The Wonder Garden (20 page)

The women nod at April's comment, some tightening their mouths as if in contemplation. Leanne Vogel tells of a friend with an adopted Chinese daughter, the quizzical looks they receive from supermarket cashiers. There is a general murmur. Swiftly, the discussion shifts to same-sex parenting, then to gay marriage, then to tax evasion.

When the conversation begins to splinter, the women rise and chatter, moving sinuously through the room in groups of two and three. Suzanne approaches Madeleine, who is standing with two other women. It is not difficult to insert herself here, and when she does, the other women shrink away. Alone with Madeleine, she begins with questions about the baby:
How has she been sleeping? Are you still nursing?
She adopts a tone of sisterly experience, but the truth is that the early days of Elliot's infancy feel as distant to her as something she has dreamed. Madeleine responds in a choppy fashion, nervously alert, running her fingers through her hair as if dislodging loose strands.

Suzanne lingers with Madeleine. Before she can weigh the wisdom of it, she hears herself asking, “What does your husband do?”

Madeleine smiles strangely and glances to the side. “Well, he just changed careers, actually. He worked in advertising for years, but now he's started a business of his own.”

“Oh? What sort of business?”

She pauses. “A kind of holistic healing business, I guess you could say. Traditional medicine.” Madeleine flushes. “It's something new for him.”

Suzanne feels herself staring. “Eastern medicine, like acupuncture?”

“Not exactly.” Madeleine trails off. “It's hard to explain.” Her eyes dart to the side. “Excuse me,” she mumbles, “I have to say good-bye to someone.”

Suzanne is left standing alone, glass of clotted sangria in hand. The women are dispersing, the room is quieting. She waits, dumbly, for Madeleine to return. Through the side window, she can see a segment of her own house showing pale between the pines.

The process is a long and slow one, the specialist reminds them. Therapies that work for some children do nothing for others. There are no shortcuts, only trial and error, love and patience. Suzanne takes a day off work to bring Elliot to a treatment center an hour's drive away. There, she chats with a few of the other mothers—they are all mothers—who share a saintly aura. It seems to Suzanne that they have moved through the stages of denial and sorrow into a ferocious embrace of their children's conditions. They use foreign terminology—
stimming
,
perseveration
—that bespeaks years of reading, research, preoccupation. She thinks she detects a condescending sympathy in their eyes when they listen to her speak about Elliot, when she tells them she is optimistic about his recovery. They smile kindly, creases of valiant exhaustion in their faces. Their hair is cropped or pulled back, and their clothing is utilitarian: cargo shorts and rubberized sport sandals. None of these women, she comes to understand, works outside the home. They do not have to announce this fact; it is evident by their casual camaraderie, their practiced stances and ritualized movements, that they come here every day. When she mentions having taken a personal day from work, they give her that same frustrating, patient smile. The work they do with their children—the grinding hours of floortime, of tantrum taming, of endless mopping and toileting—is bigger than any office job, the smile seems to say.

The next day, Suzanne returns to work, and Carlota brings Elliot to the center. At night, Brian is quiet in bed. It is as if Suzanne can read his mind, but she waits for him to speak, makes him work at shaping his words and finding a careful way of delivering them. He asks whether she would consider leaving her job, working with Elliot herself. When she does not respond, he gathers himself, as if to continue the discussion on a greater scale.
No.
She stops him. She does not want to hear about life's unpredictability, the necessity to reassess, reprioritize, to choose what must be sacrificed and what preserved.
No,
she tells him.
Not now.

It is maddening that the question will never be whether he should leave his job. His salary is double hers, and without it they couldn't keep the house. But still: work, for him, is just work. It isn't oxygen. It took years to realize that she was unusual, that for most people work is a discrete and ill-fitting role, incompatible with their true pleasures and purposes. Few are fortunate to have been born, as she was, to a clear-cut ambition. As a girl, she'd brought a notebook and flashlight under the covers at night and drew women in dresses. By the time she reached high school, she'd completed a dozen such notebooks and developed what she thought was a recognizable style. Now, at thirty-five, she is a design director at a major fashion house, just one notch beneath the name on the label.

