The Mapmaker's Children, page 4
The longer it took her to find her clothes, the more spun up she became. Her heart pounded. Her cheeks flamed. Her only calming thought was that he’d learn quickly after she was gone that someone had to clean up his messes; soon she’d look back on this moment after two martinis at an agency lunch and say, Thank God that’s over, thank God I’m here now, thank God.
She pulled on a hibiscus-printed maxi dress, combed her hair once through, and went downstairs again.
“Now then,” she said, but the girl was gone, as was the dog.
She went out on the front porch. To the right on Apple Hill Lane, a woman in a wide-brimmed hat knelt on a gardening cushion, weeding her yellow begonias. Directly across the street, a man who looked too young to be retired sat on his front porch drinking from a mug and leisurely reading a newspaper. A couple of moms in workout clothes chatted as they pushed strollers at a pace that made Eden tired to watch. She hurried inside and shut the wooden door. The moms with their strollers passed. Their peppy voices filtered through the wall.
“Stomach flu. The kids are passing it round like candy. Phil and I haven’t slept in a week. Vomit everywhere!” one of the moms explained.
The other chuckled. “These are the days we’ll laugh over when we’re old and the kids are grown and their kids are barfing buckets on their Persian rug.”
Eden remembered what her mother had said when she told her they were trying to get pregnant a month after the wedding. “I’m glad to see you came to your senses quick. That Mary Tyler Moore was all show. Career girls—drivel. The truth is, everyone wants to live forever. It’s a narcissistic need that began with Adam and Eve in the Garden—to see your seed produce its own. Children mean immortality. Give a man that and he’ll stick by you no matter what forbidden fruit may come.”
She’d brushed it off as her mother being her usual pessimistic, holier-than-thou self. This was a new era. Women could have it all: a successful career, a perfect household, a devoted husband, and a thriving family. And she’d almost proved it. Eden had never expected that her own body would be her biggest obstacle. Jack could have children for years to come—just not with her. Better she left him before he left her for someone young with a belly full of immortal possibilities.
The cat food lay sideways in the middle of the floor. Eden picked up the tin and spotted a note from Jack atop the phone stand.
E, the girl next door is going to take care of Cricket. We’ll figure out a more permanent solution when I return. Get some rest and I’ll call you from Austin.
Love, J.
“What kind of name is Cricket?”
If they were going to name the dog, she would’ve liked a hand in it. Achilles, Fitzgerald, Cornwall, Manhattan—a conversation starter. Or at the very least, something they came up with together. But then, what did it matter? Soon there would be no more together anyhow.
She crumbled the paper into the pulpy meat tin and tossed it in the garbage. The doll’s head sat on the marble counter, farther down from where she’d left it. It gazed directly at her with a snide smile. Eden held her breath a beat, though she hadn’t meant to.
“Damn it, Jack,” she cursed aloud, exhaling the fear out with it.
In full daylight, the head was smaller than she’d remembered, smaller than in her dreams. Maybe four inches wide and six from crown to neck. Chipped to balding at the crown, the painted hair around the face still parted perfectly in wavy dark locks, giving way to a peachy forehead and rouged cheeks, loved off in patches; tired eyes were rimmed with dirt, the right one black, the left one olive, the harsh break just above it. Eden wondered why they were so oddly painted.
She picked it up, and something within clinked. The piece of porcelain from the chip, she figured, and turned it upside down to try to jiggle it free. When it wouldn’t fall out, she worried she’d break the whole thing—shaken baby syndrome. So she let it be and wet a paper towel to clean the dirt off. The rose of the doll’s cheeks shone through. The pursed lips gave way to a demure grin. This was loved, she thought, it belonged to someone.
“Where’s your little girl now?” She finished bathing it, then set it on the windowsill so as not to risk it rolling off the countertop.
Outside the kitchen window, Cleo’s ponytail bobbed up and down in the communal backyard. Eden shielded her eyes with the blade of her hand as she exited. The vegetal smell of warm summer dirt was nearly overpowering, a familiar scent from her childhood in Larchmont. She’d grown detached from it while living in the city.
