The Wonder Garden (21 page)

To Suzanne's surprise, Elliot disengages his grip and allows himself to be placed on the rug. He does not lie down, but sits with his legs forked in front of him. Madeleine positions her own daughter into a saucer-shaped jumper seat. From a closet she retrieves a drum, moldy looking and embellished with bells and tassels. She lowers herself to the floor, legs crossed Indian- style, and nestles the drum in the crook of her knees. The herb bundle smokes, producing its exotic perfume. Suzanne looks instinctively to the window. The blinds are tightly closed.

David begins to walk a slow circle around Elliot, humming a meandering tune. After a number of circles, he lowers himself to the floor and stretches out beside the boy, while Madeleine begins to pat the drum. Elliot ignores both of them, picking at tufts of yarn on the rug.

Suzanne sits with her legs tight together, wishing herself out of the room. It is unpleasant to watch adults behave in this way. She does not like to see a grown man on the floor; she does not like to see a woman with a dirty drum. Madeleine increases her volume and tempo so that the drumbeats grow loud and insistent. At this, the baby girl stops bouncing. Her little face reddens and her mouth gapes silently for a moment. When the cries come, Madeleine looks up and falters in her drumming.

The baby's father, flat on the floor, appears unaware of the disturbance. He is absent from the room, the movement of his eyeballs perceptible beneath his closed lids. Suzanne hesitates, then goes to the bouncer and picks up the baby. She gazes into the fat, wet-lashed face, so different from Elliot's, and blinks her eyes playfully. To her amazement, the baby shows her nubby teeth in pleasure. For the rest of the ritual, she holds the little girl on her lap, breathing her smell of orange and vanilla.

The performance continues monotonously, tirelessly. Elliot has now slumped sideways onto the floor, his fingers meshed into the rug's fibers. David makes quick shapes with his mouth, as if speaking to an invisible entity. He snarls and clutches his hands into fists. Madeleine's tempo slows to a heartbeat, then quickens again. Finally, David's legs jerk and his eyes spring open. He stares blankly at the ceiling for a moment, then gives his wife a nod, releasing her from drum duty. Suzanne returns the baby to her, feeling a bittersweet tug as the girl's body is taken away, vibrating with health and potential.

David crawls to Elliot and leans over his prone form. He places his cupped hands to the back of the boy's head and blows a long breath into them. Elliot stirs and David carefully rolls him face upward, then blows the same way into his chest. Watching this, Suzanne realizes that she is holding her breath. Something is happening, she sees. Something is passing between them. Whether it is healing or not, she doesn't know, but there is a thickening in the air that seems to her full of her son, and for a moment she is certain that he has been tapped in some way, freed.

Finally David passes the feather over Elliot's body, and with a touch at the forehead, the boy awakens. David resumes his tuneless hum and walks a final circle around the child.

“I think that will help,” David says, and puts a hand to Elliot's head. “It makes sense that he's been having trouble. He's battling powerful forces. But I located his guardian animal, and it's a good one. He's been fighting without any help up to this point, but now he'll have some backup.”

Suzanne nods mutely.

“I think you'll start noticing some changes,” David says, and lowers himself into the easy chair. He closes his eyes. There is a sense of dislocation that Suzanne imagines they all feel, as the reverberations of the drum linger in the air.

“Well, I'm so glad you could come,” Madeleine says, walking Suzanne toward the door, as if she had stopped in for coffee.

In the entrance hall, Suzanne turns to her. “Does David . . .” she whispers. “How much does he . . . or should I expect an invoice?”

“No, no”—Madeleine shakes her head—“of course not.”

“Well then. Thank you.”

She carries Elliot home. The day is blinding, and she feels the disorientation of emerging from a matinee. Her son's body drapes against her shoulder. The weight of his arms around her neck is achingly pleasant, the closest she will get to a hug. They go slowly up their neighbors' driveway, over drifts of fallen catkins and past the overgrown yard, the wild violets humming with life. They step briefly along the hot-baked road, then turn into their own driveway, laid with cobblestone pavers. The driveway appears to Suzanne, in her mild delirium, as a throat connected to the house, swallowing her down.

