The Wonder Garden (3 page)

He recalls the evening he and Lori talked over drinks at Charley's. She'd confided in him some garden-variety disappointment with her husband, and he'd complained about some small failing or other of Diana's. They'd sat together amicably in the tavern's wooden booth, pints of amber ale between them, the tableau dimly lit by a wall sconce. There had been a warmth to their rapport, made possible by the relative mildness of their grievances, and when they parted, it had been with the lightness of friends returning to safe and familiar quarters.

After Diana's sudden departure, John hired his own lawyer out of the yellow pages. The lawyer assumed that John would request custody of Bethany, and he hadn't contradicted this. He knew he would have a case. Diana had abandoned them both without warning, without a hint to her whereabouts, leaving father and daughter as awkward housemates.

The strange thing was that Bethany hadn't complained. Day after day she came home from school as if nothing had changed. She sat across from John at the dinner table, Diana's empty seat at her side. As her eyes lowered to the microwaved lasagna on her plate, John felt certain that she knew where her mother was. They were in secret contact, he surmised, and Diana was bracing for battle. One night, when John could no longer stand watching his daughter's prim, calculated motions at the table, he cleared his throat and heard himself tell her that he did not intend to fight for custody. She was old enough to decide for herself, and that was what he expected.

Over the following weeks, he felt himself on trial. He made genuine overtures to his daughter—offered to take her shopping for summer clothes, to host an end-of-school party for her friends—but feared that these efforts seemed forced and transparent. He wanted to remind Bethany of the way she'd squealed in delight when he lifted her into the air as a child, but he sensed the powerlessness of nostalgia against the new barrier of womanhood she'd erected. This, he imagined, was the loss felt by every man who'd ever raised a daughter into adulthood, been through that tragedy. Bethany responded coolly to his efforts, and finally he let them drop.

The days seemed to accelerate then, jerking out of his grasp like a violently unspooling fishing line. And then, last night, he had the phone call from Diana. Abruptly, after weeks of silence, her voice. Bethany was going to pack some things, she said, and come stay with her.

“What do you mean, stay with you?” John asked, his voice tight. “Where are you?”

Diana sighed through the receiver. “What does it matter, really.” Her tone was no longer resentful—just tired.

After dinner, Bethany came out of her room with an overstuffed duffel bag.

“That's a big bag” was what John had said. She smiled, a shadow of wistfulness at the corners of her lips, and tugged the bag behind her.

“Here, let me take that.”

He carried his daughter's bag out of the house and onto the porch. Diana's Impala was waiting in the driveway, its headlights shining in their faces. Bethany hugged John guardedly, and he returned the hug in the same way, so that there was a gap of several inches between them. Then she went out to the car, her figure silhouetted. For a moment, after the passenger door slammed shut, the faces of mother and daughter were briefly illuminated by the interior ceiling light. Then the light faded, and the car backed out of the driveway into the dark.

It is this image that returns to John as he stands between oil tank and furnace. He can still see the faces aglow in the car, already like relics, unreachable.

Lori pokes her head into the mechanicals room. “You okay in here?”

John ignores her winking, confidential tone. “Fine,” he grumbles.

As he emerges, he hears the wife saying, “I'm just surprised they left it this way.” She gestures to the floor, frowning. “But we can rip this up and put down some good carpeting.” She brushes a hand over a wall of aged corkboard, breaking off crumbs. “And this stuff has to go. We can put up new drywall and recessed lighting and make a really nice playroom.”

John's jaw tightens, and he walks away from the voices. He comes to a halt by the electrical service panel and slowly unscrews its cover. It's a 200-amp panel with no fewer than five GFCI breakers. Overkill, maybe, but he feels a prick of envy. He is ashamed to never have invested in GFCIs for his own house, despite the cautionary tales. He remembers clearly the chapter on electrical safety from his certification course, what happens when a loose current finds a ground fault in an unsuspecting human body. It would have been so easy to install circuit interrupters himself when Diana was out of the house, and yet something had made him forget. It is inexcusable for a professional to expose himself and his family to such a simple and unnecessary danger. Their home, after all his vain attentions, is nothing but a coiled snake, charged and capricious. As he thinks of this, a knot tightens in his gut, and his hands tremble as he screws the cover back onto the panel.

He takes measured steps around the perimeter of the basement and pauses beside the corkboard, littered with staples and ripped paper corners. Upon closer examination, he finds traces of scribbled crayon—the outlines of horses, rabbits, trees—like cave paintings. And, faintly, a ladder of penciled parallel lines rises from the floor, labeled with initials and dates:
'62, '63, '64
. Looking at these hieroglyphics, John feels a squeeze in his chest, akin to the ache he'd once felt watching his daughter sleep in her crib.