The dog scampered through the rows of white-tipped basil blooms, snow peas hanging like green icicles, verdant fountains of lettuce. He stopped every few paces to smell a flower or eat a leaf. When he saw Eden, he left the garden and bounded to her feet, licking her bare toes.
“What on earth,” she said, pulling her foot away. He moved on to the other. His tongue, like dewy pear skin, tickled. “You crazy dog,” she said, her voiced lilted with squelched laughter. She swished her long skirt to shoo him off, but he paid her no mind, his tail wagging from beneath the floral print. “You don’t know where those feet have been, Cricket.”
Upon hearing his name, he lay down and inclined his head up to her, one fuzzy ear dangling to the dirt. She pulled the ear up and scratched behind it.
“Cricket,” she whispered again, and it seemed to fit. His dark eyes searched her face. An old soul within.
Eden had never had a pet as a child. Her mother didn’t want to clean up after one. Her father said he would love a dog but they were so frequently traveling, it wasn’t practical. “We’d have to kennel it for weeks at a time, and that’s not fair, right?” he’d argued.
Even then, Eden recognized the irony. They didn’t blink at boarding their children at sleepaway camps for the same amount of time.
The closest thing she’d had to a pet was the brown Tenderheart Care Bear she pretended was a dog when she was six years old. She fed him bowls of rock candy, brushed his fur with her hairbrush, let him sleep on her pillow, and took him with her everywhere her parents left her. Then one day she made the mistake of taking TCB on the Slip ’N Slide. His cotton body absorbed the water, grew fat and sodden, then rotted from the inside out. Her mother threw the doll away while Eden was at her weekly piano lesson. It was like losing the closest friend she’d ever known. Denny wouldn’t come along for another three years. She wondered if the owner of the doll’s head carried a similar memory of loss.
“I promised your husband I’d feed him,” said Cleo, “but looking through your pantry, there isn’t even a macaroni.” She shot Cricket a look of dramatic pity, which put Eden on the defensive.
What was she doing going through their kitchen? Jack had paid her to take care of the dog, not to nose around. She huffed, but Cleo took no notice.
“We only got cat food,” she went on, “and he doesn’t seem to take to it, so either you give me money to buy dog stuff at Milton’s Market or you need to get some.” Cleo plucked a purple clover by her ankle. The color nearly matched her eyes.
She was a pretty kid, if sassy, thought Eden. There was a rawness about her: unspoiled produce in Mother Nature’s basket. Eden couldn’t remember how it felt to be that bud-young.
A bee landed on the tip of a basil bloom, and Cricket sniffed it.
“Watch out,” Eden said. “That’ll sting you.” The dog opened his mouth as if to taste the stem.
In one motion, she swept the pup up. He was light as her childhood teddy bear, the bones of his rib cage thinner than her fingers beneath the fluff. He licked the salty night sweat on her wrists and let his body go limp in her arms.
“So what’s it going to be?” Cleo twirled the clover blossom between her thumb and forefinger. “I have to go to the bank on Main at lunchtime. Milton’s is there. I can stop.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. Even if Cricket wasn’t staying, Eden couldn’t starve the poor animal, and she couldn’t blame him for rejecting that god-awful cat food.
“Okay,” she said and carried the pup back into the house with Cleo at her heels.
She wasn’t sure where her purse was but remembered a crumpled twenty-dollar bill she’d found in Jack’s trouser pocket the last time she’d bothered to do the wash. She went to the catchall basket in the laundry room just off the kitchen, fishing one-handed through the loose change, sticks of metallic-wrapped gum bent to odd shapes, crumpled takeout recipes, and a half-eaten Tums peppermint roll until she found the money.
“Here you go,” she said, holding out the crinkle of green, but Cleo’s attention was diverted.
“What the hay?”
At first, Eden wasn’t sure what she meant; then she followed the child’s gaze to the dismembered skull. Before Eden could open her mouth to explain…
“Are you and Mr. Anderson voodoo people?”
“No! It’s not—” Eden began, but Cleo interrupted again.
“ ’Cause I don’t want no hex. I got enough heaped up on my head. Gives me a neckache just thinking about.” She didn’t seem afraid. Irritated, rather.