The next morning, while Brian is on the computer, Suzanne brings Elliot out to the backyard. She spreads a blanket at the far edge of the lawn, out of view of the neighbors, and reads a picture book to him. As usual, he ignores her, fixated on combing his fingers through the freshly mown grass, frilled with clippings. She tries to put a melody in her voice as she reads, but keeps reverting to the same mechanical chant. She holds up the pictures, pointlessly, for Elliot to see. Finally, she stops reading. The silence is a balm, and she lies down in the sun, watching strings of red baubles float behind her lids.

After several drifting moments, she is surprised by a pressure on her chest. She opens her eyes to see Elliot resting there. He raises his head and looks at her. He smiles. It takes a beat to process this. She lifts herself on an elbow and looks deeply at him. They stare at each other for a long moment, and Suzanne feels as if her son is finally, lavishly pouring himself into her. She smiles back, and Elliot actually laughs. She laughs in return. She wants to gather him up in her arms, to tackle him with astonished joy. She wants to run through the clump of pine trees and bang on the window of the house next door, shouting. Instead, she keeps still, and for a few airborne moments, her son lolls on the blanket with her, and seems to know her. Tentatively, she puts a hand into Elliot's hair. Closing her eyes, she lobs up something like a prayer to the summer sky.

It's true, Brian agrees. He does seem better. They spend the day as a family, outdoors. They take a walk around the neighborhood with Elliot, docile in a stroller. Suzanne returns the waves of drivers in slow-moving cars. The houses they pass are faced with thin stone and brick, self-consciously substantial and too close to the road, but ultimately benign, even kindly. Elliot appears to notice them, too, for the first time.

Suzanne returns to work with fresh energy.
Notice,
she tells Carlota, as she steps out the door,
if he seems any different to you.
When she returns home that evening, she finds Carlota asleep on the couch. The television is on, and Elliot is seated on the floor in front of it, transfixed by the screen. Suzanne walks into his sight line and stops. He looks at her without recognition, his eyes dull.

Carlota stirs, shakes herself awake, apologizes. She comes to gather Elliot for bed.

“It's all right,” Suzanne tells her. “I'll do it tonight.”

Carlota studies Suzanne for a moment, as if searching for reprobation in her employer's face.

“Really, it's okay,” Suzanne assures her. She sends her up to her room, which they have allowed her to decorate however she likes, with whatever religious icons and candles.

Suzanne is actually looking forward to putting her son to bed tonight. There is a new understanding between them now, she imagines—the bond of travelers who have been through a taxing journey together—and she is eager to explore its boundaries and variegations.

She turns the television off. As its strident chatter ceases and the screen dies to black, Elliot's fists clench and his body turns rigid. A low moan of protest emerges from his throat. It is the sound of a pained animal, a pup deserted in the woods. Suzanne squats down in front of her child and attempts eye contact. For a suspended instant, she is certain that he will return her gaze the way he had on the grass yesterday, that he will bestow that seal of recognition, of rightness. And she is confused when his eyes and mouth squeeze to slits, when his face seizes into a mask of outrage. And then, all at once, he is upon her.

The pain is a surprise. His teeth penetrate the linen of her trouser leg at the back of her calf. She yelps and stands, tries to yank away, but the clamp of his jaw is as strong as a dog's. The instinct to reach down and wrench him off, to hurl him away, is almost overwhelming, but with all her will she resists doing this. She stands in place as the boy bites with growing ferocity, deep into her flesh. She stands with her own teeth clenched and feels the force of it.

The pain burns through her like an electrical bolt. It keeps burning even after her son has released her leg and rolled onto the floor, sobbing. It keeps burning after she has picked him up, thrashing, and carried him upstairs, and after she has lowered him screaming into his crib, still in his clothing and wet diaper. It burns when she is lying in bed alone, and later when Brian lies down beside her and when he puts a lazy hand on her breast. It burns as she turns away toward the wall. It is there, sharp and searing, as she stares at the bedroom wallpaper, the delicate black-on-white toile she'd chosen for its delicacy, its smiling maidens with their lambs, shaded by trees in leaf.

