The Wonder Garden Read online

The jets come on strong and sure. John drains the water, leaves the bathroom, and moves downstairs. In the kitchen, he turns on the tap and leaves it running for the septic dye test.

  “Beautiful cabinets,” Lori is saying. “You can tell they were just done.”

  The wife nods. “They’re gorgeous. And I love the tiled backsplash, don’t you, honey?”

  The husband stands vacantly at the far side of the kitchen island, his hands deep in his pockets. He does not reply at once. His gaze is abstracted, perhaps focused on an evening in his future when he’ll come home to this kitchen and greet his family. When John catches the man’s eye, he thinks he sees a flicker of apprehension.

  “They’re very nice,” the husband replies.

  If all goes well with the inspection, this man will live here. This will be the landscape upon which fresh chapters of his life and marriage will play out, for better or worse. John doesn’t purport to be a gauge of the intimate lives of others, but he imagines that this couple is vulnerable to the same blights as any. Perhaps this wife will become callous and antagonistic like Diana. Perhaps all women do, eventually. If John were a different sort of man, he might beckon the husband into a corner and caution him about wives turning against husbands without warning. He might alert him to the perverse importance of talking. He might tell him how he’d always believed he and Diana were viscerally linked, that she’d been as much a part of him as his lungs or liver, that their communication had approached telepathy. So then, how, in nineteen years of marriage, had he failed to notice what she one day referred to as a “brick wall” between them? All at once, it was too late for endearments; all the talking they’d ever done was meaningless, abruptly sealed away behind them.

  John opens the cabinet doors beneath the kitchen sink. Bottles of cleaning fluid are organized around beautiful new PVC piping. There is still sawdust in the corners of the cabinetwork. He turns off the tap and circles the kitchen, opening and closing drawers. He checks the countertops, above and below, feeling the weight of Lori’s eyes on him.

  “Granite,” John mumbles. “There’s a small possibility of radon, in case you’d like to order a test.”

  When he looks up, he sees the wife leaning against the counter, her inflated middle tapering to the implausible pair of tanned legs.

  “No, I think we’ll pass,” the husband says.

  John clears his throat. “Otherwise everything looks clean.”

  “Oh, good.” The woman smiles and, after a moment, asks, “So, how long have you been an inspector?”

  John hesitates before answering. He is unable to tell from the tone of her voice whether she is asking out of polite curiosity or skepticism.

  “About twenty years,” he says. “Truth is, I know more about the houses in this town than anyone should be allowed to know.”

  “Oh, do you live here?” The surprise in the woman’s voice is undisguised.

  “Since before you were born, probably.” At this, Lori shoots him a look.

  The wife nods at John. There is something appraising in her face that makes him uneasy.

  “I think you’ll love it here,” he goes on. “It’s a great school system. I’m on the school board myself, making sure of it.” He glances at her belly and attempts an avuncular grin. “Girl or boy, do you know?”

  The woman’s smile dims. “It’s a surprise.”

  “I have a daughter.” John hears his voice echo in the kitchen. “She’s in the high school now.”

  The woman nods. She now strikes him as much older than before, too old to be having a baby.

  “We have a terrific theater program,” he continues aimlessly, “and the football team does very well.”

  Again, the dim smile.

  “All I can say is, enjoy them when they’re little. You’ll see how fast it goes.” As John speaks, he feels a thickening at his tonsils. Bethany’s childhood has sluiced past like water.

  The husband has come to his wife’s side now. Neither of them responds to John’s last comment, and he can’t blame them. He always hates it himself, when others proffer such insulting banalities. Children grow up, everyone knows that. He feels humiliation brush his cheeks like sandpaper. The prickling migrates to his neck and chest, inflaming the skin beneath his shirt.

  Husband and wife lean together against the granite countertop, unfazed by the radon progeny that may or may not be forming a particulate cloud around them. It is now clear to John that these are unapologetic members of the city rich, that breed of newcomers who’ve been slowly infiltrating the town, contracting showy new construction or transforming the abodes of the dead and elderly. John has watched modest, well-loved homes grow extra limbs overnight, become burdened with columns and porticos, moated with wrought-iron gates. He’s seen bumper-stickered Volkswagens give way to army-sized SUVs. And in his rearview mirror, more and more often, he finds shadowed drivers behind gleaming windshields, clutching cell phones, tailgating.

  “So, what’s next?” the man asks. His arms are crossed over his chest, and the vulnerability in his eyes has vanished. This is a man in control of his life, proprietor of home and family, and John feels the cool, professional distance between them.

  He leads them back through the icy living room and into a smaller room with a piano and built-in window seats. This room, some kind of parlor, is obviously another addition. It is crisp, with unclouded windowpanes that give an impartial view of the outdoors. The window seats are covered with blue velvet cushioning suitable for a royal family portrait. It is difficult to believe that the same wife responsible for the stiff orange sofa has chosen the upholstery here. Just as Diana loved to do, this other woman must have sat with fabric swatches and held them to the light. Whenever he came upon his wife in such a pose, he would be struck by the distant focus in her eyes, as if she were envisioning a life somewhere beyond the walls of the room, a life more captivating than her own, a life that he suspected did not include him.

