The Healing Zone

1.

Connor was still in his crib, an elaborate crib, something with slide bolts between the slats and a mattress made of material astronauts might sleep on. Restorative. Connor was still sleeping in this crib and very tiny when Owen brought home the first airplane. It was gorgeous with sleek wings painted blue as a morning glory and a belly of yellow. Propellers that buzzed incredibly loud, sound amplified by the water, as Owen directed the plane to loop first one way then the other over the cattails out into the channel, watching Connor in his carrier in the grass to see if the baby followed the sound or the colors or the motion. Not yet.

Cece bounced up and down beside her father. Please, she cried. Please, Daddy. And he let her wrap her hands over his and together they flew the little plane back over Connor and landed it sideways, with a crash in the tulip blades. No harm done, declared Owen, and Connor cried—more a ­mew-mew—not because of the plane or the crash. Cece said, He’s hungry, Daddy. Cocoa’s hungry.

Owen wasn’t in love with this nickname. It made him wonder the first time he’d heard it, Faith curling the baby close to her chest, sort of, always a pocket of air for safety sake. Oh little Cocoa bean, she whispered. Funny bean. She stroked with one finger the black down that fell into a widow’s peak on the baby’s forehead. What a character! she cried. Little Cocoa.

When Connor was born, and this was startling, he looked exactly like his father, a replica but almost too small to survive. He’d lived for two months in the neonatal intensive care and then like a miracle he was home. Owen felt he could cry sometimes, for just the relief of seeing him flex and curl his fist, seeing the funny bud of his mouth purse, a miracle of strength and genius, how much it took for this baby to blink his eyes and strain to see his father watching, laughing, saying, Good boy, little sweetheart. There you are. There you are.

Connor still had a hospital bandage, very professional looking, wrapped around his miniature forearm. A monitor or feeding tube or some apparatus had bored a tiny hole into his arm that failed to heal before they brought him home. On Monday, Faith would travel into the city for a checkup, she’d already alerted the Sheas. Tom Shea would pick her up early and drive her up in his old-fashioned limousine. A Cadillac, one of two he’d bought with his brother, Brendan, in the late seventies, when it was popular to go to dinner and a show in the city and then have one of the Shea brothers circle while disco bouncers were softened up with hundred-dollar bills to let in the couples in blue blazers and good pearls. A laugh for all concerned. Except for the Sheas, who had never charged enough to be cheerful. Besides, they lived, the two men in their forties, with a mother who still had a voice that tripped any decent day directly into irritation. Brendan was nicer than Tom, but Tom was the better driver and knew the city. It was still a good business but not enough apparently to warrant a new fleet. The polished old limos were a nice joke and a pleasant convenience. She’d sip a cup of coffee and hold Connor’s toes wrapped in his white cotton socks, belted in the car seat. And the news would be good, for the most part. And the difficult news, a slightly fragile heart, they could live with and help in certain ways. But for now, Connor’s face seemed to flicker once or twice with delight, a slight lift of the dark-rose lips as if he could drink that swooping plane his father guided only for his pleasure right out of the sky. And then he was hungry and crying and the plane as light as a butterfly crashed in the mulch. We’re all hungry! claimed Owen, and he left the plane tangled in the tulips so he could lift his nearly weightless son in his carrier by the plastic handle and hold his daughter’s sticky hand.

Such a wonderful father! said everyone in the neighborhood. Only three houses tucked impossibly along the tidal basin at the tip of Little Rest Road. Now they never would have been allowed to build, but in the early thirties who was looking? Any construction was good construction. And the three houses were placed at angles only determined by how many windows in each could find a water view. The houses were tossed down like a handful of seeds, Faith liked to say, no rhyme or reason. But when they first saw it, she wasn’t so blithe. My god, she said to Owen. How is this place even possible? And it wasn’t quite possible, but Owen sold the stock that was his inheritance and borrowed money from his brother, Hadley, a disaster waiting to happen, he’d said at the time as a joke, but Faith remembered it later as prophecy.