S
ENTRY

T
HE LITTLE
girl is trampling the flowers. For the past half hour, Helen has watched her move closer to the property line, then finally duck beneath the split-rail fence and edge into the garden. The peonies have only just sprung five days ago, have only just lifted their faces to the world, and Helen has felt the same quickening she does every May, the same pride of a new mother.

She sits with her tea, which she drinks from a fine, hand-painted cup passed down from her great-grandmother in Bremen. She sees no reason to store such treasures away, to use cheaper objects for everyday life. Her ethic is to live among beauty.

The girl next door is a garish bird, clumsy among the garden's tender shoots. She wears a blaring pink shirt and glittered sneakers. There had been another girl with her earlier—an underage babysitter, it seemed—who is now absent. Helen clinks the teacup onto its saucer and rises from her chair.

Outside, she walks with a measured step around the side of the house. As she approaches the garden, the girl freezes in place with the round eyes of a hatchling. Helen walks slowly closer, puts a kindly smile on her face. She peers over the fence to the scrubby yard next door. There is no one there that she can see, no one monitoring the situation.

“Where is your mother?” she enunciates carefully.

The girl shakes her head.

“Do you have a babysitter?”

The girl just looks at her. The pink T-shirt is pocked with faux jewels that spell the word
DIVA
.
A cheap barrette hangs from her hair.

“Is anyone here with you?”

The girl continues to stare. It occurs to Helen that there might be something wrong with her.

“Come,” Helen says. She takes the little girl's hand, plump and sticky. They walk up Helen's own driveway and down the one beside it.

The house next door is yellow, as it has always been, although the new occupants have removed the shutters for some reason, denuding it. The former owners had moved into the neighborhood the same year as Helen. One of the daughters had been in school with Rufus and went on to become a successful prosecutor. The parents were themselves professors, always somewhat disheveled, driving a wood-paneled station wagon and letting the house slide into neglect. After the children were gone, they retired to Maine of all places, and Helen had been heartened to see a young family replace them. They would renovate, she was certain, and bring the property up to neighborhood standards. She'd walked over with a batch of peppernuts and introduced herself. The young woman who answered had seemed harried, almost rude. The husband had not even come to the door. Peering inside, Helen had been discouraged to see the front hall still littered with moving boxes, a baby crawling on the dirty floor.

Now, the husband appears to be gone. His diminutive black sports car, with two white stripes like a skunk, no longer pulls out of the driveway in the morning. Helen no longer sees him on warm evenings, drinking beer on the back deck. She sees only the mother, in tight jeans and fur-collared jackets, her blond mane tousled, rushing her daughter to and from a white Toyota. At night, she lounges in her lighted window like an Amsterdam whore. On some days, babysitters make an appearance, girls no older than twelve. On other days, the little girl roams the property alone, wearing shorts in the unmowed grass, her bare legs exposed to deer ticks. Playthings are left out in all weather, gathering puddles in their plastic gullies.

As Helen mounts the neighbor's porch steps with the girl, she puts a hand to the original wrought-iron railing, its curves shamed by a rash of rust. There is a piece of paper stuck to the door.

My mom told me I have to go home. Sorry. Avis is playing outside. —Olivia

Helen whistles softly through her teeth. No ring sounds when she presses the grimy doorbell button, and after a moment she opens the screen door and knocks with her knuckles. When there is no answer, she tries the door handle, finds it unlocked. The hall, now divested of boxes, is stark and uncarpeted, toys scattered across the floor like land mines. There are patched places on the wall where pictures should hang. She calls out uselessly.

Back outside, she pulls the note off the door, puts it in her pocket, and takes the girl around the house's exterior, as if the babysitter might be hiding in a bush. The heels of her brown leather pumps sink into the moist grass, and she pauses to roll the cuffs of her slacks. The girl follows at a distance as Helen goes past the birdbath with its slimy basin of stagnant water, past the blue plastic toddler slide, faded by the sun.

“I'm hungry,” Helen hears a small voice announce behind her.

She turns and looks at the girl. She is not a bad-looking child: blue-eyed and honey-haired, but with chubby limbs like bratwurst links.

