The Wonder Garden (29 page)

The clack of the hazards is stereophonic and insistent, overruling the turn signal's tinny tick. Lori holds her foot firmly on the brake and draws a long breath, relieved to be alone again with her stop sign. She finally allows herself to glance at the dashboard clock: 6:50. A shot of terror goes through her body. The party begins in ten minutes. Mitch will already be dressed, even as Mason continues to goof in his room. Without Lori there to nag, Mitch will have to be the one to remind him to change out of his sweat-stained T-shirt, to put on something befitting the son of a managing director. Lori pictures her husband in a clean shirt and chinos, face re-shaven, checking the Rolex she bought him as a birthday gift that summer with the excess of money he'd earned. The watch is still bright gold on his wrist, its bezel notched and fluted, almost feminine. She thinks of it now with a kind of nostalgic longing as she pictures her husband pacing the floor of their kitchen, just a few miles away but bizarrely out of reach. How long will he wait, she wonders, before going to the party without her? He will, after all, have to go to the party. He will leave a note, Lori thinks, in his boyish scrawl, telling her to call the minute she gets home. Or perhaps he will wait until nightfall before phoning the Christensens, keeping the fear out of his voice as he explains the situation. Whichever Christensen answers will express concern, as party sounds jangle in the background, then offer assurance that Mitch's wife will be home soon, that she probably just ran into a friend and lost track of time, and that they should come anytime before ten, really.

Lori opens the compartment in the center console and takes out a stack of CDs. She chooses the most relaxing music she can find: a New Age orchestral album with a snowy horse on the cover. As the synthesizer arrangement drifts through the car, Lori tries to relax her eyes. The vehicles on Cannonfield are passing less frequently now. With a moment's preparation, it will be easy to join them. The music is beautiful, transcendent. As she stares at the trees ahead of her, they impress her as meaningfully sublime. These are the kinds of trees the old artists painted, worshipfully, in a time when America promised different kinds of riches. One tree is at a slant, its trunk bowing to a neighbor. Another is tall against the sky: a horse's head. These trees have stood, frozen in their God-given poses, for years, decades, centuries, overlooking this same thoroughfare. Lori considers this. These same trees have watched horses pass over dirt, then cars over asphalt. And, today, they watch what must be a curious sight—a woman alone in a silver-gray Lexus, paralyzed.

It is now well past seven. Maybe they're at the party now. They'd be there with kebabs, Mitch standing firm beside Mason, being strong for his sake, holding the same warming beer bottle. If he could just stand like this long enough, he would have done what he needed to do; he would have gone to the party. Then he and Mason could go home, and they would find Lori waiting for them, apologetic, embarrassed, with a story to tell. Then they would get into bed, he and Lori, and pull the blanket up around them and go on together to the next day. Saturday. September.

It feels good to sit like this. One more moment won't make much difference now, and it's such a rare pleasure to simply enjoy music, to be still. What, after all, is the rush? There's the party, yes, but otherwise, what? The next chapter of her life hardly beckons seductively. Lori imagines the likely content of the years to come, the long hours at her parents' bedsides, the beginning of physical ailments of her own. There will be sporadic, rushed visits from her children as they enter their futures like swimmers shoving off a pool wall. Is this all that life promises at its far end? She blinks her eyes at the thought of such imminent, unpopulated years. She will, she supposes, have to do what every underutilized, terrified woman has done throughout history: find volunteer opportunities, become an involved elder citizen, vigorously resist the twilight slide to oblivion.

For the moment, however, she is still relevant. After some span of time, Mitch and Mason will set out to look for her. They will, eventually, call the police. The certainty of this gladdens her. She allows herself, from the safety of her unmoving car, to imagine their fear of her death. They would not mention it aloud, of course, but it would be in the kitchen with them as they sit at the table, unspeaking. Wrenching scenarios would play out in their minds, each ending with her permanent absence from their lives. Perhaps it's wrong to derive a flowering kind of warmth from this idea. All Lori knows is that, for the span of her unexpected absence tonight, she will be prominent in the minds of her husband and son, and perhaps that is all right. Let them wait. Let them think deliberately of her for this one extended moment before time begins again and she is thrust into the dark.