For a couple of years they slept on a mattress on the floor—like hippies, declared Faith—but Owen always wore a tie, and she herself ironed every garment she wore. A mattress and an iron, what more do we need? They laughed and sat out on the back-porch steps, sun setting orange, bright as foil in the pricker bushes low near the water. But once Cece was conceived they got serious about furniture. Hadley offered a book of Japanese erotic prints delivered by UPS. For the nursery, read the card, with love from Uncle Hadley.

On the night of Connor’s first airplane, Faith was attempting an oyster stew. Formula for Connor, hot dog for Cece, but for their triumphant parents, a stew, just like the one Owen and Hadley ate as boys on Middle Island.

This house had been the great compromise. This house made it possible for Owen to lay aside—for a moment—the avalanche of bad ideas that seemed to him to flourish when Faith and her mother were near one another, even briefly. Ten miles apart? How would they all survive? Even small dinners at big absorbing restaurants in New York had failed to diminish the wrapped misery they could generate in a flash. What a pair! Didn’t Faith want a new life? Wasn’t that the big idea?

What are you talking about? said Faith. A stance she maintained as long as she could, and then she’d sigh. It was very hard.

Hard! Hard? Owen would have been jubilant with relief that she could admit this much, but that possibility had already passed them by.

The house was the glory of their marriage. He felt it every time he turned in between the twin white pines and drove the arc that edged the lily pond and the toolshed and the collapsed barn, a miniature left over from the one farmer who’d planted from here to the Sea Bright Bridge. From the barn, two cypresses, twinned again and spanning the blue gravel, and on the other side his house would reveal itself, a beauty, low and welcoming. He liked the lawn to sweep right down, then the lace fringe of cattails, then the walkout dock, a long slender stretch almost to the buoy marker and the gray-blue, purple-black deep water of the channel. He’d said Paris, a place on Île Saint-Louis! Theirs for the asking, an old company flat, overlooking the Seine. What could be nicer? And Faith had considered it, flew to Paris to meet him, saw the apartment in its listed building with the oval stair.

It smells like tar, she said.

Impossible, he’d laughed and held her. You’d be happy here. The drawing room had windows eight feet high. The bedroom a dark cocoon. Let’s do this.

She didn’t say no. She just asked him to do her a favor. Back in New York, they drove down to the shore and she showed him the house at its most cunning hour, six on a September evening. And then they had dinner with her mother, Irene, at a place called Hook Line and Sinker. Burgers larger than his hand. Irene suggested a pied-à-terre in the city as well, something functional, for late work nights. You know, she said, sipping a Seagram’s on the rocks. Just a little pad for emergencies. I see gray flannel. Very spare, very handsome.

Faith watched his face and opened her mouth wide to bite the burger dripping with cheese and ketchup. Oh, that would be nice, she said, gulping down water, holding out the glass to the passing busboy. More, please. You’d love that, Owen. A sanctuary.

Irene smiled, Faith smiled, and he considered. The following Sunday he looked at the house again and said to the realtor: I’m going to Bangkok. If it’s here when I get back, we’ll take it. So he flew out the next morning, and when he arrived and called Faith he couldn’t reach her, not that day, not the next. No answer for a week. He delayed his homecoming and flew to Hong Kong, ran into an old girlfriend by chance. She said, Why not just live here, darling? Everything is so much easier.

They moved in and met the neighbors, to the left—just visible in the winter through the bare forsythia—Pinky Atterlee and her husband, Ralph. On the right, Mrs. Trainforst and her grown divorced son, Anthony.

A novelist! said Irene with clapping hands. You know that means lots of peace and quiet.

A prediction that turned out to be untrue. Anthony trysted that first summer with a local teenager. First there were loud shouting orgasms in the forsythia that echoed across the water, and then the police became a regular presence until the father finally brought suit and sent the girl away to work off her bad experience on a kibbutz in Israel. Mrs. Trainforst moved to Fishers Island and thereafter let Anthony fend for himself. A decision, Faith learned at the market, locally applauded. After that, the Trainforst house was vacant until the summer Connor was born. Then it was taken by the Cliffords, Natalie and Steve, with their responsible, athletic, brown-haired daughters, Eleanor and Sue.

