The drumbeat is tediously slow, the plodding of an old draft horse. Within a few moments Madeleine’s hands have begun to fall mechanically, driven by their own momentum, and the strident thumps have dulled into sameness. David appears to go to sleep. She continues to hit the drum, resigned, a trudging giant in the nursery.
Watching, she notices gradual changes in David’s face. His eyeballs flicker under the lids like goldfish in a bag. His mouth moves slightly, as if he is speaking to an unseen companion. The baby’s legs finally stop cycling. Squares of blue light fall upon the carpet, and the room is suffused with something sublime and church-like. Madeleine closes her eyes. She pictures David’s tree house, dimly, in the branches of the ash. She entertains the idea of embracing the trunk of the tree and being pulled downward into the ground. Is this how it goes? As she drums, she extends the script, sinking down through the earth, following the tree roots through the soil, to—what?—a sloping underground tunnel. Here, her imagination stalls. What should lie at the bottom? A dark pool of water, or a grassy clearing, or a cave of molten rock. She settles on the pool of water, hovers above it, conjures murky creatures beneath the surface.
When she opens her eyes again, Annabel appears to be asleep. It has easily been ten minutes since she began drumming. At last, her hands pause, then drum again faster. As she does this, she imagines David racing up through a tunnel as through a mine shaft. She looks for evidence of this effort in his face, but it remains placid, as serene as the face of their sleeping daughter. She beats the drum and closes her eyes. She is in a coal car barreling underground, dimly aware of the turns and dips ahead. There may be water, there may be rock. It is not for her to know the way.
SWARM
THE NEW house is a horror. Martin and his wife remark on it each time they turn onto Minuteman Road and are struck by the bald ostentation. The house, constructed in just three months, appears to have been modeled after a Palladian villa. It is fronted by a columned entry with a pediment like a dunce cap, and its symmetrical wings are shot through with fussy, arched windows. Although the structure is set back from the road, the owners have perversely removed the trees at the property’s front edge and installed a squat stone wall flecked with mica. They don’t believe themselves to be prone to prejudgment, but Martin and Philomena are people of modest leanings and allow themselves the small, wicked gratification of condemning the owners’ taste.
So Martin detects a tone of abashment in his wife’s voice when, over dinner, she tells him she has met their new neighbors.
“The wife’s name is Coraline,” she says between bites. “I was driving past and she was out by the mailbox, so I stopped to say hello. Anyway”—Philomena sighs—“she seemed very nice. Maybe in her midfifties.”
“Fifties?”
“They just moved up from the city. Their kids are already grown.”
“You mean it’s just the two of them?” Martin says. “In that palazzo?”
“Yes, I guess so.” Philomena sighs again. “Anyway, I invited them over for Saturday. It seemed the hospitable thing to do.”
“I wish you would’ve asked me first.”
“Why? What would you have said? No?”
Martin looks down to the burnt orange weave of the chair upholstery, then back up to his wife. She is in her usual spot, across from him at the table, her plump form silhouetted by the window behind her, glazed with late-afternoon sun. Her hair shines white gold.
Martin has seen forty years of skies pass by that window. The interior of the dining room is still lined with wood paneling, as it was the day they moved in. Like a ski lodge. He has stared at the same wooden slabs for forty years, too, his eye settling on their natural flaws, the dark knots in the grain like stationary whirlpools. Forty winters in this room, with chili and cocoa. The zero sound of snow. The shifting, lenticular sky.
In the summer, Philomena’s garden opens like a garden in a children’s book. Her climbing-rose trellis blooms, and the diagonal rows of marigold. The little pond in the woods comes alive with turtles and frogs. And over those forty years, property values have blossomed, too. Their four-bedroom colonial with green shutters and charmingly darkened shingles is now worth at least a million dollars. Nearly a full acre on a desirable street between train line and school. If this is possible—if it is possible that a boy who sucked licorice on the sidewalks of Flatbush could be a millionaire now, inflation notwithstanding—then the world is a spooky and fabulous place indeed.