She never stops designing. On the train, she sketches. When her eyes close, patterns erupt before her. Her current obsession is chinoiserie. She is not alone in this, she knows, and fears that the classic motifs—birds on flowering vines, sleepy pagodas—won't be fresh much longer. Still, she is pushing it as a unifying theme for the spring line. The novelty will come from the colors and details she proposes: silken dresses in cream and ivory, printed with shades of citron, magenta, turquoise. Romantic pieces slashed by exposed zippers. And suede footwear in risky pastels and unwise whites, sexy in their vulnerability. Here is a woman above such concerns as mud and scuffing. Buff-colored boots, brushed to rabbit softness. Suzanne feels a sensuous rush through her body as she draws a figure in these boots, the neck customarily long, with short marks for the mouth and nose: disdainful, defiant.

The fall line, now in stores, is dark and billowy, unstructured. She has grown to hate it with the acid repulsion reserved for things most recently loved. She can't get away from it fast enough, can't draw pale, slim things quickly enough to obscure the fall collection from her mind, the wide navy capes and black duster coats, the models like dour crows.

Coming home from work, she pours a glass of Syrah and helps Carlota with dinner. Elliot sits in front of the television, his hair greased with its daily buildup. Suzanne asks about their visit to the center, and Carlota itemizes Elliot's activities: squeezing a ball, looking at pictures of faces, toeing a painted line.

“What did the therapists say? Did they mention how soon we might see progress?” Suzanne takes a breath and revises the question for Carlota. “Did the teachers say when he'll get better?”

Carlota shrugs, makes a sour face. “I don't know. The teachers, they don't really talk to me.”

Suzanne is silent. Of course Carlota is the only nanny there. “It's okay,” she says, and looks at the back of Elliot's head.

It's a lot to ask of both of them, this daily trek to the center. If Elliot doesn't begin to show improvement in a few weeks, she decides, she will tell Carlota to stop taking him. In the meantime, there are other options. She has trawled Internet forums devoted to every treatment imaginable. There is play therapy, music therapy, massage therapy. There are vitamin supplements and elimination diets and antifungal treatments. There is a detoxification procedure to remove metals from the system. There is acupuncture.

They begin with elimination diets. Suzanne instructs Carlota to remove all sugars from Elliot's food for two weeks. This proves more difficult than expected—nearly every food label lists some form of sugar: evaporated cane juice, high fructose corn syrup—so that for two weeks Elliot eats nothing but lentils and cooked vegetables. Next, they take away food dyes, then gluten. There is, Suzanne thinks, a brief spell during the gluten-free period when Elliot seems more attentive. His eyes meet hers briefly when she soaps him in the tub, and for a breathless moment she believes she can read a message there: that he is on his way to her. But this happens only once.

Suzanne takes another vacation day and brings him to an acupuncturist. A foolish idea, she realizes, when she sees the long needles. He will shriek; she will cry. She pays for the annulled appointment and takes Elliot home.

There is still chelation therapy. For this, a willing doctor inserts a formula designed to bind with metal in the bloodstream and flush out any mercury left by vaccines. Suzanne has never been one of the hysterics who demonize immunizations—but who knows? Some mothers insist their children have been cured by chelation. Others warn that it's quackery. Doctors have been sued. A little boy has died.

Suzanne lies awake while Brian sleeps untroubled beside her. No light comes through the window blinds of their bedroom; there are no streetlamps or passing headlights. The darkness of night here is complete. The city had offered unlikely comfort in its sheer, crazy numbers. Here, Suzanne feels stripped of such layered company. She finds the neighboring houses at their respectful distances to be curiously confining. Those houses are darkened now, dense with their respective sleepers and insomniacs, humming with individual dreams.

The pink balloons on the mailbox next door had eventually shrunk to limp mitts, drooping against the post, until someone finally removed them. Suzanne remembers the way the husband had looked at her. It hadn't been flirtatious, but clinical, diagnostic.
Holistic healing,
his wife had said. Perhaps he'd been appraising her as a potential client. Perhaps he is one of those men who believe every woman is sick at the core, corroded by toxic memories, in need of a deep-tissue massage or scalding with hot rocks.