“Well.” Helen bends slightly at the knees, to approach the girl's level. “Why don't you come to my house and have a little snack while we wait for your mommy to come home?”

Helen instructs the girl to remove her muddy sneakers at the front door. After a moment's pause, she leans down to help with the shoelaces, ineffectual with her own long fingernails, and is suddenly revisited by the impatience of motherhood.

Inside, they sit quietly at the table where Helen has left her cup of tea. The girl gingerly eats slices of green apple, looking out the window at her own deserted house. Perhaps this is a good but unlucky child, at the mercy of lazy upbringing. Helen's husband dislikes her tendency to point out every set of incompetent guardians they encounter in public. It is none of her business how people raise their children, he tells her. But it matters, she answers. It matters more than she can explain.

“So, your name is Avis?” Helen asks.

The girl nods.

Helen smiles, cocks her head. “What an interesting name.”

It is possible—though unlikely—that the girl's parents have named her for the Latin
avis
, or
bird
. If so, the name would be almost elegant.
Rara avis.
It seems to her that the inspiration here, more probably, was the car rental company.

After the apple, Helen brings the girl to the room where she works on her dollhouses. Avis is silent for a moment, then says, “Can I play with them?”

“These are not for playing,” Helen answers. “I make these houses by myself. I make the furniture, too, and the little people.”

The girl stares at the collection in front of her, and for the first time Helen sees it the way a child might. There are seven dollhouses in this room, painted shades of ice cream—pale pink, mint green, yellow—and frilled with sugar gables. A paradise.

Helen smiles. “Would you like to help me paint?”

The girl nods her head savagely.

It is easier than Helen might have thought. The girl is careful with the paintbrush, dipping it timidly into a jar of ochre. Helen has given her a simple chair to paint, a throwaway piece, one of several. She herself works on a canopy bed, gluing the blankets and floral-cased pillows into place. They sit in silence together, and it strikes Helen that perhaps it is just as simple as this. Children are, after all, wonderfully malleable at this age. All the girl needs is a model. Already, she is absorbing something of Helen, learning the virtues of quietude, focus, discipline. This, Helen muses, is how she might have spent time with a daughter, if she'd had one. Instead, in some perverse joke, she'd been given a son. If she were thoroughly religious, she might have viewed this as a test from God, customized to engage her individual shortcomings.

After half an hour or so, the girl begins to squirm, and Helen sees that she has turned the paintbrush on herself, making hatch marks along her lower arm.

Helen stands, removes the brush from the girl's hand. “Let's go and see if your mother is home yet.”

There is still no car in the driveway, but they go next door anyway. Helen knocks, receives no answer. She and Avis stand on that concrete porch, looking at their own shadows on the door. Things like this happen, Helen knows. This is a country in which mothers sometimes don't come home. Often they are innocuous episodes—a stalled car, a delayed appointment—but equally often they are something worse. Helen begins to imagine the scenarios. A traffic accident, the Toyota overturned at the side of a highway. Or, more terrible, the Toyota driving onward—heading west, or south—with a tankful of fuel.

They return to Helen's house, remove their shoes again, come back inside. Gene and his crew are repairing a collapsed roof on Cannonfield Road today, and he will not be home until dinner.

“Are you tired?” Helen asks the girl.

She nods.

“Come upstairs, and we'll give you a nice bed.”

Rufus's room has been transformed into a respectable place for guests. The moment he moved out, Helen had peeled off the dreadful posters with their macabre images and inscrutable words:
Ministry
,
Tool
,
Bauhaus.
She scrubbed the room clean, took up the crusted carpet, the blotched bedspread. The new rug is plush white, the walls a buttercup yellow. A vestige of masculinity has been retained in the nautical duvet and navy drapes. On the bookshelf, Helen has arranged framed photographs of Rufus as a little boy. His first-grade photo, with his missing front tooth and shirt collar turned up. A snapshot from a farm trip, with an ice cream cone, shaggy bangs shading one eye.

