In the calm right after the last bell, green shadows from the trees outside wavered and rippled and splashed across the bulletin boards on Charles’s classroom’s back wall. He loved that. He loved the green. He loved the country: he always had. He’d grown up in an overstuffed double-decker house on Chalk Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a block that his parents had come to as children from Barbados. Everyone on Chalk Street was from back home. On Chalk Street, the houses drowsed into one another and the people inside them kept a careful watch out the windows—everyone was lovingly guarding their lives there. Family was his mother and father and older brother, Lyle, and hundreds of cousins, always asking for favors. You went to Boston and to places where white people were for work, not for life. Life moved from the Chalk Street front porch to Mayflower Meat Market to the bus stop on Mass Ave. and back again. Anything outside this circuit was not to be considered real.
But Charles always yearned for wide open spaces. When he was six he’d announced he wanted to be a farmer. His parents were appalled. They hadn’t left Barbados only to have their son turn around and work his way back down into the dirt. No one understood it; his older brother and their friends laughed about it for years.
He hadn’t really known that black people in America could live outside a city, could grow in wilderness, until he found Laurel. When they first met she still smelled like fresh pine sap. It was subtle, most noticeable right behind her ears and under her chin. He’d told her and she’d been mortified and then insisted he must be joking. But he wasn’t. She had always smelled like wide-open country to him. He made her tell him everything about her home: the tree farm, the hills. Once, she mentioned picking fiddleheads from the weeds in the woods behind her house, brushing off their paper veils and secretly biting the fresh curls till they burst into green in her mouth. “My mother said they’d make me sick, but they never did.” She did not find that wondrous at all, thought him odd for thinking so. “It was just stuff you eat as a kid on your way to school, like chewing on hay,” she said, as if chewing hay were normal, too.
The farm was gone by the time they met. Her parents mortgaged it to send her to college and then her father died of pneumonia shortly before her graduation, followed by her mother a few months later. In the wilds of their early love, Charles promised Laurel he would buy it back for her, and she’d said, “Don’t bother.” She told him about the oblivion of Maine, the cotton balls in her ears, the breath suspended. But that didn’t put him off. It made him want it more. Even the racism up there in the country seemed bucolic to him. Much better than the squawks and loud calls of the college students in Central Square who liked to mark their territory by catcalling insults at him from the doorways of bars he’d walked past for years. He considered it the major failure of his and Laurel’s life together: that at the end of their first decade of marriage, he still hadn’t made enough money to get them to the green.
Laurel knew that, of course. She’d used it to her advantage, when she’d started the long, slow haggle of convincing him to move to the Toneybee. She mentioned the money, and the teaching gig at the high school already lined up for him, but they both knew the real selling point was the woods and the trees and the streams. The selling point was the green. The rest of it: the monkey and the book and the stories, those awful stories about the place, didn’t matter.
Charles erased the ashy chalkboard of all the equations he’d written that day. He turned to his desk and began to pack up his things. He would like to have driven home with Charlotte, but she was doing her best to pretend she didn’t know him, a fact Charles found funny and sad. “We’re the only two black people in this place with the last name Freeman,” he’d told her gently. “They know you belong to me.” Charlotte was tricky. Maybe she would laugh at that, maybe she would be mortally offended. He’d caught her on a day when she was mortally offended—she’d rolled her eyes at him in a panic of embarrassment.
He walked out of the office toward the parking lot and the Toneybee’s Volvo. He could never think of it as his. He did not like to drive it, though he knew it made Laurel proud. Lyle, Charles’s brother, called Laurel a snob, said she would ruin him. And Charles knew what Lyle saw—Laurel had a desperation on her, a desire for better that sparked off her like sharp gleams of light. If you didn’t know her, you’d mistake it for base ambition. But it wasn’t, Charles knew that.
When they were first dating, Laurel worked at a city hospital. Her boss put her in charge of a patient named Ned. Ned was seven but the same size as a two-year-old. He’d been found tied to a metal post in a barn in Vermont. His teeth were rotten, nearly mush. He had never tasted solid food. “His family fed him on one carton of whole milk, tossed into the barn at sunrise every morning,” Laurel told Charles, her eyes shining.
Ned had a birth defect: a soft opening at the back of his skull that never closed, only opened wider as he grew. Ned’s parents weren’t bad people. They kept him in the barn for his protection, they claimed, and tried to overlook the problem of a hole in the head. As for feeding him only milk: they were worried the strain of chewing might upset the gap. By the time the proper authorities got ahold of him, it was too late for Ned to learn to speak and Laurel was supposed to teach him to sign.
Laurel told Charles that every night Ned was in her care, they lay together side by side, his back against her front so that he wouldn’t roll over in sleep and crush his gap and die in the spoils of his own brain. She held Ned tight, careful not to brush his head. She clasped his hands, muffled in hospital mittens, between her own, to keep him from scratching. While he slept she studied the hollow in his head. “I forced myself to do it,” she told him, and Charles knew then that he loved her.
“It used to scare me,” she told him. “It was so open.” She could see, under the whisper of Ned’s bright blond hair, the mysterious whorls and lines of his brain. “I could look at it all day,” she told him. She thought she could see Ned’s brain pulse.
“It’s like, it’s like,” she’d sputtered, searching for the right words.
“It’s like love,” he’d supplied her, and she’d smiled, grateful. That’s when he knew they would make it together. “Yes, it’s exactly like love,” she replied. And then she’d thought a moment, corrected them both. “No, it is love.”
She finger-spelled into Ned’s palm and told Charles excitedly about seeing flashes of recognition in his eyes. She bathed him twice a day, attempting to rid his skin of the dried mushroom musk of the barn, but it never completely went away.
“I just want him to survive in this world,” she’d said.
And Charles had understood. He wanted Ned to live, too. The world would prove to be a kinder place, a bigger place than the circuit of Chalk Street and Maine’s blinding whiteness, if something like Ned and his hollow lived in it. Charles wanted him to prove how boundless the world could be, and when Ned choked to death trying to swallow his own shoelaces, they both cried for what was lost.
Charles started the car now and began the drive back to the Toneybee. He rolled down the window and breathed in deep, slow, swallows. The world was bigger. Ned had died, but the world was bigger and Laurel had found that for them.
“You don’t love Charlie yet,” Laurel accused him the other day, and he had not been able to deny it.
“I don’t know if I would use that word for him,” he’d said diplomatically. But she was angry, oh she was mad, and she’d seemed to miss the point entirely. He’d said, “That monkey doesn’t love me, either,” and he’d gotten her to laugh at that, at least, because it was true. Charlie understood him as a rival for Laurel’s affections, which Charles found funny, and he could only laugh when Charlie would tilt his chin up and stare, glassy eyed, just over Charles’s shoulder.
Up ahead, Charles could see the gates of the Toneybee. He had never imagined, back in his bedroom on Chalk Street, that he would end up here, with a woman like Laurel. She made things magic for him. It was a weird kind of magic: it did not bring him anything recognizable, any sort of understood glory. It brought something deeper, something that he did not know he needed until it was in front of him. He didn’t particularly care for Charlie—he’d never liked animals much—but he did care for this, for the drive rolling out before him and the large house in front of him that was definitely not Chalk Street. He cared for what was beyond the limits of his understanding. He’d broken through, somehow, gone past his block and reached a different country. It was strange, it was new, he could not say yet whether or not it was good. But it was something he could never have imagined, and for that, he was grateful.