So that was the house that took him by surprise. He was thinking Paris or Brussels maybe. Not Rome, he’d never get anything done, but instead he took the workingman’s house on the Jersey Shore with the white painted porch and the long dock. A dinghy wobbled in the wake, slimy oars left in the locks. Owen would float around along the shoreline, through the cattails, and look at killies under the surface. You’ll get bitten alive, Faith would yell from behind a screen door. Come in, idiot. At least put on some spray.

The Clifford girls took charge of the dinghy once they’d settled into their teams and clubs at school. They’d come through the hedge with their bellies and short brown bobs, and soon the dinghy was in dry dock, up on the lawn subjected to Brillo pads and bleach scrubs. After that, the sun would work out the rot that Owen had allowed to penetrate. Cece was in raptures, though they wouldn’t let her help. Toxins, Mrs. Barlow, they explained. And Faith agreed. Cece should be worshipful at a distance.

Two summers passed and Connor remained indifferent to the Clifford sisters. Something that amused Owen. Already he had interesting preferences. Connor watched the Cliffords come and go with placid sweetness. Only Bernadette had his passion. He’d burst into cooing burbles at the sight of her car coming down the drive. Bernadette and Cece, Connor’s two loves. We might as well be trees, Owen said to Faith.

Don’t be an idiot, she’d said. And he was surprised how angry she was. Idiot, he noticed, had replaced sweetheart and honey. He emulated Connor’s placid good humor in response. Idiot, she’d say, and Owen would coo at her and open his blue eyes and sigh. It was so exact, so perfect to the lash shadow on his high cheeks that she’d laugh. Christ, she said. Two of you. Let’s not speak to him. See if he can find a personality that won’t drive everyone crazy.

But they doted on him, loved to watch his face, amazed he’d grown so big now, so nice and round and funny. That he didn’t speak didn’t worry them. Lots of boys developed language late. Owen’s brother, Hadley, who could talk the ear off a rock, hadn’t said a word until he was three. From then on he spoke in full sentences, perfect syntax, Owen swore, and Faith believed it. Hadley could be relentless about her turn of phrase. Did you sleep through that semester at Smith? A favorite refrain.

Owen hadn’t really loved Faith, he thought, until he spotted the mystery bird in her mother’s yard. Later he called it love’s messenger. But that was much later and not the kindest telling of the story. Early summer and Faith had invited Owen for a weekend visit down to the shore to meet her mother for the first time. They’d been seeing each other off and on for a few months in the city. Faith had taken a part-time job at an art gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, behind the front desk. Not far from Owen’s office on Fifty-Ninth. He wandered in one day with a big client who bored him. This would be something to do. Look at art. She was delectable, said the gallerist who hired her. Perfect!

Expensive! said her mother. The commute cost more than the salary paid, but it was something.

Later Owen said he’d had a kind of vision in Irene’s garden. Almost a religious thing, he said.

Irene’s place had become so tidy and verdant, the neighbors slowed their evening walks to view it now. Once her husband died, Irene couldn’t stay out of the flower beds. And Owen’s first visit happened many summers into that urgent gardening.

Neighbors, Irene’s nosy neurotic neighbors, spotting Owen on their evening walk predicted a wedding next spring. Nonsense, said Irene when poor mad Smitty told her. Someone had been predicting a wedding for Faith since she was born, like a magical princess. And just like a princess, she was impossible to please, and now she was nearly twenty-seven. But that morning, Smitty, her nuttiest neighbor, Smitty from Chestnut Street, had stopped by with this latest forecast and some newly picked currants, translucent and golden and fat. Try one—he’d balanced a plump globe on the tip of a long-nailed finger—just taste. And Irene wiped her hands along her hips and plucked it from him and put it onto her tongue. There was likely a trick here.

Go ahead, said Smitty, and he watched her eyes while the strange bitter unctuous flavor spread.

Very nice, Smitty.

Oh! You kill me.

The questionable currants sat out in the sun in Smitty’s little chipped bowl on the back doorstep until evening when they’d turned to a bumpy syrup. What’s this? called Faith.

It’s for the bird, said Irene.

What bird? said Faith. There were so many.

And Owen lifted his sunglasses to his forehead and squinted up into a leafy magnolia. Right there, he said. Can’t you see it, Faith? He could. It wore a little tweed jacket and had a hungry pointy yellow beak. It was very obvious.