He turns to Lori and the clients. The husband now stands with an arm around his wife's waist, a bright wristwatch flashing at her belly. John finds himself transfixed by its luster, by the hallucinogenic circles of the wife's dress, the miraculous swell beneath. They are the uncontested, oblivious owners of all of it. They lack even the awareness to doubt this.

“Are we all done?” the husband asks.

John coughs artificially. “Yup, that's about it.” His own voice sounds muted to him, muffled by the basement walls.

“Everything looks all right?” the wife asks.

John meets her open, girlish gaze for a moment, the crystalline irises with nothing in them but confidence in the universe. He feels nearly dead in comparison, wearier by the moment, as if he were being depleted by her presence. It seems that there is a lack of air in this place, that the windows have been sealed shut for decades, since the long-ago children were last measured.

A slow moment elapses. In the space of this pause, John feels the breath of the past, the cumulative exhalations of the house and its lost inhabitants. They seem to gather in the basement's webbed corners, fuzzed with dust and dead skin. It strikes him that this is a last capsule of memory, that when it is swept and painted, the raw floor carpeted and windows unstuck, no trace of life will remain. The history of the house will persist only in the memories of its former residents, those far-flung stewards of dwindling, inexact images.

These meditations visit John as he stands, breathing stale air, and fuse into a beam of insight. The house, in that moment, speaks to him. Suddenly, he sees this basement as an invaluable artifact. Perhaps another set of purchasers will understand, and preserve it.

He inhales purposefully. His eyes turn away from the clients and fix upon a clouded window, its smear of dull sunlight.

“Well, not everything,” he hears himself say. “You've got some pretty decrepit machinery here. The furnace is inefficient, water heater's on its last legs, and the oil tank's vintage Watergate.”

Lori jerks around to look at him.

“And I don't feel good about the WDI situation.”

“WDI?”

“Wood-destroying insects. Termites, carpenter ants. I can't get inside the walls to diagnose how much damage there might be, but I saw a few red flags. You can try preventative measures, of course, like a baiting system, but that'll be a few thousand bucks and it's basically a crapshoot. It might already be too late. The structure could already be compromised.”

The husband's pale face flushes. “You didn't say anything about red flags.”

John shrugs, drops his gaze to his clipboard. “I'm just mentioning it now as part of the wrap-up. There was wood dust on the porch. No visible mud tubes, but there are signs of chronic dampness near the foundation, under the azaleas. Very attractive for termites.”

“And the machinery,” the wife says calmly, “does it all have to be replaced?”

“Ma'am,” John hears himself say, “it would be irresponsible of me to recommend anything else.”

“Well, that's something we can bring to the bargaining table,” Lori interjects. “You could ask for a credit to cover the costs.”

“But what about the insects? That sounds like a deal breaker to me,” the husband speaks in the deep voice of pragmatism.

“We don't know for sure if there's a problem,” answers Lori, looking to John. Her head tilts slightly and her eyes blink rapidly.

“No, you're right. There's a possibility there's no damage.” John pauses, swallows. “You could certainly take that chance.”

The wife stands in place, her optimism still there like firelight, undimmed. John's eyes are repelled from her as from a blaze. “Another thing I remarked before you arrived, during my exterior inspection, is a questionable septic. You'll notice the grass in the back is bright green. That's the classic sign of an overworked field. It's hard to say how many years might be left, but you'd be wise to be careful with your water usage. Short showers, easy on the laundry, and so on.”

The woman stands silent, clear-eyed, watching John. Then she turns an expressionless face toward her husband, a barely perceptible quiver at the lips.

“Here's your report summary,” John murmurs, handing the clipboard to the husband. “Excuse the chicken scratch. The full, typed report should arrive in the mail within forty-eight hours.”

Lori stands in place, smirking slightly, the creases beneath her eyes etched in a kind of shallow mirth. It's as if she is waiting for the joke to reveal itself, for John to break into a grin and rip the report in two.

Instead, the husband signs the paper, and John tears the top sheet across its perforated line, leaving the carbon copy beneath. He touches his ear involuntarily. His voice catches as he speaks, croaking.

“Nice to see you, Lori.”