  It’s impossible to think their bond had been so tenuous. After all these years, Diana’s insistence that there was a fault line all along—that they communicated poorly, that he’d always been self-involved, unromantic—does not jibe. Her dissatisfaction had congealed too suddenly; her voice was too sharply contemptuous. Any man would be suspicious. And then, in January, the odd phone calls in the morning began, followed by lengthy, unfruitful trips to the mall. John had more than once thought of trailing her car, but resisted. What a pathetic thing it would be to usher his proud GMC behind her Impala. And worse than the ugly possibility of being detected, of course, was the calamity of being correct.

  So he did nothing, and in March the paperwork appeared on his night table on the letterhead of their family attorney. Diana did not come home from work. Prowling the hallway in the night, stunned and sleepless, John found a strip of light beneath his daughter’s door. Entering the room, he met Bethany’s eyes where she lay propped in bed with a book. The look she gave him was flatly unsurprised and, he swore, held a glint of mockery.

  John bends to check the electrical outlets beneath the velvet window seats: three-pronged and modern. As he stands, he sees the husband tentatively run a finger over the glossy fall board of the piano and catches the private smile his wife gives him.

  “He used to play,” she explains, then looks back to her husband. “We could get a piano and put it right here. We should do it.”

  “What a wonderful idea,” Lori chimes.

  John has no doubt they will do it. This wife will surely surprise her husband one Christmas morning with a grand piano wrapped in a bow. It’s the sort of purchase people like these make without undue concern, rooted in the belief that everyone deserves the things that attract them.

  John’s house, too, holds a piano—an old upright from the elementary school, which Diana was savvy enough to procure when the district sprang for concert grands. It makes John crazy that the board
squanders property taxes on such extravagances, but at least Bethany has had her own instrument to play at home. It is a blond wood Kimball with shallow graffiti inscribed on its lid, and Bethany had sat dutifully at its bench for a few months, picking out commercial jingles and television theme songs. Then she quit and turned to acting. It’s normal, John supposes, for his daughter to aspire to stardom. It’s normal for a girl her age to paint her eyelids with pink glitter and wear rhinestones on her jean pockets. And yet John notices that Bethany dresses differently from most girls in town. He isn’t sure what is influencing her: music videos or supermarket magazines. Her friends seem coarse, with pitted faces like moonscapes and suggestive phrases across the rears of their shorts. Bethany herself is delicate-featured and thick-haired. When she leaves her hair long and simple, John thinks she is as lovely as any actress in a photograph.

  Earlier that month, she played Holly Golightly in the school’s unlikely musical production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The director had caused a near scandal by casting Bethany—an eleventh grader—as the lead, but apparently no senior was able to carry the role. John came to the play alone and sat apart from Diana, the back of whose head he could see several rows ahead of him. He watched his daughter pretend to smoke from a cigarette holder onstage and give a real kiss to her costar. She made up for her middling singing voice in brass and volume, and her potholed melodies soared gloriously across the auditorium.

  After the play, John rushed to arrive backstage before Diana. He stood at the periphery of a squealing huddle around Bethany, holding a bouquet of red roses and waiting his turn to commend her. She smiled politely as he gave her the flowers, as if indulging a misguided suitor. He found himself stumbling as he told his daughter how well she’d acted, how much like Holly she’d been. He left her holding the bouquet tentatively, as if it were not hers, and when he turned back saw that she’d rested it on the floor beneath a school desk.

  John tests the windows of the piano room, noting the fluid opening of the sashes. Lori stands in a shaft of sunlight, saying, “It’s a lovely room, don’t you think? So bright and pleasant.”

  It must be almost four o’clock, judging from the slant of light through the glass. A single home inspection always seems to occupy the whole afternoon, no matter how quickly he works. He thinks longingly of his couch at home—truly his couch now, no one else’s—and its burgundy slipcover. He thinks of the Michelob bottles in the refrigerator. Closing the windows in the parlor one at a time, he seals out the warm breath of spring that has already begun to mix in the room. The dry chill of central air returns, and John’s fatigue becomes an aching, shrunken feeling in his skull.

  He exits the parlor at a clip, not waiting for his flock to keep pace, and heads for the basement steps. The air, as he descends, takes on a more humane humidity for which he is grateful. The basement is refreshingly raw, lined with ripped industrial floor covering and sided with cinder block. The only untouched, indigenous part of the house. A tower of softened cardboard boxes tilts in a corner along with a dusty bicycle and snowboard. Several cobwebbed windows are level with the ground, framing the undersides of azaleas. These, he is sure, are the original basement windows, thick and invincible. John tests one, finds it sealed shut.

  He takes a breath and concentrates on the low humming sound at the far side of the basement. Here are the mechanicals, enclosed within plywood walls. This is his favorite part of an inspection. More than anything he enjoys scanning the maintenance history stickers on the sides of oil tanks and water heaters, the old names and dates scrawled in faded ink. John feels the old gallop in his pulse return as he slips behind the thin walls, out of the group’s view.

  The furnace is dormant for summer, a run-of-the-mill American Standard. There is some rust on the belly of the oil tank, like the barnacled hull of a ship. The maintenance dates go back fifteen years, but this tank is older than that. It’s a workhorse, John thinks of telling the clients, but knows they won’t appreciate the meaning of this. To him, looking at the tank is like looking at a stalwart old man, a veteran of important wars. These machines are the pumping heart of the house; everything else is frivolous and disposable in comparison. He hears snippets of discussion on the other side of the wall, Lori’s voice, small and obsequious. “Definitely, definitely.”

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.