The Wonder Garden (6 page)

Sinking into the cushion, captive, she thinks of Thomas Callahan. She hadn't known him when he was alive, but had seen his photograph and obituary in the newspaper. A kind, competent face. A father of three: a boy and two girls. His face comes to her now, in the colors of life, and she pictures him here on the cushion beside her, an unborn moment. She thinks of the phone call he might have made from his desk in the last clear seconds before the world caved. For a moment she wishes she'd been the one he'd called, the wife who'd heard his warm breath in the mouthpiece. She feels the collapse as if it were happening inside her. She feels a plunging grief for his children. A plunging grief for Noah.

The television news purrs on, and she remains in place beside her husband, pinned in his shadow. The collapse is still happening, always happening. She feels herself shrinking, becoming infinitesimal, a cone of dust. The children are in bed in their rooms, their little hive cells, asleep or awake. Rosalie sits far apart from everything, disintegrating.

She opens her eyes and looks at the television, a car commercial. An American couple achieves the top of a mountain, commanding a vista. She breathes in and breathes out. It is all right to retreat. She will pull back, she will redraw her boundaries. She will find her balance. When she emerges again, she will be refreshed, reenergized. She will be the best Rosalie she can be. The best and only.

A
FTERGLOW

H
AROLD
'
S WIFE
is up on a stepladder, doing something to the drapes. A pattern of leaves and vines, framing a point-blank view of the sound.

“How strange,” she says, “I'm having such a sense of déjà vu right now.”

“To do with the drapes?”

“Yes, to do with the drapes. And also you saying that. And this right now, too . . .” She turns from her perch on the stepladder and looks with wide eyes at Harold. “Now it's gone. But it felt so real, like I knew what was going to happen next.”

Harold nods.

“It's been happening a lot lately.” Carol steps down from the ladder, turning her head from side to side. “And you know what I keep thinking of? You know what keeps popping into my head? That time when we were in Spain, when we had our first paella together, at that restaurant with the flamenco dancer. Remember? The very dark restaurant that felt like a cave. All the candlelight. The flamenco dancer had a yellow dress, and you were wearing a red shirt.”

“Seville.”

“Right, Seville. It's funny. I don't have many vivid memories from that long ago, but that one just popped back. It feels like it happened yesterday.”

“It's a nice memory”—Harold's stomach clenches—“I wish I could remember it.”

“It keeps coming back now.” His wife shakes her head again, as if shaking the memory away.

Thinking of Spain, Harold can resurrect only one moment: sitting on a hill in La Mancha, looking over the arid landscape. There had been a bare tinge of evening's approach, a retreating glow on the scrublands, an advancing mineral tint. They'd looked out at the distant town of Cuenca, its ancient stone houses jutting over a cliff, and he'd absorbed that picture into his brain, imprinted it there. He had deliberately frozen that moment when he turned to the woman at his side, soon to be his wife, and told her that he was happy.

Now Carol disappears into another room of the house. The tap of her clogs on hardwood floor punctuates the quiet. His brain continues to hold aloft the image of the Spanish vista. Then it quavers in his mind's eye and goes dim.

From outside comes the bleat of a bird. An ugly tune. His wife's clomping, too, has become irritating. Harold goes into his office, closes the door, and turns on his jungle sounds—a gift from one or another of his children. He sits on the easy chair and lets the jungle wash over him. With the shades drawn, the bright Sunday afternoon progresses unseen. The weekends are beginning to make him feel old. He is aware of vague aches in his body. His jog was hard this morning, and his cholesterol count is a problem, a maddening genetic hand-me-down. There are cocky young bastards in his office with designs on his leadership. Fifty-nine, he reminds them, is the prime of a man's life.

But one day, he knows, the board will elect to force him out. They'll retire him, impose a blank second act for his life. At that juncture, perhaps, he might like to enroll in medical school. People begin new careers all the time. His business experience would be helpful, he thinks, in making difficult judgments, dealing with difficult patients.

He sits at the computer and looks again at the admissions page for Harvard Medical School. They require a college transcript, test scores, letters of recommendation, an essay. He chuckles at the thought of the essay, his explanation of this sudden shift in his life, a man who could buy the whole medical school if he wanted.

He thinks about that. He thinks about buying a medical school, enrolling himself in it, paying the doctors to teach him.

