“Weak, but all right. A little woozy.”
Her face is blurred, like a child waking from a long sleep. Her eyes focus slowly on him, and she smiles back at him—that same impish smile that had stolen his balance twenty-five years ago. At this moment, he wants desperately to tell her about the incredible thing that has happened, the secret inside him that threatens to pop. He is suddenly hit by the full truth of it: the strange new closeness that they share, profound and singular. Even unspoken, he imagines she might already be able to sense it. It is a miracle, an uncanny dream. It is as deep as anything else in their lives.
“I brought your necklace,” Harold says gently, and Carol’s eyes travel down to the gleam in his hand. They register the necklace. In her brain, she still stores a picture of it. She remembers Harold, too, amazingly; the shapes that make up the face of her husband.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
Harold stands. He comes close, brings the chain around her neck to the front, and fastens the clasp.
THE UMBRELLA BIRD
IT HAD been a touch of incredible fortune to find David one spring night at a dive on Houston Street. He’d been attending a coworker’s farewell gathering, an anomalous outing for him. He was short-haired and clean against the peeling paint and graffiti. That he’d been there that night nursing a Stella Artois, and had needed the restroom at the same time as she, had upended statistical logic. He was taller than everyone, and thinner, as if streamlined for air travel. Not conventionally handsome, but with a narrow, austere face. His green irises seemed lit, like dappled leaves on a forest floor. When he looked at Madeleine, she was briefly paralyzed, a field mouse in a clearing. He bought her a vodka tonic and left a three-dollar tip for the bartender. As he handed the glass to her, turning the tiny straw in her direction, she’d felt the dizzy euphoria of a traveler who has turned onto the right road, the easy expansion of lungs as the horizon opens before her.
He was an account supervisor at a big advertising firm in midtown, he explained breezily, coordinating campaigns for sneakers and tortilla chips. But later, over a series of ardent dinner dates, she learned that he’d grown up in the country—on a farm, no less—and had never felt truly at peace in an apartment building. Lately he felt that he was being gradually drawn back to Nature, and now that he’d found her, he suggested with elaborate, soft-forested eyes, perhaps his quest was complete. Within six months, they were married and looking at real estate listings.
The house has been sweepingly renovated, the front door framed by columns and topped by a counterfeit balcony. It’s what the real estate agent had termed a center-hall colonial, with the kind of timeless architecture and rigorous symmetry designed to leverage a calming effect on its inhabitants. Paired with precise, harmonious details, she implied, a house like this had the power to transform its owners’ experience of the world, to render any obstacle—any boiler failure or termite siege—surmountable.
Nearly all their money has gone to the down payment, and with the little that remains, Madeleine is scrambling to furnish. With a Sharpie, she circles furniture in soft-lit catalogs: a sectional sofa, a leather armchair, a mirrored console table. Deliverymen put them in place. Still, the rooms echo.
Alone, she wanders the house on the balls of her feet. It is preternaturally quiet, the walls themselves thick with insulation, sealing out the buzz of the world. A sliding glass door displays a wide lawn tumbling to a thumb-smudge of trees. She has reached it at last: this asylum, this glorious valve. Madeleine had first glimpsed this kind of life as a girl, visiting a friend who’d moved to a verdant nook of New Jersey. Entering that house had been like entering a palace: the soaring entrance hall, floors that didn’t sag toward the middle, bay windows looking onto wanton grass and trees, the great yawn of sky. There, she’d learned to ride a bicycle. Pedaling back and forth on that wide blacktop driveway, she’d felt the first ecstasy of flight.