She shaps a vague resolution as she drifts off to sleep, and a few days later goes to the phone like a somnambulist. Madeleine answers, her voice heartier than Suzanne remembers.

“Madeleine, it's Suzanne Crawford from next door.” She pauses. “It's been a while. Just checking in to say hello.”

There is a moment of silence in which Suzanne fears that Madeleine has forgotten her, followed by a rambling of thanks, apology, grateful effusiveness. Suzanne listens. Then a breath, a pause.

“Oh,” Suzanne says breezily, “I think I remember you mentioning that your husband has a healing practice of some sort? Do you think you could tell me a little more about that?”

She puts a hand to the kitchen wall as she says this and focuses on a glass-paneled cabinet, rows of glass tumblers inside, layers of transparency. There is no reply on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

Madeleine's voice returns. “Let me put David on the phone.”

Suzanne briefly considers hanging up, pretending the connection has been cut. She grips the receiver to her ear as the husband's voice comes on, dark and mellifluous, a radio voice.

They make an appointment for Saturday, when Brian will be on the boat. Suzanne will not mention it to him. The chance is too great that he will interpret it as evidence of her desperation, her rejection of responsibility. Any defense she might make would only cement her guilt.

On Saturday, Suzanne chooses an easy chambray shirtdress and ballerina flats, just a touch of nude lip gloss. She gives Elliot a bath, hastily shampooing his hair before he thinks of screaming, and dresses him in short overalls. He is reasonably compliant this morning, for which she is grateful.

Madeleine answers the door in a flowered peasant blouse, holding a solid and very pink baby. She looks fresh, unruffled, and young—utterly unlike how Suzanne recalls her own first months of motherhood. Suzanne gives her widest, most sincere smile as she compliments her neighbor. When Madeleine steps to the side, Suzanne sees David in the living room. For a long moment, no one speaks, and she feels immediately sorry for coming.

“Would you like something to drink?” Madeleine finally asks. “Iced tea, coffee, water?”

“Some iced tea would be nice.” Suzanne smiles, still holding Elliot in the entrance hall. She does not want to put him down near the mirrored table.

“Have a seat,” David instructs her. “Make yourself comfortable.”

With as much dignity as she can, Suzanne strides into the living room and smooths her skirt before sitting on the couch. Elliot reaches beneath her dress collar, as is his habit, and digs his fingernails into her shoulder, but she refrains from pulling his hand away. She does not want to start a conflict so soon.

Madeleine brings the iced tea and takes a seat at the other end of the couch. David stands facing them like a workshop leader, in jeans and a thin brown T-shirt. Some kind of leather pouch hangs around his neck, bound with string.

“What I'm going to do is a modified version of an ancient custom,” he begins without prelude. “As Madeleine might have mentioned, I've recently been blessed with the ability to enter altered states of consciousness that allow me to access and diagnose hidden illnesses and blockages in people.”

Elliot is now clawing forcefully at Suzanne's shoulder. She concentrates on keeping her face relaxed, her expression neutral. She hears what David is saying, but is unable to make meaning of the words. She gives an interested smile and nods for him to continue.

“What I'd like to do is spend a little time with Elliot and see if I can confront whatever it is that's obstructing his development. It's not uncommon for a young child to have problems on a spiritual level stemming from some early trauma, like a difficult birth. But most medical doctors don't consider this.”

Suzanne's shoulder flinches involuntarily, and Elliot digs deeper. She registers the words
difficult birth
. It had, in fact, been difficult.

“The whole session shouldn't take more than an hour or so,” David says, turning away. He goes out of the room and returns with a rough wooden tray holding a collection of objects: a long striped feather, a group of round stones, a small animal skull. The tray is a peculiar prop in this anodyne beige room with its microfiber sofa and leather armchair, its shag rug the color of milky tea.

David lifts the coffee table up from this rug and moves it to a corner of the room. He puts a match to a bundle of weeds in a little clay pot, and after a moment the fragrance reaches Suzanne. He dims the lights, then squats in front of the couch and asks if Elliot would like to lie on the floor.