The trees have gone black. The CD ends, and the car fills with the crude ticking of the hazard signal. Lori touches a button and begins the music again. From time to time, a car rolls up behind her and passes incuriously. There is little traffic on Cannonfield now, but she thinks only abstractly of making her turn. She just wants to stay for another moment. Every so often, she tells herself, we need to stop and sit. There should be pauses between chapters, white space on the printed page. Even a wave of water needs an instant of suspension before crashing down.

Lori's right foot aches. It's like a brick on the brake, unattached to her body. She closes her eyes for a moment, looks at the faint, conjured faces of her husband and sons, then opens her eyes again to the wall of darkened trees. The stop sign, too, has gone dim, its authority muted. Lori gazes at its letters, aglow in the dusk, until they become strange and lose meaning. She puts the car in park and, just like that, removes her foot from the brake. It feels light, grateful, hers again. She just wants to be quiet for another moment. If she could just be quiet for a moment, she would see a space between cars and slide into it. She would go home.

But for now, she turns off the ignition. Her stomach rumbles audibly. It's been hours, she realizes, since she last ate. Ah, but here are the cookies. No one will notice if the box is one or two short of a dozen. Lori loosens the red string and withdraws a jelly cookie, its red blotch like a stoplight. She eats three of these, then reclines her seat. From here, she stares up through the car's moon roof.
Moon roof,
she whispers to herself.
Moon roof
. Mitch had paid extra for this feature at the dealership, though Lori was never sure of its benefit. Now, its value is clear. Through the rectangle of engineered glass she sees a neatly framed portion of sky, a handful of static stars.

Kurt is in Pennsylvania, two hundred miles away. Lori is proud to have dropped him off without crying. Now, she finds herself replaying the day in her memory: the fast westward drive over polished black highway, the abrupt stop at the campus whose gate rose into view like a halting hand. Lori hadn't cried when they located Kurt's concrete dormitory, breathtaking in its ugliness. She hadn't cried when they laid eyes on the cinder block cubicle where he'd sleep for the next ten months, out of her sight and protection, at the mercy of Quaker gods. She had adamantly not cried. This moment of separation, she told herself, had been scripted from the beginning, contained in the very moment of his birth. It was the destination, the destruction, of parenthood.

But now, Lori cries. Sobbing, she allows herself the dangerous luxury of remembering the first months of Kurt's life, when she—her looming smile, the warmth of her body—was all he knew. She would watch his little face, its twitches and flashes of dawning comprehension, and wonder at the shadowed, textured mysteries that were evolving there. His little mind would be labeling everything it encountered, eliminating possibilities, whittling the world into its proper shape, its ultimate, disappointing narrowness. She would stare, as if she might witness the transformation as it occurred. But it was too fast, it was too slow. And one day he became a boy, kicking a bicycle to the ground. From an infant at effortless swim in the world, he'd become a stout little person with a name, a wish, at odds with everything.

It is the story of every mother. Lori leans against the headrest and puts a hand over her eyes. It seems, at times, that everything ends the minute she thinks of it. The minute she considers a thing's eventual end—no matter how far in the future—it ends. She takes her hand away from her eyes and looks through the moon roof at the stars. Those stars may as well be dead the minute she considers their death. The remaining thousands of years are only a technical distraction.

Lori lets her body sink farther into the driver's seat. It is a surprisingly comfortable seat, the headrest expertly contoured to the shape of a woman's skull. She allows herself to be cradled by the upholstered foam and focuses on relaxing each muscle of her body, beginning at her toes, the way she learned to do as an insomniac girl. Like this, she could become a floating being, weightless and free.