She opens her mouth, then lets it close again. She nods and crosses her arms over her chest, as if concealing an unbuttoned blouse. After he leaves, John imagines, she will use her most coaxing broker's tone to try to allay the damage. She will return her clients' attention to the granite countertops, Jacuzzi tub, piano room. There will be no one to stop her from trying. John turns and leaves them in the basement.

He drives silently home. As he moves through town, he is aware only of the blunt power of his truck gripping the road. He concentrates on this feeling, the simple momentum of driving, of making a dull push upon the world. On Mercy Avenue, the town's main concourse, he does not slow, as is his habit, to take proud note of the properties he's inspected. He lets the houses blur past.

John turns onto Iron Horse, beneath the mature oaks and maples that have shaded his walks with Bethany and Diana on so many summertime mornings. He presses the brake gently as the roof of his own house comes into view, its chimney like a snorkel. Drawing closer, he views it the way another inspector might. The house is a plain brown box, on its fifth year of paint. It rests at the base of an incline that turns icy in winter and channels storm water in spring. The basement is prone to flooding. This is an error of siting, impossible to solve.

The growl of John's truck dies as he cuts the ignition. He steps along the front walk, over the same seven cracks in the flagstone that grow wider each year. The boxwood still needs pruning. The porch steps list, and the railing bobs under his hand. His work boots are heavy and slow, but they bring him to the door before he is ready. He pauses there for a long moment, his key in the knob, suspended between the sidelights' dark margins.

T
HE
W
ONDER
G
ARDEN

J
FK
IS
disgraceful. The arrivals hall is dirty, sickly lit, clogged with sour-mouthed taxi drivers. What a shameful first face for the country to offer its rosy visitors and inspirited immigrants, Rosalie thinks, this unpainted face of neglectful contempt.
You're on your own
is what it seems to say. She holds up a sign with the girl's name on it and attempts a smile sunny enough to obliterate the gloom.

She and her family have been standing for nearly an hour behind a metal barrier, like cattle, waiting for the passengers of Etihad Flight 101 to come through baggage claim. Finally, a river of new arrivals comes into view: tight-lipped, dark-skinned people hunched jealously over mounded baggage carts. A woman with an airline badge stops in front of them, a scrawny girl at her side. During the handoff, Rosalie maintains her smile, but is unnerved by how strongly the girl resembles a mongoose, with round black eyes and a pointed chin. Her hair is severely parted down the center, and a tight ponytail exposes elfin ears. She is dressed in a blue T-shirt and lightweight olive pants, not the elaborate native costume Rosalie had expected.

Hannah vibrates with excitement like a dog who would bound upon the girl, licking. There is no doubt for her that this will be a great new friend, plain and malleable.

“Hi!” she cries. “Welcome to America!”

Rosalie extends a hand and squeezes the girl's damp, wormlike fingers. In contrast to this diminutive person, her own children are giants. Their faces are assertively sculpted, with patrician brows and jawbones. It's striking, seeing these young people together, how God is capable of carving such variety from the same stone. As Rosalie studies the girl's face, she decides there is a slanted kind of prettiness there—something that flickers in and out, dodging and diving.

In the short-term parking lot, Rosalie gestures to the titanic Grand Caravan, gleaming silver. “Here it is,” she says. The girl's pointed face shows no change. For a moment, Rosalie sinks with the suspicion that this was all a mistake, that they have gotten a dud, that the next several months will be suffocating. But, no. It is her job to make it work. She is a mother, first and foremost, and this stranger will soon be like her own child. She takes a quick gauge of the girl's height and weight: borderline. To be safe, she gestures her into the middle booster seat. The girl fidgets but does not resist as Rosalie buckles her in.

On the Hutchinson River Parkway, Rosalie keeps to the center lane, tolerating the maniacs weaving around her. These initial surroundings are disappointing, the cramped multifamily dwellings along the exit lane, the frightful megaliths of Co-op City.

“Don't look!” Hannah says jubilantly to the girl. “This isn't where we live. I'll tell you when to look.”

“How was the flight?” Rosalie attempts in her best motherly tone.

The girl's voice barely rises above the sound of the car engine, soft and musical. “It was okay, thank you.”

“You must be tired.”

“Yes.”

The Grand Caravan finally merges onto an emptier highway, wide and clean, edged with lush leafwork, and Rosalie feels a familiar sense of relief, of spatial freedom. As they pull off the exit and drive through the center of Old Cranbury, she prickles with a feeling of pride for this place, its preserved character, the quality of its people.

“That's the hardware store,” Hannah says, “and the handbag store, and the health food store, and there's where we get our hair cut.”

