NOW
It took me a while to fall asleep that night. All I could think about was men coming with guns and me being trapped, so I couldn’t save Xander, and about being locked up for the rest of my life. It was like a movie except everything was real and I couldn’t relax with the knowledge that everything would turn out fine in the end and that the main character would walk into the future happy and strong and whole.
I tossed and turned and finally got up. The dampness seemed to have seeped from the mattress into my bones. Before I decided to try to get some sleep, I opened the steamer chest, found some old cotton sheets and made the bed with tight military corners the way I did for all my clients. I thought it would help me sleep but it didn’t.
I padded across the floor and looked out the window. The world was bathed in a gauzy light that made everything seem slightly out of focus. I stared at the cabin and thought of Xander curled up in the twin bed with Rudy, of Angela lying next to Mark, her tight young body cupped against his. It filled me with a kind of dark metallic rage and I thought, Why did I accept Mark’s excuses instead of seeing the signs? Mark getting a call and taking the phone into the backyard (one of Xander’s movies had been on and it had been hard for Mark to hear the caller); the sudden interest in herbal supplements (a guy at work had turned him on to them); coming home late (overtime).
I thought of one of my earliest housecleaning clients, Phoebe Walters, who’d grown suspicious of her CEO husband and snuck back to her house one day instead of going to her yoga class and found her fifty-four-year-old spouse in bed with the twenty-one-year-old dog groomer.
“I say, let her have him,” Phoebe said when she called to tell me she’d sold the house and was moving to Portland and no longer needed my services. “The little whore can spend her thirties buying diapers for him and for her kids.”
When I told Mark the story about Phoebe’s husband, he said, “Talk about cliché.”
I started to turn away from the window. It did no good to think about Angela and Mark lying together, about how clueless I’d been. Before I turned, however, I saw something move at the far edge of the garden and leaned closer to the window.
It was a fox.
The tip of its tail looked as if it had been dipped in white paint, and there was a matching spot on its snout. It trotted purposefully through the plants, stilling once to sniff the air and then looping in my direction before turning again and disappearing around the edge of the cabin where Mark said the coop was located. I waited to see if Shadow would come barking out of his shelter but there was nothing. I guessed the fox knew enough to stay upwind of the dog and the thought came suddenly: That is exactly what I will have to do with Mark and Angela. Stay upwind of suspicion, act as if I am fine with this strange life of theirs and then make my move.
Which is why I went over and picked up the Mind, Self, Love book, lit the lantern with a match from the box next to it and began to read.
The second chapter described how the wandering boy had carried with him a jade necklace that had belonged to his mother. Even as he starved, he refused to sell the piece and slept only in snatches for fear someone would steal it from him. The ritual master said if the boy wanted to stop his suffering and find riches, he needed to cast the bauble into the river.
The boy went to the river, where he paced for three days before, exhausted from worry and tired of his world of hunger and fear, he finally did what the ritual master had said. He waited for his riches to arrive, and when they didn’t, he hiked back to the ritual master’s house to complain. The master said the riches he had promised was actually the freedom of living without having to carry the burdens of his past, and the boy realized that indeed he felt lighter and happier without the necklace constantly weighing on his thoughts. He slept eight hours for the first time that night.
I thought about my past. I didn’t think it was as easy to toss it away as this Kai Huang guy made it seem.