The sound of raindrops and monkey calls deepens his reverie. Curiosity, he read somewhere, is part of the recipe for happiness. Perhaps following its pull is the only way to upend the mind's more tedious, workaday functions. Perhaps happiness is nothing more than that—the cessation of logistics, a broad clearing of the decks.

He feels that his own potential for curiosity is still there, but atrophying more each year. Math and science had come so easily to him when he was younger. He'd always assumed that his life would follow that path—a brightly studded path of organs and numbers and knives. Instead, he found economics. It's true that his inquisitiveness has served him well in his chosen field. He's absorbed the tenets of finance, learned to handle the instruments of business the way a surgeon handles his scalpels, with a sure grip and steady purpose. He's made leveraged buyouts, one by one, with clinical precision, taking his targets by surprise. In the best cases, it feels like hunting. Stalking a company, studying its inner workings down to the behavior of individual executives. He predicts the moment of weakness, then waits for it, sometimes for years. It is obsessive, he knows, but he always takes his quarry. It has kept him limber for decades.

Ultimately, he has no regrets about the direction his life has taken. He is a businessman who enjoys reading science magazines in the evening. His is a comfortable living, with three substantial cars, a number of well-tended acres on the water.

On vacation in Kauai, the Christensens buy coconut halves from the barefoot men on the beach, and the almost-grown daughters learn to make leis. Near the end of the trip, Harold's wife lies flat on a towel under the sun.

“I'm thinking about Spain again.”

“Again? The paella?”

“It's so strange, it's like I can taste it again. It actually feels like I'm eating paella right now.”

Hearing this, Harold feels his body tense. The lulling seaside heat turns hostile.

“Maybe it's the sun,” he says. “You should go under the umbrella.”

“Hmm,” she says, her eyes closed. Then her eyes open and she sits up on the towel. She stares intently at the ocean, as if seeing something approach, some strange ship. Harold follows her gaze, but finds nothing but water and empty horizon. He looks back at Carol, whose right arm lifts and stretches in front of her. Harold can see the beginning of sunburn on the skin.

“Honey, are you all right? What are you doing?”

She doesn't answer, but continues to stare straight ahead, her arm stretched. Her lips move soundlessly.

“I think you should go under the umbrella.”

Her arm stretch lasts another moment, and then another. She appears to be reaching for something. Then her arm slackens and relaxes at her side. She lies back down on the towel.

“What just happened?” Harold asks her.

“I don't know.” Carol says. “What happened?”

“Honey, come under the umbrella. The sun is doing something to you.”

That evening, her arm stretches out during dinner. She topples a water glass, and her fork falls from her hand.

The Hawaiian hospital admits her overnight. Their test results are inconclusive. The doctors recommend she follow up at home. The Christensens are lucky to live in a place with some of the best neurological facilities in the country.

Harold's family spends a tame New Year's Eve at the hotel bar. Carol maintains her muted good spirits, sipping sparkling cider. Their daughters are determinedly upbeat, and no one mentions the episode.

The day of their return, Harold makes a few strategic phone calls and secures an appointment with the best doctor in the field. According to his chief operating officer, who's survived an aneurysm, there is no one but Michael Warren, head of neurosurgery at St. Joseph's.

Harold takes the afternoon off work to accompany his wife to the hospital. Dr. Warren is young, at least a decade younger than Harold, with a full head of dark wavy hair. They sit in his office, a cold shell of a room with few embellishments, and Harold describes the nature of Carol's episodes.

Dr. Warren listens closely. When Harold finishes, the doctor says, “I should tell you that I'm not usually involved in diagnosis.”

“Usually,” Harold repeats.

Dr. Warren looks silently at Harold for a moment. He has quick, intelligent eyes.

“How long have you been practicing?” Harold asks.

The doctor blinks, sits back in his chair. “Well, I finished medical school twenty-one years ago.”

“Oh, I'm not questioning your credentials. Just curious. I wanted to be a doctor myself when I was a kid.”

“A doctor is always practicing. That's a bad joke in the medical field.” The doctor sits forward again, begins to stand.

“This seems like a very good hospital,” Harold says, standing first. His shoulders square instinctively and he feels the clean, masculine lines of his suit. “I shouldn't speak so soon, I mean not until my wife has been diagnosed.” He tilts his head toward Carol, who is gathering herself up from her chair. “But this seems like the kind of institution that might be worthy of financial support.”

