Wonderland Read online

  Shaw was as proud of the damn furnace as another man might be of a fancy Italian motorcycle. “This is the heart of the house,” he’d said as they stood in the basement watching its installation. “The heart of our new home.”

  But for Orla, the cost of everything was becoming a concern. The house and property. The SUV. The furnace and windows. The new generator, in case the electricity went out—even their water, brought up by a pump linked to a deep well, depended on electricity. And the day-to-day things they needed to keep everything and everyone up and running, alive and healthy. They’d paid cash for as much as they could, but she kept a watchful eye on their reserves.

  The Chelsea co-op, which they’d owned for twenty-two years, had sold quickly and earned them a nice profit, and she’d offered to pay her father back for the down payment, as promised. He’d declined it. “Keep it to help with the kids’ education, in case I’m not around.”

  Everything about his words bothered her—that he didn’t foresee being alive when her kids were ready for college, and that he understood the more immediate problem: their savings simply weren’t going to last that long and they needed it for mortgage, food, utilities, car payments, incidentals.

  Maybe Shaw expected her to get a job if things got iffy. It was his turn to be creative, her turn to manage the household. He’d supplemented their income with various jobs over the years—waiter, bartender, tax preparer, temp. Maybe such options would have been available to her if they were living in Plattsburgh, about an hour northeast of their homestead. But their place in the woods—a forested piece of land with a view of no one and nothing man-made, up a dirt-and-gravel road on a gently sloping hill—was beyond any clearly defined boundaries. After living in walkable, public-transportation-friendly New York since she was seventeen, Orla was just now learning how to drive, but she wasn’t yet comfortable behind the wheel. Even in good weather, it was too far to walk anywhere. And in bad weather…

  She gazed out the window. The extended region had the dubious honor of having the coldest winter temperatures in the continental United States. Not to mention occasional snowfalls by the foot.

  Julie had sent them on their way with a big bag full of extra and outgrown winter gear—snow pants, boots, mittens, even a couple pair of snowshoes—and some tomatoes and green beans she’d canned over the summer. Was the summer season actually long enough to grow vegetables? Were those skills Orla would have to learn to help stretch their funds—growing, canning, preserving?

  She’d tried to fill her children with a sense of adventure, especially during the weeks when they’d been without a habitable home of their own. Tycho either didn’t notice or didn’t care that his life was in flux. As long as someone he knew was within his field of vision, he was happy. But it bothered Orla that Eleanor Queen still had such basic and essential concerns. She’d been to the house several times, had witnessed the progression of improvements. So why didn’t she think it was ready? Where did she think her parents were taking her?

  Eleanor Queen had watched the workers remove the old windows from the farmhouse. When the reflective glass of the big living-room window was gone, leaving a shockingly dark hole, the girl had clutched Orla’s hand. “Are we going to die?”

  “Of course not!” Orla had said with a laugh, giving her a squeeze. But for a second there had been only the squish of puffy jacket, and Orla’s blood throbbed with the panic that her daughter had abruptly evaporated. Then she felt Eleanor Queen’s little bones, and the sensation passed.

  “Are you excited to have your very own rooms?” Orla said now in a cheery voice, pushing the uncomfortable memory away. Shaw slowed down as visibility diminished.

  “Yay!” Tycho said, though he was probably the one who cared the least. Which was fortunate, considering his sliver of a room seemed to have been an afterthought, little more than a closet with a window, created by the addition of a wall that severed the largest of the upstairs bedrooms. But it was still more personal space than he—or any of them—had had. After Eleanor Queen was born, they turned the one bedroom into a nursery and bought themselves a new sleeper-sofa for the living room. A few years later came the bunk beds. The four of them were very accustomed to compact living.

  “And Papa has his very first studio, where he can create his masterpieces!” Orla said. She grinned as Tycho’s face lit up, always delighted for everyone. She was still smiling when she turned to Shaw. He looked funny when he was happy, the progression of half-moon lines around his eyes and his teeth on full display, angled this way and that, his upper teeth sitting directly on his lower ones. A crazy grimace. But she was glad for his happiness.