As Lori shifts her focus to her abdominal muscles, she feels suddenly and irreversibly tired. It's as if all the years have piled upon her at once, the accumulated hours of lost sleep. She lies with her eyes closed, her brain requesting the release of the cinches that hold her abdomen together. As she does this, a maw of exhaustion opens in her core. It would be so easy to just go to sleep. In the corner of her consciousness, she is aware of being a woman alone in a car at night. She thinks of locking the doors, but her hand disobeys the order to move.

Distantly, she wonders what time it is. Perhaps her husband and son are already home from the party or, more likely, out looking for her. The childish pleasure of this thought is undercut by a feeling of trepidation. Her family will be distraught by now, convinced of the worst. What, exactly, is she doing? An animal whimper comes out of her as she strains helplessly against sleep, its steady velvet tug.

Hours pass. Lori sleeps shallowly. Half dreaming, she drives out onto Cannonfield, then snaps back into place at the stop sign, over and over. When she partially surfaces from sleep, she senses that the black screens of her eyelids are changing, becoming reddish. Possibly, the morning sun is approaching, lighting her blood vessels. She allows her lids to remain closed. Groggily, she understands that the residents of this town, invisibly sleeping in the houses surrounding her, will be rising soon. The Christensens will be waking to hangovers, to a fresh-faced cleaning crew ringing their doorbell. Two hundred miles away, Kurt will be starfished upon his narrow dorm bed, possibly working toward a hangover himself, but for the moment still lost in dreams, his mind enviably clear.

The sound of a car engine registers in Lori's awareness. Someone going to work on a Saturday morning, or to an early breakfast at the pancake house. The engine idles behind her for several moments, the sound of anticipation itself. If she had the ability to sit up, she would lower the window, wave the car past. Perhaps it isn't a car, but the hum of her own dreaming. But then, unmistakably, the sound of a door closing. Someone is finally coming to check on her. A concerned neighbor, or perhaps the police. It's a wonder that it's taken this long, a wonder that so many others have driven past indifferently. From behind this thought stalks another, darker possibility. This is no concerned neighbor, but a stranger with malign intentions. She lies helpless in her seat, conscious of the distance between the door's locking mechanism and her own immobilized fingers. She is the perfect victim, supine and defenseless.

The inside of the car is silent as she waits, adrift in space. The passage of time has become strangely palpable, each moment billowing around her. In these suspended instants before a tap on her window, any outcome remains possible. And yet she is certain it's Mitch who has come. She knows, in her blood, that it is her husband behind her, emerging from their old Acura, the one Mason drives to school with the mysterious gash on the passenger door. That's the car he would have chosen for the hunt, for trolling through town for hours. Now that he's found the Lexus here on Iron Horse Road, he will be walking toward it, his chest thundering with gratitude and fear. This can't be good, he will be warning himself. If she'd simply broken down, why hadn't she found a way to call, or walk home?

Lori is awake now, more awake with each second. At last, she opens her eyes to the moon roof and sees the gentle blue sky. It's a sweet morning, she can see, very sweet. He will have almost reached the driver's side window by now, preparing himself to look in. She'll be seeing his face any minute, unslept and creased with worry, brown eyes as soft as the day she met him. He will peer in at her with an expression of relief and concern, of decades of life already lived and decades remaining, and then he'll open the unlocked door and lift her out of the car. Just like that, he'll lift her and take her home. She turns toward the window and waits. His face will appear any minute now.

W
AMPUM

M
ICHAEL HAS
already unlocked the pistol case. He keeps his eyes pinned to the road, to the vague weavings of the car in front of them, as they cross through town to the address on the invitation. The gate is open, winged by stone pillars and carriage lanterns. As Michael navigates the driveway, Rosalie surveys the grounds through the passenger window. Michael knows that she has seen other fine properties of course, but this is of another tier. He is aware of the weeks she's spent preparing for this evening, having found the invitation where he'd buried it deep in the recycling basket.
This is not something you ignore,
she chastised, holding the card aloft.

