And is it surprising that she would align herself with someone like this, after all? People are drawn to those like themselves. On a deep level, they recognize themselves in others, so that every couple is, at the core, properly matched. Like his corporate charade, her own transformation into suburban housewife has been a hoax. She is an imposter in this place, in this house. She stands at the kitchen sink, before the wide window that is still missing treatments, and feels that the whole town can see in.
“I think a healing practice would fill a real need,” David is saying. “People are looking for release from the ills of modern culture. So many of us are disconnected from Nature, from our spiritual selves, and it’s making us sick. It’s endemic to the whole country, don’t you think? It’s something I’ve always suspected in some low-grade way, but kept pushing aside. Don’t you feel like that, deep down? Don’t you just rationalize it away?”
Madeleine takes the pot from the burner and slops the vegetables onto a platter.
“Maybe they’ll take you back,” she says.
David stares. “Haven’t you been listening? I don’t want to go back.”
Madeleine brings the platter down on the counter. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. We just bought this house, David. We’re having a baby.”
As she speaks, her body sways as if upon a boat. Another memory returns from her visit to David’s childhood home, one curious moment. Washing her hands in the rustic powder room, Madeleine had looked out the window to see David in the yard, standing beside a pole birdfeeder, its clear plastic silo filled with seed. As he stood, tall and still, Madeleine watched a sparrow circle the feeder and alight. Then a crow. As she stood at the powder room window, the feeder had swelled with birds.
David spends his first day of unemployment thumbing library books on the couch. Madeleine slips out of the air-conditioned house and into a kiln. She lumbers down Whistle Hill Road, past flat-faced houses blinking back the noonday sun, past the little pond furred with algae. She keeps a small, purposeful smile on her face, but is unable to rid herself of the sense that she is being watched, as if her husband’s aberration is visible upon her like a jumpsuit. There are men in the periphery of her vision, trimming bushes, washing cars. There are the low growls of lawnmowers and chain saws. David hasn’t mowed their lawn in over a month.
That night, David stays in the woods, in the ripped blue sleeping bag of his boyhood. Madeleine lies alone in bed with a hand on the globe of her belly, deciphering the changes in its temper. There is a sense of agitation, of looming implosion. There is a swoon of adrenaline as her abdomen stiffens, becomes hard as a watermelon. She gasps and fixes her eyes on the skylight, a black velvet kerchief crusted with stars.
The adrenaline waves proliferate, building on themselves, in the pattern of the panic attacks she’d had as a younger woman. She has learned to breathe through these, to carve a space for herself, as she would do when negotiating a crowd in Midtown.
At last, when the breathing becomes impossible, she crawls from bed and goes outside with a flashlight. She edges over the dark carpet of grass, stopping to clutch herself. In the woods, she follows a narrow path, twigs snapping, and sweeps her flashlight over the barbed branches. At last she illuminates a crude box suspended in a forked tree trunk. She calls to David.
They name the baby Annabel. The first weeks are suspended out of time, a dream of sleeping and nursing. David is mercifully silent on the topic of his spiritual vocation. It isn’t until Annabel is two months old that he comes to Madeleine with a library book, an almanac of South American fauna. Without speaking, he opens the book to a full-page photograph of an ebony bird poised upon a branch, a crest like a standing wave upon its head. Its eye is small and hard, a jet bead ringed with white, and there is a long protuberance like an empty black kneesock beneath its beak. The bird gives an impression of cool majesty, of indifference to human quandary.
“It’s an Amazonian umbrella bird,” David whispers after a moment. “All I know is that it has a loud call, but is rarely seen. It lives its whole life in the rain forest canopy in Brazil and Peru. The male courts the female by stretching out his wattle, but then the female builds the nest and raises the chicks alone.”
“Leave it to Nature,” Madeleine says.
“I’d love to see it in person one day.”
He spends the rest of the week designing a logo—a black silhouette of a crested bird in flight—for an ad that will run in the local newspaper and the kinds of free magazines provided at spas and yoga studios. By the end of the month, he has his first appointment.
When the client arrives at the house, Madeleine hides in the bedroom with the baby. She watches from the upstairs window as a young man approaches the door, a silver bull ring glinting at his nose. The Warren children are probably running indoors right now, she imagines, calling to their mother. Perhaps Rosalie, at this moment, is dialing for a patrol car.