  “My own stu-di-o,” he sang, tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel in contra time to the music on the CD. “Where I’ll do my painting-o.” Tycho wasn’t the only one in the family who liked to croon little ditties.

  The studio, as it had been in his dream, was the spacious bedroom directly off the living room. For the first time in fifteen years, Shaw would have his own workspace, with a door. Orla was a bit envious, but reminded herself that if he was in the studio, she could go to their bedroom upstairs—and shut the door. It would be new for all of them: the many rooms, the many doors.

  Tycho’s eyes fluttered with sleep; the moose in his hand was splayed across his lap, already down for the count. Ever aware of her own body, she too felt a heaviness, a desire to hibernate. Yesterday’s Thanksgiving feast still trudged through her system. And her legs (still two, in spite of the lingering sensation of their having been severed, cleaved) ached and she longed to jump from the car, grab her heel, and extend her leg up to her ear.

  They’d always said Plattsburgh wasn’t so far from where they’d be and that they’d go there often for shopping and family visits. But as they drove down Route 3, the world seemed to elongate behind them, stretching beyond recognition, obliterating the landmarks that would guide them back. Orla struggled to accept that they were still in New York—State, not City—but how could it be so different? It had been easier to agree to this when it hadn’t seemed so utterly foreign. North of the city hadn’t sounded so bad, with the word city dangling on, unwilling to let go, and New York still their resident state. But the city was gone. Her life was gone. And the landscape—unrecognizable.

  She turned up the music, hoping to blot out the wind screaming beyond her window. You owe him this, it said. You promised. Shaw peeked at her, elated, and she let him assume the best, that she was as happy as he was. But even the dulcet tones of the strummed guitar wouldn’t let her off. Owe. In the vibrating strings. Her husband would never say it, but it existed in the silent space between them. My turn. We agreed. And even softer, beneath that, a voice she’d struggled to suppress. Your part is finished. The curtain had fallen and wouldn’t rise again. And she was afraid of the dark.

  3

  The snow had laid down a thick carpet by the time they snaked their way up the driveway. The kids were wide awake, faces pressed to the windows. They’d all been in the house before, of course, but none of them had spent a night there or seen it under such wintry conditions. Shaw turned off the music, and the fog they breathed, the recycled mishmash from all of their lungs, hummed with expectation.

  “So pretty!” Tycho said when the farmhouse came into view.

  Bless his heart. It must have been the snow, like frosting on the tree limbs with smears of white on the roof. Blue-gray paint, so old it looked mostly washed away, and the windows were trimmed in what might once have been a festive red, now rusty scabs. They’d need to have the exterior painted if they were to keep the wood protected, but next year; they’d already spent so much. It looked fragile to Orla, nothing like the massive steel buildings, the stone and brick and solid permanence of her past life. A gust of wind could blow it down. Two stories of decomposable wood, pitched roof, a porch made of matchsticks, and windows of watchful eyes and open mouths.

  “All right, everybody ready?” Shaw pulled into the detached, three-walled garage, i
ts flimsy boards even more weathered than the house’s, its roof equally as steep to prevent it from accumulating too much snow. Along the outside of the near wall, a bank of firewood, half covered by a blue tarp, sat ready for use. And around the back wall, out of view, was their generator. They’d had the electrician reroute the critical circuits in such a way that if they lost power, the generator would automatically kick on and take over.

  The kids unbuckled and hopped out, their tongues ready to catch the snowflakes.

  “Wish we could’ve left some windows open,” Orla said. Painting the bedrooms had been the last of their home improvements before their furniture was delivered from storage, and she worried about the fumes. She worried about other things too, more nebulous and harder to express.

  Shaw grabbed luggage and groceries out of the back of the SUV. “It should be okay, been a few days.”

  Eleanor Queen and Tycho spun in circles, enjoying the snow. In a flash of memory, Orla saw herself and her brother, Otto. It happened at rare moments, a ghost image from her past—a flickering film that quickly dissolved—when she saw her children playing together. “Ready to come in and check out your finished rooms? We can get all your stuff unpacked.”