The tennis court comes as no surprise. The green clay blends into the surrounding emerald acreage, the pleasant dips and hills, a miniature Ireland here on Pelican Point. The Christensens are the type of people who would build a court whether they play tennis or not, he thinks, the type who trust they will learn the game eventually, hire a private instructor, spend weekend afternoons rallying together. They are determined to reap their rewards, seize each moment as their due. They are, in this way, so much like children, Michael thinks. When the final collapse comes, they will simply and effortlessly crumble. It would be a kind of liberation to live like this, free from the burden of constant vigilance. He exhales audibly and Rosalie flashes him an admonishing glance.

They are met at the end of the driveway by a dark-skinned man in a bomber jacket. Michael's grip on the steering wheel tightens. The man signals to them, gesturing alongside his body.

“Ah, a valet,” Rosalie says, keeping the dazzlement out of her voice.

Michael knows he will have to be fast. The valet opens the passenger door for Rosalie. The moment the door closes behind her, Michael reaches under the seat and slips the subcompact into the outer pocket of his sports jacket. He is out of the car before the bomber jacket has reached the driver's side. He feels a rush of relief. Let the guy adjust the seat and change the radio station all he wants.

As the BMW slides away, he takes off his glasses, which are strictly reserved for driving and theater performances. He and Rosalie circle the house on foot, following the valet's direction. It's a sprawling Tudor with severe, half-timbered gables over a hulking stone base. The effect is heavy, almost medieval, out of sync with the waterfront setting.

Sunlight is fading already. The operatic end of summer, the perennial pinnacle of romance and youth. They circle the house and stand at the top of a granite staircase. Lights are strung in the trees. Jewels glitter on the women. Michael idly contemplates the total dollar value upon the bodies of these collected guests. A group of armed interlopers—perhaps even one bold villain—could hold up the lot of them and divest them of millions. Before he steps down into the mix, he calls the scene to mind. His raiders are equipped with ski masks and black rifles. The women slip necklaces over their heads and drop them to the flagstone. The men unclasp wristwatches with as much slow dignity as possible. Michael knows that, if it weren't for the Ruger, he would have to do the same. Letting Rosalie step briefly ahead of him, he deftly transfers the gun from outer pocket to inner. It is so slim that it barely makes a bulge.

Carol Christensen appears at the bottom of the steps, beaming up at them, illuminated by a footlight. She looks good, hair all grown back, dressed in a snug flower-print number, still shapely for a woman her age. If she has had work done on her face, it is of the highest quality.

“Dr. Warren, we're so glad you could make it,” she says, brushing her cheek against his. He keeps his torso pivoted away. “Your husband is a miracle worker,” she informs Rosalie. “We're honored to have you both here.” She gestures and leads them into the crowd. Michael glimpses the place near the ear where the incision had been, where he'd peered through a window of bone.

They pass batches of faces. Most are attractive, none beautiful. From behind, the women could be young. Their hair is dyed in lustrous blacks, golds, and auburns. Michael's eye is hooked by a woman in red, and he balks. From behind, the shape of the shoulders, the russet hair like a tapered flame, suggests Diana. This is what he was afraid might happen. He's been reckless, playing too close to home.

He sidesteps, causing Rosalie to look. There is no way Diana could be here, he tells himself. There is no feasible link she could have to these people. And even she would not drop so far as to track him down this way. The shape in red rotates a few degrees, exhibiting a horse-nosed profile, and Michael snickers aloud.

But isn't it possible that she would do it? Diana's campaign has stretched out for months. Her phone calls and texts have been unpredictable. Rosalie has been reporting hang-ups at home. He's put a new cell number into service, but kept the old one to throw her off the scent. As far as he knows, she is still in the rented apartment with her daughter, hostage to her own amateur error.

Off to the side, a swimming pool glows. A stone cabana the size of a town house has its double doors open. The main residence is apparently closed. Smart people.