“Well.” The doctor pauses, smiles. “There's always room for improvement—and for fighting malpractice lawsuits.”

There. They have an understanding.

Harold chuckles. “And there's always room for grants for talented doctors, I bet.”

Dr. Warren sends Carol for an MRI the same day. Harold watches her frame disappear into the space-age tunnel, then asks the radiology technician for permission to come inside the booth where they study the scan of her brain. The technician hesitates, but looks steadily at Harold, a gray-haired man in a gray pin-striped suit, and cautiously assents.

“Just don't touch anything,” he says.

The technician sits at what appears to be a desktop computer. Harold hovers at his side, watching the monitor. All at once, the brain shape appears, ruffled and white, like a cauliflower cut in half. Harold stares. His breath catches, and he has the irrational desire to touch the screen.

The radiology technician speaks into a headset. “You'll hear some banging sounds. They'll just last a few seconds.”

“Who are you talking to?” Harold whispers.

The technician glances coldly at him. “Your wife. There's a speaker in the machine, so she can hear my voice. It's comforting for patients to know that what's happening in there is normal.” He looks back at the machine. “Now you'll hear a buzzing noise and some high-pitched beeping. It will last about a minute. Just close your eyes and try to relax.”

“What's happening now?”

The technician presses a button and writes something down. The image on the screen flips to a side view, showing the profile of Carol's face, the bone of her nose. “We're checking for abnormalities in the hippocampus.”

Harold stares at the brain. Viewed from the side, there is a breathtaking architecture of curved vaults and aqueducts, and a purposeful canal leading to the rest of the body. It seems far too complex a thing to be inside Carol. Harold feels an itch at the top inner part of his right thigh, near his groin. He resists the urge to scratch it, and considers the elaborate circuitry that makes him aware of the itch and that keeps his hand in place despite the overwhelming desire to move it. He wonders what that particular neural scenario would look like on the brain screen. Perhaps the arising itch might appear as a spontaneous bright dot in one of the brain lobes. Which lobe, he cannot hope to know. It would be improper to ask now, of course, and distract the technician from the medical attention he is supposed to be giving his wife.

Several moments of silence pass. Harold takes his eyes from the screen and looks through the lab window to the colossal machine that contains Carol. He can see the hem of her hospital gown, the soles of her socks, her bare legs tan from Hawaii. The top part of her body is hidden. She looks like a magician's assistant about to be cut in half. What is she thinking in there? Is she thinking about drapes? Death? Handbags? She looks lonely in the tube. The brain on the screen looks lonely, too. It feels like a strange sort of perfidy, to examine her mind in this way, to ogle it with these other men. The most surprising part of it, so far, is that her brain is exactly the shape he expected. It is the shape of all brains in the world.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” Harold asks.

“Any lesions or abnormalities in the brain's anatomy,” the technician mutters, “that might help us determine the cause of your wife's seizures.”

“Any indication yet?”

“You'll have to discuss the results with the doctor.”

Harold looks back through the glass and sees Carol's foot jiggle. What if she has an itch inside the tube? How terrible, he thinks, not to be able to scratch it.

Harold watches the technician's face in profile, lit up by the glow of the screen. The face contains godly knowledge. What, on the other hand, does Harold know? Cash-flow projections? Imaginary galaxies of real use to no one. He feels the same hunger that he felt as a boy, a driving need to know, to be taught.

“Now twenty seconds of clicking,” the technician says.

Harold thinks he can hear the clicking sounds himself. Like the sound of a fork tapping a glass bowl around his head.

Carol emerges, whole, from the MRI tube. She emerges fully clothed from the hospital, and Harold escorts her back to the car. She is a civilian again, with makeup and high-heeled shoes. The only difference is the slightly shaken look on her face, the lips flexed in a strained half-smile.

“The doctor said we'll hear in a few days. I'm sure everything's fine,” says Harold.

“Yes, I know. I'm just glad it's over.”

The MRI was nothing, thinks Harold. If there is bad news, she might have to undergo brain surgery. No one has told him this, but he's sure it is true. Bad news always means surgery.

“It didn't hurt, did it?”

“Not at all, but the noises were unpleasant.”

Harold tries not to grin.

“You mean the bangs and taps and whirs?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“I talked to the doctor about it. I wanted to know what you were experiencing.”

“That was sweet of you, honey. But really, it wasn't that bad. I'm just glad to be out of that tube.”