Irene smiled at him. A rare smile, he’d learn soon enough. Right you are, my boy. Right you are.

2.

A very different bird, a once-living bird now with bashed-in brains was lying under a holly bush. Brains spilling on the brash copper-colored mulch. Tiny sparkling bugs moving in spotted sunlight. This was the last thing she should be looking at. Faith almost laughed.

Her first day after, her own brain had been wrapped in white, foam and gauze, thick and wet with leaking neurotransmitters. This molded helmet had been configured to pad the outrage to her head. The outrage. That was all she could muster in the way of a thought. Disembodied. No story. Though she suspected, and this the slowest notion, that eventually Hadley would turn out to be culpable. Was he driving the car? No. It’s true he wasn’t. It was the girl behind the wheel. A poor driver, no experience. Faith was teaching her how. And where was Faith? Faith was holding Connor, two years old, but still so little, in her lap. Faith was laughing out instructions. The girl had never sat in a driver’s seat before, she said. Ever. It was all so funny.

We were only circling the drive. That’s all. We never even once pulled out onto the road, not even the little bit, the apron before the new tar. Just that morning the roller truck had smoothed it all down. And the stink! And the stillness, not a breeze. The leaves hanging limp in the trees. No, it was all between the hedges. Who said this? It must have been the girl. There were policemen and two ambulances. Faith went in one, Connor in the other. Cece stayed home with the girl, who was fine. Not a scratch, Faith heard her say over and over. Not a scratch, as if it were a miracle. Later she would say she broke her thumbnail and thrust it forward. Faith remembered this gesture but couldn’t think much about it.

Faith cracked the same vertebrae that in Connor broke entirely. In Faith the spinal cord was flirted, an odd expression. In Connor it was bruised, abraded, and in one small crucial area something worse. His head under her chin, spines nestled together, his breaks. Hers bends and flirts.

Sometimes now she turns her head and a pain erases everything in a sheet of white. But she has things, elixirs, to wind that down, to give that shafting annihilating pain a shorter, blunter life. And that’s why she’s here, now that she can walk, and it’s funny because it’s a bit of a misunderstanding.

It was the night nurse at the hospital, the burly one with forearms you could sit on who’d done the deed. No one believed Faith. But she, the big heavy woman in the Hello Kitty nursing smock, tapped too many fixers into a fluted cup. She wants to kill me! Faith said. She called me a murderer! The nurse would be trial and jury all on her own.

No one believed any part of this story. No one thought Faith was a murderer, and no one thought the nurse—Hello Kitty?—even existed. And so here she was, thanks to Hadley, walking a curving gravel path through lawn scraped as short as a putting green, urns planted with impatiens in salmon pink, revolting, boring, safe. The gravel composed of round gray stones, no sharp edges, no jarring color. But there, a foot away: a sparrow, dead, its head mashed in and bright black bugs crawled in and out of its eyes, sunlight reflecting on the jittery movement.

Hey! she laughed and laughed again just to hear the word. But the liquid stopper sponge of pain started up in her head tamping it down, putting aside the sound of her own voice. She made a hiss, bending down, looking closer, the beak, a taupe, dulled thing half-open. Oh god, she thought and, dizzy, sat on the gravel. Warm and gritty through her sweatpants, she could feel it, as if she were reading about it happening to someone else in a large book, and the feeling of this gravel was important. Something big would happen next. Lots of the trees—she noticed from this low level—had crotches. Interesting.

Hello, Faith. Hello, dear. She knew just who that was, but the voice passed like an oil slick right over her head.

Here’s the truth as it was repeated over and over: the girl hit one thick trunk then backed into the other, not the white pines, but the cypress, both only slightly gouged but now removed, cut down to stumps. That was Owen. All that fresh sunlight was wrecking the lawn, burning the flower beds planted for shade. He said the girl had done so much damage to the trees they couldn’t survive. But they’d barely been touched. And Connor so snug in Faith’s arms, his dirty hair smelling like onion grass, salty like the ocean and sweet, too, a strawberry. Hey, this is fun, she said. This is fun. Lee-Ann is learning to drive. Tucked into place with a seat belt cradling them both, they were crawling along when the girl coasted into the trees, but the air bag, the thing meant to double protect them in extra-safe blankets of air, released on the first tap so fast it snapped his neck and cracked hers, too.

