For the hour that David spends in the tree house with the stranger, Madeleine sits nursing Annabel, examining the same few pages of a novel. When the men finally come back through the house, they are laughing. She remains upstairs until David knocks.
“It went amazingly well,” he announces. “Rufus was perfect to work with, so cooperative. He’s trying to overcome a drug addiction.” He holds up a bouquet of twenty-dollar bills. “Not bad for an hour.”
Madeleine closes her book and funnels her whole heart into a smile.
More clients come in the next few months, smiling bashfully at Madeleine and Annabel as they pass through the house to the backyard. They go over the grass and into the woods: large women in caftans, thin girls in yoga pants, ponytailed men. At first there are two or three a week. Then one a day. By the winter, David is juggling several appointments on each square of the kitchen calendar.
“Where do they come from?” Madeleine asks.
“All over. My client this morning came down from Hartford.”
“How do they know about you?”
“There’s a very tight community. Word spreads fast.”
Today he is wearing something new: a leather cord necklace with a small pouch attached.
“It’s a medicine bundle,” he says, following her gaze. “It’s where I keep tokens that bring me closer to my spirit animal.”
Madeleine asks what kind of animal this might be.
“I’m not supposed to tell you, but I bet you can guess.” From a pocket, he removes a second leather pouch and shows it to her. “A bundle for the baby.”
Madeleine gazes at the pouch. It is made of soft leather that begs to be touched. She reaches for it, takes it from David’s hand. The leather is puckered neatly at the top, and there is a clink of hidden objects within. An amulet.
“I’d like to journey on her behalf,” David says. “And meet with her animal. Would you help me?”
“Journey where?”
“To the Lower World,” he answers matter-of-factly.
Madeleine is quiet. Her husband is in front of her, behind the rough reddish growth of beard, speaking of spirit worlds. She looks at the leather pouch again. She looks at the baby in her arms, built from nothing.
That night, she sits on the nursery floor with a drum in her lap. On the baby’s changing table is a plastic bag labeled Spirit Warrior Music & Instruments.
“It’s not perfect, but it’s something to practice on for now. Eventually I’ll make my own drum out of maple and rawhide.”
David stretches out on the sand-colored carpet. Annabel lies on her back in the bassinet, cycling her legs. The winter sun has gone down, and the room is quiet and dark. The windows make a grid of indigo sky. It is not difficult to imagine that the three of them are alone in the universe.
“The drumbeat is a bridge to the World Tree,” David tells her from the floor, “giving me access to the branches that lead to the Upper World, or to the roots that tunnel to the Lower World.”
“Is that in one of your books?”
“More than one.” David closes his eyes. “Check your watch before you start drumming. Just start out with a nice, slow beat. When you’ve been going for about ten minutes, go ahead and change to a callback rhythm. Something faster, like a gallop.”
“To call you back?”
“I’ll hopefully be down pretty deep, but I’ll perceive the change in the drum’s tempo and know it’s time to return.”
Madeleine tests the drum. The hard surface is made of a polished synthetic that stings her palms. The sound it makes is flat and unsubtle, like something heavy dropping to the floor again and again. The effect is the opposite of soothing.
“There, keep it going like that.”
Madeleine’s legs are already starting to cramp in their pretzeled arrangement. Although there is no direct sight line from neighboring houses, she wishes with a sudden fervor that she had closed the curtains. She wishes that she had not agreed to do this, that she could switch bodies with any of her neighbors. She thinks of Suzanne Crawford in the irreproachable house next door and desperately wants to be doing whatever she is doing—sipping Pinot Grigio at a kitchen island, loading the dishwasher, paying bills.