  Tycho, incapable of moving in a restrained fashion, ran toward the porch, arms flailing. The porch’s railing dipped slightly in the center where the ground beneath it had settled unevenly. Shaw, bags under each arm, opened the front door with his son hopping at his heels, both a-chatter with shared eagerness. The house swallowed their sounds as they entered.

  Abandoned by her playmate, Eleanor Queen lingered in the yard. She looked up at the sky. The woods. Her dark eyes alert and watchful.

  “Eleanor Queen?”

  Still the little girl assessed her surroundings, with more wariness than she’d shown on previous visits to the house. Orla felt a chill as she watched her. What was she concentrating on with such rapt attention? The girl squinted, cocked her head, like someone trying to make sense of a distant sound. To make sense of something that Orla couldn’t hear, or see.

  “Love? What’s wrong?”

  “What kind of tree did Papa say that was?” Her mittened hand pointed to the giant that reared up fifty yards behind their house. Its immense boughs frowned down on the munchkin trees that surrounded it. Maybe it was the slate sky, or the other trees without their leaves, but the great pine looked even older than it had in the spring, like an old person drained of color.

  Orla tried to recall what the real estate agent had said when he’d shown them the property. He’d boasted of the tree being over five hundred years old, she remembered that. “Eastern white pine, I think? We’ll ask Papa again. It’s so big because it’s five hundred years old.”

  Eleanor Queen continued to gaze at it with an intensity that Orla found disconcerting. She didn’t see admiration for the ancient tree on her daughter’s face, or curiosity. But something more troubling.

  Trepidation.

  “Well, come on, we can get your snow pants and gear if you want to play outside.” Orla really didn’t think that’s what her daughter wanted in that moment, but it’s what Orla had hoped for her when they’d talked about the North Country, that she would like the tranquillity, the slow pace of the wilderness. Eleanor Queen wouldn’t have to worry about getting run over by a taxi or crushed against a pole in a crowded subway car. Perhaps she just wasn’t used to how quiet it was, how different. How the wind, in a silent place, made everything speak.

  Eleanor Queen abruptly turned and charged toward the house.

  Orla didn’t want to think it was fear she saw on her daughter’s face. But she hesitated in the yard as Eleanor Queen scrambled inside. What had spooked her? Was something out there? She scanned the terrain at the back of their property. The air carried the cozy fragrance of wood smoke—had Shaw lit the stove already? Or was that a plume rising above the trees? Impossible; there were no homes, not even distant ones, visible behind them.

  Movement caught her eye and she refocused on the giant pine in time to see a cascade of snow drop from its ragged limbs. The wind had settled and she didn’t think it the source of the snow’s collapse. Could a tree shiver? Shake off the cold and wet like a dog? She heard a sound she couldn’t identify…a soft pfloof. Again, and again.

  Her mouth dropped open. Something was moving toward her, something quiet but immense. Her gut said, Run! The nerves in her spine jangled a warning, but she couldn’t turn away.

  One by one, the trees shook off their snow. That was the sound: inches of accumulation on hundreds of branches falling in a swoop onto the white, cushioned ground. But it wasn’t all of the trees; that’s what was wrong, that’s what chilled her blood and kept her agog. It was a path of trees, starting with the goliath and moving forward. Orla wanted to think, Chain reaction, but her mind flung aside such logic.

  It was coming.

  When the snow tumbled from the final tree at the edge of their back clearing, a great gust of wind swept toward her. Finally Orla came back to life and lunged for the porch. She stumbled inside and locked the door behind her.

  As she pressed her back against the door, confused by her narrow escape, her eyes met her daughter’s and her blood froze all over again. A cloud of snow battered against the windows. And then all was still once more. But Eleanor Queen huddled in the corner behind the cold stove, wide-eyed. Upstairs, Shaw and Tycho carried on as if all were normal, chatting, making the floorboards creak as they moved stuff around.

