, the dog Wolf, and Bitch the cat. Both animals looked like their names, but only the cat acted like hers. Wolf, shaggy and huge and dangerous-looking though he was, spent his days yearning for love. If Madaket was around, he was at her side; when she was gone, he hurried to be with Joanna, wherever she was. Wolf had blue eyes and a multicolored coat. Bitch was all black, with green eyes. She was furious at being moved, furious in general. She hid in the house, coming out only at night to eat the food they’d set on a shelf of the sideboard where Wolf, even standing, could not reach. She would not make friends with Joanna, but eyed her with disdain. If Joanna entered a room to find Bitch sleeping on a cushion in the sun, Bitch would awaken immediately and streak from the room, in spite of Joanna’s most appealing entreaties.

  Madaket had chosen a bedroom in the attic, a small room with a wonderful long window looking out at the ocean. Long before Madaket even considered moving in, Joanna had bought furniture and linens for the room and attic bathroom and decorated the stairwell and rooms with paintings she’d adopted from the dump and lovingly rejuvenated. Now she offered to buy anything else Madaket needed—a standing mirror, a desk? But Madaket said she was happy with everything just the way it was. Joanna had purposely refrained from watching when Madaket carried her things from the Jeep into the house and up to the attic, but she was aware of how quickly the work was done; Madaket didn’t own much. She didn’t want to appear to pry, and yet she finally gave in to her curiosity and climbed the stairs. Standing in the doorway to Madaket’s room, she looked in. Madaket was transferring a stack of white T-shirts from a cardboard box into a bureau of bleached pine which matched the headboard, bedside table, and chair. The lines of the furniture were clean, almost stark, a basic style Joanna had assumed Madaket would like.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Great!” Madaket answered. “What a wonderful view!”

  “There is a radiator in here, but I’m afraid it still might be hard to keep warm in the winter. Especially when it’s windy.”

  “That’s all right. I’m used to that.”

  “Where did you get that lamp?” Joanna asked, surprised.

  “Do you like it?” Madaket crossed the small room to caress an elaborately beautiful lamp: the bottom was a cast-metal statue of a voluptuous woman whose flower-twined hair wrapped around her body, covering her breasts and pubic area. The woman’s arms were raised, stretching high up above her head, disappearing beneath the blue and red stained-glass shade capped by a cast-metal finial. Her feet were surrounded by flowers.

  “It’s fabulous,” Joanna replied. She knelt to inspect it. “Looks Art Deco.”

  “I bought it at an art dealer’s a few years ago. It used up most of my savings. But I don’t buy much. That lamp and that painting.”

  Joanna looked at the oil Madaket had hung just where her eyes would fall on it when she lay in bed. It was an impressionistic scene of the ocean at night. The water was dark, the waves spangled with silver moonlight. A round moon slid out from the cover of a frothy cloud.

  “What beautiful things you have,” Joanna murmured. She caught herself from adding that such sensuality surprised her.

  “Well, they’re all I have,” Madaket confessed. “The house we rented came furnished. The stuff wasn’t very high quality, to put it mildly. My grandmother and I didn’t have a lot of things people considered necessities—we bought our sheets and blankets at the Second Shop, for example. Found our rugs at tag sales. Bought most of our clothes there, too, for that matter. You’d be surprised what good things you can find there.”

  “Tory raves about your beautiful dresses.”

  Madaket laughed. “They’re really just old housedresses, the sort of thing people brought to the Second Shop when their grandmothers died.” Her eyes fell. “I’ve always known my grandmother wouldn’t be able to leave me any money, and my parents of course didn’t leave anything, so I guess this is just my way of providing myself with heirlooms.”

  “You’re very wise, Madaket. Really. I’m impressed. I wish I’d thought to do that when I was your age.”

  Madaket smiled shyly, ducking her head in pleased embarrassment. Joanna continued to look at the room, realizing how with those two pieces Madaket had made the room her own.

  Later, with Joanna’s permission, Madaket put boxes of glass jars and jam-making pots and utensils in the butler’s pantry. Her herbs gleamed greenly on the windowsill. From the moment she moved in, she used every free moment to work outside on an open plot of moorland away from the house and ocean in preparation for a garden.

  Joanna loved the sound of Madaket and her animals coming and going. Their various footsteps, Wolf’s eager barks, Madaket’s gentle admonitions to the animals, all blurred together into a soothing and distant music, like water running over rocks. The evenings were more companionable with Madaket around. They ate together, discussing recipes, their day, the news, and took long slow walks on the beach, watching the sun set. At night they sat together in the library reading, or watched videos or played cards. Madaket was knitting blankets for the babies.

  Joanna sometimes talked about Carter to Madaket, and then pleasurable memories flowed through her like honey, but just as often Joanna would be jolted by the remembrance of Carter’s temper, his arrogance, his moods, and she’d shake her head in wonder at what she’d settled for.

  She said nothing to Madaket about Jake. What could she say? He had kissed her on the Fourth of July. He had looked handsome, and slightly younger, as if the strain of grief had eased somewhat. She could close her eyes and remember the way his hand had so gently touched her cheek as they stood in the cabin of George Mullen’s yacht. A touch, a kiss, a starry summer’s night … a recipe for daydreams. But she mustn’t make too much of it; besides, now was the time to concentrate on her babies.

  One morning shortly after Madaket moved in, as Joanna was working in her study, a large cry sounded in the air. Seconds later, Todd came thundering up the steps two at a time.

  “Joanna! We’ve found something!”

  She swiveled in her typing chair. Todd ran into her room. Wolf was at his heels, barking
at Todd’s excitement, racing in circles around Todd’s ankles.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the kitchen! In the floor! Dad and I were pulling up that awful old linoleum, and we found a trapdoor! Come on! I’ll show you!”

  Madaket appeared in the doorway then, her hands covered with gardening soil.

  “What’s going on? I heard shouting.”

  Todd whirled toward Madaket. “Dad and I found a trapdoor in the kitchen. I bet it leads to the treasure.”

  Joanna waited for Madaket, usually reasonable at most times, to glance over at her with gentle scorn. It was such a boyish thing, Joanna thought, to think he’d found a treasure. But Madaket’s eyes remained on Todd’s face as he talked.

  “We had all the linoleum up, and then we started prying up some damaged wood, bits and pieces, that looked like they’d been just nailed down any old way—”

  Joanna interrupted. “If you’ll help me, I’d like to come down and see it.”

  “Of course.” Instantly Madaket came to Joanna’s side and, wrapping an arm around her just under her shoulders, supported her as they made their way down the stairs and into the kitchen. They found Doug standing inside the space they’d broken open between the kitchen and sunporch.

  “We didn’t want to proceed any further without your permission.” Doug spoke as if he were the voice of reason, but his dark blue eyes were intense with excitement.

  The floor of the screened porch had been covered with an unattractive green linoleum, which Joanna had in turn covered with various pastel dhurrie rugs. Now the rugs, rolled and tied, lay in a corner. The linoleum had been ripped up in jagged pieces and stacked in piles along the perimeter of the room, waiting for the Snowmen to take them to the dump. The final layer of subflooring consisted of old boards, wide and splintered and warped. Underneath all that was hard-packed dirt. The carpenters had laid down sheets of plywood to walk on as they prepared a level underlay for the playroom.