Rosalie troops quietly at his side in a matte silver dress that reminds him of a fish. The dress is out of character for her, but she'd come home one day elated to have stumbled upon it in a consignment shop in town—perfect for this party. A long silver chain with a squiggly pendant rests upon the unified mogul of her breasts. Matching squiggles hang from her earlobes. She has applied some kind of metallic makeup that adds to the marine effect.

“I wonder if we know anyone,” she mutters.

“I'm sure you'll find someone you know,” Michael answers, putting a hand to her elbow. He has, after all, never accompanied her to an event where this has not been the case.

They have already lost Carol. A waiter zeroes in on them like a drone with a filigreed platter of bruschetta. The women are all beginning to look familiar to Michael now. There is a wavy-haired blonde like Camille—but he dismisses this possibility, too.

Rosalie is spirited away by a sparkle-toothed specimen rhapsodizing about the school board. Then Harold Christensen appears. He envelops Michael with a hearty, patriarchal greeting—a hand to the shoulder, a booming hello meant to be heard by all those around them. Michael has the unmistakable sense that their power dynamic has shifted. He is on Harold's turf now, among Harold's people, where Harold reigns. It occurs to him that Harold views his single, privileged visit to Michael's operating room as something inevitable from the start, to which he was always entitled. He had paid good money for it. Very good. And there is no residue between them. A quick wink is the only evidence of their secret compact. Carol is fine, yes, he says. The seizures have not returned. Michael is the best of the best.

“The best of the best,” he repeats, drawing another man into the conversation. “Bill Gregory, I want you to meet Michael Warren. He's the one who fixed Carol.” Harold hits the man on the upper arm and says to Michael, “I'm so glad I lured this one to town. Already he's making waves. The town council nearly sued him for some sort of art”—Harold gestures, looking for the word—“exhibit on his property.”

“Installation,”
Bill corrects, smiling.

“He's a firebrand.” Harold grins. “One of the finest businessmen I know. He finally gave in and joined my board.”

They all know each other, of course. This is the nature of
society
as Michael is given to understand it. A nebulous flow of acquaintance and event. A rigorously upheld air of casualness, coincidence, serendipity—of gleefully “running into” one another. To circulate among them is to witness finely wrought identities held aloft by mutual scrutiny. In every exchanged glance is a judgment of financial prowess, social capability, personal fulfillment. Michael is both repulsed and fascinated by it all. Mostly, he is grateful to be spared, ensconced in a comfortable, unassuming home kept presentable by his wife. He has never gone in for the usual pretentions. It would feel like a lie, trying too hard to please. He is not from this world and would not pretend otherwise.

And being in the presence of these men, complacent upon their moneyed peaks, makes him uneasy. Indeed, he is most admired by his colleagues for the phenomenon of his success out of dingy beginnings. His life story, having leaked somehow to the hospital staff, has become legend: his father's sudden brain hemorrhage when Michael was twelve; his widowed mother cleaning houses, going on food stamps. The consensus is that Michael was activated by poverty's humiliation to rise above his station. Given the nature of his father's death, it seemed logical—and admirable—that he would pursue medicine, and neurosurgery in particular.

Now, he stands upon a square of flagstone on Pelican Point and watches in horror as his host retreats into the mass of guests, leaving him alone with the art insurgent. There is a long, vacant moment during which it occurs to Michael that it must be his duty as the lower-ranked male to carry the conversational burden.

“What's your line of work?” he finally ventures.

“Banking,” Bill Gregory says, his focus snapping back. Despite the relaxed stance and soft-jowled face, despite the pink shirt and navy blazer—that uniform of the ages—there is something hawklike about him.

Michael mirrors his stance, one hand in a pocket, the other holding a tumbler of Scotch. “Rough time lately?”

“It's a memorable moment, that's for sure.” Twinkling smile. Of course no one of Gregory's rank would feel a pinch of any kind. They are the ones delivering pinches.

