An individual may be chosen by the spirits to act as a go-between, a kind of messenger between worlds, entrusted with the role of community healer. The chosen individual may be awakened to his calling in a number of ways. He may hear voices or encounter animal spirits in his dreams. He may undergo a profound trial in Nature, characterized by physical symptoms such as headaches, general numbness, and tingling in the scalp. Often, the chosen individual is initially fearful or confused by these signals from the spirit world. He may feel cursed, angry, and resistant to adopting such responsibility. But the alternative is typically worse; rejecting the spirits’ calling may put him at risk of severe depression, even suicide.
Madeleine listens quietly, unable to absorb the words. They arch over her head, as if she is standing behind a waterfall. As she watches David’s face, his latticed irises, a memory comes to her of their first date, when they’d walked downtown along the Hudson. When they’d reached Trinity Church, he had led her through the gate to its weathered graveyard, and they’d wandered among the mildewed headstones. She remembers the way he’d run his hand over the grave markers. As a boy, he told her, he’d spent hours in the old cemetery near his house. He’d made grave rubbings, memorized names, birth dates, death dates. He’d devised detailed life stories for those people: the wives who’d died in childbirth, the grieving husbands who remarried only to be left again. At the time, this had not struck her as peculiar, but as exquisitely sensitive, the mark of a man with untold depths.
He begins to skip shaving in the morning and wears the same pants three days in a row. He leaves the house so late on some mornings that Madeleine knows he will miss his train. There is nothing she can do, she tells herself, except trust. He has come this far in his life without her. He is more of an adult than anyone else she knows. Men, of course, go through transitions and investigations like anyone else. This is normal, healthy. No one is—or should be—completely stagnant and predictable, year after year. This will prove a brief episode, she assures herself. At worst, a midlife crisis.
She goes about her own concerns: choosing paint for the nursery, a runner for the upstairs hall. She prepares a macaroni-and-cheese casserole for her first book club meeting. The invitation had come from a neighbor named Rosalie Warren, who’d swooped in the wake of their moving van with a tray of lemon bars. Her army of children is impossible to ignore, patrolling Whistle Hill Road on bikes and scooters, peering into the windows of parked cars.
Madeleine pulls on a white eyelet maternity dress and carries the casserole the half mile to Rosalie’s house. Arms aching, she shuffles up to the brick facade with an oval window like a third eye above the door. Flowering shrubs flank the walkway, and on the front step a shoe brush grows from a stone hedgehog’s back. Feeling watched, she rubs the soles of her sandals over it.
Inside, women mingle in shades of melon and chartreuse. The furniture is permanent-looking: a vast coffee table of distressed wood, armchairs of cream-colored linen. Madeleine’s tub of macaroni sits on the buffet like a fat girl among asparagus wraps. The women gather on tufted dining chairs and discuss the book selection, In the Path of Poseidon, a memoir of a man who sailed around the world with his family. They dive right in. The author was reckless, they agree, to endanger his wife and children in this way. They could have been killed.
Madeleine listens, nodding when appropriate. She thinks of David, surely home already, huddled in the woods. A flare of something like dread goes through her body. She is uncomfortable in her chair, unable to cross her legs, forced to squeeze them together. She curses herself for wearing such a short dress. The women volley their opinions around her. Within half an hour, the conversation has devolved into a lament about the economy, worry that husbands will be laid off, that home renovations will have to wait. The book is not mentioned again.
After the meeting, Madeleine walks home. Some of the women drive past, their headlights illuminating the macaroni tub in her arms, still nearly full. Her next-door neighbor Suzanne—whom she has just met—rolls slowly alongside in a Range Rover like an abductor, but Madeleine politely tells her she prefers to walk. It is good to do this, she thinks, to breathe the night air, absorb her new habitat. As Suzanne’s engine dies out, the only sound remaining is that of her own sandal steps. The darkening sky is the color of the open sea, bare and boatless. All around, windows smolder with lamplight. The seafaring author is indoors somewhere with his family now, sheltered in some American home, perhaps looking out a window at this same nautical sky, pining for the sway and jostle of water beneath him.
She finds David on the couch, barefoot, eating ice cream. He smiles as she comes in the door, as if he has been waiting for her.
“It’s the end of an era,” he says, holding up his bowl. “I’m done with work.”
Madeleine puts the casserole on the console table. “What do you mean?”
David sucks on his spoon. “I mean I’m not going back.”
She steps into the living room. “You didn’t quit.”
“No, not exactly.” He crosses his legs, exposing overgrown toenails, curled and yellow as claws. “They asked me to leave.”
“You were fired?”
“I would have left anyway.”