“No! We’re, I don’t know, Presbyterian or something, I guess. No voodoo or hexes. It’s an old toy we found—in this house!” She picked it up. “Rubbish.” Maybe Jack wasn’t being that insensitive.
Like a rattle, the head seemed to chatter back in response as she moved it. She set it back on the windowsill. “Just somebody’s forgotten thing.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“In the pantry. Under the floor. A cellar of some sort.”
“Can I look?”
Eden didn’t see why not. Not much there, in her opinion. “To the left. Against the far wall. There’s a baseboard with a notch in it.”
“Yep, looks like a root cellar,” Cleo called out. “We don’t got one of those next door ’cause our place was a barn before it was a house. But Ms. Silverdash has one. She keeps her treasures in it—old letters, books, and photos. Says things preserve better down there.”
“It would make a good place. Who knows how long that doll has been there. All things considered, it’s amazing how well it’s held up. I agree with this—uh, Ms. Silverdash.”
“I’ll ask the Nileses.” Cleo exited the pantry, scribbling on a pocket pad with a golf pencil. “They own an antiques shop halfway up to the Bluff. It used to be a sawmill till nobody needed sawing no more. When Mrs. Niles passed, Mr. Niles bought the building and filled it up with crazy stuff: rusted kitchen gadgets looking like they could torture a tomato, broken plates, china bowls, plus everything in between, including kids’ toys. They say they’re pickers. My grandpa says, ‘Like boogers.’ Maybe so, but if I ever have a question about old stuff, they usually know the answer.
“Once, half a teacup come up from the dirt in the backyard. You could barely make out a letter on the side. An A, R, or H—one of the ones with a bridge. I took it over to Vee—that’s Mr. Niles’s daughter. She’s official, got her antique appraiser’s license and everything. Ms. Silverdash wanted her to come check out your house before it got sold in case it was a historical site or something but…” She seemed to catch herself again and shrugged it off. “The teacup ended up being, like, over a hundred years old.”
An appraiser? Eden’s mind alighted on the idea. What if the house wasn’t just an old house? If it was a historical site, with the repairs they’d done, it could bring in triple or more if sold to a museum or local historical society. The wheels of her mind churned. Jack and she could split it fifty-fifty. Enough to get her going on her own.
Cleo slid her pad and pencil back into her pocket. “I’m good at figuring out whodunits. Don’t you worry, we’ll get to the bottom of this doll’s head case.”
Eden didn’t think this was exactly a “whodunit” kind of thing, but she wasn’t about to snuff the girl’s drive. She studied the porcelain skull once more.
Beyond the right eye was a halo of green, as if it had been painted over in black. Artfully drawn and lightly downcast, the eyes gave the doll’s face a melancholy expression. The sadness was part of her beauty. But where was the rest? Even pictographs from ancient civilizations had bodies attached to faces. No little girl, now or a thousand years ago, would be comforted by a floating head. From what Eden could tell, it appeared to have been purposely removed. There were holes at the base of the ceramic neck for attachment but no torn fabric or clinging threads, no damage or wear to the lower half. Only the forehead crack. Why would someone remove a doll’s head? And, moreover, why would they leave it in a root cellar?
Cleo took the money. “What kind of kibble and…” She nodded toward the bare pantry. “Do you want me to get anything else?”
Inside was a bottle of barbecue sauce, a tube of raisins, a couple cans of beans, and an empty Kashi box. In May, when they’d moved in, Eden had held the idealistic belief that the garden would supply much of their needs.
From the time she was a child, she’d had an affinity for gardening. Though her mother had complained of having to scrub grass stains from her clothes and dirt from under her fingernails, she’d let Eden till and weed a little two-foot patch of earth in their yard. When friends asked what might possess a child to invest such time and energy in dirt and seedlings, her mother had shrugged, saying, “It’s my own fault. I named her Eden.”
Their New Charlestown real estate agent, Mrs. Mitchell, had sent photographs of the Queen Anne’s preplanted, seasonally thriving garden along with the listing.