Rosalie glimpses the girl's profile as she looks out the window, brightened by the lucid and fair New England sun. She has cleared her own calendar these first few weeks. She'll write her “In the Spectators' Stand” column at night, after the children are asleep. She will devote her daylight hours to acclimating the student to her family and its roster of enriching activities.

“This is it,” Hannah announces as they pull into the driveway. Rosalie tries to see her home through the girl's eyes and imagines it looks like paradise. There is a barn-style garage door, borders of neat Belgium block, stone pillars flanking the driveway. The flower boxes are full. She has added these careful details to the property over the years without ever altering the original structure. She is proud not to have wasted money on expansion, even as her family has burgeoned. The boys occupy two bedrooms, and she has transformed an attic storage space into a funky, garret-like room for the girls.

This is the room that Nayana will share. Rosalie has purchased a roll-out trundle for her, along with cheerful bedding, careful to avoid television characters she might not recognize. At home in Bangladesh, according to the exchange agency, the girl sleeps in a single room with her entire family. Rosalie has a picture in her mind of this room, of disheveled blankets, stained mattresses on the floor. The mother probably sweeps with a straw broom, ushers the dirt right out the door. Is there electricity? This point has been omitted by the agency. Rosalie has warned her children that this might be the student's first experience with it.

At dinner, the family eats quietly, a kind of humming suspense in the air. Rosalie is pleased that the kids have remembered her guidelines, to not ask too many questions and to speak more softly than usual. Nayana's family is probably not as rambunctious as the Warrens. There are cultural differences that need to be respected. Rosalie sorts through a muddle of feelings as she watches Nayana pick at her macaroni and cheese: pity for the girl, mixed with pride in herself for having invited her here, and a surging affection for her own children, sitting respectfully with their forks and knives, each of them excellent in his or her own way.

The girl is obviously exhausted. She lays her fork down as if its weight is too much for her and looks up to Rosalie in supplication.

“Why don't you go ahead and get ready for bed, Nayana. I'll show you where everything is.”

Rosalie leads her down the hall, past the framed array of black-and-white photographs, a gallery of family joy. As they walk, Rosalie is almost ashamed of her tremendous fortune, and feels a shiver of gratitude for who she is, for what she has been given.

In the girls' bedroom, Nayana opens her suitcase, revealing a compact mound of clothing, and pulls out a pilled pajama set the color of mud. Rosalie waits outside the bathroom as she brushes her teeth, or completes whatever cleansing rituals she has learned at home. Before the rest of the family has finished eating, she is under her generic pink blanket, asleep.

In bed, Michael remarks, “She's quiet.”

Rosalie stiffens. “Well, that's to be expected.”

“I know. I was just making an observation.”

She lets a beat pass. “It's going to be a great experience for the kids.”

“I'm sure it will be. You always do wonderful things for them.”

There is, Rosalie thinks, a sardonic inflection in his voice, passing beneath the words like a water moccasin. What is wrong with doing wonderful things for her children? This is an argument not worth having before bed. She has every confidence that, by inviting this girl into their home, they will all learn about the world. They have not traveled since Ethan was a baby, when they'd visited Mexico and Rosalie had gotten sick from the water. Now that they are a family of seven, now that Michael's work has intensified and airfares have risen, now that places like Mexico have dropped into the quicksand of crime, it makes more sense to stay home and bring the world to them.

The agency had allowed her to choose the nationality of her student. To Rosalie's dismay, many of the available students seemed to be from Middle Eastern and North African countries. Muslim. Rosalie had to admit she felt unprepared for that. She was more open-minded than most, but as a Christian and peace-loving American, she had mixed feelings about certain tenets of the Islamic faith. Not to mention that she was uncertain as to how her own community, having lost so many husbands and fathers in the terror attacks, would react to such a youth in its midst. And what would such a youth have in common with the Warrens? Wouldn't she feel uncomfortable, out of place, in her burka, or face veil, or whatever covering she was required to wear? Rosalie had to be honest with herself: it would make
her
uncomfortable to share space with a veiled child. She was afraid she might slip and say something that might offend the girl, defame her culture. It was one thing to host a foreign student, another to incite a political skirmish.