I could hear it, whispered the girl to the policeman. I could hear the bones break.

The liar.

Irene made a big impression on the staff in the Sunny Creek welcome pod. At the front desk, the athletic blond with green jewel bindi between her eyebrows scanned a clipboard and said that Faith had lawn time; she was taking part in a freedom and fresh-air module. Then tea at four in the healing zone. Irene was most welcome. The girl smiled up at Irene.

I see. This way? she asked, looking to the series of French doors just beyond the white slipcovered armchairs. The girl nodded and smiled. Not the best dentist, thought Irene and swiveled away. Irene had large wing-style white hair now and large blue-tinted sunglasses she never removed in public. Her skin was flawless and pale, stretched over bones that looked fragile and small around the eyes then expanded to a surprisingly heavy jaw. Almost as if it had been replaced and a wrong part had been installed. It gave her the look of a delicate pugilist. Her skirt was hemmed, hand stitched to just below the knee. She wore the sheerest stockings. Irene had come to believe in sling-backs.

One of the Shea brothers, Tom, drove her the long way up from Spring Lake to the little “sanctuary” off the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Nothing New Age, she’d insisted. Not that Owen had consulted her. No chanting, she’d said. It will never work. But here was her girl made to walk in pointless circles through shaved-down shrubbery searching for a soul that could hold her. Faith had married a fake man, a make-believe, a charlatan. Maybe when she was better, she’d begin to understand that. But Faith, even Irene suspected, might not be better for a very long time.

And here was Faith now, sitting on the gravel, looking like a lost toddler, not an attendant in sight. Irene was torn between going immediately to the head office and taking a strip off the imbecile in charge or going straight to Faith. With a sigh, she knew it might be more pleasant to beat the tar out of the administrator. Faith, at her best, could be impossible.

Hello? she repeated. Faith, love. Don’t sit on the ground. You’ll catch cold.

It’s August, said Faith. She splayed her ragged-looking hands on the gray gravel, skin puckered and sunburnt, nails a bitten-down mess. Certainly they could have taken better care of her than this. And what about her diet? Faith appeared, well, Irene wouldn’t even think the word. Faith’s belly was falling over the waistband of her spectacularly unflattering yellow sweatpants. She’d been recuperating here for a little over a month and her beautiful daughter had become a butterball rolling around on the ground.

Irene sighed and looked up all around her. Pretty, she had to admit it, old trees and good ones, none of those trashy maples that cause so many problems. The borders were tidy, already planted for fall, chrysanthemum perky and newly, thickly bedded. She liked to see that. Nothing so grim as a flopping cosmos in August. Strangled and spent, a nightmare. She pulled hers up right after the Fourth of July. Missus! cried Jose. The flowers have been stolen! He still worked for her. And she was grateful. He wasn’t skillful. He pruned with a heavy hand. But he’d found her husband’s pistol in the wishing well and had the good sense to bring it to her first. So as far as Irene was concerned, Jose had job security, even permanence. It had become a seasonal game for her to undo his damage.

No, these beds were fine, perfect really. These flowers faced a bright future. And the house was good, an old brick Federal, with graceful additions in the nineteenth century. A decent-size veranda, old marble steps led to the wide lawn, and there was something romantic and right proportioned about the glassed greenhouse at the end of a covered walk. But the veranda and the garden were in the main area. The residence where Faith actually lived was a punishment. And given all it was meant to do for her, disturbing. Cinder blocks showed in the hallways. The window wall in Faith’s room was painted black! Irene could scarcely believe it. And the communal bathroom. The stalls with the doors removed. She wouldn’t think about that at the moment. This had already triggered an ugly fight with Owen. And they all just needed to get along for now.

The place had been a boarding school for about three decades, from the thirties to the sixties. The cinder block confusion was the dormitory built in 1958, the year that Faith was born. Then the school promptly went bankrupt. Irene could imagine why. And all this was part of the pamphlet she’d been given by Owen, who seemed content to warehouse Faith here indefinitely. Very civilized, he’d said. One singing paragraph of history on good paper stock and lots of expensive photography. Elegant smiling women in long white ­palazzo pants batted blue tennis balls in the sun. But here was Faith in yellow sweats sorting gravel. She’d brought Faith a pair of cotton sundresses, but she’d left them in the car for later. And some ballet flats with festive ribbons. Faith on the veranda. Faith taking tea.