There are fewer photographs of him as an adolescent, but Helen remembers vividly the pebbled forehead, the dyed black hair incongruously long on top and shaved beneath. She remembers the rotation of concert T-shirts emblazoned with profanities and revolting images. Nude women with their hair on fire.

Her son is now twenty-seven. It has been six years since he dropped out of college and moved into an apartment in the town to the south with chain-smoking roommates. Since then he has been fleetingly employed and released by concerns such as Gold Soundz Records, the Coffee Bean, and the Donut Hole. There has been at least one flunked drug test, a vague cross-country road trip, stretches of unexplained absence. From what Helen can glean, he is now working as a counter boy at the Sweet Spot, wearing a hairnet over his ponytail.

Helen helps Avis out of the grimy
DIVA
shirt and gives her Rufus's old Block Island T-shirt, which comes down to her knees. She closes the drapes against the afternoon sun. The girl clambers into bed, nestles beneath the covers.

While Avis naps, Helen returns to her post at the kitchen table: her teacup, her window view of the flower garden and the house next door. What was previously a leisurely occupation now feels like a vigil. Still, Helen is caught off guard when the white Toyota turns into the neighbor's driveway, and the girl's mother—in a gauzy white top like a bandage—gets out and goes into the house. Helen sits unmoving, holding the handle of her cup for the few moments before the woman comes bursting back outside. The sound of the screen door banging shut makes Helen jump. She grips the handle of her teacup as she watches the woman walk across the grass, disappear around the far side of the house, and reappear in the driveway. Helen holds her teacup as the woman makes another circuit, calling her daughter's name. Helen sits quietly, as if watching a film reel, and does not move from her chair, does not go to wake the girl. The woman has begun to run in erratic patterns over the grass. Helen watches her bend to look under a rhododendron and beneath the plastic slide. There is a new tremor in her calls, discernible even through the window glass. Helen listens. No sound comes from Rufus's bedroom upstairs. She stands and goes to the stove, puts the teakettle on.

Later, Avis wakes, drowsy and rose-cheeked, and asks for her mother. Helen nearly replies that her mother is home now, that their little visit together is over, but the words do not come. Instead, she hears herself say soothingly, “Your mother called. She said she'll be home soon, and that you should stay with me a little while longer.”

Helen leads Avis to the master bedroom, where she closes the curtains and puts on the television. The girl sits on the bed in the draping Block Island shirt, a thumb in her mouth.

Helen searches the channels for a suitable program. She skips over the animated shows with their exaggerated colors and frenetic blinking. Whatever has become of the educational shows of Rufus's youth, she doesn't know. Everything seems frivolous now, designed to stimulate quickly and cheaply, to dazzle the eye and ear. Helen finally stops at a nature show about meerkats, a wholesome, slow-moving program that she herself finds tremendously calming. She appreciates the earnest faces of the animals, their clean, careful manner, the hushed, expert voice of the female narrator. Avis seems similarly transfixed, watching a mother meerkat shoo a snake out of the family den. A wordless emotion rises in Helen's heart. While the pack forages for food, one animal takes sentry duty, standing erect on its hind legs, exposing itself for the good of the group. Gene does not understand her fondness for this show. He accuses her of forcing human values onto nut-brained rodents. Perhaps this is true. But, she thinks, it is hard to ignore the light in their liquid eyes that suggests something more, an inner province of emotion. It seems to her that they really do mourn their young, that a mother really does wither when a predator enters the burrow in her absence.

Of course, Helen is unable to watch without thinking of Rufus. When he visits, when Helen can persuade him to drive the twenty minutes home, he greets her with the old teenage grimace. He rails against the changes in town, the renovated homes, the refurbished street signs, the expensive new high school building. The town was always bad, he grumbles, but has only grown worse. Everything has been scoured and polished to a cold, slick finish. The few warm shadows that used to exist, the only furrows where authenticity could hope to take refuge—the weedy alcove behind the high school science wing, the concrete-benched town plaza—sacred places to smoke and skateboard—have been expunged. Helen rankles at the moral superiority in his voice. She feels compelled to defend the town, insist that it is a good place to raise children. He does not respond to this, but looks away from her, a cloudy film over his eyes.