So she'd chosen a girl from a Hindu region of Bangladesh. A little less obvious than India, a little more exotic. She taught her children to find the country on the map. They took out books from the library to learn about the customs and habits, dress and language. Rosalie emphasized that this was a thoroughly poor country, devoid of glittery urban pockets and mirrored skyscrapers. There was no question that they would be hosting an underprivileged child, introducing her to the dizzying freedoms and opportunities of American life. She pointed out that only a minority of Bangladeshi children have a chance to learn English in addition to their native language—the implication being that her own children, in their fortunate circumstances, should be grateful for their grade-level Spanish. Together, they learned about the Hindu religion, the meaning of the gods. Her children were entertained by the idea of so many deities for so many oddball things.

It's a thrill to bring Nayana on Sunday to outdoor church services at St. John's Chapel in the woods. The possibility flits through Rosalie's mind that mere exposure to such a parish, so humbly and effortlessly in harmony with Nature, will be enough to snap the girl out of her yoke of archaic, superstitious beliefs. At the end of a wooded path, the congregation is seated upon log benches facing the young pastor beneath his rustic trellis. The Warrens usher Nayana onto the wood-chip path in her white cotton dress like a shy debutante.

The pastor begins the service by announcing the presence of a special guest from afar, whom he is confident everyone will treat as an honorary member of the congregation. Faces turn and smile at the Warrens, and Rosalie feels lifted by the collective tide of goodwill. It is so strong, she thinks, that Nayana must feel it, too, the pure force of decency in these people around her. The pastor then leads the group in song, and Rosalie lifts her voice to meet the others, twisting and braiding in the air. Rosalie glances at Nayana and wonders what revelations might be occurring inside her brain at this moment.

Back in the car, Rachel asks, “Nayana, what is your church like at home?”

“They don't have church,” Noah calls from the far backseat.

“He's right,” Jonah says from the middle backseat. “Don't you remember? They have temples and icons. They paste silver foil on rocks and paint them orange.”

Rosalie intervenes. “Why don't we ask Nayana what she thought of the service?”

There is a pause, then the girl's voice lilts, “I thought it was very nice.”

Noah grunts. “She
has
to say that.”

Rosalie glances in the rearview mirror to where her youngest son sits behind his brothers. He alone among her children remains pale after three months of summer vacation, three months of dazzling afternoons spent in his room, sorting minerals and dead insects.

“Put your seat belt on, Noah,” she tells him, and watches him yank the strap from its sheath. It kills her that the belt hits him just at the neck, denting the skin, but she fights the urge to adjust it. He could technically still be in a booster—he has yet to surpass the weight requirements—but she would not point this out. Any scrap of dignity, she knows, is crucial to a boy this age. Even his face reflects the torture of pubescence. The eyebrows are too low, left behind by the reckless rise of his forehead, and there is a permanent look of scorn in his eyes, set temporarily too close together. Rosalie has faith that his features will soon adopt more regular proportions, as his older brothers' have, but knows better than to assure him of this.

Rosalie meets Nayana's eyes in the rearview mirror and smiles. She is not a true “exchange” student, in that no child from Old Cranbury will be spending equal time in Bangladesh. Instead, one of Noah's eighth-grade classmates will stay with a family in Australia for the semester. Noah had wanted to do this, but Rosalie had told him no. She can't fathom one of her children being absent for so long, coming home taller and heavier, full of meals she hasn't prepared.

There is no higher directive than motherhood, she believes, no better purpose than shepherding new life through the world. She is continually transfixed by her own offspring, these five miraculous iterations of her own genes. What a pity, those women who choose not to have children, who deny the clamoring souls inside them. She disapproves, too, of those women who have children casually, who treat them as accessories, or worse, burdens—those women who continue to chase power careers, who hire live-in nannies who keep the television on all day, as she has witnessed through the window of Suzanne Crawford's home. It's no wonder her little boy still hasn't spoken a word.

The sad fact is that Rosalie is nearing fifty. She might have tried for another child, but her husband had been firmly opposed, and now the stockades of menopause are undeniable. Still, she takes comfort in the fact that there is no family in town larger than her own. Because of this, she enjoys a kind of celebrity. She is always the class parent in one grade or another at any given time. She knows every teacher and parent in the elementary, middle, and high schools. It is difficult to complete any grocery trip for all the chatting she is obliged to do. It was inevitable, of course, that she'd eventually run for school board and be elected. She understands what children need. She'd begun her first term this summer, an intrepid foot soldier in the battle of the budget. The numbers are daunting to her, the spreadsheets with rows of digits like crawling ants, but she knows better than to worry over them. What matters are the values those digits represent: each a history teacher, a soccer field, a new set of school bus tires. The decisions are, after all, basic. The board doesn't need another mumbling accountant. It needs Rosalie Warren, clearheaded and largehearted, mother of all.