Faith, dear, I brought you some things. Come see. Come up to the porch and then we’ll go take a look.

That’s not a porch, Mom.

Well, you’re right, Irene said. But come on up to whatever it is, the veranda. They have some tea set out and some cookies, but we’ll ignore those. Are you playing any tennis? The court looks very nice, though morning glories on the fence?

Mom?

Yes, sweetie.

Is Owen with you?

Owen?

You remember him.

No, he’s not. Come have some tea. Come, stand up, Faith. You’ll catch cold.

It’s boiling. These stones are boiling hot. I can barely touch them. Ouch!

You’re acting like a baby, Faith.

Well, that’s okay.

Did someone here tell you that? Did someone, I don’t know, some mental health professional with plastic glued to their forehead say go ahead and act as badly as you wish? You deserve it?

Of course not, Mom. Faith squinted up at her mother. Nice skirt.

Irene unclasped her white straw purse and looked inside. She closed the clasp, sighed, then blinked up at the sky. She realized this might be a very short visit.

Faith shielded her eyes and watched her mother. The tea looked good?

Yes, said Irene, a sudden smile, her big jaw wide like a banner of happiness. And I hear they do it every day. Every afternoon.

How did you get here?

Mr. Shea.

Oh. Well. Faith poured some gravel into her cupped hand then tossed it down. Okay, she said and edged herself off the ground, slowly as if her skeleton was half-fused in every joint. Oh, she said. I hurt all over.

That will pass.

Will it.

Faith.

Yes?

Let’s go have some tea. Then you can open your presents. All right?

Faith had her eye on something up ahead. And Irene looked her over as she’d been doing since the day she was born. Funny, she said.

What’s that, Mom? She turned for a moment with a half smile then back to whatever had her attention on the veranda. Irene followed her gaze but only saw a few slumped, pajamaed bodies on cushions and the pleasant shuffle of the serving women, easy and reassuring in pastel uniforms.

Oh, you know, Faith, I was talking to Dottie McMahon.

How’s Kenneth doing, Mom?

You remember him?

Of course I do. Don’t be silly.

Someone up there you’d like to avoid? Irene tipped her chin toward the veranda.

No, no, not a bit. I’m just wondering about Kenneth.

Well, Dottie is hopeless.

Why?

He’s been hospitalized for six weeks and still not a word about his release. And it’s not like they’ve been able to do anything.

Oh, poor Dottie, poor Kenneth. I’m sorry.

Are you?

On the top step, Faith nodded toward a dark-skinned man at the far corner table, who smiled at her. He wore a big loose pink shirt with a Nehru collar and the same yellow sweatpants as Faith. His black baseball cap said porn star in white letters. Faith waved, then turned back to Irene, saying, Kenneth has had a terrible time.

That’s right, Faith. He really has. And Dottie is just picking herself up every single morning and living for those kids.

I’m sure.

One of the uniformed women offered the man in the pink shirt some tea cakes. He seemed to be sniffing the various icings. He shooed away the tray, then grabbed the free hand of the woman and nipped her finger with his big front teeth. Oh! she cried out laughing. You stop your games now, Mr. Bud.

Let’s steer clear of Mr. Bud, whispered Irene.

Oh, he’s an angel. I wanted to introduce you.

Maybe later. Here’s a nice spot, shady.

I’d like some sun.

Don’t be silly, Faith.

They settled down into the wicker settee. Anyway, Irene said. Dottie is beside herself.

Faith didn’t seem to be paying attention. She was smoothing the heavy yellow cotton over her thighs as if it were chiffon. She still had a nice shape to her wrists, no puffiness there at least, but she hadn’t shaved her ankles in some time.

Dottie said she just doesn’t get it.

What’s that, Mom?

Well. You. I tried to explain that you just needed a rest.

Um.

And Dottie said, A rest? Kenneth hasn’t had a rest in years.