  Orla hadn’t meant to make it worse, but her daughter looked terrified. What had even happened? She’d never been in a forest after a blizzard. She felt silly now, a lame barricade between Mother Nature and common sense. She stepped away from the door, shrugging it off.

  “It was just the wind after the storm,” she said. “Like the way earthquakes have aftershocks.”

  “You kept it out.”

  “Of course—” But before she could say anything else, Eleanor Queen darted out from behind the squat black stove and raced up the stairs, calling for her papa.

  Orla had half a mind to do the same, run up and call for Shaw. Ask for a hug. She heard him, cooing away their daughter’s fright.

  “’Tsokay, Ele-Queen.” Tycho, mimicking his father.

  That made her smile. Overreacting wasn’t going to help. Orla listened at the front door; it was quiet. She cracked it open and peered out.

  Nothing moved. Crystals glittered on the snow. It was pretty, but she didn’t fully trust it. Walls felt more reliable, and more familiar. In her mind, home was the place within the boundary of the walls, not what lay beyond it. She left the door wide open, to facilitate a hasty retreat, and returned to the car to fetch the rest of their things.

  4

  It was a crappy bathroom by most people’s standards, nothing anyone would swoon over on House Hunters, but longtime New Yorkers had a different appreciation for space. They had friends who had to squeeze into a tiny corner shower, barely big enough to hold an adult, set beside a toilet where, still sitting, you could lean forward and wash your hands in the sink. Now they had space—a precious commodity—though the black-and-white vinyl floor would have to be ripped up someday. But it was serviceable for now. The white pedestal sink was charmingly old-fashioned, and the throne, as Shaw liked to call it, faced the frosted window. Orla had already put a little bookcase beneath the window and filled it with their folded towels and extra toilet paper, but maybe she needed to add an actual book or two. Perhaps the leisurely pace of their new life might involve more alone time in the therapeutic comfort of the bath.

  She slipped out of her sweatpants and thermal shirt, swept them into a pile with pointed toes, and stepped into the claw-foot tub. It was deeper than their old tub, and she inhaled the steam rising from the hot water. With her calves propped on the opposite rim, she gazed at her knees, her feet. They splayed out in opposite directions, a sign of her effortless turnout. There were hard knobs on the tops of her toes from decades of pointe work. Her blac
k hair draped over the edge of the white porcelain, and she felt the warm air coming up from the vent stirring it. The furnace in the basement was doing its job, sending heat out through its veins.

  This was what she needed. After nearly three months of turmoil, of deconstructing the status quo, finally she could relax. Her limbs melted into the water, though her thoughts weren’t as easy to soothe.

  Her body, when it was moving, stretching, spinning, leaping, was a wonder that made her grateful. A machine of muscle and flesh. But lying back, naked, unmoving, all she saw were bones and the flat angles of her stomach. She looked more like a stick insect than a woman.

  Friends called her exotic, but Orla had never figured out why her strangeness was so appealing to people. She gave the impression of towering over her husband when in fact she was only an inch taller than Shaw. But everything about her was long, exaggerated. Even her facial features. A couple of her less politically correct friends enjoyed asking new acquaintances to guess her ethnicity. They’d say Greek, Persian, Italian, Israeli, Peruvian, Syrian. When they gave up, she told them she was just another Generican—a generic American. But that never satisfied their curiosity. So she’d tell them about her Venezuelan/Irish mother, and her Filipino/French/American father. Then they’d ask, “How many languages do you speak?” only to be disappointed by her answer. Being a Generican who spoke only English didn’t fit with people’s idea of who they thought she should be.

  She carried these dichotomies with her, the half-admirable/half-disappointing realities of her life. Not quite a woman of the world. Not quite a star in her field. Not quite beautiful in any traditional sense. Other women expressed envy for her slenderness, but Orla longed for a little flesh, some softness to her breasts. She’d never loved her body more than when she was pregnant, and when everyone marveled at how quickly she returned to her pre-pregnancy physique, Orla missed the roundness, the goddess she had briefly been.