“A majority of the garden is on your side of the official property line,” she’d said when they met, pointing to the plot map and the corresponding photo. “But there’s also a lemon tree and heaps of blueberry bushes on the neighboring property. That’s Mr. Bronner’s—he’s president of Bronner Bank and one of New Charlestown’s founding families,” she’d boasted.
It had been the one aspect of the move that trumped city living. They’d have a garden bursting with produce. The prospect renewed a childhood longing. The week they moved in, Eden had harvested asparagus and radishes, cut them up, and drenched them in rich olive oil, red wine vinegar, sea salt, and cracked pepper.
Jack had been thrilled. His father had been on the forefront of organic farming before the car crash that left Jack an orphan and sent him off to his only living relation, an uncle in Cornwall, England. So it came as a swift kick to Eden’s ego when after eating and applauding her homegrown salad, Jack said he was ready for the main course. “A protein?”
Truthfully, she hadn’t thought that far, too preoccupied with her vines of veggies; her mind was seemingly always one step behind because of the IVF hormones. She wasn’t about to admit to Jack that she was still hungry, too.
Instead, she’d bristled. “If what I have to offer isn’t enough, maybe you should grab takeout on your way home from now on.”
And from that day forward, he’d done just that. Bombay Bistro boxes piled high in the garbage, reeking of yogurt raita gone tangy.
“Hmm,” she said now, running her hand over the empty pantry shelves. “Thanks, but I need to go buy a bunch anyhow. This”—she gestured to the twenty in Cleo’s hand—“is for the dog.” Cricket rolled his head into the crook of her arm, pressing his clammy puppy nose to her skin. “Get Casey’s Organics.”
Casey’s Organic Dog Chow Company had been one of her best clients, and its familiar label was the only dog food she could think of on the spur of the moment.
“I’ll bring back the change,” said Cleo.
“Keep it,” said Eden. She was suddenly in a magnanimous mood.
“Oh no, Mrs. Anderson, I couldn’t do that. I’m not looking for a handout.”
That wasn’t what Eden had meant, but she appreciated Cleo’s entrepreneurial spirit.
“Shipping and handling fee. And please, call me Eden. Mrs. Anderson isn’t me.” She’d never changed her maiden name on the Social Security documents and had continued to work as Eden Norton. Changing her business cards and e-mail seemed a cumbersome process. When she was out with Jack’s investors, she was simply Eden, Jack’s wife. Nobody called her Mrs. Anderson.
Cleo glared warily, pocketed the bill, then started toward the door, which reminded Eden.
“Hey, by any chance, do you know who lived here before us?”
Cleo shrugged. “Old Man Potts.”
“Did he have children?”
Cleo shook her head. “He had one leg. Lost the other in an automobile wheel when he was my age. He lived with his sister until she married off, and then he was alone. Ms. Silverdash says the word for him is a reclusive. A mind-your-own-bees neighbor, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“Hey.” Cleo gestured to Cricket, in Eden’s arms. “You aren’t going to break out in hives or swell up, are you?”
Eden rolled her eyes. “I’m not allergic to dogs.”
She wondered what on earth had possessed Jack to make up such a lie.
Cleo nodded. “I figured.” She started toward the back door, chattering as she went. “Potts didn’t have but a nickel left when he died and owed a heap to the bank, so the house and everything in it went to pay back the debt. Mack Milton bought the place at auction. Him and his dad were going to do one of them house-flip deals, but then they got in a big fight just before construction started. This house sat boarded up for, like, forever! Kids said it was haunted, but Ms. Silverdash said the only things haunting New Charlestown are old secrets and new grudges.” She cleared her throat. “I gotta go. I’ll bring your dog food later.”
It dawned on Eden that she ought to introduce herself to Cleo’s mother. She didn’t want to have an awkward scene: Why is my daughter running your errands? Shouldn’t you have checked with us first? Again, she blamed Jack for giving her one more thing she had to attend to properly.
“Is your mother home now?” asked Eden. “I should let her know about hiring you.”
Cleo stopped, hand on the doorknob, and turned her cheek to her shoulder without fully facing Eden.
“My parents are gone,” she said. “I live with my grandpa.”