Michael considers, for a brief moment, whether to ask this man's advice about gold bars. Most likely he has his own cache. Anyone with insight into the current financial debacle would know how to hedge—and gold, after all, is the hedge of all hedges, the only sure thing. When the crunch comes, no one will want to see a dollar bill. Anyone with a stock certificate or government bond will get a laugh in the face. If anyone would know this, it's Bill Gregory.

“Hell, I hate talking shop,” Gregory says. “But now Harold tells me you're quite a prodigy with the scalpel. I heard you saved a girl's life? Some new type of surgery?”

“A hemispherectomy. Not new, but unusual. The disconnection of an entire hemisphere of the brain.”

Bill Gregory nods. “Yes, that's right. That's what I heard. She was almost gone, she was seeing angels, and you brought her back.”

This is what everyone has heard. It has become less about the procedure, less about Michael's life-saving work, than about his patient's glimpse of the afterlife on his operating table. There was a national magazine feature about it, which mentioned Michael's name only in passing. There was no praise for the heroism of modern medicine, or of the surgeon who yanked the little girl back from the brink and secured a semi-normal life for her. Rather, the article went into raptures about the existence of God, as proven definitively by the words of a child.

The girl gave everyone what they wanted. She hovered near the OR ceiling, traveled to the waiting room and observed her anxious parents. She floated to a night sky and passed the planets of the solar system—Saturn was a floating ball of milk ringed with ribbons, she said—and beyond. Then the light and tunnel. She entered this light, of course, and felt the usual sense of warmth, perfect peace. She met the relatives she'd never known in life, all of whom fluttered with wings. The long-dead grandmother turned her around and sent her back to her body.

It would have seemed petty to contradict all this, to offer the probable scientific explanations: The malfunctioning of the girl's remaining parietal cortex would have created a feeling of union with the universe and the sensation of flying. Adrenaline from a distressed brain would have dilated the pupils, causing the appearance of bright light. The diminishing supply of oxygen would have been to blame for the closing of the girl's peripheral vision field and her trip down the quintessential tunnel.

“The surgery was a success, yes,” Michael tells Bill Gregory. “She'll need plenty of therapy to regain the use of the left side of her body, but will otherwise be like any other child.”

Gregory puts a hand out, pumps Michael's. “Well. It's an honor.” He smiles. A trim blonde appears at his side. “Excuse me, my wife.” Gregory winks, claiming her. As they retreat, Michael allows his imagination to swoop into their bedroom, then back out, to what he presumes are Gregory's extracurricular pursuits.

Michael stands in place, training his gaze over the heads of party guests. Between the pool house and Tudor mansion a swatch of the Long Island Sound is visible. From here, it is a fragment, an ornamental splash of color. Still, its presence agitates him in some primal way. Just the suggestion of sea, the undertone of its faraway thunder.

There is one woman who keeps looking over. Bottle blond, in a dress with a complicated green-and-navy print. Despite the wrap design that creates a deep plunge at the chest, Michael distinctly dislikes the dress. Its pattern, he realizes, is like a crude illustration of the sea. The woman's chest is so smoothly rounded beneath the fabric that there must be some sort of padding in her bra, or beneath the skin. The over-bleached hair lies flat against the sides of her head like paper. Still, he returns her glances. The woman disengages herself from her conversation and approaches.

“You're the brain surgeon, am I right?”

“I'm Michael Warren, yes.”

She touches his arm. “The Christensens have told me about you. And I read the story of the little girl you saved.”

Her hand remains on his arm, the fingers impressing themselves through his shirtsleeve. She holds his gaze, and he feels the usual stirrings. Despite the unappealing sleekness of hair, the toned upper arms, the terrible dress; despite the lurking presence of the husband in blocky eyeglasses—or maybe because of it—he does not look away. He feels the woman's fingers against the flesh of his arm like a reassurance: the old passages will always remain open to him.