Faith frowned as if Irene were speaking a language she knew but hadn’t practiced in a while.

Kenneth can’t sleep? she said.

Kenneth is too sick to sleep, said Irene. Kenneth would love the luxury of being able to go someplace where avoiding life and the basics of grooming was considered a cure. The minute he can sit up without assistance, he’ll be straight home. Dottie said he won’t even stop to say goodbye to those hardworking doctors. But you know those two. Can’t get enough of each other.

Faith closed her eyes. She tipped over a bit toward the arm of the settee and sighed. In the shadow, it looked to Irene that Faith was the same girl who’d won the algebra prize then got German measles and missed the ceremony. Always missing the show, that was her girl all right. Faith opened her eyes and watched as the man in the Nehru shirt and porn star cap stood. He moved with an odd wriggle, like a very round snake charmer, and when Faith saw him moving in that slithery way, she laughed. He bowed, and then he skipped down the marble steps to the lawn.

He lives right across the hall from me, said Faith. His actual name is Coconut Bud. When he can’t sleep, he lets me sing to him. He’s taught me his childhood songs. So sweet!

That man sleeps across from you?

Mr. Bud on the lawn swirled his hips. Now he moved like a very young hula dancer—unsure, warming up—and Faith laughed with something close to delight.

Have you spoken to Owen today?

Owen?

Yes, Faith. Owen.

Only on Sundays. How about you?

I call to see how Cece is doing. He always tells me the same thing.

And what’s that?

Irene turned her whole torso toward her daughter. Why don’t you already know, Faith? What’s wrong with you?

Faith squeezed her eyes shut then opened them wide. She shook her head and yawned. I’m hungry. That’s all, she said.

Mr. Bud attempted a headstand right in the middle of the new bed of chrysanthemums. He lost his hat and tumbled over flat to collect it, ruining everything. Oh, look! cried Faith, laughing.

Yes, I see.

Honestly, he’s the best thing going here. Oh, Mr. Bud.

I see that, said Irene, nodding. I really do.

So, what did you bring, Mom? What’s my present?

Yes. That’s right. That’s right, Faith. Your present. And Irene found she’d already decided. Very fast for her, she usually liked to mull things over for weeks. See all sides. For instance, when Jose had appeared on her back doorstep with the pistol it took her a very long time to understand it was loaded. Really almost impossible to believe. Even when he showed her the bullets. First nestled in the chamber and then, like a magic trick, in the palm of his hand. But here in the healing zone she was operating faster than a jet plane. Transportation, she said.

No. Really?

Yes, Faith, yes. Finish your tea.

We can just do that? Have you asked?

Asked? Come now, Faith. Drink up. Then we’ll pack your things, quick as a bunny. Quick as a bunny!

I don’t know, Mom.

Mr. Bud was being escorted out of the flower beds directly back to the dormitory building for a reflective break by two unsmiling men in matching polo shirts. Faith watched Mr. Bud’s face to make sure he wasn’t crying, as he often did when his tricks went haywire. But he laughed at something instead. He laughed very loud, and then he waved at her: Goodbye! Goodbye, my friend. Goodbye! At least that’s what Faith believed he was doing. She knew Mr. Bud could be very intuitive. Goodbye, darling Faith! he might be saying, even advising. He’d taught her more than one song to sing in the night. It’s important, he’d said, to know more than one.

Listen. You stay put, said Irene. And Faith watched her mother toddle off across the flagstones. Her sling-backs were taupe colored, just like the sparrow’s open beak. Faith’s sweatpants were yellow like, like nothing real. Stay put! She watched her mother coast through the French doors, then she accepted a whole plate of frosted cookies from the passing attendant. Seven cookies. A lucky number.

Faith was surprised she was allowed to wear the sweatpants home. They don’t need them. Believe me, said Irene. Then she settled deep into the back of the Sheas’ slightly better car and closed her eyes. She reached up and took off her blue sunglasses and placed them folded on her lap, as if taking off a defensive headgear. The victorious gesture or its equivalent Faith had been clocking and resisting forever. But she didn’t feel resistance now. She felt wonder at her mother. And surprise. And intense overwhelming sorrow that flooded in fast, then receded even faster. Faith and Irene, side by side, eyes closed.